A week later, in front of a half dozen people sitting at a long table, I performed a two-character scene from Lillian Hellman’s Toys in the Attic, with my mother playing opposite me. I hadn’t bothered to read the play, stopped after finding the one scene, so I don’t know what the hell I thought I was portraying. But whatever it was, I was admitted to the workshop. And on the following Thursday evening, after my first—oddly unchallenging—class, I stood on the corner just outside the gates of Columbia waiting for Ricky to pick me up, since I wasn’t allowed to drive at night.
Just as my brother had promised two years earlier, every June he came home from Berkeley for a few weeks, though that summer I’d hardly seen him. Most of the time he was with a girl whom he had met years before while competing in a gymnastics match against Garfield High. Beautiful, slightly shy Jimmie was the student who held the scorecards in the air after every event, cards that always had my brother on top. After graduating, he reconnected with her and that fall, Ricky would take Jimmie back to the Bay Area with him, where she was to be a freshman at the University of San Francisco. Eventually Jimmie would become his wife, which she is to this day, devotedly.
As I waited on the corner, watching all the cars whiz by on busy Sunset Boulevard, I noticed a man heading toward me with such purpose he made me wonder if I’d left something behind.
“Excuse me,” he said. “Are you Jock Mahoney’s daughter?”
“Yes,” I said meekly, then reconsidered. “Well, no. Actually, I’m his stepdaughter.”
The man smiled, then continued quickly, as if trying to keep me from running off like a scared rabbit. “I know your stepdad. I know Jock. I’m Eddie Foy the Third. I saw your audition last week. Tried to catch you in class tonight but just missed you.”
“Hi,” I said with as much ease as I could muster.
“I work here,” he continued. “I’m head of casting for Screen Gems, the television division of Columbia, and I’d like you to come on an interview tomorrow.”
I just stood there with my teeth hanging out, saying nothing. I couldn’t believe this was real. Mr. Foy watched me searching for something to say, then handed me a little card with his name and the Screen Gems logo on it, asking if I had an agent he could contact. When I shook my head with an incredulous no, he told me to show the card to Jock and to come to his office tomorrow at eleven.
“Can you do that?” he asked, as if I were a five-year-old.
I reached for the card like I was afraid it might bite me and said in a voice so high only dogs could hear it, “Okay…”
“Great.” And as he began to walk away, he stopped, then turned back. “Tell me your name again.”
With eyes as big as pie pans, I answered, “Sally. Sally Field.”
“Okay, Sally. See you tomorrow,” and he walked away.
Something had reached out of nowhere to change my life, just as it had for my mother and even my grandmother before her. For one moment, I could see out of the fog and into my future, then it was gone again, and the only thing I knew for sure was that Ricky was very late.
If there was a tiny part of me that felt relieved when Jocko insisted on accompanying me to that meeting the next day, it quickly vanished along with any hope I might’ve had of sitting quietly in the corner, unnoticed. When he sauntered in with a protective swagger, then immediately treated the receptionist as if they were intimate friends, loudly laughing at some remark he whispered in her ear, I wanted to crawl under one of the sofas lining the reception area. I tried to act as if I didn’t know the man, smiling nonchalantly at a few of the young women who filled the room. Most of them were holding eight-by-ten photos of themselves; some even had zippered portfolios, which I presumed were stuffed with pictures and résumés of their vast experience. All I had was a wallet containing a few snapshots of God knows what, which was lost somewhere in the tangle of stuff crammed into the big straw bag I held at my side.
When I was finally asked to step inside Mr. Foy’s office, Jocko walked in before me, shaking hands with everyone and blasting a baritone greeting in such an alpha male display he might as well have lifted his leg on the furniture. But after a moment, he reluctantly backed out, closing the door behind him, leaving me to face four men dressed in suits—two on a sofa, one in a large chair, and one in a smaller desk chair. After an awkward beat, they began asking me questions: How was graduation? Where had I been acting? Did I have any plans for the summer? And even though they were watching me, I knew they weren’t really interested in my answers, I knew it was about something else. Like flipping a switch, I began to bubble. I told them about going to the beach later that day, that I had my bathing suit with me, that Jocko was dropping me off at my friend Lynn’s house so she could drive us in the old beat-up Ford she’d been given for graduation—the car that would soon be sitting in Lynn’s family garage as she headed off to her freshman year at San Jose State College and slowly moved out of my life.
A little later, I sat perched on the chair opposite one of the men, Bob Claver, who was my reading partner, and we ran the three-page scene they had given me to study for a few minutes in an adjacent office. Rarely looking down at the slightly crumpled pages, I recited all the dialogue with an avalanche of raw energy—not knowing how to contain it, or even that it needed to be contained. And as I said the last line, I looked at Bob, then crossed my eyes—actually used the facial expression as a punctuation mark. I don’t remember ever doing that in a conversation before. I mean, yes, I was a champion eye crosser. I could cross them, then move one eye at a time, as if one was crossed and the other was watching a tennis match. This time I performed a simple cross, hold, and release. And they laughed. Effortlessly friendly and entertaining, I radiated pure delight, because that’s all I felt. The slivers of me that were nervous or unsure watched from a great distance, until they seemed to vanish altogether and I was without fog or fear.
I lost track of how many times I walked into that waiting room, because from that point on, the entire summer of 1964 was sprinkled with meetings. And with each meeting, more and more people would crowd into the room to watch whatever I was asked to do, while there were fewer and fewer hopeful young women pacing the waiting room floor, listening for their names to be called. Finally, the group was down to eight and I was asked to do a “personality test,” which consisted of sitting, then standing, in front of a camera while answering random questions asked by Bob—my reading partner in every previous meeting. By August, when it was down to three—and I was lucky enough to be one of them—we were asked to do a screen test.
On that day, after having greasy dark makeup applied to my face and my hair put in pigtails, I was led through one of the huge soundstages and into the middle of a bedroom that had only two walls. Where the other half of the room should have been were big pieces of equipment, most of them on wheels, all being pushed and pulled into place by busy, bustling guys. With genuine curiosity, I turned to Bob, who was standing at my side, and asked, “Which one is the camera?” I had visited a set only once before, one of Jocko’s when I was about eleven, and five-year-old Princess had come with me. But we hadn’t seen much because we sat squished together on one canvas chair, hidden away in a darkened corner.
Jocko is behind us, covered with oil from the scene he was filming.
In reality, most of any soundstage—a huge airplane hangar of a space—is nothing but darkened corners. Only the center, the actual stage, radiates with light. People move around on the rim of it or in the shadows or on the wooden walkways suspended from the high ceilings above, but their focus is always on the light’s center, even if they aren’t looking at it. And for the first time, I was standing inside that light where it was loud and bright, so searingly bright it was hard not to squint as you looked around the two-walled room. Someone asked me to move to the side, out of the dangerous hustle, so I walked off the set and waited, standing in the dark. I have learned to love the darkness on the edges of that bright world. In those dark safe seconds, before stepping into the glow, I’ve lived and relived every moment of my life, the good ones and the bad ones—over and over.