A PILOT IS ONLY a pilot. It means next to nothing unless the network decides they want it on their schedule for the following season, and since countless pilots are made every year, resulting in very few “pickups,” it’s probably not a good idea to count on it. But until the network makes their decision, you can’t walk away and forget about it either. This was my first big lesson as a professional actor: “Learn to labor and to wait,” in the words of Longfellow. And so, with one foot in my childhood and one unsteady foot on a path under construction, I waited… off-balance.
Actually, there was nothing sturdy to stand on, anywhere. Jocko’s career was going downhill fast, with the deadweight of his marriage to my mother not far behind, and by early 1965 he was hardly working at all. Plus, it seemed that my mother had gradually stopped, never even occasionally going out on an audition—or interview, as they were called back then. Years later when I asked her why, she told me she’d given it up to be with her children, and maybe that was true, but it made no sense. We weren’t little kids anymore—Ricky wasn’t even living with us—and at that point we needed all the money we could get. When we were forced to sell our home in Tarzana, this time moving into a rented house on the cusp of Encino, I know Baa felt silently disgraced. But whatever feelings of loss or fear might have been running through her, they never showed. She energetically, and almost single-handedly, loaded everything we owned into boxes we’d gathered from the market, then unloaded it all into a lightless, musty-smelling place that always felt like it belonged to someone else—probably because it did. And though he never said anything either, I know that this house, with its empty, pool-less backyard, was another demotion for Jocko. But since my bedroom was separate from the rest of the house—an awkward add-on above the garage with lots of windows and a lock on the door—it was all fine with me.
Ricky was in his third year at Berkeley, Steve in his second at USC, and I was waiting by the phone. But happily, my one and only boyfriend was back in my life, and at night, I was the recipient of shadow classes in history, literature, and philosophy, hearing about the books Steve was reading, listening to him passionately pore over passages or to his long explanations of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, as close to a formal education as I would ever get (something I long for to this day). Steve’s appetite for learning was endless but he could never find a place to actually put all that education, except in my lap.
Not knowing what else to do, I bought a stack of spiral notebooks, sharpened a handful of pencils, and with the best of half-hearted intentions, signed up for a few classes at San Fernando Valley State College—which at the time didn’t even have a theater arts department. And who knows what I might have discovered there had it not been for that one morning in early May when the phone rang just as I was leaving for classes. The voice on the other end of the line said, “Pack your bags, Sally, ABC picked up the show and they want you in New York by the end of the week.” All at once, I took both feet out of my childhood and stepped onto that new path.
Five days later, I was sitting in the first-class section of a TWA Boeing 707 heading for New York City, the Plaza hotel, and the ABC Upfronts. I’d never been on an airplane before, never traveled outside of California (not really), and it was such a major moment in my life that I remember exactly what I was wearing: a little white hat with blue cloth forget-me-nots pinned to one side and a new baby-blue suit, purchased with the money I’d saved from the pilot. It had large white buttons down the front of the cropped jacket, worn over a matching, slightly A-line skirt, a skirt that Baa had shortened the night before. She was now buckled up in the aisle seat beside me, and as the plane began to lift off, away from the life I had always known, I took my mother’s hand. Radiating with the same excitement that I was feeling, she said, “Here we go, Sal,” and I knew she meant more than just the trip to New York.
No one bothered to tell me what the Upfronts were and I didn’t ask. I didn’t know I’d have one day of rehearsal before finding myself onstage at Radio City Music Hall in front of hundreds of station owners from across the country, all affiliated with the network—the affiliates. Advertising representatives from companies like Procter & Gamble, Westinghouse, and the Ford Motor Company were also sprinkled through the crowd, giving them the opportunity to purchase airtime on the season’s new shows up front—thus the name. I went from a suspended daze to performing skits with Barbara Parkins from Peyton Place, David Janssen of The Fugitive, and the cast of The Big Valley, including the brilliant Barbara Stanwyck—whom I must have met, though that part hasn’t stayed in my head. I’m sure I was respectful but vague. Ms. Stanwyck was an actress I greatly admired, and despite the fact that I’d grown up in a show business family, I’d met very few actors in my life and never anyone I admired—except Beulah Bondi, whom I was thrilled to find sitting alone in the living room of the Libbit house one day when I was about eleven, though what she was doing there, I still don’t know. But now I was eighteen, in New York City, the star of a new television series, and about to walk onto the enormous stage at Radio City Music Hall. Awe was something I couldn’t allow myself to feel, not in the slightest. My carefully learned survival system was securely in place so I wasn’t fragile or unsure, wasn’t quaking in my boots—which would have been completely understandable. I saw what I needed to see, did what I needed to do, and blocked from my brain anything that felt overwhelming, which unfortunately included Barbara Stanwyck.
Onstage with lovely Barbara Parkins.
Approximately eight weeks and a handful of surfing lessons later, production began and I walked through the looking glass. On one side was my life, my real life as it existed, and on the other side was a greatly altered world. And my God, how I loved the girl on that side of the glass, loved her ease around people, her trust in them. She was pure and untarnished. My twin sister, who looked very much like me, was a part of me, and yet was not me. For thirty-two episodes—and many more weeks than that—her house, her friends, her family, and her perfect pink-and-yellow bedroom were mine.
What Gidget did during the day, I did during the day; her life was my life and the pages of that life would come to me in advance so I could read where my life was going. I knew next week I would have a crush on a handsome schoolteacher, or be thrust into auto shop at school, showing a group of adorable boys that I was as good as they were, while being appealingly inept. Or I’d be caught in a misunderstanding with my family—her family, not mine.