Then on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, scene nights at the Actors Studio, I’d step out of the ragamuffin’s wordless world and become an entirely different person. And on Wednesday nights, when Lou Antonio, the charismatic New York actor, conducted his popular exercise class, I could hear my voice again and I could open my mouth and use it. This class was not an evening filled with sit-ups and push-ups—though that might have been a good idea too. These exercises had only to do with acting.
The first time I timidly stepped into his class, I hadn’t even put my rear in a chair before I heard Lou shout, “I want six people up, now!” Without worrying if I was prepared or informed or qualified, I jumped onto the stage, then looked out at the theater, half-filled with actors just settling in. As soon as Lou had all his volunteers standing ready under the rudimentary work lights—making it somewhat brighter onstage than it was in the audience—the exercise began. It went something like this, give or take a few details: Lou climbed onstage with us, then one at a time whispered to each actor their own private motivations. In my ear, he informed me that I was desperately in love with the unfamiliar performer standing to my right, adding that I had an overwhelming urge to touch him. Then, he quietly told my love interest that one of his contact lenses had popped out and though he desperately needed my help to find it, an obnoxious odor seemed to be radiating from me—basically, I reeked to high heaven. After everyone onstage was given a secret drive, always a motivation in direct conflict with someone else’s, Lou called “action,” and what must have resembled a scene from The Snake Pit began. He would then move into the audience or stand in the back and yell out different locations periodically: You’re on a storm-tossed boat, in a roasting desert, stuck in a crowded elevator. All of which would radically change the physicality of everyone’s behavior, but not their need to get whatever it was Lou had told them they wanted.
I loved every joyful minute of it. And even though most of Lou’s exercises seemed like silly party games, they were actually a kind of limbering up, stretching your imagination, strengthening your ability to act on a fleeting impulse, and challenging your concentration. The more intense exercises—sense memory, emotional memory, room, and the private moment—I wouldn’t learn until later, all conducted by Lee Strasberg himself.
One Wednesday night during that first hiatus, I was heading home from exercise class with the top down on my flashy sports car, still feeling slap-happy from the evening’s improvisations. I had the 1812 Overture playing loudly on my eight-track—yeah, go figure—when I stopped at a red light on Sunset Boulevard. Pounding on the wood steering wheel as if it were a bongo drum, I noticed a car filled with cute guys pulling up next to me, and for a moment I was just an ordinary girl… in her ordinary blue Ferrari playing the overture of 1812 full blast. So I met their eyes and smiled. Most people my age were looking at either college or the threat of Vietnam, and to them anyone over the age of thirty was under suspicion. They were listening to Jimi Hendrix or the Beatles or Buffalo Springfield, not Tchaikovsky in an ostentatious vehicle, and though I was clearly not over thirty, they immediately recognized me as a participant in that over-thirty world, and of all things, the Flying Nun herself. So to the timing of Tchaikovsky’s thunderous cannon fire, they all flipped me the bird, except the one poor guy who made a wet raspberry sound. I drove the rest of the way home feeling like the ragamuffin again.
Even in the first days of my hiatus I began to prepare for what lay ahead, to smooth out some of the bumps I knew I’d be traveling over as soon as production started again. I gave up my Malibu apartment and rented a big ugly house in Hollywood, ten minutes from Columbia, eliminating the long commute that was not only a waste of my precious time but filled with anxiety, since I never knew when the temperamental Ferrari would overheat on the 101 freeway, forcing me to pull over and wait for traffic to thin before I could limp home. From Kings Road, I could almost coast to work if I had to. This time it was Princess who helped me load up the boxes, staying with me a great deal of the time, helping me unpack as if we were building a new life together.
My twenty-first birthday party, hosted by Screen Gems.
There are no family photos taken during most of those years because there was no family to take them. The only tools I have to unearth memories are the scrapbooks Aunt Gladys devotedly kept, basically documenting my career until 1989, when she passed away, less than a year after her older sister, my grandmother Joy. In the stacks of carefully cut-out articles, clippings, and fan magazine stories (all placed in clear plastic sleeves with the date on the top) I find a paparazzi-style photo of an overweight, double-chinned Sally. With long straight hair and short blunt bangs, I’m smiling gleefully as I stand jammed against two of the Monkees, Davy and Peter. It was my twenty-first birthday party, held at the Factory, hosted by Jackie Cooper and thrown by Screen Gems. I’d hated birthday parties ever since my brother’s fourth-grade no-show, and even though the whole event had been arranged by the studio and was mostly a publicity opportunity, I remember being very nervous. Shortly after the band’s deafening beat started up, a few familiar faces began to appear, mostly the cast and a few executives. But when I looked up to see those two strutting guys walking toward me carrying a big ribbon-bedecked package, I felt a jolt of either dread or excitement, not certain which. (I don’t remember opening that gift, which I’m sure had been put together by Screen Gems.) The contrived stories in both TV Radio Mirror and Movie Mirror dated February and March of 1968 reported that Davy was my date, but whatever it might look like in those photos, I remember that he wasn’t. Behind the smiling threesome, almost unnoticeable, looms my very tall little sister with an “I want to be in the picture too” look on her face. I was turning twenty-one but looked like a chubby fifteen-year-old. Princess was fifteen but looked twenty-one. She was my date.