As my fellow actor began to grope me, rubbing his hands intimately over my body, the madwoman part of me stayed present, and when he began to choke me—truly lost in the task—the red rage of me pushed him away, while I jumped to my feet crying ragamuffin’s tears, and the rock-solid piece of me said the required dialogue. All the pieces, the voices, the parts of me came together. Worked together. Lived for that moment… together.
Then the scene was over. Lee had not stopped us when our allotted fifteen minutes were up, like he had done with all the other scenes. Our Respectful Prostitute had taken forty-five minutes. As I had seen the other actors do after completing their work, I gathered my things and sat on the edge of the stage, not wanting to meet anyone’s eyes. My partner pulled up a chair, took out a notepad and pen, then sat poised, ready to jot down important instructions and words of wisdom from Lee, while I sat with my legs crossed and my hands in my lap. Lee asked Paul what he had been working on and received a long explanation, which I didn’t listen to because only then did I realize with a jolt that Lee would soon turn to me, asking the very same question, and I had no answer. I wasn’t working on anything. And, sure enough, after commenting briefly and rather blandly to Paul, Lee turned and looked at me. But he didn’t ask me what I’d been working on. He asked, “Why are you here?”
My heart stalled in my chest, and I braced myself to hear him say that I didn’t belong, that I shouldn’t be there.
“You work,” he continued. “A lot of people here don’t and you do. You’re doing very well. Why are you here?”
“Because I want to be good,” I said.
“You are good,” he said. “Good enough to work all the time.”
“Yes, I do work. But… not the way I want. I’m not good enough. I want to know how.”
Never taking his eyes off mine, he sat back in his chair while making little clicking sounds, as though he had a popcorn kernel stuck in the back of his throat. After a moment that felt like an hour, he leaned forward and very softly said, “I let this scene continue. I wanted to watch you. You were quite brilliant.”
My stalled heart would have exploded, but he spoke so softly I wasn’t sure that’s what he had said. He held my look, clicked the back of his throat, and repeated nonchalantly, “Quite brilliant.”
Instantly the room became vacuum-packed, airless and still. No one moved. No one raised a hand to offer comments, as I had seen happen in the past. And my eyes, which had been fastened to Lee’s, began to search the room for Madeleine.
11
Second Season
WHEN FILMING BEGAN on the Nun’s second season—leaving me with no time to attend classes—Lee’s words became fuel, a verbal elixir I would drink over and over in my memory. At the Actors Studio, I felt inside my body. Without that space, without that kind of exploration, I lost the ability to hear parts of myself, as though half of me just vacated the premises. But on the edge of my brain I could still feel that one moment of coexistence, like an echo of harmonizing voices, and one day, after we’d been in production about a week, I surprised myself.
Except for the phone call in which I had initially passed on the show, I’d never had a real conversation with Harry Ackerman, the executive producer on both Gidget and The Flying Nun. I remember seeing him on the Gidget set once or twice and in the convent for short, infrequent visits that sent tense “Big Daddy’s watching” ripples through the entire company. After a few moments of stiff chitchat, I would always find a reason to back away. But when production on the Nun’s second year started up, Mr. Ackerman invited me to lunch in the windowless, hard-to-find conference room known as the Executive Dining Room. It was an hour of forced smiling from me, of pushing the food around my plate while I counted the moments until I could leave. Then, as I was preparing to scurry back to the set, relieved to be finally free, I sat back down. Without knowing I was going to, I asked Harry if it might be possible to have one show written that season about an honest human problem, or even one scene every now and again, adding that it would give me something to look forward to. I hadn’t rolled every word around in my head four thousand times, hadn’t begged myself to speak. I just made a request, plain and simple. And when he replied, “That might be good for you, Sally; however, your audience doesn’t want to be surprised or touched or taught or have to think too much,” I silently nodded my head. Yet, as I walked back to Stage 2, I felt oddly triumphant. Without feeling blazing rage or fear or sadness, I had asked for what I wanted. Getting it seemed secondary.
I never told anyone in production about my dissatisfaction with the show and struggled hard to keep it from showing, except when I was with Baa. If she wasn’t drunk, she was my sounding board, my pillow to scream into, patiently listening to my endless stream of frustrations. Since the first days of Gidget she was always advising me to get to know the camera, to make friends with it—which, instinctually, I had. Sometimes I felt more intimately connected with that mechanical device than with anything breathing on the set. But in that friendship, she warned me, I had better be careful of what I was feeling. She repeatedly drilled it into my head that if I was irritated or impatient or bored or just fed up with the work, the camera could and would see it, implying that those colors were unappealing and would paint me as unlikable. I scoffed at her advice, not because it wasn’t right, but because it seemed as if she was telling me to erase my true feelings, to swallow them, to settle for what I had and never want more.
I have a little square snapshot of my mother taken around 1936, when she was fourteen or fifteen. She peers over the shoulder of an unnamed young man, with an open joyous laugh on her face and a spark in her eyes like a challenge to anyone who thinks they can stop her. She’s alive and going to take a big bite out of life. Either that or a big bite out of the boy standing next to her, and maybe at that moment, they were one and the same.
Fifteen-year-old Baa with her infectious laugh.
It goes without saying that my mother’s generation had a more confining set of boundaries dictating their behavior than the one I grew up in. And she had been a bit of a renegade in her way, had challenged those parameters, behavior that must have given the women of her family some worrisome, hand-wringing moments. Before taking the career opportunity that had landed in her lap, before earning a living in the foreign world of show business, she’d spent two years in a city college, and quietly knew so much about so many things. Certainly, literature: I could hardly name a book she hadn’t read, and she remembered them all, could summarize the story and talk about the author’s other works. She had read Freud and Jung, had seen a psychiatrist in the early fifties, could spout the theories of most of the important philosophers, studied art history on her own, practiced painting with oils all her life, was proficient in quilt making, knitting, and sewing. And when I tried to learn French in my early sixties, then foolishly attempted to speak to her using my shaky skills, she maddeningly filled in all the words I couldn’t remember, using the correct and exact pronunciation.