Happily, Lane Bradbury—who had helped me with my homemade test—played my younger sister, and since she’d been a member of the Studio much longer than I, we could confide in each other about the work. Playing my troublesome mother was the beautiful Eleanor Parker, who was at the tail end of a wonderful career and to me, she was fascinating. Never in my short time as an actor had I worked with anyone so frantic for control. Every time a scene required us to hug—which for some reason happened a lot—she would automatically turn my face away from the camera, making sure the only things on display were her glowing, tear-rimmed eyes and the back of my head. But Lee had always said, “The best acting is no acting at all,” and since the mother and daughter had a contentious relationship in the text and I didn’t feel exactly bonded with Eleanor, I “used it.” As I watched this actress—who had been extremely successful by anyone’s definition—I realized that she was a cautionary tale for me, a blinking hazard sign. True, she came from a different era of acting, and that was part of it, but as I sat quietly in a corner, observing how she worked, I realized that I never wanted to get to the point where showing my face on camera at just the right angle was more important than the work itself. This work that I was just now trying to understand.
David Carradine, who played my hippie boyfriend, wore a pair of suede bell-bottom pants that laced in the front, which was fine except that the panel of fabric usually placed behind the laces—like the tongue of a shoe—was missing, and because David wore no underwear, it allowed pubic hair and a great deal of the penis nestled there to be on constant display. But since that seemed to be his only costume in the show, the novelty of that eventually dwindled, and the more hypnotic thing became the forgotten food piling up in his capped teeth. I didn’t much like kissing him, but he was easy to work with and right for the role, so what’s a little visible gum disease between fellow performers?
To round out the colorful cast was the actor who played my father, Jackie Cooper. Yes, the man who had been an important executive at the studio where I had spent my entire career—all five years—had left his job at Screen Gems, gone back into acting, and was now playing my father. I met him face-to-face as an actor, seeing him for the first time through different eyes. In reality, he was a kind, gentle man, not to mention a good actor with a storybook body of work.
Right before Maybe I’ll Come Home in the Spring aired, and just after I’d wrapped another TV film—this one about a newly married young couple, aptly called Marriage: Year One—Cecil Smith wrote in his Los Angeles Times column: “It’s doubtful any two films have caused more stir here, partly, I think, out of curiosity about what Sally Field is doing in them. Both are highly complex dramatic roles, demanding the sort of acting resources that Sally never demonstrated flying out of that convent in Puerto Rico.” Mr. Smith went on to say, “Strange, that the production company of Marriage: Year One, Universal Studios, swarms with fine young contract players, highly skilled in drama like Carrie Snodgress, Katharine Ross, Belinda Montgomery, Tisha Sterling, Pam McMyler and yet Sally was brought in from the outside.”
Well okay, fine. But in the Hollywood Reporter’s review of Maybe I’ll Come Home in the Spring—which I’ve only now read, forty-seven years after it was originally printed—John Goff calls it ABC-TV’s most intriguing Movie of the Week and says it ranks highest largely because of a radical departure in performing material by its star. “Field, with Sargent’s almost delicate direction, shows that she can handle a serious role as well as light comedy. She simply needs more experience at it. With this as evidence she should have no trouble getting it.” Ha.
Marriage: Year One and Hitched—another NBC movie I made that year—were both two hours of uninspired viewing, as was a third film called Mongo’s Back in Town. And just in case you’re wondering, I wasn’t Mongo. I was his girlfriend, basically a generic supporting role to Joe Don Baker’s lead. The only interesting thing about Mongo’s Back was that the cast included young Martin Sheen, also in a generic supporting role, and Telly Savalas, whose character was not unlike the one he played two years later in his Kojak series.
After a year and a half, what little cachet I might have had coming off my back-to-back television series was slipping away. I could feel it in my bones. I was repeating the same pattern my mother and stepfather had before me, working but going nowhere. Soon I’d be relegated to a guest spot here and there, to being a supporting player on TV shows I didn’t know or like, and then what? Game shows? That was a horrifying thought. How would I make a living?
And Steve was still no closer to entering the workplace. He had written and directed a very good short play presented at USC during an evening of student one-acts, and even though he was fired up and engaged during his first semester of a two-year MFA program, he never wrote another play, never wrote a screenplay or produced another project at USC. He talked about wanting to be a writer, to pursue writing as a career, but he didn’t push it anywhere, never explored options, and relied on me to bring home the bacon… and the eggs.
Then Steve’s number came up. The draft lottery had gone into play in 1969, at which time he’d received a student deferment, but when Peter was not quite two years old, Steve got his notice to report for a physical the following month. And that news presented the possibility of being sent to Vietnam. With Peter on my hip and my heart in my throat, I stood stone still in the living room while Steve read the order again and again. What could we do? There had never been a patriotic, “fight for your country” feeling connected with the war in Vietnam, and by 1971, only a year after protesting students were gunned down at Kent State, angry demonstrations were happening everywhere. Proudly marching off to potentially lose your life in Southeast Asia was not high on anyone’s to-do list. (But as I write this, I’m flooded with great sadness and respect for the thousands and thousands of young men my age who did just that.)
There was always the chance that when called, you might be rejected from serving for legitimate reasons, even if perhaps those reasons had to be embellished just a little. Steve had been a juvenile delinquent, was arrested several times, and spent a year in a facility for troubled children: These issues were real. Therefore, he requested and received a letter from a psychologist he’d been seeing off and on since he was a teenager. The letter stated that Steven Craig Bloomfield was mentally unstable and unsuitable for the armed services. Though I knew Steve was complicated, I did hope that the doctor was doing him a favor and exaggerating.
Each morning we woke feeling a little more anxious than the day before, until suddenly, out of the blue, two weeks before the designated day, Steve decided he needed to find his father, whom he only vaguely remembered. He had never reached out to him, hardly ever mentioned him, but after somehow discovering the man was still living in Fargo, North Dakota, Steve turned into a young Telemachus and off he went, in search of his long-lost father.
He had been gone only a day or two when Princess called to tell me that Jocko wanted to meet my son. Not quite eighteen, my sister had been working in a clothes store in Sherman Oaks, living sometimes with Baa, sometimes with whatever boyfriend she had, and sometimes with me. At one point we even tried to turn my garage into an apartment for her, but no amount of scrubbing could change the fact that it was a raw-walled concrete slab with a washer and dryer in one corner and an electric door that opened erratically and without provocation.
I hadn’t seen or talked to my stepfather in a very long time, not since he walked out of his marriage with my mother, and the thought of being in the same room with him again made my stomach flip over. But Princess sounded thrilled, excited to include the fact that Jocko wanted me to meet Autumn, the woman he had waltzed away with more than two years before, then married directly after divorcing my mother. And I mean directly—doubt the ink on the documents had dried.