That night, as people milled around, stretching their legs and preparing for the next scene, Lee quietly told me to consider joining his master class series at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute, which he and his wife, Anna, had opened in 1969 not far from the Studio. Attending the institute cost money that I didn’t want to spend, but it would mean working more intensely with Lee, three times a week. I immediately signed up and started classes the following week.
The four-hour daytime sessions were much as I imagined a college class would be and very different from the Actors Studio. Lee always began with a lecture of sorts, telling stories about acting and stories about life—which were ultimately about acting. Eventually he’d announce the specific exercise to be taught and call six or seven students to the stage, where everyone sat in a loose semicircle of folding chairs. First came relaxation—as important as anything else we ever did in class—and Lee would slowly move from person to person, picking up an arm to shake it, testing the shoulders, pulling the jaw open and closed, hunting for rigidity anywhere, telling us that a mouth held tight or shoulders tensed, even hands that are unconsciously clenched, can block impulses. After he replaced all the body parts where he’d found them, we’d begin the work of the day.
During the first week, we looked at ourselves in nonexistent mirrors, or sat in a windowless room feeling the touch of sunlight, or held imaginary cups of coffee, felt the weight in our hands, inhaled the aroma, tasted the bitter warmth—all sensory exercises that are about much more than the five senses.
On one particular day—after a month of classes—Lee chose me along with six others to work onstage, then announced that he wanted to guide us through the room exercise, an exercise that he said was underused and an effective back door into subconscious emotions. After we all had properly relaxed and each had moved to a separate spot on the stage, we sat down, waiting to have the task explained. “Pick a place in your life, at least seven years in the past, which stands out in your mind,” he told us. “It could be your bedroom or your father’s study, a location from your life.” He advised us to pick something important enough to be remembered but not to worry about reproducing whatever emotions we might connect to the memory. He gave us a moment to think and when ready, we were to close our eyes and not just re-create the location in our brains, but put ourselves in it. “Do you see paint on the walls or is there wallpaper? What’s on the floor?” he asked us. “Where is the light coming from? What do you hear? What do you smell?”
Sitting with legs crossed, eyes closed, I searched for a place to start until, without intending to, I began to see the carpet on the stairs leading to my stepfather’s bedroom. As if I were turning a viewfinder, details slowly began to appear: the stains on the edges of the rug, the flat off-white walls, the worn banister on one side of the staircase, the dirt on the scuffed baseboards, the window on the first landing where I could see the tree, hear its leaves rustling like the sound of rushing water. Then came Lee’s voice, softly urging us to investigate, to touch what we see in our mind’s eye. I put my fingers in the worn carpet, felt the slightly sticky wool, and instantly I could smell dust and summer and bacon frying.
I feel the sun streaming in, glaring off the wall, stinging my face as I begin to walk up, my bare feet sinking into the carpet. I stop in the sun on the first landing, turn to see the next four stairs and the door. I’m wearing white shorts with a red-and-white checked blouse, and as I stand with my hand on the knob, feeling powerful, I undo the first button of my blouse and knock. I have not been called. I’m moving into his room because I want to go. I want to feel I’m important. He’s surprised, then his smile glides into a knowing smirk, as if he sees where I am heading before I do. He sits on the edge of his bed, watches me, bemused. How could he know what I didn’t? Was this my Achilles’ heel he would threaten to reveal and destroy me with two years later? Was I not a victim, but a participant? I haltingly tell him that my skin is feeling dry and he chuckles as he slathers his meaty hands with the lotion that waits next to the bed, then rolls the goo over my bare legs, smearing his hand up under my shorts while I stand before him.
I’d become an expert at not feeling anything in that room, and though I still felt the familiar distant burn of humiliation, this time I felt something else. And suddenly, with a jolt, I was yanked back to the stage I was sitting on and it hit me for the first time—the deep shame and horror of my own desires, desires I couldn’t feel when I was fourteen. Only at that moment, twelve years later, in an acting exercise with Lee Strasberg, did I realize what I had been asking for.
The exercise continued for a bit longer but the memory instantly cut off there. As hard as I tried then, and forever after, I can’t see how I left the upstairs bedroom that day. I truly don’t believe it went any further, however that moment in my life—though never consciously registered—had been so powerful that I instantly stopped talking to Jocko for almost two years, barely responding when he talked to me. And I had never known precisely what had caused the abrupt halt to our relationship, what had flipped the switch in me from needing his approval to despising him. From that day on, and for the rest of my life, I shut him out. But I had shut out a part of myself as well, the madwoman. Had sent her away to live in the attic of my brain, disconnected from the rest of me.
After we’d been wandering around in our heads for nearly two hours, Lee carefully called to each of us, whispering our names one at a time. Like waking a child from sleep, he said, “Sally, come back to class. Come back now and look at us.”
I tried to squint, to open my eyes enough to see my folded legs and nothing else.
“Look at us, Sally. Can you do that?”
I couldn’t.
“Look at us,” he said.
“I can’t,” I whispered.
“Yes, you can,” he gently reassured. “We’re here with you.”
I didn’t want to look at anyone because I didn’t want anyone to see me. When I opened my eyes, I looked only at Lee and cried for the little girl I once had been.
I’ve tried to piece together my childhood and early career most of my adult life, relentlessly going over the memories, occasionally telling some of the stories to a captivated few, and I realize I’ve become my own lore, halfway falling in love with the drama of it all. But when I try to look at my early years of motherhood, my relationship with Steve, and what it became, I run out of lore. Maybe it’s easier to remember myself as a powerless victim and not the perpetrator, not a player in the mindless damage game. I’ve never wanted to see the reality: that I was a young woman who began to have violent rages, who needed to find her sexuality in other men, and who hurt Steve. And more than anything, I don’t want to acknowledge how often I placed my children into the arms of my mother and walked away, only to feel jealous of her relationship with them when I returned.
My mother, my sister, and I had lived a life of musical chairs, never staying in one place very long before the music would start up again, and off we’d go. The only stationary structure in our lives was Joy’s house, and even though I was now paying my mother a small salary to help me with the kids, that’s where Baa went to live, along with Princess, who tried to convert another garage into a room for herself—this time Joy’s spider-ridden, car-less barnlike thing.