When he left to take a shower, I watched the tomato soup boil up and over the edges of the pan, looking exactly like I felt. Was I being asked to walk away from what I’d been working toward, so that Steve could find a career for himself? Was I to give up on myself, swallow my longing, so that he could dabble in this new arena? Is that how I saw this moment, why I felt so angry? Or did I see Steve as Jocko, like a mole in my organization, appearing to be on my side but actually in cahoots with the enemy? Sometimes when I was caught in an argument with Steve, I’d be so overwhelmed with rage I couldn’t find any other parts of myself. I’d lose sight of love and trust, then literally have to start packing my suitcase, blind to anything other than my need to run. Usually the fury dissipated before I had emptied the closet.
I think there was always a part of me waiting for a reason to walk out the door, to be safely alone and hear nothing but my own heartbeat… to put myself back into that little pine house next to the big sycamore on Libbit Avenue.
When the pilot was shot in February of ’73, Steve worked in the production office, but by the time the series sold, with a schedule to go into production in July, he was no longer an associate producer—whether he quit or I was callous enough to tell the studio I didn’t want him there, I don’t remember. He decided to focus on the completion of the house. We gave up the place on Topanga Beach to rent a house in Toluca Lake, only blocks from Columbia Ranch, where I’d be filming, allowing me to be closer to the kids. Steve didn’t live there with us.
Cecil Smith’s column in the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday, April 4, 1973, displayed the headline NBC DISCLOSES NEW FALL LINEUP. It goes on to say,
Most drastic shake-up of the prime-time schedule NBC has had in several years. Nine new shows, four new half-hour comedies, two dramatic series and two anthologies. The Girl with Something Extra with Sally Field as a young housewife with such highly developed ESP powers that she can read the mind of her husband John Davidson (well at least she doesn’t fly).
The Girl with Something Extra, which proved to have nothing extra, ran for only twenty-two episodes. Thank you, God.
15
Hungry
I READ THE script while sitting on the bed in the unfinished Chantilly house, propped up against a pile of pillows. It was late afternoon, and Peter sat on the floor near me, using the newly completed fireplace hearth—a two-foot-high, lumpy surface made from Steve’s collected boulders—as his artist’s desk. With paper and colored pencils scattered around, my five-year-old son quietly concentrated on the colorful creatures he called “weirdies,” drawing them, then giving each an original “weirdie” name. From somewhere downstairs I could hear work going on—hammers and saws, lumber slamming onto an unfinished floor—and above it all rang out Eli’s persistent not-quite-three-year-old voice: “Dad… Dad… Dad… Dad… look… look… Dad. DAD!” Every now and then I’d hear Steve’s distracted reply.
For all the months that I’d worked on The Girl with Something Extra, even after the show was canceled, Steve had been camping in the lot while the house was being built, working alongside the contractor and his crew, taking ownership of it as the walls went up. And now, because I was no longer filming a series and hadn’t worked since then, and because no money was coming in but a great deal was going out, the boys and I had moved into the not-yet-finished house too. Which meant that Steve and I were both living under the same newly shingled roof. Although not together.
And that’s where I was, holding those pages, propped up against the recently painted pale yellow wall, directly across from the fireplace and Peter’s artistry. I was sitting with my knees bent, feet planted on the bed, which was the same king-size mattress and box springs I’d carted around with me to five different houses in the past six years. My butt was snugly lodged into the permanent dent on my side, the side I’d always slept on no matter what house it was in. The slightly larger dent on the opposite side of the bed had held several different bodies over the last two years since Steve and I had unofficially separated, but more times than not, it stayed empty and haunted. The nights when Peter had an asthma attack and was struggling to breathe, he’d sleep nestled close to my side, never rolling toward his father’s phantom imprint. And I would spend those nights wondering if I should take the little boy to the hospital. I’m sure I should have, countless times. But I never did.
I don’t look back on this time of my life with pride, don’t see it as a shining example of thoughtful parenting. I can’t recall a single moment when I stopped to worry about how my actions would affect my sons, didn’t wonder if I should consult a therapist to learn the best way to help them adjust to their parents’ living apart. I simply told Steve I didn’t want to be with him anymore, because that’s all I knew to be true. But when he was gone, I missed him terribly, even if I was seeing someone else—and I was always seeing someone else, as if I were making up for lost time. I’d long for Steve to come back, to be comforted with his familiarity, and when he was back, I’d want him gone again.
Little Eli on the Chantilly construction site.
In reality, it wasn’t Steve that I didn’t want to be with, it was me. I didn’t want to be the person I became when I was with him, didn’t want to lean on him because he expected me to, because he wanted me to, because he felt better when I did—or even because I felt better when I did. It seemed as though we were trapped in our childhood, like Dorian Gray’s portrait. We got older but our relationship never changed.
It had been almost two years since I’d worked. Almost two years since I’d met with my business manager as he sat holding a slim file of declining bank statements and nonexistent pension plans, looking dumbfounded when I told him of my intention to turn down any television projects that came my way. Almost two years since he strongly advised me to accept the first offer I got, adding that, even if I was lucky enough to be cast in a film—which was unlikely—actresses got paid very little. It had been almost two years since I met with my agent, who flatly stated that only models were working in films, and no offense, but I wasn’t pretty enough, insisting that situation comedy was the place for me, a place where I had a real foothold. It had been almost two years since I’d fired them both.
During those unemployed years, I’d tried to shake myself up, to push myself out of my own nest, to get stronger any way I could. Everything from doing six weeks of summer stock in Ohio to studying musical theater with a man named David Craig, who taught actors how to mount a song technically, not to be in front of it or behind it, but to ride it. And though he couldn’t give me the vocal chops I longed for, the skills a singing teacher might have provided, David taught me how to build a structure to lean on, like a tree where I could hang all my Actors Studio ornaments. Most important of all, he taught me, and countless other lucky actors, the art of the audition.