Those years were spent in David Craig’s joyful classes—where I’d sit in a roomful of other terrified actors, taking chances, flinging myself into the tightly structured, poetic world of songs, learning when to breathe and in what meter—then running off to Lee Strasberg’s intense sessions, filled with exercises that were often emotional but abstract, many times performing scenes when the process felt intangible and undefined, when I couldn’t figure out how to use whatever tools we were being given. Until one day something changed.
I’d been asked by a fellow student in Lee’s class to partner with her in a scene from a two-character play entitled The White Whore and the Bit Player. In it, two actresses portray two different aspects of the same character, and my scene partner—a beautiful blonde I didn’t know very well and whose name I swear I can’t remember—was to play the Marilyn Monroe–ish, whore side of the woman, whereas I was to play the nun. For obvious reasons, I didn’t especially care for this scene and probably should have turned it down from the get-go. But Lee expected us to participate in whatever work our classmates wanted to tackle, whether we wanted to tackle it or not. Because of that, I agreed to do it. In all honesty, I didn’t devote much thought to the performance, which meant my work was lazy—mistake number one. And because I’d been working with Lee off and on for many years, I’d developed a slight swagger, confident of my secure place with him—mistake number two. When I stepped on the stage that day, thinking I could fake my way through it, my work was a deadly mix of uninterested and uninteresting.
After the scene, Lee spoke to my partner with patient, careful attention, then clicked the back of his throat a few times, looked laser-like into my eyes, and said, “Yes?” as though I were a stranger who’d come to his house uninvited.
I knew the drill, therefore I threw out the standard “I was working on a moment I once had with my father.” And in reality, I had—very obliquely—been visualizing an episode with Dick for my preparation.
Lee paused, and—making sure the whole class could hear—said, “When are you going to stop this shit?” I was stunned. I’d been caught and the rug I’d been so smugly standing on was being pulled out from under me. “I don’t believe your father was enough. I don’t think that moment with your father affected you very much.” He pronounced this with such finality, as if he had just said, NEXT. I was being dismissed. Without taking a moment to gather my wits (wherever they were), I started stuttering, explaining, defending myself, while Lee shook his head, preparing to move on.
Suddenly, I jumped to my feet as if yanked by a bungee cord hooked in my brain, and began shouting through a gag of emotion, “Who the fuck do you think you are to tell me what I’m feeling? Who the fuck do you think you are?” Almost unable to breathe, I kept repeating the same sentences over and over.
Lee never backed off or demanded that I contain myself. Instead he rose to his feet, becoming red in the face while he worked hard to be heard over my raging, hiccupping barrage of protest. “Listen to me, Sally,” he yelled. “You keep saying you want to be better, but you keep dancing around. I don’t see anything important going on in you.” Again and again he said the same thing while all the time I continued to spew, “Who the fuck do you think you are? You don’t know what’s going on inside of me…”
No one ever talked to Lee like that. And from the edges of my awareness I could feel every other actor in the room scrunch down in their chairs, suddenly looking at their feet or placing their hands over their faces, while Lee and I dueled with overlapping monologues. Finally, feeling embarrassed and foolish, I crumpled cross-legged onto the stage, like a puppet whose strings had snapped, my head hanging limp from my neck as I tried to sop up the river of snot pouring from my nose with the sleeves of my sweater. The whole room was silent; no one moved as I stared into my folded legs, seeing nothing but loss. Lee stepped to the edge of the stage, reaching out for the boards as if to hold himself up (this couldn’t have been easy for him either), and when steady he said, “You keep saying you want to be better, that you come here day after day because you want to know how to be a better actor. But Sally, listen. Where you want to be is where you are right now. And it has cost you a lot. You have tried to hold it all in. You must always be where you are right now.”
And what the holy fuck did that mean? He dismissed the class and I quickly gathered my things, without once looking at Lee. I would never again meet his eyes in a classroom situation.
Unable to understand what he’d said, I drove home in a blind blur, feeling betrayed and defensive and, most important, outraged. Furious for every moment in my life that I’d felt dismissed, discounted, or defined by someone else.
Did I take my wounded dignity to the music and laughter of David Craig’s class? Did I whine that I’d become the victim of the famous Strasberg buzz saw? Probably. But it was soon after that, in April of 1975, that I received the script that I was now sitting on the bed reading.
It wasn’t well written, and if telling an understandable story with believable, realistic characters was what I was looking for, then Stay Hungry wasn’t it. But none of that mattered. By the grace of God—and a casting woman named Dianne Crittenden—I had been included on the very long list of potential actresses to play opposite the always-dazzling Jeff Bridges, who was already a star. Even with the new and improved representation, my name had never been included on anyone’s list, so when Bob Rafelson’s office called requesting a meeting, asking if they could send me the script, I was as shocked as my agent, whose first reaction had been to ask if they had the right Sally Field—or so I was told.
Oddly enough, Rafelson had been one of the creator/producers of The Monkees television series, though we’d never met roaming around the Screen Gems lot. Bob went on to direct The King of Marvin Gardens and Five Easy Pieces, both well-regarded films with a liberal peppering of Actors Studio faces, Jack Nicholson’s being one of them. I didn’t know it at the time, but my work at the Studio over the years had started some chatter, at least among the Studio members, and that chatter had filtered down to Dianne, which was one reason my name had been put on the list. The second reason was the fact that Ms. Crittenden happened to be good friends with Zohra Lampert, the wonderful actress cast as my best friend on the thankfully short-lived The Girl with Something Extra. Zohra and I had been together for all those months, both of us struggling to make the show better, times that usually ended in a tussle between me and my bouffant-haired co-star, John Davidson—who once accused me of having Helen Reddy up my ass. Lovely Zohra, whom I hadn’t seen since we wrapped, reportedly told Dianne that though I was well known, I was totally undiscovered. So my name went on her list.
I really couldn’t tell what the script was about, but I knew my interpretation couldn’t be unclear and vague, even if the screenplay was. The character of Mary Tate Farnsworth was southern, and appeared to be uneducated, economically challenged, and physically inclined—a champion water-skier (sweet Jesus, another water sport). She was also sexual, with an open, easy, “no big deal” kind of sensuality, an ingredient that I didn’t own, or not on the surface at least. These were the specifics I had to work with.