And there I was, at the bottom of the dimly lit staircase after the housekeeper had invited me in. Bob stood barefoot in the doorway of his bedroom, his shirt open and hanging over his jeans, or was it a baggy gray T-shirt? I don’t remember. He thanked his housekeeper, told her he’d see her tomorrow, then greeted me with “Hey, Sal, come on up.”
To prepare a character, Lee taught me that you have to understand their history, their emotional ingredients, their physicality. You have to know their lives completely up to the moment you walk onstage, but when you do, you forget it all and just be. No matter what happens, if the other actors drop dead or the set falls down, you are that character. And so I was. Did I sit on an armchair somewhere in the room? Or did I throw myself freely onto the bed as M.T. would have? Did Bob offer me something to drink? Was he smoking a joint and did I take a hit? I’m not sure. But, as if it happened ten minutes ago, I remember Bob sitting on the bed, leaning against the headboard, while I sit before him on my folded legs with my feet hanging off the bed in midair, like some part of me didn’t want to join in. I began to relax as I heard acceptance in his voice, as if the audition was over and I was in the film. In the midst of casually talking about the work, he told me to take my top off so he could see my breasts, saying since there was a nude scene in the film, he needed to figure out how to shoot me. Ignoring the sharp jab of emotion that shot through me, I removed my shirt as casually as he had made the request, then sat for his approval with my eyes closed—the only clue that those fingernails were clawing my insides. And when he asked me to go to the closet and use whatever scarves and shirts I could find to play dress-up, I did that too. I was a grown-up version of the child wrapped in plastic dry-cleaning bags, performing while an older man, whose approval I needed, watched. After I put the things back in the closet and my clothes back on my body, Bob walked with me to his bedroom door. “Okay, Sal, the job is yours. But only after I see how you kiss. I can’t hire anyone who doesn’t kiss good enough.” So I kissed him. It must have been good enough.
When I left his house and climbed into the safety of my dark car, my hands were shaking. What was I feeling? Excited and slightly flattered? Bob had responded to me. I had won. Is that not what I had wanted? I thought about the fact that I was in the film, that I was going to be working with Jeff, that I’d beaten down the door. But a quiet part of me felt afraid, tarnished, shamed, and without a voice to scream, Who the fuck do you think you are? I couldn’t consciously see it then, and not for a long time after. I had won the role, yes. But I had lost something important, something I was also fighting for: my dignity.
I packed my bags and kissed my kids goodbye, Baa constantly reassuring me that they’d be fine, reminding me that Steve would be there too, overseeing the completion of the house. Then, feeling like I was leaving half of me behind, I flew to Birmingham, Alabama, where I lived for seven weeks in a squat, crumbling motel along with the other actors, a smattering of crew, plus the director and his brilliant wife, the production designer on the film (and that was the first I’d heard that Bob had a wife, brilliant or otherwise).
In 1966, when I spent the summer in Oregon filming The Way West, I was so young and unfocused, it had felt as though I’d been sent away to the wrong summer camp and half the time I couldn’t figure out why I was there. But on Stay Hungry, I learned that filming on location is like being sent to the front lines of a foreign war; strangers immediately become friends, daily routines and patterns emerge, and everyone is speaking a new and instantly learned language: the movie. It’s what you eat, sleep, and breathe for however long the film is in production—or as long as you, as an actor, are involved with it. I have almost always found it to be both exciting—that single-minded focus—and stupefyingly lonely. I wanted to be with my children and yet I wanted to be an actor. No matter what, one part of me was always going to be aching.
As Mary Tate Farnsworth.
It helped to remind myself why I was there, to focus intensely on the work, and during Stay Hungry that meant being Mary Tate Farnsworth 24/7. Even without the drugs that were floating around in 1975, I felt wired, simmering with anxiety as I constantly hung on to the M.T. parts of myself, shoving every other aspect away. Hovering close to a character, whether in front of the camera or not, is a process I’ve learned to love over the years. But because I’d worked so hard to convince everyone—most especially Rafelson—that this nymphet and I were two peas in a pod, and because he constantly picked at me, hating my mouth, wanting me to hold it up in a semismile, to pout—just be sexier—it made staying in character feel less like an artistic choice and more like something I had to do to keep the job.
And my body was a constant worry. Mary Tate worked in a gym and the bodybuilders were her family. Presumably she’d slept with one of those family members, a character played by newcomer Arnold Schwarzenegger—who at that point was only a bodybuilder without a hint of what lay ahead. I’m not sure if Arnold was there the day that Bob stopped the whole company—the writer, the crew, the actors, the extras, everyone who was within earshot—to take a vote as to whether they thought I was sexy or not. I stood propped against the full-length mirror of the moldy-smelling weight room, my leotard-clad body starving-to-death thin, and looked around at everyone’s slightly distracted faces. Being in the midst of the crew was always where I felt safest, and I didn’t need to spend much time with this specific hardworking gang to know that I already knew them. With a shrug or a wink, they unanimously voted that I was grade-A material, whether they actually thought I was or not. I tried to laugh, to go along with everything, to be all easy-breezy. So when Bob—who was staying in the large suite directly above my tiny nonsuite—showed up at my door late one night, I had no problem letting him into my room and my body. Easy-breezy.
I can’t blame Rafelson—well, yes I can. When I look at it through today’s eyes and my now seventy-one years, I’d like to bash him over the head. But I wasn’t anyone’s victim. I was a twenty-eight-year-old grown-up, and in ’75 it seemed like acceptable behavior on his part. We’re all locked into the drumbeat of our history, but eventually you have to drown out that tune with your own voice. I couldn’t hear my voice. I couldn’t tell the difference between what was the work and what was real life. I felt powerful and important if I could please Bob—and yet I was being humiliated in the light of day by the same man who was happily devouring me behind closed doors at night. The only thing that Bob Rafelson didn’t do was tell me to point my toes.
Where was the rest of me, the pieces that were capable of taking care of a child, of standing up for myself, that didn’t care whether I pleased him or not? Nowhere I could find. I was participating in a secret relationship that in many ways filled me with shame and rage, a relationship that if discovered would be hurtful to Bob’s wife, whom I liked and respected and who was only a staircase away—just as my mother had been only a staircase away in my childhood. None of that ever entered my mind.
16
Sybil