TIME IS A funny thing. My brother tried to explain it to me once. Why it moves so fast now when it used to move so painfully slow. It has to do with the percentage of your life that each day represents. When you’ve lived 25,915 days, one twenty-four-hour span is a very small part of the whole picture. But when you’ve only got 10,220 days under your belt, each day is a bigger portion of that existence.
After Stay Hungry had wrapped, when I was finally home getting up in the morning with the kids, fixing breakfast, doing all the things I had longed to be doing when I was away from them, every hour moved so slowly I wanted to chew my arm off. And while I can remember that aching impatience to move forward with my life, and I know where I ultimately ended up, I can’t quite put together how I got there. Fortunately, tucked away in several old suitcases, I have over forty years of mental maps: dozens of spiral notebooks, leather-bound journals, and cute little diaries that I endlessly scribbled in. Starting in 1974, I threw up on page after page—well, not literally. I kept my book with me always, traveled with it, hiding with it in a bathroom sometimes to vomit my feelings using pen or pencil or even crayon. I think I always had a fantasy that those barely legible pages would someday read like the journals of Patti Smith or Ana?s Nin or Virginia Woolf. But I regret to tell you, and myself, that they do not. Even so, I’m glad to have them.
I open the book marked ’75 and stop on April 17, where I wrote, “Waiting, waiting, waiting.” Then: “If I don’t get the part in Stay Hungry, I’ll find a way to move on, beginning with a banana split.” Turning the page, I find written in enormous letters, “I GOT IT!” Then on July 16, I wrote about being back home again after we wrapped, glad to be with Peter and Eli but worried about money. And that entry reminds me that my salary on the film was so small I had to beg production to pay my phone bill before I could check out of the motel. In August of that year, I describe how I stood in the unemployment line, determined to get my check while politely signing autographs the whole time. But seven months later, by March of ’76, my whole world had changed: The finished but barely lived-in Chantilly house had sold, Steve and I were in the process of getting a divorce, and a young man named Coulter was in my life. How the hell did that happen so fast?
A few months after production was finished and postproduction began, Rafelson called to invite me to an early screening of the film in Aspen, where he lived. And with some reluctance, I agreed to go. Waiting for me at the airport when I arrived was a man wearing scuffed boots and a sweat-stained cowboy hat, looking more like the resident of a cattle ranch than a ski resort. He was two years younger than me, a foot taller, and at that moment, Coulter Adams was one heck of a lot savvier. He had lived in Nepal teaching English, spent his life skiing and camping, living by hook or by crook, then a year earlier he had begun working as Bob’s assistant/right-hand man/sometimes house sitter/sometimes playmate.
I remember how nervous I was when Coulter took me to Bob’s Aspen house, nerves I never experienced when auditioning. Even though I’d been anxious during the filming, it hadn’t been like this. Now I was trembling, felt shy and awkward. Without Mary Tate to define me, I didn’t know who I was. And when Bob finally walked in, expecting to find the same girl he’d known me to be, I then felt trapped and couldn’t imagine what I was doing there. I kept trying to hide the panic building in me, to buck up and swallow my tears while I calmly told Bob—who thought I’d lost my mind—that I needed to go home. Eventually, in a state of total confusion, I agreed to stay long enough to see a rough cut of the film. After the screening, when Bob stayed to talk with his editor, it was Captain Fun, as Coulter was called, who walked me around town, then took me dancing, showing me his Aspen hangouts. It was a rare moment of feeling young and footloose, with people my age, some of whom had college degrees but weren’t driven by the need to find their place in the world, who wanted to play before they had to hunker down. I’d never done anything but hunker down and had no idea how to play. Coulter was not Steve, not filled with vehement opinions that would wipe out my own, and he was not Bob. I didn’t need Coulter’s approval; he needed mine. If this was fun, then I liked it and I liked him. By March, several months later, Coulter was in California with me and my sons.
Then someone flipped the switch and everything started happening at once. The release of Stay Hungry was fast approaching so I was needed to help promote the movie, which meant traveling to New York to do a few days of press. At that precise moment, the escrow on my house was closing, which meant I was once again MOVING! It meant I was truly walking away from Steve and the beautiful home he had built so that I could live in the inexpensive cracker box of a house I’d found outside of Malibu, in a community aptly named Point Dume. And it also meant that I would be living there with someone I barely knew, not bothering for a moment to think how bewildered my children must have been. Hell, I never stopped to think how bewildered I must have been.
In the midst of that total upheaval, I received a call from Dianne Crittenden, who, once again, wanted me to audition for a role against the wishes of everyone else involved. This time it was for a four-hour NBC miniseries produced by Lorimar, which would air over two consecutive nights: Sybil. Magnificently adapted by Stewart Stern from a book by Flora Rheta Schreiber, and based on a real case (though the accuracy has been debated), it’s the story of a young woman with severe dissociative identity disorder, or multiple personality—and she supposedly had seventeen of them. At the heart of the story is the relationship between Sybil and Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, the psychiatrist who takes on the task of uniting the damaged girl with her fragmented selves.
This was it. The fact that it was a television project didn’t matter. I had worked my whole life—lived my whole life—to play this role, and as I read the two-part screenplay, my hands shook. I knew her. She belonged to me. And though I never consciously saw how connected I was to Sybil, never saw myself as having similar psychological survival techniques, I knew my own childhood difficulties would fuel the work, knew this role was mine even if no one else in the room thought so.
All my energy was directed toward that meeting and not one ounce on the gloomy new house with its low ceilings and ever-present smell of fried food, which no amount of candle burning could eliminate. The entire house remained crammed with stacks of unlabeled boxes, making it difficult to move around the small rooms and impossible to find anything. I uncovered the toys, thank God, and a few kitchen supplies. But I was missing a big box of my old clothes, and that’s what I needed. My task, this time, would be to convince everyone that I was a real-life version of this damaged young woman. And though I had several different personalities of hers to choose from, I knew I had to go into this meeting as the passive, shell persona of Sybil herself: baggy colorless clothes, no makeup, neat but uncoiffed hair. My old ragamuffin look.