After the film wrapped, my life bounced back into the familiar routines: being with my kids, my mother, my sister, and finding somewhere else to live. But no matter what I was doing, no matter how important or pressing things in my own life were, I’d instantly drop everything whenever Burt called from his home in Florida—as regularly irregular as those calls might have been.
Burt always told me that he’d been born in Waycross, Georgia, and whether that’s true or not, I do know that he grew up in the Sunshine State and over the years, he had accumulated enough land to build an unpretentious, no-frills ranch for his family. The house he’d made for his parents was a simple one-story home, with an easy arrangement of well-worn furniture scattered atop the indoor/outdoor carpeting, which ran throughout, including the kitchen. To the side of this concrete block house was an awning-covered path connected to a smaller but identical version of the main structure, the only difference being that the smaller one had red-flocked wallpaper and black shag carpeting. And it was here that he had gone to recuperate after we parted in Georgia.
I think Burt always considered this rudimentary compound in West Palm Beach his real home, though he’d also owned a place in the Hollywood Hills—a kind of bachelor’s pad with a backyard guesthouse where Hal Needham had been living. Right before filming had begun on Smokey, Burt had sold that Hollywood home and purchased a hacienda-style gated estate in exclusive Holmby Hills—a beautiful, perfect place with high-vaulted ceilings, polished dark wood, and terra-cotta tile floors, a house that stayed cool in the blazing summer and was almost unheatable during the mild winters (something I loved about the house and he didn’t). When Burt finally returned to L.A. that fall, his new piece of real estate was undergoing the massive renovation he’d requested, so he decided to live in the guesthouse located behind his new four-car garage. This one-bedroom cabana had already been completely redone and decorated up the wazoo with a lavish Moroccan theme—no flocked wallpaper but lots of shag, this time off-white, not black.
In that late October of ’76, just as I was packing up to move into a rather decrepit though charming house I’d purchased in Studio City, just as my whole life was about to vanish into Burt’s needs again, I was asked to go on a publicity tour for Sybil. I hadn’t seen the miniseries, other than the few grainy clips I’d watched projected on a screen while looping (rerecording pieces of dialogue to fix sound problems). And because I’d felt popped on the nose whenever I’d talked about Sybil with Burt, I had tucked the whole experience out of sight, hidden it in the back of my mind, until eventually I quit thinking about it altogether. But then I got to San Francisco and Minneapolis, Chicago, New York, and Dallas, and I remembered that part of me, that vital part that I had worked so hard to own. I remembered my work.
Five days later, when I returned home, it was not only my thirtieth birthday but also the night of the four-hour industry screening. I’d been planning to go with Princess and Baa, but much to my surprise, Burt insisted on escorting me. By the time we arrived at the screening, it was already full and I couldn’t find my family, didn’t know where their seats were located. Scanning the packed theater for their faces, I held Burt’s hand as we were guided to our reserved seats in the back row. It was then that I realized I was to sit on the slightly worn velvet chair situated between Mr. Reynolds and Joanne Woodward’s husband, Paul Newman… whom I had never met. The second I laid eyes on Paul, I blurted out, “Where’s Joanne?” hardly acknowledging his existence and barely listening while he explained that his wife would not be joining us, due to the fact that she couldn’t stand looking at herself on-screen. Sitting between two matinee idols in a crowded, airless theater, feeling that my head or my heart would explode, I realized that Joanne had the right idea.
By the time the screening was over, my face was on fire and my teeth were chattering, as though a case of malaria had set in. If there was a reaction from the audience, I was too overwhelmed to hear it, and the only thing I wanted was to know where my family was sitting. I longed to see Baa’s face, to meet her eyes, to feel proud of myself because she was proud of me. Only then would I know if I had accomplished anything. I wanted to talk to her in the car all the way home, to have a bowl of soup in bed and watch A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving with Peter and Eli. But I disregarded that voice, simply shut it out. Where was the part of me that could look at the situation and realize that I felt more alone with Burt than with my children? That I felt trapped not because of him but because I couldn’t hear myself? I had found someone to love, to pour my heart into, someone I felt frightened of, and I was seeking to be loved the only way I knew how: by disappearing.
I went to Burt’s place and without discussing what we’d just seen on the screen for three and a half hours, he gave me two Percodan for my throbbing head. It wasn’t that he was mean. In a way, I felt he was trying to take care of me for the first time. But when I said that I’d rather have an aspirin, I recognized the sound of his irritated impatience, the “how dare you doubt my know-how” tone, recognized it without registering the recognition. It was a “do it now, go!” command, so I took the pills and immediately felt sick. All night my heart raced, either from the drugs or from the day or both. I lay next to Burt, perfectly still, staring at the ceiling.
18
Treading Water
EXCEPT FOR THE tasty little bits that Jackie Babbin shoved under my nose, I didn’t read the reviews when Sybil aired at the end of November. But true to form, I’ve kept many of them.
Variety: “Sybil” boasts an extraordinary performance by title character Sally Field that is as moving as anything ever seen on TV… It is further evidence, following her ‘Stay Hungry’ film performance, that she is now one of the finest young actresses in the U.S.… The impact is devastating.
Cecil Smith, Los Angeles Times: The bravura role here is Sally Field’s—and wonderfully does she play it… Sally’s ability to shift from one of these [personalities] to another in an instant, sometimes to find them tumbling over each other, is little short of astonishing.
The Hollywood Reporter: But it’s Field who dominates the screen, switching from personality to personality like a sparrow hopping from branch to branch in a maple. And it is this tour-de-force performance which allows the viewer to see how nearly normal Sybil really is. After all, we all have our own multiple personalities that we fling up at a moment’s notice. The only difference being that we are in control: Sybil is not.