Feeling how deeply I meant it, I answered, “Yes.”
“The studio doesn’t want you. You’re not a name to them, not a name they want. Several other actresses, who are names to them, were offered the film. I think they would have done a fine job, but for whatever reason, they all passed and things have a way of ultimately working out as they should. I want you to do it and if you want the role, I’ll fight for you… and I’ll win. Read the script, then let me know.”
In my beige dress, with my beige flats planted squarely on the ground, I answered as calmly as I could, “Even before I read it, I know. I want this.”
That night while sitting propped up in bed, Eli asleep on one side, Peter on the other, I read Norma Rae. I read it again on the airplane heading back to location the next morning, this time with my hands shaking as they had when I read Sybil. I wasn’t anyone’s vision of the uneducated, promiscuous southern mill worker who stumbles into becoming a hero. I wasn’t even Marty’s. But he had wanted to meet me, over the studio’s objections, because he thought I could act. And as we sat together in his office, he saw something in me that I didn’t know I was showing, that I couldn’t have planned because I didn’t know I had it within me to call on. Marty saw the place where Norma and I met, where we were the same. Two days later in the rented Tuscaloosa house, I answered the phone to hear Marty’s voice: “Sally, the part is yours.”
I wouldn’t have asked Burt to read the screenplay, but he wanted to, acting as though he were doing me a favor. When he finished, he threw it across the room at me, saying it was a piece of shit, and in an outraged sneer accused me of simply wanting to play a whore. And wham, without thinking I found myself speaking up for Norma and ultimately for Sally, and the part of me that I valued most.
“First of all, she is not a whore. She’s a wonderful, complicated character. And sure, I’d play a whore. Why not?”
“Well, no lady of mine is gonna play a whore.”
“I’m an actor, Burt. I’m not a whore. I’m not Norma or Sybil or Gidget or whomever I’m supposed to be playing. I’m an actor.”
“Oh… so now you’re an actor. That’s all that matters now, right? Ha… You’re letting your ambition get the better of you.”
“My ambition is the better of me and you can’t touch it.” I felt that I was inside my dream again, standing with my arms around the children, protecting them from being destroyed by something unseen at the top of the stairs. The children were me, all of me, and the love I had for a craft that had allowed me to hear them. I will not be conquered. With that, something shifted, and the debate inside my head that had started the moment I met Burt ended.
Even in 1978, the unionization of southern textile mills faced substantial opposition from management, who didn’t exactly want this film to be made. The story was based on Crystal Lee Sutton, a heroic union organizer and advocate who in the early 1970s bravely stood up against the J. P. Stevens mills for the mistreatment of their workers. But luckily, the Opelika Cotton Mill, located in Opelika, Alabama, was a family-run, recently organized plant that had been operating since 1901 and was struggling against the larger, more lucrative companies. Which meant it was the only working mill willing to give the production permission to shoot in and around their factory. Of course, the large compensation check didn’t hurt. So, with a welcome letter from Governor George Wallace, the three-month location for Norma Rae was set for Alabama—the state where my grandmother was born and the place where my friendship with the man whose words I still hear in my head began.
Born in New York City in 1914, the son of Jewish immigrants, Marty attended Elon College in North Carolina, which forever imprinted on him the stark contrast between his Bronx childhood and the Depression-era south. He then attended St. John’s University but quickly gravitated to the theater, first as an actor, then as a director. Work was hard to find during those Depression years, but he was able to get employment with Roosevelt’s WPA Federal Theatre Project as a playwright. And though he always said he had never been a member of the Communist Party, he was certainly influenced by the radical left and proudly called himself a true “lefty.” In 1952, Marty was working as an actor and director plus producing television programs when he was mentioned in an anti-communist newsletter called Counterattack, published by American Business Consultants, a group formed by three former FBI agents. Though he was never asked to testify, Marty refused to cooperate in any way with the House Un-American Activities Committee and was ultimately blacklisted by the entertainment industry when he was charged with donating money to Communist China. For five years, he supported himself, his wife, and several other blacklisted friends by teaching at the Actors Studio and handicapping horses. He understood the Norma Raes of the world. He was one.
Two weeks of rehearsal time, on location, is what Marty always insisted upon and I’ve never worked with a director who used that time more productively. Before moving out to the real locations, with a handful of scenes that he thought were essential to understanding both the characters and the relationships they had with each other, we spent three days in a conference room located in the same building as the production offices, a short drive from the mill. Three days of nothing but asking questions and exploring the text with pencil in hand, beginning on that first day with the inevitable read-through.