Every day was filled with focus and challenge, with calling on skills I didn’t know I owned because I’d never had the opportunity to use them. And in the evenings, I’d enter my rented condo, still exhilarated with accomplishment, only to feel how far away my children were, in more ways than one. When I’d make my nightly call, hoping that one or the other would deign to talk to me, would consent to a few mindless seconds of chatter, it was usually Peter taking the phone, not because he needed to hear my voice but because he knew I needed to hear his. Afterward, Baa would reassure me that they were fine, repeating over and over that they missed me but they were honestly just fine. And I’d cross another day off the calendar I’d hung on the wall, feeling torn and grateful for my mother’s presence. But when they stayed with their father for a few days or a week, I’d lose all contact with them, which made me feel a whole lot of things, grateful not being one of them.
Steve was a devoted, caring father, but his life seemed even more chaotic than mine. He had found a way to acquire two tattered houses next to each other, then created his version of a freewheeling hippie compound in the middle of Sherman Oaks. Whenever the boys spent time with him they’d return looking like two starving refugees, their dirty arms and legs covered in fresh scrapes or poison ivy or mysterious bug bites, Peter looking hollow-eyed with his asthma in full swing. I’d hear Steve’s anger coming out of the mouth of one son, see his attitude on another, letting me know that they thought ambition and careers were for fools, that their father lived in the real world and that mine, the superficial world of show business, was fake. And even though that rhetoric tapered off after a bath and a hot meal, I selfishly felt relieved knowing that when I was away, my children spent the majority of their time with their grandmother and not with their father.
But halfway through Norma’s shooting schedule, Baa was going to be traveling to Switzerland for three weeks with Ricky and Jimmie, who now had two children of their own. My brother was still working at Caltech with the Nobel Prize–winning theoretical physicist Richard Feynman. They had published several important physics papers together, and because of this, Ricky had been invited to CERN for six weeks. This physics facility for nuclear research would soon become the most important international scientific establishment in the world, home of the proton-colliding LHC (Large Hadron Collider), which is a massive underground ring, twenty-seven miles in diameter, between France and Switzerland. It was at CERN, on July 4, 2012, that my brother, along with hundreds of other scientists, announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, or the “God particle.” But in the summer of 1978, Ricky was making his first trip there and had invited Baa to join him. That meant that I would lose the help of my mother. Once again, it was my sister who jumped to the rescue.
Princess agreed to bring the boys to me in Alabama for two weeks, then take them back to stay with their father for a week, until Baa’s return. When I look back at that time, it makes me think that perhaps this was the beginning for my sister, the first step toward discovering the career in which she could truly excel. On film after film, as my movie career continued, Princess would join me, first as my sister, then my assistant, and then, all on her own and with bone-wearying hard work, becoming an assistant director. Accomplished and well respected, over the next ten years she would create the shooting schedules and run the sets on countless movies, big and small. Then in 1991, when her daughter, Maggie, was born, she moved into episodic television, staying close to home, always relying on Baa, just as I had, to take care of her baby while she worked. But during that June, she was the nanny, the boys’ aunt, and my best friend.
The two of us on a movie set in the early eighties.
One day, toward the end of their time with me, Peter and I were sitting in the camper looking out the front window, watching everyone slowly returning to the set after their half-hour catered lunch under the pines. Princess was standing outside beside a tree, out of harm’s way as the dangerous Eli rode his rented bike around in circles, dodging crewmembers, who were busy dodging him. With his knees tucked up under his chin, Peter sat adjusting and readjusting the big foam driver’s seat, turning first one way, then the other, while asking me a nonstop stream of questions: Who is Norma Rae? Why does she work in a mill? What is a union? Always wanting to know the story and who I was in it. (No surprise he became a novelist and screenwriter.) I watched his antsy behavior from my seat on the passenger side, carefully answering everything he asked, until slowly Peter began to cry, deep inconsolable sobs. When I asked him why, what had made him so sad, he said, “It’s Norma’s life, just that, Mom. I feel so bad for her.” But as I moved to sit on the floor next to him, patting his back, I had an inkling that it wasn’t Norma who had affected him so sharply. The following day he would be traveling back to Los Angeles and Sherman Oaks, back to his father, and it was a sadness that we both felt. He had begged to stay with me, begged and begged like only an eight-year-old can. If his grandmother had been the one waiting for him, perhaps he wouldn’t have felt so powerfully alone. Perhaps I wouldn’t have felt as though I were bleeding internally, making a kind of Sophie’s Choice decision. My work or my children. And as I look back, from so many years away, I want to scream at my thirty-one-year-old self. Could I not have kept Pete with me, a boy who only wanted to sit and memorize the dialogue, and let Princess take five-year-old Eli back to Steve? It would have split my focus, but it would have eased his heart and mine. Can you not have a do-over? Ever?
Eli and Peter on the set with me. The supportive local folks standing in the background were extras.
The day before Norma wrapped, Burt arrived at our Opelika location, driving up to my condo in a Cadillac convertible and a cloud of red Alabama dust. For the first time, he was coming to me, visiting my set, where I was working and he was not. It was late afternoon after a day of filming, and when he stepped inside my location home he held me to his chest and I could feel his heart jumping around frantically, just as mine had done when we first met. Awkwardly, he presented me with a little white box tied with a red velvet ribbon, and it was hard not to notice that his hands were trembling. But when I opened it to find a diamond ring, not huge but not me, he didn’t speak and I didn’t know what to say other than thank you, awkwardly. For the rest of the evening, something unsaid hung in the air, something that neither of us wanted to pluck out and examine.
We had only one scene to shoot on that last day and it’s one of my favorite moments in the film. In it, Norma returns home late at night after Reuben has bailed her out of jail. With quiet purpose, she strides through her tiny house and, one by one, wakes her three children, then sits on the worn love seat with them tightly tucked around her. Unemotionally, she gives each of them a picture of their different fathers then tells them the men’s names, who they were, and whether she had been married to them or not. She looks into the sleepy faces of her children and says, “This is who I am. I want you to know that.”