My Extraordinary Ordinary Life (12 page)

Like many Texans my age, I got my first dose of the real world in November 1963, when John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas. I was in eighth grade, and our big tough junior high principal, Mr. Browning, was crying as he came around to each classroom to tell us that the President was dead and classes were dismissed for the day. My mother drove to school in Ed’s red Corvair to pick up Robbie and me. She was crying, too. We were too stunned to speak. It was like the world was coming to an end.

With the rest of the country, my whole family sat transfixed in front of the television set watching the awful events unfold. We saw Lee Harvey Oswald gunned down on live TV, and watched as the President’s funeral procession rolled through Washington. I remember feeling so ashamed that the assassination had happened in Texas, and only ninety miles from our front door. I was shocked because I loved Texas so much and couldn’t have imagined something so ugly springing from such a wonderful place. But I had read the papers, and I’d seen the inflammatory full-page ad denouncing Kennedy—paid for by the business tycoons Bunker Hunt and Bum Bright—in the
Dallas Morning News
on the day the President was shot. It made me so angry that I wrote a letter to the editor. It was never published, but it was my first political act.

Kennedy was hated by segregationists in Texas and across the South for his support of the Civil Rights Movement. Although the
Brown v. Board of Education
Supreme Court ruling had outlawed separate schools and other public facilities since the mid-1950s, integration came slowly to many parts of the country, including Wood County, Texas. Quitman schools were finally, quietly integrated in 1965. It took a few years before the black and white students started sitting together at the lunch table, but there was no serious trouble. And everybody danced to the same music at the prom.

I think it was because blacks and whites all knew each other so well that we were spared the turmoil that beset so many communities, North and South. Having everybody in the same school seemed as natural as breathing to me. And it was a relief that the last, degrading symbols of Jim Crow were finally gone from my hometown.

Beverly Waddleton, who was two years younger than me, was the first African-American elected to the student council. She was a brilliant girl, the daughter of Joe Waddleton, my father’s favorite mechanic, so I had known her all my life. After integration, Beverly rose to the top of her class at Quitman High School. She gave the salutatorian speech two years after I graduated. Beverly went on to college and medical school, and then returned to our hometown as a family practitioner. Since then she’s been Quitman’s most beloved doctor and runs the East Texas Medical Center.

Dr. Waddleton remembers how my father went out of his way to support her and her friends as they navigated the new, integrated Quitman. Daddy used to pick up Beverly and drive everybody to and from the 4-H camp. Beverly thought that was completely wonderful, except for one thing: The kids just wanted to get home at the end of the day, but Daddy insisted on stopping at every historical marker between the camp and Quitman.

… NEW YORK …

… 6 …

Robbie was really the actor in the family. He was handsome, talented, and relaxed; he got roles in all the school plays. I never did. After I won the Oscar for Best Actress for
Coal Miner’s Daughter
, my mother ran into our high school drama teacher in the grocery store. She must have been feeling a little sensitive, because she pushed her cart right up to Mother’s and said, “Well, I guess you wonder why Sissy never got into any of the school plays.”

“No, actually, I never really gave it any thought,” said Mother.

“Well, she didn’t learn her lines!” she said, as she moved on down the aisle.

Because a career in high school theater was obviously out of the question, I poured my efforts into music. I carried my guitar with me wherever I went, singing for anybody who would listen. I performed for seniors at the old folks’ home, kids at their grade school assemblies, church functions, parties, Rotary Club meetings, between acts at school plays. Late at night, I would sit cross-legged on my bed, hugging that guitar and plucking out tunes, then writing lyrics in a spiral notebook, on napkins, paper bags—whatever was available. I wrote songs like “Tiny People,” about young people wanting to be older, older people wanting to be younger, and nobody being satisfied to be who they are; and “Sweet Cheeks,” about laughing so hard that your cheeks hurt. We had a lot to laugh about in our house, most of it instigated by Robbie.

As my brothers and I became teenagers, Mother and Daddy would always say, “If you want to drink and smoke, do it at home. Don’t go off drinking and driving in a car somewhere.” So one evening when Robbie was about fifteen, he walked into the den while we were all watching TV and plopped himself down in a chair. He was holding a beer in one hand and a cigar in the other. We all stared at him while he casually lit the cigar. Finally my father said, “Robbie, what do you think you’re doing? Have you lost your mind?”

Robbie just grinned and took a puff.

“Well, you said if I wanted to smoke or drink, to do it at home,” he said. “So here I am!”

My parents could hardly get angry; after all, it was their idea. Ed never tried to pull anything like that. He was perfect. I was the sneaky one, but just never got caught—even the time I was playing with matches and set the backyard on fire. But Robbie was an open book. He was always up to something, most of it funny.

Even though Robbie and I fought like cats and dogs sometimes, we were best friends, even as teenagers. I used to pick out his clothes for him. I didn’t let him pick out mine, but he would stop me from going out of the house if he thought my skirt was too short.

“You’re not wearing that, Sissy,” he’d say.

“Why? What’s wrong with it?”

“Trust me.”

We did everything together, and we had a lot of the same friends. Most of my girlfriends had crushes on him. He went out on dates, but most of the time he was busy with sports, or hunting and fishing, or just keeping up with his studies.

School was always easy for me, but not for Robbie. He was dyslexic, although we didn’t know the term back then. All we knew was that he had a hard time learning to read and write, even though he was very smart. If he had to write things down on a test, he struggled. But if you asked him the questions out loud, he got every one right. So he had to work twice as hard as everyone else on his class work to keep from falling behind.

When we were little, Mother would spend hours with Robbie, helping him with his homework. Before too long, I’d be tugging at her sleeve and making a lot of noise that it was my turn. I needed to read a story out loud to her. “Sissy,” she would say, “why don’t you take your book into my bedroom and read out loud to yourself?” I thought that was a wonderful idea. My parents had a full-length mirror on their closet door, and I loved to sit in front of it and read aloud to myself. I would give all the characters different voices and imagine how they would behave in the stories. I might not have known it then, but this could have been the dawn of my acting career.

Robbie made it through elementary school with a combination of charm and determination. When he was in seventh grade, he took up track and football and met a coach who changed his life.

My brother could run like a deer. Even when he was a tiny boy, my dad had a hard time keeping up with him. If he got into trouble and knew my dad was looking for him, he would race around the house as fast as he could to avoid a spanking. Daddy knew there was no possible way to catch Robbie. He would have to outsmart him. One day he waited for Robbie to circle the house, and when he came around the corner, Daddy stepped out in front of him. It frightened Robbie so, he shot straight up in the air. Daddy fell over laughing and gave up any idea of punishing him. Robbie was such a fetching child, you just couldn’t stay mad at him. When Robbie and I were still in diapers, Mother would put us down for naps in the same room. He hated naps and always managed to escape from his crib. Often he made it clear out of the house. Somehow he was able to unlatch the screen and crawl out. My mother happened to look out the kitchen window one afternoon and saw Robbie out on the back road, wearing only his diaper, marching up and down through a puddle with one of Daddy’s hunting rifles over his shoulder while the other neighborhood mothers grabbed their own children and pulled them inside to safety.

Another afternoon, when Robbie was eight or nine, the whole family was driving back from picking blackberries in the country when a jackrabbit ran down the road. Robbie shouted, “Daddy, let me out! Let me out! I want to catch that rabbit!”

“Oh, Robbie, you can’t catch a rabbit,” my dad said. “It’s too fast.”

“No, Daddy! Let me out! I can catch him!”

So Daddy pulled the car over and opened the door. He was chuckling to himself, figuring this would teach his son a lesson. Robbie took off down the road and disappeared into the thicket. A few minutes later, Robbie reappeared holding the rabbit.

When Robbie joined the track team, his coach, Fred Billings, started working with him to channel his energy into running and help him focus on his schoolwork. Before long, Robbie was making better grades than I was because he worked so hard at it. And once he started competing on the sports field, nobody could beat him. By the time he was in high school, he was a bona fide star in the relay race and hurdles. The whole family would go out to watch him run at all of his track meets. Daddy took reel after reel of 8mm home movies that captured Robbie’s grace as he flew over the hurdles and his long strides as he sprinted across the finish line.

In May of 1966, when he was a high school junior and I was a sixteen-year-old sophomore, Robbie started to feel run down. He was still running and winning, but he was tired all the time and achy at night; he just didn’t feel right. At first we thought it might be a cold or flu that he couldn’t shake, or maybe he was training too hard.

One night I was arguing with Robbie about something, and Mother pulled me into another room for a private talk.

“Please be patient with Robbie,” she said. “I’m worried about him. He could be really sick.” She paused for a moment, then said, “He might even have leukemia.”

“Oh, Mother,” I snapped. “He’s fine!” He was my brother; nothing could happen to him.

My parents took Robbie to see Ben Merritt, our family doctor who had known us kids just about all our lives. He examined him and did some blood tests. When they came back from the lab, Ben just couldn’t bring himself to tell us. So he sent Robbie to a hematologist in Tyler, who finally made the diagnosis. Mother had been right.

It was surreal. We’d gotten a diagnosis, but we really didn’t know what it meant. We didn’t know how afraid to be. I guess mostly we felt kind of numb.

After the initial shock, our family rallied together and approached Robbie’s illness as a problem that could be confronted, like any other. My uncle Wade Spilman, who had been in the Texas legislature and knew everybody important in the state, arranged for Robbie to be admitted to one of the best hospitals in the country for the treatment of leukemia and other cancers: MD Anderson in Houston. My mother called our friend and high school principal, W. T. Black, to let him know that Robbie would be missing the rest of the semester, while Robbie told his coach and his teammates the bad news. He had to start chemotherapy right away. But he had one last thing to do before going into the hospital.

Robbie had been training hard all year to qualify for the state track finals in Austin the next weekend. Our plan had been to drive down, meet up with Ed, attend the meet together, and watch Robbie win. But now, of course, all that would change.

First Robbie called the boy that he had beaten to make it to the finals and said, “I’m not gonna be able to run, and I wanted you to know that you’re up.” Then we drove on to Austin as planned. I know Robbie wanted to be there to cheer on his teammates, but also, I think, to help steel himself for the unknown that he was facing. When we got to the stadium, Robbie went down to the track to see the runner who had taken his place. He shook his hand, wished him good luck, and helped him set his blocks.

One of the officials saw Robbie in his street clothes and yelled for him to get off the field. But the young man stepped between them and said, “No, no, no. You don’t understand. He should be the one running. He beat me.”

My brother was in and out of MD Anderson for the next sixteen months.

Robbie’s illness turned our ordinary, orderly lives upside down. Mother was no longer working at the courthouse, and Daddy took a leave of absence from his job as the county agriculture agent. We rented an apartment in Houston to be near the hospital during Robbie’s treatments. Ed commuted back and forth from college in Austin, and I did the same from Quitman. I missed a lot of school, but my teachers let me make up the work. Sometimes my grandmother would come up from Granger to stay with me. Sometimes I lived with the other Spaceks, my aunt and uncle Sam and Maurine, and my cousins Jan and Sam. Sometimes it was just me and the dog. I had to grow up fast in those months, but everyone in Quitman looked out for me.

When I was in Houston, I spent all my time with Robbie on the hospital’s sixth-floor pediatric cancer wing. I made friends with the other leukemia patients, who were all young teenage boys, like Robbie. We got to know their families. In fact, we became like one extended family, all facing the same challenge.

The treatment for leukemia wipes out the good blood cells along with the cancer cells, so after chemotherapy, the patients are extremely susceptible to infections. Robbie and the other boys often couldn’t leave the hospital, and it got boring for them pretty quickly. It was always a cause for celebration when someone’s blood counts went up and they could go out and be teenagers for a little while. When Robbie’s counts were high enough, we’d go out for lunch or to a movie, or even to the Astrodome for a ball game. If any of his friends had good enough counts, we’d take them along with us to join in the fun.