My Extraordinary Ordinary Life (29 page)

It sounded kind of suspicious to me, but I was relieved that Five and the cat were in good shape and the house was relatively clean. “Not Sissy clean,” as I pointed out. But good enough for forgiveness.

The full details of what happened while we were in Europe remained shrouded in mystery for the next thirty-four years. Bill Paxton would guard his secret well, even as he became an accomplished art director, working on big pictures with his friend the director James Cameron. He uttered not a peep when he switched to the other side of the camera, starring in
Twister
and
Apollo 13.
It wasn’t until he was starring in the HBO show
Big Love
, and I had joined the cast for a recurring guest part one season, that Bill finally spilled the beans.

“Oh, Sissy, I’m still so sorry about Twerp!” he said, shortly after I arrived on the set. Then he proceeded to spin the story of Twerp’s demise, except it was different from the version I had heard in 1974. Bill is a great storyteller, and a group of cast and crew members gathered around as he set the scene.

“Strutter was the meanest cat in the world and he was always trying to kill Twerp,” said Bill. “He would just sit all day under the birdcage, staring up and twitching his tail. So it wasn’t a safe situation for the bird, anyway. Meanwhile, my brother Bob and I and our friend Danny were really enjoying living at the house. We would stay up all night messing around and blaring music as loud as we wanted, and then by the time it was getting light, we’d be wanting to go to bed. But Twerp would just be waking up, the bird was like a rooster in that house. He’d be whistling and chirping and we couldn’t get to sleep. So, we thought, the solution would be to hang the cage in the downstairs shower and close the door. Let that bird just sing its heart out. That worked out great for a while, until one night Strutter got in there. The next day we found feathers everywhere, and Twerp was gone.

“We panicked. Here we were, entrusted to take care of this beloved pet, and it was eaten. Then we thought, hell, parakeets kind of look alike. So we drove over to a pet shop in Tarzana and bought a parakeet that we thought looked sort of like Twerp. We figured that it had been a while since Sissy had seen it, and maybe she would think it was molting. So we brought it home. That bird just dropped dead, overnight. We didn’t know why. (Twerp #2 probably took one look at Strutter and had a heart attack.) So we went back and bought another bird, Twerp #3. We got him set up in the cage just as Jack and Sissy walked in the door....”

Bill looked over at me and saw the look on my face. I think he went a little pale. He may have even glanced around to see if Jack was going to pop out of the shadows and fire him. Then we both doubled over laughing. The truth was out.

“It was a cover-up!” I said.

“Aw, Sissy,” Bill said. “We just made up that story about the mail to make it look like we weren’t completely negligent.”

I forgave him again. I just hope Twerp went quickly, without any suffering.

And Bill forgave me for the first time he hosted
Saturday Night Live
and, because he was my friend, they dumped a bucket of pig’s blood on his head.

After we got back from our honeymoon, Jack and I went house hunting. We found a simple ranch house on a ridge at the summit of Topanga Canyon. It only cost $55,000, but we needed help guaranteeing a loan, so we asked my dad to come out and have a look at it. Daddy walked through the house, inspected the foundation, and took a stroll around the property. It was an ugly yellow stucco tract-type house, but sound. Jack already had big plans for the place. Best of all, you could see all the way across the canyon, over pine, eucalyptus, and chaparral-covered peaks. “Well, Jack,” said my dad. “What you’ve got here is a $5,000 house … with a $50,000 view.” He agreed to help us buy it.

Not long after we moved in, Jack started renovating. One weekend, using only a hatchet and a crowbar, he gutted the house and tore down three of its four walls. How it was still standing, I don’t know. The only room he didn’t tear up that weekend was our bedroom, so I went in there to get some sleep. When I woke up, I found Jack in what used to be the living room, sitting cross-legged like an Indian on top of a huge pile of rubble, reading a book titled
How to Build a Wood Frame House.
Of course, this was a man who could build anything for a film set, from windmills to dungeons. Before long, he turned that little tract house into a hilltop paradise, with vaulted ceilings and skylights and stained glass, an outdoor dining room and a wraparound deck with a hot tub and sauna.

The only disadvantages of living way up there were the steep roads and the constant threat from wildfires. Some nights we would sit on our deck and watch the orange glow creeping along distant ridges. We had some close calls in our part of the canyon. In the beginning, we would evacuate whenever a fire was near. I learned to keep the guitars and family treasures handy, and to hang all my clothes in one direction, so that I could scoop them out of the closet in a single motion. Then I would take a trick from Pancho Villa’s playbook and pile all my belongings on the bed and haul them off wrapped in sheets, just like the bandits did in the Rio Grande Valley back in the day. I figured you could learn from anyone, even criminals.

Many times we would load our most precious possessions into our cars and sleep in the house, ready to leave at a moment’s notice. Then it dawned on us: LA County used convicts to fight wildfires, while we were placing all our valuables in ready-to-be stolen vehicles left conveniently by the road! We also noticed that the more seasoned homeowners weren’t panicking and running every time there was a fire. Jack and I took a cue from our neighbors and ended up staying behind most of the time, sitting on top of the house drinking margaritas while dousing our roof with the garden hose.

The steep road up to our house was a daily challenge. For a while we had my brother’s Austin Healey, which Jack and I had driven out to Los Angeles from Texas during an ice storm (but that’s another story). It was scary keeping that car in gear climbing up the mountain. There were places where it felt like we would flip over backward, or slide back down, like my father sometimes did trying to drive out of the spillway at Lake Lydia. Eventually we got used to it, but some of our friends never did. We had a tax accountant who was afraid of heights. We would have to pick him up at the bottom of the hill and blindfold him while we drove him up to our house to do our taxes. Once there, he sat with his back to the windows.

Jack was always finding interesting used cars for us, and the only requirement was that they make it up the canyon. The worst was a 1968 Ford Fairlane station wagon that was so awful I wouldn’t even let him park it in front of the house. But he redeemed himself when he showed up one day with a pea green 1950 Plymouth in cherry condition, with only thirty thousand miles on it. It even had the original white sidewall tires. The car had only had one previous owner, a studio contract actress named Virginia Grey, who used to date Clark Gable. Her Pall Mall cigarettes were still in the ashtray, stained with red lipstick. We left them there, untouched. This car was so awesome that people would stop on the street to stare at it. When Jack and I drove it to film premieres, and we’d pull up along with the usual Mercedes and Rolls, the valet parking guys would squabble over who got to park the Plymouth. Then one night, driving on Hollywood Boulevard, some jerk rear-ended us and then sped away. The impact knocked Five right into the front seat. We were all okay, but the accident crumpled the trunk and bent the chassis. We managed to drive the Plymouth back to Topanga, where it sat in a field for two years. When a house painter came up to give us an estimate and saw the Plymouth parked in a patch of weeds, he said, “Hey, I’ll paint your house for free if you give me that car.” Jack took the deal, but he felt bad. He hated to take advantage of anyone. But to everyone’s astonishment, he only had to turn the key once and it started right up.

We eventually sold the Austin Healey, too. It was always a persnickety car, and the fuel injection often stopped working. My dad gave me a little hammer to carry whenever I drove it. When the car stopped on the freeway, I’d have to jump out in the emergency lane in my long hippie skirt and tapestry boots, then kneel down behind the back wheel and tap a little box. That would get the fuel going again. It finally got too dangerous for me to drive the Austin Healey, and we sold it to a collector. Now I wish I had kept it in the family, but back then I was still too young to be sentimental.

Brian De Palma loved working with Jack, and he hired him as art director for his adaptation of a Stephen King novel called
Carrie.
By now Brian was one of the hottest directors in Hollywood, and all the young actors in town wanted to be in the picture. I read for all of the female parts, but I wanted the title role of Carrie White, the bullied, alienated daughter of a religious fanatic, who unleashes her telekinetic powers on her high school class. Even though I was twenty-five years old, I still looked like a kid, and I thought I’d be right for the part. But Brian and the studio had a different idea. In fact, they didn’t even want to give me a screen test, because they had already decided on another actress to play Carrie. I didn’t know that Brian had argued with the studio to stop them from canceling my screen test.

I was unaware of what was going on behind the scenes when I called Brian the night before my scheduled screen test. I had just gotten my first television commercial, a big job for Vanquish headache medicine, and it would pay good money. The only problem was that it was shooting on the same day as my test. I was hoping Brian would say, “Are you crazy, Sissy? Of course, do the test!” Instead there was a short pause on the line and then Brian’s scratchy, deadpan voice.

“Do the commercial,” he said.

That made me so mad that I canceled the Vanquish job. Now I wanted this part so badly, I could taste it. I was convinced that Brian only thought of me as Jack Fisk’s wife, the no-talent set decorator, and I was going to prove him wrong. I stayed up all night and reread the whole book. In the morning, I got ready for the test by not showering and smearing Vaseline in my hair. I rummaged through my trunks and found a pale blue sailor dress that my mother had someone make for I me when I was in seventh grade. I looked like a total dork, and that was the point. When I got to the studio, the hair and makeup people started swarming around me, trying to fix me up for the screen test. I ran away from them, yelling, “Nooooooo!” I was already channeling Carrie. She reminded me of a timid girl I knew in school who dressed in hand-me-downs and had a reclusive, skittish personality. But there was a sweetness that I could see underneath her facade. It made you want to save her. That’s what I took with me in front of the camera that day.

After the film was processed, Brian, the producers, the casting director, and Jack got together at the studio to watch all the screen tests. I had ridden along with Jack, but stayed outside waiting in the car. I was feeling awkward, crouched on the floorboard, thinking,
What am I doing here?
Then Jack came running out to the parking lot. “Ask for whatever you want!” he shouted. “You’ve got the part!”

The studio had been so sure that I was wrong for the role that they never bothered to make a deal with me before I tested, which is standard procedure. Brian was shocked as well, because he was so fixated on this other actress. But Jack told me that as soon as I came on screen, they knew they had finally met Carrie.

We filmed on location all over the LA area, from the desert suburb where Jack and his team found Carrie White’s house, to the track at Pacific Palisades High School, to the back lot at Culver City Studios where
Gone with the Wind
was made. The cast and crew were wonderful. Piper Laurie was over-the-top great as Carrie’s mother. Then there were my classmates: Amy Irving, William Katt, P. J. Soles, Nancy Allen, and John Travolta, who I knew from my New York days. John was already becoming a big star with his television show, but he had signed up for an ensemble role in
Carrie
, and he never showed a bit of attitude about it. They were all young and beautiful, and I could see that they were having a great time together on the set. But I was doing my thing, inhabiting the character of Carrie. I kept myself separate and lurked in dark corners of the soundstage, brooding, while everybody else had fun. I decorated my dressing room with religious tokens and played heavy classical music on the stereo. Jack had a book of Gustave Doré’s Bible illustrations that I pored over every day, studying the body language of people being stoned by their persecutors or tortured for their sins. I tried to start or end every major scene in one of those melodramatic positions. Some of Dore’s figures were looking up at the sky without lifting their heads, and I practiced staring up and down like that, so that only the whites of my eyes would show. I was pretty serious back then; I was young and thought I had it all figured out.