My Extraordinary Ordinary Life (31 page)

… 12 …

I’ve never liked being told what to do. When I was about three years old, I climbed high up into a tree and wouldn’t budge. My dad said, “Sissy, are you gonna come down from there, or do you want a paddling?” I looked him straight in the eye and said, “I want to eat an orange.”

In the summer of 1977, Loretta Lynn started telling the world that I was going to play her in a movie based on her autobiography,
Coal Miner’s Daughter.
I was slightly dumbfounded because I’d never even met Loretta, and I’d certainly never agreed to be in her film. I had been approached by Universal, which had the rights, but what little I knew about the project seemed wrong to me. It was a big-budget studio production, a rags-to-riches story with a country music theme—all things I’d been trying to steer away from in an attempt to minimize my “country” image and open myself up to different kinds of roles. (Recently, I’d even made myself stop wearing cowboy boots.)

And I wasn’t exactly sure I trusted Hollywood to keep Loretta’s story out of that dreaded but familiar territory: clichéd and corny. Besides, I was already committed to another film, a more artistic film, I thought, being directed by the former cinematographer Nicolas Roeg, who also directed
Don’t Look Now
and
The Man Who Fell to Earth.

But Loretta wasn’t taking no for an answer. Universal had shown her a stack of eight-by-ten glossies of all the young actresses in Hollywood, and when she “got down to one of a little ol’ strawberry blonde with a freckled face”—me—she said, “That’s her. That’s the coal miner’s daughter!” Before long, she was telling the audiences at her nightly concerts that I was going to portray her. Gossip columnists picked it up. She announced it weekly on daytime and late night talk shows. Loretta was a regular on Johnny Carson in those days; she was popular and funny, not to mention entertaining. But it was driving me crazy because she’d always mention the movie and say, “Little Sissy Spacek, she’s gonna play me.” I thought, who is this woman, and why is she saying these things about me? Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I decided to tell her in person that I didn’t want to do the film, and would she please stop saying that I was.

Jack and I were visiting my parents in East Texas and staying at their lake cabin near Quitman, when we found out Loretta was performing in Shreveport, Louisiana, only a few hours away. This was my opportunity to meet the woman face-to-face. My brother, Ed, who was still deeply involved in the music business and knew both Loretta and her manager, made some calls and arranged a meeting. So we loaded into the car and headed east. I was careful to look as different as I could from this country music star, so there would be no confusion. I wore my hair up. I wore John Lennon wire-framed glasses. I wore pegged pants, high heels, and a shawl. I looked like an urban hipster, and I was going to show Miss Loretta Lynn that I was my own person, I made my own decisions, and I’d already made mine about this movie.

Finally, we arrived in Shreveport and turned onto Fisk Street.
Fisk Street!? That’s weird.
I shook it off. I just needed to get to Loretta. We could see the auditorium in the distance, but it was quiet. The parking lot was deserted. We were late, so late we’d missed the whole thing, managing to arrive after the concert was over and the auditorium was empty. But Loretta’s tour bus was parked out back, and we were invited on board. All of a sudden, the door to the living quarters of the bus flew open and out stormed a tiny woman in a flaming red chiffon dress. Some of Loretta’s band members were following right behind her like a covey of quail, and she was angry and shaking her fist in the air and hollering, “BAM BAM BAM! BAM BAM BAM! I couldn’t hear nothing but them dat-gum drums a’beatin’ in my ear!”

At that moment I thought,
Oh my God, I have to play this woman!

We visited a bit that evening, and I was captivated by Loretta. She was tired after the show, but as gracious and kind as could be. She had this regal kind of beauty—high cheekbones and jet-black hair that made her look like Indian royalty. And there was a glint of steel in those hazel blue eyes of hers. I felt at home with her right away, like we’d been friends for a long time. She was a grounded person, and still a tomboy and a country girl who hoed her own garden and grew her own butter beans. She opened her hands to show me great big blisters. “Looka here, Sissy,” she said. “I got these puttin’ in my garden.” When she told me she had twenty-seven goats back at her farm outside Nashville, I was a goner.

Still, I had big misgivings about signing on to
Coal Miner’s Daughter.
By then I had read Loretta’s book and admired her for all she had overcome to get to where she was. Her story was already an American legend: She had grown up dirt-poor in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, where her father worked in the coal mine and her mother raised their babies in a house so far in the backwoods there wasn’t even a road to it, just a trail. When she was only thirteen, she married a brash young army veteran named Doolittle “Mooney” Lynn, who took her away with him to a logging town in the Northwest. She’d had four children by the time she was nineteen, and no skills to speak of except raising babies. But she had an old guitar that she taught herself to play, and she started writing songs and singing them to her kids. From those humble beginnings, she built a career as the top female country star of her day. Her husband was a rough but good-hearted character who managed her in the early days and then, after she became a superstar, retreated back to their farm at Hurricane Mills, Tennessee, to raise the children and ride around on his beloved bulldozer.

It was an inspiring story, but I wasn’t sure I could play a real person who was still living and working. Should I try to imitate her, look and sound like her? Could I get away with an impression that wasn’t letter-perfect? And the subject matter, if handled the wrong way, could easily cross the line into camp. But on the strength of Loretta’s personality, I agreed to meet with the director who was, at the time, attached to the project.

It did not go well.

As soon as I walked into the meeting, he pointed to a
Time
magazine with Loretta’s picture on the cover and said, “This is what we’re dealing with. Everybody knows what Loretta looks like, and you don’t look like her.”

I said, “You’re right, it’s a bad idea.”

It was a short meeting. As I was walked out, I bumped into Sean Daniel, the producer from Universal, and Michael Chinich, the casting director, who had both been huddled against the door, waiting to hear what happened. They really wanted me in the picture.

“How’d it go?” they asked in unison.

“Not good,” I said. “I don’t look like her.”

But Sean and Michael were not about to drop it, and neither was Loretta Lynn.

Meanwhile, the Nicolas Roeg film kept getting delayed. Months went by, and I didn’t know which way to turn. At this point I hadn’t worked on a film in nearly two years, since
3 Women.
I was getting a lot of offers, but I felt strongly that I needed to step back and choose my next project very carefully. I wanted to play a grown-up for a change—I was in danger of being typecast after playing a succession of teenagers like Holly Sargis, Carrie White, and Pinky Rose. The Roeg film, in which I would play a mysterious woman caught in an obsessive love affair with a psychiatrist, felt like a step in the right direction. And so did the role of Carolyn Cassady, the brilliant and long-suffering wife of Neal Cassady and companion of the beat writer Jack Kerouac. I wanted that part badly. The script was called
Heart Beat
and was set in the 1940s and ’50s. I had read every book about the Beat Generation that I could get my hands on, and I was so into it that I was shocked when the filmmakers didn’t want me for the part.

One night in LA, Jack and I were invited to dinner with the producer, Ed Pressman, and the director, John Byrum. They told me I was perfect for the role, but they were holding out for Diane Keaton, who had just won an Oscar for
Annie Hall
, and who basically had her pick of any movie out there. Outwardly I seemed completely calm while I tried to absorb the news that I might not be playing Carolyn after all. I was smiling and nodding as Ed and John spoke, not realizing how tightly I was squeezing my glass of wine until it literally shattered in my hand. Glass and wine flew everywhere. I got the part of Carolyn—and when we started filming in San Francisco, Ed Pressman gave me a gift: a piece of the broken wineglass. “That’s when you clinched it,” he said.

Meanwhile, the folks at Universal were still pressuring me to sign on to
Coal Miner’s Daughter
, in spite of the director’s misgivings. My manager, Bill Treusch, was advising me not to make a country music movie, while my agent was saying, “Do it! You’d be a fool to pass this up!” In the middle of this mental tug-of-war, Jack and I flew to Washington, DC, to visit his mom. She lived in a high-rise apartment building outside of the District, from which she would commute to her job in real estate in a big white Cadillac. Gerri was not a country music fan, and her car radio was always tuned to a classical station. She didn’t know much about Loretta Lynn, but she did recognize my dilemma. When she saw me tearing my hair out, she said, “Sissy, why don’t you ask the man upstairs?”

“What? Oh, right, the man upstairs.” So I said, “All right, God! Give me a sign!” I was kind of joking.

Later that night we were watching
The Tonight Show
in her apartment when Loretta came on, and sure enough, she told Johnny Carson that Sissy Spacek was going to play her in that movie. I thought I would scream.

“C’mon,” Jack said. “Let’s just go for a drive.”

So we got in the elevator and rode twenty floors down to the basement parking lot. We climbed into Gerri’s Cadillac, and as soon as we drove through the metal gates and out onto the street, the radio started up and I heard Loretta singing the refrain to “Coal Miner’s Daughter.” It seemed that Gerri’s classical station turned into a country station at night. That was enough of a sign for me.

“Stop the car, Jack! I’m doing the movie!”

Not long after I agreed to do the film, my longtime manager and I parted ways. It was a painful time because Bill Treusch and I dearly loved each other and still do. Meanwhile the director who didn’t think I was right for the project was replaced. It turned out that Loretta wasn’t sure about this director, either. She thought he made good films, but she didn’t think he understood her life, and she was afraid he might make fun of her. So the studio bought out his contract. Then the producers and I began looking for another director. We screened as many films about musicians as we could find. We looked at
The Buddy Holly Story
and
Payday
, the story of a shady country star, starring my cousin Rip Torn. But the one that truly caught our eye was
Stardust
, directed by Michael Apted, about the rise and fall of a fictional sixties rock idol. The film had the mixture of realism and grittiness that we wanted for
Coal Miner’s Daughter
, and we felt that Apted was the perfect choice to direct. The soft-spoken British director happened to come from a coal mining area in England. And we thought that, being an outsider, he might bring less cultural baggage to the production. After meeting him, we were convinced he would see Loretta and her family and fans as real people, not cartoonish hillbillies.

I started following Loretta around like a puppy, trying to capture her body language and her accent. She doesn’t have a typical Kentucky accent. In fact, I never found anyone else in Kentucky who sounded like her—she has a completely unique rhythm, the way she breathes and talks. I met her while she was playing some shows in Lake Tahoe and spent an afternoon tape-recording her while she told stories. She had me rolling on the floor laughing half the time. We even used some of her stories in the script; like the time a fan ran up behind her and snipped off a piece of her hair for a souvenir. “That was before I was a-carin’ about the back of my hah-r,” she said, as only Loretta could say it.

When I got back home from our visit, I videoed myself sitting in a chair with my tape recorder in my lap, playing and replaying Loretta telling stories. I would play that recorder and repeat those lines over and over until I kind of got my own version of her. Somewhere around my house, in a storage room or closet, is a video of me learning to “speak Loretta.” And once I “got” her, I decided I should stay in character all the time, on and off the set. When we started filming, people working on the set who hadn’t known me before thought that was the way I always talked. I knew I had it down when Jack brought our little dog, Heidi, to visit me on location. She came running as soon as she saw me, and I greeted her in Loretta’s voice, “Well, I’ll be! If it ain’t my little dog, Heidi! C’mere, girl!”

Brrrrrrrppp! As soon as Heidi heard that voice, she put on her brakes and started backpedaling. And I thought to myself:
Yes!

Getting Loretta’s voice and character was one thing; learning to play and sing like her was a whole new challenge. I could already play guitar, since I’d started out as a singer, but the producers at Universal still weren’t sure whether or not to dub Loretta’s vocals over my performance. That was a sticking point for me, and one that I knew might blow the whole deal, because in the best movies I’d seen about singers, the music had always been done live. It added realism and authenticity. In the end, Loretta was the one who encouraged them to let me do all the music, “Let her sing,” she said. So I sang.

I spent about a week with Loretta in Nashville, at the Spence Manor, a hotel on Music Row with this crazy guitar-shaped swimming pool. I could look right out my window and see it. Everybody from Elvis to the Beatles to Frank Sinatra had stayed there, and so it was an inspiring setting to learn Loretta’s music. We would write out the lyrics to songs on scraps of paper and fasten them with bobby pins to lampshades all around the suite. Loretta would walk around with her guitar, singing, and I would walk behind her with my guitar, doing my best to copy her, note for note. Sometimes we’d go into the bathroom, where the acoustics were fantastic, and sing together, our voices blending in a way that rarely happens outside of families—it’s that sibling thing. We started to joke that we must have been twins in another life. Loretta and I ended up writing music together. She told me I was a quick learner. Mostly I didn’t want to do anything that would embarrass either of us.