My Extraordinary Ordinary Life (33 page)

I had written out an acceptance speech, just in case, but it’s true that your mind does go blank as soon as you hear your name called. Luckily, I think I thanked everybody I wanted to, but most of all, Jack. I also thanked my parents, who were watching it on television back home. I’ve never been much of a party person, but we did go to quite a few of them that night. When we got home early the next morning, I found dozens of yellow roses waiting for me at my front door, sent from all of my friends in Quitman. It made me feel like I had won for the whole town.

But perhaps my favorite accolade of all was a telegram Dolly Parton sent me shortly after the film opened. It read, “Dear Sissy, I hope you make millions of dollars from
Coal Miner’s Daughter
so that you can get a boob job and do the Dolly Parton story.”

The Oscar recognition made me a bona fide movie star, which is a weird thing to be. It can be a lot of fun—I mean who doesn’t like flying first class when you can do it?—and the fact that you’re considered a box office draw brings whatever roles are out there your way. There’s also the ability to get a project made just by attaching your name to it, not to mention getting the best table in a restaurant. But it’s harder to stay grounded when everybody suddenly recognizes you on the street, they want to do you favors; they know your work and your face, so they feel they know you.

The loss of privacy unnerved me at first. I was having lunch with my mother at a restaurant in Texas when one person after another came over to ask me for an autograph or to pose for a snapshot. I was hungry and trying to finish my salad, and I must have rolled my eyes or muttered something to my mother because she reached over and touched my arm and smiled.

“You are so lucky,” she said.

“What are you talking about?” I said, feeling more besieged than blessed at the moment.

“Well, all you have to do is smile or sign your name, or look somebody in the eye, and you can make them happy,” she said. “Isn’t that wonderful?”

I’ll never forget that moment. Sometimes you just have to hear it spoken to make the obvious clear.

In the end, the hardest part about
Coal Miner’s Daughter
was giving it all up. It was kind of sad to go back to my old self. I was so funny as Loretta! I had my own bus and band and millions of adoring fans! I loved being her.

The film’s success transformed Loretta’s life as much as it did mine. It opened up her music to audiences that might not have listened to her before, and helped keep her in the spotlight. We knew while we were making the film that it might be pretty good, but we didn’t know it would be so beloved. Thirty years later, people still come up to me on the street and tell me they’ve seen it ten, twenty, thirty times or more. They’ve connected with the film in such a personal and enduring way, and they’ve kept it alive for new generations. That is a testament to Loretta.

Loretta Lynn, like many country stars, gives so much to her fans that she often loses the distinction between her public and her private lives. Loretta collected all the props and sets from the movie and had them hauled to Hurricane Mills to create a museum and tourist attraction called the Loretta Lynn Ranch. She and Mooney rebuilt the house from Butcher Hollow and the church where they were married in the film, and rent it out for weddings. Tourists pour in by the busload and hitch up their RVs in the campsites. Visitors can view the Cadillac where Loretta wrote her hits, and see all the fabulous flouncy dresses I wore in the movie, along with her own costumes and memorabilia. Until his death in 1996, Mooney and Loretta lived in the same white-columned antebellum mansion where we did a lot of the filming. It was also opened up to daily tours, like the White House, and still is, although Loretta now has built a separate place on the property where she can have more privacy. She says that if anything is out of place in the mansion, different than the way it was in
Coal Miner’s Daughter
, the tourists kick up a stink, they know the picture so well.

Loretta loved the movie, but she’s said she can’t watch it anymore. The scenes of leaving her father and mother are just too painful to relive, she told Michael Apted years later. “There’s too much real in it.” It was also hard for her to watch the scene of her nervous breakdown, when she collapsed onstage after touring nonstop for years. She had missed watching her children grow up, missed out on her own life while she was stuck on the spinning merry-go-round of fame and obligations. The lessons weren’t lost on me. I saw how easily it could happen. And I didn’t want to give up all that she did for my own career; I wanted to keep some privacy. It’s been important to me to live a regular life, around regular people, because these are the characters I portray in films: regular people, like me.

But after
Coal Miner’s Daughter
came out and offers started rolling in, I was faced with more dilemmas. Do I keep making big studio movies and build on this new momentum? Do I stay in Los Angeles, in the belly of the movie beast, stoking my career, or find a place of sanctuary, a place where I can live a real life? I wanted to stay up in that tree, and I wanted an orange. So I waited for a sign.

… VIRGINIA …

… 13 …

An actor’s work doesn’t end when the film wraps. We are expected to support it by attending all the red carpet events and giving interviews to the media. Dozens and dozens of interviews. I enjoy meeting journalists, but it’s hard trying to answer the same questions over and over in new and interesting ways. By the end of a publicity tour, I’m usually staring off into space, in a corner of my hotel room, unable to remember my own name. Once, after a very grueling press junket across Europe, I had an out-of-body experience on the most popular nighttime talk show on English television. Every day I did countless back-to-back interviews. Every night I flew to a different country, and every morning I started the daylong interview process all over again. I was exhausted after several weeks of this on top of fractured sleep and terrible jet lag. I loved the studio press people I was traveling with, but by the time I arrived in London, I was fried. So when they asked me to do one more, very important talk show, I knew I wasn’t up to it, but I hadn’t the strength to even refuse.

When I arrived at the live show, I was thrilled to meet Gloria Swanson, a great actress and movie icon. She was a tiny woman, but formidable. She was there to promote her memoir, and we chatted for a while backstage. I’ll never forget how kind she was to me. She could see how exhausted I was, and she was concerned that I was in no shape to do the show. She went on first, and I waited my turn. When I heard the music swell and felt a tap, I walked out to take my place beside Ms. Swanson. After that, things got strange. The host appeared to be talking, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. I felt like I was watching television with the sound turned down. I could see his lips moving, and then he would cock his head. I assumed he was waiting for an answer to a question that I hadn’t heard. I had answers—but unfortunately none that went to any of his questions. I think he must have thought I was on drugs, which was not the case at all. Apparently he was ripping me to shreds. And although I appreciated what appeared to be Ms. Swanson’s attempt to defend me to the host, I couldn’t understand anything she was saying, either. I was too far gone. The next day at the airport, as I walked up to the long line of Americans waiting for the flight back to the U.S., they looked at me with sympathy and concern. I even heard a few of them murmur, “Awwww....” It must have been pretty bad.

So when I was asked to fly to Brazil for the opening of one of my films in South America, I was feeling more than a little trepidation. I called my mother to tell her the latest news.

“Yeah,” I sighed. “It looks like I’ve got to go to Brazil and do a bunch of press.”

“Oh really!?” she said, her voice filling with excitement. “You get to go to South America?”

“Well sort of,” I said, “I don’t really
get
to go; I have to go.”

“Oh, Sissy, that’s the chance of a lifetime!” she said.

“It is?”

“Well yes, of course it is! You’ll have so much fun!”

“I will?”

“Of course you will! Just think of all the things you’ll get to see.”

I thought for a moment. It was beginning to sound like fun.

“Do you want to go?” I asked.

So off we went to South America to meet the press. With her, I saw everything in a different light. Even the long flight to Brazil seemed amazing: “How luxurious!” she said. “We get to go on a plane and stretch out on a seat that’s just like a bed!” And once we arrived, she was right. We had a blast. We were all dressed up one day and looking lovely, when our young host suggested we climb to the top of the most popular mountain in São Paulo. It was a challenging climb, especially in our high heels, but Mother and I were both game, and we made it to the top without too much trouble. After that, I don’t know what came over me, but once atop São Paulo’s highest peak, standing on a large wooden ramp used to launch hang gliders, I felt compelled to jump off that mountain holding on to nothing but the harness of some very handsome young Brazilian. I was one step away from flying into the abyss, when fortunately, my mother grabbed me by the collar and wouldn’t let go. “This is not a part of the plan,” she said through a clenched jaw. “You are here to talk to journalists!” Well done, Mother!

Once I reached my thirties, I appreciated my mom more than ever. We were long past the push and pull that daughters go through with their mothers as they assert their independence and adulthood. I realized that so much of what I had, I owed to her. She was my confidante and my friend. And when it came time for me to play Nita Longley in
Raggedy Man
, she literally became my role model.

Jack had honed his craft as a production designer while working with some of the best directors of our generation. He knew filmmaking inside and out. And he had always wanted to do a film about a woman like his mother, Gerri, who had struggled to raise small children on her own. So when a writer from Austin named Bill Wittliff showed us his original screenplay about a divorced mother raising two young sons in rural Texas during World War II, we both knew it was the perfect match. In 1980, we spent six months on location in Texas, making
Raggedy Man.

Actually, we hadn’t expected to spend that much time on one picture. But that summer the Screen Actors Guild went on strike for three months. We had to shut down on the first day of production. There was nothing to do but wait around until we could go back to work. For me, it was heaven to be back home. Jack and I had rented a place on Lake Austin, not too far from our location in Maxwell, Texas. The lake is actually a dammed section of the Colorado River, cut through limestone, winding its graceful way through Austin. We spent every day water-skiing nine miles up to the dam and then nine miles back down. At the time I was also running five or six miles a day and following a strict vegan diet. Sugar didn’t touch my lips. I was so fit, you could bounce a quarter off me. (Although I was occasionally known to break rank and have a margarita or two.) When the strike was settled and it came time to start shooting again, I weighed about ninety-five pounds, and I was afraid I would look too skinny in the one scene where I took my clothes off to bathe.

Times had changed, and we were no longer as nonchalant about nude scenes. The sixties and seventies were definitely over. During the actors’ strike, Jack and I had nothing but time, so we rehearsed in the little house where my character, Nita Longley, lived. I was sitting in the galvanized tub, and Jack used a video camera blocking out the camera angles so that we could suggest nudity without actually showing anything. It was going great when we heard a knock on the front door.

“Yoo-hoo! Anybody home?”

It was a group of neighborhood women, coming to bring us some fresh garden vegetables to welcome us back to town. They took one look in the house and scurried away, leaving their carrots and cucumbers on the front porch. But the people of Maxwell rolled with the punches. We also had fabulous luck finding the boys to play Nita’s young sons from a local radio casting call. Neither eight-year-old Henry Thomas nor five-year-old Carey Clyde Leebo Hollis (“I’ve got four names!”) had ever acted before, but you would never have known it. In a scene at the dinner table, Henry was so angry that he raised one eyebrow at me. I thought,
Oh great, blown off the screen by an eight-year-old.
What was it W. C. Fields said? “Never work with children or animals.” (Later, when Jack was editing
Raggedy Man
, he showed Steven Spielberg some footage of Henry Thomas, and Steven cast him immediately for the lead role in
ET.
We were thrilled for Henry. We’d known he was a star from the moment we met him.) I loved watching Jack work with those boys. He expected them to deliver like seasoned actors, and they did. He added little things for them to do that came right out of my childhood, like playing with cutout cardboard wings.

In
Raggedy Man
, Nita Longley is a plucky, lonely young woman, doing her best to get by in a dead-end job as a telephone operator in a small town where people look down on her for being divorced. Then Teddy, a handsome young sailor on leave, played by Eric Roberts, wanders into her life and turns her world upside down. To play Nita, I reached back into my grab bag of memories for the voice of Ganelle Rushing, Quitman’s telephone operator. I drew on what I knew about Jack’s mom and the screenwriter’s mother, but most of all I used my own mother’s spirit and her gestures to create the character. Sometimes, Mother would eat her meals leaning over the sink to save dishes and catch crumbs, so Nita did that, too. And I wore my hair up like my mother did during the war. In my favorite scene in the movie, I am pinning laundry onto the clothesline, just as I had seen Mother do it a thousand times. (We even have a home movie of her at the clothesline, dressed so femininely, shyly trying to shoo away my father, who was filming her.) When Teddy and the boys beg Nita to come fly a kite with them, at first she says no, brushing them off with a friendly wave that says “don’t be silly.” Then she gives in and runs to them, but not before stealing a glance at herself in the reflection of a window and fluttering her hands over her hair to make sure her pins are in place. It’s a gesture I’d had seen my mother use many times, and I knew it by heart. My entire performance was an homage to her.