My Extraordinary Ordinary Life (39 page)

This was a classic Western, and Tommy Lee and Sam were galloping their horses all over the place. I was only allowed to walk, or maybe trot if I was lucky. It started to bother me, because I had put in so much time learning to ride sidesaddle—and I wanted to
ride.

“Tommy Lee, am I ever going to get to gallop in this movie?” I asked one day.

“See all the rocks in this field?” said Tommy Lee.

“Yep.”

“Know what they call it?”

“Nope.”

“Cemetery Field. That’s what they named it after an old boy’s horse threw him here one day, and he hit his head and died. Now, what would I do if I had to call Jack and tell him you got thrown off your horse, hit your head on a rock, and died?”

“Tommy Lee, where I live now, people jump four-foot fences in the woods riding sidesaddle in skirts. I worked hard to learn how to ride this way. I’d rather fall off and hit my head on a rock and die than go back to Virginia and tell everybody that I just walked into the middle of every scene!”

So he let me gallop in one time, but he shot it with me riding straight at the camera, so you missed the effect of my flowing skirts traveling east to west. And I thought,
Where’s the drama?
It was a bit of a disappointment, but my only one. Tommy Lee Jones is a talented director. And I loved working with him.

In
Streets of Laredo
, shot on the same location, I got a little more drama than I’d bargained for. I drove a wagon filled with children through a raging dust storm and rode across the prairie at a dead run, shooting bad guys off their horses with a Colt .45 revolver. It reminded me that all my childhood experiences on the back of my horse had actually helped prepare me for something.

Madison, who was about four, wanted to be an extra in the film, so we dressed her up in an old-fashioned sailor dress that had been her sister’s, her paddock boots, and a hat. She was so excited, but after hours of waiting in the heat she started to fade. By lunchtime, she was “over it.” We had befriended one of the stuntmen who had also brought his children to the set. When he saw that Madison was losing her mind with boredom, he offered to put her on an old, gentle horse and walk around with her. She hopped right on. When it came time to eat, filming stopped and everyone headed over to the lunch tent, open on the sides because it was so hot. There were about a hundred people seated at the tables. Madison wanted to go faster, so she gave her horse a little kick. Even the mellowest horses have their moments, and this one took off at top speed. Right toward the lunch tent. We all stopped eating and turned to look, utensils frozen in midair, as we heard two set of hooves galloping toward us. Madison was in the lead, and way out front, on a direct path to disaster, when, from far behind, in raced the stuntman. He galloped alongside her, scooped her off her saddle, and pulled her horse to a stop just before it collided with the tent. Everybody applauded, then went right back to eating. Madison walked around with a smile on her face for the rest of the day.

… 16 …

It’s no secret that the good film roles dwindle when an actress reaches middle age. I don’t even know who said it first, but the progression goes like this: At first the studio head says: “Get me Sissy Spacek!” Then it becomes “Get me a young Sissy Spacek!” Then it’s “Sissy who?”

I have been lucky to find so many rich, nuanced characters written for grown women. One of the best was Ruth Fowler, the bereaved mother in
In the Bedroom.
It was Todd Field’s first time writing and directing a feature, and it was shot for a budget of $I million on location in Camden and Rockport, Maine, two idyllic little towns on the Atlantic coast. Everyone involved was passionate about the project. We always seem to have the most fun on films where nobody’s getting rich and everybody’s there for the right reason: because we love it. With financial limitations, everyone has to be more creative, figuring out ways to do things on a budget. The crew is smaller, and the unit is closer, and everybody pitches in. Schuyler, who was just eighteen, got her first experience in set decoration. Her job was to make a house into a home. She collected children’s drawings (some of them her sister’s) and painted some of her own. She came along with me to all the antique stores, asking if we could borrow furniture for the film. Todd and his wife had their own linens and paintings shipped out to the set, and many of us contributed some of our own clothes for costumes. It was like that scene in the Mickey Rooney musical, where he says, “Hey, kids, we’ve got a barn, let’s put on a show!” We all worked together to make it happen.

Sometimes it felt as if I had come full circle in my career, reminding me of the days when I dressed sets for Jack. It made me proprietary about some of the props. I had chosen a perfect framed picture for my bedside table in the film. We were shooting a scene where I was lying on the bed, and I heard the camera operator say, “We’ve got a glare on that picture.” Rather than change the angle, he sent an assistant over to take it out of the shot. I grabbed it, and a tug-of-war ensued. Guess who won? It was my contribution to what turned out to be an all-but-perfect film, a masterwork that paid off for all of us in every way.

In the late 1990s David Lynch directed a film that would bring us old friends together to work for the first time.
The Straight Story
is the simple, true saga of Alvin Straight, a retired farmer who drives his riding mower across two states to visit his dying brother. Jack signed on as the production designer, and David asked me to play Alvin’s middle-aged daughter, Rose. It was a challenging part because Rose had a speech disorder. I needed to learn how to stutter through pages and pages of dialogue. I worked with a doctor of speech pathology and I listened to dozens of stutterers on tape. Then I had to learn to stutter with a Wisconsin accent. I used my old standbys, the tape recorder and video recorder. I gave myself headaches—for me it was all about the air being blocked and not flowing smoothly over the vocal chords. I had decided to wear some dental devices during filming to give Rose interesting teeth. So before I left LA, I worked with an Oscar-winning makeup artist named Matthew Mungle. He made me a set of prosthetic teeth and added plumpers, to fill out my checks, and a palate, which is sort of like a retainer, to change my voice and remind me to stutter. He was also able to lower my gum line with this device and give me one crooked tooth, which gave the illusion of a whole mouthful of crooked teeth.

The most important thing I did, once we arrived on location in Iowa, was spend days with Alvin’s real daughter, Diane, absorbing her voice and learning her body language. She’s a very funny person, and I enjoyed spending time with her. She didn’t have a driver’s license and had never driven a car, so we walked all over town together. She was quite an institution around Laurens, Iowa. One day she said, “I’m gonna take you to the cop shop.” I didn’t know what she meant until we walked in on a meeting of police officers and detectives at the police station. They didn’t recognize me because I was in character, but they seemed to know perfectly well who Diane was, and they were not at all surprised by this episode. I just had to convince her not to blow my cover by always introducing me as “the movie star that is playing me.”

Matthew had made me several sets of prosthetic teeth, which we both thought would last for the entire show. From the first time I met Diane, I wore my “movie teeth.” I didn’t want to hurt her feelings by letting her know I was wearing fake teeth to play her, so whenever she took me to the fast-food hamburger place, I would have to eat with my prosthetic teeth in place. Unfortunately they weren’t made for eating. Matthew had to make quite a few extra pair for me before the filming was over.

To help me transform into the character, David Lynch also talked me into cutting off my hair. That was traumatic, and, trust me, I’d only do it for David. We had both wanted to work together for years, and this turned out to be the perfect project. Jack and David hadn’t worked together since
Eraserhead.
Now they were like schoolboys again. They would walk around inspecting locations. David would mention to Jack that he thought the kitchen of Alvin’s house was a little too small, and before he could blink, Jack would pick up a sledgehammer and start demolishing a wall. Then David would take out a crowbar and join him. David and Jack worked harder than any of us, and always with enthusiasm. I would often find them sweeping the sidewalks before the day’s filming. As a director, David was a dream: a kind, calm person, with a wonderful inventiveness. It made us want to do anything for him. I had one scene where I hauled big sheets of plywood while talking nonstop to Richard Farnsworth, who played Alvin Straight so beautifully. We did that scene all morning, until David said, “You know, Sis, this doesn’t feel right. Let’s change it.” So we reshot it a different way for half of the afternoon, until David announced, “No, it was better the other way.” My arms were about to fall off, but in the end he was right, and the scene was perfect.

It was fun watching him with the other actors, too. There was a scene in a hardware store, where one of the elderly actors was supposed to get something from behind a counter, say a line, then turn back around. He kept mixing it up, and he was getting upset with himself for doing it wrong every time. David was so patient. He told him, “I’m gonna get a little string, and I’m going to tie it on to your belt loop. And every time you start to go the wrong way, I’m gonna give that string a little tug, and you’re gonna know it’s time to turn around and put that box back on the shelf…” He had everybody laughing, and it calmed the actor down and made him laugh, too. He did the next take just right.

It was easy to see why David has such loyal friends who will drop everything and work with him for minimal pay when he makes a film. Freddie Francis, one of the greatest cinematographers ever, who had worked with David on
The Elephant Man
and
Dune
, was director of photography for
The Straight Story
(and always wore pink cashmere socks). Most of the crew had worked with David for years. We were like a big, happy family on location, all staying together in a shabby little motel in Laurens, Iowa. With Jack there, it reminded me so much of filming
Badlands
out on the Colorado prairie, when I first realized that filmmaking could be art. Twenty-five years and thirty films later, I still felt like I was at the center of the universe.

Living on a farm, surrounded by animals and weather and hay-fields, our whole family was bound to the natural rhythms of life and death and birth and renewal. Our girls watched as foals were born and pets died and grandparents became frail. They grew up understanding we are all a part of the grand and sometimes heartbreaking pageant of being alive. It was something I had learned as a child, with the loss of my grandparents and the death of my brother Robbie. I have always understood how precious and fleeting life can be. But one time, shortly after Jack and I moved to Virginia, the universe gave me a tap on the shoulder to make sure I remembered.

It was a lovely summer evening, that magic hour right before dusk when the light covers everything like honey. Jack and I were driving along the highway leading out of town when we passed the scene of an accident. Just minutes before, an old man had been riding his bike along the edge of the road when he was hit by a car. The police and ambulance hadn’t arrived yet, although I could hear sirens in the distance. A few people were standing around the injured man, who lay sprawled on the ground. While I was looking out my window, the man died right in front of me. I watched as the life left his body. One moment he was pink and alive and the next he was gray and dead. It was the most incredible thing, because the life didn’t drain out from him, but rose up from his body like a bright shadow, then was gone.

I knew I had witnessed something profound and mystical, and also strangely intimate. I kept thinking that I had watched a man die, but no one in his family even knew he was dead. They were expecting him to walk through the door any minute after his pleasant evening bike ride.

The experience has stayed with me all these years, and I still haven’t fathomed its full meaning. Although it was a tragedy for the man and his family, for me it was an indelible reminder that life can be taken from us in an instant, without warning. It was like a mid-course adjustment, to remind me not to take anything or anyone for granted, to live without regrets and enjoy every minute of the time we have.

My father came to live with us on the farm when he was eighty-six years old. The house in Quitman had become too much for him to keep up, and he was already spending months at a time with us. We set him up in the front bedroom of the house, on the first floor, and turned the library across the hall into an office for him. There he would spend hours reading through a dozen or more newspapers, mostly the
Wall Street Journal
, and clipping articles that interested him. He saved all his papers, piling them in stacks on the floor. (That’s probably why I only read newspapers online—to offset all the trees sacrificed for him!)