‘My stepfather taught me that to be loved was to feel frightened’
Oscar-winner Sally Field’s memoir details personal and professional cruelty, as she tells Chris Harvey
In 1976, Sally Field caught a plane to Atlanta, Georgia, on her way to a five-week movie shoot. She was 29, three years away from her first Oscar, for Norma Rae (1979), but had been on the small screen since her teens. She had just starred in a four-hour TV drama called Sybil, about a young woman suffering from multiple-personality disorder; her film roles in Places in the Heart, Forrest Gump, Steel Magnolias and Lincoln were way into the future. She was the mother of two young children, in the process of a divorce and living with a new partner.
The movie was Smokey and the Bandit; Field’s co-star Burt Reynolds (who died last month), had just turned 40 and was soon to be the biggest box office draw on the planet. He arrived a day later and asked her to join him for dinner. “He sauntered over, grabbed me,” she noted in her journal. “He must have felt my heart. I could no longer be responsible for it.”
We’re sitting in the library of a London hotel, talking about her beautifully written memoir, In Pieces. It vividly captures the people who have meant most in her life: her mother Margaret – whom she called Baa – with her fading B-movie career, her grandmother Joy, hiding her emotions behind a handkerchief; and the men who have loved her, flawed, sometimes beautiful, sometimes dangerous. All come to life as if they are walking into the room where you are reading.
The attraction between her and Reynolds was “instantaneous and intense”, but in their four-year relationship he would turn out to be self-centred and controlling. Field would win her first Emmy for Sybil, but was not at the ceremony. She was at Reynolds’s house watching with the sound turned down. He had gone to bed and she was trying not to disturb him. “Go if you want,” he had told her. “But be prepared to lose again.”
She would leave him in 1980. What did she feel when she heard Reynolds describe her later as the love of his life? “It isn’t real,” she says softly. “If he was standing here now, he would disagree absolutely, but when I was ever with him that wasn’t the case. That was only the case when I wasn’t with him, and when he was talking to the press.”
In the book she describes how, from the start, when she talked to Reynolds about herself, she began to get “subtle – or not so subtle – hints that he didn’t want to know”. She would write in her journal “leave, go, run”, she says, but to her, the relationship seemed familiar. “It was what I had been taught by my stepfather – to be loved you have to disappear, and you have to feel frightened. That’s love.”
Field grew up around the Hollywood movie industry. When she was four, her mother divorced her father to marry 6ft 4in stuntman Jock Mahoney, known to all as Jocko, who for a time had his own Western TV series, The Range Rider. But Jocko would soon begin to abuse his new stepdaughter, a pattern that continued to develop into her teens. “From the beginning, there was a great deal of physicality,” says Field. Was she aware that what he was doing was wrong? “I don’t think any five-yearold child processes that it’s wrong unless you’re taught, unless you have a parent who says if you’re ever being touched and you don’t feel comfortable, you come tell me.”
The abuse continued. At 13, Field describes an event in which she is naked and performing a dance, with Jocko watching her from the shower, before he picks her up and kisses her, then “sets his penis, as muscular as the rest of him, between my legs and pulls my littleness toward him…”
“He loved me enough not to invade me,” she writes. It’s a startling sequence in which before it happens, she describes wanting to be a child, while also feeling powerful, to have his focus totally upon her. “That specific episode that I write about is so within the confines of the child that I was then, what I was feeling at that moment,” she says, “and that’s one of the reasons why any kind of sexual abuse is so complicated and so difficult to overcome because it’s so filled with different feelings… it’s filled with inconsistencies in a way and that’s part of the reason why it’s so difficult to ever get over… Part of what the book is about is how it affected me all along the way.”
Now 71, Field has been acting for more than 50 years. She’s on stage in London next year for the first time, in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons – “at the Old Vic… that’s romantic to me.”
But her career almost didn’t begin at all. In 1964, she won the part of the surf-loving, boy-mad teenager Gidget in the TV show of the same name, but got pregnant just before shooting began. Her stepfather arranged for her to have an abortion in a clinic just over the Mexican border in Tijuana.
“It was illegal, so it wasn’t exactly safe,” she says. Does she ever wonder how different her life would have been if she hadn’t had access to that clinic? “I can’t really wonder about it any more than I can about what if my mother had never divorced my father,” she says. “I mean, what if, what if?”
She’s wearing large glasses, but even through lenses, her gaze is very direct, her thoughts fast and sometimes
‘Any kind of sexual abuse is so complicated and so difficult to overcome because it’s so filled with different feelings… Part of what the book is about is how it affected me all along the way’
impatient. She’s small and slight, in jeans and a sweater, her looks still those of the girl-next-door, but you can feel her force and the independence of her spirit. We talk about an incident in her book, where she won the lead in the film Stay Hungry by Five Easy Pieces director Bob Rafelson. He asked to see her breasts, then told her: “OK Sal, the role is yours, but only after I see how you kiss.” During filming, she would sleep with him and writes that she felt she had lost her dignity. I ask her if she thinks it was a common experience at the time. Was he abusing his power?
“I don’t really know,” she says. “It was 1976. I think it was commonplace behaviour; is that right or wrong? I can’t put a judgment on it. I can only say what happened – how I felt, how I got there, how he behaved. I don’t stand back and judge it.”
The role in the film Stay Hungry set her on course for a film career, and freed her from the millstone of her role in the ludicrous Sixties TV show The Flying Nun, which ran for three series but became so identified with her that she could barely get an audition.
“I don’t regret taking it at all,” she says. “But for me, it was the late Sixties, my generation was in upheaval. Everyone was running around naked and eating granola and I was dressed as a nun.”
It’s a long way from her latest project – Netflix’s strange futuristic drug-trial drama Maniac, with Emma Stone: “That was so insane,” she says. “I had been offered lots of films that just seemed the ordinary girls things that just didn’t interest me, girlfriend things, older man on a date, and I was like, ugh.”
Does it amaze her to think how far television has come from the formula fare of the Sixties where she began? “Yep,” she says, “and glory hallelujah!”
In Pieces (Simon & Schuster) is out now; Maniac is on Netflix; All My Sons is at the Old Vic from April 2019 (tickets: 0844 871 2118; tickets.telegraph.co.uk)