Sally Field Stronger Than Ever at 71
THE ACTRESS OPENS UP ABOUT OVERCOMING HER TROUBLED PAST AND HOW SHE FINALLY FOUND HAPPINESS
Since she turned 70 last year, Sally Field earned a Tony nomination for The Glass Menagerie and started filming Maniac, a new Netflix series co-starring Emma Stone. But away from the spotlight, Sally’s been working on her most personal project ever: a memoir, In Pieces, due next fall. It’s about “the little girl I was, about the teenager who backed into becoming a celebrity,” Sally says, “and about the craft that taught me to stand on my feet, a craft that helped me find my way out of a complicated childhood.”
Though she’s won two Oscars (for 1979’s Norma Rae and 1984’s Places in the Heart) and three Emmys, Sally has endured her share of difficulties. In the book, she’ll open up about her parents’ painful divorce, her menacing stepdad, a debilitating depression and her lifelong search for love. Writing In Pieces for more than five years has been cathartic. “She used to look back at her life and think she was weak but she now realizes, ‘Wow! I was stronger than I thought,’” a friend of the actress tells Closer. “Sally’s had so many ups and downs, and now people are going to be reading about them in her own words.”
CHILDHOOD FEARS
Sally’s first big challenge came at age 4, when her parents divorced in 1950. “I felt I had to make everybody happy,” she recalls of the pain shared by mom Margaret, an actress, and father Richard, an army officer. “I remember my father’s crying. That was devastating to me. I thought it was my fault and if I could be real, real cute and funny, I could make it better.”
She couldn’t, of course, and it was jarring when Margaret married Hollywood stunt man Jock Mahoney in 1952. Jock’s temper was volatile and when Sally suffered horrific nightmares, he “thought the way to handle my fears was to tell me to shut up. I never did find anybody to help me, to turn on all the lights and make that fear go away.” The burly, 6-foot-4 Jock also got physical. “[He] threw me across the yard, something humiliating,” Sally confesses. “I was always aware of my lack of size and my powerless position. I’d have given anything had I been able to pick him up and throw him.”
Later, Sally did start to stand up for herself and older brother Richard. “I was the one that wouldn’t take it,” she says. “Then, for other reasons that will go in the book, I became a focus of [Jock’s] tyranny. I was terrified all the time. Terrified that I would be forced to fight, and yet I did. Something in me wouldn’t be quieted.”
That feisty spirit would later serve her well in her career. “Oddly enough, I think I owe a great deal to how difficult [my stepdad] was,” says the actress, who landed her first TV series, Gidget, at the age of 17 and was offered the lead on The Flying Nun two years later, though she initially turned it down. Due to pressure from Jock, she reluctantly took it, sinking into a deep despair because she longed for more respected roles. “I was so depressed — that kind of depression [where] you gain 20 pounds in two seconds,” Sally, who developed an eating disorder for three years, recalls.
“One of the things that saved me was therapy,” Sally admits, and she became laser-focused on finally pursuing her acting dreams and the meatier roles she desired. The confidence she’d built from standing up to Jock also kicked in, and she refused to cower to casting agents who didn’t take her seriously. Her growing confidence led to her winning an Emmy for the 1976 TV miniseries Sybil and an Oscar for 1979’s Norma Rae, though her lingering childhood pain continued to affect her personal life.
“I never saw a relationship with any longevity that wasn’t horrible,” says Sally, who had wed her high school sweetheart, Steven Craig, when she was still on The Flying Nun. “We were never destined to have an adult relationship,” she reflects. They divorced in 1975 after having two sons, Peter, now 48, and Eli, 45.
“In so many ways I feel like I’m new to myself. All of us, in every stage of our lives, are coming of age.”
— Sally
FINDING HER WAY
As a single mom with two young children, “I was hell-bent on giving my boys the kind of childhood they [deserved] regardless of a man,” Sally insists. Adds her friend, “Even though she was busy with her career when Peter and Eli were young, she never shortchanged them.” The same goes
for the actress’ third son, Samuel, now 30, who was born during Sally’s second marriage to producer Alan Greisman from 1984 to 1993.
Her highest-profile romance, however, was with Burt Reynolds, in the ’70s. “Burt was the most important influence that came into my life other than my children at the time,” she says of the actor, who chose her as his co-star in 1977’s Smokey and the Bandit. Having been self-conscious about her looks for years (“I could definitely be ugly at the drop of a hat,” she once said), the call from Hollywood’s top hunk was thrilling. “I thought even if the film didn’t work, if he thinks I’m attractive in it, other people will think so, too,” she explains.
Their ensuing romance caught her off guard, but she fell hard. “He gave me a feeling that I was sexy, and I wanted to be everything he ever wanted,” she says. “[But] that was terrible, because what happened is that I stopped existing. I dressed for him, looked for him, walked for him.”
Burt was equally smitten.
“He asked me to marry many times,” Sally reveals, “[but] I knew his heart wasn’t in it. We’d have ended up just feeling terrible.” Burt disagrees. “I think we would have been very happy,” he says, and he called Sally “the love of my life” while promoting his 2015 autobiography, But Enough About Me. “If anybody asks about that period of my life, it was a wonderful time,” Burt says. “I was — and still am — very proud of her,” he tells Closer.
These days, Sally jokes “her door is open to romance, but no one’s been knocking,” her friend shares. “People try to fix her up, but she’s doubtful love’s going to come into her life again. It’s not big priority, and it doesn’t keep her up at night. She’s content with her own company.”
After the 2011 death of her mother, Sally bought an apartment in New York near her youngest son, Sam. “Sally always wanted to have that true New York City experience, and she’s had that for several years now,” her friend says. She splits her time between Manhattan and LA, where her two older sons and her five grandchildren live. “For her, it’s the best of both worlds.”
In her downtime, Sally “has a love of needlepoint that can eat up hours a day,” the friend adds. She’s also passionate about current events and putting the finishing touches on her memoir. “She’s a beautiful writer, and she wants to put something out there that can serve as an inspiration for others,” the friend says. “She knows she’s far from being the only one with a difficult childhood, and she wants to show how she became the person she’d hoped to be with the career she always dreamed of having.”
Sally credits her ever-growing belief in herself as the secret to her success. “In my late 50s, I began to embrace myself in a way that I hadn’t been able to before,” she shares. “I’m not as worried about what other people think. That’s a comfortable place to be.” She’s also stopped doing things she doesn’t want to do, an impulse that formerly was “linked to the feeling that I’m not enough.”
Once she silenced the negative voices from her past — agents and managers who told her, “You’re not pretty enough; you’re not good enough” to make it — nothing was impossible. “I had to fight like holy hell,” she proudly says of her journey to this happy time in her life. “I found my own voice,” she insists. And to paraphrase her now infamous 1985 Oscar acceptance speech, she likes herself. Right now, Sally Field really likes herself.