Sally Fields dunkle Erinnerungen
LOS ANGELES — Even now, just before the release this month of her memoir, “In Pieces,” Sally Field wasn’t sure she wanted it published. She wasn’t confident that anyone would want to read what she wrote.
“I didn’t know I had a voice,” she said.
Still, Ms. Field felt compelled to say something when, in 2012, she addressed a women’s conference.
Rather than make bland opening remarks, she shared a complicated reflection about her pursuit of the Mary Todd Lincoln role in the Steven Spielberg film “Lincoln” and about her own mother, who had died of cancer in 2011.
Soon after she learned the “Lincoln” part was hers, she made dinner for her mother. Then she opened up to her about how she had been sexually abused as a child by her stepfather.
It had been difficult for her mother to hear that it was not a single act but actually a series of offenses throughout Ms. Field’s adolescence. But that next morning, her mother, even in her declining health, assured her that she would not be alone any longer in her pain.
Recalling the experience of giving this speech, Ms. Field said: “I was shaking all over to do it. But I felt strengthened by that faceless mass of unknown people. When I laid it out there, I felt them giving me something back.”
Ms. Field, 71, is not by nature a confessional person; despite the visibility she has gained from a decades-long acting career — she has won three Emmys and two Oscars, and starred in films like “Norma Rae,” “Steel Magnolias” and “Forrest Gump” — she finds it easier to speak through her outspoken characters than put herself on display.
“In Pieces” delves into some of Ms. Field’s famous roles and relationships with celebrity co- stars like Burt Reynolds (who died on September 6), and it recounts how she raised three sons through two marriages that ended in divorce.
The life that Ms. Field reveals over the course of “In Pieces” is one that has been darkened by abuses and cruelties that are frustratingly commonplace for women, both inside and out of the entertainment industry.
The book also tells a story illuminated by its author’s abundant grace and dignity, and her authen- tic desire to plumb the depths of her feelings, a yearning that she said was overwhelming.
“Something was growing in me, this urgency that felt gangrenous,” Ms. Field said. “I could hardly breathe.”
Ms. Field said that compulsion became more acute after the death of her mother, Margaret, who raised the Field family in Southern California.
After Margaret Field filed for divorce from Sally’s father, Richard, in 1951, she got remarried in 1952 to Jock Mahoney, a stuntman known as Jocko.
As Sally Field writes of Mr. Mahoney in her memoir, “It would have been so much easier if I’d only felt one thing, if Jocko had been nothing but cruel and frightening. But he wasn’t. He could be magical.”
He also frequently summoned Ms. Field to his bedroom alone. “I knew,” Ms. Field writes. “I felt both a child, helpless, and not a child. Powerful. This was power. And I owned it. But I wanted to be a child — and yet.” Ms. Field said her stepfather’s abuse of her stopped after she turned 14. Her mother divorced Mr. Mahoney in 1968, and he died in 1989.
Ms. Field’s sexual awakening in her late teens, a period in which she said she felt she was “breaking out of my own brain,” was followed by a secret abortion in Tijuana when she was 17. Then came her profes- sional ascent on TV’s “Gidget” and “The Flying Nun,” and the end of any sense of normalcy in her life. “I was no longer a member of the club anymore,” Ms. Field writes. “The Human Club. I was a celebrity.”
Feeling unable to fully share her experiences with others, Ms. Field sought an outlet in her acting, and in roles like “Sybil” (the 1976 TV series that cast her as a woman with multiple-personality disorder) and “Norma Rae” (the 1979 feature in which she played a budding labor activist in a cotton mill), which allowed her to negotiate long-held frustrations.
Playing parts like these, Ms. Field said, “I heard my voice.”
Ms. Field devotes several pages of “In Pieces” to Mr. Reynolds, her former lover and co- star in films like “Smokey and the Bandit” and “Hooper.” Ms. Field said their time together was “confusing and complicated, and not without loving and caring, but really complicated and hurtful to me.”
She characterizes Mr. Reynolds as both charismatic and controlling of her. Her assessment now is that, in her romance with him, she was recreating a version of her relationship with her stepfather.
“I was somehow exorcising something that needed to be exorcised,” she said.
What Ms. Field hears loudest right now is the voice in her own head, still questioning herself over the book, saying, “Can I say, never mind?”
She exhaled a short breath and added: “But I didn’t.”