FIELD OF BROKEN DREAMS
Actress’s biography, although absorbing, feels like tales from therapist’s couch
Sally Field has won Oscars and Emmys and a lifetime of plaudits, but you must look hard in her memoir for any sense of fun she might have had along the way. In Pieces is a book that feels wrenched from its author’s soul, an anguished account of an upbringing that almost destroyed her and a career that nearly crashed before it got started. Field has written it without professional help, unless you count the analyst who got her to unload about her emotional damage in the first place.
Born in Pasadena, California, in 1946, she was three when her parents divorced. Her army father ‘hardly even talked to me’; her mother, whom she called ‘Baa’, was a Hollywood actress who made another bad marriage to a stuntman and B-movie actor named Jock Mahoney. This stepfather proved to be a bully and a secret abuser, demanding the young Sally walk up and down his naked body (‘Lower, lower’). not surprisingly the family began to fall apart, her once-beautiful mother raddled by vodka. Decades later Field told her the truth – Mahoney’s abuse had lasted ‘my whole childhood’, though it stopped short of rape.
Field’s fledgling successes were in television, first as a Californian surfer-girl in Gidget and then as star of The Flying Nun. It would take her years to live them down. Racked with self-loathing and locked in her own ill-advised marriage to her high-school sweetheart, she was rescued by attending the Actors’ Studio, where she became a favourite of Lee Strasberg. He helped her land the title role in Sybil, about a woman with a multiplepersonality disorder. But her difficulties with men continued. She became involved with director Bob Rafelson, despite feelings of guilt about his wife. Back then, in 1975, it seemed like ‘acceptable behaviour’.
Later, she fell hard for Burt Reynolds after they starred together in Smokey And The Bandit. Reynolds was then Hollywood’s leading heartthrob, and also, she would discover, an egomaniacal boor and control freak.
When she won the title role in Norma Rae in 1978 Reynolds reacted furiously: ‘No lady of mine is gonna play a whore.’ She displeased him further by accepting an invitation to the Cannes Festival, where the film was in competition. ‘You don’t expect to win anything, do you?’ he asked her.
You may feel like cheering when Field carries off the Palme d’Or and every other gong for best actress that year, ‘includ-
ing the Academy Award’.
She won a second Oscar five years later for Places In The Heart, and then, as happens to so many actresses, the good roles dried up.
Not until 2012, when Steven Spielberg cast her as Mary Todd opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln, did she remind the world of her acting chops (and won another nomination).
The book ends on a conciliatory note as she makes peace with the mother who loved and resented her – ‘I needed to know her… so that then, perhaps, I could know myself ’.
It sounds like another line from her analyst’s couch, but at least she found a refuge somewhere.
‘Burt Reynolds was Hollywood’s leading heartthrob – and also an egomaniacal boor and control freak’