Portrait by Sam Jones
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Small Wonder
By Margaret Guroff, September & October 2006
For years she fought for respect. Now, as an empty nester, actress Sally Field is facing new challenges—and itching for new fights
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Sally Field sits cross-legged in an armchair in her airy, bougainvillea-draped Malibu ranch house. The actress's straight hair—dark, scattered with individual strands of gray—is clutched in a tortoiseshell clamp; her toenails are painted pink. At nearly 60, her forehead is laddered with expression lines, and yet she is such a cherub, and so tiny, that you kind of want to put her in your pocket for safekeeping.
That sense of fragility, friends say, is an illusion.
"You tend to feel like you need to protect her," says actress Jane Fonda, a dear friend. "Then you realize she is very strong and extremely smart and capable. You end up saying, 'She's the one who needs to help me.' "
And Field is doing a lot of helping these days, as an impassioned spokesperson on osteoporosis (a disease from which she suffers), a mentor to young filmmakers at Robert Redford's Sundance Institute, a daughter, a mother, a grandmother, and a friend. "I'm becoming typical of women in my generation," laughs Field, a California native with an inherited Texas twang. "My last son is leaving to go to college; my grandchildren are being born. My mother is living with me."
Field's passion as a mentor is typical of how she approaches the projects and people in her life, says longtime friend Pat Mitchell, now president of the Museum of Television and Radio in New York City and a fellow Sundance board member. "She has this ability to absolutely focus on the person in front of her," Mitchell says. "They call her in the middle of the night; they call her crying. She is just in there grappling with them."
Bone Health
For information about osteoporosis prevention and treatment, read “Boning Up on Osteoporosis” on AARP.org’s Health channel, and Dr. Huerta’s “Understanding Osteoporosis” column on AARP Segunda Juventud Online.
Such intensity can be intimidating. "She's like half my size, and she totally scared the sh-t out of me," says Michael Kang, a young director who studied with Field at Sundance in Utah. While filming, Kang wasn't getting the performance he needed out of a child actor, and Field wouldn't have it. "She grabbed me by the throat and said, 'Whatever you have to do to get a good performance out of the kid, do it. It doesn't matter if he ever wants to act again.' " (The results are visible in Kang's new film, The Motel, currently accumulating awards on the festival circuit.)
Field is famously driven. This quality explains her well-known passage from Gidget to Norma Rae: she's the teen surfer-chick sitcom star who studied Method acting by night and ended up with two Best Actress Oscars (that's one more than Meryl Streep has). But it also explains lesser-known aspects of Field's career, such as why, with nothing to prove, she still leaps at the toughest roles, recently winning raves onstage in The Glass Menagerie and onscreen in a recurring role as Dr. Abby Lockhart's bipolar mother on ER. (Her latest TV role is the mother on ABC’s drama Brothers & Sisters, which premieres in September.) Easy roles are embarrassing, Field says: "If it's too easy, you have time as a human being to stop and think, 'This is really stupid that I'm standing here pretending to be somebody else. Gosh, I feel like an idiot.' "
‘When you’re old, you are more certain of who you are, and that may be a good thing or a bad thing.’
Though "the consummate professional" on the set, Field can be willful, says actress Joanna Kerns, a friend who directed Field in a recent episode of ER. "Talking her into something she doesn't want is a near impossibility." Frequently described as "fierce," Field has a temper—she once punished an unreliable dishwasher by "beating the crap out of it" with a hammer, she has said. And she admits to being spiteful: "If someone treats me with disrespect, I never forget it. If they try to call me, I pick up the phone and tell them 'Not in your wildest dreams.' "
To hear Field tell it, her forceful side emerged as a reaction to her stepfather. Her parents divorced when she was only four, and she rarely saw her father after that. Her mother, Maggie, married Jock Mahoney, a stuntman and TV cowboy who demanded worshipful obedience from Field, her older brother, and their younger half sister. "I would stand on the coffee table and scream at him," Field once told Playboy. "I was so frightened of him that the only way to get to myself at all was to be louder than he was, bigger than he was." But Field later admitted that learning to stand up for herself probably changed her life: "If I hadn't fought back, I might have been Gidget forever."
Field grew up in the San Fernando Valley and was cast as the lead in TV's Gidget after being discovered in an acting class. Next came The Flying Nun, a trifle. "You knew the minute you worked with her that there was this incredible talent bursting to come out," recalls actress Shelley Morrison, who played a fellow nun on the show but who is best known as Rosario, the maid on Will & Grace. Madeleine Sherwood, who played the mother superior, saw Field's promise and brought her to the Actors Studio, where Field studied at night with the acting coach Lee Strasberg, who became a sort of surrogate father for her.
Her breakout performance, as a woman with multiple personalities, came in the 1976 TV movie Sybil. She topped that by winning her first Oscar in 1980, for her portrayal of a union activist in Norma Rae. Field's second Oscar, and her life's most ridiculed (and misquoted) moment, came in 1985, when she reveled in her peers' approval of her performance in Places in the Heart. "You like me!" she sobbed. "Right now, you like me!" Next came producing—her first effort was Murphy's Romance, in which she starred with James Garner—and leads in high-grossing films such as Forrest Gump and Mrs. Doubtfire. Field also has directed one feature film, 2000's Beautiful, and a few TV dramas.
If Field's career has been about exceeding expectations, her love life (so far) may have been about not having any expectations. "I've never had my heart broken," she said recently. "I think that's very sad, that I haven't allowed my heart to be broken. I have broken a few." Field married her high-school sweetheart, Steven Craig, in 1968 and had two sons with him: Peter, a novelist and the father of Field's two granddaughters, and Eli, an actor and the father of Field's new grandson. Field and Craig were divorced in 1975.
Two years later, on the set of the car-chase romp Smokey and the Bandit, Field met Burt Reynolds, and the unlikely duo began a five-year romance. It ended when she got angry about her role in the relationship, as the perpetually sweet southern belle who "made brownies and rubbed his feet and never asked for any space," she once said. "It wasn't fair of me, because I had never professed to need anything."
In 1984, Field married the film producer Alan Greisman, with whom she has one son, Sam, a freshman at New York University. Field and Greisman were divorced in 1994, and she has not had a public companion since. "I'm not really good at that," she says. "I've allowed myself to be so busy with my grandchildren, my sons, and my family, and work, that I really don't know where I would fit anyone in."
Along with devoting time to work and family, Field has brought attention to political causes, from the antinuclear movement to V-Day, an annual February observance to protest violence against women. Says playwright Eve Ensler, the creator of V-Day and the author of The Vagina Monologues: "What's so moving about Sally is how committed she is to bringing people together. Women who are that powerful, that talented, that fierce—I think the world isn't fully ready for them yet."
Field's latest crusade is more personal. Last year she was diagnosed with osteoporosis, a dangerous bone-thinning disease that is common among postmenopausal women. Shortly after she began taking a drug to prevent bone fractures, she was approached about joining a campaign to raise awareness of this silent condition. As the face of the campaign, Field does ads for her drug, speechifies on the importance of bone scans and prevention, and keeps a monthly journal at www.bonehealth.com.
"People think, 'Oh, osteoporosis, that's when you get old and bend over, and everybody kind of has it.' Like it really isn't a big deal," she says. "But it's a very big deal. If you're not getting bone-density tests, you don't realize that your bones are like chalk. And they just crumble at the most insignificant stress."
Calling baby boomers to action on osteoporosis has allowed Field to reclaim membership in a generation that, in some ways, she missed out on. "I was in The Flying Nun and everybody was out eating granola"—she pronounces it "grain-ola"—"and protesting, and I was kind of stuck," she says. "I did miss a part of my young adulthood." So it is fitting, if also surprising, that she has lately grown so close to Fonda, a baby boomer icon of a completely different kind.
"She was flying as a nun while I was flying as Barbarella," jokes Fonda. "I didn't know her intimately, but I identified with her. What I sensed was a woman who was wounded, had scars, and instead of those scars making her disabled, they were making her stronger."
Lately the two and their group of friends have sought to understand a feeling of "becoming whole" that came unexpectedly with age, says Fonda. "You feel like you are starting to live wholly inside yourself, and it feels fabulous and new and strange," she says. "You need to talk about what it feels like, talk about what it means, talk about why it's happening, talk about what you need to do to keep it happening." One thing this has meant for Field and Fonda is a pact they made in 2005 to age naturally from then on, without plastic surgery.
This fall, as Field gets used to a child-free house for the first time in 36 years, she seems steeled for new challenges, though she doesn't know what they'll be. "Change is never easy," she says. "You lose your habitual behavior, which allowed you to sort of zone out. You have to be here, you have to be now, you have to be present." Her friends wonder whether life in an empty nest will make Field lonesome for a partner. "That's a real question mark," she says. A notorious hermit, Field says she can't imagine how or where she would meet someone new. "But maybe that will be one of the transitions that occurs now," she says.
"When you're old, you are more certain of who you are, and that may be a good thing or a bad thing," she adds. "Because you've lived your life, you're independent, you're not looking for anyone to 'complete you,' as the saying is. There isn't anybody who would complete me. I am so way completed."
Features editor Margaret Guroff profiled William Shatner in the May & June 2006 issue.
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