In Pieces(68)

The following week, I answered the phone one afternoon, barely hearing it through the grind of the cement mixer outside and the bickering little boys inside. It was Jolene, Rafelson’s secretary, or assistant in today’s world. After she gave me a quick greeting and asked me to “hold on for Bob,” I steadied myself, lowered my energy, and waited. He laughed when he came on the line, saying, “Well, we’ve now read every actress in this town and I can’t believe that you were the best. It must be because you’ve had more experience auditioning than anyone else.” I paused before telling him I’d not read for anyone since 1964. He went on to inform me that they’d honed it down to five girls, saying that none of the other actresses had read as well, but they all had the look he wanted: long legs and long hair. My hair had grown out several times over the years, but then I’d cut it off again, so no. My hair was not long and my legs were never going to be long, no matter what I did.

But even with my shortcomings, I had my first callback since I began in the business eleven years earlier, and when I sat in Dianne’s cubicle this time, I waited only a few minutes before being summoned into Bob’s glass office. Charles was now sitting with Dianne on the back sofa and Jeff Bridges was sitting in the chair across from Bob. Wonderfully alive, totally available Jeff, tall and quick to laugh, focused and fearless—I adored him the minute our eyes connected. I can’t translate into words what it was like, that time with Jeff. Instantly we met in a hypnotic out-of-body world, a place where there is no space between impulse and action, no guard gate at the crossings between strangers and intimates. It felt as if we were breathing through the same air hose.

I don’t know how many scenes we worked on. Actually, “played with” might be a better way to describe it, because that’s what it felt like—the two of us, toying with each other, curious and experimental in an easy sensual way, a place I could never find in my real life. Or was this my real life? Was I there for twenty minutes or four hours? I don’t know. But eventually I was driving home, feeling I’d done the work I set out to do.

Two days later, Rafelson called, perplexed. He was having a hard time owning the idea that he’d be hiring the Flying Nun (what a surprise) and it was driving him crazy. Plus he was leaving the next morning for Birmingham, Alabama, to scout locations for the film. He asked if I would come to his house that evening for one more meeting, and even though an alert went off in my head, I tucked it away with all the other pieces of me that didn’t belong to M. T. Farnsworth.

Jeff and me in a scene with wonderful Helena Kallianiotes.





Around this time, another recurring dream kept haunting me. This one stays with me through the years and even though it no longer visits me in the night, I can’t leave the images behind. Much of the dream would change, but there was always a staircase and I was always at the bottom of it, looking up, paralyzed with fear. It’s dark and I can see the curtains at the top billowing in and out, sheer and ghostlike, a breathing thing waiting at the top of the stairs. I’m standing there, surrounded by little children, all grabbing my shirt, clinging to my legs, while my arms are around them, gathering them to me, protecting them. But I don’t turn and run. I don’t look for a way out. I know I must go up the stairs to survive and, more important, for the children to survive. There’s no other choice. And as I take the first step, from somewhere deep in my body comes a voice, guttural and primal: “I will not be conquered. I will not be conquered.” With every ounce of life, I roar, “I will not be conquered.”


And there I was, at the bottom of the dimly lit staircase after the housekeeper had invited me in. Bob stood barefoot in the doorway of his bedroom, his shirt open and hanging over his jeans, or was it a baggy gray T-shirt? I don’t remember. He thanked his housekeeper, told her he’d see her tomorrow, then greeted me with “Hey, Sal, come on up.”

To prepare a character, Lee taught me that you have to understand their history, their emotional ingredients, their physicality. You have to know their lives completely up to the moment you walk onstage, but when you do, you forget it all and just be. No matter what happens, if the other actors drop dead or the set falls down, you are that character. And so I was. Did I sit on an armchair somewhere in the room? Or did I throw myself freely onto the bed as M.T. would have? Did Bob offer me something to drink? Was he smoking a joint and did I take a hit? I’m not sure. But, as if it happened ten minutes ago, I remember Bob sitting on the bed, leaning against the headboard, while I sit before him on my folded legs with my feet hanging off the bed in midair, like some part of me didn’t want to join in. I began to relax as I heard acceptance in his voice, as if the audition was over and I was in the film. In the midst of casually talking about the work, he told me to take my top off so he could see my breasts, saying since there was a nude scene in the film, he needed to figure out how to shoot me. Ignoring the sharp jab of emotion that shot through me, I removed my shirt as casually as he had made the request, then sat for his approval with my eyes closed—the only clue that those fingernails were clawing my insides. And when he asked me to go to the closet and use whatever scarves and shirts I could find to play dress-up, I did that too. I was a grown-up version of the child wrapped in plastic dry-cleaning bags, performing while an older man, whose approval I needed, watched. After I put the things back in the closet and my clothes back on my body, Bob walked with me to his bedroom door. “Okay, Sal, the job is yours. But only after I see how you kiss. I can’t hire anyone who doesn’t kiss good enough.” So I kissed him. It must have been good enough.