In Pieces(73)
As Sybil.
I didn’t feel excited when I got the “congratulations, you got the job” call. Everything in me went still, quieted by the thought of what lay ahead. I didn’t doubt myself, but I couldn’t congratulate myself either. I was going into battle, this time on the front lines.
The schedule was to rehearse for two weeks on a stage at Warner’s, then spend two weeks in New York, shooting the exteriors, and a remaining five weeks in the sets built on the studio lot. I needed my mother. I couldn’t leave the kids for the two weeks’ filming in New York without her help. I couldn’t do any of it without her. She had moved out of Joy’s house, was renting a tiny apartment at the beach, and was still trying to beat down the real estate door. But when I called her, she, without hesitation, packed her suitcase. From then on, that suitcase would be kept in the back of her car, packed and ready to go at a moment’s notice if I needed her. She even hovered nearby when Steve had the kids, days that always made Eli happy and Peter achingly homesick—though for what home I don’t know.
Before traveling to New York to start filming, we rehearsed the four-hour miniseries on an empty soundstage. With white tape on the cement floor to indicate doors and room size, we’d block out as many scenes as possible, then at the end of each day, Mr. Page wanted us to run it all, full out. The process felt more like we were rehearsing to open on Broadway, rather than preparing a project to be filmed one scene at a time. And while I appreciated the information it gave the actors as to the evolution of the story, my instincts also told me to guard against leaving the performance on the rehearsal room floor, as they say. Very different from the discipline of creating and repeating a performance night after night onstage, I understood the magical immediacy of working in front of a camera, understood that the camera just needs to see it once, instant and alive, sometimes only the blink of an eye, or a flash of a thought that can never be repeated.
Because of that, I’d ask Anthony if I might simply touch on the emotions and not ask myself to land the performance day after day. That would not do. He needed to see all that I had to give, constantly doubting my ability and disapproving—many times vociferously—of my choices. He didn’t like the physicality I was bringing to Peggy—the nine-year-old piece of Sybil who held all her anger. He would say he didn’t believe her, that she was farcical and looked like an old lady golfer (which she actually did). I didn’t know what to do. Rehearsal time needs to be free from the obligation of being a finished product, and I needed to flop around, to try this and that, to find things I didn’t know I was looking for, to let my brain lead me toward behavior I couldn’t have planned. I learned to rehearse at home with Peter and Eli walking in and out, away from his scrutiny and judgment.
To me the most complicated aspect of Sybil’s condition wasn’t her many personalities, because those personalities, in themselves, were very clear and uncomplicated, each with a different age and separate emotion. To me what seemed most essential was the moment when one self left off and another picked up—the transition. I was given several grainy videotaped therapy sessions conducted with diagnosed multiple personality patients, the same tapes that Joanne had studied when researching her 1957 award-winning role in The Three Faces of Eve. In one tape, the patient looks as though she’s trying to pass a kidney stone before evolving into a personality that doesn’t seem very different from her original one. And in another, the subject reacts so violently when transitioning, grimacing and contorting in such a way that it was laughable, looking very much like a case of bad acting—which was not something I wanted to emulate. In my mind, there had to be a moment when no one existed in the body at all. As if literally no one was home and the body was quiet, waiting for the arrival of its next occupant. But my vision, my interpretation, wasn’t something I could reveal or explore during rehearsals for fear that Anthony would blow his negative directorial whistle and freeze me in my search. I felt protective of some tender part of myself that would not be safe under his gaze.
If anyone other than Joanne knew how dysfunctional the rehearsal time had been, or of Anthony’s dissatisfaction and my frustration, I was unaware of it. And when I saw Stewart standing in the back of the stage at the end of the third day, then caught glimpses of Jackie lurking in the shadows by the end of that week, I wasn’t sure if it was a good thing, or if the director’s disappointment in me was spreading. But rehearsals continued, and on the last day, Anthony called in all the executives, producers, and anyone else he could find, to watch a full run-through. He wanted me, Joanne, and Brad Davis (a wonderful actor who played Sybil’s friend) to run the whole thing, all four hours, at performance level. Joanne met my eyes, knowing full well what an irrational, unreasonable demand this was—not to mention potentially destructive. She knew that I was trying to tiptoe around the perimeters of whatever performance I had to give, and as we huddled together on the rehearsal sofa, she took my hand. “Do the best you can,” she told me softly. “But don’t throw it away, Sally. We all see what’s happening. Trust us and yourself.” So we stumbled through that agonizingly long run-through, then flew to New York the next day and began shooting.
A character—any character—can be played effectively more than one way. But however Anthony Page wanted Sybil to be played made no sense to me, and nothing I did seemed to make any sense to him. I was exhausted, but not from the work, from refusing to give up what I saw so clearly in my head and to bend myself into some indefinable shape in order to satisfy the director’s sensibilities. And at the end of the third day, when I was weaving my way through the crew—who were busy wrapping up—the assistant director asked that I follow him down a hallway of the abandoned hospital where we’d been filming.