In Pieces(74)

Joanne’s dressing room had once been someone’s office but now had a piece of cardboard taped to the door with Dr. Wilbur scribbled on it, and after knocking once, the AD opened it to reveal a small group of conspirators. Handing me a cup of chamomile tea, Joanne told me sternly to drink it, then moved to the back, sitting next to Stewart on a window ledge. Jackie stood with her arms crossed, legs set wide as if she were about to coach a softball team, and for one horrible moment I thought I was being fired. She then moved to the door, locked it, and beckoned me to join them at the back of the room. As we crowded in with our heads together, it felt like the scene from Dial M for Murder when the true killer is about to be revealed. Jackie spoke in a stage whisper, looking straight at me: “Anthony Page will be gone as of tomorrow. We will shut down for one day, and Friday we’ll shoot without an official director. It’s not a tough day, just a lot of establishing shots. Then on Monday, you’ll have a new director. He’s flying in tomorrow, will come to the set on Friday so you can meet. And off you’ll go. How’s that?” I was flat-out stunned. She went on to say that Anthony had not been the right director, that he wasn’t comfortable around emotion and really didn’t believe in therapy in the first place. Then matter-of-factly she added, “He got in the way of your performance.” I couldn’t speak. There had been moments in my life when someone believed in me enough to extend a hand: Madeleine Sherwood, Lee Strasberg, and now these three people. Joanne Woodward, Stewart Stern, and Jackie Babbin.

In all fairness, Mr. Page was and is a wonderful director of British television and both British and American film, and he has always been an important stage director. The following year he directed the film I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, though I don’t know if he had been connected to the project when I sent my ill-fated homemade test. Maybe the problem between us had all to do with me. Probably. That’s show biz.


That Friday the whole set was vibrating, everyone pitching in to complete the day’s work under the unusual circumstance of being director-less. Then, like the first sighting of land after a rough voyage, Dan Petrie’s sweet round face appeared after lunch. He made no grand entrance, only stood on the edge of the crew with his hands in his pockets, looking like a passerby who’d just stopped to watch the film company on the streets of New York. I don’t know what he’d been told about the director’s dismissal or about me. He couldn’t have seen enough film to have any opinion about the performances because there wasn’t much film to see, and he hadn’t been present during any of our rehearsal period. So when Dan started directing the project, bright and early Monday morning, he must have been working on blind faith. We would run the first scene of the day for him, a scene that we had already rehearsed in L.A. but that he’d be seeing for the first time. It was his reaction that I began to trust and rely upon. Through the remainder of the New York work and back on to the Warner’s lot in Burbank everything was changed.

In the clearest part of my memory, I see myself standing in the hospital set on a soundstage after we’d been shooting in L.A. for about two weeks. That day had been spent filming, in order, the four scenes that occur when Dr. Wilbur and Sybil first meet. In each of the scenes, Sybil disassociates into a blackout, then awakens at the top of the following scene in another room, doing something totally different. When she becomes aware that the doctor has not only been watching but also having a conversation with her during those blackouts, the terror of having her mental illness discovered is momentarily outweighed by her need to survive. And for the first time in her life, Sybil tells someone. Each scene took place on a different set, with the passage of time indicated by a change in the lighting and the progressive chipping away of Sybil’s defenses. It had been a very long day, at the end of two grueling weeks, and as we started to set up the last and most difficult scene, I felt slammed with fatigue. Even though Sybil herself couldn’t cry—had blocked herself from feeling any emotion at all—to play her at this critical turning point in her life, I had to be filled with an avalanche of terror and sadness and yet desperately fighting to keep any emotion from emerging.

I was preparing on the set, standing in the corner with my eyes closed while the crew worked around me. Without opening my eyes, I heard Joanne quietly moving into her position so filming could begin and suddenly I couldn’t think anymore. I bent forward, putting my hands on my knees as though I’d just finished a race. Immediately, Dan appeared at my side, gently telling me that several more setups would be needed to complete the scene, that it had already been a long, hard week and if I wanted him to pull the plug, we could finish on Monday. I just stood there, trembling as if I were cold, and yet I was sweating. I wanted to say, Yes, please let me go home, but I started to cry instead. And in my head, I heard Lee Strasberg’s last words to me. Where you want to be is where you are right now. All of a sudden, I knew what he’d meant. That you can’t dance on the edge, whether emotionally or otherwise; that you had to drown in the character until it was without thought. No longer acting. That to be excellent at anything, it must cost you something. Without looking at him I said, “No, Dan, this is where I need to be.”

I don’t believe I accomplished it throughout Sybil, but it was the first time I had a glimpse of what it meant to be inside a character. Exhaustion now came from the work, a glorious adrenaline-filled climb to catch some part of myself that I didn’t know I knew.