In Pieces(87)

Eli and Peter on the set with me. The supportive local folks standing in the background were extras.





The day before Norma wrapped, Burt arrived at our Opelika location, driving up to my condo in a Cadillac convertible and a cloud of red Alabama dust. For the first time, he was coming to me, visiting my set, where I was working and he was not. It was late afternoon after a day of filming, and when he stepped inside my location home he held me to his chest and I could feel his heart jumping around frantically, just as mine had done when we first met. Awkwardly, he presented me with a little white box tied with a red velvet ribbon, and it was hard not to notice that his hands were trembling. But when I opened it to find a diamond ring, not huge but not me, he didn’t speak and I didn’t know what to say other than thank you, awkwardly. For the rest of the evening, something unsaid hung in the air, something that neither of us wanted to pluck out and examine.

We had only one scene to shoot on that last day and it’s one of my favorite moments in the film. In it, Norma returns home late at night after Reuben has bailed her out of jail. With quiet purpose, she strides through her tiny house and, one by one, wakes her three children, then sits on the worn love seat with them tightly tucked around her. Unemotionally, she gives each of them a picture of their different fathers then tells them the men’s names, who they were, and whether she had been married to them or not. She looks into the sleepy faces of her children and says, “This is who I am. I want you to know that.”

Since it was a bright Alabama summer day and the sequence took place at night, large sheets of duvetyn (dense, feltlike black fabric) had been placed over the windows and doors, turning the shoe box of a house into a cave filled with movie lights—airless and stifling. The scene was shot simply, with the cinematographer, John Alonzo, following me handheld as I moved from room to room, collecting Norma’s sleeping children, then into the front room to flatly explain their existence. And as I held my body in Norma’s world, sweat rolling down my neck and between my breasts, I had the flicker of a thought: Burt was going to be arriving on set soon, maybe he was already waiting for me in my motor home. I could feel a tug on my mind, some part of me preparing to leave myself, leave what I wanted behind, to give over, to serve someone else’s needs. This sliver of a moment is so clear in my mind. I felt Norma’s strength, just as she was beginning to feel it herself. It was as if Norma gathered that fragile piece of me in her arms with the rest of her children, set me on the sofa, and said to me, I want you to hear it from me. This is who I am, without sentiment, apology, or appeasement.

While they were setting up the last shot, Marty and I stepped outside to get some air and as soon as my eyes adjusted to the light I saw Burt, laughing and talking with the crew. I walked toward him, looking like a greasy-faced, sweaty mess, and hugged him, my arms wrapped around his neck. Even I could smell the unmistakable field-hand odor radiating from my body. But when my condition registered on his face, his disapproval an instant smack, I immediately turned around and walked back into the airless cocoon, keeping Norma away from Burt’s critical eye, leaving Marty to welcome him, shaking his hand. I was sitting on the floor in the corner, hovering over the performance, when Marty returned to the set, and after looking through the lens to check the shot, he sat on an apple box next to me, putting his hand on my shoulder. I looked at him from the corner of my eye without turning my head, and I could feel words through his steady tender grip. Words he didn’t need to say.

As with Sybil, I never stood outside of Norma Rae to see how much of her story was, in reality, mine. On first read she’d seemed as foreign as if she’d stepped from a flying saucer, but when Norma is pushed against the wall, when everything in her is on the line, she springs onto a worn worktable with a sign over her head—the coffee table of my past. Her struggle to stand up, her fight for respect, was the same as mine, for my work and myself. Through each day of working side by side with Marty, as Norma’s sense of dignity gradually emerged, I stood taller. As she unleashed her rage, I felt freed. When she found her voice, I heard mine. By standing in Norma’s shoes, I felt my own feet. If I could play her, I could be me.





20


The End of the Beginning


IN A SMALL screening room at Fox studios, I sat next to Baa, an audience of two as we watched Norma Rae for the first time together. As with Gidget fifteen years earlier, I’d never visualized the film becoming a product to be put in the marketplace. It was all so secondary to the experience of doing the work, secondary to having Marty in my life. Even after the film had wrapped, that moment when everyone vows eternal friendship only to vanish from sight, Marty had never let me go. Month’s later he was still reaching out, asking me to join him for lunch at the studio where his office was located, or Adele would invite me to their home for an early dinner, telling me to arrive at 5:30, and if I didn’t show up until 5:45, Marty, no doubt, would have started eating without me.

And as my mother and I sat in this tiny room with a huge screen, saying nothing when the film ended and the lights came up, I didn’t know what to think. I waited for Baa to respond, for her unbridled enthusiasm, her avalanche of joyous support allowing me to be joyous too. But she looked as numb as I felt and as we wandered out of the building, she sounded only lukewarm, expressing concern about Marty’s simplistic, documentary-style approach, saying, “I don’t think he helped you very much. He doesn’t even use any music.”