Sissy Spacek’s Long Walk Home
Whether she’s on-screen or off, the Academy Award-winning actress is still a small-town Texas girl at heart.
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She met Jack in 1972 on the set of Badlands. He was the art director for the movie. “Jack had built this incredible treehouse on a river,” Sissy tells me. “One day he asked me to ride home with him on a boat. We loaded up, and there came a terrible flash flood. The boat sank. Right then I knew life with Jack was going to be eventful.”
From the beginning they joked that their children would look like Howdy Doody. Jack is tall (six foot two and a half), and Sissy is short (five foot two and a half). She is light with freckles, and he is dark with a wide space between his teeth. Fate didn’t give them a composite child, but one of each. Schuyler looks like her, and Madison looks like Jack.
The reclusive life on the farm suits Sissy’s temperament. She works only a few months a year, and the public aspects of her job—interviews, photo shoots, and autograph seekers—drain her energy. She loves center stage, but only when she’s pretending to be somebody else. When she and Jack decided to get married in 1974, she couldn’t even face walking down the aisle of the Methodist church in Quitman. Instead, they drove to a small chapel in Santa Monica, California, to be married in private. They both wore jeans, and their only witness was Jack’s Hungarian sheepdog—named Five—which signed the wedding license with its paw print.
The best actors, says The Long Walk Home director Richard Pearce, protect their inner mystery. “Sissy makes the audience earn a look inside of her,” says Pearce. “When they think they’ve seen the real her, they feel privileged.”
Her real life with Jack is hidden and ordinary by Hollywood standards. Her wardrobe comes not from the expensive boutiques on Rodeo Drive but from the Gap. “If I can’t wash it,” says Sissy, “I don’t wear it.” The difference in the way Sissy grew up and the way her daughters are being reared is a matter of scale. When Sissy was a small child, she had one horse. Madison and Schuyler have a farm of horses. When Sissy was young, everyone in Quitman knew her because her father was the county agricultural agent and she was a town ham—singing solos for area Rotary Clubs and local churches and never missing a talent show. Albermarle County residents know Schuyler and Madison because their mom is a movie star who is always being stopped for autographs. Schuyler has already been in two of her mother’s movies—The Long Walk Home and Hard Promises—and in one of her father’s, Daddy’s Dyin’ . . . Who’s Got the Will? When Sissy was a kid, her clothes came from the local dry-goods store, and she saved her own money to buy her first guitar, a $14.95 special from Sears and Roebuck. Her own children long for nothing. One evening the whole family was shopping for toys. Schuyler ran to her mother. “Come over here, Mom,” she shouted, dragging Sissy down the aisles. “I found something in the store I don’t have.”
“Mercy, mercy, mercy,” Sissy Spacek moans to herself. “Just wait till I get my eyebrows on. Then I’ll be gorgeous.” It is one o’clock in the morning in Lockhart, and Sissy is sitting in a small makeup trailer on the set of Hard Promises, with her legs propped up on the counter, allowing her makeup man to buff, pat, and primp her, molding her like clay.
I sit off to the side and watch Sissy Spacek, the person, become Sissy Spacek, the movie star. Movie stars live by their wits and appearance, and Sissy is no exception. Men like the way she looks because she isn’t formidable. She arouses feelings of protectiveness. Women like the way she looks because she gives the illusion of not being beautiful, which puts her within reach. Kelvin, Sissy’s makeup man, runs a pink lipstick across her lips. He applies no foundation to her skin, but pats her cheeks with rosy Clinique liquid blush and fills in the age lines around her eyes with liquid concealer. All the while Sissy laughs and talks and moves her diminutive body to the big, round music of Etta James that is playing on the boombox.
“When I was a little kid, I used to spend a lot of time thinking about what I’d wish for if a magic fairy gave me three wishes,” Sissy tells me, surveying her own famous image in the mirror. “First, I wanted to be loved. Then, I wanted to be beautiful. And, finally, I’d wish for a million more wishes.”
It’s easy to understand how someone like Sissy Spacek, growing up in Quitman, could develop a longing for fairies and wishes. In the fifties Quitman was a small world unto itself, populated by young couples home from World War II who were drawn there by oil, the good crops of sweet potatoes, and the wild, wooded distinctiveness of the place. Girls like Sissy grew up believing that they were the center of the town and that the world was out there somewhere, theirs for the asking. “Mama told me the world was my oyster,” Sissy says, “and I believed her.”
She was born on Christmas Day, 1949, in a hospital in nearby Tyler. Virginia Spacek had put her two boys, Ed Junior, who was five, and Robbie, only a toddler of seventeen months, to bed on Christmas Eve and was adjusting the decorations on the Christmas tree when she felt the first labor pain. “Let’s go,” Virginia told her husband. “It’s time.”
From her mother Sissy learned how to tap dance to “Charlie, My Boy,” how to do the Charleston, how to spray-paint plastic ferns to make them look like feathers, how to make a game out of life. From her father Sissy learned pragmatic skills—how to keep a bank account, how to organize her time, how to make a plan and stick with it.
Sissy’s mother died in 1981 of cancer. Her father, Ed Spacek, who is eighty, still lives in Quitman in the modest green-frame and beige-brick house where Sissy grew up and returns to visit regularly. Ed is a small, trim man with eyes like fireflies, who, when I met him, was poring over the Wall Street Journal in his book-lined living room. “I don’t think any of us in the family ever called her by her real name—Mary Elizabeth,” says Ed. “The boys called her Sissy, and it just kind of stuck.” Sissy remembers that her father had a strong will. Even today, Sissy says the greatest accomplishment of her life was persuading her father to give her a horse once he had decided against it. “I bugged him for months,” she recalls proudly. “Eventually he gave in.”
When she was six years old, she and her family went to a one-room school-house in nearby Coke (population: 25) and watched the Cokettes march across the stage and twirl their batons. The Cokettes wore silver cowgirl outfits and white boots. It was the first time in Sissy’s life that she felt the urge to perform. There was something magical happening on that stage, and she wanted to be part of it. “I remember sitting there in the audience, wanting more than anything in the world to be a Cokette,” says Sissy. Not a movie star, but a Cokette: She never remembers wanting to be an actress. Her favorite movies at the Gem Theater in Quitman were monster movies, but often she didn’t see the end of them. At the scary parts, “I’d always sneak off to the lobby and buy a big pickle for a nickel,” she recalls.
Sissy became the child star of the Quitman stage. She and Robbie used to sing duets—she sang alto and he baritone—and she often danced for Rotary Club meetings and school functions. She took guitar lessons from the local Church of Christ preacher. Mrs. Mary Margaret Pepper, her public school music teacher, remembers the night Sissy, still in elementary school, performed the Charleston at a PTA meeting: “She brought the house down.”
As a child, Sissy thought in two dimensions. She had an outer self—noisy and extroverted—who was a doer, and in inner self, who was a watcher, always making internal notes and keeping secrets. To this day there is a fishing box under the bed in her room in Quitman where Sissy used to store her secret papers—songs she had written, letters from friends, private notes to herself. These two sides of herself are still present. She keeps a notebook about all of her characters, writing down details she supplies about their fictitious lives—physical mannerisms, rituals, daily routines. “In every movie there’s always some physical thing that triggers the character for me,” says Sissy. “In The Long Walk Home, it was the girdle. Every time I’d put that girdle on, I’d feel my character wiggle to life.”
Small-town life was something Virginia and Ed Spacek believed in. They worked hard at giving their children a strong sense of place. Both taught Sunday school at the local Methodist church, and Virginia was active in the PTA and various women’s clubs.
Quitman is the county seat of Wood County, and the blocky brick courthouse was a second playground for Sissy and her two brothers. Their father worked downstairs as the county agricultural agent, and Virginia worked part-time on the second floor as a typist in the abstract office, earning 20 cents for every page she typed. Ed Junior, Sissy, and Robbie would ride their bicycles to the courthouse, walk upstairs, and watch their mother’s fingers fly across the typewriter.
Ed had several chances to leave Quitman for better jobs—once the king of Saudi Arabia wanted him to become his agricultural agent—but, he told me, “I had a little family. We were all real happy in Quitman, and I just didn’t dare tear up our roots.”
The Spaceks lived a solid middle-class life, but they had their own special flair. They were the second family in Quitman to buy a television (the owner of the appliance store had the first). Often Ed and Virginia invited friends over for TV viewing—sometimes just to watch the test-pattern Indian on the brown-and-white Admiral. When Sissy was about eight, her father bought a boat, and every weekend he hitched it up and drove the family fifty miles to the Lake O’ The Pines to go skiing.
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