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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Occasionally the Spaceks would be visited by a famous relative, actor Rip Torn, the son of Ed Spacek’s eldest sister. Rip grew up in Taylor, a small town 35 miles from Austin, and was already an actor by the time Sissy was in junior high school. He would show up wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt, ready to take his cousins fishing, and, says Sissy, “All my friends thought he was the coolest thing in the world.” Having a relative in the movies made it psychologically possible for Sissy to imagine show business as a career—although as a singer rather than an actress.
In high school Sissy was a majorette, a 4-H’er, a cub reporter for her high school newspaper, the Paw Print, and eventually the homecoming queen. In her last year she tried out for the senior play but didn’t get a part. She wasn’t voted the most beautiful girl in school, but she was the cutest and the first to try new fads. For a while she wore two pairs of fake eyelashes, and people in Quitman still talk about the day Sissy cut her long hair mop-style after the Beatles made their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964. Small children from the elementary school stood with their noses pressed against the window of the high school, straining for a peek at Sissy’s weird hairdo. “I had to wear a hooded jacket for six weeks until my hair grew out,” she remembers, “but I learned an important lesson—never cut my hair.”
Her brother Robbie was the town track star. As a sophomore, he was the fifth-place winner of the state class 1A low hurdles. Funny and handsome, with olive skin, dark hair, and a spectacular smile, he was just enough older than Sissy—seventeen months—to have mastered the skills she lacked. He got his driver’s license before she did. They cruised to the Dairy Queen, with him at the wheel. They rode horses together. His was named Gunsmoke; hers was Buck.
It was during track season of his junior year—his best season ever—that Robbie came home one day and told his parents he felt tired. Virginia ordered him to bed. But the weak feeling hung on, and she and Ed grew worried. They took him to a specialist in Tyler and soon got the terrible news. Robbie had leukemia.
Robbie’s illness changed everything. Suddenly the close-knit family seemed to be going separate ways. Sissy’s eldest brother, Ed, was away at college at the University of Texas at Austin. Her parents began spending most of their time with Robbie at M.D. Anderson Hospital in Houston. They took turns sleeping in the chair in his room. “Ol’ Robbie was such a good boy,” says his father. “As parents we tried to protect our children from harm, but we learned there were things we couldn’t control.” Sissy stayed with friends in Quitman and shuttled back and forth to Houston to visit Robbie.
“It was a real horrible time,” says Sissy. “I’m only now beginning to understand how difficult it was for my parents. All of a sudden the world was upside down, and there was nothing I could do about it.” All she could think of was escape. The summer after her junior year, when she was seventeen, her parents agreed to let her go to New York to live with Rip Torn and his wife, Geraldine Page. Sissy insisted she wanted to pursue a career as a folk singer, and her parents decided to indulge her.
She spent the summer going to the theater on Broadway every night with Geraldine Page, watching her put on her makeup, and then finding a place backstage to see the performance. Rip and Geraldine’s world seemed new and large, and Sissy longed to be part of it. “I remember going to dinner with them and listening to them talk to famous writers, directors, and actors,” says Sissy. “I’d just sit there amazed, longing to one day be able to simply contribute to the conversation.”
As Sissy’s senior year began, her parents were living full-time in Houston. They made plans for Sissy to enroll in a private school in Houston to finish out the year. But on September 19, Robbie died. In Quitman the high school principal announced his death over the loudspeaker, and a cold silence fell over the school.
Sissy returned to Quitman to finish high school but longed to escape again and immediately began pressuring her parents to let her return to New York after graduation. At first they said no. “We’d just lost Robbie and didn’t want to lose her,” Ed Spacek says. Sissy had already been accepted at UT-Austin, and the family had put down a deposit on her dormitory. But Sissy had a strong, stubborn streak, and she would not relent. “We decided,” says Ed, “that if we didn’t let her go, she’d go anyway.”
As was his custom, Ed Spacek decided he and his daughter needed a plan. He sat down with Sissy at the round kitchen table and made a deal: He would support her—both morally and financially—for four years, but if she hadn’t made it as a singer by then, she would have to come home and go to college. Virginia handled it her own way. Once she decided to let her daughter go, she never doubted that Sissy would be a star. “Don’t worry, Sissy,” Virginia would tell her daughter whenever she called from New York, discouraged. “Once those people up there find out how talented you are, you won’t be able to fight them off with a stick.”
Robbie’s death gave Sissy’s life a sense of purpose, even urgency. At eighteen, she took on the hopes of her family. “I didn’t understand anything,” she says, waiting to be called to the set for Hard Promises. “All I knew was that I was alive and Robbie wasn’t, and I owed it to everyone—my folks, Robbie, myself—to go for it.” Her eldest brother, Ed Junior, followed her into the movie business. He recently established his own production company in Dallas.
Her makeup applied, Sissy departs to inspect the set in downtown Lockhart. Then she returns to her trailer for a steaming cup of cappuccino. I ask her how she dealt with knowing that she had gone on to fulfill her family’s destiny for achievement. She flinches and physically gathers herself up, folding her arms in front of her chest. “I never felt guilty,” she says. “What I felt was a tremendous responsibility to live all of life that I could. The bad. The good. All of it.”
Sissy and William L. Petersen, her costar in Hard Promises, are standing by the canteen trailer, eating burritos and taking bets on when they’ll finish the night’s work. “I say four in the morning, if we’re lucky,” says Petersen. Sissy hisses out of the darkness. “Count on it. We won’t be lucky. Not on this set.”
Hard Promises has been in trouble since the filming first began at the end of September. Sissy wanted to do the movie only to work with director Lee Grant, another Academy Award-winning actress. The executive producers back in Hollywood saw Hard Promises—the tale of a schoolteacher who divorces her wayward husband to marry a steady appliance-store owner—as another Philadelphia Story, but when they saw the early rushes, they panicked. The rushes weren’t funny. One of the producers began publicly undermining Grant on the set. “Oh, no,” screeched the producer repeatedly, “she’s making Ibsen again.” Five weeks after shooting began, Grant was fired.
Throughout this subdrama, there was one person who simply removed herself: the star. As the atmosphere grew more tense, Sissy focused in on her character. Some days she was so preoccupied that she looked right through members of the cast and crew. “All I could do was concentrate on making each moment in each scene work,” Sissy told me. “It’s been like the Twilight Zone on the movie. Very bizarre.”
In times of trouble, Sissy turns to her work for solace. From the beginning of her career, she has sensed that her success is tied not to some external force such as luck or who she knows but to her own will to survive. On-screen she comes across as needy, but in real life she is self-reliant and astonishingly strong.
One night, when Sissy was eighteen and new in New York City, she was working late, singing background vocals for commercials. Sissy was the last one to leave. She picked up her twelve-string guitar, hurried through an exit door, and heard the door lock shut behind her. She found herself standing on a tiny balcony, high above the street. There she was, a skinny kid from a small town, marooned on a balcony in a New York skyscraper. The next morning a security guard found her huddled on the balcony, wide awake and frightened.
That experience would have been enough to send most eighteen-year-olds running for the next airplane home, but Sissy kept going. She sang for free in coffeehouses in Greenwich Village, occasionally working for a group called Moose and the Pelicans. Once she worked as an extra in Andy Warhol’s movie Trash and even managed to cut a record under the name “Rainbo.” Within six months of arriving in New York, she was paying some of her own bills, but her goal of becoming a big-name singer still seemed out of reach.
In 1970 a young agent-manager named Bill Treusch persuaded her to try her hand at acting. She attended some acting classes and soon found herself learning sense memory and other abstract techniques. “I discovered that I could make acting work if I could tie an event in my character’s life to an event in my own life,” says Sissy. Her strength as an actress was obvious from the beginning: She had access to her emotions and understood her motives.
It was Treusch who talked her into auditioning for her first film, Prime Cut, a sordid clunker about white slavery that is dominated by two dumb, brawny men played by Lee Martin and Gene Hackman. Sissy plays the role of Poppy, an orphan sold into prostitution. Her father remembers the day she called to tell her mother she had the part. “Mama,” Sissy asked, “what if they find out I’m not really an actress?”
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