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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The first glimpse we see of Sissy on-screen is as Poppy lying naked in a pile of hay in a cow pen. The movie is a classic example of how young actresses are debased. Even Sissy’s own father says the movie is terrible—but Prime Cut got Sissy noticed. She made Poppy seem like a helpless girl from East Texas who deserved to be rescued.
It was Terrence Malick, the Austin director who made Badlands, who rescued Sissy by giving her the chance to play a female lead. Badlands is loosely based on the story of Charles Starkweather and Caril Fugate, who aimlessly wandered around the Midwest in the fifties on a killing binge. Badlands was Sissy’s big break. Professionally it established her niche as a tomboy leading lady, and personally it settled what had up to then been a nagging, unresolved question: whether to change her name. “I had always intended to change my name,” says Sissy. “I just never seemed to get around to it.” She had considered changing it to Elizabeth Holiday when she first went to New York. But she found Sissy a difficult persona to drop. The role of everyone’s favorite kid sister had served her well in Quitman, and she sensed that her success was intimately tied to those roots. “It was Terry Malick who finally convinced me to keep my name,” says Sissy. “He liked the way it looked on the credits.”
It was Carrie, however, that made her famous. When she first read the script about a high school outcast who possesses psychokinetic powers, she couldn’t wait to mail it to her parents back home in Quitman. “Read this, fast,” she told her mother, “and tell me what you think.” Virginia read it, raced to the telephone, and told her daughter not to do the movie. She and Ed found it distasteful. “If you do this movie,” Ed advised, “it will be the end of your career.”
She didn’t listen. There are different kinds of intelligence, and Sissy has the kind that runs on pure instinct. She has what one director calls a “wonderful dumbness,” a child’s sixth sense that she follows no matter what anyone else says. She was drawn to Carrie because there was a poor girl in her high school in Quitman who lived in a shack and was ostracized by the popular kids. Sissy felt she understood the role. “What I liked about the screenplay was that Carrie has a moment of hope,” says Sissy. “She gets to go to her prom with a popular guy, and for a moment she knows what it feels like to be normal.”
Brian De Palma, the director, had another actress in mind for the role of Carrie. Sissy telephoned him and told him that she was scheduled to do a commerical for Vanquish, the toilet-bowl cleaner, on the same day as the auditions for Carrie. “Which should I do, the commerical or the screen test?” she asked him. “Do the commercial,” De Palma advised.
That did it. Sissy worked for days getting ready for the audition. She arrived wearing a blue sailor dress that she wore in the seventh grade, her long hair matted with Vaseline. All the other actresses were flawlessly dressed in ritzy Hollywood gear. She didn’t even speak to anyone. “I just went inside myself, focused on the character, saving my energy for the audition,” recalls Sissy. When De Palma saw her test, he instantly changed his mind. Sissy had the part.
In a critical scene in the film, Sissy used an event in her husband’s life to bring the character alive. It happened during the shooting of a nude scene when Carrie is taking a shower in the gymnasium and unexpectedly starts her first menstrual period. Sissy was worried about the scene—after all, she has to stand naked in a shower and realize that she’s covered in blood—but De Palma told her to play the scene as though she was being run over by a Mack truck. Jack was the art director for the movie—it was his job to hand her the tube of blood—and he told her that when he was a teenager, he had been run over by a car on a winter night. The two of them stood in the shower and Jack described seeing the lights of the car, hearing it approach, realizing he was going to be hit, and feeling the pain of impact. “The emotion you see on Carrie’s face is Jack’s emotion,” says Sissy.
Although she didn’t have to fight to play Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner’s Daughter—Lynn wanted her for the part—she did have to fight to sing. The director thought that Loretta Lynn’s voice should be dubbed onto Sissy’s lip synchs. Sissy was horrified and took her case directly to Lynn, who supported her. Both women believed it would be more authentic if Sissy could learn to sing like Lynn. Lynn agreed to coach her, and the two women holed up in a hotel room in Nashville, pinned sheet music all over the room, and jumped around the room, singing with their guitars. “By the time Loretta was finished with me,” says Sissy, “I was doing a pretty good imitation.”
Sissy’s mother lived to see her win an Academy Award for Coal Miner’s Daughter, but in 1981, after a long battle with cancer, Virginia Spacek died in Quitman. Sissy was with her, holding onto her hand. The day before her mother died, Sissy found out she was pregnant with her daughter Schuyler. She decided not to tell her mother because she thought it would make it harder for her to go. “I felt like I was running a relay race,” she says. “My mother was dying, my child was coming to life. I felt like someone was handing me a baton and saying, ‘Here, you’re the grown-up now.’”
After Robbie died, Sissy had tried to make sense of his life by becoming a success on her own. But after her mother died, the only sense she could find was in changing the direction of her work. She didn’t want to play teenagers anymore; she needed to tell stories about the lives of women. In 1984, when Schuyler was two, Sissy made Marie, a story about a crusading single mother. During the film, she was exhausted and in a funk. Schuyler walked over to her on the set, threw a Bible at her, and squealed, “Here, read this. It’ll make you feel better.” Sissy jumped up and stared at her daughter. It was exactly like something her mother would have done. “Mother,” she called, her eyes boring into Schuyler’s, “Are you in there?”
In 1986 Sissy wanted a role that would challenge her as an actress, and she settled on ‘night, Mother, the story of a young woman who tells her mother one evening that she intends to commit suicide and then goes about doing it. There is nothing glamourous about Sissy’s character: She’s frumpy and dressed in gray, and she walks around three or four rooms for the ninety minutes it takes for her to carry out her plan.
During the filming, Sissy became so depressed that she would often telephone Jack at home and beg him to remind her of the details of their life together. “By the time that my character killed herself at the end of the movie,” Sissy recalls, “I couldn’t wait for the gun to go off.”
Of all the characters Sissy has played, the one she says is the most like her real self is Babe Magrath in Crimes of the Heart, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award in 1986. Babe is one of four sisters who grew up in a small town in Mississippi. She is sunny and predisposed to make the best of every situation. She winds up shooting her husband, Zackery Boutrelle, because he’s so boring that she just gets tired of looking at him. “If I ever went to jail, I’d learn to play the saxophone just like she did.”
When she talks about Babe, she instantly slips into Babe’s southern voice, slightly different from her own East Texas accent. Her chin automatically lifts, her blue eyes widen, and her face contorts. Within seconds, she has transformed herself into Babe. This, I realize, is the big payoff that acting offers Sissy. She gets to live many lives and wear many faces without having to reveal her own in public.
It is three in the morning on the set, the muggy night is unseasonably warm, and Sissy is standing behind the Lockhart Dairy Queen, waiting for her cue. “Quiet, please—rolling,” barks a grim-faced assistant producer. “Action!”
Sissy and Billy Petersen emerge from behind the Dairy Queen into the romantically lit parking lot—pink fluorescent lights here, yellow ones over there—and spot a pair of young lovers kissing in a 1948 Ford. Billy stops, points to the young couple, and asks, “Remember when we used to do that in my old Chevrolet?” Sissy smiles up at him and replies, “You mean before we used to do that in your old Buick.”
Everyone on the set is punchy with exhaustion. They do the same scene eight or nine times, until it is not romantic at all. After a few hours the large lights and boxy cameras don’t seem out of place. The set feels like a factory, and Sissy and Billy are like blue-collar workers instead of stars. I sit on the sidelines and try to imagine the scene as it will appear in the movie. It is exactly the kind of scene that has made Sissy famous. The Dairy Queen will evoke feelings of nostalgia, and the ordinary give-and-take between her and Billy will seem charming and meaningful. Its very ordinariness will work for her. She has made a career of elevating the common to the magical, the personal to the universal.
Between takes Kelvin, Sissy’s makeup man, who is following her around brushing her bangs from her eyes, whispers to her that there is a young girl who has been waiting on the street corner in Lockhart for Sissy Spacek’s autograph.
“You’re her idol,” coaxes Kelvin, grabbing Sissy by the arm and dragging her over to a dark-haired teenage girl who is standing with pen and paper in hand. Sissy says a warm hello and reaches for the paper.
“Did you get to see Loretta Lynn up close when you made Coal Miner’s Daughter?” asks the fan. “I sure did,” replies Sissy. “Ooooohhhhh!” squeals the fan. “Loretta Lynn is my absolute idol.” Sissy writes her name neatly, smiles once more for the fan, and then walks back into the pink and yellow lights of the Dairy Queen.
“I thought I was her idol,” she says, throwing her chin up to strike a movie star’s vain pose, then collapsing into laughter. “Oh, well, that’s the glitter of Hollywood for you.”
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