Sissy Spacek Acts Her Age
Everyday life for Sissy Spacek began to take on a unique quality three years ago. Passing cars would screech to a halt. Teenagers at the local Jack-in-the-Box would panic. Children clutched their parents and screamed: “It’s Carrie!”
So disturbingly effective was the actress’ portrayal of Carrie White, the high-school outcast with secret telekinetic powers in Brian De Palma’s drive-in epic Carrie, that Sissy won the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actress and received an Academy Award nomination for same, followed by a barrage of cover stories trumpeting her incredible promise in two other films released the next year — Welcome to L.A. and 3 Women.
Then, with the enigmatic timing of one of her characters, Sissy Spacek disappeared from the screen. In January, that will change.
First arrives Heart Beat, in which Sissy portrays Carolyn Cassady, the wife of Neal Cassady (Nick Nolte) in a love triangle with beat novelist Jack Kerouac (John Heard). Then, in March, she will appear in Coal Miner’s Daughter, based on the life of Loretta Lynn from ages thirteen through thirty-five. It is Gary Busey as Buddy Holly one better; Spacek acting and singing in the biography of the queen of country music.
Loretta Lynn and Carolyn Cassady are two roles far removed from the unstable cast of characters she portrayed up through 3 Women. And that is the point. Originally assigned in 1977, this was meant to be a story of Sissy Spacek’s followup to her first wave of success. “I’m holding out for a good part, or else I’ll become a mountain climber,” she vowed then. It seemed a flippant statement from such an insatiable acting talent. But Spacek’s incredibly malleable personality could run, in the course of several minutes, from innocent tomboy to savvy young businesswoman. In the next two and a half years, her story would turn into one of Sissy Spacek holding out.
Mary Elizabeth Spacek (the nickname Sissy came from her two older brothers, Robbie and Ed Jr.) is remembered by childhood friends as a born ham. A Christmas Day arrival in 1950, hers was never a cold or neglectful childhood, and she flourished under all the attention. By age nine, she and Robbie had formed a Charleston and banjo duo that was popular around their hometown of Quitman, Texas. By her early teens, Sissy had saved enough baby-sitting money for an expensive twelve-string guitar; for years she carried it around with her like a trophy.
Life in Quitman was dominated by small events like getting caught jumping fences (“Mrs. Spacek, did you know your daughter has been riding our cows again?”), or being called Space-chick in school, or the time her football-player boyfriend asked for his ring back but Sissy made him cut if off.
“Things like that,” she told me almost seriously, “made me what I am today. I felt really cradled by Quitman. I felt like my whole life was headed in a single direction. Everything was always going to happen in a certain way. I was going to go to the University of Texas at Austin, like my brother Robbie, get involved with music and maybe be a female Buddy Holly. Then I intended to come back to Quitman. Two hundred miles away was worldly enough for me.
“Then something happened to blow the air out of everything.”
Robbie came down with acute leukemia. Unable to attend classes, he returned home from the university and got steadily sicker.
Right about the same time, Sissy was chosen runner-up in the area’s biggest annual beauty and talent show — the Dogwood Fiesta pageant. Wearing a space dress of her own design and performing two original songs, Sissy so impressed one judge, a newspaperwoman from Longview, that she convinced Sissy the place to start her career was New York City. Seventeen-year-old Sissy asked her parents if she could spend a few days in Manhattan with cousin Rip Torn and his wife, Geraldine Page. They said they’d sleep on it.
“We let her go,” Ed Spacek told me, “because she would be staying with Rip and Geraldine, and because she needed to get out from under the weight of Robbie’s sickness. A lot of parents make the mistake of cutting off their children’s drive. They say don’t a lot. Sissy’s always had that drive. When we slapped Sissy, she’d slap back. Robbie made a point of telling her not to change, and I don’t think she ever did.”
She stayed two months. Young Sissy Spacek in Manhattan for the summer of ’67 must have been a sight to see. Adopting the Twiggy look of the times, Sissy and her guitar were inseparable.
“Geraldine was in a play at the time, and I’d go every day. I was friends with the hairdresser. Later he committed suicide; he was a male prostitute. So pure. I remember just being exposed to all kinds of amazing people. I was never frightened. I didn’t know who anybody was anyway. I could talk to ’em. I was a blank page.”
There is a story about the time Rip and Geraldine took the blank page to meet Terry Southern, who was working on the screenplay for Candy at the time. “I took my guitar out,” Sissy recalled, “and was singing this song I had written. One of the lines was, ‘I feel his soft touch while I’m sleeping.’ Well, I meant kind of, you know, dreaming or something. It was a nonsexual lyric. To me.
“Terry Southern stopped me right in the middle of the song and asked me if I was a virgin. I was just . . . aghast. You didn’t talk about politics, religion or money where I was brought up. And I was sure you didn’t talk about sex. I was dumbfounded. And I assured him that I was. He asked, ‘How could you have written a song like that?’
“Geraldine appeared to be asleep — she had performed that night — but she rose up from the couch and said, ‘Terry, you don’t have to stomp grapes to know what wine tastes like.'”
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