09.20.18

DISMANTLING MYTHS
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 09
Again, those revelations, which have grabbed
headlines in the wake of Reynolds’ recent death, will
resonate with women who have coped with similarly paternalistic
partners. Field’s book is essentially her declaration
of refusal to continue “clamping down,” and to
finally speak up. She mostly expresses sad regret rather
than bitterness about past relationships. (The notable
exception is Mahoney, whose abuse seeded a volcanic
rage she later tapped into while acting.) After describing
what amounts to date rape by “MacArthur Park” songwriter
Jimmy Webb, she chalks it up to the hash they
were smoking and a consequence of her own choices,
not deviousness on his part. She’s less forgiving of “Stay
Hungry” director Bob Rafaelson, who demands she bare
her breasts and kiss him before hiring her — requests
she grants, she writes, at the expense of the very dignity
she was fighting for. (Rafaelson has disputed her account.)
Later, in the spirit of her sensual character, she
acquiesces to letting the older man “into my room and
my body.” Now 71, she writes that she could “bash him
over the head” but that she was not “anyone’s victim”:
“I was a twenty-eight-year-old grown-up, and in
’75 it seemed like acceptable behavior on his part.
We’re all locked into the drumbeat of our history,
but eventually you have to drown out that tune with
your own voice. I couldn’t hear my voice.”
That striking theme of not being able to hear her own
voice recurs throughout Mahoney’s abuse, and later
while navigating oppressive relationships with lovers
and producers. Acting is salvation because then, finally,
she can hear her own voice. Actors Studio guru Lee
Strasberg and “Norma Rae” director Martin Ritt in particular
appear like earthbound angels as they stubbornly
encourage her to protect that inner guide.
Some passages involving Reynolds feel patchy in
comparison to more gracefully unfolded explorations of
Burt Reynolds and Sally Field in Smokey The Bandit
“I was a twenty-eight-yearold
grown-up, and in ’75
it seemed like acceptable
behavior on his part.
We’re all locked into the
drumbeat of our history,
but eventually you have to
drown out that tune with
your own voice. I couldn’t
hear my voice.”
— Sally Field
family, but then the book’s narrative backbone is Field’s
close yet frustrating relationship with her Jennifer
Jones-lookalike mother, Margaret, whom Field called
“Baa.” The meaning of “In Pieces” gradually emerges as
Field traces inherent contradictions within herself — an
enduring restlessness versus a desire for a stable home
life, a self-protective drive for solitude versus a yearning
to connect — in a drive to understand why the two
women could not directly address Baa’s alcoholism,
Field’s breadwinner status or her stepfather’s abuse
until shortly before Baa’s death in 2011.
Born at Huntington Memorial Hospital, Field spent
her earliest years in her parents’ Pasadena home alongside
her older brother, Richard (who grew up to become
a successful physicist, working alongside Richard
Feynman at Caltech). Her warmest memories revolve
around her grandmother Joy’s two-bedroom bungalow
in Altadena and the empowering circle of women rooted
there. Field’s depictions of the foothill region in the post-
World War II years are as lovely as her recollections of
thrifty relatives are revealing:
“When I look for that house in my mind, I have a
blurry vision of my great-aunt Gladys standing in
the dining room cutting flat rubber padding into tiny
circles to paste onto her sore feet. … There’s a rocking
chair beside the mesh-curtained fireplace where my
seventy-six-year-old great-grandmother sits under
a halo of white hair, her hands dancing around two
thin knitting needles with a steady stream of twinelike
yarn flowing from the paisley bag resting on the
floor. I remember that chair, how it chirped like a
cricket when my great-grandmother would rock me,
quietly patting my back the whole time. … It was a
kind of no-man’s-land. A world filled with women
who would straighten up if a man walked in, who
would set aside the triviality of their own work and
quickly move everything out of the way. But the men,
whoever they were, never stayed long, and when
the door slammed behind them, the house seemed to
breathe a sigh of relief.”
As Field recalls her undemonstrative yet caring
elders, it’s hard not to notice similarities to dominant
female characters in her 1989 film “Steel Magnolias.”
Other than an admiring caption beneath a cast photo —
“The stupendous women” — the book makes no mention
of that film, which seems an odd omission given how
their onscreen bond echoes the dynamic in the most formative
relationships in Field’s life. Many viewers related
to the rage unbottled by her character in that film. Many
readers of “In Pieces” will likely be grateful Field found
her voice to tell her own myth-busting story, in her own
words. ■
Vroman’s Bookstore presents Sally Field discussing “In Pieces” with
Patt Morrison at Pasadena Presbyterian Church, 585 E. Colorado Blvd.,
Pasadena, 7-8:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 27; $40. All tickets include one
seat and one book copy. Info: (626) 449-5320. Vromansbookstore.com
10 PASADENA WEEKLY | 09.20.18