Barbara Baxley on Sally Field: Terminal.
“Sally was, to use that term I’ve heard from Harold Clurman and Tyrone Guthrie and Tennessee Williams and William Inge: Terminal. Everything was on the line."
Barbara Baxley enjoyed a burst of attention for her performance in Robert Altman’s Nashville, a part she considered a rich reward from the director, whom she had been championing since she worked for him in television. “He’s one of the best with actors,” she told me in 1989. “Total trust. Playfulness. He can be cruel if you’re lazy; if you don’t rise to his level of commitment. When everyone is at the same level—which he demands—the work is never better.”
Another dream Baxley held was to work with Martin Ritt, a director also known for his work with actors in films that were finely crafted. “They were tapestries,” Baxley said. “I bugged Joanne [Woodward] for years to get me together with Ritt, and I got to meet him, but it took a long time to get a job. But he called. I was going to be a poor old woman working in a mill, married to Pat Hingle. This is not how I saw myself. I had gotten Theoni [V. Aldredge] to make me a wardrobe. I was thin as a dancer. I moved like the wind. I had had a facelift. I looked great. Now I’m a mill worker. Great. Joanne said, ‘Don’t be a fool. Go and work with him. Be elevated.’ So I went.”
Barbara went to work on that film—called Norma Rae—and she went to be elevated by Martin Ritt, but her greatest gift was being elevated by Sally Field. Again it was Joanne Woodward who spoke to Barbara about this aspect of working on this film, and she urged her friend not to judge Field, as so many did, on her earlier work in television: Woodward reminded Baxley that she had demanded Field in the television special Sybil, when so many derided her. [We now know from Field’s excellent memoir “In Pieces,” that Woodward would not proceed without Field.]
“One—if one is smart—does what Joanne Woodward tells you to do,” Barbara told me.
“Let me tell you about Sally Field,” Barbara continued, lighting another cigarette. “I have taught the so-called best in a college [Barbara taught at Carnegie-Mellon, and was impressed by only one student, Laura San Giacomo], and I went to the Actors Studio for years, and no one was anything like Sally Field. Sally credited Madeleine Sherwood for getting her to the Studio, and I want you to know that Sally Field elevated the Actors Studio, not the other way around. Madeleine and I were never friends. I liked her okay, and I admired her work, but we did not connect. [Carrie Nye suggested that they were a bit too much alike: Briny, brilliant, tough women. They circled each other like starving rattlesnakes approaching a lone rabbit.] But if Madeleine Sherwood saw the potential in Sally Field in that stupid show [The Flying Nun], then I hand it to her. Madeleine had ideas I loathed at first. You know, the gobbledygook stuff. You’re working on Ibsen or Shaw or Albee, but she would first just speak in this nonsense, all while moving about as if the scene were going perfectly fine. People would laugh. I laughed. But by God, if the scene wasn’t great. It did something. It unlocked something in Madeleine and her scene partners, so, you know, go with God. I don’t know. Not my scene, but….” Another drag on a cigarette.
“Sally was, to use that term I’ve heard from Harold Clurman and Tyrone Guthrie and Tennessee Williams and William Inge: Terminal. Everything was on the line. Terribly serious, and yet Sally vibrated with life, she was utterly real. She became my daughter. When she dragged me through that mill when my character had lost her hearing, it was frighteningly real. Terminal. I told her I was going to let her lead me. So lead me. And Marty Ritt said, ‘She’s leading all of us.’ And she did. What we want to preserve in actors—if they ever had it—was what she just has, what she just oozes. A life force. A connection to the words, the situation, her fellow actors. When Sally/Norma stood on that loom or table or whatever with that sign that said UNION, I think we all felt the hairs on our body stand upright. It was like a lightning bolt. It hit you like news of a death or some other altering experience, and when Marty yelled “Cut!’ quite a few of us burst into tears. It’s when you stop acting, you know, and start replicating, when you’re in the ultimate ‘as if’ moment, that any of this matters. And just watch Sally in that film. That film—that performance—matters.”