My Extraordinary Ordinary Life (30 page)

The first days of shooting were the hardest for me, because Brian started with the sequences in the high school girls’ shower room. My scene called for Carrie to be standing naked under the shower, then panicking when she discovers she’s bleeding, which she doesn’t understand is her first menstrual period. I was wracking my brain, trying to come up with a sense memory or an experience in my life that I could draw on to make the scene feel real. I went to my director and said, “Brian, tell me about the scene.”

He thought for a moment, then said, “It’s like getting hit by a Mack truck.”

“Got it,” I said. “Like getting hit by a Mack truck…”

I wandered back to my dressing room, trying to imagine what it’s like to be hit by a truck. Jack was there, and I told him my dilemma.

“Well, I got run over by a car once,” he said.

“You did?”

Jack told me that he was walking home from school one winter evening and it was snowy and icy outside. He found an abandoned sled along the side of the road, and he decided to carry it home with him. It was getting dark and all the Christmas lights were on in the neighborhood. He thought they were so beautiful, reflecting off the snow. With the sled in his arms, he looked at all the houses along the way, with their colorful trees in the picture windows and sparkling lights on the eves, thinking how lovely it all was in the quiet and the snow… when he glimpsed a flash of light. He looked up and there was a set of headlights coming straight at him. He looked away, then back again, and now the lights were right on him. He pulled the sled up just as the car hit him. He went down and the car rolled over him, pinning him to the ground. The sled was splintered, but it had probably saved his life. He tried to get up, but he couldn’t. He imagined that there was a four-hundred-pound man in that car, keeping him down. Then suddenly he heard the car start up again, and he thought,
Oh my God. He’s going to back up and run over me again.
He thought he was a goner, but when the car moved, he was able to scramble out from under the tires. He was badly bruised, but not seriously injured.

I listened carefully to his story. And that’s what I used when it was time for the shower scene.

Brian cleared the set of everyone who wasn’t needed. I took off my robe and stepped under the spray while the camera rolled. Jack was sitting at my feet on the shower room floor, ready to pour fake blood into my hand when the time came. The water was warm, and I thought how Carrie would have enjoyed the feel of a hot shower, because she probably didn’t get one at home. If you think of something, it will register on your face. Then I imagined:
I’m walking home from school, and all the Christmas lights are twinkling along the road. They’re so beautiful and I’m thinking how beautiful they all are
.... I am soaping my arms and torso and my thigh....
And then I see a flash of light. The headlights are right on me. I can’t bear to see, so I look away.
There is blood all over my hands.
The car hits me with all its force.
… I start to scream. And scream. And then… I run.

All the beats in that scene matched the rhythms of Jack’s story. It worked perfectly. I was so relieved.

Then Brian said, “Okay! Great, Sissy. Now let’s try that again.”

I spent the whole day in that shower. By the time we were finished, I looked like a ghost and felt all shriveled up, like when you’ve stayed in the bathtub way too long.

I wasn’t the only actor having trepidations about that opening sequence. The script called for all the high school girls to be partially nude as they romped around the locker room at the end of gym class—a fantasy scenario that only a man could dream up. When it came time to actually shoot the scene, some of the girls were balking. According to Brian, there was a lot of weeping and hand-wringing among the cast. That is until we all watched the rushes from my shower scene.

I had it written into my contract that I would not appear fully nude on screen. But that was a trick of the editing room; the camera saw everything. And as it happened, every time Brian shot another take of the shower scene, the clapper board was placed directly in front of me. And each time the board was pulled away, the camera was right where my contract said it couldn’t be. Now, I’m not a shy person—you can’t be in this business!—but by the time the rushes were over, I didn’t know if I should laugh or crawl under my chair. I decided to laugh.

“Thanks a lot, Brian!” I said, as sarcastically as I could, as I left the screening room.

After that, Brian later told me, the female cast members stopped complaining about their topless locker room scene.

Piper Laurie was so much fun to work with. We had a fabulous time playing everything big—big gestures, big emotions, outrageous scenes. And she was such a good sport. For her death scene, I had to telekinetically impale her with a hail of kitchen cutlery, crucifying her like St. Sebastian. But those were the days before computer-generated imagery, so we had to shoot the scene the old-fashioned way. First the special effects guy put her in a harness with all the trick knives and forks already in place, then they attached them to different locations in the kitchen with wires. On cue, the special effects person would yank each wire and the utensil would come spinning out of her, while she jerked her body in the same direction. Then the editor would reverse the film and paint out the wires, and it looked like she was being stabbed. It was so much fun to watch, but it was time-consuming. The crew had to break several times during the filming. At one point Piper was seen walking to lunch with knives, forks, and potato peelers sticking out of her and her nightgown drenched in fake blood. She casually waved hello to David Janssen, who was filming an airplane disaster movie, while he dined on lobster in his trailer. David waved back without missing a bite.

Jack was having a great time designing the sets for
Carrie.
Like Terry Malick, Brian De Palma loved how Jack would create a world for the actors to inhabit, often working around the clock to stay just ahead of the camera crew. Brian said, “Jack’s sets were always wet.” (That came to be known as Jack’s calling card.) The biggest and trickiest was the apocalyptic prom scene where Carrie is voted queen, which was shot on the same sound stage in Culver City that was used for
Citizen Kane.
The night before Brian started filming there, Jack’s team of “elves,” including Bill Paxton, were busy fashioning tinfoil stars and painting glitter on the decorations for the freshly built high school gym set.

It wasn’t hard for me to get into this scene, because I’d been to a few proms in my time. I’d even been homecoming queen my senior year at Quitman High School. The lights and music were so familiar to me, and I could easily imagine how Carrie would have been dazzled by the attention. Of course, anyone who has seen the movie knows that Carrie’s moment of glory is destroyed when her enemies drop a bucket of pig’s blood on her head and all hell breaks loose—literally. They filled the bucket with Karo syrup and red food dye. Of course we had to film the scene twice, from every angle. At first the “blood” felt like a warm blanket, but it quickly got sticky and disgusting. I had to wear that stuff for days. And when they lit the fires behind me to burn down the gym, I started to feel like a candy apple.

The scene where Carrie is buried in the rubble of her house was my first big death scene in films, and I wanted to make the most of it. It was a tricky setup. Jack had built a tall, narrow closet with the roof cut out so the camera could shoot down on me. I was thrashing around on the closet floor, causing an earthquake with my anger. The crew was shaking the closet walls while Jack stood next to Brian and the cameraman, throwing Styrofoam rubble on top of me. I was writhing in agony, focused on the sensation of being buried alive, but evidently I was taking too long to expire. I was almost completely covered up by debris when I heard a familiar, laconic voice calling down from above.

“Die, Sissy! Just die!”

Jack also built a quarter-scale model of Carrie White’s house, which was used when the earth swallowed up the naming ruins at the end of the picture. Now, don’t read this if for some reason you haven’t seen
Carrie
and don’t want it spoiled for you. In the final scene, Amy Irving’s character visits the spot where the house had stood and where Carrie lies buried. As she kneels to place some flowers on the grave, Carrie’s hand shoots up out of the dirt and grabs her.

To set up the stunt, Jack dug a hole and built a plywood chamber beneath the soil, with a breathing hole and a piece of Styrofoam for Carrie’s arm to push through. When I heard that Brian wanted to bring in an extra to do the hand scene, I objected.

“Please, Brian, I want to do it myself.”

“But Sissy, we’ll have to literally bury you in a coffin in the ground,” Brian said. “Let me hire someone.”

“No, Brian, I do all my own hand and foot work!” I was joking, but I was also serious.

He looked at me and then turned to my husband.

“Jack,” he said. “Bury her.”

After
Carrie
wrapped, Jack and I invited Brian De Palma out to have dinner with us in Topanga Canyon. Despite his grumpy demeanor, he is a lovely person and we have always been so fond of him. I wanted to make it a really special evening. I planned a wonderful roast chicken with vegetables, followed by scrumptious ice cream sundaes. On the day of the dinner, a freak winter storm blew into Los Angeles, with freezing temperatures and gale-force winds. Brian, a city boy from New York, managed to make the white-knuckle drive up Topanga Canyon, but by the time he arrived, we had lost electric power. The stove went off, but the bird was nice and brown, so we figured it had to be done. We were all bundled up in our warmest clothes when we sat down to eat. I served our lovely dinner, but when we cut into the chicken, it was still raw. Brian sat there shivering in his great big coat and wool cap, staring down at his plate of cold, bloody chicken.

Then he looked up at me balefully and said, “What’s for dessert? Ice cream?”

Now Brian De Palma knew I was a terrible cook as well as a worthless set dresser. But all was forgiven after
Carrie
was released in the fall of 1976. The film was Brian’s first blockbuster, and it earned Academy Award nominations for Piper Laurie and for me—something unheard of at the time for a “horror movie.” I even won the National Society of Film Critics award for best actress.

Around that time, Jack and I flew back to visit my folks in Texas. We were driving along the Central Expressway in Dallas with my brother Ed, his wife, and their two young sons, Mark and Stephen, chatting away, when we passed the biggest drive-in movie theater I had ever seen. And what would happen to be playing on that screen the size of Mount Rushmore? The shower scene from
Carrie.
I clamped my hands over my nephews’ eyes, which were growing wide as saucers as it slowly dawned on them that it was Aunt Sissy up there—with no clothes on.

Did I say I was everywhere?
Newsweek
put my freckled face on the cover and featured me in a story about the “new actresses” of Hollywood. Around the time I was shooting Carrie, I also had a supporting role as a spaced-out housekeeper in Alan Rudolph’s
Welcome to LA.
The film was produced by Robert Altman, who noticed me in the dailies and cast me in his next film,
3 Women.

There was nothing ordinary about working with Bob Altman. He came up with the idea for
3 Women
one night in a dream; the next morning he stopped by the Fox studio and made a deal. Shelley Duvall, Janice Rule, and I began filming in the desert outside of Palm Springs with only a treatment and Bob’s direction to guide us. I played Pinky Rose, a vacant waif who shows up looking for work at a low-rent physical therapy spa. Shelley’s character, the super-efficient Millie Lammoreaux, takes Pinky under her wing, until their roles reverse and Pinky starts assuming Millie’s identity.

We started each day’s filming with a briefing from Bob, who would outline what he wanted in each scene. Then we’d improvise the dialogue. And each night, the script supervisor would type up her notes and hand out a page or two of what we had shot that day. By the end of the shoot we had a whole script, and a film that was as surreal and dreamlike as its origins.

As actors, we were all thrilled to be working with such an innovative director, and we gave the film everything we had, even when we weren’t sure what we were doing. In the climactic scene Shelley’s character delivers Janice Rule’s baby in a lonely motel room while I stand by, watching. Bob set up the camera a long way off, to film with a long lens through an open doorway. The scene was emotionally wrenching, with a lot of thrashing and moaning and Shelley staggering around covered in blood. We all thought we must really be on to something when we noticed the whole crew gathered around Bob Altman. Instead of wandering around the set, everyone was staring intently at the monitor.

When the scene finally ended, Shelley and Janice and I walked over to talk to Bob, eager to find out what brilliant thing we had done to draw so much unexpected attention. We soon discovered that the “monitor” was actually a portable television set, and everyone had been watching the World Series!

While I was working on
3 Women
, Jack was on location in Canada with Terrence Malick, filming Terry’s second feature,
Days of Heaven.
It was an exciting and creative time for us. The only thing missing from our lives was Five.

Five had broken her leg when she was young, falling out of a truck, and she died from complications years later, when she was about seven. We were shattered. For Jack, it was like losing his best friend and his guardian angel all rolled into one. Five had taken care of Jack for years, and now she would entrust him to me. To help fill the hole in our world, we adopted a cute little mutt named Heidi. In the years to come, Jack and I would always surround ourselves with dogs and cats and birds and horses, completely willing to let them break our hearts again and again for the privilege of having them share their too-brief time on earth. We’ve loved them all, but Jack would search for decades before he found another dog like Five.