My Extraordinary Ordinary Life (41 page)

After attending the University of Virginia, Schuyler moved to Los Angeles. She continues to act in films, but almost all of her energy for the past few years has gone into her music. She has already written countless songs and released two CDs, the latest, recorded in Virginia, in a little studio just a few miles down the road from our farm. I am in awe of her musical talent, which goes much deeper than my own. Every once in a while I’ll sing backup on a song, or she’ll bring me up onstage to put on a harmony while she’s performing. One of the best moments of my life was performing with Schuyler during a huge concert at Wolf Trap National Park in Virginia. But most often I am happy just to sit in the audience, watching her live out my old fantasies of being a rock star.

Schuyler lives in a cozy house near the ocean with her fiancé, Chapman Bullock, a motion-graphics artist, and their rambunctious yellow lab, Rigby. There always seems to be something delicious bubbling on her stove or baking in her oven, and a crowd of grateful friends at her table. (I don’t know how she learned to cook so well—it couldn’t have been from watching me!)

Madison studied painting and sculpture at California Institute of the Arts and Virginia Commonwealth University with a yearning to become an artist and filmmaker. She’s written and directed several short comedies; in one I have a funny cameo, playing myself as an out-of-work actor. Since then, she’s been busy paying her dues and is on her way to becoming an art director, which is what she wants to do. She’s moved to Texas, where there’s a booming independent film industry and where she’s surrounded by family and feels right at home.

The walls of her house are covered with her paintings: her adopted dachshund mix, Maude, who reminds me of Patch; a painting of me in a dress I wore in
Badlands
; and a study of her grandmother Gerri. I love her use of color and the way she captures the spirit of her subjects. Madison’s paintings are expressions of the world around her.

It looks like the whole family is destined to live the “art life.”

Like the first Spaceks who made that leap of faith and sailed across the ocean to settle in Texas, we depend on one another, and our lives are deeply intertwined. We like each other’s company. Madison lives a short drive away from my brother Ed, his wife Tannie (who often tutored Madison on location), and their computer-enthusiast teenage son, Austin. Ed’s eldest son, Stephen, is an artist’s manager who lives near Schuyler in Los Angeles, and Mark is a filmmaker who lives near Madison in Texas. All of Ed’s boys are like brothers to our girls.

Jack and I have also stayed close to his family. His sister, Mary, still lives nearby in Virginia. She runs our office, manages our business, and keeps things working smoothly on the farm. Although she and David Lynch have parted ways, they are still friends. Their son, Austin (did you notice we have a lot of Austins in the family?), grew up with our girls and is also like a brother to them. He’s an artist and filmmaker, like his father and uncle, and his wife, Nancy, is a sculptor. Nasif Iskander, the son of Jack’s older sister, Susie, is dean of faculty at a highly regarded school in San Francisco. Susie is remarried, to a rancher named Richard Francis, and lives in South Dakota. They tried moving to Virginia for a while, but they quickly returned to the western prairie. The East Coast didn’t sit well with Richard.

“Too many trees,” he said.

The part of Virginia where we live has grown over the years. We no longer have to rely on the combo platters at La Hacienda when we want to dine out. There is a bustling downtown open-air mall filled with fine restaurants, and theaters that attract some of the best musical artists in the world. Best of all, for me, a Whole Foods supermarket has opened. I still think it’s the best way to be well fed at home (without actually having to cook). I’ve been shopping there for years, and the clerks all know me well.

Not long ago, I was coming back from a trip to California, and I was bringing Schuyler’s chocolate lab, Cassidy, back to live on the farm. I had the dog and her huge shipping crate, so I asked the car company that always picks me up at the airport to bring a large SUV. We were going to need extra room. No problem, they said. And when my flight arrived, the driver was there with a Yukon, and he helped me get the dog into the seat next to me, and the crate into the back of the car. It was great!

On the way to the farm, the driver said, “You know, you’ve been gone a long time, would you like to go to the grocery store and get some food?”

“Oh, that’s so nice of you. But you don’t have to stop.”

“Really, it’s no problem! I know you’ll be hungry when you get home, and Whole Foods is on the way.”

“Well, okay! That’s wonderful. I won’t be a minute.”

We pulled up in front of the store, and as I was stepping out, the driver said, “I just got a call. There’s a football game at the university, and they need an SUV. Do you mind if we switch out cars while you shop?”

“Oh, no problem,” I said. “Just take good care of Cassidy!”

The regular customers are so used to seeing me at Whole Foods that usually nobody pays any attention. So I thought it was odd that people kept coming up to me and asking for my autograph and taking pictures. Then I thought, “Oh, there are probably a lot of strangers in town for the ball game.” But it kept happening. It was so weird! When I checked out with my groceries and walked outside, I found the longest white stretch limousine I have ever seen in my life, parked right in front of Whole Foods. The chauffeur was standing next to the car in his uniform, holding the door open for me. And there was Cassidy sitting up in the backseat, looking like Mrs. Astor’s plush horse. Everybody was staring at me and taking pictures with their cell phones. They must have thought I was the most stuck-up thing east of the Blue Ridge. I laughed so hard I thought I would cry. I called Jack from the car. “You’re not going to believe this, Jack,” I said. In thirty seconds, a reputation that had taken me thirty years to build was dashed.

I thought I’d be shocked when I turned sixty, but it was easy—a lot easier than turning twenty, when I was nearly panicked that I was getting too old to make it in the music business. It helped that my friends, the producers Helen Bartlett and Tony Bill, threw me the best and certainly the biggest birthday party I’d ever had, at their home in LA. Being a Christmas baby, I’m not used to celebrating my birthday and being the center of that kind of attention. I was overwhelmed, and I hardly noticed that someone kept filling my glass with champagne. When the time came for me to thank my friends and family for their beautiful tributes, I looked out at the lovely crowd and thought,
Who are all these people and why are they staring at me?
Jack had to get me home early that night, but Schuyler and Madison told me the last half of the party was wonderful!

Other than a diminished tolerance for champagne, and occasionally losing my car in a parking lot, growing older hasn’t been so bad. I try to approach it as gracefully as possible and I welcome all good advice. I think Sophia Loren said it best. When asked how she managed to appear so young, she replied, “I try not to make any noise when I get up out of a chair.”

One of the best things I’ve done in my life came late: Harper Lee, the author of
To Kill a Mockingbird
, asked me to read the audiobook version of her masterpiece. I spent weeks wrapped up in her gorgeous prose, like a comfortable old quilt. I reexperienced all that I’d felt when I first read that book and saw the film that made me fall in love with movies.

I continue to be offered roles in rich, nuanced films, like
Get Low
, with Robert Duvall and Bill Murray, and most of them I’ve been smart enough to accept. I can hardly believe I almost didn’t do
The Help.

When Tate Taylor sent me the script, I kept nipping through the pages, looking to see if my character had any memorable scenes. Tate wanted me to play Missus Walters, the batty mother of the film’s villain, but she only had a few lines of dialogue. When I read the novel to see if I could learn more about her, I discovered that Missus Walters played an even smaller role in the book. Still, I loved the Civil Rights–era story of how a misfit Junior Leaguer and a group of maids secretly wrote a book together in Mississippi. So I met with the director.

“Tate, I love the script,” I said. “But I don’t think there’s enough there for me to make this character work.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “You can improvise.”

Now, many directors say that, but very few follow through. Tate Taylor was the exception. I created my Missus Walters from memories of my father’s sisters, the eccentric, colorful aunts I grew up with in Texas, and then I added some red lipstick, cat-eye glasses, and cocktails. I’m afraid I shamelessly upstaged the other actors in all my scenes, and I don’t regret a minute of it!

We filmed on location in Greenwood, Mississippi, located a couple of hours north of Jackson. To get there from the airport I drove within a few miles of the small town where my grandmother Elizabeth Holliday Spilman, was born. When people asked where I was from, I was able to tell them I was a Holliday, from just down the road. “Oh, that’s a fine family!” I’d hear again and again. A few long-lost relatives even tracked me down while I was filming, and I learned even more about my Mississippi family. It felt like a homecoming.

One morning I was walking through the hotel lobby, on my way to the set, when a tiny blond woman introduced herself as Kitty Stockett, the author of
The Help.
I told her how much I loved her book, and we visited for a few minutes. I was wearing little round sunglasses and my typical summer uniform—Oxford shirt, knee-length shorts, and Chaco sandals—and I noticed that Kitty was looking at me intently.

“You don’t look old enough to play Missus Walters!” she said.

“Oh, just you wait!” I laughed. I’d like people to think it took hours to make me look that old. But the truth is, it didn’t.

I enjoyed playing an older character in
The Help.
It was fun and liberating not to have to worry about looking youthful and attractive—although Missus Walters was plenty attractive to her boyfriend at the nursing home. He was played by Tate’s father, John Taylor, who also was put to work as a driver. In fact the whole production felt like a family affair. Tate had grown up in Jackson with Kitty Stockett and had been good friends with Octavia Spencer and Allison Janney for years. We had a wonderfully diverse cast and crew, and many of the extras were friends and relatives.

The film used a light and comedic touch to explore a shameful era in American history, when the races were so segregated that the collaboration between a white writer and a black maid was dangerous for both of them. But at its heart,
The Help
is a story about love and friendship that transcends class and race. We certainly felt that on location, on what had to be one of the most integrated sets in the history of filmmaking. We all blended together and got along so well that nobody seemed to dwell on the ghosts of the past that still linger in Mississippi. As a nation, we still have a way to go before we heal the division between races. But to me, being able to make a film like
The Help
seemed like a reward for how far we have managed to come.

Not long ago I was walking through an old historic downtown mall in Virginia when a teenage girl came running up to me, all excited. “Sissy Spacek!” she squealed. “You’re Carrie! You’re Carrie!” She pulled back her sleeve to reveal a full color tattoo of me as Carrie in her prom dress, holding a bouquet of red roses. It was a beautiful tattoo, all pink and gold—it apparently captured the moment just before the bucket of pig’s blood was dropped on my head—and I had to admire it, but I was still shocked that this lovely young girl would do such a thing.

“Do your parents know about this?” I asked her. And more important: “Do they blame me?!”

Early in my career, I thought that making it in the business meant appearing on the Johnny Carson show. These days, a mark of success is having one of your characters tattooed on someone else’s body part. But nothing beats getting your star on Hollywood Boulevard.

I had been acting in films for more than forty years, but there was one milestone I hadn’t crossed. Oscar on the mantel?
Check.
Handprints in the sidewalk at Universal Studios?
Check
Golden Globe?
Check, check, check.
Yet tourists were still unable to stroll over my name on the “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” I only realized what a big deal it was when, in the summer of 2011, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce honored me with my very own star on the Walk of Fame. There I was, on the sidewalk outside the El Capitan Theatre, in the company of Tinker Bell, Winnie the Pooh, and Steve McQueen. It’s a great piece of real estate right across from the Kodak Theatre, home of the Academy Awards.

My family was there, along with so many friends that I felt like it was an episode of the old TV show
This Is Your Life.
I was so thrilled to see everyone that I forgot to be nervous about the dozens of cameras pointed at me, and the hundreds of fans yelling my name. And I had excellent company on the podium that day. Two of my dearest friends, Bill Paxton and David Lynch, had agreed to say a few words about me.