Oregon daily emerald., June 05, 1978, Page 13, Image 33

Sally Flew &
Faltered,
Sow Flowers
By Stephen Randall
It left some of the more
serious-minded Hollywood
artists scratching their heads.
Why would Sally Field, who
had worked so hard and so
successfully to erase the image
pinned on her by three of the
most insipid television series
ever produced, take a giant
step backwards and sign up to
do Smokey and the Bandit, the
same type of frothy and
mindless comedy that nearly
ruined her career in the first
place? Hadn’t she learned?
They pondered the Sally Field saga. Discovered virtually
days after graduating from a Los Angeles high school, Sally
was cast as the lead in Gidget, a 1965 surf-bunny TV series
that established her as cute — certifiably, button-nosed,
girl-next-door cute. When Gidget wiped out, Sally traded her
bikini for a habit in The Flying Sun, a cute little nun who,
because of her tiny size and large, wing-like habit, was often
carried aloft by gusts of wind. “Only people who hate
daisies and ice cream could find Sally field less than adora
ble,” gushed Look magazine in 1967. “I hate being called
cute,” countered the Flying Nun. “When someone says I’m
cute, I want to throw right up.
After three years of being adorably airborne, Sally was
given another set of clothes to package the same old char
acter. This time the girl next door was married (to equally
cute John Davidson) and had ESP, making her The Girl With
Something Extra. It was all a little too darling. Any one of
these shows could have slowed down the career of even a
gifted actress. But doing all three of them — in succession,
with no other roles to balance them out — would have
ruined Laurence Olivier. Sally Field did not need ESP to
realize this and, at the age of 25, she retired to rethink her
career.
For three years, she thought. And studied not only
acting at the Actor’s Studio, but voice and dance lessons as
well. To her friends in the workshop, she was an unknown
talent with a well-know name. It was one of those friends,
actress Zhora Lampert, who arranged Sally’s modest re
entry into show business — a supporting role as a Southern
tease in Stay Hungry, an offbeat movie set against a backdrop
of bodybuilders. All three of Sally’s previous efforts espe
cially the Flying Nun — had been devastated by the critics.
And she knew her background was not likely to warm a
reviewer’s heart.
“I knew that some people might want to use my past as
an opportunity to make a joke; after all, something called
The Flying Nun is a built-in punchline. I knew my work in
Stay Hungry had to be strong; it had to be beyond laughter. I
couldn’t be timid as an actress because if there was one
inkling of the girl I once was, I’d be dead. They’d grab on to
that and strangle me with it.”
Sally knew that this was her comeback; people would be
watching to see if she failed. “I suppose I was afraid some
where, but you can’t allow yourself to feel that — it's not
productive. I was like Scarlett O’Hara, I just said ‘1 won’t
feel that now, I’ll feel that tomorrow.’ By the time that day
comes and you allow yourself to feel it, it just overwhelms
you and floods you with insecurities. You want to go jump
off a cliff. But I had already faced the possibility that 1
would never reach my potential publicly, that I'd end up
doing it in little theaters or by teaching. But I knew I had
done good work in Stay Hungry. ”
It was not the splashy comeback that, say, Frank Sinatra
made in From Here to Eternity. But it was a comeback
nonetheless — solid, subtle and professional . and not at
all girl-next-door cute. Plus, it was a stepping stone to an
even bigger breakthrough, the lead role of the multi
personality schizophrenic in the TV-movie Sybil.
It would have been a tour de force for any actor, but for
Sally it was even more. It won her an Emmy and erased
once and for all that image of a cute little nun soaring with
the breeze. Industry wags could only marvel at how effec
tively Sally Field had carved out a brand new career for
herself as a serious actress.
Then, as if she had lost interest in her “respectable"
career, she signed up to play the female lead opposite Burt
Reynolds in Smoker and the Bandit, which was certainly not
the proper vehicle for an artiste. any more than Sally s three
TV sitcoms had been. It was as if Norman Mailer had said.
“Yeah, this is nice, but I’d rather be writing the type of
books Harold Robbins and Irving Stone do."
“I was scared to do it because it was commercial and
lightweight and that was the background I was trying to get
away from. But I think that actors make a grievous error
when they think that they should go for serious heavy-duty
meaningful drama and they don’t ever think of the audience