Sally Field: When Larry Met Sally

LG: With all these feelings, I hope you still keep a journal.

SF: I do, but it's sporadic. When I'm working it's almost every day, but when I'm not and life's going on, I tend not to write in it as much.

LG: Ever think you'll publish any of it?

SF: When I was moving into this rented house one of my volumes fell out of a box and I sat down and flipped through it. I thought I was going to be blown away at the revelation as to who I was and I was so embarrassed because everything was misspelled and sophomoric. Now, granted, I picked up one of the very early volumes, but nonetheless! My older son Peter was just accepted into the master's writing program at Iowa, so I think all my fantasies about ever writing just left. I see his work and how concentrated and dedicated he is. He works so hard on knowing where to put commas and I think maybe I'm not meant to write.

LG: Do you think any image of you as insecure and doubtful stems from your acceptance remark for your second Oscar, when you told the world 'You like me, you really like me'?

SF: It's a fine line between really understanding what I meant. People have interpreted that in a way in which they can under-stand with their own words. And they often will interpret that feeling as insecurity when really it isn't. It's a very different thing than insecurity when you receive an Oscar and stand up there and go, 'Oh my God, I can't believe you actually like me.' My work worked for this one moment in time. And it isn't insecurity behind that at all. Have you ever had a standing ovation from your peers? If you do, you will be overcome with a feeling that at this one moment in time, I did it! An impossible task. All the odds, all the struggle to stay in the business, to get the work, to do it, to be right, to be good, at the right place at the right time, to commit yourself, to have it work! That's what it's about.

LG: Do you have any doubts about being liked today?

SF: I think I have a general respect factor now, even if people don't really like my work, they sort of respect me. So I don't feel like I'm fighting that.

LG: Let's talk about another kind of struggle: relationships. You said that you've never seen a relationship with any longevity that wasn't horrible. Your marriage is still together, do you still feel that way?

SF: Does going on seven years mean longevity? Longevity to me is like 20 years, 30 years. But I have what is a really great, quite spectacular husband. He's a real worker and he's really in it with me. He's never-endingly amazing to me. He's redefining a lot of me and certainly a lot of my images of men. Sorry guys.

LG: Do you still like men better than women?

SF: No, that's changed over the last five years as I've become closer to women.

LG: You once told me: "I know much more about myself as an actor than I do as a partner to a man. I've just started to learn about that."

SF: I still feel I know more about acting than I do about men. But I'm learning and getting better. I'm just so grateful that I have this person who will work with me, so I don't feel I'm in it by myself.

LG: Do you think many people know how much you like to swear?

SF: Those who know me do. [Laughs] I do, I do like to swear. It's just so much fun.

LG: You also like to be exhibited by a man in some ways, like an object. Can you talk about that part of you?

SF: I don't know if it's in every woman but it's in most women who were raised in the era that I was raised in. It feels great whenever I feel like a sex object. Maybe because it's pretty much of an oddity in my life. Probably women who had that as a burden in their lives don't feel that at all. But I've had so little of it that I think it's fun.

LG: You actually grew up feeling sex was a completely useless event. You hated it. Has that changed?

SF: That was in the early years of my first marriage. I was really very repressed, and then I was very Sybilesque--I would bust loose and be somebody else for a while. Then I would go back to my repressed state. The repression part I left off in my twenties, which was all about getting rid of that sort of cage that I put myself in emotionally.

LG: Part of that cage had to do with how your stepfather Jock Mahoney treated you--often throwing you from one side of the yard to the other. You spoke of going apeshit, fighting with him-- changing from a sweet, helpless being into Godzilla when you were 15, 16. Are you still emotionally scarred from those years?

SF: I still have to get over some of the things that I feel when I get to that because I was terrified of my stepfather and it hurt emotionally so deeply, those fights, they were just so painful. Sometimes if I get into a huge argument at a studio I have to keep saying to myself, 'This is not my stepfather, this is not my step-father....' Because the same pains start coming up.

LG: Do you still feel that you would have given anything to have been able to pick him up and throw him across the yard, as he would do with you?

SF: No. Even if I could have picked him up and thrown him across the yard, it wouldn't have made the pain go away. Not when you believe you have been so unfairly accused all the time. That rage remains.

LG: When we first talked, you were hesitant to say negative things about your real father, with whom you felt you never had a relationship, because you feared he might read it. Has anything changed there?

SF: I've actually reconnected with my father and that's sort of changed my life a lot. He's had a stroke and he's very ill now but I feel very close to him. Right now I wish I could say something that I could give to him to read, because he needs it right now. So I wish I could say something to you that you'd write and I could take it to him on his wall there and all the nurses and everybody around could see it, so he could feel... glad.

LG: Is he capable of understanding?

SF: Yeah. He just can't speak. I talk to him every day. He doesn't talk back. But unless you say something great I don't want him to see anything that might be hurtful to him right now.

LG: There's nothing I can say, it's up to you.

SF: [Pauses. Thinks. Is quiet]

LG: What about your mother, is she still your best friend?

SF: We're still very close, yeah.

LG: She said that your great ambition was to do a Broadway musical.

SF: Actually, in the bottom of my heart I would love to do that more than anything. But they don't do many Broadway musicals and I can't sing.

LG: She must have had quite a scare when you and your family were involved in a small plane accident in Aspen three years ago. How frightening was that?

SF: It was really scary and I don't think I've quite recovered from it.

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