By Deborah Starr Seibel
How do you stay in show business — and at the top of your game — for 44 years? If you’re Sally Field, you take a wheelbarrow full of talent, plant it in soil rich with solid material, and water with a good measure of sass and wit. The two-time Oscar winner has somehow managed to sink deep roots in both film and television, and her secret to longevity may have something to do with her love for the simple act of gardening.
For years, Field has taken solace in planting and pruning, walking her three-and-a-half acre property in the Malibu mountains with an eye toward proper balance and growth. After long hours shut inside cold and dark Hollywood sound studios, it’s the perfect respite: “Everybody should go out and dig in the dirt,” she says of her gardening obsession. “It’s totally a form of meditation. But it’s not only that; it’s important to touch the things that grow on this planet, because it literally grounds you. It’s a very healing thing to do.”
Field, now 63, didn’t have to think about healing or health in 1965 when she was a perky teenager starring in the hit television series Gidget. And it didn’t cross her mind when, at age 20, she wore a hideous, winged-back wimple as The Flying Nun, a show that continued for three seasons. But sometime in her 30s, says Field, she realized that she had to start taking care of herself.
“Like every other woman in my generation, I had a lot of self-loathing issues,” she admits. “I didn’t look like what they told me I was supposed to look like. I wasn’t skinny enough, big enough here, or small enough there. My friend [actress] Jane Fonda helped me realize that exercise was a really important thing to put in your life. Not only does it help you maintain your weight, but it helps you feel better, more powerful, and less sorry for yourself. And it was around that time that I realized that I was an actress, and that I wanted to stay in the game as long as I could.”
Not only has Field stayed in the game, but she’s become one of its heaviest hitters. At age 30, Field picked up her first Emmy for her image-shattering title role in Sybil, as a woman tortured by multiple personality disorder. She was only 33 when she won her first Academy Award for her portrayal of a rebellious factory worker in Norma Rae. At 39, she took home another gold statue for Places in the Heart. In her 40s, she dazzled audiences in Steel Magnolias, Mrs. Doubtfire, and Forrest Gump. In her 50s, Field won television’s highest honor again for her recurring role as Dr. Abby Lockhart’s bipolar mother, Maggie, on ER. And in her 60s, she has continued her winning streak by taking home yet another Emmy for her role as matriarch Nora Walker in the ABC series Brothers & Sisters.
Now her loftiest ambition is to play old women. “I don’t really care about any sort of glamour thing, because I don’t have any,” she says, laughing. “I want to play old women and have an honest-to-goodness old woman’s face and body, as horrifying as that is. I don’t want it to be horrifying, but it’s difficult because I do look at myself in the mirror and go … Arghhh! I don’t have a strong jaw line anymore. And my neck looks like somebody’s bedroom curtains.”
Those telltale signs of the passage of time she can accept. As a mother of three grown sons and a grandmother three times over, Field says the rewards of getting older far outweigh the costs. But she wasn’t willing to sit idly by when, in her early 50s and still very physically active, she had a bone density test and found out that her bones were thinning. “Osteoporosis to me was always the little old grandmother disease,” says Field, who practices yoga and hikes the Santa Monica mountains. “You picture the little white-haired old grandmother, fragile and bent over, and the Boy Scouts need to help her across the street.”
But Field’s doctor informed her that she was, in fact, the perfect candidate: “I’m very small, over 50, Caucasian, and have osteoporosis on both sides of my family,” she says. Chewing over the diagnosis, Field was frustrated and angry about her own lack of health education and the mixed messages in the media about how to care for her changing body. “You don’t get that little book — like you do when you’re in junior high school — which says, ‘These are the things that are going to happen to your body.’ And all of the information was coming out ass backwards: take this, don’t take that. I didn’t have the right information and I didn’t know where to get it.”
The one thing Field was sure of was that she wasn’t a fan of prescription drugs. So when her doctor recommended a powerful monthly medication to help stop bone loss, she was terrified. “I was really scared because I’m not a pill taker,” she says. “I’m not like girlfriends of mine who, at every meal, take packets of vitamins. I took calcium, but even that would upset my stomach.”
But because Field was already doing everything else right — like getting exercise and eating calcium-rich foods — she agreed to try the pills and steeled herself for the worst. “On the directions it says [not to] lie down for an hour [after taking the pill],” says Field. “So I really thought, ‘Oh, Gosh,’ took the pill, and walked around my bedroom thinking that I was going to explode. But I had no reaction. Nothing — absolutely, totally, and completely nothing — happened. And subsequently, it has reversed the bone loss and I’ve built back healthy bone in both the spine and the hip.”
Then Field took another big step, one that’s highly unusual in Hollywood’s notoriously youth-centric business: she agreed to represent the pharmaceutical company and become a cover girl for this “old person’s” disease. How could she do that when she’s still a Hollywood star? “Look, I’m not a Hollywood star,” she says emphatically. “I’m an actor and I’m incredibly grateful to be able to do what I do best. And I want to keep doing it. Osteoporosis isn’t what aging needs to be. You have to actively work to stay upright. You have to ask for a bone density test, and if you’re diagnosed with bone loss at a dangerous level, you have to look into treatments that are right for you and you have to use them.”
Field sounds tough-minded, strong — the kind of woman who always takes life in both hands and tries to wrestle it to the ground. But she’ll tell you that it’s been a tough, uphill battle. Field was born in Pasadena, Calif., and her parents divorced when she was 4. Her mother, a former actress, then married stuntman Jock Mahoney, whose relationship with Field was turbulent at times. Once, in a fit of temper, he threw her across the yard, she says.
As an adult, Field has had troubled relationships with men as well. Married and divorced twice, she’s been single since 1993. Ask her for a description of the ideal partner and she says, “I haven’t the foggiest notion. That’s probably my problem. I don’t know that I would recognize him if he walked in the room.” She says she still dreams of romance, “but I certainly wouldn’t give up anything to get it. In my time off, I want to babysit my grandkids.”
And Field wants to spend time in her garden. It gives her joy and, occasionally, great stories of misadventure. One famous family story involves an overgrown eucalyptus tree and her hybrid Lexus. She was determined to fell this particular 8-foot tree because it had become a fire hazard. “So I was out there on the slope with my saw,” she says. “And I’m sawing away at this thing. And my son Sam was home from college, sleeping. I thought I had planned out the way I was supposed to do it. But the wind came up and blew it over and the tree crashed on my car. So there was this big crash and Sam came running out. He said, ‘What the heck are you doing?!’”
The Lexus survived and Field can’t wait to have another free hour away from her television series to prune through more of her great oaks and California olive trees. “It’s not like an exercise class that you have to put in your book from 9 to 10,” she says. “It’s just there, a constant sort of call to go play in your yard.”
Photo Credit (top photo): Nigel Parry/CPi Syndication