My Extraordinary Ordinary Life (25 page)

We started shooting in mid-July with temperatures hovering around one hundred degrees. One afternoon Janit and I were sipping cold milk shakes through straws, when Jack and one of his friends walked by. I offered Jack the rest of my shake and he took it from me with a grin. It felt like a primal act, a “stranger in a strange land” moment—sharing water in the hot desert. I learned that he was an artist from back East, a trained painter and sculptor who had moved to LA and started working as a grip and set dresser. When he was still in art school, Jack created huge environmental sculptures in his studio, but longed to see people moving through them and interacting with them. While in Philadelphia, he began designing sets for the Theater of the Living Arts, which led to his work in film. It was a natural evolution.

Badlands
was his first serious film as an art director. His previous experience was on exploitation films and biker movies, one of which had an art budget of $300. Jack went to the hardware store and bought $100 worth of plywood, $100 worth of black paint, and $100 worth of chain. That kind of austerity turned out to be good training for
Badlands.

Terry only had a budget of $250,000 for his entire film, which was tiny, even for an independent feature back then. Jack did his best to stretch things out. When he arrived in Colorado, he found an abandoned house that had belonged to a junkman who’d recently died. He paid the man’s family $100 cash for everything in it. To Jack it was a diamond mine, filled with amazing things like jars of black widow spiders and balls of string the size of pumpkins, an old iron bed, and a Sears and Roebuck catalogue from the early 1950s. ‘ There were rusty tools and beat-up furniture, perfect for “Cato’s shack,” an important location where Kit visits his old buddy (and then shoots him). Jack and I found out right off that both of us loved going to flea markets; our idea of a perfect date was rooting around at the town dump.

We were all in awe of Jack’s ability to incorporate these junk-store finds into the set to help develop the characters. I could only marvel when I walked into the house he had created for Holly and her father to live in. I spent hours in Holly’s bedroom, preparing for my role by imagining myself in her world. And everywhere I turned, there was some kind of treasure Jack had left for me. He had found an old stereopticon just like the one my grandparents Momsy and Pops had. Terry later shot a scene of Holly looking through it. The closets and drawers were filled with trinkets and books that Jack thought my character might have liked: a horned toad made of plaster of Paris, a tiny lead soldier on a three-legged horse, a door knocker shaped like a butterfly with painted enamel wings. I loved them so much; I still have them. I’d lay on Holly’s bed and hold these gems in my hands, feeling like I was Scout in
To Kill a Mockingbird
and Boo Radley was leaving me gifts in the hollow oak tree. And, also like Scout, I had the eerie feeling that I was being watched, even though there didn’t appear to be anyone else around.

Jack later admitted that he often was quietly watching me from another room while I explored the set.
Badlands
was like an enormous art project for him, and Terry and I were his grateful beneficiaries.

Terry Malick only shoots in natural light, so Jack would build several identical sets with skylights and windows facing different directions so that Terry could keep shooting as the sun moved across the sky. Terry rarely saw the sets before they were finished. He told me that working with Jack was like being on an Easter egg hunt—he never knew what wonderful things he would find when we arrived at a location. Usually, Jack would have just left, leaving behind an abundance of riches, and a complete environment for us to work in.

Terry and Jack never mapped out exactly how a set should be built. They didn’t use storyboards or even color sketches. Instead they would have a conversation about what each scene might entail, but they didn’t have to talk much. Jack and Terry’s work together is very instinctual. They were already developing a kind of shorthand with each other, one that has intensified and deepened with each film they’ve done together. On
Badlands
, when they were discussing Kit and Holly’s hideout in the woods, Terry mentioned the two fugitives might have built a wickiup or lean-to made of sticks, and Jack just nodded his head.

What we found the next day on the banks of the Arkansas River was almost beyond belief. There was a magnificent tree house built up among sprawling old Cottonwood trees, made out of branches and twigs braided together with rope. It had ramps and rope swings, and a crow’s nest where Jack had placed a copy of
Kon-Tiki
for Holly to read. That had a lot of meaning for me. It was the book my mother read to my brothers and me to keep us occupied during one long car trip to the Rio Grande Valley and back. There were other wonders Jack had imagined for us: a framed Maxwell Parrish print hanging on the tree house wall, soft pillows and blankets that made a bed; chickens living beneath a woven basket; booby traps and a covered pit that Kit could use to hide from bounty hunters. As soon as Martin and I saw the set, we started acting like children romping in a playground.

While Jack set the stage, Terry gave us the words to say and the freedom to inhabit our characters. Martin and I both loved working with Terry. We trusted him completely, and he coaxed the most nuanced performances out of us by trusting us back.

By now my relationship with Jack was in full bloom. When I arrived in Colorado, I was still sort of seeing that “Oh yeah, and don’t answer the phone while I’m gone” guy back in LA. Once I left town, he started sending me messages. But I was so involved in the filming and having so much fun with Jack that I never answered them.

I’d found my soul mate, and didn’t try to hide it. But Terry didn’t realize what was going on until well into the summer. We were filming a scene where Martin and I were dancing in the dirt beneath the tree house, while “Love Is Strange” played on the portable radio. It was a beautiful but bizarre moment in the film, and Martin was being playful. We were shuffling and spinning around when he decided to ad-lib a move and kick me in the behind with his boot. All of a sudden, Jack walked into the shot while the camera was rolling and said, “I don’t think you need to do that.” They were all shocked. Jack has an almost Zen-like calm about him, and this was a side of him that none of them had seen before. But I got the joke. Jack’s humor is deadpan; he was kidding around. Terry just shook his head and kept rolling.

One day after filming at the tree house, Jack invited me on our first official “date.” He wanted to take me by boat down the Arkansas River back to the Capri Motel. That sounded like fun to me, so the crew left us out in the Cottonwood grove and drove on back to town. Jack’s dog, Five, went everywhere with him, and this time was no exception. So off we went, the three of us. No sooner had we launched that rickety little boat than it started taking on water. We sank fifty feet downstream. Luckily the Arkansas is shallow in the summer, and we made it to shore … just as a massive thunderstorm blew in across the prairie. There was all kinds of thunder and lightning and pelting rain. But we were so mad about each other that Jack and I just figured it was part of the adventure, and we started walking back to town in the storm. When we didn’t show up at the motel, alarmed crew members sent out search parties to find us and bring us in. But we didn’t want to be found and would jump into wet ditches whenever we saw a car coming.

By the time we made it back to the Capri, our friends were about to call the sheriff to start dragging the river. It never occurred to us that anyone would be worried. And some weren’t.

We were still soaking wet and covered with mud when we walked into the restaurant, hoping for a hot cup of tea. Terry was eating dinner and looked up at us with a beatific smile.

“Oh, you’re back,” he said. “How was your boat ride?”

Before long, Jack and Five moved into my motel room. I had everything all neatly arranged, with my clothes lined up in the closet and toiletries carefully laid out in the bathroom. Jack carried in a cardboard box stuffed with jeans, dark blue shirts, paintbrushes, and spare motor parts. Five ate human food, mostly chicken, sometimes bones and all. Sometimes Jack liked to feed her in the parking lot. It was a bit of an adjustment for me.

Jack and Five had to move out again a few weeks into the filming because my parents decided to drive up from Texas in their brand-new Buick to visit me. They wouldn’t have understood our living arrangements. My parents got a room at the Capri and drove out to the set with us. They loved meeting Terry and his first wife, Jill, and they seemed to like Jack, who was introduced as our art director. After seeing us together for a while, they must have figured out that something was going on. And Daddy even thought enough of Jack to let us borrow the Buick one afternoon, but probably regretted his decision after Jack drove it off-road to check on one of the locations and brought it back covered with dust and dog hair. The next morning, when my dad was backing out of the motel parking lot, he got a flat. When we saw him later he said, “You won’t believe this, but they found a chicken bone in my tire!” I looked at Jack, and Jack looked at Five. My dad never suspected a thing.

Jack and his dog moved back in after my parents left, but the motel room was getting awfully cramped. We decided to pool our living allowances and rent a small single-wide in the trailer park across the street for $55 a month. We decorated our new home with props from the film. This was my chance to impress Jack with my domestic skills, so I decided to cook him dinner. I wasn’t eating meat at the time, but he loved it. So I made him a hamburger. It was so memorable he saved the recipe:

HOW TO MAKE A HAMBURGER

Ingredients:

ONE HALF POUND LEAN GROUND BEEF
.

10
SALTINE CRACKERS
.

1 ½
CUPS WESSON OIL
.

1. Crush crackers and mix with lean ground beef.

2. Form into a softball-sized sphere.

3. Add Wesson oil to iron skillet.

4. Put ground beef softball in the center of the skillet.

5. Turn on stove.

6. Cook until done.

Jack never said a word when I mixed that prime ground beef with crackers. And he didn’t even snicker when I plopped it into a skillet of cold oil. All he did, when I decided the meat was done, was wad up a huge ball of paper towels to try and soak up some of the grease. And then he ate the whole thing. Now, that’s love.

Food was never very important to me. I was like my mother that way. She made wonderful, healthy meals, but she never liked to cook. When we were little, lunch would be sliced tomatoes, a wedge of lettuce, and a hard-boiled egg. She could make all the standard Southern dishes, like fried chicken, corn bread, and beans with ham hocks, but she never really enjoyed it. I remember when the space program was in the news, she said to me, “Sissy, one day we won’t have to cook at all! We won’t even have to eat! We’ll just take a pill.”

When I was little, my favorite snack was a sugar sandwich. I’d sneak into the kitchen and climb up on the counter to get out the sugar and white bread. I always thought I’d hidden the evidence, until Mother would walk into the kitchen and feel that telltale crunch under her shoes. “Sissy! Who’s been into the sugar?”

My dad was the real cook in the family. He loved making sweets, especially fudge and popcorn balls and pulled taffy. It must have come from his Moravian ancestry, where food was the centerpiece of every family gathering and sharing a meal was the ultimate expression of love. I think that’s why I tried so hard to cook for Jack, but most of the time, Five was the only one who really enjoyed my efforts.

At first I was afraid that Five would be jealous of me, because she was so devoted to Jack. He had gotten her three years before as a puppy in a pet shop in Pennsylvania Dutch country. Nobody could tell him what breed she was. She had long, shaggy hair that covered her face, like an English sheepdog, but she was much smaller and pure black. Her unusual name was decided long before she was born. When Jack was in seventh grade and delivering newspapers at five o’clock one morning, it just came to him:
One day I’m going to have a dog and name it Five.
He must have had a thing for numerals; Jack had also had a cat called Two-and-a-half. Five was so smart and well behaved that she never ran around or made a sound while we were filming. She did whatever Jack asked her to do, and she followed him like a shadow. Five always sat between us in the front seat of Jack’s truck, and she’d lean against me. At first I thought she was trying to push me away from Jack, but that wasn’t the case. She leaned on the people she liked, and it meant that she had accepted me.