Read My Lips (14 page)

When I turned around, standing there in front of me was
Boomy, my next-door neighbor on Sweetzer Avenue. So that’s who I shot my first “Jack Lemmon” scene with: Boomy the script supervisor.

Soon after
April Fools
my agent called me about an audition. I didn’t know anything about the director or who, if anyone, had already been cast. The only thing my agent said was that I was reading for the part of “Lt. Dish,” so I thought that I had better put on some red lipstick to look more “dish-y.”

The audition room was full of men, scattered about, none of whom I recognized. I didn’t even know which one was the director. I guess I did well because, all of a sudden, one of the men—he had the longest fingers I’ve ever seen, like birds about to take flight—said, “I’ll give you the best role in the picture: Hot Lips.”

The first thing that popped into my mind was Diana saying to me, when I sang as a kid, “Shut up, big lips, with your stupid voice!” I’d burst into tears every time. But the guy said he was giving me the best role in the picture.

“Really?” I said. I was so excited. Finally! The best role in something. I thanked the long-fingered man, took the script, and rushed outside.

The man was director Robert Altman, who later loved to tell anyone who would listen that I was down on the floor, chewing on his pant leg, when I got the part.

Not true.

I didn’t even wait to get home before I cracked open the script to get a better look at this “best” role in the picture. Leaning against the building, I began thumbing through the pages looking for my part. And looking. And still looking. Nothing. On page forty, maybe I found a single line. Later I found a few more.

Fourteen years in Hollywood and my “best role” is the nine-line part of a soldier named Hot Lips? I staggered home, angry and bitter, and I called my agent, indignant.

“There’s nothing to this part!” I told him.

“This guy is supposed to be really talented,” he said, trying to calm me down. “I really think you should do it.” I later learned
that fifteen directors had said no to this film before Altman had said yes.

So I read the script again and then agreed to take another meeting with Altman. It was just the two of us this time, and I arrived in a huff. I didn’t know him from Adam, but I hated him for thinking he could fool me. Hot Lips was a memory before the script was even halfway over. But as long as I had come this far, I was going to tell him what I thought.

“Why does she have to leave in the middle of the film?” I began.

I had spent years playing roles on TV. I was already thirty-one years old. I didn’t want a career playing hard-bitten drunks in Chanel suits who get slapped by their husbands. This movie was supposed to be a comedy. Hell, I’d done two episodes of
Bonanza
just to prove I could be funny. I was capable of so much more than a few lines. I was capable of a “best” role—and so was my character.

“I’m not just some WAC—I’m a woman!” I shouted at Altman. “So why can’t she do this? And why can’t she do that?”

I was ranting. When I finally came up for air, Bob just casually leaned back in his chair. He said, simply, “Why couldn’t she? You could end up with something or nothing. Why not take a chance?”

The minute he said that, something in me shifted. Here I was having a tantrum in his office, and there he was leaning back in his chair, smiling. Everything about him was so comfortable and relaxed. So sure.

Oh my God,
I thought.
I love this man.

So it was settled. The role of Hot Lips Houlihan was mine. The movie was
M*A*S*H.

T
HE SHOOT BEGAN IN
A
PRIL
1969.
M*A*S*H
WAS A MOVIE
about an Army medical outpost during the Korean War—a thinly veiled commentary on Vietnam—and the doctors and nurses who lived and worked there. The storyline was unconventional,
not the kind of predictable plot that audiences were accustomed to. Cinema was changing.

I hadn’t known Bob at all before I threw my tantrum in his office, but evidently he quickly got my number. On that first day of shooting I stood nervously in front of the mirror, looking at my bright red lips. Bob strolled by and said, “Sally, if you’re worrying about what you look like, you’re fired.”

Son of a bitch, he really did understand me.

So I had to get over the way I looked. Jo Ann Pflug, who was playing Lt. Dish, the part I had auditioned for, got to wear makeup and a scarf and get laid. I got to be uptight and buttoned up to my neck. On the set nobody looked at me twice.

Until the shower scene, when I was hoping they wouldn’t.

I spent half my life backing out of rooms. I always went to the beach with a towel wrapped around my legs. For someone like me, who had ridden the roller-coaster of pregnant women’s urine, dexamyl capsules, apple diets, and fruit fasts to always run back to cookies, brownies, and candy—the mainstays of my diet—getting naked was not at the top of any “to-do” list.

Now I was about to be stark naked on the big screen.

“Can I at least look pretty?” I asked Bob.

“Here’s what we can do,” he said. “Sure, we can have the entire crew of a hundred and twenty men light you for an hour, or as fast as you hit the deck, that’s what we’ll see.”

I took the second choice.

There wasn’t going to be anything sexual about it—that wasn’t the issue. Nudity in films was becoming more common, if not the norm. These were the early days of the Motion Picture Association of America’s rating system (Rated G, PG, R, etc.), which had been in effect for not quite a year when we began shooting. Frankly, I wonder if it’s still in effect. Back then we had some nude scenes. Today we have munching on breasts, vaginas, making love, masturbation . . . Acting has certainly changed since I was a kid. I like to say I was lucky that all my nude scenes were done essentially alone—no munching.

Still, I was terrified. So I did what any woman in her right mind, who was anxious about her appearance, would do: I went to my shrink and dropped my pants.

This was shrink number two in my short line of therapists. (No one can ever accuse me of not trying to better myself.) This particular psychiatrist encouraged attending orgies as a means of overcoming virtually any kind of repression. It was the 1960s, after all. I ignored that suggestion, but I was pretty sure that nothing I did in his office would catch him off guard.

He had already been harping on me to stop dieting. “Get to the deeper problem,” he had told me, and I had agreed to give it a shot. But now I had to do this scene. I had to know what kind of shape I was really in. I stood up, turned my back, and dropped my pants.

Silence.

“So?” he finally said. “That’s it?”

As long as he didn’t recoil in horror, that was good enough for me.

In that famous scene in the film, the Army doctors Hawkeye, Duke, and Trapper have placed bets on whether or not my carpet matched my drapes, so to speak. So they have invited a crowd to watch as they raise the flaps of the women’s shower tent to expose me—and settle their bet.

On the first take I hit the deck so fast that Altman said I was on the ground before the tent flap was even raised.

I lay there, soaking and naked, on the ground, too embarrassed to stand. When I looked up, I saw Gary Burghoff, who played Corporal Radar in both the film and the TV series, standing directly in my sight line without a stitch on. Stark naked.

Take two.

I hit the deck again, this time making sure the tent hit the ground before I did. When I looked once more, I saw Tamara Wilcox-Smith (then Tamara Horrocks) who was playing one of the nurses, Captain “Knocko.” Tamara was a comedienne, one of several from a comedy troupe in San Francisco who were cast in
the film. Tamara is, shall we say, amply endowed. And there she was, standing in my sight line, bare breasts in the sun. But I still had Gary’s anatomy burned on my brain, and so when I got a look at Tamara’s boobs, I thought for a split second that I was looking at some sort of hermaphrodite.

Take three.

I hit the deck once more and again looked up, wondering what new vision was in store for me. This time, Tamara had her clothes back on but was being dry-humped by actor Kenny Prymus.

That third take was the charm. Thanks to my castmates, who bravely stripped and humped to spur me on, I’d done it! Bob had probably put them up to it to relax me because he knew how scared I was. Who knows—he was such a rascal. No matter how those antics came about, to this day I attribute my Academy Award nomination to my reaction to seeing my colleagues off-camera during the shower scene.

However, it still wasn’t clear that I would have anything at all to do in the remainder of the movie. All I knew was that I had one more scene. After the shower incident I was supposed to storm into the tent of Colonel Henry Blake, played by Roger Bowen. How I got from the shower to the Colonel’s tent was up to me.

Years earlier Joe Stefano, the guardian angel who had changed my life by promoting my career during my first appearance on
The Outer Limits,
had given me a piece of advice I had never forgotten:
Don’t run on film.
Now, on the set of
M*A*S*H,
I hesitated for one second before saying to myself,
Sorry, Joe, here I go.

Other words flowed through my mind. Gig Young had once said to me when I worked with him on an episode of
The Rogues: In comedy, you have to play for something.

That inspired me to take really huge, hideous strides. With soapsuds running down my face, arms flailing—all five-foot-ten of me—I strode and stomped my way to Colonel Blake’s tent. I’d worked myself into a rage until it hit me: Hot Lips was losing everything she cared about. So because Bob hadn’t said “cut,” I started whimpering, “My commission . . .my commission.”

All of a sudden, Bob ran around the tent and grabbed me. “I had no idea you were going to do it like that!” he said. “Now you’re vulnerable! Now you can stay in the movie.”

After that, Bob kept making up scenes to keep me in the movie. There were no big intellectual discussions about the part. Every now and then Bob would just throw out an idea or a thought that would convey the whole sense of the character. Hot Lips wasn’t in the script anymore, but she was still on screen. She was, for example, sneaking into the swamp to be with Tom Skerritt’s character, Duke Forrest. She was playing cards. She appeared at a football game, as something I had always dreamed of being but had never had the chance in high school: a cheerleader.

Cheerleading was maybe the most fun I have ever had in my life. I got to be goofy and silly: doing cartwheels, making up cheers, getting hit in the face by my whistle as I spastically jumped up and down. Bob was in his element, hovering over the football field in a crane and barking directions through his megaphone.

“Sally! When the gun goes off at the end of the first half, say, ‘My God, they’ve shot him!’”

“Hot Lips! You’re a blithering idiot,” Colonel Blake yelled, and I was. It was exhilarating.

Working on that set was like going to summer camp. The 4077th M*A*S*H was set up on 20th Century Fox’s Century Ranch in Malibu. For someone like me, it was heaven: I was out in the open air, working with a director I now knew to be brilliant.

One day Bob walked up to me and asked, “Sally, where are you from?”

“San Fernando,” I answered proudly.

“Whatever,” Altman said. “Listen, when Don [Sutherland] asks you where you’re from, say, ‘I like to think of the Army as my home.’”

That, for me, was genius. That one line tells you that Hot Lips wasn’t offended by the obnoxious doctors because she was a nasty, cold-hearted wench; she was appalled because they were
not only disrespecting the rules, but they were also disrespecting her home, ridiculing everything she held sacred. Bob got that across to me in just a few words, with no book learning required. Speaking of books, I didn’t learn to read until I was twelve.

Leon Erickson was a brilliant art director. I loved the way he worked my own personality into Hot Lips. When he was set dressing for my tent, he asked me, “Do you smoke?” I told him I didn’t. “Well, what would you have in your tent?” My answer was, of course, “Candy.” So he made sure to have a candy dish in there. It was also Leon who decided that I needed to wear garters. Bob loved the garters the moment he’d heard Leon mention them.

“Oh, garters!” he said. “Come with me . . .”