Once, when I was about twelve, I asked my mother, “How do you get a boy to like you?” She thought for a moment, then answered, “You listen to everything he says and laugh at all his jokes.” Now I was sixty-three and she was eighty-seven, cancer-ridden and savaged by the unsuccessful chemo treatments, but whenever she’d hear me starting dinner, she’d mosey out of her room with a paperback mystery in hand, then patiently sit at the kitchen counter, listening to everything I said and laughing at all my jokes. We chatted sweetly, stiffly discussing the kids or their kids, or Princess and her daughter, anything to keep talking. But then we’d be struck with it. The quiet. If I looked at her, she’d look back down at her book, and when I turned to the sink, I could feel her eyes on my back. I’d clamp my mouth closed in a soundless scream, then turn back toward her, my face showing nothing as I pleasantly chopped and stirred and served—a do-si-do that went on and on. I felt helplessly locked into step, unable to shake it off and reach out to her.
On the rare mornings when I didn’t have to get up before the sun, when I didn’t face the hour-long, traffic-filled drive to and from Burbank, where the Brothers and Sisters sets were located, I’d wake to the slam of a door, followed by the nonstop barking of Baa’s look-alike dog, the dog that peed every time I tried to be nice to it, the dog that went insane, running up and down beside the steamy, overheated pool while Baa swam her few laps. On those mornings, I’d sit in my bed, or on the floor of my room, unable to breathe. Baa, in the ongoing battle for her life, was downstairs swimming in the pool, while I was upstairs drowning in nothing, feeling panicked and futureless, as if I were the one who was dying. And when I felt like I was going down for the count, I finally reached out for help.
Dr. Dan Siegel quietly led me into his glass-filled office, then sat in a straight-backed chair, while I sat on the sofa across from him with my heart pounding. After a moment of stillness, he gently asked what had brought me there. Slowly, I started telling him about my life, dribbling it out until it became an emotional flood, as if I’d been storing everything up, waiting for this one moment. I relived memories, episodes, and events that had happened long ago, but which now felt fresh and scab-less.
One day, after we’d met a handful of times, Dan asked me in a casual tone if I could name all the different parts of myself. “Parts or fragments or aspects or personalities, whatever feels right to you,” he continued.
“I call them pieces” was my reply. No one had seen me like that before, as being a divided person, and at the time I hadn’t yet begun to see it clearly myself. But, as if it were a question I’d answered before, I immediately, without hesitation, named all the pieces of who I am. From incident to incident in my life, I could name the parts of me that had been most present, and if any others were involved. Little by little, memory by memory, I could see it, could feel the system of behavior, the cooperation and alienation between the members of my interior family. It was something that I had known instinctually but had never pulled into the front of my awareness and certainly never articulated. The powerful, elusive Madwoman who had always frightened me and the deeply sad Ragamuffin who had fueled much of my work but whom I despised and would banish from my mind, except when acting. Then there were the easy ones, the red rage of Fire, reliable Rock, and Airy, the entertainer. Dan urged me to talk to each of them, to visualize them in my brain like they were separate people and, as if I were playing a game of “Red Rover,” to finally call each one over, to allow them to join the group, and me. It was a version of the very scene I had played in Sybil.
But this couldn’t be the reason I felt so frantic, so panicked and frightened. I’d been like this all my life.
I tried not to think about the Lincoln project as the years passed. I didn’t want to know how it was progressing because for every month it dragged on, for every year it was delayed, my loss of it was also delayed. With all my might I tried to not want it, as though the film were a hungry animal, and if it could smell my desire, it would eat me. Several scripts came and went, as did the writers, and the possibility of the film ever happening seemed to dwindle. Then it was announced that Tony Kushner, the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright of Angels in America, had been hired to take a stab at it, and a year later, he delivered what I consider to be one of the finest screenplays ever written. Instantly, an elaborate table reading was assembled in the East Village’s historic Cooper Union and I was invited to participate, along with an extraordinary group of New York actors, including Liam Neeson—who was to play Abraham Lincoln. The producers kept insisting that my attendance wasn’t required, that the reading was “only” to give Steven and Tony a chance to hear the script out loud, and maybe that was true. But part of me, quieted for so long, refused to listen. That part knew very well that the reading would be more than that, no matter what they thought or said—as every reading is. Fortunately, during that week’s schedule of Brothers and Sisters—then in its fourth season—I happened to have a few days off, meaning I didn’t have to sell my soul to the devil to get to New York.
I could feel the battle going on inside me, one part repeating that this reading was dangerous, exposing me to an inevitable loss that I might not have the strength to get up from. While all the time another voice softly persisted, arguing that if this was truly my only moment as Mary then by God, grab it fully. And so I did. I worked to own as much of the text as I could in the forty-eight hours I had it, put on a blousy black dress, pulled my hair into a knot at the base of my neck, and without hedging my bet, launched myself toward Mary Lincoln. For two and some-odd hours all the voices in me came together, and I was lifted by the eloquence of the words, the skill of a huge tableful of actors, and the craft that had always been my lifeline. When I walked away on that glorious day, I knew that my work had been well regarded. But the further I got from the afternoon, the louder that frigging voice became, telling me that I’d better protect myself because the whole scenario had already been played out and I had failed.
When Liam dropped out of the film a few days later for personal reasons, I silently hoped that the whole project would fall apart and I wouldn’t have to worry about it anymore. Then several months later, when it was announced that Daniel Day-Lewis had agreed to take on the role, I felt sure that this was it: my death knell. I was back to being a television actor, whereas Daniel was considered to be the finest actor in the world. I wanted to dig a hole and bury myself, to beat my mother to the grave so I didn’t have to feel any of it. Including my mother’s death.