Sally Field played ‘The Flying Nun.’

By Randal Hill
Guest Columnist

Editor’s Note: Randal C. Hill, Brandon, Ore., is a retired English teacher with a master’s degree. While attending college in Long Beach, Calif., he worked as a DJ at two radio stations. Later, he taught language arts at Fairvalley High School in Covina, Calif., where he offered “The Rock and Roll Years,” an elective fine arts class that featured invited guest speakers: Jan and Dean Bobby Vee, Freddy Cannon, to name a few. He has extensive writing credits including the first three editions of the House of Collectibles’ The Official Price Gide to Collectible Rock Records, which was reviewed on NBC’s Today show. He has done numerous personality profiles of rock and pop artist for the record-collector magazine Goldmine.

“I was in heaven, learning as much as I could learn. I loved, loved, loved every minute of it,” Sally Field once enthused to a writer from “O, The Oprah Magazine.” High praise for Field’s time spent as “The Flying Nun?” Actually, no. Field was waxing nostalgic about her first television series, “Gidget,” a 1965 show on ABC-TV based on the Sandra Dee movie of the same name. In 1959, Gidget had kicked off the beach party/surfing film craze of the early 1960s.

Field’s remembrance of her “Flying Nun” years was quite different. She had landed the Gidget role right out of Birmingham High School in the Los Angeles suburb of Van Nuys, shortly after she was spotted by a casting agent at an acting workshop. When “Gidget” folded after a year of mediocre ratings, Field was devastated.

She was then offered the lead role in another ABC-TV series, this time as a Puerto Rico-based Catholic sister who could soar through the air. “The Flying Nun” was based on Tere Rios’s 1965 book, “The Fifteenth Pelican.”

Field rejected the role, later explaining, “The show just made no sense to me. It was just drivel! There wasn’t any piece of it that had human behavior in it.”

Her stepfather was a stuntman/actor named Jock Mahoney, who Field found intimidating and controlling. When Mahoney warned her, “If you don’t take this part, you may never work again,” Field capitulated and signed to play the cartoonish sister. When she later requested more depth to the nun scripts, Field was told, “(People) want to know what they’re going to see before they see it. They don’t want to be touched. They don’t want to be surprised. They don’t want to think.”

The series ran for three years, 1967-1970, for a total of 82 episodes. It quickly became a ratings winner, but as the weekly stories unfolded, viewership dropped steadily. By the third year, the show was on life support.

In the meantime, Field had married her first husband, Steve Craig, and was pregnant during the last season’s filming. “You can only imagine what a pregnant flying nun looked like,” she said. “I was a walking sight gag.” The show’s producers used props and scenery to block the view of Field’s body below the chest.

But eventually Field came to realize that the time she spent on “The Flying Nun” did, to her surprise, have an actual upside. “Something in me started to take care of myself in a way I hadn’t been able to before,” she said later. “I started to change and heal. I grew up and moved out of the fog. And ultimately, the experience of being on the series gave me tremendous strength. It made me want to be a real actor, no matter what.”

She certainly achieved that goal. In her superlative movie career, Field carried home an armful of Tinseltown trophies, including two Academy Awards for Best Actress for “Norma Rae” and “Places in the Heart.”