The King of Marvin Gardens is the story of two brothers, played by Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern. Bob Rafelson has a brother, Don, so he was somehow compelled to explore the relationship between brothers, as he had in Five Easy Pieces. My character, Sally, was a woman who lives off men. When the film opens, the man she is living off of is the brother played by Bruce Dern. She has a stepdaughter she’s raising, played by the young and heartbreakingly beautiful Julie Robinson.

On December 23, we were shooting the scene in the Atlantic City Convention Hall where the four of us stage a mock Miss America pageant and crown Julie Miss America. Then we were to jump in a golf cart and drive off. Bruce was the driver. Julie was to climb in the backseat and I was, too, with Jack’s help. When Jack sat down beside Bruce in front, that was Bruce’s cue to take off. But Jack forgot to help me and hopped into the front seat before Julie and I were settled. There was no back on the cart, so when Bruce took off fast, I fell off to the side. Having done acrobatics as a teenager, I knew how to fall, so I wasn’t worried about myself as I went down, but I kept my eyes on Julie as she went over backward like a doll. I could see that her shoulders took the brunt of the blow before her head smashed into the solid concrete floor. If she had landed headfirst, I think she would have been killed. We all ran to her and she was rushed to the hospital. Although she was badly hurt, the X-rays showed no fracture or concussion. I suffered only a nastily bruised arm and body aches, but I was fine. Julie stayed in the hospital for a day or so. The next day we just did pick-up shots, and then it was Christmas Eve.

We were in a Howard Johnson’s hotel. They had a big Christmas tree in the lobby and BBS had a turkey dinner for everyone who hadn’t gone home. I called my mother for Christmas and heard that my godfather, my uncle Dave in Detroit, had cancer. He was the one who sent me fifty dollars when I needed it to escape from Texas back in the fifties. I called my mother’s sister, his ex-wife, my aunt Mildred, to get the phone number of my uncle. My aunt confessed to me that she also had cancer, but asked me not to tell my mother. She was planning a visit to my mother in March and wanted to tell her herself. We had a week off, so I decided to fly to Detroit and visit with both my aunt and uncle for the last time.

While in Detroit, I called Bill Alexander, my first husband. I hadn’t seen Bill in fifteen years and hadn’t been back to Detroit since I’d left. Bill and I stayed up until four A.M. talking about books, as we always did, as well as our lives and all that had happened to us since we were last together. The next day we drove to the Detroit Institute of Art and visited the Diego Rivera murals I’ve loved since I was a child. We had a look at the top-floor turret studio where we used to live. I asked Bill to take me to Hazelwood so I could visit the houses in which I’d grown up. I remember when I was a child, the adults used to worry about any neighbor selling to a black family because “the neighborhood would go down.” Why? I once asked. “Because they don’t take care of their homes,” was the answer. We drove down Hazelwood, which was now an African American neighborhood, and saw the living reality of the ignorance of prejudice. All the houses were well cared for, the gardens tended, the lawns mowed. Children were playing ball in the street, just as we had. It looked like a dreamscape to me. I’ve dreamed so often of this street. It lives in my psyche like one of those streets on the backlot of a big movie studio. To actually revisit it was almost surreal. It was real to me inside, surreal to actually stand there in the flesh. The most astounding thing was there was a very tall maple tree towering over the roofs of the two houses I’d lived in. It stood on the front lawn of 3277, but also shaded the roof of 3271, which was next door. That tree was not there when I lived there. It had grown in my absence. I stood gazing at it and saw how much time had passed. How much life I’d lived. The door of 3277 opened and a pleasant-looking, middle-aged man stepped outside and looked at my white face quizzically. I smiled at him and said, “I used to live here.”

“Is that right?” He smiled. “Would you like to come in?”

“Thank you. I would.”

Bill waited in the car as I stepped inside a smaller version of my memory. I’ve read about other people having this same experience, of going to their childhood home and it looking so small. It is a remarkable phenomenon. After all, when I left home I was eighteen years old, fully grown. It’s not like I was a child and everything was physically bigger in proportion to my size. I was adult size. I stood there realizing the size of my life, how it had expanded, taken in more. I’d seen the wide-open spaces of Texas, the opulence of the Vatican, the magnificence of the Grand Canyon, and the Atlantic Ocean. My eyes, my seeing, my point of view is what had grown larger, what made these rooms seem so tiny. I looked out the dining-room window at the backyard. I could see myself sitting on the top step of the back porch eating tomatoes from the garden, licking the juice off my arm. I could hear my mother’s footsteps upstairs and smell my stepfather’s cigarette smoke, see my brothers coming through the door. The owner of the house stood by me smiling quietly as he allowed my life in this house to come alive for me. I thanked him for his kindness and left his home and my own childhood.

The next day, Bill took Jeff bowling. When they returned Jeff asked if he could stay at Bill’s house when I went back to work. Bill suggested I consider the request carefully because if Jeff stayed with him, he would become attached to Bill and that would involve certain decisions on my part. I wasn’t sure exactly what he meant, but I promised I’d think about it and see if I could clarify my feelings. Bill put us on a plane for Philadelphia. As we waited in the airport for the limo to take us to Atlantic City, Jeff found a toy store to browse in. I bought the Philadelphia Inquirer and settled down on a wooden bench to read. An article about the New York Film Critics caught my eye and as I read, I was startled to see my name, Ellen Burstyn, listed as Best Actress in a Supporting Role in The Last Picture Show. I couldn’t believe it. I’d actually won an award. I felt so excited, I wanted to share the news with someone. I turned and looked at the stranger sitting next to me. He had a kind, nearly blue-black face.

“Excuse me,” I said to him. I pointed to my name under the heading “New York Film Critics.”

“See that?” I asked.

He nodded.

“That’s me.”

“Well, congratulations,” he said, nodding his head. He flashed a big, beautiful, white-toothed smile at me.

“Thank you.” I smiled, nodding in rhythm with him.

“How about that?” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. We continued nodding and smiling together.

“Well,” he said, beaming at me. “You got your name in the newspaper.”

As Chris MacNeil in The Exorcist.