If I fell down and hurt myself, I never cried. There was no one to hear me.

If I fell down and hurt myself, I never cried. There was no one to hear me.

I really would rather have gone to New York, since all my training had been in theater, but I didn't have the guts to go there alone. I knew only one person in New York, and that was a man. What I needed was a woman. That's the way Southern girls thought.

From the time I was very young, maybe five or six, I thought a lot about being an actress. I didn't tell my friends about my ambitions, though, especially when I got older, because I thought they would not receive them well. I never talked about what I wanted to do.

My interest in acting was overwhelming, but I wasn't thinking, "I'm going to California and I'm going to become a movie star." Things were different then. I lived just for the moment, and whatever happened, happened.

Only do it if you absolutely have to, because you are gonna eat rejection every single day. And it's not easy eating that rejection every single day because it hurts. You have to learn not to take it personally. And that is a very hard lesson to learn.

She and my uncle were very sociable and would have a lot of people over at night to play cards or whatever. The high spot of those evenings was when we kids got dressed up to do a skit or something to amuse the guests. I loved it.