OUT ON a LIMB

by Shirley Maclaine

  “Can I see you there?” I said yes.

  “Will you be able to come with me to Paris the week after?” I said yes again. With great determination he got up, headed for what he thought was my front door. It wasn’t. He ended up back in the bedroom. Then he pointed himself in the right direction and was gone. He hadn’t said goodbye or even looked back.

  I arranged to have the script conferences in London and meet with Gerry at the same time. In the film business, a great deal of time is spent poring over scripts that never develop into pictures. Such was the case with this one. I was glad to have Gerry, so the time in London wasn’t a complete waste. Sometimes I wonder if the script wouldn’t have been better if I hadn’t had Gerry to divert my attention. Anyway, all of London seemed to be on strike when I arrived. Gerry was right. The ship was sinking, but I wasn’t sure it was gracefully, flowered cups at tea time and the misty morning walks in Hyde Park notwithstanding. But all that really mattered to me was the smell of his tweed jacket and his thick hair falling across my face: the softness of his fingers on my cheeks and the way he swayed me in his huge arms seemed to close out the reality that not only England, and my script, but also the world was in big trouble.

  We were careful not to be seen when we were together (I stayed in the apartment of a friend) and anyway Gerry was known for enjoying his privacy while walking the streets of the city he grew up in.

  Then, after a few days, I went on to Paris and he met me there a day later. We watched the rooftops of St. Germain from my hotel room, and after we made love we never talked about our relationship or what we meant to each other. Gerry and I never discussed his wife or my personal life. It wasn’t necessary or anything we needed to get into … not, that is, until the night he took me to dinner and a table full of English journalists recognized us. They smiled and waved. Gerry froze and couldn’t eat. He talked of how this would hurt his wife—how she couldn’t accept it and how we should progress more slowly. I said of course, but hadn’t he thought of all this when we began? He was so terrified that my heart turned over. That night he couldn’t sleep. His mind, he said, was tumbling in confusion. I offered to leave so he could collect himself. We stayed away from each other for a day while he attended conferences and meetings. I planned to leave anyway, when, in lonely desperation, he called me.

  He said he couldn’t bear to see me go. He had a terrible longing for me and could we be together again.

  We met outside of Paris in St. Germain en Laye. He fell on me, showering me with kisses and touches, holding me so tightly I felt he couldn’t breathe. He seemed abandoned and considerate, pleading and demanding all at the same time. It was rare and real and open and direct and a little bit frightening.

  He said he had never done anything like this before in his life. He said he was confused and terribly guilty. He talked about the state of the world and how he wanted to make a contribution to improve it. He talked about Democratic-Socialist principles and how it was possible to have them both at the same time, if the rich would only share their wealth more.

  He was soft and whispering and challengingly loud and hard driving, almost as though he was experimenting with the many facets of his personality. He never asked me about myself or whether there were other men I might know or be involved with.

  It seemed to be an emotional purge for him. And when the time came to leave each other, he was economical and not at all sentimental.

  He wondered if I’d be all right getting back to America. I said I had found my way back from wilder places than the French countryside. He apologized for his behavior in Paris and said he’d call me soon. With no superfluous motions, he simply said goodbye in his Spartan English manner, opened the door and walked through it. The trouble was—he was in the closet. He laughed and, saying nothing, he walked out the right way.

  The room we had brought to life for two days came to a silent halt. The walls closed in on me. And neither one of us had mentioned the word “love.” I felt I had somehow been compelled to involve myself in this relationship that I knew could offer little more than irreconcilable obstacles. The question was, why?

  Chapter 2

  “Pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world; all knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it. Propositions arrived at by purely logical means are completely empty of reality.”

  —ALBERT EINSTEIN

  Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist

  I drove through Malibu Canyon and onto the Ventura Freeway. There wasn’t much traffic. The San Fernando Valley stretched out in front of me, household lights beginning to twinkle, like a giant jewel box in the night. I remembered how they had taken Khrushchev to the Valley when he came to California. It was America in progress, they said. It was beautiful if you looked at it from the right perspective. But otherwise everybody made jokes about the Valley—like saying a person was so bad off, the only thing he had going for him was he didn’t live in the Valley.

  I turned off the freeway to my street. Climbing my long driveway I felt the low-hanging cherry trees brush the top of my car. I loved those trees. They reminded me of the cherry trees my former husband Steve and I had had in his house in Japan before our divorce. Steve had planted them there when he lived in a residential section of Tokyo called Shibuya. He wanted to stay and live and work in and around Asia. I wanted to live and work in America, not because I grew up there, but because my work was there. We discussed the dilemma and decided to try to make the globe a golf ball and do both.

  For a while it worked. But gradually we each developed separate lives. We remained friends as we raised our daughter Sachi, who spent the first seven years of her life with me in America, the next six in an international school in Japan, and her remaining school years in Switzerland and England. She learned to speak and read and write fluent Japanese (which meant she could read most any Oriental language) and she began to think and perceive like an Oriental, which was sometimes amusing because Sachi is a freckle-faced blonde with the map of Ireland written on her face and the loping arms and legs of a Westerner, which she somehow manages to orchestrate as though she’s wearing a restrictive kimono and obi when she walks and sits. She still kneels in a living room and locks up adoringly at whoever is speaking, and her Alice in-Wonderland countenance can be quite confusing even when I think I understand her. What I’m really getting is a combination of straightforward, direct Western thinking tempered with circuitous Asian ambiguity usually employed to rescue what might be an embarrassing, impolite or insensitive remark.

  I learned a lot about Asia from Sachi, which she didn’t even mean to teach me. She is one of that new breed of people whose blood and ancestry is Western, but whose psychology and thought processes are half Asian. With Sachi this was a result of the “golf ball” belief that Steve and I had had in the beginning. As with everything, it has its duality—its drawbacks and its assets. In the long run, though, I would say the assets outweigh the liabilities, if for no other reason than the fact that Sachi is a combination of two worlds—and if she can handle it, she will help each understand the other. She has lived and studied French in Paris, where she says it was most difficult for her to make the sociological and cultural adjustment. Apropos of Parisian rudeness and cynicism, she said, “Mom, it’s really hard to bow with Japanese politeness and say ‘up your ass’ at the same time!”

  My house sat warm and homey at the top of the hill. “MacLaine Mountain” one of my friends called it, and wondered if I ever fell off it. If they only knew how often I had wondered the same thing.

  My friend David had joked that the tallest mountain I was climbing was myself. He didn’t have much time for small talk, yet he could make the smallest moment seem important. Like the time he peeled an orange into a flower and the juice of the luscious fruit gently dribbled down his chin as he ate it. He said there were no accidents in life and we all basically meant something important to each other if we’d just open our hearts and our feelings and no
t be afraid of the consequences. When he was in California we took walks on the beach and had lunch in a health food restaurant after yoga class. So many times he had suggested that I stop “climbing” myself and journey “into” myself instead.

  “That’s where all you are searching for resides,” he said. “What’s the matter with you? Why don’t you take the time to look?” He hadn’t said it angrily, really, but more impatiently.

  He gave me books about spiritual teachings to read. He told me I should get more in touch with my true identity. I really didn’t understand what he meant. I had always thought that was what I’d been doing, but apparently he was talking on a different level. When I asked him, he would never elaborate. He said I should just think about it and it would come. I thought about what he said, skimmed through the books, but continued to happily approach everything from a head-on, open-minded point of view. Not totally satisfying, really, but certainly functional.

  I was not an unhappy person—not at all. And I always thought I had a pretty good sense of my identity. That’s what everybody said about me. “She knows who she is,” they’d say. In fact, it was sometimes difficult for me to relate to the complaint of the women’s movement that they had been colonized away from their female identities. I had never really had that experience in my life. I sometimes felt to the contrary. I seemed to be so sure of what I felt and what I wanted that some others complained I was too liberated, that I didn’t need anyone.

  But I wasn’t so sure of that anymore. Maybe David was right. Possibly he was seeing something much deeper in me that I was missing because I was already so liberated. Maybe because of that I should realize that I had a long way to go. It’s hard to know something really deep is missing inside yourself when you feel successful and busy and responsible and creative.

  I could smell Marie’s good French cooking waft across the driveway. Mine was the best restaurant in town, only I hardly ever invited anyone to eat. I liked being alone and I was uncomfortable entertaining anyway, especially when I could be spending the time reading or writing.

  Slamming the front door shut so Marie would know I was home, I yelled that I was going to take a bath and relax a little before dinner.

  Two steps at a time when there was no need to rush, I broke a nail as I opened my bedroom door. Damn, I thought, that will take a repair job. But there was the bedroom I loved—spread out, blue and cool and refreshing—waiting for me.

  I loved my ice-blue colored bedroom and its adjacent sitting room-office, as much as a person could love a room. I spent hours there alone. I knew I could lock the door and without seeming impolite or unsociable I could shut out the world. I could have lived in those rooms and never wanted anything more. I never felt detached or abstract in those rooms. I designed the bedroom myself. The blue was pale enough yet vibrant enough to keep both the morning and the evening alive. The drapes were filmy and flowing and stretched across a solid glass sliding wall which overlooked a view of the San Fernando Valley and the mountains beyond—mountains which always took me by surprise on a clear evening. The furniture was covered in crushed blue velvet and the bed with a band-brocaded blue satin spread.

  I remembered hearing about a movie star once who slid out of bed because she slept on satin sheets. I liked being stuck to my regular sheets because I usually read in bed and wrote in bed whenever I didn’t want to feel professional. I had books and notebooks strewn all around me, and whenever I was stuck on a transition or a story point, I would turn the electric blanket up very warm, take a little nap underneath all my research, and by the time I woke, usually had figured out whatever was bothering me. I loved to feel alone in my beautiful bedroom, with nothing but me and whatever I wanted to think about. It was such a fulfilling feeling to know I had concentrated on something deeply and had forgotten all about myself. Maybe David was right. Maybe I should actually learn to meditate … to meditate deeply. Maybe what I would find was what he was talking about.

  I walked into my dressing room and changed. It was a room of mirrors. Mirrors on all four walls and the ceiling … a monument to vanity, I thought—which embarrassed me, because unless I was working on a film I didn’t much care about how I looked.

  I opened one of the mirrored closet doors to change into a robe. I wondered what Gerry would think of my movie star’s closet indulgently crammed with clothes left over from pictures I had made or that I had bought in nearly every big city in the world. I wondered what he’d think if I told him that I loved the feeling of beautiful pearls around my neck at the same time that I felt ostentatious and out of place wearing them. I wondered what he’d think if I told him I loved to snuggle into the deep fur of a soft sable coat, but hardly ever wore it, even though I did get it just for posing for an ad. I wondered how he’d feel about how I loved to travel on the Concorde even though he had campaigned against it.

  I wanted to talk to him about how I had made a lot of money and that it made me feel elite in a world that was broke to know I could buy just about anything I wished for. I wanted to ask him what he would do if he could demand large sums for his services. I had seen him eye my expensive luggage in the hotel room in Paris. Did he think physical manifestations of earned wealth violated socialist principles? Did being born poor automatically make one a good guy? I had wanted to talk to him about it all, but couldn’t because once I had asked him if his wife had nice clothes and luggage that would last a lifetime. “No,” he had said, “my wife is a Marxist. She doesn’t even like it if I wear fur gloves in the winter.”

  I took out a robe and looked around. One of the mirrored walls was a sliding door which led to a terrace with a tumbling rock waterfall and tropical plants and flowers. They were cared for by a Japanese gardener who loved them like children and believed that Peter Tomkins was correct, that plants had emotions. I remembered how silly Gerry thought I was when I first mentioned such a concept to him.

  “Plants can feel?” he laughed. “Well, I’m just glad they can’t talk back.” I had wanted to pursue the conversation but his sardonic laughter nipped it in the bud, so to speak. So often I had longed to pursue some crazy metaphysical idea that might just be a recognized scientific fact in twenty years, but Gerry was the kind of man who dealt only with what he had proof of, what he could see, and what he could therefore parody or comment on sociologically in his occasional fits of black humor. It left out so many possibilities.

  The bathroom was my favorite room. It was just adjacent to the dressing room on the other side of the terrace garden. A sunken square marble tub overlooked the rock waterfall where indirect light now played on the falling, dancing water in the evening light. There were two toilets and two sinks in pink marble and a shower head above the tub in brass. I loved the fact that the sunken tub was so large I didn’t need a shower curtain to protect the carpeting from the spray of the shower.

  I leaned over and turned on the tub faucet. Warm water always made me feel better. Often, no matter where I was in the world, a tub of warm water could change my spirits into happiness.

  Now as I simply held my hands under the warm flow I began to feel more relaxed.

  I sighed to myself, climbing into the hot VitaBath soap suds. I thought of my mother. She loved hot baths too. I remembered how she’d sit in the tub and just think. I always wondered if she might be thinking about how to get out … how to get out of her life. It seemed as though everything Mother did, she did for Dad. And after him, for her children. It was the same story with everyone else’s mother, I guess. Her cooking was punctuated by deep sighs. Often she would manage to burn something, and then she would have to wring her hands. Her lovely hands were the most expressive part of her. I always knew how she felt by watching her long, slim fingers, for they never stopped twisting or being busy with something around her neck or wrists. She was either fiddling with a high-necked sweater (wool against her skin bothered her) or toying with her silver chains. I understood that she enjoyed the sensuality of the chains slipping through her fingers. But t
here was a contradiction because I sometimes felt she would choke herself out of frustration. I wanted to understand the contradiction, scream for her to clarify what she was feeling—but when she reached a certain pitch of desperation, before I could sort out my own thinking, she’d launch into another project like peeling potatoes or making scotch cakes.

  Dad knew that Mother had wanted to be an actress, so he said that most of what she was doing was a performance. The two of them, in fact, were like a pair of vaudevillians. I thought I remembered Dad saying something about wanting to run away with a circus when he was fourteen. He loved railway cars and traveling and said that he felt he wouldn’t even have needed make-up to play a clown. And he had a way of commanding attention like no one I’ve seen before or since. He usually did it with his pipe. Regardless of where he sat in a room, it became the center. His chair would become a stage and his friends or family, the audience. He’d crook one leg over the other, pick up his pipe and knock it against the heel of his shoe, as though he were bringing a meeting to order. A tiny hunk of ash would spill from the bowl of his pipe onto the carpet beneath him.

  The roomful of people would by now be uneasily watchful. Then he’d sigh deeply, uncrook his leg, grunt a little and proceed to bend over to determine what to do about the ash. This was the master attention-getter. Would he pick it up? Would he gently squeeze the hunk of ash between his fingers so he wouldn’t crush it into powder? Or would he rifle for a matchbook cover in the top drawer of his little pipe stand beside his chair and scoop it up? It never occurred to anyone watching to go to his rescue. This was a scientifically manipulated exercise of such commanding expertise that it would have been like rushing to the stage to help Laurence Olivier recover a prop he had purposely dropped.

  Usually Dad picked the ash up with the matchbook cover. However, in mid-bend, out of the corner of his eye, he would spot a piece of lint on the shoulder of his jacket. With the pipe in one hand, matchbook cover in the other, the focus of attention on the ashes, he would slowly but surely proceed to flick any discernible flecks of lint he could find while everyone in the room waited on the fate of the ashes. His complete capture of attention accomplished, he was a happy man. If, however, no one paid any attention, Dad would get unmercifully drunk.