It's All In the Playing

by Shirley Maclaine

  The night before I left for Peru I sat and meditated. I was beginning to see I could take control of my destiny in every way. My work would not only be person to person now, but person to humanity. It was now important for me to take complete responsibility and to be aware of what was going on around me, but not afraid. I recognized and acknowledged that I had prepared for my trip to Peru for a very long time; that the first time I went I decided to use that trip as a vision quest, and knew then that I would write the book that would become a film that would take me back again.”

  —from It’s All in the Playing

  Bantam Books by Shirley MacLaine

  Ask your bookseller for the books you have missed

  DANCING IN THE LIGHT

  “DON’T FALL OFF THE MOUNTAIN”

  GOING WITHIN

  IT’S ALL IN THE PLAYING

  OUT ON A LIMB

  YOU CAN GET THERE FROM HERE

  DANCE WHILE YOU CAN

  MY LUCKY STARS

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  About the Author

  Copyright

  I would like to thank

  Colin Higgins

  Bella Abzug

  Stan Margulies

  Thomas Sharkey

  John of Zebedee

  Tom McPherson

  Lazaris

  Charles Dance

  and

  John Heard

  each of whom helped me to

  realize an aspect of myself

  When the eagle of the North

  flies with the condor of the South—

  the spirit of the land she will awaken

  Peruvian Inca prophecy

  Chapter 1

  I stretched upright, lifted my arms to the sky, and breathed deeply. I needed the oxygen. The altitude of the surrounding Cordillera Blanca mountain range, high in the Andes of Peru, was 22,205 feet. I was standing at only 12,000 feet and could still feel my heart pounding and thumping. It occurred to me that it would be worth the discipline of coming here just to get in shape for a new show. Returning to two shows a night at sea level would be a breeze.

  From where I stood I could see straight across the valley of Rio Santa, known among the Andeans as the Callejón de Huaylas. The Rio Santa valley is one of those places so stunningly beautiful as to be literally breathtaking—in fact, its impact on me might have been the real reason I was short of breath. To attempt a description can give only a hint of the meadows of waving corn, silent turquoise lakes, and luminescent waterfalls tumbling into the rich and fertile valley below, backed by unending vistas of ice-covered peaks marching in glacial splendor to their high horizon. I have always loved mountains, always felt a sense of peace and elation being there, a glowing feeling that something wonderful is going to happen just around the corner—and even if it doesn’t it won’t matter because every present moment is so magical. I wondered what Gerry would think of this ancient Inca land, of its secretive, mystical quality. I reached out and peeled the soft skin from a quenuales tree. It was more like fabric than bark. Gerry said that all of his happiest moments had been connected to nature, yet he never had too much time for it. The smell of Scotch broom and eucalyptus mingled in the glacial mountain air. God, it was so strange how I missed him, particularly since there hadn’t been any personal involvement for so long.

  It had been ten years since our troubled love affair had sparked the self-search that pushed me into writing Out on a Limb, which, in turn, first brought me to these mountains. Long enough, I thought, for me to be objective about Gerry in the film I was now making of the book. And I had good cause to be grateful to Gerry, whose rigidly skeptical attitude about spiritual values had provoked me into further explorations both on my own and with my friend David—David … who had been a composite of so many people acting as spiritual guides for me, condensed into a character who would become real on the screen. I wondered about all the people whose various realities I had combined to crystalize in David. Would they see the film in far-flung areas of the world? Would they even know, from distant mountain-tops, that it existed? David—my creation, a marvelous, quirky, gentle, strong friend who led me into the labyrinth of my self and left me to find my own way. I had created David. I had created myself. Was life like the movies, only a dream?

  I felt a crisp, cold, yet mellow warmth flow together like a textured elixir over my bare arms. I could see sugar-cane fields far down in the valley. The air was so clear I could make out where sheep and cattle dotted the craggy mountains, and where molle (red pepper) trees provided shade for the mountain people in their brilliantly colored ponchos. Brilliantly colored so as to permit people to distinguish one another in the mountain distances, each village subscribing to its own color.

  The peasants took great care of their sheep, the most highly prized of animals, for their perennial gift of wool. Often the Andeans used pigs as watch animals to tend children—animals and peasants all participating fully in family life. When I asked why I never saw llamas or alpacas or vicuñas in this part of the Andes, no one seemed to know except that “they had just never come over here.”

  I sat down under the quenuales tree and bit into an apple I had brought with me. I focused on the irony of the stunning countryside, remembering how deeply affecting the natural disasters of the area had been in scarring the memories of the people who lived here just recently. It would be impossible to understand the culture of the people here without recognizing the accepting, fatalistic undercurrent that made it possible for them to live under the threat of storm, earthquake, and volcano.

  Huarás, the central commercial and cultural mountain city of the region, with a population now of 50,000, suffered a massive earthquake on the afternoon of May 31, 1970. Measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale, it killed about 67,000 people, leveling almost every town in the Callejón de Huaylas. In terms of lives lost it was the worst disaster in the history of the Americas. The quake lasted about fifty seconds and was followed by aftershocks all through the night. It was so severe that two days later helicopters were still unable to land in some places, because the dust was so thick. The death toll would have been greater had it not struck on a Sunday when children were out of school.

  Not long after, in 1972, the shocking avalanche landslide occurred which buried the beautiful mountain city of Yungay, killing 18,000 of its inhabitants. The people still speak of the massive slabs of granite that broke loose from the west face of the north peak of Nevado Huascarán. Three million cubic meters of ice and mud rode a cushion of air down to Yungay and the Santa River in only three minutes, at a speed of 300 kilometers an hour. The only survivors were 240 people watching a circus outside the avalanche path who managed to scramble to a high knoll.

  Way back when, Gerry had been shocked that I was going to Peru. He and I had talked of the destiny of those 240 people. Why were they different? He said it was coincidence. I said it was karmic.

  As I sat munching my
apple I wondered what I’d do if I found myself caught in an event of that magnitude. And worse, how would I feel if I survived? Would I know why? As soon as the thought struck me I was reminded that I had been through such disasters many times—not in this life, but in others. Even today I have a haunting terror of tidal waves. I “knew” I had watched, transfixed in horror, as a mountainous wall of water bore down on me, curling me into it. The terror of my memory was not associated with being inundated by the weight of the water, but more by the pull of the giant undertow as it sucked me out to sea again. I remembered dying then, almost relieved that earthly panic and pain had ceased.

  I was convinced that I had lived before, “died” before, and would live and “die” again.

  As I sat thinking I reflected on what I had just been through. I was exhausted from shooting a five-hour miniseries based on my book Out on a Limb in which I played myself. It was that original experience in Peru that led me to search out the possibility that life was more multi-dimensional in its reality than what I could see or prove. Having lived and “died” before was only part of it. Life was ongoing and eternal. I was sure of that.

  But now I was beginning to explore the concept that everything that happened in my life was occurring because I was creating it in order to learn about myself. The uniqueness of filming Out on a Limb was that it was a metaphor and a constant daily reminder of that truth.

  I looked out across the mountains and asked myself what I had learned from the experience. If I acknowledged that I created my own reality on every level, then I had been totally responsible for everything that had gone on. That would be something to write about, I thought. But dare I go back to the well of my Peruvian adventure in order to peer into the illusion within the illusion of my life? Would that be the ultimate self-centeredness? Yes. The more I understood self, the more centered I became. And the more I understood others. That was the point. It all starts with self.

  Truly, life is a stage and each of us players upon it. We choose our parts, but how we play them is the real issue. Sometimes we complain about the parts we have written for ourselves; sometimes we wish we had someone else’s part. But more important than anything, we so harshly judge the manner in which we play ourselves, as well as how someone else is playing his or her part. We all know there is a need for protagonists and antagonists in a “play” in order to have color and dramatic, or even comedic, tension. Without the polarity of tension and points of view in a play, there is no interest. So why is it that we are so unwilling to be tolerant of those very values that give us the color and tension and differences in the grander play called life?

  That is what this book is about. Life was becoming like a play to me. A play that I was not only writing for myself every day of my life, but acting in as well. So, necessarily, all the characters were characters of my own creation, on the screen and off; apparently necessary because I found them either amusing, intriguing, infuriating, upsetting, repulsive, entertaining, loving, or uplifting. Characters who failed to hook me emotionally were not in my play. They didn’t need to be. I noticed that only characters who enabled me to learn and touch more of myself were in my play. I barely knew the others existed. In fact the characters in my life’s play seemed to exist in direct ratio to what I needed or wanted to learn about the world and myself. And when I learned whatever it was, the characters that had acted as mirrors for me subtly disappeared, somehow replaced by new players who offered entirely new themes and perspectives. Not all my characters were in for the run-of-the-play contract. I didn’t want them to be. Did that seem cruel and unfeeling? No, not really. It was just simply true. I did that to players in my drama and they did that to me in theirs. We existed on several separate levels of reality simultaneously. Or to put it another way, the creatures, persons, events of my reality, as in the activity of all creation, took on a life of their own.

  I remembered a dream I used to have as a child—a rather prophetically sophisticated dream as I look back on it now.

  I dreamed I was being chased by a gorilla. I ran until I came to the edge of an abyss. Then I had a choice. I could confront the gorilla or jump, out of fear, into the abyss. I turned to the gorilla and said, “What do I do now?” The gorilla threw up his hands and answered, “I don’t know, kid. It’s your dream.”

  That’s just about how I look at things now. It’s all my dream. I’m making all of it happen—good and bad—and I have the choice of how I’ll relate to it and what I’ll do about it.

  Other people are creating their dreams, too, with their own casts of characters. These realities intersect in ways so involved that the dynamics of the outcome ultimately drive one in upon one’s own reality. The question then becomes: “What do I do about this, or what do I want from this?” which, of course, was the question in the first place. The lesson? Perhaps we are all telling the truth—our truth as we see it. (Or hiding from it, of course.) Perhaps everyone has his own truth, and truth as an objective reality simply does not exist.

  There’s nothing like making a movie to bring home that point, because you can make the truth anything you want it to be. Particularly if what you’re dealing with is your own life. I have been accused by some of “remarkable” hubris in making Out on a Limb, but because of the experience of playing myself in a film, I was able to look closely at the illusion within the illusion. It began in Peru ten years ago and ended in Peru ten years later. But the stops along the way were the real story.

  Chapter 2

  ABC Television approached me to consider making a miniseries film of my book Out on a Limb. They spoke of metaphysical searching being popular now and extraterrestrials and UFOs as something the public was genuinely interested in. Witness Cocoon, E.T., Star Wars, Close Encounters, Starman, and so on. For a long time I didn’t take their suggestion seriously. Somehow in my mind, my writing speculations were separate from my performing career. It wasn’t until later that I realized that each was an aspect of the individual creativity, coming from the same source and returning to the same source.

  About the same time, I found myself “accidentally” in a restaurant in the San Fernando Valley talking with my friend Roddy McDowall, who said that writer-director Colin Higgins (Harold and Maude, Nine to Five, Foul Play, Best Little Whorehouse) thought that Out on a Limb would make a good movie. A movie? Or a television miniseries? A captive audience shelling out $5.50 per person for the privilege or a living-room audience getting up for a beer? Then I thought: Two hours isn’t enough time to tell the story, and besides, every American household has at least one member of the family who has had a mystical experience, felt déjà vu, seen a UFO, or experienced an inexplicable “coincidence” of one sort or another.

  I decided to call Colin.

  “Listen,” I began. “TV seems to me to be a natural medium (no pun intended) for a real-life drama about my reincarnated love affair with a British M.P., and a Peruvian encounter with a man who claimed to have a relationship with an extraterrestrial from the Pleiades. What do you think?”

  “Well,” said Colin, “I see a lot of entertainment value either way. What you just outlined is already funny.”

  God knows Colin Higgins knew comedy, irrespective of the fact that he spent his childhood in Australia. I wondered how funny he would think TV salaries were. Or more to the point, how funny would his high-powered Hollywood agent feel if Colin was slumming in television.

  It didn’t matter. Colin, as it turned out, was a fellow searcher. He had attended as many metaphysical seminars as I had, and even introduced me to a transmedium I had never previously heard of. He also began to reveal to me a set of personal values of the highest human priorities I had run into in twenty years of successful artistic encounters. The litmus test for me then was, as it is now: do people apply their spiritual and metaphysical knowledge to the roles they play in life? Colin does—in spades, as they say.

  So we began a creative and personal friendship which challenged us both and which I’m sure will also sta
nd the test of time and artistic trauma. It was evident to both of us that spiritual material, if honestly perceived, tended simultaneously to keep the working and personal relationship free of contaminating influences such as power grabs, ego trips, temperamental fury, writer’s block, and fear of what the audience thinks and feels.

  Colin is about five eleven, storybook handsome, with a brown mane of hair so luxuriously rich that on first meeting him I had the impulse to run my fingers through it but hesitated for fear the tresses would come unglued in my hand. A baseless fear. The hair was real. I emphasize the hair of the man because somewhere under there I felt that it was the gift wrapping for his creativity. I was right.

  Now, Colin has an interesting way of walking. I can always tell what mood he’s in by the way he walks. If he’s been hurt and is feeling vulnerable, his arms hang from his sides and his steps seem as though they are moving in place. His chin juts out as though he expects a jab, and a smile of ironic resignation plays on his lips. When he’s in centered spirits his eyes flash, he speaks much faster, with clarity and force, and when he walks, his arms move more enthusiastically. Sometimes he even holds a cigarette “to seem grown-up,” and always he cuts right through the comedy chicken fat until the bone of humor is pristine and sparkling. I’ve noticed that really creative comedy scientists never feel the need to perform. They are too busy observing and analyzing why something or someone else is truly comic—as opposed to “hostile” comic. But when their own funny bone is tickled they let go with uncontrollable abandon. Every once in a while that happens with Colin and he becomes an incisive, mischievous brat; the essence of comedy bite. That’s when I started calling him Harold after the character he conceived in Harold and Maude. In fact I sometimes see myself as Maude (the eighty-year-old fun-loving Auntie Mame character) and him as Harold. Anyway, that’s my way of referring to him when I love him the most or when I feel he should listen harder.