It's All In the Playing

by Shirley Maclaine

  So Harold and I began to interview prospective writers for Out on a Limb. He would oversee and supervise and I would keep it real and honest, since it was my life.

  To make a very long one-year story short, we decided to write the screenplay ourselves. We knew the material better than anyone else. Even though I had never written a screenplay before, and Colin, an experienced screenplay writer, had no idea about writing a five-hour film with commercial breaks, we proceeded with courage. A regular two-hour screenplay usually took a year. So were we talking a two and one-half-year job here? Well, we both knew the UFOs would have landed already if we took that long.

  I had attempted a kind of detailed screen treatment of five hundred pages on another subject I had shown Colin some months before. He was impressed with the fact that I “worked hard.” Now I pulled out the screenplays for Terms of Endearment and Being There (two that I admired a great deal) and began to study them as a writer, not as an actress. I began to see and understand the subtlety of the craft a bit more. I wrote the first three hours of Out on a Limb as an exercise in on-the-job training. Colin said, “Now at least we know it can work.”

  So then we wrote a “treatment”—that is, a brief plot rundown with high-point scenes and a fleshing-out of the chief characters—for a five-hour screen scenario based on the book. There were really going to be only four major protagonists: Gerry, my British M.P. lover; Bella Abzug, whose life and friendship speak for themselves; my precious David, who introduced me to spiritual matters and guided me in Peru; and myself. Colin and I worked with our proposed producer, Stan Margulies, who was an experienced television miniseries producer (Roots, The Thorn Birds) until Stan said we were ready to present our outline to Brandon Stoddard, head of entertainment at ABC.

  I was leery of television executives, feeling that you could put their collective intelligence on the head of a pin and, as Oscar Levant once said, still have some room left over. But Mike Nichols had told me that Brandon Stoddard was different. Mike had made Silkwood for ABC. He was right.

  Brandon ushered us into his office with an informal flourish. (He looks like a shrewd child-man with intensely intelligent eyes and a skin of scrubbed freckles.) He listened politely as Colin and I blue-skyed our presentation. (We embellished as we went along.)

  Stan sat quietly, reminding me of an inscrutable Talmudic scholar who, in calm shrewd silence, knows he will always get his way. Stan had earned the respect of so many people, he didn’t need to do anything that even hinted at pulling rank. He knew the show would be good.

  One of ABC’s female executives was present as Brandon’s co-decision-maker. She was a pants-suited “I’ve come a long way, baby” female. She must have seen her job as one of being the devil’s advocate (again, no pun intended) in a sea of mystical spiritualistic ecstasy. On an earlier occasion she had literally auditioned Colin and made some sterling suggestions for Shirley’s character, such as: “She is too successful, too much in command of her life, and doesn’t have any problems the TV audience can identify with. Maybe you should give her a serious leg injury so she can’t dance, or maybe make the love affair with Gerry really agonizing to the point of suicide and that’s why Shirley goes on her spiritual search.” When I pointed out that neither of these suggestions was even remotely true and hence hardly relevant to my life story, she countered with: “But we need to pull a rating.” I felt doubly awkward because she was a woman in an important job, but her need to prove her “executivibility” was earnest, so we simply had to cope with it as well as we could.

  Brandon fortunately turned out to be his own decision-maker. He caught the drift of my remarks in response to further suggestions from the lady and sent Colin and me away to come up with whatever script we thought would work. He said ABC had been attempting a metaphysical story for years and could never arrive at anything personally dramatic and involving. He was well aware of the growing spiritual hunger in the American culture and wanted to be the one who had the courage to okay the nourishment.

  Colin and I left extremely impressed. Thus began the collaboration of Harold and a slighter, younger Maude.

  In June of 1985, Colin came up to my house in the Pacific Northwest. His agent did not know what he was doing there. If he hadn’t known better, he could have explained it away as a Hollywood fling or something. But Harold and I never thought of each other in those terms. He had a kind of a girlfriend anyway and I had sworn off men for a while. Or rather the “feeling” gave me up—I didn’t give it up. The two of us were to make the gossip columns quite frequently, but that only made us laugh.

  Anyway, there we were in my home. It is a place of beauty and a joy forever, surrounded by trees and located on a mountaintop looking straight across at Mount Rainier, and with a full-fledged tumbling river below us. There is a swimming pool with warm water and a hot tub of hotter water, all of which one enjoys with the surrounding 360-degree view.

  This house is my personal paradise which I bought by dancing two shows a night—the leg action that the female executive had wanted me to sabotage for “ratings”! (I always have felt that telling the truth is the wisest course, as well as explaining my feeling that one definitely deserves everything one has earned.)

  Anyway, my assistant, Thomas Sharkey, endearingly known to me and my friends as Simo (because of a past-life connection), runs the house for me. He takes care of the dogs (a handsome chocolate-brown Lab named Hot Fudge Sultan and, a later arrival, a snow-white American Eskimo named Shinook). We have a large vegetable garden, which Simo tends and nurtures, along with flowers abounding in rainbow colors, and chickens and birds that the dogs delight in pestering. Simo also cooks, which is important to this story, because Harold and I love to eat. Plain, regular eating is one thing, but eating as a kind of artistic reward is quite another. It’s difficult to articulate the joy of eating half a coconut cake after you know you’ve written a good scene. And conversely, it is probably hard for anyone to believe that we sometimes wrote good scenes because we knew there was coconut cake in the oven at the other end of the tunnel. But that’s the way it was with Harold and me.

  We wrote in the kitchen den. We could have chosen any room in the house, but we chose to write near the food. It kept us going. And when Simo went into his act in the kitchen, it was up for grabs which of us was the most entertaining. The smell of barbecued shrimp, steaming homemade lentil vegetable garlic soup, hot homemade bread, and fresh apple pie was enough to motivate us to write Citizen Kane Revisited.

  Colin began as an actor. He has exquisite sensitivity regarding the problems of actors. So before we committed a scene to paper, we acted it out. Sometimes I took the part of “Shirley” and sometimes he did, and sometimes we switched roles in midstream. In any case, Simo had no idea that we worked that way. He had heard that writers write. So most of the time he would discreetly baste the roast, with his head in the oven so as not to overhear our artistic arguments. Then, in the middle of tempers flaring and insults screaming, Colin and I would stop cold and say: “No, that doesn’t work. Let’s try this.” And we’d be at it again. For a while Simo thought we were conducting a New Age relationship where we’d let it all hang out and comment as we went. What pleased Simo the most, however, was that in the first few days Harold and I devoured three cakes, pounds of shrimp and scallops, a couple of chickens, enough salad for an army of rabbits, and several quarts of ice cream. Both the screenplay and our bodies were getting fatter. We worked and ate thirteen hours a day, sometimes taking a break to swim or walk. We didn’t answer the phone, and thought and breathed nothing but our story. In ten days we felt we had completed the first draft of the first three hours.

  At this point I should elaborate more on what it means to have a professional association with an individual who is himself seriously involved in spiritual meaning and metaphysical perspectives. The cornerstone of such values is the understanding that each of us creates our own reality. Blaming whatever happens to us on someone or something else went out with
high-button shoes—it’s old-fashioned. Colin and I both understood that each of us was responsible for whatever positive and negative events were flowing in our lives. With that kind of clear perspective, it was possible for each of us to be honest about ourselves and each other. And when you can be honest with the person you’re working with, all sorts of blockages fall away, because you discuss them openly, and as soon as they are acknowledged, they seem to disappear almost as though “once what is to be learned from them is learned,” there is no need for them to exist anymore.

  Colin and I had the view that life itself is a situation comedy, where we play the same scripts over and over, learning something different each time; each of us devising a script for ourselves that enables us to know ourselves better. We saw creativity as a necessary expression in life; almost as though to be alive is to be obligated to create. We also felt that to be creative was to be closer to the meaning of God or the Universal Mind or whatever one wishes to call it. We felt we were drawing on forces beyond our reach, beyond our own empirical understanding.

  Colin and I were both totally familiar with the process of trance channeling: that is, using a talented psychic (medium) as a channel of communication with entities who acted as guides and consultants—and, indeed, as Mends. It was a process I had first written about in Out on a Limb, and it would be, of course, one of the main subjects of the movie. In that context we both felt it was something that had to be handled with careful authenticity.

  Channeling is one of the most controversial and popular processes of the New Age. There are pure channels (mediums) and there are channels who have so much emotional static of their own that the teachings from “the other side” are quite garbled and even inaccurate. I have observed both forms and find both fascinating.

  But there are many people who feel that all of the mediums are acting; that through some process of self-hypnosis they can put themselves into a trance state and pretend that they are teaching complicated revelations in metaphysical truth.

  And so I had studied meticulously and rigorously the emotional language that occurred during channeling. That was one reason I had sessions with so many. I had, by now, met and had sessions with more than twenty trance channeling mediums around the country. All the channelers had originally experienced the same thing. During meditation or in some other relaxed mind state, a spiritual guide would begin speaking, usually first inside their own minds (causing them to believe they were crazy at first) and then, as an adjustment occurred, the spiritual entity used the bodies and facilities of the channelers themselves to convey information. In every case, the trance channelers experienced a shift in perceptions relating to objective reality and, of course, a change in the way they led their lives. In each case there was an adjustment to the curiosity that others evidenced, but also they all told me they became happier in their personal lives because they had “proof” that death was not the final end—that life was eternal as evidenced by their guides, who now resided in a spiritual dimension with personalities and emotions and even involvements in the progress of spiritual understanding and development here on the earth plane.

  I was more interested in how the spiritual guides actually used the medium’s body. Each one of them explained the same thing. They don’t “possess” the body of the trance channeling medium. They “overshadow” it. The medium puts his own “self” consciousness into a trance state, and gives permission for the spiritual entity to overshadow him, imbuing him with the energy that accesses the larynx, the hands, the face, the body, and so on.

  Some trance channeling mediums actually have the experience of leaving their bodies (out-of-body experience) and some simply put their “self” consciousness into an unaware state. All of them say they cannot remember what occurred while in trance, and most of them are concerned that the spiritual entity did not humiliate them or otherwise act without social appropriateness. Some channelers whom I have talked to have been profoundly shocked (while listening to tape recordings later) by the information that came through them, and others have totally rejected some of the knowledge channeled. Often there was no agreement at all between the beliefs of the channeler and the beliefs of the spiritual entity. But always there was an agreement that the entity had permission to use the body of the channeler.

  Colin had by now introduced me to his spiritual teacher, an entity named Lazaris. Lazaris is an entity who channels through a trance medium named Jach Pursel, who lives in San Francisco. Jach is a quiet, affable, unassuming man. He lives and works around the Illuminarium Art Gallery in San Francisco. He is an appreciator of beauty and good food, which we often enjoy together, and is a delightful man just to spend quiet times with. Lazaris came through one day when Jach was deep in meditation. At first Jach was uncomfortable and perplexed as to what had happened to him, but in due time his close friends assured him that the information coming from Lazaris was beneficial and loving. Lazaris as a spiritual guide and teacher spoke about the unseen divine reality which is at our disposal and available to us if we’d make ourselves aware of it. He taught that the universe is an extremely successful place—it is man whose perceptions have veiled the truth. Lazaris taught that mankind’s natural proclivity was to be in harmony—just as plants, animals, fish, and birds were in harmony—that just to be was the goal and the secret to happiness. That was why nature was the ultimate teacher.

  Colin and I were both coming to understand that struggle and strife were not necessary to the creative process. In fact, the notion of needing to overcome adversity in life itself was rapidly becoming passé to us. Adversity is not a requirement anymore. It never comes from outside of us, anyway. It is self-generated, because we believe we need it. So why continue to generate obstacles and impediments in our lives when by now we should know better?

  All of this brings me to what happened after Colin and I finished our first three hours and turned it in to Stan Margulies and ABC.

  The reaction was lukewarm. I knew we had more fine-tuning to do, but I also knew we had a very good script, so I couldn’t understand why ABC wasn’t more positive.

  I called Jach Pursel. He went into trance and Lazaris came through. (Jach often channels on the telephone for his clients.) I asked what had happened. Lazaris was simple and to the point. “Unconsciously,” he said, “you are not certain you want to expose yourself in front of fifty million people who might potentially see your show, contrasted to a few million who have read the same material. As a result, you are preventing the project from flowing smoothly.”

  I was astonished, as yet another fine point in creating my own reality hit me. I had intellectually understood the profundity of such a concept but in my gut I hadn’t really felt it. Lazaris brought it home to me.

  “You mean,” I said, “that I caused the lukewarm reaction to what I worked so hard on?”

  “Precisely,” said Lazaris. “You have a hidden agenda of fear of public judgment on a mass-consciousness level. Recognize that truth, and if you desire to overcome the fear, the energy of the project will be cleared and you will find it going forward rather smoothly.”

  “Why didn’t I recognize my own fear?” I asked.

  “Because,” said Lazaris, “you don’t realize yet that you create your own reality every moment of your day.”

  To make sure of what he was saying, I repeated, “Then you’re saying that I created the lukewarm reaction to my script?”

  “That’s correct. It happened in your dream, did it not?”

  “Yes. But so is this ‘conversation.’”

  “Exactly. You also created me to point it out to you.”

  “So that’s what you mean by all knowledge being available if we just make ourselves open to it?”

  “That is correct. In the spiritual dimension, one can sometimes see more clearly because we don’t have the density of physical life blocking us. However, we also are not experiencing the rich adventure of life as you in the body are.”

  “Do you wish you were in the phy
sical dimension sometimes?” I asked.

  “If I wished it deeply enough it would be my reality. I would do it. For now, I am happy and fulfilled counseling you and others who allow us to be of service and to love you.”

  I thought a long time before I asked the last question. “So you’re saying that if I overcome my fear, ABC and Stan will do a turnaround on their opinion of our script?”

  “We believe so,” he answered. “Yes, try it.”

  I hung up. Talking to a disembodied spiritual, entity, even on the telephone, was no longer novel to me. I had learned to enjoy the give and take of a phone chat as I would with a friend who still had a body! And after hanging up I always looked into my own heart for a correct assessment of the conversation. I had long since learned that I was my own best evaluator.

  Unseen spiritual guides speaking through trans-mediums are not always correct, particularly when it comes to matters of time and mathematical figures. From their plane of consciousness time does not exist in a linear measurement (past, present, and future). All life and experience is occurring for them simultaneously in a hologram. To paraphrase Einstein, “There is no such thing as time as a linear reality. Time is an invention of man.”

  I have been fortunate to “create” and attract accredited transmediums in my life who have been correct a great deal of the “time.” But the test for me has always been how I felt about their advice and projections of the future. The transmedium’s behavior is as important to me as the information coming through: which brings me to the subject of trance mediums charging money. This issue has of course been of primary concern not only for people involved with the New Age awakening of the spirit but for the press as well.

  Materialism itself is a subject that everyone in this society, affluent, middle-class, or poverty-ridden, has to confront, whether the confrontation involves spirituality or not. We see material greed everywhere: in the churches, in the government, on the stock exchanges. We might each ask ourselves what role money plays in our lives. We may understand that greed is wrong and not spiritual, but can we also accept the truth that to be abundant is a spiritual act? The question of spirituality and materialism is full of complexities.