It's All In the Playing

by Shirley Maclaine

  Simo came away from the courtyard and joined me in the temple tower. I didn’t tell him my vision.

  “I don’t feel this was a fort,” he said, “or anything like that. I don’t feel war. I feel it was a very advanced society and although I can’t remember what it was like for me, I know that even today it is sacred.”

  The wind whipped around us.

  “I see,” he went on, “priests and ritual ceremonies praising the sun and moon and God. I see all the people in total harmony with nature.”

  I never mentioned the images I had seen that matched his.

  “I’m glad,” I said instead, “that we are here together. I’m so glad you decided to climb.”

  Simo looked over and touched my arm.

  “Nothing is an accident,” he said gently. “We’re together for a reason, but then we’ve always known that, haven’t we?”

  I squeezed Simo’s hand and left the temple tower. I climbed to the edge of the mountain and raised my arms. I felt I should make a pledge of some kind to myself, some kind of a promise. I could feel the invisible presence behind me relax. I could also feel the presence of other beings with me.

  I lifted my face to the misty wind.

  “For all you invisible guides and teachers and Gods around me,” I said out loud. “I know you’re there and I know I’m not letting you help and love me enough. I am going to change that by allowing myself to receive your love and help. That is what it means to be a woman.”

  I lowered my arms. That was all I had to say.

  There were those who would say that I was “allowing” them to help me too much already. But I had learned one thing a long time ago. The safest place for me was out on a limb, because that was where the fruit was.

  Chapter 20

  The scene for the next day was to take place in a broken-down bus. It called for chickens, pigs, and goats to ride along with John and me. To convey the sense of culture shock, we had written into the scene that a pig would be handed across the laps of Shirley and David while they were eating a sandwich. It took eighteen takes of pig-handling and uncounted numbers of curves in the road till we had the right sunlight for the “background.” Why background was so important in a pig-handling scene was analogous to the classical conflict in filmmaking between front-of-the-camera people and behind-the-camera people. In all my years of movie-making I could never get it clear which was the higher priority. It would seem obvious that the actors’ reactions to the pig would take a higher priority (front of the camera). But then if there was darkness in the background, the long shot wouldn’t match the close-ups which would come later.

  In any case, irrespective of John’s good morning health and my sunny attitude, it wasn’t long before the whole thing descended to the pits of movie-making madness. The pig got sick and threw up on me. The goat grabbed my sandwich and ate it, and the chickens thought nothing of backing up, leaning out of their cages, and relieving themselves on my Peruvian poncho, which had no double because it was the original I had worn when this whole experience unfolded in the first place. Life imitating art? Art imitating life? I don’t know. I was too sick to analyze. I’m not good in moving vehicles anyway. Curves always make me nauseous. And clean smell is a favorite for me. Well—I had neither. Clearly this reality was a learning experience. I tried to make myself believe it.

  John went into one of his smiling trances—out of it, away somewhere—and I used every visualization known to metaphysical circles to keep from throwing up even further on my wardrobe. To exacerbate the difficulties, a toothless woman holding her baby in full view of the camera decided it was time to nurse her child. She pulled out a beautiful bulbous tit, stuffed it into her baby’s mouth, and began to sing over our dialogue. Butler yelled, “Cut.”

  She of course spoke only Quechua and continued to suckle her child and sing. The cameras stopped, the sound tape stopped, the bus stopped, and the script girl exited the bus and vomited. The pig threw up again on the floor, the goat went for my hat, and the chickens leaned farther out of their cage. The baby nursed silently, with unperturbed concentration. One of the crew asked for the door to be opened. He fled down the steps and leaned over just in time. John smiled his secret trance smile and Butler winced. He couldn’t deal with the nursing baby. He decided to take control of the situation anyway. In his best Beverly Hills television dialect he shouted to a woman in the back of the bus: “Now listen, babe, let’s have you wing that basket full of vegetables up here a taste more rapid. Ya dig?”

  The woman stared at him. I stared at him. The crew stared at him. Not only did she not speak one word of English, she didn’t even speak Spanish. She spoke only Quechua. That didn’t seem to deter Butler at all. He repeated his direction with a kind of blind faith while the rest of us prayed to be rained out.

  Two hours later we got the shot and the rain, which meant that we were relegated to walking, sloshing up to our ankles in Peruvian mud mixed with all sorts of organic waste assembled by Mother Nature. This was to be the standard operating procedure for the rest of the shoot. McPherson had warned us about the rain, but I guess he figured mud (and whatever else) was too earth plane to mention. Either that, or from his perspective, everything looked like light.

  Since a movie company could be termed a mini-society, it wasn’t startling that a mini-revolution broke out among the ranks of the Peruvian and American crew. The Peruvians insisted they weren’t being fed properly and were angry. The Americans were being fed and were angry because they didn’t want to eat in front of their brethren who had worked just as hard in the rain and mud as they did. So everyone was hungry and angry.

  Yudi, the assistant director, inherited the problem. She came to me pleading for something to be done with “these penny-pinching ABC money people.” I agreed and told her to send the driver back to the hotel to get one of them who was having lunch in a dry dining room.

  The driver elected to tell the ABC production brass that they’d better get out to the location quick because I was quitting the show. (He was probably one who got no food.) They showed up as though borne on lightning. (When the star quits or refuses to work, that’s real bucks to be worried about.)

  Brass Number One spoke first.

  “It’s all fixed,” he said.

  Yudi didn’t wait for more B.S.

  “Listen,” she accused. “I’ve brought up this problern to you guys five times in the course of this shoot and you’ve done nothing about feeding the Peruvian crew. You stay at the hotel all day. We have to work with them.”

  “Well,” said Brass Number Two, “you know Americans aren’t welcome anywhere anyway.”

  His logic slid by me.

  Brass Number One spoke up.

  “They don’t like our food anyway. They have their own ways, you know.”

  I guessed that one of their “ways” was to handle hunger silently.

  They both continued in unison, overlapping each other. “They’re supposed to bring their own food. Besides, our crew probably hired more Peruvian help on the sly and that’s why there’s not enough food. They make more in one day from us than they do in one month from anyone else. They know what they want. They don’t want our ways.”

  Everyone turned to look at me.

  “Well,” I said, “our American crew is really pissed off at your human insensitivity while they and the Peruvians are slogging away in pig shit and mud. They are buying the food for their co-workers out of their own pockets. Make some kind of new arrangement. Okay? I hate seeming like ugly Americans when we’re supposed to be doing a spiritual picture here.”

  The guys blushed. I knew they were only trying to save money—as, indeed, they were supposed to. Like so many location problems, this one probably arose from a breakdown in communication. The Peruvian firm delegated to hire the Peruvian crew probably neglected to tell them to bring their own food as part of the deal. Sooo … there we were: in the crap, literally.

  “Look,” I finished. “I don’t blame them for
not wanting our ways. But they would like some food. So order some Peruvian food from the caterer. Okay?”

  There was a condescending collective nod as they got up to leave.

  I was to learn later that Yudi had a private meeting with them where she really let them have it:

  “There we were with a director who speaks television English no one understands, a vomiting crew, a vomiting pig, chickens with diarrhea, goats that eat props, an oblivious-to-time nursing mother, a bus stuck in the mud, a Peruvian revolt, and a schedule to keep. You apologize to every member of our crew and don’t let me hear one of you say I’m stirring up trouble.”

  The Brass complied. The mixture of art and business was not easy on human sensibilities, particularly when each individual had his own set of priorities. I, however, was really proud of Yudi.

  In the meantime, the bureaucratic cultural representative telephoned Stan and said, “No flying, no UFOs, and no people perpetrating a neo-Nazi plot to discredit the intelligence of the Third World.”

  Colin said, “Think of it as someone who says the Brooklyn Bridge was built by a New Yorker, and someone else says, ‘No, it was built by an extraterrestrial.’ Let the someone-else guy say it. That’s freedom of speech. That’s democracy.”

  “No, Colin,” said Stan. “Let’s let John do one of his famous ‘it could be anything’ takes. The guy won’t know what that means.”

  I walked into John’s trailer. He was smiling and mischievous. I was to learn that adversity made him happier because it helped him define his identity. Cowboy, John’s assistant, was frying Spam over a Bunsen burner.

  “So you’re going to eat that fried stuff?” I asked.

  John smiled. “Sure I am. The heartburn feels good. I have to hurt myself, since everybody else is being so nice to me.”

  Wow, I thought. “You know you’re no Catholic, John. You’re a terminal Protestant, because you always need something to overcome.”

  John bit into the fried Spam.

  “That’s why I like Cowboy. Like I tell him, he has the good grace to allow me to fail.”

  The drama of the crew revolt carried with it enough gossip to occupy us for days. I had learned early on that on a shoot, somehow it seemed necessary to have someone to hate, someone whom everyone considers the heavy. It’s unfortunate that having a common enemy draws people together but at least then they don’t attack each other. In that respect, a “son-of-a-bitch” makes it possible for the rest of the group to operate harmoniously. Such was the role that the ABC Brass selflessly played. Stan knew he had to be the good guy, the one everybody loved and respected. And I had to be the “creator” who was crazy enough to attempt to initiate all of it in the first place. And John? He was the teacher and the entertainment, since we didn’t have television, and our Gauchos cookies, See’s chocolates, and Nutter-Butter cookies were held up in Customs.

  The shooting progressed regardless of the weather. Making a movie must be comparable to a military invasion, I think. Human individuality takes a back seat to the overall project, yet without the idiosyncratic contributions that only individuals can make, there is no successful theater of “war.” There is a mathematics to the precision required, compounded of human selflessness, a desire to please, and a fear of displeasing the person in charge—who in feature films is the director, and in television, the producer.

  The terrain we were shooting around was breathtaking. The rarefied altitude of the Andes caused us to feel the vividness of our waking hours as intensely as our sleeping hours, each of us experiencing strong dreams, having powerful impact, sometimes nightmares, sometimes exquisitely lovely images, sometimes idealized romance. It was as though we were centered in an energy power point that amplified what ordinarily would have been a more low-key experience.

  None of us slept more than a few hours a night. And when we did, it was in fits and spurts. Sometimes we weren’t even sure whether we were sleeping or not.

  Rain came several times every day. We shot through it if possible, chilling our feet and legs to the bone. It didn’t matter that we were ankle-deep in mud because we were being shot from the waist up. I thought of McPherson’s warnings. Such simple pleasures as hot coffee and the warmly welcomed Nutter-Butter cookies, which finally arrived, made us feel we were being given a treat. We were reduced to almost childlike pleasures and interreactions. Sprightly jokes were prevalent when the sun was shining. Bathroom humor was the rule of the day when the mud squished in around us.

  The Peruvian crew and extras did the best they could with attempting to understand why we had invaded their land, why we were requesting them to do such strange things as “hit marks,” “do it again with more animation,” and the like. It was doubly difficult for Yudi and Butler because there were no words in Quechua for movie, camera, once again, or even thank you. I remember asking one of the Peruvian crew if it was difficult to speak Quechua. He said to speak it well you had to be born to it. Later on I asked him about the fermented native drink chi-chi; I wondered how potent it was. “One sip of chi-chi,” he said, “and you speak fluent Quechuan.”

  Brad May tried to balance artistic perfection with efficiency and speed, and his desire to win an Emmy for cinematography was not lost on the rest of us. Stan, as a good producer, said we were all pulling for him (particularly with such glorious scenery to work with), but we needed to pull faster. Brad knew I squinted in the sun, so he took time to erect a silk tarp over my head. “The movie is about the lady’s adventure, not squintage,” he would say. “And I don’t want to be responsible for launching Shirley into character parts.” Another few hours would go down on the production chart by Brad’s name.

  Butler promised he’d shoot more master shots and not fall prey to his television conditioning, which dictated that every scene end with a close-up.

  “Awfulness,” Butler would say. “The awfulness of conditioning.”

  Yudi, who was in charge of organizing the production to make the shooting run quickly and smoothly, was faced with extras who wondered why we were pushing them around, difficulty in communicating, and because of the unpredictable weather, rarely knowing which scenes were next.

  However, all problems paled when John Heard dunked me in the so-called mineral bath. I swallowed water the grips wouldn’t put their feet in, and of course my hair and makeup were ruined. I was stunned. The crew shrank back into a mudbank, wondering how I’d handle it. I wasn’t sure myself. When I surfaced, John was just standing there smiling at me. I truly do not know what the hell he had in mind but the effect was somehow to put everything else in perspective. It was such a spontaneous act that in many ways I thought it was funny. Outrageous, but funny. And so I shook the dirty water from my hair and face and couldn’t think of anything to say but “I don’t believe you did that.”

  The crew knew a long coffee break when they saw one. I retired to my trailer. There was no hot water, so someone got me rainwater in a bucket to wash my hair. All my makeup was streaked with mascara and mud, so I washed it off and Tina applied it again.

  Stan walked in.

  “We always say we’ll never make another movie again, don’t we? But somehow when it’s all over we forget the pain and difficulties.”

  I nodded, almost chuckling to myself.

  “It’s like childbirth, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “Yep,” answered Stan.

  I stared into the makeshift mirror, wondering if John would survive a push into the Urubamba River.

  Just as Tom McPherson had predicted, several of the crew members were experiencing serious cardiovascular difficulties with the hard work in such high altitude. Most everyone had intestinal and stomach problems, and was losing weight. Tempers were short over such mistakes as the hotel operators calling the wrong rooms in the middle of the night.

  The most serious sickness was that of the leading man on our sound crew. An old soldier from many wars, he refused to put his own health ahead of the production. He was close to cardiac arrest every day. S
o Stan took charge and told him he had to go home. No film was worth dying for.

  On the day he left, we stopped the cameras and waved to his plane as it circled overhead. I heard someone say “The lucky cuss.” But another guy shot a look at him and said, “What’s the matter? Is what you’re learning about yourself too much for ya?”

  As each of us dealt with the difficulties in our own way, it soon became clear that we each had different lessons to learn and problems of self-esteem to solve. I heard the word karma everywhere as relationships were buffeted about in storms of emotional conflict. “What goes around comes around” was on everyone’s lips. A kind of clear karmic harmony began to become evident. If someone was cruel and short-tempered at ten in the morning, it took no longer than till eleven o’clock for that person to experience the same treatment from another.

  “It used to take three months for my karma to come around,” I heard someone say. “Now I’m experiencing it in twenty minutes.”

  And so it went. Sometimes the rain would come in flashing torrents, drenching us with such swiftness that there was no time to run for cover. There were many “towing” shots, where John and I had to do scenes in an open jeep with the cameras chained securely to the windshield and on “door platforms” while the camera crew huddled in a truck, hunkered down under yellow rain slickers. Sometimes they sang between gusting flurries of rain; sometimes they shivered in silence. I think John, as a New York actor, must have reassessed his respect for making movies. There was no way to know what the cameras were recording. There was no room in the jeep for Brad, and Butler sat in the back seat unable to see us. The dailies never did arrive, so we were, in effect, shooting blind, with only the crackling long-distance telephone assurance of someone back home in the editing room telling us that what we were getting was okay. They couldn’t possibly understand what it felt like to pull trucks out of the mud every morning while living on peanut butter and crackers. Our feet were wet and frozen inside our combat boots, and our stomachs rumbled with Peruvian dysentery. The Peruvians themselves stood in open sandals in the cold driving rain with such patience, peering at us from under drenched ponchos and wondering if these invaders from North America’s Hollywood were really from another planet.