Dancing In The Light

by Shirley Maclaine

  I collected the strewn objects from the coffee table. Bella and Martin came back in and helped me get together my dancing shoes and tights and leotards. Vassy calmly sustained his no-break expression throughout the whole proceedings and, when we were ready, climbed behind the wheel. We drove to Malibu in silence, with the Abzugs following in their car.

  When we got home I said good night to everyone and went directly to bed, trying to secure my emotions in a neat compartment in my head, which would enable me to sleep. Fortunately, except for circumstances which were actually frightening to me, I had the capacity to shut off when I knew I simply had to. (I could always rely on my left-brain, yang, male approach to things!)

  Apparently Vassy hung around in the kitchen with Bella and Martin for a while and they were honest enough to communicate their feelings about what had gone on. They said they felt he had been excessive in his demands and that the pressure of taping had really been the reason for my behavior. He said he had felt unwanted and “unspecial” to me.

  The next morning neither of us said anything about the night before. Bella, though, took me aside and said, “Was that about male chauvinism or about being Russian?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “You’re Russian. You tell me. I’m only a beginner with you people.”

  Vassy and Bella and Martin all accompanied me when I reported to CBS and began the final day of the marathon taping. Vassy, in a good mood, was fascinated with the advanced equipment used in American television.

  The final taping included a twenty-two-minute dance number and, not unpredictably, we got to it at two o’clock the next morning. Exhausted would be an understatement in describing how I felt. I hadn’t been eating properly, mostly because there was no time. And I had been suffering from fainting spells due to what the doctors described as hypoglycemia. So, when the big number rolled around, I was not exactly in marathon shape.

  The number was shot in sections, with long waits in between while the technicians changed the scenery and the lighting. During one long wait I sat beside Vassy, parceling my energy to get through the rest of the night. Bella and Martin had, of course, long since departed.

  “You are a horse,” said Vassy. “You are as a well-trained horse that has had many races and can operate automatically. A real monument of strength.”

  He said it with such admiration it made me proud. I was coping reasonably with everything, until we finally finished the last section. I had some orange juice and cottage cheese, which usually worked for me during taping days (to eat a whole meal would have been disastrous to dance on). We finished the number and I sat down next to Vassy again for a well-deserved collapse. The director and technicians went on to shoot the final pickups I wasn’t needed for.

  Vassy patted my knee and congratulated me again on my stamina. I breathed deeply. I began to feel dizzy. Oh no, I thought, am I having a low-blood-sugar attack now because it’s safe? It wouldn’t be costing any time to do so.

  My lips and hands began to lose their mobility, familiar signs of what was happening to me. A low-blood-sugar attack was not really serious, but it could be frightening to people who had never seen it before. Vassy had never seen it. All I needed was for someone to get me some orange juice—quickly. But predictably, Vassy reacted as though he were dealing with a four-alarm fire, at the top of his not inconsiderable lungs.

  “Sheerlee is dying! Sheerlee is dying!” he shouted huskily.

  The whole place was astonished as he roared for help, gathering me in his arms as though I were at death’s door.

  “Sheerlee, my Sheerlee, don’t die!” he shouted again.

  Someone got the orange juice. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The crew confusedly returned to their work as I tried to calm Vassy and sip the juice at the same time.

  Whenever I finished taping a television special, the entire experience, in retrospect, dimmed like a bubble lost in time. The intensity of the grueling work tended to make me separate the marathon days from real life. Of course, the work involved was inhuman. I knew that as I was doing it, but the sense of isolation also made me tend to relate to events that occurred during the same period as a bubble lost in time too. Such was the case with Vassy. The drama that had occurred on my birthday, along with the passionate theatrics of the low-blood-sugar attack, receded from my memory as theatrical everyday living took precedence instead.

  Vassy subsequently apologized for his birthday-party demands, explaining that upon reflection he thought he understood what he had done wrong. I apologized for turning over the table. I said I understood that living with the demands of my being a “star” couldn’t be easy for him, and he said that his frustrations from being an unemployed director contributed to his behavior.

  Where my low blood sugar was concerned, however, he had decided I should go on a strict diet—to put it bluntly, a fast. I refused, and that became the new source of conflict. He said fasting cured everything from arthritis to hypoglycemia. I said it would kill me—a Mexican standoff.

  He proceeded to comment about every, morsel of food I put in my mouth, on occasion literally pulling the food out of my hand and throwing it down the garbage disposal, or if we happened to be in a restaurant, he would simply return the food to the kitchen. Sometimes I laughed, sometimes I was outraged. The roller-coaster ride was in full swing.

  His deeply felt convictions about my health stemmed from real fear for me and because he cared so much. In principle, he was often right, but I felt that he conducted himself autocratically, as if he were an expert in absolutely everything, and I responded by being in a constant state of very vocal protest. Nothing either of us did eased the situation.

  Even as I was living through it, I found myself standing outside of my own personality observing the scenes unfold, richly endowed, as they were, with valleys and peaks of passion, floods of feeling, and hilarious humor. Smooth it was not. Confusing and bewildering it was … for both of us, I’m sure. Perhaps we continued through the melodramatic maze of it all because we were both involved in professions that used such emotional tumult as grist for the mill. Certainly we were attempting to coexist as man and woman. Therefore whatever occurred as we worked through our crossed cues was productive and contributive. Perhaps the lives we led were indeed scenarios we had mapped out for ourselves to experience long before we had been born.

  Living with Vassy made me think that way. Maybe we really had chosen these circumstances with each other in order to work through values and points of view we hadn’t completed in previous lives together. Karma—cause and effect—whatever it was, I was more and more aware of the precognition that everything was happening for a reason. That Vassy and I were destined to spend time together was a predetermination I felt more and more. Whether it would resolve anything was up to us … how well or badly we handled our problems. He recognized the meaning of what we were experiencing too. Some of it was harsh and heartbreaking, some of it was delirious delight. One evening as we lay together in the twilight zone just before sleep took over, I felt a strong urge to prop myself on my elbow and look into his face. I was not surprised to see tears welling in his eyes. I didn’t need to ask what was wrong. Without acknowledging in any way that he was crying, and totally without self-pity, he said, “I was thinking of how long it took for me to find you again.”

  He said no more than that. It was so simple, so unadorned, so completely self-revealing.

  “How many times do you think we have been together?” I asked gently.

  Vassy sighed with the breath of ages and said, “I don’t know. I am only sure that I was a woman and you were a man more than once. Of that, I am certain. Don’t you feel it?”

  “Yes,” I said, playfully kicking him in the side of the leg. “I feel it because this time around you act so macho, like you’re making up for lost time.”

  “I am not macho. I am Russian,” he answered, tickling me in the ribs. I pulled his hair—an off-limits indiscretion, as I was fully aware.

&n
bsp; He sat bolt upright in the bed, a grin of pure joy announcing his intentions.

  “Now,” he said, mock-grim, “now you will have big troubles.”

  With no more dialogue he proceeded to tickle me unmercifully. I laughed and screamed and laughed and screamed. At last, thoroughly frazzled, I fell off the bed and called for a truce. Flushed with playful power, Vassy affected a stern look of mock agreement and released me from his bearlike grasp. We crawled under the covers, curled up together, and hibernated for the night.

  * * *

  The next day I was driving in Beverly Hills and through a large, spacious store window I spotted a big, almost life-size furry toy bear. I slammed on the brakes, parked close by, and went in to look at it. The store sold electronic equipment, but the owner collected big toy animals. The bear was brown and cuddly with a white face and saucer-sized, Bambi-like eyes with long lashes and furry brown ears. His expression made me chuckle inside when I looked into his face. He had a pudgy stomach and outstretched furry arms. I wanted to hug the creature.

  Next to the bear, sitting on the floor, was a comical lion. Vassy prided himself on being a Leo (born in August), therefore king of the jungle. I knew I had to buy both animals. I would give the bear to him right away, and save the lion for his birthday. The owner agreed to sell them to me and we wrapped them in two monstrous plastic bags.

  That night I gave Vassy the bear, which of course we named Honeybear, Jr.

  Honeybear, Jr., became the source of delight that alleviated our most seriously destructive moments. Whenever we reached a low point of unresolvable difference, either I or Vassy would use Honeybear, Jr., as token of humorous apology. Rather than waving a white flag of truce, we would place Honeybear, Jr., in a comical position somewhere in the house, either on his head in the sink with a towel hanging from one leg, or maybe on top of a half-opened door, which one of us knew the other would walk through, so that Honeybear, Jr., would fall on our heads and remind us to laugh. We used him as a humorous intermediary since neither of us would ever admit we were wrong. I wondered if the Russians and the Americans should bring furry toys to the SALT talks.

  After my television special I went to work on my live show because I had a Vegas and Tahoe date to play. Vassy began work on a project for us to do together. Perhaps all artists feel the need to work for their own experience and creative interests. I don’t know. But we did. I had concluded that working with Vassy would be difficult but worth it. Besides, I admired his overall plan to bring Russian and American artists together with film, using our respective countries as locations. We talked about many subjects, including The Doctor’s Wife. The subject that surfaced more often than any other was reincarnation. We wanted to do a love story based on the recognition that the two characters involved had lived and loved together in previous lives. We searched through old films and found that no one had successfully done that before. So we began to consider writing an original screenplay and hiring another writer, who was also conversant with the subject, to work with Vassy. Vassy was anxious to express some of his spiritual beliefs on the screen and felt he would be very good at a spiritual love story. I agreed with him. There were several American and English writers he was anxious to work with. He put his agent to investigating their availability. And so did I.

  In the meantime, Vassy was working with an English writer on his screenplay about whales, which he had outlined to me during our first dinner together. It was a fascinating romantic and metaphysical adventure story, and he had financing to develop it.

  While I played Tahoe and Vegas his co-writer, Marc Peplow, would come with us and work with him so we could all be together.

  We all piled into the performers’ house in Tahoe, a set and a setting straight out of an old Betty Grable movie.

  It wasn’t long before Vassy and I both complained bitterly about the night hours we had to adjust to because of my schedule. He was a man who liked to rise just after the sun. He felt turned around and “out of order with nature” when he went to bed when most people get up. He tried to sleep before I got home, but said that that wasn’t possible for him, either, because he couldn’t really relax unless he knew I was there. I understood completely. I would have had the same trouble.

  Perhaps the day-night reversal was responsible for some of what began to happen. But I think perhaps it had more to do with his own emotional work habits.

  Whatever the reason, as Vassy began to work on his script with Marc, I noticed that he became more and more tortured. They would decide on a scene and read me the outline of it, happily sure that they were working in the right direction. Then Vassy would begin to emotionally writhe around in agony. He really suffered the pangs of insecurity to an extent greater than anything I had observed in the American writers I knew. He stared at the ceiling, and instead of analyzing the scene he was involved with, he verbalized about how much he was suffering … how difficult and painful the creative process was. I knew something about that, but I somehow just accepted it as part of the process. He went into long detail about how excruciating it was. We tried to discuss the problems of creative work where original ideas were concerned, but he really didn’t want to acknowledge that creativity could also be joyful. He simply could not countenance such a concept, claiming instead that in order to be creative one needed to suffer. I had been having that discussion for years with artists I knew. It was a favorite topic among creative artists who were good and knew it. Some came down on the side of creative happiness, some came down on the side of creative torture. Did one need internal emotional conflict, pressure, in order to produce great work, or was greater work forthcoming when neurosis was unlocked? To Vassy, though, there was no discussion. Creativity that flamed easily was suspect, and whenever he felt it in himself, he was certain his creative expression was faulty. I saw his theory in action. Marc seemed able to roll with the tortured punches of creative pain, yet I could see an aspect of him wonder also if all the pain was actually necessary. But Vassy had institutionalized his suffering and without it he felt he was literally incapable of creating.

  I remembered my years in film, working under all kinds of circumstances. Every time I was happy, I was better. When I was miserable or blocked, nothing worked. That seemed to apply to those I had worked with, as well, or maybe that had been because I usually walked away from self-imposed suffering, figuring it just wasn’t worth it. With an artist like Vassy, though, it wasn’t possible to walk away because, first, he was brilliant, and second, he needed everyone involved with him to be involved also with his grande torture in order to plumb the depths of their potential.

  I watched and observed as the weeks bumped by. Great shouts of gut-wrenching excitement followed by sinking silences emanated from the room where Vassy and Marc worked. During the day I brought them coffee and mounds of cheeses and salads prepared by the cook hired to take care of the entertainers. Then around six o’clock every afternoon, we would all sit down to a family meal of rice and vegetables, homemade bread, and a lusty meat dish which Vassy usually had had a hand in preparing. He loved to preside at the head of the table, where he would pour glasses of chilled vodka flavored with raspberry leaves he had plucked from the bushes surrounding the house. He could identify each flower, bush, and tree on the property and told us just where the corresponding flora grew in Russia. He stuffed the raspberry leaves into the vodka and let it marinate until it was permeated with the fruit flavor.

  While presiding over the head of the table, Vassy held forth on many subjects. He loved to hear himself talk as much as we did. But it wasn’t so much what he was saying as much as it was the fact that he was. I felt that he needed to be the commanding head of the household, the master orator, the initiator of conversations. It was a charming need because he took such pleasure in our being there. It was clear he missed the family environment of his country house in Russia. He would lift his chilled raspberry vodka glass, look into it, and while watching its contents gradually disappear, he would launch into one
of his favorite topics—Love versus Respect. Vassy had the conviction that one could not love and respect another human being at the same time.

  “When one loves another,” he would say, “one is so involved with that emotion that it is impossible to respect the integrity of another.”

  “But Honeybear,” I would counter, “you can’t have real love without respect.”

  “That is not true in Russia. You either love or you respect. You cannot do both.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “With love you have jealousy, possessiveness, and many other emotions and passions which make respect impossible. We know that in Russia, therefore we accept it.”

  I had heard him espouse this theory many times, usually profoundly shocking everyone within earshot. It was a theory which we in America might have subscribed to in the nineteenth century, but since the evolution of human rights—civil, female, and otherwise—we had come to comprehend that it was not only possible to have both, but actually necessary, otherwise democracy couldn’t work. But then it was becoming clear to me that Vassy, in his “Russianness,” wanted his own freedom, yet didn’t understand the democratic principle of respecting the freedom of others while you loved them.

  “Sometimes I think that Russians don’t know respect,” he would say. “They know only love. Therefore their actions are motivated by feelings when they love. In Russia my neighbor can knock at my door at 3:00 a.m. and ask for five rubles, or a cup of hot tea. And if I don’t help him, he is surprised. And I expect the same from him. Here, you respect privacy. You Americans know only respect. You don’t understand love. You don’t know how to love. You know only how to respect. You think you are doing both, but you’re not.”

  His was a one-sided theory that nevertheless bore examination. It seemed outrageously judgmental on the surface. But the more I observed the outrage he precipitated, the more I began to wonder if he didn’t have a point.