My Lucky Stars

by Shirley Maclaine

  ACADEMY AWARD-WINNING ACTRESS TURNED BESTSELLING AUTHOR SHIRLEY MACLAINE DAZZLES US WITH THE SUBJECT SHE KNOWS MOST INTIMATELY—HOLLYWOOD. IN THE MEMOIR THAT MADE HEADLINES, SHE TALKS ABOUT …

  Her wildly unconventional marriage to Steve Parker

  “As soon as [we met], I knew my life was to take a new course…. Our connection had the shock of destiny to it…. There was nothing I could have done to alter or avoid the experience we were intended to have together.”

  Her friendship with the Clan—especially Frank Sinatra

  “I was comfortable and friendly being around the guys in the group because I was perceived by most of them as a mascot. I was the only woman they allowed in the house, but that was because there had been a kind of communal decision made that I wasn’t really a girl—I was a pal, maybe even one of the boys.”

  The movie she made with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis

  “Dean, not Jerry, was the funny one to me. His humor was subtle, spontaneous—a result of the moment. Jerry’s was brilliant, but usually premeditated.”

  Her love affair with Robert Mitchum

  “He saw himself as a common stiff, born to be lonely. … I willingly fell into the role of rescuer, saving him from himself.”

  Her take on Hollywood lives

  “I don’t know many really happy people in Hollywood. There is always that look lurking behind the eyes of the accomplished. It’s the look of ‘lostness.’ … Any one of them would be nostalgic for the days of struggle.”

  Her Oscar-winning film, Terms of Endearment

  “I began the scene—I was on the telephone with Emma while Jack slept. Suddenly, under the covers, I felt a tongue on my ankle. It went up my leg and then it stopped. … I realized it was Debra under the covers.”

  And much, much more …

  “Robust, ribald stories … juicy.”

  —People

  “Readers should find MacLaine’s memoirs as entertaining as her films.”

  —Associated Press

  FOR SACHI

  With all my love

  AND TO PETER

  For being there

  BY SHIRLEY MACLAINE

  “Don’t Fall Off the Mountain”

  You Can Get There from Here

  Out on a Limb

  Dancing in the Light

  It’s All in the Playing

  Going Within

  Dance While You Can

  The great mystery is not that we should have been thrown down here at random between the profusion of matter and that of the stars; it is that from our very prison we should draw, from our own selves, images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.

  André Malraux

  La Condition Húmame

  (“Man’s Fate”)

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  PREFACE: Star Fallout

  1 The Question

  2 Breaking Loose to Fly

  3 Cracking Up in the Fun Factory: Dean and Jerry

  4 Mascot to the Clan

  5 Sinatra: Now—and Forever?

  6 Power

  7 Coming to Terms with Terms

  8 Fosse: Once Again, Please Forgive Me

  9 Showbiz Politics

  10 “Women’s Pictures”

  11 Men I Have Loved … To Star With

  12 Starring in Reel Love

  13 A Man I Loved … On Location

  14 Say Anything

  15 Movie Sets: Then Vs. Now

  16 Aaaaarghh!: Acting with Aging, Anxiety, Anger, and Accomplishment

  17 The Answer

  AFTERWORD: Just “Desserts”

  The Films of

  Shirley MacLaine

  The Trouble with Harry (1955)

  Artists and Models (1955)

  Around the World in Eighty Days (1956)

  The Sheepman (1958)

  The Matchmaker (1958)

  Hot Spell (1958)

  Some Came Running (1959)

  Ask Any Girl (1959)

  Career (1959)

  Ocean’s Eleven (1960)

  Can-Can (1960)

  The Apartment (1960)

  All in a Night’s Work (1961)

  Two Loves (1961)

  The Children’s Hour (1962)

  My Geisha (1962)

  Two for the Seesaw (1962)

  Irma La Douce (1963)

  What a Way to Go! (1964)

  The Yellow Rolls-Royce (UK) (1964)

  John Goldfarb Please Come Home (1965)

  Gambit (1966)

  Woman Times Seven (1967)

  The Bliss of Mrs. Blossom (UK) (1968)

  Sweet Charity (1969)

  Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970)

  Desperate Characters (1971)

  The Possession of Joel Delaney (1972)

  The Year of the Woman (documentary, 1973)

  The Other Half of the Sky (documentary, 1975)

  The Turning Point (1977)

  Being There (1979)

  A Change of Seasons (1980)

  Loving Couples (1980)

  Terms of Endearment (1983)

  Cannonball Run II (1984)

  Madame Sousatzka (1988)

  Steel Magnolias (1989)

  Waiting for the Light (1990)

  Postcards from the Edge (1990)

  Defending Your Life (1991)

  Used People (1992)

  Wrestling Ernest Hemingway (1993)

  Guarding Tess (1994)

  Mrs. Winterbourne (1996)

  Evening Star (1996)

  Preface

  STAR FALLOUT

  We live in a world of images. They bombard us twenty-four hours a day. If not in the newspapers or on our television screens, then most certainly in our heads. The birthplace of many of those images is Hollywood, where artists create the illusion of infinite possibilities. Hollywood dangles golden fruit on branches that are out of reach for so many, yet it also inspires hope and optimism.

  The image of Hollywood itself is that of a universe of stars, a great factory of power with rotating constellations of success and failure, with times and tides of creative fulfillment as well as of humiliation. Now, as I sit and reflect on myself and on the reality of what happened during my years in Hollywood, I want to go behind the image that I was part of, that I drew to myself. The reality of Hollywood is that every person creates his or her own image, and in the process can so easily be exalted or ruined, held aloft in the light or burned out by his or her own luminosity.

  Once I hit the golden shores of the American Dream, no matter where I went or what I did, Hollywood was the place I always returned to. It was the place that made me feel I could walk on water—if I knew where the sand bars were. It taught me discernment. It glistened in the dark like a tinsel township that sailed so fast and used so much of my fuel, I often felt I was struggling toward a future that was already the past. It has all been so swift, yet so slow—slow in the struggle to achieve perfection, fast when it really went wrong … but always so enlightening … so meant-to-be.

  Hollywood was the land where I did any damn thing I wanted because, more than any place on earth, it offered me the opportunity to create my own reality: the reality of success; the reality of failure. It taught me that success was always temporary, and failure, a lesson about self. It taught me that winning and losing were essentially the same and the secret was to treat each with equal detachment. I ventured out in the real world, collected experiences, cultural artifacts, friends from faraway places with strange-sounding names, and returned to Hollywood a deeper, more knowledgeable person who sometimes tried to incorporate what I had learned on the screen. Hollywood was the place where I utilized anything I thought I was,
and explored so much of what I was afraid I was not.

  Hollywood was a playground, with emotions, people, audiences, and costars as my playmates. Whatever I could paint with my characters on celluloid I felt I could identify in life, and vice versa.

  When I was younger and in the thick of the experience, Hollywood didn’t seem so cosmically miraculous to me. It was play, definitely, but it was also hard work. I was learning. I was struggling to stay afloat, to understand what was happening to me. I had fun and I had depression, oh yes, but I didn’t take the time to revel completely in the fullness of either. I was too busy regarding myself—keeping an eye on the future and looking over my shoulder at the past—to understand the miracle of the breathtaking creativity around me. Now, in retrospect, how I wish I had appreciated the real reason for Hollywood’s magic … the creative people. The extraordinary individuality of those talented human beings who surrounded me at every level, some of whom I had loved and admired since childhood. I wish I had lived more in the moments of their laughter, their love, and their turmoil. I wish so much now that I had seized the moments then to fully appreciate them.

  Only now as I write this do I realize how much I missed of their true meaning. It is a cliché that youth is wasted on the young, but a true one. We think so much about ourselves, not realizing that we are truly mirrored in the people around us.

  So as I recollect my feelings and celebrate, with tardiness, part of my forty years in Hollywood, I am curious, even surprised, as I wander around in my memory, at the people whom I feel the need to dwell upon, to understand, and resolve my feelings for. All observations are clues to oneself, and I realize now how important it is to take myself seriously in observing others. Why do these people emerge from my memories as leading players in my play? Because they set me on my course and they taught me many things. When I was a young girl in Hollywood, they were the people destiny provided as my guides. And later, as the years passed, these people were my mirrors. I feel profoundly lucky to have known them. I want to thank these stars who were lucky for me, who enriched and troubled my life, who brightened my days and my nights. These people who were so generous with the expression of their hopes and fears and joys and even neuroses, because now I see that they served as reflections for some of my own problems. I celebrate all of them, these children of creative genius who came to light up and reflect the world. These people who struggled with themselves and persevered, demonstrating the need all of us have to know ourselves better. These people who were responsible for showing me how to love and be more understanding.

  1

  THE QUESTION

  Not long ago I was having lunch in New York with a friend when he asked me a question that set me to thinking deeply.

  “How did you manage,” he said, “after so many years in the minefields of Hollywood, to retain the capacity to have your feelings hurt?”

  The question stunned me. I couldn’t answer.

  My friend pressed on. “I want to know,” he said, “why you haven’t become one of those well-functioning thing people? The ones with shrewd dead eyes who no longer live behind their faces; the ones who operate successfully but can’t feel pain anymore. One of those people who got what they wanted from Hollywood, but never knew what they wanted from themselves. How come that didn’t happen to you?”

  I sat in silence. I couldn’t reply. Why was it good that I could still have my feelings hurt? It was awful. It made me angry and sometimes cruel. I couldn’t simply be hurt and leave it at that. So why was that praiseworthy? I became confused, left the restaurant, and went back to my hotel. For a long time I sat by the window and gazed out at Central Park. I had begun my career in New York. I was from the East Coast, yet Hollywood was now my home. In every way. And it had been for more than forty years. I did my first picture when I was twenty. But was my friend right? Was I really not jaded, dead-eyed, and shrewd? There was so much neither he nor anyone really knew. I had been naive to the point of denial. Was that because I never really allowed Hollywood to hurt me? Had I encased myself in a pleasant bubble of light while denying the darkness outside? Had I chosen to be unaware of the chunks Hollywood and some of the people around me had bitten from my heart because to acknowledge the truth would extinguish my enthusiasm?

  My mind spun.

  Another friend had accused me once of being relentlessly optimistic. My daughter had said I trusted too much, purposefully ignoring other people’s demons and my own as well. Now, as I stared out the window, I understood what she had meant. I had denied so much in my personal life, but that was what had allowed me to go on. Yet I was fully aware that most people in Hollywood were motivated by their own internal demons. The kings and queens of power held on to those demons as an identification. Neurosis was a protective coverlet a great deal of the time, and provided the impulse for their ambition. They were quick to reject before suffering rejection from others. No, I knew Hollywood could be a torture chamber of rejection. It could shred you, bleed you, tinker with your sanity, leave you torn and tattered along the highway of the misbegotten. And now, as I thought about my friend’s question, I remembered all the times people had said to me, “How come you keep popping back up again?” Was my longevity the result of having experienced Hollywood at arm’s length? Or had I taken pain and turned it into something else? I never wanted to adopt a mask. I feared that my face would grow into it.

  A mask was too confining anyway. I wanted, I needed to be free … free of any image I would create. Free of dependency upon it, free of committing myself completely to it or to anything else for that matter … there it was … I wanted to be free of the long-term soul-searing pain that only comes from committing completely to something. So as snow began to fall on the park and my mind whirled backward in time, I thought, My friend is only partially right about me. Yes, I can still be hurt by Hollywood, but no, not deeply because I never honestly committed myself to the requirements of the town in the first place.

  Instead I think I regarded Hollywood as a game. A game of expression, a game of humor, of love, of power, money, and fame. A game of created illusion where pain itself would be a choice. To me Hollywood was a place to learn, a test site for my identity, a new land where I could experience anything and evolve from it. But the game that I played exacted a high personal price. From the moment I came to Hollywood, I knew I would never be from Richmond, Virginia, again.

  People in Hollywood are usually sophisticated in wading through certain shoals of human behavior, inept and maladroit in others. Human behavior is, after all, our business, our work, our survival: The more we understand its underbelly, the better we can play our parts. But more to the point, the more we understand ourselves, the better we are at our work. This is not an easy task because we so often enjoy playing other people in order to avoid who we are. Most of us have had therapy and, for the last ten years, have begun to understand that we are spiritual as well as physical and mental beings. This helps. We are becoming more and more conversant with the “Karma” of our behavior. Therefore, with our growing spiritual sophistication we understand the profound necessity to take complete responsibility for our words and actions. Well, maybe not complete, because we are also possessed of insecurities, envy, and jealousy; within our own creative community, we are often suspicious of each other. Therefore, even among friends, guarding the safety of one’s own heart and position is paramount. Often we feel reluctant not only to allow our hearts to be opened and examined, but also reluctant to see others put themselves in the same position. We know that sharing that kind of intimacy can lead to the agony of feeling used—and of using. Yet it becomes excruciatingly clear, all too soon, in this land of reel life, that if we can know and understand the murky depths of our coworkers, we have a fallback position for our own ultimate survival. Knowledge of self … numero uno. Knowledge of others a close second.

  People in show business call everyone else “civilians.” That’s because we think no one else is hip enough to understand the depth of
emotion in any given situation. We are an insecure yet arrogant breed. We can’t believe that any other line of work so challenges the human heart, its terrors and demons, or indeed its joys and scaled heights of ecstasy. So within our community—our social lives, our relationships, our problems with our children, our attempts to sustain friendship, even the way we conduct meetings, script conferences, and character-development talks—Hollywood people tend to revel in the belief that we are more free and more open and more explorative about ourselves in relation to our own product (ourselves) than, say, a CEO at General Motors or a guy selling baby food or tract houses. And we know that even with all our explorations of self and others we tend to manipulate what we find to suit our own individual needs. Sometimes we don’t even know we’re doing it, but we are. Manipulation is often our livelihood, our technique of choice in order to succeed at being noticed, acknowledged, and loved. Like Oscar Wilde’s definition of a cynic, we sometimes know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

  From the time I was six, movies have been important to me. I’m not sure why. I would sit for hours in the movie house, becoming the characters who shone down from the screen. I loved the feeling of being totally immersed in the story, the relationships, the drama.

  Perhaps the reason was as simple as wanting to get out of the house. Or perhaps early on I had the feeling that there was, as Walt Whitman wrote, “a multitude of humanity within me,” and I enjoyed identifying with the multitude on the screen.

  My brother, Warren, and I went to the movies every Saturday and stayed for as long as we could sit there. And sometimes sitting in the movie house wasn’t enough. Sometimes we would go “behind” the movie house and listen to the dialogue of pictures that were particularly horror-filled, like Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman or the torture scenes from The Purple Heart. Perhaps, symbolically, we viewed these films from behind so that we could surprise-attack anything that frightened us. Perhaps we needed the option of recreating the truth the way we wanted it to be.