My Lucky Stars

by Shirley Maclaine

  Í elected to apply my disciplined technique to acting for many years. I developed into an astute observer and practiced the art of emulating what I saw rather than feeling it.

  For example, when I played a victim I acted what I thought a victim felt like. I never really became a victim myself. I’ve often reflected upon whether the quality of my acting would have been higher had I let myself become a victim. I’m still not sure. Sometimes a feeling of controlled distance is more effective when playing the part of a sentimental person. A true victim who does not see herself as such is infinitely more moving than a victim who whines. Therefore, as the years passed, one of my deepest and slowest dawning revelations was the understanding that characters who held contradictions were certainly the juiciest.

  In real life I was not so allowing. Contradictions in people I knew and worked with were anathema to me. I therefore missed so much in judging them on their inconsistencies.

  To this day I have a hard time with inconsistencies in people’s characters. I usually consider it a form of lying, which is much too harsh a condemnation.

  But acting has shown me that contradiction is the spice that makes people and life worth being interested in. These are the characters that keep an audience interested. Now I can see that the same is true in real life. A person who is constantly predictable becomes boring. Unpredictable contradiction is fun.

  In fact contradiction holds within it a kind of messy perfection, which is incumbent upon us humans to excavate.

  The canvas and terrain of characters to play has offered me the lifelong pleasure of finding the harmony in messiness. This is what I loved most about Aurora Greenway in Terms of Endearment. She was an impossibly difficult woman, but in the end she was usually right. She was essentially a heroine whose path to harmonious conclusion was strewn with the maimed and wounded who willingly would go through it again because she was fun.

  Aurora affected my personal life because of the unpredictability of her contradictions. People like this are now an adventure and exploration for me. I have learned that a kind of harmony exists under chaos. The quest is to search it out. Then you have found a character on the screen and off.

  If not for show business, I’m not sure I’d understand this. In fact show business has been instrumental in my deeper understanding of real life. Yet when I look back on the deeper lessons of my years in Hollywood, why do I first remember such strange, unrelated, isolated details, images that seem unimportant in themselves: the bright sunlight as I’d open the door of a dark soundstage, giving me an instant headache as I stepped into a blazingly white California day; emerald-green lawns, and sprinklers that go all year, wall-to-wall swimming pools, gorgeous fruit with no taste; 5:30 A.M. calls for making up and making love, 5:30 P.M. calls for giving awards for doing it … evening dress both times; thick makeup sinking into the pores of my face, separating me from the real world. Thoughts of dissatisfaction and restless boredom fluttering in me as I’d wait yet another hour for the lighting on the set to be completed. Even from the earliest days I considered that perhaps I basically did not enjoy making pictures. I never voiced this to anyone—I was afraid of sounding like an ingrate. I liked acting, but not making movies. There was too much waiting around for my temperament, which was basically impatient. I liked things to move fast, even at the risk of sloppiness. Many times I can recall the feeling of just wanting to get it done and over with rather than done right.

  This has been a serious defect in my approach to my work all my life. I don’t know where the impatience comes from. I was born with it. It seems I’ve been intolerant of “dillydally” from the beginning. Perhaps this is another cosmic issue I came in with and I chose picture making as a course of investigation and resolution just because there is so much waiting around. To keep my character’s emotional attitude afloat while camera people ditz around is sometimes intolerable to me. It causes anxiety and finally rage, to say nothing of bone-aching exhaustion. But it goes with the territory and therefore must be approached as a lesson in self-confidence and discipline. Time is different in Hollywood. It is a built-in part of the budget. It is paid for, so why not take it? I find this concept wasteful, dishonest, and indulgent and I usually say so, which doesn’t help matters.

  No, from early on I was not a happy candidate for moviemaking. There are probably many reasons as yet unmined in my psyche for my nagging sense of unfulfillment, my discomfort at being noticed and catered to. But I was not the only one with those feelings. Over the years I realized that many of us felt a raw dissatisfaction in the midst of what would be perceived by others as a perfect life. We felt we had a kind of emotional virus that afflicted us and was never really curable. It was treatable from time to time with massive doses of box-office success or, as the case may have been, a string of “deserved failures” to make us feel more ourselves.

  But we were never really comfortable, cured of the affliction. We had each struggled with such intensity to achieve our goals, that “struggle” identified who we were. Without struggle we lost touch with ourselves. Success and achievement meant becoming someone else. Because we were not prepared to be without the familiarity of conflict, we would often create it. I am only now beginning to understand that the stars in my little cosmos were so important to me in relation to my attitudes about struggle in a town as superficial and as deep as Hollywood; their talent, lives, behavior, and luminescence helped me see my own light.

  Two of those stars had been there from my childhood—two who had a particularly strong influence during my first years in Hollywood. They behaved like no one I had ever met.

  3

  CRACKING UP IN THE

  FUN FACTORY

  Dean and Jerry

  Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were my favorites when I was about twelve years old. How could I dream that eight years later I would be starring in a picture with them? Warren and I used to see every picture they made and at one point drove our parents crazy by cupping our hands and screeching around the house holding huge, invisible grapefruits the way we had seen Dean and Jerry do in At War with the Army.

  I also remember registering the fact that Hal B. Wallis was the man who produced all of Martin and Lewis’s films at Paramount.

  I would never have gone to dinner with Hal B. Wallis when he came backstage to see me after I replaced Carol Haney in Pajama Game if it hadn’t been for Martin and Lewis. Our destinies seemed intertwined. Or at least that’s how it looks to me now.

  Steve had arrived at the stage door to pick me up for dinner. We were not yet married, but when Wallis introduced himself and saw that there was an important man in my life, I saw a flicker of displeasure cross his face. Boyfriends and husbands usually meant trouble where female stars were concerned because the husbands saw their role as one of protector from the Hollywood predators. That was basically true of Steve too. He was thirteen years older than me, more sophisticated about life, and could spot a useful or an unuseful situation a mile away. It wasn’t until much later that I realized the basis for that particular talent of his, a talent that had attracted him to me.

  In any case Steve and Wallis and I had dinner. Wallis wanted me to do a screen test and, if he liked it, wanted to put me under contract.

  I did the test (with Danny Mann), Wallis liked it, and Steve thought I should sign the contract. So I did.

  I went back to the chorus. Then Hitchcock came to see The Pajama Game on the one other night that Haney was out—destiny again? He was doing a picture called The Trouble with Harry and was looking for an offbeat, “kooky” actress to play the lead. He asked me to be in The Trouble with Harry before I did anything for Wallis. That meant a location in Vermont and an immediate departure for Hollywood. I knew I had to make a decision about Steve, because he insisted that we marry or he wouldn’t follow me to California. I didn’t want to lose him, so I married him, and nearly fainted during the ceremony because deep down I knew I was doing something I wasn’t ready for.

  Nevertheless Stev
e was protective and supportive. He seemed to want to do anything that would ensure a successful career for me.

  So having completed The Trouble with Harry (Hitch cock didn’t like husbands either and banned Steve from the set), I was safely ensconced with Steve in a small apartment in Malibu, California, and I reported to work for my second picture: Artists and Models with Dean and Jerry. I could barely believe what was happening to me. I was twenty years old.

  I was used to “well-kempt” Protestant behavior. This was my first experience with ethnic (Jewish and Italian) antics. I saw tourists and passersby swept up into Dean’s golf cart, usually by Jerry, who had stolen it. I saw Jerry so unabashedly in need of attention that he’d do anything to get it. He was so free-flowing and openly demanding with his crazy antics, his spastic jokes, and his out-of-control inclusion of everyone in his path that I found him attractive. I was constitutionally incapable of acting that way and I sensed also that within that canny insanity brooded a really lonely man.

  Dean was another matter. He was smooth, kind, subtly witty, good-looking, and seemed to be infinitely more complicated than Jerry. I didn’t realize I had come along when their relationship was crumbling. I only knew they had been my childhood idols and they were still the hottest, funniest combination in every area of show business—number one in personal appearances, movies, TV, and radio. I was enthralled and fascinated by their combined talents. They were everything I adored.

  To my surprise, 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. I watched them carefully, scrutinizing every comedic antic, clocking why their zaniness sometimes worked, sometimes didn’t. I sensed there was deep tension between the two, but I was used to behavior that repressed rather than expressed.

  The first day I worked with Jerry, I was supposed to do a number on a stairway with him called “Inamorata.” It was a love song and I was dressed in a little yellow sunsuit. My job was to leap up and down the stairs, striking provocative, funny poses so that Jerry would fall in love with me. Being a dancer, I was used to taking orders from the choreographer, Charlie Curran (married to Patti Page), and listening to the specifics from his assistant. The assistant, however, was an aging juvenile, an ex-dancer whom time had outrun. He was neither attractive nor very funny.

  Unless you’ve experienced someone demonstrating your proposed material in an unfunny, forced manner, you can’t imagine how humiliating it is. You’re turned off the material, yet you know you haven’t really given it a chance. You know the assistant can’t possibly do it justice or he would be where you are. On the other hand, the fear of ridicule is so strong that reason flies out the window. More often than not, the fear makes you cruel, which is what happened that first day with Jerry.

  In those days, musical numbers were shot before principal photography on the script began. I didn’t know Jerry or how he operated. I wanted to tell him how my brother and I had loved his scene with the grapefruit. I wanted to tell him about the time when I heard people laugh because of him—that was one summer in New York when I was studying at the American School of Ballet and he and Dean were playing down the street at the Copacabana. Waves of laughter would float out onto the street. But I never got the chance. Jerry rode onto the set on a bike, threw his leg over the crossbar, and swaggered toward Charlie Curran. I thought his swagger was rather sexy, actually, connoting confidence and a kind of unspoken intelligent arrogance. He nodded to me, we shook hands, and then he gestured for Charlie and his assistant to show him the number. I played myself, since I was a disciplined dancer from Broadway, eager to be prepared and to please whomever I needed to at any given time. I even wore my yellow sunsuit instead of rehearsal clothes and had body makeup caked on my legs so my freckles wouldn’t betray my Scotch-Irish lily-white skin.

  I did my part pretty well, I thought, but the assistant, as I said, was awful.

  When we finished, Jerry said nothing and walked off the set. I looked at Charlie, wondering what I had done wrong. He shrugged and went to Jerry’s dressing room, which was a little prefab box house on wheels, outfitted with a makeup table, a cot, a few chairs, and a telephone. I looked over at them, straining to hear the conversation. The door was open and I saw Jerry on the phone. I heard him say he didn’t want to do the number.

  I, of course, thought he either didn’t like me or was being competitive with me. The assistant rolled his eyes and I sat down and waited. Within a few minutes, Hal B. Wallis appeared on the set. He was the producer. He went to Jerry’s dressing room and closed the door. After a while they all emerged and it was clear that Wallis had prevailed.

  As Wallis walked past me he said, “That young man is going to ruin himself. He’s a great comic, but he tries to do too many other things. He thinks he’s a producer, a director, and God knows what else. He should stick to being funny. We’d all be better off.”

  What Wallis misunderstood was Jerry’s fear of not being funny. That’s why he dabbled in everything else.

  Jerry and I went back to rehearsal. He was not happy, but he was professional. I was having my first class-A lesson in how destructive the anticipation of being humiliated and outshone could be. The number was constructed to feature the girl (me). Jerry’s character was the reactor to her comedy. But he was used to being the funny one. He was used to other people reacting to him. Actually he was very funny, but like all great comics he was afraid he wasn’t.

  The rehearsal for that number and others didn’t last long. Jerry was nice enough to me, but what I didn’t realize was that he felt his very survival was at stake. He and Dean were breaking up. He felt he needed to be funny every second and in control of every aspect of the movie, whether it was outside of his province or not. He was clearly a genius. That was obvious. But his genius inspired a kind of awestruck intimidation in everyone around him.

  I felt something different. I felt I could be paralyzed by the tyranny of his insecurity. I understood his temperamental outbursts and cruel lashing out. I had done it myself. Unfortunately, his loyalists gave him more and more rope. They laughed at his jokes and fawned all over him. No one really told him the truth. No one said he needn’t worry if Martin left the act, because no one even acknowledged that there was a problem between them. Wallis was right, but for all the wrong reasons. Jerry was wrong for all the right reasons.

  So, Jerry began to lose himself in distractions—hightech gadgets. His dressing room was outfitted with advanced stereo equipment and he had the first tape deck ever made. He invited me into the inner sanctum of his high-tech room and demonstrated his brilliance in technology as he experimented in plugging and unplugging wires and pushing buttons that gave his Al Jolson-like voice deeper resonance. Jerry would sing to me. I didn’t know how to react. His voice had a piercing vibrato but it made me want to laugh. I knew he was serious, though. I repressed the laughter, wondering if I was doing him a great disservice. I liked Jerry.

  After he got to know me better, he told me about his childhood. He said he had been plagued with fears of abandonment because his show-business parents were away so much. He told me how afraid he still was of being alone. That was why he needed people around all the time. He said he had developed into a control freak because that way he could refuse to allow anyone to leave. He spoke of himself in the third person. He never said, “I did this or that.” He said, “Jerry did.”

  He told me he mugged so zanily and used his body in such a funny, bizarre way because he was afraid to let people hear him express himself in his high, squeaky voice. He was afraid to talk, to tell people how he felt. He said his comedy came out of these feelings, feelings about feeling like a freak. They were true feelings, he said. That was why people laughed. I couldn’t believe that the great comic genius, Jerry Lewis, was sharing such intimate knowledge of himself with me. And yet in so many ways I was able to identify with him.

  He showed me that expressing feelings about oneself was okay eve
n if they sounded crazy. Whatever he had gone through in his psychological upbringing made mine seem like a day at the beach. In fact, I began to wonder whether deep deprivation was necessary to be good at your work!

  Getting to know Dean was another story. The words that come to mind are those that describe a person cut off from feeling—purposefully cut off. Perhaps that was why he seemed so devil-may-care and so coolly casual. The Italians, I later learned, had a more apt ward for it, menefreghista, which means “one who does not give a fuck.” Dean Martin was basically a menefreghista.

  He was so witty because of the way he saw the world. If he did a routine about the President announcing a nuclear attack, the focus of his humor would be the tie the President wore or how he, Dean, couldn’t open his refrigerator door as he was listening to such a momentous speech. I remember once he called me about something, and the entire conversation was about the telephone wire he couldn’t locate under his sofa. I was in tears of laughter. He would make observational jokes about things that no one else could see as fodder for comedy.

  Dino Crocetti—Dean Martin—had been born into an environment where the Mob resided as neighborhood characters. In Steubenville, Ohio, he discovered the rackets early and he loved to bet on anything that moved. After school he’d make the rounds of pool rooms, cigar stores, and gambling dens. His offhand stories of the old days captivated me.

  I asked him about Vegas and Bugsy Siegel, who dared to build the Flamingo Hotel and make it the first grand establishment for gambling, before anyone else was there.

  Dean smiled. “Guess who was in the pit opening night, dealing blackjack?” he asked.