My Lucky Stars

by Shirley Maclaine

  Paramount finally acquiesced to financing Jim’s dream, and we were on our way. He asked for $8 million, knowing it would cost more, but “once they see the dailies, they’ll be so committed they’ll give me more,” he said. Street-smart, I guess, but the studio also could have pulled the plug—which they came close to doing.

  There was some talk of Sissy Spacek playing the crucial role of my daughter because she looked so much like me. But Sissy turned it down. Mary Steenburgen was another possibility, but she and Jim didn’t connect.

  Debra Winger had just had a big success in An Officer and a Gentleman and Paramount was high on her. Even though she was a dark-haired beauty, unlikely as my daughter, Jim felt that her spunk and intelligence would make her a perfect Emma. So did I. I loved her smoldering intelligent eyes on the screen. Up to that point I had never met her. Her reputation for being difficult preceded her on every film, but that was true of just about anybody who was any good and who cared about the work.

  I met her at a NATO (National Association of Theater Owners) convention. She was pleasant, witty, and said she couldn’t wait to begin working on the film.

  We rehearsed in New York during the winter of late ’82. I took the opportunity to wear, as Aurora, all my old fur coats. I did not wear them anymore myself, but for the character they were perfect.

  I’d walk across town from my apartment on Fifty-second Street to Jim’s midtown place, bundled up in a fur coat, trying not to feel conspicuous, but knowing that it was exactly what Aurora would do.

  Debra usually wore miniskirts, combat boots, and knee-high socks, and had her long black hair swinging around her shoulders. She looked mod and offbeat in a studied kind of way, rather obstreperous and defiant. I liked the look, almost wished I could dress that way, but by now I was forty-nine and into my more conventional and straight period. Slacks, blouses, sweaters, leather, and high heels.

  It all began with Debra being ticked off at the way I dressed.

  “What is that piece of shit you are wearing?” she asked, referring to a white leather dress I had dragged out of my trunk and found very comfortable.

  A little taken aback I said, “Well, I like it.”

  She turned to Jim. “My hair … what do you think?”

  He shrugged, not terribly informed about anything women put on their bodies or did to their hair. She opened her tote bag, extracted a pair of shears from it, and disappeared into his bedroom. We chatted and waited.

  She came out of the bathroom and said, “Isn’t this Emma?”

  She had chopped her hair off to chin-length. I was impressed. This was real commitment to a part and an abdication of her own vanity.

  We then launched into a scene in which Aurora tells Emma that she should be more aware of her limitations. We stuck to the script and then Jim asked us to improvise. Debra, as Emma, sprang back with admonishments about my (Aurora’s) way of being and dressing. I, as Aurora, chose to play my reaction as one of detachment. Whatever Debra-Emma said, I-Aurora ignored her and went on with other dialogue and action. I thought that would be Aurora’s weapon. Debra became more and more upset. She walked out of the living room and called Jim into the next room. I couldn’t really hear what was being said. A while later Debra and Jim emerged saying that was the end of rehearsal.

  Debra left. I looked at Jim. “Don’t worry,” he said. “She’s just emotional. She’s finding the character. It’s about the work.”

  I took that at face value.

  We all returned to California and preproduction.

  Jim had written the part of the aging astronaut who becomes Aurora’s lover for Burt Reynolds. Jim had worked with Burt in television and liked him. Burt, however, didn’t want to work without his toupee and he insisted on his daily regimen of working out and watching his diet. So a middle-aged spread was not something he was willing to allow for the sake of a part. Vanity got in his way, I was sorry to see, and Jim moved on to someone else: Jack Nicholson.

  Jack is an actor who doesn’t count close-ups or how many scenes he’s in. His only exercise of that ilk would be “How much do I get? Which days do I have off so I can go to a Lakers game?”

  Talks proceeded between Jack’s agent and Jim’s people. In the meantime, Jim wanted Kim Basinger to play the role of Emma’s best friend, Patsy. The part called for someone extremely beautiful who could also provide competition for Aurora.

  From my living room in Malibu, Jim and Debra and I called Kim. She was upset that we approached her directly.

  “Why are you guys doing this to me?” she asked. “This is a supporting character with you guys and Burt Reynolds has asked me to star with him in The Man Who Loved Women.” I could feel the anguish in her voice as she turned us down, feeling deeply put-upon.

  I understood Kim. From her point of view, a picture with Burt was more of a sure thing. Unfortunately, though, she took a calculated risk and lost. The Man Who Loved Women didn’t work. An unknown actress was cast in the part of Emma’s friend.

  Our rehearsals proceeded with what I would call chaotic exploration. Debra was hyperkinetic and insistent upon having everyone’s full attention.

  With cozy friendliness, she sat down next to me one day. “You know, you’re the most important person in the room to me,” she said. “Never forget that.”

  “Thanks,” I said, pleased that we had finally connected.

  “Do you have a cigarette?” she asked.

  I brought out a package with two smokes remaining. I handed Debra one.

  “Oh no,” she said. “You only have two left.”

  I said, “That’s fine. No problem. We can always get more.”

  “No,” she said.

  “Oh, go on, take it,” I said.

  “No,” she said.

  “Why not? You wanted a cigarette. Have one.”

  “No,” she said. “You’d never forgive me for taking your next to the last one.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I replaced the cigarette. I didn’t know if we were doing an Emma-Aurora improvisation or if she was angling for a fight.

  A few days later Jim and I and two actors, playing my suitors, were immersed in concentration over a comedy sequence so that it wouldn’t go OTT (over the top).

  Debra arrived at rehearsal with a ghetto blaster turned up to eardrum-bursting level, set it down not far from where we were rehearsing, and began to dance. Jim looked up. His focus was broken. He walked over to her and said something I couldn’t hear and an argument erupted. Debra had achieved her goal: full attention.

  Perhaps tension between actors created tension between characters on the screen because it was authentic? Was this about non-acting?

  I called John Travolta, who had done Urban Cowboy with Debra.

  “Tell me about Debra, Johnny,” I said. “How does she work?”

  “She’s difficult on herself,” he answered, “and can cause, how shall I put it, consternation among her coworkers.”

  He went on to say he wouldn’t like to repeat the experience, but he was reasonably friendly with her and liked her. All oí that made sense. I could live with someone being difficult on herself. God knows I had walked that road myself, but being a well-brought-up, middle-class “lady” from Virginia, I never liked rocking other people’s boats. It was socially inappropriate—not polite, in other words, I never had the guts to be outright difficult where others could observe it. In some ways Debra was refreshingly unrestrained.

  With Jack Nicholson finally cast as Garrett, the company moved on to Houston where we would continue rehearsals, along with the wardrobe and hair fittings. The day I was to leave for Houston the storm of ’83 hit Malibu. I was stuck on Malibu Road and couldn’t get out. I was alone in my house because no one was allowed to leave or enter. The old houses built on wood pilings in Malibu were not safe. As I looked from my window I saw several collapse and be swept away with the undertow. Then the pilings from Paradise Cove began to flow south. Two of them hit the pilings under my house broadside. I
thought my place would collapse. But it held. Then I looked out over the churning ocean and saw a Dodge car tossing its way directly toward me on top of the waves. This is it, I thought. I held my face, as though that would help, and put my hands over my eyes. I waited. I didn’t feel the thundering, crunching thumps that I had come to identify from years of living above water. I waited another few seconds … nothing … I braved the balcony outside to see what had happened. The Dodge had crashed into the house next door. A man on the other side of me was taking pictures from his balcony about thirty feet high. A wave was gathering force. I could see that the man busy photographing the Dodge was directly in its path. I screamed for him to get off his balcony. He couldn’t hear me. The wave washed over him and dashed him to the rocks below. I panicked and ran inside to call 911.

  The phone rang. It was Jim calling from Houston.

  “Why aren’t you here?” he asked. “We’re starting a picture in a week and you are not here.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m here in the middle of a hurricane.”

  “Oh, good,” he replied. “So you have a chance to study your script.”

  “Well, yes,” I said, “but not right now.”

  I looked out the window to check on the man next door. There were people and sirens and lights. I could see help had come.

  “What kind of accent are you going to use?” Jim continued. “Have you decided on it yet? We have to know so Debra can take hers from yours.”

  I heard the frightening rumble again. I knew it was a mountain of water coming straight at me. I couldn’t speak, I was so terrified.

  “Are you there?” said Jim.

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  “Speak up,” he said. “I know you’ll be all right with whatever’s going on out there. I just have one worry.”

  “So do I,” I said.

  Almost on cue, the mountainous wave hit. It crashed through my living room. The sound was something I had never heard before. I was sitting high on a kitchen bar stool. The water inundated everything. Then, as quickly as it had come, it was gone. My furniture, walls, clothes, and carpet were soaked or dripping with salt water.

  Miraculously, the phone still worked. Jim continued as though the world only existed from his end of the line.

  “Listen,” he said, “whatever happens, I don’t want you to get out of character.”

  He hung up. I sat surrounded by the mess in my living room.

  So he didn’t want me to get out of character.

  I never was one to get “in” character until the moment the director yelled “action,” and even then half the time I’d be thinking about what I was going to have for lunch. I wondered what he’d think of that.

  Directors who have written their own screenplay are more territorial about their material and their characters than they are about their own children. They live and breathe their creations, and nothing, absolutely nothing, will deter them from realizing their vision. This intensity of focus is what studio heads find so intimidating. To a creative filmmaker it is not just another movie. To a studio chief it is what will fill the autumn time slot.

  Jim’s focus was so complete that he was determined that nothing would disturb mine. Death was the only excuse for getting out of character. And he would use any means necessary to accomplish what he needed, regardless of the side effects.

  Early on, when he was still uncertain whether I should play Aurora, he took me to a restaurant that he knew had questionable service, but was pretentious and expensive. He watched me with the intensity of a hungry hawk as I dealt with the waiter’s ineptitude. I tried to be civil and patient with him for a while. Then I erupted and let the waiter have it. Jim fairly drooled with delight that I could call on my imperious aspects so readily. Aurora was mine.

  It was the tactic he used throughout the shoot, but while it was happening I was either too naive or too stupid to see it. It was my agent, Mort, who suggested Jim’s attitude was a method, but by that time I was already beginning to see how our human defects could be a grist for any mill. It was an idea that had never before occurred to me, not at this extreme. I was a novice when it came to such exquisite manipulation. How could I have been in the business thirty years and not seen this? But, of course, until I worked with Jim Brooks, I hadn’t worked with such a master. I had been used to a method of work where the director simply told me what he wanted and I’d try to accomplish it. William Wyler was famous for not telling you what he wanted but getting you to do it another way … namely his. During a scene in The Children’s Hour he made me run up and down the stairs for nearly thirty takes. When he finally yelled “print” and I asked him why, he answered that he wanted me to be tired! Why he didn’t just say so in the beginning he never told me.

  One of Jim’s unexplained directions came the night before we were to begin Terms. During the rehearsal period in Houston, I had worked with a River Oaks—Houston accent at Jim’s instruction. That was where Aurora lived and it wasn’t too much of a stretch for me because I was from the South anyway. So, I conceived the character as a Texas belle who lived on the lower end of the right side of the tracks. She spoke with a Texas drawl, had bouffant hair, many chiffon dresses in her wardrobe, and cared desperately about her kitchen and the impression she made at every turn. I always work on a character from the outside in, not the other way around. If I know how she walks and laughs and places her feet when she sits in a chair, I know her. In other words, I work like a dancer. When I know how a character moves, I know how she feels.

  We had completed rehearsals in Jim’s hotel suite and were ready to shoot the next day. Jim lay down on the couch and put his head in my lap. Everyone else had gone. He talked of his demons and a dark-spiritedness that frightened him. I was touched, but perplexed as to how to react. I decided to emphasize the positive, which is usually my MO. He sprang to an upright position and said, “Why don’t you let yourself come down here in the muck and the mire with the rest of us? What makes you so fucking stable and on top of things?”

  I was stunned. Oh my God, I thought. Was he serious? Yes, it seemed so, but what was he serious about? Did he want me to change my values and personality for the film, or was he just trying to provoke Aurora?

  A Russian play was not as Byzantine as this. I pleaded a headache and said I needed to get to bed and left.

  My call was at six in the morning. Jim telephoned me around ten o’clock that night. “I’ve decided that Aurora shouldn’t be from Texas. She shouldn’t speak with an accent. She should originate from New England and we find her here in Texas. Okay?”

  “But, Jim,” I said, paralyzed, “what about all the wardrobe, the hair? I mean, I don’t know what to say. We start in the morning and you’re changing it all tonight?”

  “Yep,” he said. “It’ll be more spontaneous. You’ll adjust.”

  He hung up.

  Jim Brooks knew I was basically a gypsy, which means a dancer, which meant I would take direction without question because I had been taught to fear and respect, without reservation, the choreographer-director. I grew up that way. Whatever the person with the stick said was law. Otherwise I’d be cracked over the back. Many a choreographer—man and woman—had hit me with a stick or thrown me across the room by my earlobe (freshly pierced, as luck would have it) or twisted my leg up behind my ear until I thought I would pass out with pain.

  Jim knew this about me. So he understood I would make the adjustment because I respected him. He took the gamble that it wouldn’t destroy my confidence. But more than anything, by putting me in an uncomfortable emotional position, he succeeded in getting another layer of reaction out of Aurora because she was a woman who hated to be thrown off balance. That’s where the comedy came from. If he could throw me off balance, he figured he’d force me more deeply into character. Maybe he was right. Maybe his method worked. Maybe I would have done it anyway. Or maybe he really just changed his mind at the last minute and left the burden with me. You could go crazy trying to figur
e out the motives for his methods. At least I knew one thing. Jim Brooks was not a man to try to outwit, outsmart, or even outprepare, and for sure, there was a purpose in his madness every step of the way. My problem was functioning with it.

  The first day Debra and I worked together in front of the camera, the assistant called us to our marks. She got to hers first.

  “Hey, Mom,” she ordered, “hey, get over here. These are yours.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  The first day in front of the camera is one of jockeying, of establishing boundaries, of assessing your fellow actors as well as letting the crew know that regardless of how brilliant you might be, you realize it means nothing if you’re not in your light and you don’t know where the camera is. You know that they know that you know this, and you are also scared.

  I moved toward my marks, trying to adjust to the tailored slacks I wore now instead of a bouffant dress. I was not yet used to my toned-down wig and I had no idea what kind of accent would come out of my mouth. I tried to sustain my dancer’s discipline. As I walked I wondered what the hell would be the damn pecking order this time.

  “You’re over here,” Debra said.

  The crew stopped talking. They could sense a stakeout.

  “I heard you,” I said. “I know marks when I see them.”

  “Good,” she said. “How’s this for a mark?”

  She turned around, walked away from me, lifted her skirt slightly, looked over her shoulder, bent over, and farted in my face.

  “Do you always talk with your mouth full?” I asked. She laughed.

  God, I thought, maybe this was the new, modern, hip way of finding a character. I felt about two hundred years old.

  So was this Debra Winger’s conception of Emma, who was, after all, disdainful of her mother and rebellious? Where did her character end and Debra begin? Aurora existed to be thrown off stride. Did Jim and Debra really feel I needed auxiliary assistance in my acting?