My Lucky Stars

by Shirley Maclaine

  The company left New York and flew to Lincoln, Nebraska, where the remainder of the film would be shot.

  Debra was doing a fair amount of research on cancer deaths because of her character’s fatal illness. I remembered that Travolta had told me she insisted on sleeping in a graveyard on Urban Cowboy, causing worry among the crew and others, but that was how she worked.

  Perhaps the identification with her character caused what happened next, I don’t know.

  We were shooting in a hospital in Lincoln, which is where the action actually took place. I walked out of the elevator on the floor allotted to us. I couldn’t hear anything. The normal crew noises weren’t evident. No one was milling around. I spotted the AD. He pointed to a room and rolled his eyes. The crew had shrunk up against the wall. I heard Debra’s voice.

  I walked over to the room. Jim was sitting on a chair, bent over at the waist, his head hanging low. Debra stood over him, berating him. She used language I’d never heard before as she admonished Jim for his insensitivity and all-around comportment.

  As I watched I realized there was a dance between two masters going on. The lower Jim’s head hung, the more vitriolic Debra became. Both of them understood that the crew was observing everything. A director knows that he is the captain of the ship; democracy does not exist on a movie set. The person who sits in the chair is a dictator. His vision, his word, his conclusion, whatever it may be, is law.

  Yet what I was witnessing was a purposeful abdication of his position of authority.

  This was doubly interesting to me because I would never dream of chewing out a director. I’d just leave. But here she was, a fragile-looking, dark-haired, vulnerable young beauty spewing venom the likes of which I had never heard before. And Jim was not only taking it, he was bending to it, as though inviting her to hit him harder, preferably below the belt if she was so inclined.

  I looked over at Jeff Daniels, who played Emma’s husband.

  “What’s going on?” I whispered.

  He shrugged. “She thinks he wasn’t being sensitive to our scene. She dies today, you know.”

  Yes, I knew. As a matter of fact, I wondered how I’d react to seeing her take her last breath. I figured it was going to be difficult for me to be devastated.

  “Was Jim being insensitive?” I asked. A rhetorical question, I realized.

  “Who knows around here?” said Jeff.

  “Did he say anything mean?” I asked.

  Jeff shrugged. “Who knows?”

  Debra continued to berate Jim. She was on a roll. A roll of such precise and definitive annihilation that the rest of us stood mesmerized.

  Crew members slowly tiptoed to the craft service table and I drifted away, waiting for the diatribe to end. By observing any longer, I felt I would be contributing to Jim’s emotional keelhauling.

  Soon Debra left the small room. She went to the hospital room where her scene was to take place. She climbed into bed.

  Then Jim emerged. He straightened up somewhat and stroked his beard. He walked toward the set with a hurried shuffle.

  “Okay,” he said. “Now, is everybody ready?”

  The crew scurried to their assigned positions.

  I went into wardrobe and dressed. The wardrobe girls busied themselves with panty hose and bras. No one spoke of what had occurred.

  I had my face touched up.

  People sipped coffee and ate doughnuts.

  A few seconds later we were all on the set. The camera was ready. The lights came on. I sat in my chair by Debra’s bed. Jeff took his place next to me.

  Jim took his place by the camera. He called “action.” Debra began the process of dying. She raised her hand in a meek little wave as though signaling good-bye to me. I watched anxiously. Jeff was properly alarmed. Then Debra took her last breath.

  She had played the scene beautifully.

  The nurse came in, reacting to the machine attached to Debra’s arm. She took her pulse. The nurse shook her head and said, “She’s gone.”

  I wanted to leap into the air and shout for joy, but I quickly recovered what was left of my professional’s sanity and made the acting choice to hyperventilate. Up to that moment I did not know how I was going to play the scene. Why I chose to hyperventilate—breathe in short shallow breaths—I can’t say. There were many reactions Aurora could have had. Breathing quickly in order to control her emotions seemed as good a move as any.

  Debra lay still. Jeff rose from his chair. I rose from mine. He held me and I decided Aurora should finally break down.

  “It’s so hard,” I cried, quoting the script. “I never realized it would be this hard.” I let myself go completely. I sobbed and sobbed into my son-in-law’s shoulder. I felt my shoulders heave up and down. I wanted to cry for days. Only I wasn’t thinking about the death of Emma. I was thinking of how hard it had been for me to be in this picture.

  A YEAR AFTER TERMS WAS COMPLETED I CALLED JIM ON New Year’s Day to wish him happiness for the next year and ask for a recap of the year we had just been through. I told him I was still confused and unresolved about what had gone on during shooting and I asked for clarification. He was wonderful. Short and sweet.

  “Listen,” he said. “Winger and I need a certain amount of chaos and Sturm and Drang in order to work. That is the way we commit to our task. You and Nicholson are different. That’s all, forget it.”

  Does one need conflict and struggle in order for artistic creativity to flourish? The oyster needs the irritant of sand to make a pearl, but do human beings? I had been working toward peaceful, straight-shooting situations, where communication was direct but noncombative. I felt that chaotic stimulation was not only unnecessary, but destructive. Maybe I was wrong, or maybe some pictures make it in spite of conflict, or maybe they make it because of conflict.

  Debra inhabits her parts to the point of misery. She’s willing to lose herself—in fact, is compelled to do that. It might seem crazy, but it is her way of working. From her I learned that the creative impulse is pockmarked with soul scars. Each of us brings a different life experience to our work, making demands on our very different memories. Therefore, each of us has something to say and a contribution to make.

  Debra’s style of working is risky and, above all, honest. Though it’s not my style, it held a lesson for me—that I was just as entitled to express my needs in order to create a working environment that was nurturing for me.

  That was what Jim meant when he said, “Why don’t you come down to the muck and mire.” I was trying to be cooperative—a nice guy. “Christian-like and disciplined,” as Jim put it.

  So, when I won the Oscar and walked down the aisle to collect it, I leaned over to Debra—even then I couldn’t be totally honest—and said, “Half of this belongs to you.” She was honest and replied, “I’ll take it.” Perhaps her honesty inspired me to raise the Oscar above my head and say, “I deserve this.”

  8

  FOSSE

  Once Again, Please

  … Forgive Me

  I can’t tell my Hollywood story without celebrating one of the great talents in the cosmos of creativity. Bob Fosse was an extremely complicated person who thrived on knowing the worst about himself. When he died at sixty, none of us was surprised. He had been attracted to his own death for many years. In fact, his greatest film was a depiction of just that. The erotica of his demise, All That Jazz.

  Bob Fosse and I started as dancers, he in Hollywood Metro musicals, me on the Broadway stage. When we worked together on the film of Sweet Charity we remembered that each of us had helped the other get to Hollywood. He had taken me out of the chorus of Pajama Game, insisting I could do more. I had brought him to Hollywood, insisting that he could direct a movie. We shared a destiny that each of us recognized—from a respectful distance.

  I was eighteen years old, dancing in a Broadway show called Me and Juliet. Bill Hayes, Isabel Bigley, and Joan McCracken were the stars. Fosse was married to Joan. They had been dancing partn
ers, doing clubs, etc., and had survived the wars of the Metro musicals.

  McCracken was a small, yet powerful woman with a foghorn voice and a sense of “in your face” comedy years before it was fashionable. She had a long history on Broadway, beginning with Oklahoma!, where she played the original “fall down girl” as choreographed by Agnes de Mille. I had done the subway circuit of Oklahoma! years later when I was sixteen years old. McCracken was part of Broadway myth. Now I was working with her in Me and Juliet for Rodgers and Hammerstein.

  Joan was a tried and true gypsy, as well as a consummate character actress in comedies on the stage, and she possessed a generosity about other people’s talent. On matinee days during the run of Me and Juliet, Joan formed an actors’ class for chorus kids she thought had talent. I happened to be one of them. She gave us little scenes to memorize and enact. Then she’d give us her observations, critical and praiseworthy. She was smart, fair, and encouraging.

  Joan’s husband, Fosse, was back and forth between New York and Hollywood, depending on where the work was. The word went around the company that he was an imaginative dancer who had worked some with Gene Kelly and an offbeat dancer named Carbl Haney. I hadn’t seen that many Metro musicals because I was concentrating on Broadway. But I remembered that Fosse had danced in a vignette with Carol Haney in Kiss Me Kate. I could see he had not been trained in ballet, but he was a superb jazz dancer.

  Every now and then Fosse would wander into our acting classes, which took place on the stage with a simple work light in between shows, and watch us. He didn’t say much. Just watched, a cigarette dangling from his lips as he hunched and paced up and down the aisles of the theater. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He exuded a kind of creativity just by the way he moved in and around the seats of the dark theater, watching and pondering. I wondered how the marriage between him and Joan worked, with a continent separating them because of their profession.

  I loved McCracken. She was direct, honest, and very sensitive. She seemed to take me under her wing, sensing how serious I was about becoming an “acting” dancer, and helped me a great deal with my speaking voice.

  Í loved being in the show too, but I didn’t want to find myself, a few years down the line, still in the chorus. I had no idea what I would do instead. As I’ve said, I never thought about being a “star.” But I did want to play good parts, even though I knew little about acting and I wasn’t sure what a good part for me might be.

  I wanted to be funny and dramatic and musical and glamorous. I wanted to make an audience feel something. I wanted to be individualized and not lost in the background. I wanted to be noticed and loved. But I never really saw myself in motion pictures, although I couldn’t focus on exactly what I wanted to do on the stage.

  The nature of ambition is very different for different people. It never occurred to me that I wouldn’t become successful in show business. I felt somehow that I should expect to make it, that I would only be fulfilling my destiny.

  I could feel the tendency in myself, however, to want to be comfortable and quiet and safe and not dare to put myself through the humiliation of the firing line—auditions and lessons and painful training and the necessary competition that was expected if I wanted to “make it.” Yet whenever I felt that anxiety, I remembered how much effort and money and pride my parents had invested in my future. Not that they ever demanded in any overt way that I “become” anyone special. But “good genes, pioneer stock, excellent bloodlines,” and the like were phrases that echoed in our house so often that my destiny seemed to be to live up to what my family and the good Lord expected of me. I guess I didn’t want to let them down. Their dream became my dream. I hated taking even the smallest amount of money from them. I was in my teens and I felt old enough to support myself. It wasn’t easy.

  The memories of my early days in New York are still visceral. I can smell the greasepaint and steam heat of our chorus dressing room on the fifth floor off of stage right. One of the dancers sharing the dressing room was married and had a child. She bought the evening and morning papers every night and headed home to her husband and what she called a “settled life.” She was thirty-one at the time and seemed ancient to me.

  I lived in an apartment over the catacombs on West 116th Street. More than once I returned to find everything gone … the furniture, clothes, dishes, etc. I was so naive, I didn’t realize I was living in one of the most notorious dope sections of Manhattan. I’d simply take my paycheck and furnish the place again with wooden furniture I bought wholesale and unpainted. My surroundings didn’t matter much to me anyway. I didn’t intend to be home much. I was always out mapping my dreams.

  During the run of the show I was in, Me and Juliet, a new show was being planned. George Abbott, the grand old man of the Broadway theater, who was directing Me and Juliet, was contracted to codirect, with Jerome Robbins, a new musical about unions and management written by Richard Bissell. It was called 7½ Cents.

  Investors were wary because the show sounded so political, but in addition to George Abbott and Jerry Robbins’s involvement, there were three very creative people producing it: Robert Griffith, Freddie Brisson, and a bright young man named Hal Prince. The choreographer was young and bright too—Bob Fosse.

  Some of the backstage personnel in Me and Juliet were going to move on to the new show. They and the producers came to the cast of Me and Juliet looking for investments in the production of 7½ Cents. I remember so well that I couldn’t afford the thirty-five-dollar investment increments they were requesting from us.

  I decided instead to audition for 7½ Cents, despite trepidation about my singing voice. I was a strong dancer, but because there were only to be six girls in the chorus, each would have to do everything—sing, dance, and act.

  At the audition I sang “Blue Skies,” and I began before the pianist was ready. But because my voice hit the balcony and my legs were long and I laughed a lot and seemed relatively believable when I read the lines, they gave me the job.

  George Abbott and Jerry Robbins conducted the auditions along with Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, who wrote the score. Pacing up and down the aisles, shoulders hunched from nervousness, darting furtive glances at the stage, was Bob Fosse. He was as I remembered, intense and magnetic. With Fosse as choreographer and Robbins codirecting and staging some of the musical numbers, I would be working with the resident geniuses of the Broadway world, but I was too young to realize that. Things were happening so easily for me—there hadn’t been that much struggle. As I said, it felt as though I should expect this. I wasn’t particularly grateful. I was comfortable with things happening as they should!

  Rehearsals began. The show’s title had been changed from 7½ Cents, which the producers thought too political, to The Pajama Game (the industry the union was involved with). My first exposure to Fosse began.

  Bob loved rhythm. He derived much of his inspiration from it. I had read that he came out of a burlesque background, and I wondered if that was why he loved the bump-and-grind beat so much.

  Hour after hour he’d pace around the rehearsal hall with his rhythm metronome on and his cigarette hanging from his lips, the smoke curling into his squinting eyes. He could adjust the machine to any combination or rhythms he wanted. He’d feel a rhythm and start to move. The movement created a style. The style became the character of the dance that then seemed to choreograph itself.

  Bob appeared fragile, not just because his body was thin and wiry, but because he seemed to make an apology every time he spoke. He didn’t have the hard-driving, fascistic cruelty that most choreographers possess. The world of dance, especially ballet, is the world of pain. When you grow up accustomed to and conditioned by pain, it becomes a way of life, a requirement for creativity, a familiar companion. Therefore, that which is inflicted upon you, you will inflict on others. It’s inevitable. It’s familiar territory. You’re comfortable with it. In fact, you feel a job well done should not be rewarded unless there has been pain involved.
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  Fosse came not from the world of ballet, but rather from the world of jazz. That’s different. Ballet is the repetitive training of the body for the purpose of executing steps in traditional fashion. It is tied to and bound by the past. It is a disciplined beauty consciously preserved in the image of the old days in societies that were class-conscious and appreciative of elitist physical expertise.

  Ballet had been my world since I was three years old. When one is a ballet dancer, there is precious little time or room for anything else; family, fun, love, children, and relaxation all go by the wayside. It is all-consuming, because to force the body into such unnatural positions requires all the perverted sense of discipline one can muster. The strength required to live up to the traditional technique is superhuman, to say nothing of the mental persistence and stamina required. Ballet is one of the most beautiful of all art forms, but it is unnatural. In order to devote yourself to it you have to be willing to be an artistic soldier, a follower of commands, and a creature of repetition. You have to eat food that will keep your energy and strength up to par, but will not put on weight … almost impossible. Smoking and drinking are forbidden, yet nearly every great ballet dancer I’ve known has indulged in both. Sex happens in between tours, and having children is a flight of ridiculous fancy if you intend to be a real parent or a real artist.

  Because ballet dancers are always touring, they rarely know what’s going on in the world beyond the barre, the rehearsal hall, the stage, the dressing rooms, the airports, the trains and taxies and hotels. Sleep is snatched whenever possible and love is rarely permanent if it interferes with rehearsals and performances.

  Fosse was definitely not a man from the world of ballet. His expressive talent and creativity came from movement that was specific and turned inward. In ballet, all movement is turned out. The five positions, from which everything else springs, require that feet, legs, hips, and arms are forced outward.