My Lucky Stars

by Shirley Maclaine

  The second event took place one afternoon a few years later. Warren and I climbed the steps on our back porch. We had just returned from the neighborhood movie house. Mother met us at the back door, ashen and crying. “President Roosevelt just died,” she cried. “Oh, what will happen to us now?” She said she had worked hard to become an American, and he had been her president during that process. She said he had made her feel that she mattered, that she had a good heart, and because he was paralyzed from polio and couldn’t walk, she loved him. She said most people loved him because he made people feel.

  When Dad sat in front of the television set until “The Star-spangled Banner” signed off for the night and tears flowed down his cheeks, I wondered why. It wasn’t until my teenage years that I began to understand the emotions of patriotism. I have never understood where they came from, but sometimes the pride of being an American was overwhelming. My chest would seize up as if it might burst. I wondered if other people felt that way about their countries.

  I remember how concerned Daddy was about “communists.” When one of the Canadian members of Mother’s side of the family showed decided “communist leanings,” Daddy invited her to Washington, D.C., so he could show her the citadel of freedom. For days we toured the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, the White House, Capitol Building, and Supreme Court.

  Mother was as informed as Daddy because she had to be. Their emotional involvement was contagious and has informed my own patriotic attitudes ever since. I can’t say that I was knowledgeable about the specifics of political issues. My attitude was less defined than that, and infinitely sentimental. But the sentiment is what moved me.

  A leader who knew how to talk to the people became fascinating to me. If he spoke from his heart, like Roosevelt, I deeply believed that he meant what he said.

  During my teenage years, I slowly began to realize that really fine politicians were good performers. They knew how to communicate their feelings. If they did it well, my parents liked them, trusted them, and voted for them. Later, when we sat in front of the new thing called television, we talked about people’s expressions and whether they were telling the truth or not. Television was a platform from which anyone able to “come across” might take a position and be influential and effective. Daddy said the days of decisions made in smoke filled rooms were over. A person who could make a clear and decisive point on television was a natural influencer, and he or she didn’t necessarily need to know anything about politics. He predicted political campaigns would shift their focus to the TV screen, and politicians would be called upon to succeed as performers.

  We would be able to see a politician floundering if he was weak in his communicative skills, but the people who were able to break through the screen into the living room would become major new influences. In this sense, performers and politicians were alike. They communicated to people about themselves, and those who communicated from the heart and soul were the ones who really got through.

  So Marlon and Steve Allen and I went to Sacramento to see Governor Brown. Steve didn’t have quite the talent for making you feel guilty that Marlon did. But he made up for it with his pragmatic intelligence. Steve was a true intellectual with a library full of books he knew by heart. He had even written some of them.

  Governor Brown received us graciously. He ushered us into the dark, cold governor’s mansion in the state capital. Years later I could understand why his son, Jerry, would opt for sleeping on the floor in a warm apartment in Laurel Canyon when he became governor.

  Governor Brown listened to us and was pleased that actors would be so genuinely involved with social issues. (Later, though, when he ran against Ronald Reagan, he said, “Don’t forget an actor killed Lincoln.”)

  But on that day we found him open to discussion about stopping the impending execution. He said he would think about it.

  Unbeknownst to us, a large press contingent had gathered on the steps of the mansion. There were reporters from all over the world to interview these three showbiz people who claimed to have such sympathy for a convicted kidnapper—sex offender.

  At the same time, other politicians entered Governor Brown’s office. They wanted to meet the contingent from Hollywood.

  I had never seen stars and politicians interact before. Here was Brando, the finest actor-activist in the country, and Steve Allen, whose Tonight was an influential must on TV, and me, a budding novice at everything. There were state senators, the speaker of the assembly, congresspeople, and so on. The politicians eyed us and vice versa, each enamored of the influence and power of the other. Marlon and Steve exuded great confidence in their fame, but they also seemed unctuous and yet at the same time patronizing. The politicians were agape at the possibility of using either Steve or Marlon to advance their causes. We wanted to learn how they “did it.”

  After a while it became obvious that we would all have to handle the press outside. The politicians didn’t want to miss being seen with us, yet they knew the issue of capital punishment was volatile. The press could slant the story any way it wanted. Already I was learning that the press was everybody’s natural predator. Above all, we would have to mold, sculpt, circumnavigate, outwit, and tactically maneuver their opinion of us. It would be my first lesson in broken field running with the press, because the real issue was not what we politicians and performers were saying. The issue was how the press perceived us. They could make or break public opinion about us simply by what they chose to accentuate or eliminate. They also, however, were in competition with each other, which, on the one hand, helped fairness prevail, and on the other made “the story” more important than the truth.

  We walked outside and the flashbulbs bombarded us. I had never experienced that before, particularly not in a political context. I was frightened and unprepared. I hardly knew who I was, much less what I thought about social or political issues. The three of us went to a bank of microphones. The politicians surrounded us. The reporters didn’t wait for anyone to make a statement. They started yelling questions at us immediately, which were all about whether we were using our celebrity to influence a social issue.

  There it was, the one question I felt vulnerable about. I hated the idea of abusing my privilege. Of course, I felt I had the right and even the duty to take a position on something I felt strongly about, but when they asked us if we were doing it for publicity, I got intimidated.

  Steve and Marlon spoke of the cruelty of capital punishment and how state-institutionalized killing never stopped crime. They spoke eloquently of the necessity to uphold the civil and human rights of a person even if it was not popular.

  Then the press asked me why I was there. How my answer came to me I don’t know. I guess it was part of the on-the-job training. I said, “We artists owe it to our country to do what we can to prevent ourselves from looking barbaric to the rest of the world.”

  That was my initiation into spontaneous response to questions from the fourth estate. I learned something else that was very important that day. As I watched Steve and Marlon interact with the politicians and the press, I realized it was the performers who possessed the more important currency of communication. That was the currency of acting. They knew how to act sincere, humble, insecure, brave, modest, and concerned about capital punishment. The politician knew about facts. I remembered what my dad had observed twenty years before. If you really mean it, the public and the press will get it.

  Marlon and Steve lit the flame of my political consciousness in Sacramento, which, to this day, although tempered somewhat, has never gone out. It has never failed to amaze me that not only does the press ask my opinion of nuclear testing, presidential campaigns, and the Chinese revolution, but I actually tell them and they print it.

  I had been educated to have an opinion in our free society, but never to feel that it mattered.

  I was basically a human being with an artistic ambition and not much time for anything else. I was sequestered within the confines of my own se
lf-imposed discipline, and although I had a surface awareness of a sociopolitical world operating around me, I knew next to nothing about the specifics either of how it operated or what difference a simple caring human being could make.

  I’m ashamed to say that I was never really aware of the most ghastly period in our modern political history … the McCarthy period. I’d see the hearings on television when I came home from school for a moment before heading off to dancing class and rehearsals. But it never occurred to me that the very fabric of our political freedom was being torn with the House Un-American Activities Committee.

  I didn’t know what my parents thought of that McCarthy person either. I knew he had something to do with hating communists and, of course, Mother and Father hated communists, so I never gave his ranting and raving much thought. I guess our household was fairly typical. I heard that some Hollywood stars were involved, and I remember Gary Cooper saying that he never would have made High Noon if he’d realized it was a communist picture. That confused me because I thought High Noon was a great Western, so I really couldn’t understand what he was talking about. Soon after, I read that Patricia Neal, who was supposed to be his mistress, had become very upset with him because he had said those things to the committee.

  And I remember Lucille Ball, who was my favorite on television, saying that she wasn’t then and never had been a member of the Communist party. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would think that my beloved Lucy could be a communist.

  No, I had no sophistication as to what was really happening during those times. In my late teens and early twenties, I was leading an insular life in ballet and musical comedy, trying to become something in New York. It wasn’t until I met my husband, Steve, who was twelve years older than I, that I began to understand there was a complex political world to be navigated and understood and that in some ways it touched each of us. Slowly I learned the tragedy of it all … the people who informed on their best friends so they could keep their jobs, the ones who took the Fifth Amendment and trapped themselves without realizing it. As I learned more and more about the enforced betrayals and read books and listened to the fear in people’s voices even after it was essentially over, I felt ashamed that I had not somehow instinctively perceived how cruel and un-American McCarthy had been. Later, when I understood, I took his violation personally. He had besmirched what America stood for.

  After the wreckage, Hollywood began to find its conscience and its duty to uphold political freedom. Now that they had been personally touched by politics, people who had previously been insulated in their craft began to become more involved with the world around them.

  I began to learn more about modern politics from Steve; it was he who taught me that the McCarthy period had been possible because of other events that had preceded it.

  Steve also told me his father had fought in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War, which was a testing ground for fascist technology and weapons. He argued that if America had joined in the Spanish loyalist cause against the fascist forces of Franco, which were aligned with Hitler, we could have intimidated Hitler enough to squelch his takeover of Europe, and thus avoid the Second World War. But we didn’t because we were so isolationist. History, then, was a continuum, a stream of events with a cause-and-effect relationship, and if we didn’t understand the past, then we wouldn’t understand the future.

  Steve also told me of his own passion to enlist in the paratroopers and how strongly antifascist he was. He told me his own war stories of fighting in the South Pacific and being among the first troops to enter Hiroshima after the bomb. He told me of the small girl he had adopted because she had lost her parents. He named her Sachiko. He said she died from radiation sickness, and if he ever had a child of his own, he would call her Sachi. I was learning what a personal experience politics and history could be.

  My political attitude began to evolve in earnest. I took Marlon’s suggestion and analyzed my own feelings about the civil rights movement. I went into the Deep South, worked with John Lewis, James Foreman, and SNCC. I stayed with black families and saw for myself the injustice of segregation. I experienced white cops stopping my car and searching me because I had “niggers” in the backseat. I experienced the Ku Klux Klan burning a cross on the front lawn of the family I stayed with. In many ways I was attempting to work out the contradictory prejudices of my own father, who spoke so lovingly of “those nice Negroes” when he liked them and “niggers” when he didn’t. I remembered feeling that in the North, a black person could go as high as he wished, but shouldn’t come too close. In the South, a black person could come as close as he wished, but shouldn’t go too high.

  I was brought up by a black maid, Dora, alongside her little boy. My memories were never of conflict, but rather of integration. That’s why I felt comfortable traveling alone in areas of Mississippi where no other white person would go. My involvement with the civil rights movement became an issue of personal clarification. It didn’t feel political to me. It was a matter of humaneness and personal sensitivity. That’s why it held such power for me. And then came Vietnam. My political involvement became total. I became “radicalized,” as they called it then—politicized on a personal level. I’m not really sure why. I just couldn’t abide the idea that America was the self-appointed policeman of the world, killing people in order to make the planet safe for democracy, It felt like another form of fascism to me; why couldn’t we just let Vietnam alone?

  But when George McGovern made his famous Vietnam speech on the floor of the Senate and said, “No longer should we send young men to die for old men’s ideas,” I got involved with wanting to do something about it.

  Frank Sinatra and the Clan had supported Jack Kennedy for president. I had first met Jack when he was a senator. He drove me home from a party one night in his rented convertible. He stopped on Mulholland Drive and for a moment I thought I might have to finesse my way out of becoming another one of his conquests. But no, he only wanted to talk. Very nice, a bit presumptuous, and open about Hollywood being a place to sow his seeds of fun and future fund-raising. I, on the other hand, was for Adlai Stevenson. I had become a real liberal and felt that Stevenson represented what I believed more than Jack did. I had arguments with Frank about this. He said Jack knew how to use power and Stevenson didn’t. He said it took greater courage to go for Jack because he was more political, which might be more suspect, but was more effective. In the end, it didn’t matter. Jack Kennedy became our president and I came to love him as so many did, although I wasn’t really included in the inner circle. I witnessed the rupture between the President and Sinatra based on Frank’s association with the Mob. I couldn’t blame the Kennedys. Frank never spoke to any of them again and it was soon after that he became a Republican.

  When Kennedy died, I was as devastated as everyone else. I felt that a light had gone out of our lives. I stopped being interested in politics and retreated from any involvement. Then Bobby declared. I got interested again. I knew people who were with him in West Virginia when he broke down and cried at the poverty he saw. His friends told me he had made a fundamental transition in his political values. They said he essentially had always viewed himself as the black sheep in the Kennedy clan. Because he was smaller than the others, he identified with the underdog. He said he wanted to dedicate his life to taming the savagery we each held within us and he wanted to seek a newer world where everyone would be equal. My friends said they were astonished at his growing sensitivity since his brother’s death, and I liked what I heard.

  Of course, my father was right. I became a bleeding-heart liberal and would work for any candidate who evinced the same affliction.

  I became a Robert Kennedy delegate from California. That meant I often passed the weekends with him and the Kennedy clan when they came to Palm Springs, where they had a home. There was croquet on the lawn, barbecued hamburgers, lots of political gossip, dancing in the local clubs at night, and of course the flirting sexual games,
some of which were consummated and some not. I was one of the nots.

  One night I was sleeping in a guest room when someone crowded into bed with me. I couldn’t tell who it was, and when I said forget it and rolled over, he left. Anonymous sex was not one of my things. I liked Bobby, though. Yes, I knew he was politically ruthless in many ways, but that just assuaged my sensitivity about being a bleeding-heart liberal. Besides, I thought he would be more effective than Jack, particularly in wiping out crime.

  Bobby and I talked a lot. I asked him about his background and feelings within his family. He told me a story I’ve never forgotten and have never really understood.

  He said it was common knowledge that the family was driven to be competitive in athletics, but no one really knew the price exacted by his father, Joe Kennedy, if he thought they hadn’t tried hard enough to excel.

  One of their favorite sports was skiing. Bobby said he loved to ski, but he was always afraid to reach the bottom, because if he wasn’t bleeding or scarred in some way, his father would send him up the mountain again until he had evidence that Bobby had tried hard enough to do it right. I was shocked by the story, but as time passed I realized he was continually doing a different version of the same thing.

  He’d stand in front of open windows, unprotected, in a kind of provocative dare. He seemed to want to defy fate and win.

  He made an appearance on Meet the Press a week or two before the California primary wearing a yarmulke and talking about jets for Israel as though he was Jewish himself, when the whole world knew his was the largest Catholic political family in America. To me, his appearance was inflammatory, and again I thought of how drawn he was to attracting danger to himself. I was somehow always afraid for him. I remember feeling he shouldn’t go out in crowds even though Rosie Grier and Rafer Johnson were there to protect him. He aroused a messianic emotional response from crowds as though he was their last best hope. And I said just that when I introduced him for his appearance at the Sports Arena. When he walked out, he seemed so boyish, so slight, so dependent on others. It must have infuriated his enemies, who knew how relentless he could really be.