My Lucky Stars

by Shirley Maclaine

  The actresses on Used People—Kathy Bates, Jessica Tandy, and Marcia Gay Harden—formed the same trusting bond that I experienced in making Steel Magnolias. We shared our lives, our loves, and our fears. For three months in Toronto, Canada, we were out of touch with the familiar stimuli of our lives. So we became friendly with each other. Again I marveled at the success of the female sensibility. Beeban had stamina that put the male crew to shame. Their respect for her was unlimited, and we actresses found it a new experience to strive to please a woman director. She was specific and almost always correct in her criticisms and objections. With a male director an actress harks back to pleasing Daddy. With a woman, somehow it is more of an equal endeavor.

  Sometimes a member of the crew would challenge Beeban in a personally macho way. She was polite, but held steadfast to what she wanted.

  Marcello Mastroianni, the male star of the film, adored being surrounded by women. Marcello is a debonair charmer who hated to rehearse, worked hard on his English, and essentially lived to have his five-course Italian meal regardless of what time we finished working. He discovered a homestyle Italian restaurant that would stay open for him until all hours. They served his favorite wine and had busts of beautiful women on the walls. Marcello had reached a point in his life where he desired only good company, good food and wine, and with luck a good script. Now and then he and I would talk deeply and personally about the loves in our lives, and how such relationships dovetailed with our work. We laughed about the time he and Faye Dunaway, who believed they were being successfully discreet, ran into Robert Mitchum and me on a London street. We believed we were being successfully discreet. And so the conversation led to the dilemma of falling in love with one’s costar.

  “One must love one’s costar,” said Marcello. “Otherwise how will the audience believe it?”

  11

  MEN I HAVE LOVED

  … TO STAR WITH

  I have made over forty films, and therefore worked with over forty sets of costars. The kaleidoscope of their talents, their personalities, their senses of humor, their serious concerns, their wives, children, lovers, agents, and even parole officers definitely makes the real world civilianlike.

  Learning to honor, appreciate, understand, revere, and even fall in love with a few of my leading men taught me more about myself than my marriage with Steve did. These relationships were often more intense and sometimes more intimate. When you make a film, you are confined to a certain set of personality combinations every day from five A.M. to nine P.M. for at least three months. And that’s just while the film is shooting. The preshoot rehearsals and the postproduction (dubbing, reshoots, and publicity) round out to four or five months. If you don’t fall in love, hate, or frustration, you must be dead. To make a film is a real commitment to yourself and the people around you. Out of that you learn how little you really know about yourself.

  As in the mirroring effect of all relationships, I’ve seen so much of myself in each of the people I’ve worked with. Sometimes that was quite painful and I’m sure they’ve seen themselves in me. I don’t know how to do them honest justice except to give a thumbnail sketch of how I spontaneously remember them.

  DAVID NIVEN (AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY DAYS) WAS WITTY and an excellent technician in both comedy and drama. But he intimidated me. When I arrived on location for Eighty Days, he was bitingly sarcastic about my being cast as a Hindu princess. I guess Mike Todd hadn’t told him he wanted a campy Hindu princess. Mike, in his inimitable way, had uncovered some iconoclastic research that convinced him that the highest-caste Hindus had blue eyes and freckles. My red hair was perhaps going too far, however, so he made me dye it black.

  Niven bought none of this, and for quite a few days treated me like an unwanted guest at a garden party. I was so new in the business, so eager to please, and feeling so lonely on location in the mountains of Durango, Colorado, that he really hurt my feelings. I never told him. I somehow needed to brave my way through it, and by ten o’clock every morning, after the Hindu makeup, hair, and costume were in place, I would have an attack of diarrhea. By the time I walked onto the set, I did not have the confidence to be imaginatively campy. I had a terrible time and in many ways blamed his standoffish, detached, droll Englishness for my insecurities.

  I know he had no respect for me until the picture was over and he saw that perhaps I might make it in the business after all.

  When we starred together in Ask Any Girl some years later, his attitude had changed and so had mine. I had more confidence, and he let me see more of himself.

  He had a beautiful wife named Hyördis, a tall and striking Swede. When she drank, she was quite freewheeling with other men.

  “Why don’t you simply present your entire package, then?” David said to her one evening at dinner when she was embarrassingly flirtatious. He was hurt, and she was sarcastic and detached. I remember thinking I should look for the deeper understanding in everybody.

  We went on to do our love scene the next day and David never missed his marks, was always in his light, was letter-perfect in his lines, but he never looked me in the eye. I could see why Hyördis tried to provoke him—not that that ever threw him off center. Years later, when I saw his performance in Separate Tables, I was ashamed I hadn’t recognized the depth he was capable of as an actor.

  JOHN FORSYTHE (THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY) WAS KINDLY and patriarchal to me. I was quite green about life, play, and work. John never had a problem with any of these three. In fact, nothing seemed to bother him.

  John and I had love scenes together, but they were fey, in the spirit of the movie. I watched him through adolescent eyes (I was barely past nineteen) as he seemed to pursue a friendly relationship with a woman who ran a farm in the mountains of Vermont. I didn’t know nor did I ask what the real nature of their relationship was. I remember wondering for the first time about faithfulness and monogamy in the movie business. Hitchcock-wouldn’t allow husbands on the set, and Steve and I had just gotten married. I wondered, were you expected to be solitary while on location if you were married? The crew didn’t appear to be. In fact, there seemed to be an unwritten freedom clause in the location contract. Whatever happened happened. I felt immature and unsophisticated as I watched what went on around me. In reality, I was judgmental. I thought that people who flagrantly threw their marriage vows aside just because they were away from home were cheats. Oh boy, did I have a lot to learn.

  John, on the other hand, was gracefully tolerant of everything. Later, I could see how he peacefully rode the waves of ten years of Dynasty. I loved seeing him become a white-haired, suave TV megastar, and he communicated his pride in me too. He wrote me a fan letter after I really hit it big. It was sweet, loving, and fatherly. But it never reached me. A secretary at the studio intercepted it, answered it, and sent him back a black-and-white glossy photo of me, signing it Sincerely, Shirley MacLaine. John brought the photo with him when he visited me backstage once in Las Vegas. I was mortified, but he smiled that knowing, understanding smile, just like a tolerant guardian. He was my first leading man, and as such was so tender with me.

  GLENN FORD (THE SHEEPMAN) DECIDED I SHOULD LEARN TO smoke a cigar. I did and threw up. Then he put my cowboy hat under his horse to “christen” it.

  Glenn definitely looked into my eyes, and told me his life story with women. I was fascinated, but frankly much more interested in the news that the ghost of Rudolph Valentino inhabited the house he lived in with Eleanor Powell. He said Valentino would sometimes move the furniture around and put on music that he had loved to tango to. Glenn loved the presence … Eleanor didn’t. When I told him that Eleanor was my father’s favorite star and dancer, Glenn was not amused. He was competitive with Eleanor. He hadn’t resolved their split. But Glenn was a darling man with a dry sense of humor. We became good friends, though not as good as he’d have had some people think.

  JAMES GARNER, WITH WHOM I MADE THE CHILDREN’S HOUR, is perhaps, except for Dean, the wittiest and fun
niest of all the men I have worked with. Our picture together was somber, but my sides ached at his off-camera comedic turns of phrase.

  Jim seemed quite happily married in a way that allowed him to make delicious fun of his family life, in fact, his comedy took priority over everything else. Audrey Hepburn and I had to develop a certain disciplined resistance to his humor or we couldn’t have settled into our serious onscreen friendship.

  Audrey had a nobility of spirit and a sense of fawnlike fun that touches my heart to this day when I think of her. She possessed qualities of such rare richness that her penchant for perfectionism seemed simply a trifle. I used to wish I could have her style and talent for fashion. I felt gawky and unkempt around her, and I told her so. She said not to worry, she would teach me how to dress if I would teach her how to cuss. We made a deal that neither of us lived up to!

  Jim Garner’s day was made when he could break the two of us up in the middle of a dramatic bloodletting. (I have never understood why Jim didn’t have his own comedy talk show.) Our director, William Wyler, feigned deafness whenever he saw Jim take control of our attention with his comedy. To him, we were childlike pretenders who were not tending to business.

  • • •

  JACK LEMMON, MY DARLING JACK, (THE APARTMENT, IRMA LA DOUCE) is the epitome of what it means to be a nice person. He was always prepared, yet mischievously open for a good laugh. His genius was so riveting that I would often come in on my days off or stay late at night just to watch him cast his comic spell before the camera. I wished Billy Wilder would pay as much attention to my talent as he did to Jack’s. But the attention had its downside too. Billy was so enamored of Jack that he pressed him to do take after take just to see what would happen. Jack, being the cooperative professional, complied, often to his own detriment. The later takes were forced, and often those were the ones Billy printed. I, on the other hand, only had to do it three or four times because frankly I don’t think Billy thought I was capable of much more, but at least I stayed fresh.

  Jack is a miracle of longevity. His staying power becomes more and more evident. He has a sad, befuddled quality that makes his talent for both comedy and drama so enduring. I remember the morning he got an Academy Award nomination for Days of Wine and Roses—I wanted so much to be recognized one day for having the talent to do both comedy and drama equally well, like Jack. His ego never overrode his nervous need to be better. I used to watch him at the end of every day holding a mug of martinis in his fist. He is a dear man who forever worried that he might not pass muster. I loved him for it because I knew how he felt. When I close my eyes today and see him holler “Magic Time” in my memory, I’m reminded yet again that he is the master of magic himself and a real friend. We have been looking for another film to do together. Hopefully we will find a good script before the magic is gone forever!

  • • •

  MY OTHER JACK—JACK NICHOLSON—IS THE MAN WHOSE career I personally admire most. He has had the courage to remain in a perpetual state of experimentation, purposely flying in the face of what is expected and acceptable. When I saw his film Five Easy Pieces, long before I met him, I felt he was single-handedly ushering in a new style of acting, a brand-new spontaneity that seemed to indicate he was performing without a script. In fact, his performance in that film gave me a new lease on what I believed possible. I was an actress who fell in between the old, formal school of acting and the new school, which demanded the spontaneity of the decision making process.

  When I learned that jack’s famous chicken-salad-sandwich scene in Five Easy Pieces was actually scripted, J realized that the intimidation of improvisation was not necessary. It was only a question of realistic tone. And when I finally worked with him in Terms, I saw how much of himself he was willing to throw away in order to risk the fullness of the unexperienced now. Each take with Jack was purposefully different. He reveled in perpetrating the unexpected. Planned response to Nicholson was not a good move—better to leave yourself open. Homework was better left at home. He challenged me to take a chance and not plan my moves or feelings. If he had a frog in his throat, he’d never mutter “cut” and stop the scene. He’d use it, play with it, and ultimately make it seem that the scene was written that way. If you could go along with his freedom, you’d be as good as he was.

  There’s a story about Jack that only contributes to my admiration for him.

  He had a very small part years ago in Ensign Pulver, which Josh Logan directed. Logan was famous for needing a whipping boy to vent his anger and anxiety on. Nicholson fit the bill for some reason.

  In front of the cast and crew, Logan attacked Nicholson one day, decrying Jack’s talent, his physical appearance, and how he photographed. He finished the verbal lashing by suggesting that Jack seriously consider going into some other line of work because acting was definitely not a profession for which he possessed even a modicum of talent.

  Jack said nothing. At lunch, a friend of his (who told me the story) approached Jack, asking how he felt and what he was going to do about Logan’s harsh advice.

  “I’m going to try harder,” answered Jack.

  He went on to do the now famous Roger Corman horror flicks and little by little learned to individualize his talent until he became one of the premiere actors of his generation.

  I was impressed by Jack’s stick-to-itiveness.

  I think Jack sees life as basically absurd. He seems to be without vanity. He loved showing his middle-aged stomach in our picture and still manages to view himself as a devilishly dangerous sex object. Frankly, I’d like to see him play a woman. What a lesson in the art of controlled outrageousness that would be! She would probably be the woman I’d like to be one day. I thought Jack’s best performances, however, were in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Hoffa. Never was there a greater range evident in an actor’s talent. I was sitting next to him when he received his Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute. “I don’t know what to say when I get up there,” he said to me. “I’ve had every comedy writer in town up to the house, but none of that is me. I don’t know. Why are they giving me this thing anyway?”

  I was touched by Jack’s feeling of undeservability. He never liked to speak in public. Like many actors, he needed the camouflage of a character. When we went around the country accepting our awards for Terms, he was never comfortable, and on this AFI night nothing had changed. I sensed that his 1994 golf-club assault on a car that had cut him off was born out of anxiety over the Lifetime Achievement Award. He told me he felt deeply embarrassed and unworthy, His mouth trembled and his hands shook. When he finally rose to make his speech, something in him released his feelings. There were tears in his eyes. He stopped for a long moment, looked around the room, and actually said, “From now on I might fall in love with myself!”

  He had allowed himself to reach the heart of the matter … his opinion of himself, which touched everybody in the room. He taught all of us that night that it was okay to be hesitant, to be publicly unaware, and finally to acknowledge that we all loved him.

  RICHARD HARRIS (WRESTLING ERNEST HEMINGWAY) LIVES UP TO his reputation as a bombastic Irishman given to high-flown, grand, eloquent stories. His bounce and vigor, his ornate emotional complexity belie a nature that is shrewdly involved with survival. He is great fun to be with until something triggers an insecurity. Then one understands the stormy Irish soul beneath. We had a love scene that involved his character’s admission that he was impotent. It was a sensitive evening’s shoot. I was playing an independent older woman who was nevertheless lonely and sexually frustrated. All sorts of jumbled thoughts went through my mind as I finally had the chance to play a love scene that involved senior citizens with juice. Flanks of sexy younger women darted across my brain. Would the public want to see gray-haired elders enact their conflicts? I couldn’t remember having seen a real love scene between people over forty in years. Was this even in bad taste?

  Richard was having his own doubts about this issu
e, which for an actor playing an impotent man I could only speculate upon.

  He procrastinated and wouldn’t come to the set.

  I began to get tired. It was three o’clock in the morning and he had already had a run-in with the director.

  I waited patiently as long as I could and then, with total insensitivity, I yelled, “Richard, get your butt in here so we can get this mutha and go home.”

  Reluctantly he slouched onto the set and tried his best. He was really quite wonderful even when he was over the top, but he had lost the belief in himself.

  It took us another few hours and about ten more takes to wrap for the evening. Our relationship was not the same after that; neither of us felt good about our behavior.

  TO ME, ROBERT DUVALL (HEMINGWAY) IS THE BEST ACTOR IN the world. To work closely with him, feel his artistry—and yet be engaged in a conversation about something as mundane as how to make corn bread right up until “action” is called—is to be in the presence of the true muse at work. He doesn’t burden others with his presentation. He is singularly without self-indulgence. His curiosity, appreciation, and interest in others are what inform his work. He is self-questioning, with an aptitude for melting into the crowd, a tendency to forgo his own identity while remaining aware and sensitive to how he is affecting others. His genuine guilt at having hurt someone during a heated moment of conflict was very important to witness. He is the finest actor we have and one of the most unassuming.

  Robert was playing a Cuban in Wrestling Ernest Hemingway, and while we were rehearsing he took me to dinner at the home of a Cuban he had met in Florida. Robert melded into the man’s family, watching and observing every move. I couldn’t quite do that. I was still the movie star, and slightly apart. I longed to be able to abdicate my persona. Duvall was a little crazy in that he had to become Cuban. And when he rose from the table and began to tango (he’s an expert at that too) I saw a Valentino in our midst. I watched his body and footwork become his entire focus. His eyes became possessed with the dance and its sexual intent. I had never imagined him this way.