My Lucky Stars

by Shirley Maclaine

  I made a decision to return to my beginnings. I went back to dancing class, put myself on a strict diet, lost thirty pounds, and returned to the stage. At least I could rely on my training from childhood. If it worked I would be guaranteed a place to express myself and a form of income.

  I knew when I opened at the MGM Grand that I was a has-been movie star with a club act as a backup because I had nowhere else to go. I drove my body unmercifully to look thin and taut. I lived at the gym and ate nothing. And I was terrified to face an audience.

  One of the individuals who was most responsible for giving me the courage to proceed was the composer Cy Coleman. He had written the music for Sweet Charity and I loved his talent and generosity. He was willing to help me put my act together, which of course featured many of his songs. That was fine with me. Most of his work was for actors and dancers who sang anyway.

  So there I was, a movie star who couldn’t get work, opening in Vegas and hopefully stints beyond. Thank God, the show was a hit. I was thrilled. I went from Vegas to Europe and finally to New York, where we played the Palace, and I was a hit there too. I had a new career, which I felt I could depend upon as long as I could draw audiences. But a confusion in the audiences’ perception of me soon became evident, which prevails to this day. Audiences who frequent live concert performances are not really sure what to expect from me. Are they going to see a movie star, a political activist, a person who will lecture about metaphysical matters, or a singer/dancer who sometimes does musicals? They are not sure.

  This is especially true with audiences in the United States (except on the two coasts). To American audiences, I belonged on the screen; Hollywood was my base—my real home. It was the town where I would find acknowledgment. This has produced an anxiety in me to somehow remain on the screen, because the screen is my natural medium of expression, my life’s blood bank. Yet with every successful picture I am lucky enough to be a part of, comes confusion relating to my stage work. Am I a character actress or a performer? And the older I play on film, the more confused the audiences become on stage. How can a gray-haired (even though they’re wigs) eccentric character actress do a glamorous act of songs and dances?

  My original persona was that of a movie star and I suppose that is how I will be perceived for the rest of my life, whether I continue to work in films or not.

  In any case, my live show saved my life during the middle seventies, and when I finally got a good offer in pictures again, it was The Turning Point for Herb Ross.

  The Turning Point became my first comeback picture! I played middle-aged, which was my first subtle entry into character acting, and I realized that I was beginning a new phase of learning about mother-daughter relationships through my characters. This subject seemed popular on the screen because so many mothers and daughters were having problems with each other. I felt useful again. I could say something about the complexity of women, young and old, changing values within families, and how age brought wisdom if one allowed it.

  So The Turning Point heralded a turning point in the kinds of parts I played. Dee Dee had trained all of her young life to become a fine ballet dancer, only to make the decision, on the brink of stardom, to give it up for marriage and a family. Through Dee Dee I examined how I would have dealt with such a decision. The answer? I would never have given up my work for marriage, family, or anybody—to me it would be like telling a B-47 it shouldn’t fly but should instead have a satisfying time secure in the hangar.

  Work was necessary to me, which led me to understand that regardless of what happened in my life, I needed to be acknowledged; therefore, I would need to survive in a business that was notorious for making people, particularly actresses, disposable.

  I had started as a dancer, and coming full circle again, here I was, in a picture I badly needed and was grateful for, surrounded by the world of my beginnings—ballet!

  Herbert Ross, the director, was in his element with Arthur Laurents’s script. Herbert had been in ballet himself as a dancer and choreographer, which was really novel because he is way over six feet tall. He saw to it that his wife, Nora Kaye, one of the greatest ballerinas who ever lived, functioned as associate producer and all-around overseer. They were brilliant as a creative team, and the footage reflected that. The Turning Point garnered eleven Academy Award nominations, including one for me, and was a big hit, because of their vision of and homage to the world of ballet.

  It was Mikhail Baryshnikov’s first feature film. He was hardworking and diligent. I liked and enjoyed him so much. We often talked in between setups about what ballet does for and to your mind, body, and spirit. He found acting exhausting because of the need to hold the emotional level all day long. Often he’d come to me at the end of a day’s shooting and say it was easier to do a full ballet than to sustain emotionality during the waiting hours.

  I loved being around accomplished ballet dancers again. I had never been good enough to become a soloist. Quatre ballet was about all I could handle, I was too tall (5′ 7″) and I didn’t have beautifully constructed feet (high arches, high insteps). My extension on my left leg was pretty good, but my feet wouldn’t point with the curve that suggests the ultimate in beauty. My real forte was jumps, especially grand jetés, and hopping on pointe.

  I loved watching ballerinas on the set try to act and dance at the same time. Many of them couldn’t. So focused were they on the movement, they couldn’t form words in their mouths. They could spontaneously talk and dance at the same time in real life, but found it difficult to remember lines while they were executing steps.

  We shot the last scene in the film first, in an upper foyer of a theater across the street from the Palace Theater. I had just closed my one-woman show at the Palace and the marquee with my name on it was still up.

  I looked down at it and remembered all the years of ballet pain. I was now playing the part of a woman who had said enough is enough. I wondered when I would come to that conclusion. I also wondered what my life would have been like had I never gone to ballet class at all. Dancing meant the appreciation of form, art, and beauty—discipline was a given. It meant punctuality, junk food, no sleep, noisy trains, and rising above adversity. It also meant struggle and triumph of the spiritual over the physical. In the end, when all of those things came together, the feeling of soaring with the body into forms of exquisite geometry made the experience of being alive a heavenly state of being.

  Even though The Turning Point was a big hit for me and everyone involved, it was dismissed by some as a “women’s picture.” Still, I was encouraged because I had found a way back into Hollywood.

  The glare of the white soundstages at high noon, the early calls and clogged freeways in the mornings, the desire and anxiety to please the front office entered my life again. So too did the camaraderie of a film set, the expression of human emotion, and the feeling of once again being appreciated.

  What would I do, I thought, if it should all go away for good? What else was there as important in my life? I had a long-distance marriage that had become platonic and unsatisfying, a daughter who had her own life, a passport that had stamps on it from nearly every country in the world, a relationship that was winding down, and an uncertain view of my future.

  I began to seriously question the meaning of my life, my purpose and divinity, my reason for being alive, where I was going, and where I might have come from.

  This was when spirituality and metaphysics became important to me. I began to ask so many spiritual questions. I read everything I could find, including the Bible, the Koran, and most every book written on reincarnation, the laws of Karma, and extraterrestrials. My investigations took me to remote areas of the globe and soon I found an entirely new circle of friends.

  As I learned the metaphysical axioms for reality which concluded that the reality of our lives was basically our own personal creation in order to learn, and that indeed life itself is an illusion or dream that deeply affects us because of its lessons, I began to percei
ve Hollywood’s reality differently. The parallels were so similar. We in the movie business created illusions for other people to believe in as real, while we were doing the same thing with ourselves in our own lives. In other words, we were each responsible for creating everything that happened to us. Therefore, we were empowered to uncreate as well, if we so desired.

  I wanted to uncreate what was happening in Hollywood relating to women’s parts.

  The parts being written for women in Hollywood reflected confusion. It was almost as though the men who wrote them were trying to figure out who they were, not who the women were.

  I received two scripts that were essentially the same, on the subject of open marriage (Loving Couples and A Change of Seasons). I couldn’t decide between them so I did both, figuring one would work. Both were awful. Neither the female nor the male characters were real as each attempted to deal with monogamy, infidelity, and finally communication in marriage. Once again I was on the outside looking in.

  The writers debated at length on the problem, as did the directors and producers. In the meantime, women were essentially excluded from the mainstream of moviemaking. They became also-rans, dutifully fulfilling the expectations of the leading male character, or vociferously opposing the leading male character. Or more than likely, women couldn’t get parts in the movies at all because the leading male characters were costarring with each other. Buddy pictures became the mode of the day. I went back to metaphysics, where I could create my own reality, which seemed to be the newly developing human art form anyway.

  Once more I found myself, as did many others, wondering if there would ever be good parts for women again.

  Enter Jim Brooks and Terms of Endearment and my second comeback picture. He understood the contradictions, the nooks and crannies, and the magnificent “magnanimosity” of women.

  The picture changed the Hollywood landscape where women were concerned. But no one could come up with a follow-through. Jim stood alone in his consummate understanding of contradictions in human beings; of men and women. He was also brilliant about aging.

  During the making of Terms, I was so glad to find myself comfortable with the aging aspects of Aurora.

  I remember Jim being so sensitively concerned about my vanity as he suggested using my own gray roots as an insignia of Aurora’s decline in physical pride and appearance. Not only did I not mind, I found a comforting pleasure in seeing that my future could lie in playing older roles successfully. At least I would continue to work and maybe I could even say some important things through my acting. However, I remember the day we shot a test of Aurora’s decline. The cameraman had to leave early. He forgot to put a filter in the lens.

  The entire company saw the film the next day. The wrinkles embedded in my face were much more startling on film than what met the naked eye. I was mortified. In that moment I knew I was old, and I was not yet fifty. Hollywood has a way of forcing you to look into the future, and what I saw was not mirthmaking.

  After Terms of Endearment, there was nothing out there. I decided to do Cannonball Run IL The critic from USA Today said Dean Martin and I should fire our agent.

  I spent the next few years writing and shooting the five-hour miniseries of my book Out on a Limb, determining with my cowriter and friend Colin Higgins, who was also involved with his own spiritual search, what was palatable to a huge audience and what wasn’t.

  The show was not as highly rated as we expected, even though it won its time period on the second night.

  One thing fascinated me in terms of our competition. Mafia Wife beat us out the first night. Two women battled in the arena of public taste. One on a spiritual search, the other on a power trip. The Mob won. Enough said.

  My character in Steel Magnolias became a pathway for my own increasingly irascible expression. The lines by Robert Harling (“I’ve been in a bad mood for forty years.”) spurred me to take a sarcastically witty course of action in my own life when I found that with age I could no longer suffer fools gladly.

  I adored working with no makeup, a gray, disheveled wig, and a wardrobe that would put a bag lady to shame. I felt free to be older and funnier and ignore social decorum. In fact, I could imagine myself some years from now, being similar to Ouiser Boudreaux. Rich, flamboyantly sarcastic, and more than happy to be alone.

  In that respect I have extracted what I considered the best from characters and used whatever gave me fun and pleasure.

  By the time I got to Madame Sousatzka, I had come through the fire: I knew I was into the last period of my life. Sousatzka was my tribute to every teacher I had ever had, including my parents. I wanted to play her even older than I could get away with. I seemed to empathize with the bittersweet loneliness of teaching others because my time was now measured. I know my portrayal was shocking, but aging is shocking, and I wanted to paint my impressions with broad strokes.

  With Madame Sousatzka I came closest to living a part. Experimenting, I decided to employ a metaphysical technique. The director, John Schlesinger, and I conceived how Sousatzka dressed, moved, talked, and felt about herself and her piano students. I then threw her up to the universe, got out of my own way, and allowed Sousatzka to play herself through me! Acting is a metaphysical exercise anyway in that we actors create a reality we then proceed to believe is real. So taking Sousatzka one step further seemed inevitable to me because I could trust Schlesinger’s taste.

  Sousatzka would “come in” right before the cameras rolled in the morning and leave after the last scene every night.

  When we shot the final scene of the picture, she left for good, and within five minutes my throat seized up, I had a fever, and came down with the flu. I don’t know why that happened. Metaphysicians would say it was due to the change of energy. I was proud of that performance, even though only about twelve people in the world saw the picture. It also launched me into character acting once and for all. Producers were no longer intimidated to send me scripts of older women for fear I’d be insulted. In fact, they became so liberated from their fear that some of the suggestions I got were astonishing, Driving Miss Daisy being one of them. I very much respected Dick and Lili Zanuck, but I felt that I had not yet graduated to Jessica Tandy’s roles.

  When Mike Nichols and Carrie Fisher asked me to do Postcards from the Edge, it felt like old times again. A big-budgeted movie with stars (Meryl Streep, Dennis Quaid, and Gene Hackman); a sumptuous catering table all day long (food was becoming more and more important to me); a musical number to sing, rewritten by Stephen Sondheim; a great director, a superb costar, a witty and dramatic script, and the best part I had had in a long time.

  But the audience had changed. They weren’t that interested in yet another examination of mother-daughter conflicts. Postcards was another modest hit, and once again, studio heads muttered that “women’s pictures” were risky.

  The same thing happened with Used People. The people didn’t care that much for family problems on the screen. The culture did not want to look at itself. Times were hard enough, I guess. They wanted to escape. Yet I kept looking for stories with intelligent meaning. Wrestling Ernest Hemingway didn’t work because it took itself too seriously. It had too much self-conscious meaning. But by now I just wanted to work with people I respected and I didn’t much care about box office.

  I had become a respected matron of many meanings in Hollywood.

  Many was the script that crossed my desk calling for me to play a woman of seventy-five and older.

  When Guarding Tess arrived, I read the description of the character: Tess Carlisle, seventy-five, widow of the former president. I elected not to be insulted, read the script, loved it, decided to do it, and made essentially only one change in the script. Where it said Tess Carlisle, seventy-five, I simply reversed the numbers to say Tess Carlisle, fifty-seven. Nobody said anything and no one knew the difference.

  When Guarding Tess became a modest success—number one at the box office until Naked Gun 33⅓ opened—I felt the old twi
nge of excitement at being a box-office hit again. People were glad to see me at parties and social gatherings. They were most deferential regarding my life and body of work. But it made me chuckle too. I remembered how it was when nobody cared. There was polite acknowledgment of my presence, but nobody spent much of their precious time locked in conversation with me in the corner of the room. Yes, how fleeting, and in the long-term, meaningless fame and success really were. Critical and box-office success means something if it contributes to the knowledge of who I am, and that knowledge comes from the experience of failure as well as success.

  I used to be concerned with what other people might think of me. Now I’m concerned with what I think of other people. That goes for the audience too. I have opinions of them now just as they have opinions of me. And sometimes my opinion of them is not overly respectful. I don’t much care anymore what they think because I’m not sure they do think.

  I care about acting now, acting and performing. I do it for myself. I have come to have a deep respect for my profession and what it takes to last. I’m not sure an audience’s opinion has anything to do with it.

  Probably my biggest acting challenge now will be the recreation of Aurora Green way in Evening Star. She is twenty years older and coping not only with aging and the trials and tribulations of her grandchildren, but also with her colorful and irrepressible sexuality. She goes to a psychiatrist to cope with the grandchildren. He is twenty-five years younger. She promptly seduces him. He succumbs willingly, and for once we see a woman of sixty on the screen who still has the juice and passions that I and many other women of age possess in real life. We are not willing to go gently into that good night, retiring quietly. We have much to contribute to a relationship—wisdom and experience and a better understanding of human nature. We want to continue to be acknowledged. And as Jim Brooks proved, life that is worth living comes from contradictions we are trying to resolve. Life is better after you’ve lived it awhile.