Lucky Me: My Life With--and Without--My Mom, Shirley MacLaine

by Sachi Parker

  Actually there was no mansion; there was a spot where the mansion would be. The next morning, we took a tour of the site. He owned a huge piece of property in the hills, and judging from the view and the blueprints, you could see it would be magnificent when it was completed.

  Right now, however, there was nothing. The foundation was being poured, and there were lots of construction workers milling about. Otherwise, it was just a lot of sagebrush. This was worth flying from Paris to see?

  While we walked about, I started feeling a pain in my groin. After all that crazy sex, maybe I’d pulled a muscle, or something was torn. I’d have to take it easy today.

  When we got back to the motel, though, I barely had time to get an aspirin down my throat before Jeffrey pushed me back on the bed. Time to earn my keep.

  The moment he entered me, I felt a searing pain. “Stop, stop!” I cried.

  He didn’t stop.

  “No, it hurts!”

  “Oh, it doesn’t hurt that much,” he insisted. Oh, but it did. I struggled away from him and went into the bathroom.

  I discovered to my horror that there was blood in my urine. In fact, my urine was blood

  Jeffrey looked down into the toilet bowl, unimpressed. With an impatient sigh, he inspected me. “Hmm,” he murmured, “it looks like cystitis.”

  “Cystitis? What’s that?”

  “It’s an infection. It happens. I’ll write you a prescription.”

  He scribbled a prescription for an antibiotic. I started for the door.

  “Wait a minute,” he said, grabbing my arm. “Not yet.” He threw me back on the bed.

  It took about a day for the antibiotics to kick in. Until then, the pain was excruciating—which didn’t matter to Jeffrey. He kept screwing me. That’s why I was there. He was furious that I’d gotten this infection, but he wasn’t going to let it cramp his style.

  I found out later, by the way, that traumatic cystitis results from a bruising of the bladder, which can be caused by unusually forceful intercourse. So I was definitely fucked into this condition.

  It was at about this point that I began to realize that Jeffrey was not merely weird but probably a monomaniacal sociopath. He had that depraved indifference to human life that you hear so much about on crime shows. Somehow I hadn’t picked up on this. I guess I’m just not very good at reading men.

  Now I was genuinely frightened of him, and I didn’t know what my next move would be. Jeffrey had shown flashes of his temper already, and I could well imagine the kind of violence he might be capable of. No one, not even Luke at his most out of control, terrified me as much as Jeffrey.

  So, on the third day, when he asked me to marry him, I immediately said yes. I didn’t want to marry him, God knows, but I didn’t think I had a choice. I couldn’t say no. He was already bouncing me off the walls for fun; what would he do to me if I actually crossed him?

  I called Mom in Malibu, ostensibly to break the news, but I think secretly in the hope that she would save me.

  “What?” she rasped. “Who?”

  “Dr. Jeffrey Dietrich,” I said.

  “Doctor? How did you meet him?” Already she was skeptical.

  “He’s a plastic surgeon. I wanted to get my breasts enhanced.”

  “Well, you could use some help there,” she conceded. “That doesn’t mean you have to marry the guy. Are you in love with him?”

  I paused a moment. “Yes. I guess.”

  Mom heard the panic in my voice. “I’m coming down there,” she said tersely. “Right now.”

  Two hours later she was pulling up to the motel. I was nervous about Jeffrey—would he be angry that my mother was coming to visit without his permission? Already, in the space of three days, he had so taken control of my mind and my nervous system that I was petrified at the thought of upsetting him.

  To my relief, it was the charming Jeffrey who emerged to greet Mom. He was delighted to see her, he really admired her film work, she was even more beautiful in person—he could not have been more cordial or gentlemanly.

  Mom wasn’t fooled. She was in show business; she knew when she was being bullshitted. He was too old for me, and there was something about him that she just didn’t like.

  She never said as much, but when she wouldn’t stay for dinner and wanted to head back home right away, I knew she was less than enchanted with him. She wanted me to go back to Malibu with her. “You don’t mind, Jeffrey, if she visits with her mother for a few days, do you?” she asked. He probably did mind, but she had so artfully phrased the request that it would have been churlish to deny her.

  I was planning to be gone for only a few days, but things played out much differently after Mom realized she’d forgotten her reading glasses.

  We were sitting in the car outside the motel, and Mom was trying to figure out how to get back on the freeway. She had a map spread out in her lap, but couldn’t figure it out without her glasses. I was hopeless at reading maps, so Jeffrey was leaning into the car window, trying very patiently to explain it to her:

  “You have to follow this road here, and where it forks, you bear to the left…”

  “Wait, wait, you’re talking too fast!”

  Jeffrey smiled tightly, and spoke slower: “When the road forks, you bear to the left…”

  “There’s a left here?” she said testily. “Where? I don’t see it.” Of course she didn’t see it; she didn’t have her glasses. When Mom got frustrated with something, she often found comfort in snapping at everyone else.

  Unfortunately, Jeffrey was not one to be snapped at. He was an important doctor, accustomed to being listened to, and his mood could turn on a dime, as it did now. His patience instantly evaporated, and he snatched the map from Mom’s hands, crumpled it up into a ball, and tossed it through the window at me in the passenger seat. “Here, you’ll find it,” he said, and he walked back into the motel.

  Mom looked at the crumpled map in disbelief, and then at me. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” she suggested. She floored the gas pedal, and we shot off like two bats out of hell.

  She didn’t say too much until we found the freeway, but after that she gave free rein to her opinion. “He’s an asshole! A pompous, self-important asshole! And an old asshole! You’re not marrying that middle-aged prick, no fucking way!”

  Now, I have to say, I was raised in Japan to be proper and soft-spoken, to strive always to swallow my emotions. I never swore, and whenever my mother let loose with a barrage of colorful epithets, I was always a bit shocked and embarrassed for her. How could she say such intemperate things? Didn’t she realize how poorly it reflected on her? However, in this case, I found myself in full agreement with her.

  “You’re not going back there,” she decided. “You’re staying with me.”

  As I heard this, I felt a calming joy come over me. I’m staying with Mom. I realized that this was what I had always wanted: to be with her.

  So Jeffrey turned out to be a good thing after all.

  Nevertheless, Mom hired a private detective to look into the background of Dr. Jeffrey Dietrich. Over her many years in the business, she’d had occasion to use private detectives, and now it was a habit with her. She was sure there was something fishy about my former fiancé, and she was going to find out what it was.

  This is what she told me she discovered: Dr. Jeffrey was a successful, highly respected plastic surgeon in the Chicago area—but he had a secret side business that was in many ways even more lucrative.

  It seems that Jeffrey would often attract clients (usually young women) who coveted his services but couldn’t afford his gold-standard prices. Rather than turn them away, Jeffrey would offer them a sort of barter system: he would fly the women down to Colombia, where he had a business colleague who would perform breast surgery for free. Instead of putting in silicone implants, though, the Colombian surgeon would fill the women’s breasts with bags of cocaine. The women would then fly back to Chicago, and Jeffrey would remove the cocaine
and put in the proper implants. Tit for tat, you might say.

  So Jeffrey, among his many other distinctions, was an international drug trader.

  This is why Mom did nothing with the information. She thought it more prudent to keep it strictly between us. “Look, we could go after this asshole and get him arrested, but…”

  “We might get our necks broken,” I said.

  “Exactly.”

  Looking back, I’m surprised he never suggested any such drug swap with me. Then again, I was with him for only four days total—just enough time for him to propose.

  That was something I never quite figured out. Why would he want to marry me on such short notice, especially given his tastes and background? That question led me back to Dad.

  When Dad found out that I had broken up with Jeffrey, he was really angry with me. “I’m very disappointed,” he told me over the phone, in his gravest voice. Why? True, I had never told him how Jeffrey treated me at the motel, or what Mom’s private detective had uncovered, so maybe my split with Jeffrey might have seemed capricious. Still, why should it have mattered to Dad? He didn’t even know the guy.

  Or did he? It was Miki’s friend Anastasia who had hooked me up with Jeffrey in the first place, and she had pushed for the romance. Was it all at Dad’s direction? Was he promoting the match behind the scenes, just the way he had tried to bring Luke and me together? And if so, why? Was he involved in this drug business, too? Is that where he got all his money? I flashed back again to all those puzzling scenes from Dad’s life: the loose diamonds, the dead man in his office, the misleading phone calls, the orgies in his hotel room. Who am I? I can’t keep this up anymore. Secrets built upon more secrets.

  Yet there was another secret waiting for me in Malibu, in a box of yellowed telegrams in an old brown safe: a revelation that would blow all the other ones right out of the water.

  Chapter 11

  Man in Space

  It was while we were driving back up the coast that I decided to ask the question. So many things were whirling through my head—Dad, Jeffrey, my life so far, from Japan to Europe to Australia, everything that appeared at once utterly random and yet somehow connected. If I could only find that vital missing piece, the common thread that would pull the vagrant strands together and give me that long-desired “Eureka!” moment.

  I suspected that Mom held the answer. She had rescued me from the sociopath, she was bringing me home, I was going to be a part of her life from now on. All roads led to her, and with this bright future stretching ahead of us, it seemed like the right moment to make some sense of the past.

  “Mom, is there something going on that I don’t know about?” I was referring to her and Dad, and their unconventional marriage, and where I fit in.

  She was evasive at first, but finally she said: “I’ll tell you when we get home.”

  • • •

  NOW let me say a word or two about Mom. She’s a born storyteller. It’s in her Scotch-Irish genes. She loves to entertain, and she despises the unforgivable sin of being boring—and I have to say, she’s never been more inspired or inventive than when she’s recounting the story of her own life.

  She’s written about a dozen books now, recounting her many worldly and otherworldly experiences, and all of them have been quite successful. Many critics have commented on her natural gift for storytelling. Dramatic confrontations and juicy dialogue abound.

  I wasn’t there when most of these stories were supposed to have happened, so I can’t pass judgment on their veracity. Some of them are probably true, but even given the make-believe dynamics of Hollywood, there are a few tales that strain credulity. Just one example: Mom tells of being on the set of Some Came Running with Frank Sinatra when a harried production assistant complained that they were two weeks behind on the shooting schedule. Sinatra supposedly took the script from the production assistant’s hands, ripped twenty pages out of it, and handed it back. “There, pal, now we’re on schedule.” According to Mom, Sinatra commanded such respect and fear that they never put those pages back in.

  It’s a good story, but if you’re familiar with film history, you know that a similar anecdote was told about John Ford years before. And if you’re familiar with film production, you know that it’s virtually impossible to cut a random twenty-page chunk out of a script, especially one based on a bestselling novel, without causing all kinds of mayhem with continuity and character development.

  Still, it’s a good story, and that’s what counts.

  I’ve witnessed a few of Mom’s adventures firsthand, and I’ve noticed a little bit of embellishing here and there. Not wholesale fabrication, exactly, but artful stretches of the truth. With her, a simple trip to the supermarket becomes a search for spiritual enlightenment. My minor bout with endometriosis turns into a hospital scene out of Terms of Endearment, with a frantic last-minute dash to the airport thrown in for good measure.

  For the most part, so what? It’s a showbiz axiom that you never let the truth get in the way of a good yarn. There are exceptions, though. The true reason for my childhood move to Japan is one of them. That’s a story that was never clear to me from the start, and as the years went by, it grew only murkier and more convoluted. Still, since it was clearly the most influential decision bearing on my life, it was important for me to find out what had actually happened, and why.

  There was an accepted explanation at the time: my mother’s career in Los Angeles was taking off like a rocket, my father had important business concerns in Tokyo, and it made sense for me to be raised in the more stable of the two environments. Children, after all, need consistency, and in Japan I would receive structure, a sense of traditional values, and one parent’s full and loving attention—more or less.

  If you read my Mom’s various memoirs, however, you’ll find that this story has been tweaked and contradicted more than once. In her first book, Don’t Fall Off the Mountain, I was sent to Japan because my father was stricken with hepatitis and languishing in a Tokyo hospital, far from home and all alone. (Mom didn’t know about Miki at the time.) For some reason, Mom felt that my presence at Dad’s bedside would go a long way toward raising his spirits. So, the story went, she put me on a plane and shipped me across the Pacific to work my two-year-old magic, a miniature Florence Nightingale. I turned out to be such a tonic for Dad that he recovered in record time—and although I was supposed to return to L.A. after that, he decided to keep me with him, as a lucky charm, perhaps.

  According to Mom in that first book, now she was the one who was lonely. She missed us so desperately that at one point she joined us in Tokyo, shucking her career to become a modest Japanese-style housewife. (I don’t remember this at all, but I was only two, so who knows?) For six months we led an idyllic life—we were a complete family again—but eventually Mom started to feel restless stirrings. Performing was in her blood; it was what she needed to do—but how could she abandon us again? She was torn between the dictates of conscience and career: a wrenching dilemma.

  It was only when I, little precocious Sachi, sensed her growing discontent and told her that she needed to follow her dream—“Why don’t you go back to work, Mommy?”—that she returned to the States to resume her movie career and become the great star she is today. Yes, it was all thanks to me.

  That was just one story. If you check out her later book, Dance While You Can, you’ll see that I’m sent away for the more mundane reason that Hollywood is an awful place to raise a child, and I’d have a much better chance of growing up normal in a different, more becalmed setting. Here’s the strange thing, though: in this version, I move to Japan when I’m six years old, not two. What happened to those four years? And what happened to her long months of living in Tokyo, and my words of wisdom that sent her back to America? Did any of that happen? Again, who knows?

  In an even later book, My Lucky Stars: A Hollywood Journey, the Mob story emerges: Mom gets the word from an associate that the syndicate is thinking of kidnapping me.
It seems the goons want to muscle in on Mom’s career and get her under their exclusive control (which is a twist on the older story, which held that the Mob was angry with Sinatra). She has no intention of playing ball with them, so Dad insists, for safety’s sake, that I leave the country. (I don’t know if I’m six or two in this story; it’s not clear.)

  The dialogue in this beach scene is especially rich: Mom gets off a few of her choice expletives (“those cocksuckers!”) and has one visionary outburst in which she declares she’s not going to knuckle under (“and you can tell them to shove their horses’ heads up their asses!”). Since this scene takes place a good ten years before The Godfather was published, I don’t know where she pulled this iconic image from, unless her gift for channeling had granted her access to the future as well as the past.

  They’re all good stories, I have to admit: solid, motivated, reasonably credible. Still, they can’t all be true.

  In fact, none of them is. The inside, exclusive story, the one Mom revealed to me when we arrived in Malibu, is the least believable of them all, but it’s the one that actually happened—or so she swears.

  • • •

  WE arrived at her beach house. I followed Mom into her bedroom, where she pulled an old brown safe out of her closet. She carried it into the living room and fiddled with the combination. The safe popped open and she removed a tin box containing a stack of old telegrams. “Read,” she said. “This will explain everything.”

  The telegrams gave me an ominous twinge. More letters from Miki, perhaps?

  I sat on the living room couch, picked out the first telegram, which was dated April 1956. It read something like this:

  My darling Shirley, I miss you so much. Can’t wait to see you again. Love and kisses. Paul.

  Huh.

  It was highly unilluminating. Someone named Paul. Obviously a romance. Was it an affair? Had she been cheating on Dad? Did it matter? They were both proud of the fact that they had a modern, open marriage, so a little dalliance on the side was no big deal. Was this something deeper, though? Was Paul the true love of her life?