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

by Sachi Parker

  • • •

  SHE needed time. Dad, whether he was Paul or Steve, was the love of her life, and she had invested everything in that relationship. To accept now that he had manipulated her in this spectacular fashion, deceived her and played her for a fool, would have been too devastating to bear.

  But she was also a very smart woman, and she knew she couldn’t keep deluding herself. After taking a few days to absorb the story, she knew she had to confront Dad.

  I remember we were sitting in the kitchen in Malibu, enjoying a very tasty Chilean red wine—at only five bucks a bottle—when Mom jumped up and said, “I’m going to call him.”

  I felt a twinge of alarm. “Are you sure you want to?” I knew that once they spoke of this, there would be no going back. I felt terribly guilty, too, because, unknowingly or not, I had brought about this situation. I was the messenger of doom.

  Mom got Dad on the phone, and immediately started firing questions at him. “What’s this about a chalet? You have a chalet?” “I didn’t know you had a yacht!” “You have a helicopter business? Since when? What is this?”

  I couldn’t hear what was going on on the other end, of course, but I could see from Mom’s face that Dad was doing his best to spin the story to his advantage.

  Mom wasn’t falling for it. For the first time, she could see right through his diversions. Then she said the words that made my stomach leap: “I want a divorce.”

  I was shocked. I didn’t realize she was ready to take that extreme step—and maybe she wasn’t, until she heard Dad’s voice and the charming lies he was casually spinning. I was glad I had the wine to calm my nerves.

  Even more shocking was the look on Mom’s face when she heard his reply. She was clearly stunned, and deeply unsettled. She slowly put the phone down, as Dad had already hung up on her.

  “What did he say, Mom?”

  Mom took a breath, and then answered, “He said, ‘You’re out! OUT!’” She mimicked his voice, harsh and ugly.

  “Out of what?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Out of his life,” she surmised. She sat down to finish her wine, but I could see that she was rattled. It wasn’t easy to get to Mom, but that violent outburst had really gotten her. I could read the deep hurt and shock and abandonment on her face; she was suddenly a little girl, orphaned and cast away from the only mooring in her life. I felt so sorry for her at that moment that I wanted to wrap my arms around her and hold her, give her comfort.

  Mom then hired a private investigator to check into my story.

  The investigator confirmed that Dad was living a lavish lifestyle, with no visible source of income except my mother’s monthly stipend. He wasn’t in outer space; he was cruising the Aegean with Aristotle Onassis. The investigator also discovered that much of Dad’s official past history had been fabricated: he never lived in Japan with his father, he never served in the armed forces, he never met a little Japanese orphan in Hiroshima named Sachiko. There was no indication that he had had any connection at all with NASA or the U.S. government.

  There was, however, some kind of government file with Dad’s name on it, labeled “top secret.” Since it was top secret, we never found out what it contained. It could have dealt with his years in space, or it could have been surveillance accounts of his various dealings with influential foreigners. He was, after all, good friends with Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia (or so he claimed).

  The investigator also told Mom that Dad was hiding his money in Miki’s accounts. That one really threw her for a loop. She knew that Miki existed, but she thought of her as a minor character—in fact, that she was Steve the clone’s girlfriend. She didn’t realize until now that Miki was her real husband’s lover, and living off her money.

  So, in 1982, after twenty-eight years of marriage, Mom filed for divorce.

  • • •

  IT was a great relief to me when Mom finally accepted the clone story as false. Oh, thank God, I thought, I’m not the one who’s crazy. We actually had some sardonic fun going over the whole story of Dad’s con, the scope of his deception, the obsessive attention to detail that had made it all work: The Dweller on Two Planets, the telegrams, the government satellites.

  “You know,” Mom reflected, “I would fly all over the world to meet him, all these secret meetings when he was supposed to be Paul. And I used to wonder in the back of my head if he was Paul or Steve. So I would come up with little tests to see how he responded. Things that only Paul would know. He always passed, but still, I was never quite sure. But then he pulled that Caesar routine, crying in the driveway, and that’s when he really hooked me. He was that good. He’s a great actor.”

  Her admiration was steeped in scorn. She had loved my father, and now she detested him. Part of that was my doing, and I felt some guilt about it. So I would always try to balance the equation with stories of the good times I had spent with him in my childhood. I told her about the places we went, the experiences we had: ice-fishing in the Japan Alps; driving around Hawaii; cruising the Greek isles on his yacht, Happy Pappy.

  She didn’t want to hear it. She was not interested in my good times. She was far too wounded. I think nothing hurt her in life as much as that betrayal. I don’t know what disappointed her more—the fact that her husband had cheated on and lied to her, or the fact that there was no actual Paul in outer space. The great romantic notion of her life had been crushed, and the world had become depressingly ordinary. How could you not be bitter about that?

  Mom talks about her divorce in one of her books, but she has a slightly different version of the events leading up to it. She claims that she discovered my dad’s treachery—the lies, the money swindled, Miki—through a channeler, someone who was letting a disembodied spirit speak through him. She would regularly go to spiritual channeling sessions for enlightenment, and on this occasion she got more enlightened than she’d bargained for: the channeler told her that Dad was a fake who had squandered much of her fortune and transferred the rest into Miki’s account. A private investigator later confirmed everything the channeler said.

  It’s pretty close to my version, except that there’s no mention of clones. She totally buried the lead role.

  About six months after the clone situation imploded, I was called to give a deposition in Mom and Dad’s divorce. It was a difficult situation for me. Much as I had been stunned by the revelation of my father’s betrayal, I didn’t want to testify against him.

  By this time he had stopped talking to me altogether. He’d really grown fond of that regular check coming in every month, and he was not appreciative of my well-intentioned meddling. “Idiot!” What else could I do, though? Did he want me to lie? Obviously, yes.

  The morning of the deposition, I woke up with a raging fever. It was 103 and climbing. I felt terrible. I needed to go back to bed. I called the lawyer and asked if we could get a postponement.

  My father refused. He didn’t care if I had a fever. He wanted me deposed, now.

  By the time of the deposition, my temperature was at 105 degrees, and I was practically delirious. It was a surreal situation: the lawyer was bombarding me with questions, but I can’t remember what they were. I can’t even remember if I answered coherently. The whole day was a fog.

  I do remember Dad and Miki sitting across from me at the conference table. I’m not sure why Miki was even there, but this was probably the first time Mom had met her as a rival. (They may have seen each other in Japan, but it had no significance then.) I remember the coldness coming from the other side of the table. From Miki, I expected no less, but while I had experienced Dad’s icy anger before, I’d never felt the full brutal force of it as I did now. There was not an ounce of love coming from him, not a glint of warmth or charm. When the deposition was over, he got up and left, without saying goodbye. We didn’t speak again for many years.

  Mom and I never discussed the clone story again after that. It retreated back into the closet, back into the tin box, back into the old brown sa
fe. She never got any of her money back, and she and my dad never reconciled. She does say in one of her books that she will always love him, and when she meets him again in the next world, with all their human foibles and frailties fallen away, that love will burn even brighter than ever. I hope so.

  Chapter 12

  The Acting Bug

  It took me a long time to get used to living in Los Angeles. I’d spent many a summer with Mom as a child, but back then, I was just a visitor passing through, and didn’t feel the need to immerse myself in the idiosyncrasies of American culture. Now I was here to stay, living in Mom’s Malibu home, and I had to figure out how to make sense of this crazy world.

  Starting with Mom. She was a mercurial, perplexing creature; I already knew that. Living with her day after day, though, adjusting my slow Japanese rhythms to her hard-driving American energy—that was the challenge. And it was my challenge, not hers. She was a star; she wasn’t changing. It was up to me to negotiate the hairpin turns of her personality and keep our relationship on an even keel.

  Not that it was ever hard to read her moods. She was very up-front with her feelings: if she was bored with you, or contemptuous, or pissed off, you knew it. The trick was anticipating when the weather was going to turn, because she could shift from a warming breeze to an ice storm in a millisecond.

  In general, I discovered that she was always happy to see me, or anyone, for about four hours. For four hours, she loved you. Then, suddenly and without warning, you became an intolerable burden. The iron door came down. You could set your watch by it. One minute she was Miss Hospitality, the next minute “When the fuck are you leaving?”

  Since I wasn’t leaving, this was something we had to work out—and I would make it work out, because she was all I had left. Dad wasn’t speaking to me, my personal history was an apocalyptic wasteland of Lukes and Jeffreys, and my life compass was spinning in all directions. I needed a rock, something to cling to. That was going to be Mom, whether she liked it or not.

  Of course there were so many demands on her attention, I knew I needed a hook to make myself a part of her world. But what? What could I bring to the table?

  Well, I was a pretty good cook, from my days in France. “Fine,” Mom said, “you can do all the cooking.” Not all the cooking—she had a chef for that—but whenever she had guests, she wanted me to show off my skills, so she could brag about me.

  She would spring these parties on me at the last minute.

  “Sach, I’m having a dinner party tonight!”

  “For whom?”

  “Just a few people. Maybe twenty. Robert Redford’s coming. Faye Dunaway. Sydney Pollack.”

  Okay, I may have been out of the loop, but I knew who those people were.

  “We need food. Here, go out and get something.” She handed me ten dollars. “And save the receipt. We can write this off.”

  I looked down at the lone bill in my palm and gave an incredulous chuckle. “Mom, I can’t get food with this.”

  “Why not?” she asked. “What’s the problem?”

  “Ten dollars?”

  “Yessss…?” She drew the word out, still not getting the point.

  “For twenty people? What can I buy with this, a box of pasta and a pound of butter?”

  Mom stopped now and gave me the Look. I’ve mentioned the Look: sharp, piercing, basilisk-like. “So you’re saying you need more money?”

  “Yes.”

  This did not sit well with her. Her eyes narrowed, as she tried to search out the truth in my dissembling eyes. Then she folded her arms and took a combative stance. “Are you on drugs? Is that what you need the money for?”

  I was dumbfounded. “Drugs? What are you talking about?”

  “Listen, Sachi, I’ve seen this happen to other kids in Hollywood. Their parents indulge them, let them have whatever they want, and the next thing you know, they’re smoking pot, shooting heroin, killing people…Ever heard of Charles Manson? Squeaky Fromme?” (Actually I’d never heard of Squeaky Fromme, but I gathered that she wasn’t a very reputable character.) “Do you want to be a cult murderer, is that what you want?”

  “I just want to make dinner.”

  She grudgingly gave me more food money, but it didn’t leave her pocket willingly. Mom was always pretty tight with a buck; there’s no way around that. It wasn’t long after I moved in with her that she brought up something that had obviously been bugging her for some time: “Say, when are you gonna pay me back for that car?”

  “What car?”

  “The five-hundred-dollar piece-of-shit car you bought in Australia.”

  “The Vauxhall?”

  “Whatever. Do you still have it?”

  “That was five years ago. It’s probably in a junkyard some-where.”

  She nodded knowingly. “I told you it was a waste of money.” Then she waited, as if expecting me to produce the cash right there.

  “Sorry, I forgot, but I’ll pay you back…”

  “When? The interest is mounting up.”

  “Interest?”

  She widened her eyes, as if to say, “We had a deal, remember?”

  “Okay,” I began, “so, tell me how much I owe, and…”

  “Eight hundred and forty-five dollars,” she shot back without hesitation. I don’t know if she pulled this figure out of thin air, but I was in no position to question it.

  “Oh. Okay.”

  Mom watched me for a moment, and then sensed perhaps that she may have been a little too harsh. “I mean, take your time. Get a job first. Just don’t forget.”

  Her fear of my drug susceptibility, by the way, was completely baseless. I’d smoked pot three times in my life, and puked three times. I was not an enthusiast.

  Mom was even less drug-savvy than I was. You’d think somebody with her reputation for experimentation would have been sampling all kinds of hallucinogens, and have had platters of mushrooms and peyote on the dining room table for general consumption. But no, she preferred “natural highs.”

  Once, we went to a dinner party where Mom was the only celebrity, and therefore the de facto guest of honor. Everybody made a big fuss over her and treated her like royalty, which she graciously accepted as her due. After dinner, the host brought out a “special sugar” with dessert. It was a bowl full of cocaine. Mom, being the honored guest, was offered the first dip. So of course she poured two heaped spoonfuls—and I don’t know how many thousands of dollars—into her coffee. The collective gasp that followed almost sucked the remaining oxygen out of the room.

  “How the hell was I supposed to know it was coke?” Mom said afterward, shrugging. “What am I, a drug mule?”

  It always amused me that Mom would watch her money like a hawk but never seemed to know what things actually cost. She’d haggle over pennies, and then spend a king’s ransom on a new pair of shoes.

  I remember being in the kitchen one time, making whipped cream, when she came back from one of her shopping jaunts on Rodeo Drive. “What do you think of this blouse?” she asked.

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “Two thousand dollars.”

  I gulped. “Wow. That’s a lot of money.”

  She shrugged as if to say, “So what, I deserve it.” She looked over my shoulder. “What are you making here, whipped cream?” She stuck her finger in the bowl and tasted it. Then a mischievous impulse seized her and she dipped her finger in again and stuck a dollop on the tip of my nose.

  This could not go unanswered. I took a slightly bigger scoop of cream and stuck it on her nose. Not content to give me the last word, she grabbed a handful and smooshed it right into my face. I returned fire, slathering her face, and the next thing I knew we were throwing great gobs at each other, slipping and sliding as we chased each other around the kitchen, and then fell to the floor, rolling in whipped cream and laughing.

  She totally ruined her two-thousand-dollar blouse in the process. She didn’t care. She was having fun.

  That’s one thing I
can say definitively about Mom: she loved to have fun. She could be inspiredly silly without a trace of self-consciousness, and she had a healthy sense of humor about herself and the world. I think that’s why she managed, in all her talk of astral planes and extraterrestrials, to maintain the public’s affection. She didn’t seem to take herself seriously, even when she was taking herself very seriously.

  We still had our walks on the beach, and she would still pick up sea urchins and react with delight when they closed on her finger. There would be stops at Wil Wright’s for ice cream, and days on the couch where we ate popcorn and watched movie after movie; and when thunderstorms rolled in, we’d cuddle up in bed, although I was a little old now for the tale of Princess Lightning. In some ways she was younger than me, a wide-eyed six-year-old who loved to start trouble and then throw back her head and laugh. Those giddy moods of hers didn’t last long, but while they did, we laughed and laughed.

  • • •

  ANOTHER memorable event took place in our kitchen a few months later. Mom and I were making pies together—I don’t remember why—and as we rolled out the dough side by side, I had what you might call an epiphany. For the first time, I was actually baking with my mother; the way they did in commercials and old black-and-white TV shows. After twenty-seven years, we were finally performing a classic domestic ritual.

  I didn’t point this out to her, because I didn’t want her feeling guilty about it. It wasn’t her fault that she hadn’t been there for me growing up. Okay, maybe it was her fault, but now wasn’t the time to make an issue of it. So I just sighed. “Wow, Mom. Life is so strange.”

  I kept rolling out the dough, until I felt Mom’s eyes on me. She was staring at me, and turning something over in her mind. “What?” I asked.

  “Say that again,” she said. “The same way.”