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

by Sachi Parker

  When the movie was over, everybody gathered around to congratulate me. Mom kept her distance, watching with a small, pained smile. Finally, after the guests were gone and we were alone, I got to ask her: “So? What did you think?”

  She busied herself cleaning the cups and chips off the side tables. “It was fine,” she said with a shrug.

  Fine—the word landed on my heart with a thud. I may have been naïve, but I knew a backhanded compliment when I heard one. “What does that mean—‘fine’?”

  “Well, you know…I’m used to professionals.”

  Another slam, and that one got my hackles up. “Professionals? Geraldine Page isn’t a professional? Amanda Plummer isn’t a professional?”

  “They were very good,” Mom conceded. So now her point was clearer: the movie was good, the other actors were good. I sucked.

  “You see, what it is, Sach…” She paused as she pretended to search for the words, although I knew damn well she had them already loaded in her gun. “There was too much crying,” she finally declared. “When you do all that emoting and weeping, there’s nothing left for the audience to feel. I didn’t feel anything. Just remember that the next time you try to act: don’t cry so much.”

  “What do you mean ‘try to act’? I can act, Mom. Don’t tell me I can’t act!”

  She rolled her eyes wearily, as if I were intent on misunderstanding her. “Of course you can act. You’re my daughter; you had to inherit something, but that doesn’t mean you have to act. Because you know what?” She looked at me intensely now, as though she were just hatching an idea. “You know what? You’re a wonderful cook.”

  What was I supposed to do with that comment?

  “So?”

  “So, you should be cooking. Making use of your real talents.” She clapped her hand to her forehead, a why-didn’t-I-think-of-this-before gesture: “You should do a cooking show!”

  “A cooking show?”

  “On TV. You can cook different meals, like the Galloping Gourmet. That would be marvelous. I would watch that.”

  I couldn’t begin to follow her logic. “Anyone can cook!”

  “Not like you. You’re special. When you’re special at something, do it. When you’re not…” She spread her hands wide to suggest the futility of such a quest. She was telling me my acting career was a quixotic, foolish dream.

  Seeing the dejection in my face, she took this as a cue to elaborate even further. “Look, I was meant to be a star. So I am. That’s how it works. Karma. You’re how old now, thirty-one? Face the facts: if you haven’t made it yet, it wasn’t meant to be.”

  She had one last thought to leave me with: “But a cooking show…”

  • • •

  ABOUT a year earlier, Mom had been approached by Pepsi to do a commercial. It was for Diet Pepsi, a drink they were marketing to the younger generation. Their idea was to pair Shirley MacLaine, Oscar-winning actress and New Age guru, with her own daughter, who was apparently trying to get into acting herself. It would cross all demographic lines.

  Mom wasn’t interested. “Why do I want to do a commercial? It’s not like I need the money. I don’t even drink fucking Pepsi.” But it was a great opportunity for me—a major commercial, with national exposure. “Come on, Mom, it’ll be fun!”

  “All right, I’ll do it for you,” she said grudgingly.

  I’m standing in a garden. EXTREME CLOSE-UP as I take a swig from a can of Diet Pepsi. WIDER NOW as Mom approaches:

  MOM: “Sweetheart, what’s the matter?”

  SACHI: “I’m drowning my sorrows.”

  MOM: “You are depressing the scenery.”

  SACHI: “Oh, Mom, I really wanted that job.”

  MOM: “I know. But listen, when one door closes, another door opens. I always learned more from my failures than I did from my success.”

  SACHI: “You mean I can learn from failure?”

  MOM: “Yes. You don’t want to get a PhD in it, but you can learn.”

  SACHI: (giggling softly) “I’ll drink to that.”

  As we walk through the garden, arms affectionately circled around each other’s waists, Martin Sheen’s voice-over ties it all up: “There’s one soft drink that fits the spirit of today. Diet Pepsi—the one-calorie choice of a new generation.”

  Mom was paid a cool million for that spot. I got scale.

  Chapter 14

  Family Feeling

  Mom was a tad schizophrenic about my career. She was always encouraging, giving me advice, wishing me the very best, but then, whenever I actually did something, she would not-so-artfully suggest that I was wasting my time. I could never figure out what she wanted for me, or expected from me. If only I could talk to someone who understood her better than I did, someone who really knew her, someone like…

  Well, Uncle Warren. He’d grown up with her, he’d followed her escape route out of the alcoholic Baptist world of their parents, and he’d experienced the same kind of dizzying success. He of all people could probably shed some light on her paradoxical thought processes.

  Except that Warren was not a part of my life. I wanted him to be, but there had always been a cool distance between us, and the gulf had widened considerably over the years. I was too young to command his attention when he was coming into his own, and by the time I got back from Australia and France, he was a superstar, with Bonnie and Clyde, The Parallax View, Shampoo, Heaven Can Wait, and Reds under his belt. For the latter two, he received Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Screenplay, the only person to achieve that distinction twice. (The only other person to do it even once was Orson Welles, for Citizen Kane.) He won the Best Director Award for Reds.

  Warren Beatty was a major Hollywood player in his own right, so much so that people often tended to forget that he and Mom were brother and sister. They seemed so distinct and original, each in his or her own way. They never acted together, and they approached performing from completely different directions: Warren was a serious actor who could do comedy; Mom was an entertainer who could do drama. Warren never did a musical, thank God, and Mom never did an epic movie or a gangster flick. They didn’t even look that much alike.

  Only in attitude—in their drive, their ambition, their laser-like focus on success—did they display a genetic similarity. Warren was, if anything, more driven than Mom, more ruthless in his determination. He still had that “don’t come too close” aura, and it was now even more pronounced. You couldn’t get near him: he had the isolated, impenetrable façade of the very powerful.

  Around this time, I was working on a play in class with a dark-haired beauty named, I think, Laura. We’d go out for drinks afterward, she and David and I, and in the course of a conversation she casually let drop that she was Uncle Warren’s girlfriend. Here was a happy coincidence! Admittedly, Warren had dozens of girlfriends, so it wasn’t unlikely that you’d run into one sooner or later. Still, the fact that Laura and I had become buddies prior to the disclosure made it much easier to cultivate her friendship without inviting suspicion.

  “How is my uncle doing?” I asked innocently. “I haven’t seen him in such a long time.”

  “You should come over for dinner,” Laura said.

  “That would be fun,” I said, trying not to sound overeager. “When?”

  “How about right now? Come on!”

  We got in the car and drove over to Mulholland Drive. I was a little nervous that Warren wouldn’t be happy to see us there. He had very definite boundaries set up around his life, and you crossed them at your own peril. Yet, as it turned out, he was surprisingly gracious. He welcomed us in, and made us feel entirely at home.

  There was no dinner ready, but Warren had a cook on call, who was happy to whip up a delicious meal for us. The kitchen had a row of refrigerators filled with food, so we could basically pick our own menu. And since Warren loved ice cream, too—he had that in common with his sister—every possible flavor was stocked in the freezer.


  Warren was a wonderful host to us, and made us feel completely at home. I hadn’t seen him in several years, but he acted as if it hadn’t been more than a couple of days. At the same time, he gave little outward acknowledgment that we were closely related. We didn’t discuss family matters at all—he didn’t ask about Mom, and I had enough sense of diplomacy not to bring her up. (They had such a volatile off-and-on relationship, you were never quite sure which way the wind was blowing; better not to set sail into that changeable sea.)

  He invited us both back again, and David and I visited several times after that. Even after he broke up with Laura—which was inevitable; the girlfriends came and went—Warren still invited us over. He really liked David. They immediately clicked. They were like two college buddies who had that guys way of talking in shorthand, making unfinished observations and understanding each other perfectly. David would have a scotch, and Warren would have maybe a club soda—I never saw him drink anything stronger—and they would sit around on the couch shooting the shit. I would sit off to the side, listening. Warren never gave any indication that he noticed I was there or not, but I didn’t care. It was gratifying just to be there with him, closing the family circle.

  I think Warren liked David so much because it was obvious that David didn’t want anything from him. David was neither starstruck nor ambitious. To him, Warren was just another guy. They could hang out, joke around, talk about cars or baseball or anything, and it never went any further than that. As for Warren, who was constantly surrounded by climbers and hangers-on, he found in David that rare thing: a person whom he could trust.

  • • •

  IF you’re an ordinary noncelebrity, you will seldom feel more vestigial and out of place than when you’re walking down the red carpet at a big Hollywood premiere. I walked down a number of them with Mom, including the Academy Awards, and I knew the routine cold—she would swan ahead, escorted by her latest boyfriend or her agent, and I would trail a step behind, basking in the residual glamour but keeping a low profile. Every few feet, Mom would stop to give an interview, and then I would have to stand behind her and smile and look interested. It was a true acting job, because I knew I was on camera, but there was nothing for me to do. Nobody wanted to talk to me; nobody cared about my opinions. If I had been really gorgeous, at least there’d have been a reason for me to be there, a fetching piece of scenery. Yet I was just a cute girl in a nice dress. I wasn’t even blonde.

  One time, we went to some kind of flashy benefit in Century City, and there was the red carpet waiting for us again. As usual, Mom stopped to hold court with her fans, being very gracious and bubbly—“Hi!…Hello!…How nice!…You’re too kind!” Then that moment came when her eyes glazed over and she’d had enough. “All right, we’re done”—and she left them flat and headed into the theater.

  I started to follow meekly behind, as my role demanded, when suddenly I heard someone yell from the crowd:

  “It’s Sachi Parker! Sachi Parker! Tracy from Capitol!”

  At that time, I was in the soap opera Capitol. I played Tracy Harris, a young mom who used to be on drugs and whose daughter was taken away from her. Tracy struggles to pull her life together and get her daughter back, but she often finds herself in locked battle with the unsympathetic social worker. I remember at one point my character loses it and screams at her nemesis, in the grand soap opera tradition, “Get out! Get out! Get out!”

  Mine wasn’t a major character, but soap opera fans are devoted to the point of obsession. They know every character, every actor, every twisted plotline. So when Mom moved on and I momentarily emerged from her shadow, they spotted me, and they went crazy. “Sachi Parker!”—they knew who I was! I was instantly mobbed by adoring fans. It was surreal and disconcerting—I was nobody; what were they getting so excited about?—but at the same time, I loved it. For the first time in my life, I was signing autographs and posing for pictures!

  “Miss Parker, Miss Parker! Over here! Smile, Miss Parker!”

  I was finally having a moment in the sun! It was really cool.

  In the midst of this ego-stroking orgy, I looked over at my mom, eager for some recognition, some maternal pride—but she was livid. Her eyes were these narrow slits shooting out beams of concentrated fury. She was actually being made to stand around and wait—on the red carpet!—while people made a fuss over insignificant me!

  Sensing the inappropriateness of my celebrity, I tried to sign my name faster. I should have just broken away and moved on with her, but so many people wanted to talk to me, and I was having so much fun! Finally, Mom gathered herself up with an imperious shrug, turned to her agent, and rasped, “Let’s go,” and she stormed into the theater without me.

  That was my last red carpet for a long time.

  • • •

  DAVID and I ended our relationship in 1988. It was an amicable breakup, probably the most civilized I’d ever had. Everything about David was and still is civilized.

  I met Mitch Garvey at a party in Venice. He was tall and handsome, and had a sort of midwestern casual cool. I thought he was a big producer, which was just the type of guy I was prowling for at a party like that. I knew I looked hot—I was wearing a clingy spandex-type dress and my trusty push-up bra—so I went up to him and flirted, turned on the charm, used all the old tricks.

  It turned out it he was just an assistant director, but by the time I found this out, I was already hooked. He took me out for sushi, and in the midst of our dinner, I mentioned who my mother was. “Who?” Mitch said. “I’ve never heard of her.” It was fairly unlikely that someone working in Hollywood didn’t know who Shirley MacLaine was, but I wanted to believe him. How cool—he was interested in me just for me!

  It wasn’t too long after that—a couple of months—that we got engaged. I know I seem to be getting engaged every time I turn around, but I think I always felt a loneliness and insecurity at my core, and I hoped that marriage would solve that problem.

  For some reason, Mitch thought I should contact my dad and tell him about the impending wedding. Maybe it was because Mitch was a proper midwestern type of guy, and he wanted things done correctly. Or maybe it was because he thought Dad had money. Either way, Dad and I hadn’t spoken since the deposition. I didn’t know if he would even pick up the phone.

  I called our home number in Shibuya, Tokyo, and waited nervously for Dad to answer. He didn’t. The new owners answered. I didn’t know the house had been sold.

  I shrugged off my disorientation and asked the new owners, “Do you know where my father is?” They didn’t, but they gave me a phone number. It was an American exchange, and when I looked at the area code I discovered that it was in the Boston area. So I called the number.

  Yuki answered.

  I was baffled. I recognized the voice immediately, but what in the world was she doing in Massachusetts?

  “Yuki?”

  “Yes?” she said warily.

  “It’s Sachi.”

  “Hello.”

  “Is this your house?”

  “Yes.” She was being very frugal with her information.

  “Is my dad there?”

  “Well, I don’t know.”

  What did that mean? “You don’t know if he’s there? Because I really want to get in contact with him.”

  “Yes, well, I really can’t say right now.” And it was crystal clear, from her inflection, that she couldn’t say because Dad was right there in the room with her.

  I wasted no time. I found out the address from the phone number—it was in Hingham, Massachusetts—and Mitch and I grabbed the next flight from LAX. We had to get out there before my father moved somewhere else.

  We landed at Logan Airport the next morning in the freezing cold—which was unfortunate for us, because we were still dressed for Santa Monica. We rented a car and found the house. We didn’t call ahead—this would be an ambush, pure and simple. When we pulled into the driveway, we saw two little girls watching from the window. They were
Yuki’s children, Audrey and Emily.

  I knocked on the door, and little Audrey answered. “Hello!” she said brightly. Then suddenly Yuki was at the door.

  “Yuki,” I said, “is Dad here?”

  Then Dad walked up behind her.

  We went to lunch together at a seafood restaurant on the water, Dad and Yuki and Mitch and me. It was an odd, awkward meeting at first. Dad pretended that nothing was amiss, that we were all on great terms. He was in his charming mode. “Sach the Pach!” he said, shaking his head with a grin. He was happy about my engagement to Mitch, and gave us his blessing, and then we launched into a lot of inconsequential talk. Yet, there came a point when I felt it necessary to acknowledge the elephant in the room.

  “Dad, I’m glad that we’re talking again.”

  Dad smiled tightly, and rattled the ice in his scotch. “Sure.”

  “It’s been very tough being apart from you, because I love you.”

  I could see him withdrawing now, putting up the force field. So I forged ahead.

  “I just want you to know, whatever’s happened between us, I forgive you.”

  Dad was startled, and turned red with anger. “What do you mean? You forgive me for what? I should be forgiving you! You’re the one who opened your big mouth!”

  I looked over at Yuki; she gave me a sympathetic look. She knew what I was feeling. Then an interesting thing happened—I reached out and took Yuki’s hand, and her hand tightened over mine. I felt a strong, pure current of love coursing between us. I don’t know where it came from, and I don’t know where it went, but for an extraordinary moment, we were soul mates. It was such a powerful, sweeping feeling that everything else at the table, including Dad, became incidental. Tears sprang to my eyes, and to Yuki’s, too, and we both started sobbing uncontrollably, in a silent way, trying hard to be composed and stoic as the tears streamed down our faces.