by Sachi Parker
Marion Ross? I did remember. The Evening Star, from 1996, was the sequel to Terms of Endearment. Mom reprised her role as Aurora, and Marion Ross played her housekeeper, Rosie. The picture was not well received, but Marion, who had played Mrs. Cunningham on the TV series Happy Days, was nominated for a Golden Globe as Best Supporting Actress.
“She should have won the Academy Award,” Dale observed. “She had a killer scene in that movie. Big dramatic moment, and she was spectacular. Stole the film. Everyone was buzzing about it in the early previews. No way she wouldn’t have won an Oscar. No way.”
“I don’t remember that scene.”
“You never saw it. It was cut.”
“Cut? Why?” But I knew why.
“Evening Star was your mom’s film,” Dale said. “She didn’t want anybody stealing her thunder. So she made them take the scene out.”
No. I didn’t believe that. There must have been some other reason. Good scenes get dropped from films all the time, because they’re incidental, or they break up the rhythm, or the movie’s just too damn long. Mom couldn’t be that ruthless. Could she?
Dale shook his head ruefully. “That scene alone would have put Marion Ross on the map. She was a terrific actress who just needed a break.”
Yes, a break. That’s all anyone needs in this business. Mom got her own break in The Pajama Game, when Carol Haney went down with a broken ankle, so she of all people should have been generous in spirit to others with the same dream.
Yet Mom never considered that a break. That was karma. She deserved it.
And others didn’t.
“So you’re not the only one,” Dale said. “It’s part of the business.”
I still couldn’t accept it. I sat there in silence, my mind spinning.
“Shirley,” he finally offered, “is a competitor. She didn’t want you to get ahead of her. Plain and simple.”
“But I’m her daughter. She’s supposed to be proud of me.”
“Your mother is unique.”
I was out of words. I stared at the rest of my lunch. I wasn’t going to eat it now.
“Look,” Dale said, trying to put it in perspective, “she’s a star. She’s up there on a pedestal, and she doesn’t want to get knocked off. By you, Marion Ross, anybody. That’s how she plays ball. Don’t take it personally.”
My mind drifted back over my stillborn career. All those opportunities, those roles that didn’t pan out—was it all because of her? Had she been working against me behind the scenes from the very beginning? Every time I had a good audition, I would call Mom to share the happy news. Did she then go out of her way to sabotage me? Was it like one of those fiendish Hitchcock films, where the kindly benefactor turns out to be the murderous spy?
That was just too awful. I couldn’t go there. Dale had to be wrong. “Please be wrong,” I begged him. “Please…”
• • •
FOR the next six months I was in a sort of limbo. I knew Dale’s story was true, but at the same time I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t stand the thought of it—and I couldn’t confront Mom, because Dale had made me promise to keep quiet. He knew that Mom was sharp enough to ferret out a traitor.
As time passed, I began to doubt the story more and more. I would call Dale in L.A. every now and then: “Are you absolutely sure that happened?” He was always sure, absolutely.
I wrote my mother a letter. I didn’t have the nerve or the debating skills to go head to head with her, and I wanted to make sure I expressed every raw sentiment I was feeling.
I told her that I’d found out in Toronto what had really happened on Closing the Ring (careful to leave Dale’s name out of it). “The talk was that you had nixed me doing the part, and that Immigration wasn’t that big of an issue. You pretended to help me but behind the scenes you were sabotaging me…have long known that you never wanted me to be in the business. Acting is the life I have chosen, and I hoped that you would support and encourage that. As a mother myself, I can’t understand how you would not want anything but the best for your child. What legacy will you leave? One of a self-centered controller of other people’s destinies—or of a loving, supportive parent?” I ended on a note of reserved hope: “I don’t know how we can get past all this, but I’m willing to try, if you are. I love you. Sachi.”
This was too important a message to trust to the postal service, so I drove down to New York City myself. Mom was staying at a friend’s Sutton Place apartment. I hand-delivered the letter to the doorman, and then drove away.
I waited nervously at home for Mom’s response. What would she say? Would she deny it? Would she admit it? Would this be the final rupture, or the beginning of a new, stronger relationship between us?
None of the above. I never heard from her. She never responded to me.
But Frank, my husband, got a call from Mom a few days later. She was furious, and denied the Dale Olson version completely. She also had a new explanation for my not getting the part in Closing the Ring.
“She said the immigration story was a front, because she didn’t want you to know the truth,” said Frank. “It would have hurt your feelings.”
“And so what was the truth?” I asked.
“The truth was, Lord Attenborough didn’t think you were very good.”
I scoffed. “That’s ridiculous. He’s the one who cast me! He’s the one who wanted me in the film!”
Frank shrugged. “She said he’s Lord Attenborough. If he’d wanted you in the film, you would have been in the film. She saw your screen test herself, and she didn’t think you were very good, either.”
I knew this was bullshit. Since when did Mom worry about protecting my feelings? Everything in Dale Olson’s story rang true. And if her version were true, why didn’t she tell me herself?
Still, she had managed to plant the one poisonous seed that was sure to take root in my battle-weary mind. Maybe I wasn’t good in that screen test. Maybe I wasn’t a good actress at all. And maybe that immigration story was just a smokescreen to keep me from knowing the truth.
A year earlier, when the saga was still unfolding, I’d called Jack Gilardi to find out what was happening. He was the first to suggest that my screen test had been a failure. “You know, they didn’t like you at all. You weren’t very good.”
I thought he was nuts at the time. Everyone was raving about the screen test. I dismissed him as a cranky old agent. After the deal fell apart, though, those words came back to haunt me. Then, when we were stuck at Mom’s in Santa Fe, I mentioned it to her. “You know, Jack Gilardi said my screen test for Closing the Ring wasn’t very good.”
“Really?” she said with surprise. “Well, I thought you were great. I was very impressed.” Then she gave a little shrug. “But, you know, I’m your mother.”
Exactly.
Chapter 18
Shut Up and Deal
When I was studying with Peggy Feury back in the 1980s, she told me I needed to write my story down. “You have to get this on paper; you have to write a book about your life. It will set you free.”
I didn’t really take her point at the time. What was so interesting about my life? Yes, my mother was a famous movie star; and I’d traveled the world, from Europe to Australia; and my father was possibly a clone—but it wasn’t as if something had actually happened to me.
Now I understand what she meant. All my life I’ve been in the thrall of those nearest to me: my father, my mother, my lovers. I’ve lived my life trying to please them. My most intimate relationships have also been my most dysfunctional, and the one that I wanted most to work, the relationship with my mother, is the one that resisted every Sisyphean effort on my part to coax it into some semblance of normality. I did everything I could to bring Mom into my life. I bent over backward, left no stone unturned. The big Hollywood happy ending never happened.
And now that I’ve written this book, it probably never will.
But that’s where my chance for liberation comes in. All this
time, in the vain hope of gaining my mother’s approval and her love, I’ve cautiously kept my secrets, my doubts, and my pain to myself. I’ve held back from expressing my true self, because I was afraid if I went public with my story, Mom might never talk to me again.
But she doesn’t really talk to me now, so what do I have to lose? Did she lose by writing her many books, by revealing her unconventional beliefs and promoting her quests for enlightenment? She may have left herself open to ridicule, but she also established, for all to see, the rules by which she lived her life. She made a statement, and it was a strong, independent one.
Maybe she’ll see my choice that way. Maybe she’ll admire my forthrightness and my determination to own and control my own life. Maybe she’ll recognize me as my mother’s daughter.
I’m kidding myself, of course. It’s so easy to live your life in denial, to ignore those things you know to be true. I did it for too many years, and I fully recognize my own failing there.
Even Mom, who considers herself a clear-eyed truth-teller, will fall back on her defense mechanisms when something threatens her sense of self.
She called me a few years ago, when we were going through one of our friendlier phases: “Hey, Sach, you know who I saw today? Steve the Clone.”
“Who?”
“Steve the Clone. He was in the Valley, buying coffee.”
I had to take a moment to decide if she was serious or not. I decided she was. She’d dismissed the real story about Dad’s swindle and gone back to the romantic one she preferred. “Mom, you know that’s not possible. Dad’s dead.”
“Your father is dead. Paul—yes. I’m talking about Steve. He was in the Valley.”
“But there is no Steve. I mean, there is a Steve; there was. But there’s no Paul. Remember, we talked about all this? None of it’s true. None of it happened.”
I could hear Mom smiling at me. “Oh, honey, you’re so naïve. You don’t know what’s out there. You just don’t know.”
Maybe she’s right. Case in point: the Mystery of the Missing Blood Type.
Among her other quirks, Mom is a faddist. She’s always leaping on the next new trend, and treating it like the one true path to deliverance. In the 1990s she was steered into homeopathic medicine—the cleansing diets, the lemon juice and cayenne pepper, the high colonics—and that became her new religion. I understood her enthusiasm, and I believe in the virtues of homeopathy, but I also believe in medicine. Sometimes you just gotta do whatever it takes.
Mom would have none of that. She was visiting us in Houston when my two-year-old son, Frankie, was sick with roseola. I was about to give him his antibiotic medicine when Mom grabbed it from my hand. “No! No more antibiotics!” She tossed the medicine in the garbage. I had to go back to the doctor and get another prescription.
Around the same time, she became obsessed with blood-type diets. The idea was that whatever blood type you had determined the kind of food you should eat. Type O blood had been handed down over the centuries from prehistoric hunters, so anyone with type O should eat a lot of red meat. Type A-positive, on the other hand, were gatherers, and they should eat vegetables and dairy.
Mom was a type O, and Dad was a type O, which meant that I had to be a type O. Therefore, meat. She gave me one of those newfangled George Foreman grills: it would be steak and burgers for me from now on. I dutifully tried the diet, and didn’t lose a pound.
It was years later when I went in for a hospital procedure and discovered that I wasn’t type O at all; I was type A-positive. So that’s why the diet hadn’t worked.
But wait a minute. If Mom was type O and Dad was type O, how could I be type A-positive? It wasn’t scientifically possible. Mom must have made a mistake. Dad had to be A-positive, too.
Or was he? I seemed to recall Dad going into surgery in Hawaii, and himself mentioning that he was type O. But he could have been mistaken, and I could be misremembering.
Still, I had gotten to the point where everything about my life was in doubt. I knew damn well that Mom was my real mother—there was no escaping that—but was Dad my real father?
This is just wild speculation on my part, and I know it. I do look like Dad—I see myself in his face—and I feel his spirit inside me, but I think I also bear a resemblance to, say, Yves Montand (or, for that matter, Alfred Hitchcock—now there’s a scary thought). The point is, I’ll never know for sure. And if he wasn’t my father, wouldn’t that explain why he was so indifferent to me, why he was so eager to use me as a pawn and sacrifice my security and sense of identity for his own gain?
Traditionally, a Japanese Zen garden, a karesansui, has fifteen stones, so carefully arranged that you can see only fourteen of them at a time; you can never see that fifteenth stone.
That’s how it is with people and relationships. There’s always that fifteenth stone you can’t see, but you know it’s there. And when you find it, the fifteenth stone, that secret thing that explains all, you look back and you realize that another stone has disappeared. You can never see a person, or a relationship, or a life, whole. There are too many angles.
So, no, I still don’t understand my mother. Every time I find out something new about her, something else gets hidden.
It has taken me this long to realize that I don’t need to understand her. She’s on her journey, and I’m on mine. Our lives may intersect at crucial points, but there’s no reason to expect them to run side by side, on parallel tracks. Mom’s spirit bounces all over the universe like a jet-powered pinball, and every now and then it settles beside me for a moment before some visionary impulse shoots it off again. I’m just a stop on the road: she doesn’t need me, not at all, and she isn’t going to pretend for propriety’s sake that she does. She’s off fulfilling her destiny.
That doesn’t mean I don’t feel the absence of her love deeply and keenly. It’s just that I understand the situation now. My mother is Shirley MacLaine: a show-business icon; a brilliant, talented, legendary performer. That’s who she is, and that’s how I have to deal with her. I have to forget that she’s my mom, because we can never connect on those terms She never said she was going to take care of me and be there when I needed her. That’s something I came up with on my own. We can’t blame people for being true to themselves.
In the final scene of The Apartment, Jack Lemmon professes his total love for Mom’s character, and she shrugs it off lightly with the famous line “Shut up and deal.” That phrase may crystallize Mom’s response to human relationships more than Billy Wilder or anyone could have imagined. I don’t want to hear about your problems, I don’t want to hear about your love, I don’t want to be bothered. Just shut up and deal.
I’m trying.
People will often say to me, “Shirley MacLaine is your mother? I love her! You are so lucky!”
They’re right. I am. I’m very lucky, and I say that with no heavy-handed sarcasm or postmodern irony. I’m lucky, because I’m here. I survived.
And through it all, I still have my optimism, and my basic faith in people. I really do. I haven’t become jaded or bitter. No, I still see the world in a positive, hopeful light. Maybe Dad would have said that’s because I’m an idiot. If so, I embrace my idiocy. Mom doesn’t mind looking like a fool for the sake of her beliefs, so, hey, neither do I.
Looking back over my life, I see that it’s full of providential moments, moments of serendipity and grace. Whenever things seemed desolate, whenever I was poised to capsize, something unexpected always came along to help me out.
I think of Eguchi-san, with her fox gods and her brown underwear, teaching me to be Japanese; my beloved David, teaching me to be American; Peggy Feury, teaching me to be an actress; that kindly old prostitute in Trieste; the Yugoslavian couple in the Zagreb hotel; Shigeko in Honolulu; Margo Tolmer in Sydney; the waitresses at the noodle shop—all of them, angels who alighted on my shoulder at just the right time.
And I think of my two wonderful children, the bright beacons of my future. They fill
my life with light, and I cherish and love them unconditionally. What could be luckier than that?
Frankie is basically a man now—at six feet tall, he towers over me—and he’s thoughtful and responsible beyond his sixteen years. From early on, he’s always showed remarkable empathy for others, and more than once he’s given me his strong shoulder to lean upon. Following my lead, he’s in boarding school now, but I have no doubt he’ll navigate those tricky, complicated waters far better than I did.
Arin and I have a glorious mother-daughter relationship—by which I mean we argue a lot. We fight over boundaries; we scream and shout at each other. I give her hell, and she slams the door in my face. I treasure those insane moments. Some mothers might get frustrated and angry with the day-to-day struggle, but I love it, because it’s something I never had with my mom. I didn’t get the chance to be surly with her, or annoying, or heartbroken, or any of those cool teenage things.
My little girl is fourteen years old now, and so far we still enjoy each other’s company. We like to walk around town, stroll along the beach hand in hand, get ice cream. She goes for vanilla-chocolate swirl. Sometimes she asks me for advice, and sometimes I ask her. Sometimes we laugh at something silly, laugh until we cry. Sometimes we’re just totally quiet together.
And every now and then, when there’s a big storm coming across the river, we open the window shades and cuddle up in bed and I tell her a story:
“Once upon a time, there was a beautiful princess, who lived on top of the tallest mountain in the world. And she was known as Princess Lightning. Because when she was happy she would laugh a merry laugh, and a great flash of lightning would flood the sky…”
So yes, I’m pretty lucky. I am.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS