Dance While You Can

by Shirley Maclaine

  Mary and I lay on the floor and did pelvic tilts and knee presses to the rhythm of the Malibu waves, quietly and easily. There was no loud insistent music, no shouting of encouragements, and absolutely no pain. My muscles felt “worked” but not worn.

  We did relevés (foot rises to half toe) and stomach presses, leg lifts and arm stretches. The arm stretches were designed to “feel the breath” in the shoulders. The more interior “air” there was, the less pressure on the muscles. None of what we did felt overexertive, and never once did I break a sweat.

  We worked for three or three-and-a-half hours each day, and inside of two weeks I saw that my body had changed and my strength was renewed in a different way. I had always thought that I needed to feel exhausted after a workout. To dedicate myself to the pain of discipline and working hard had been my credo. This time it was different. I was working correctly, instead of painfully.

  The secret lay in easy alignment. If my pelvis was pulled out of my lower back, the alignment of my posture was correct; therefore, the strength was there. If I “breathed into my shoulders,” I felt lighter and therefore took the stress off my thighs in a deep knee bend. If the center of my back had “air” in the center of the sternum, my lower back had no pressure. I was amazed. I thought of all the years I had worked with “muscularity” and force instead of breath and air and alignment; how I had strained and compelled my body to bend to my will. I could have saved myself forty years of pain. But pain had been addictive to me. It is to every dancer. Pain is not easy to give up. When you are trained to believe in pain, you feel your stamina and even your talent can’t function without it. You learn to measure accomplishment by pain. The more the better. I wondered if relinquishing pain would serve me as well in performance.

  As soon as Mary felt I was ready, we moved into a rehearsal hall. I put on my high heels. She winced at the insanity of my working in such shoes but knew I had to do it. I had worked in three-inch heels previously, because they give a beautiful ankle and leg line. The moment I put them on my feet I could feel the muscle memory return. Dancers know the phenomenon of the muscles remembering the steps irrespective of the mind. But this time there was a catch. My muscles remembered the old way of working. They needed to adjust to training in a new way.

  Pain shot through my ankles and my Achilles tendon. My calves were remembering my old techniques. They weren’t responding now. I panicked. I couldn’t even run across the rehearsal hall floor with any grace. Then my back gave out. It was as though my muscle memory was so strong it dragged me back into the past.

  Mary was undaunted. She had been through so much worse. “It just takes time,” she assured me, “and you should really consider lowering your heels.”

  The next day we went to my shoemaker, who slaved by hand over each pair of shoes he sculpted. He said that if I lowered the heels, the original last of the shoe wouldn’t fit. He had to make totally new shoes.

  When a dancer lowers the height of her shoes, even if it’s a centimeter, it’s as though she is working with entirely new choreography, because the placement of the body shifts with each centimeter. That means that the muscles have to relearn the steps. It was not an insignificant decision, but we did it. We lowered the heels. That meant I had to wear the same height heels all day long in my daily life in order to accustom my body to the new placement. So I wore heels in the car, heels to the market, heels to dinner, heels in the house.

  I also needed to tape my feet with adhesive tape in order to prevent blisters from forming, because the pressure points were now in different places.

  Regardless of where I went, I carried adhesive tape, scissors, and Band-Aids in my purse. A blister could mean a few days without working.

  Diet was as important as the correct exercise. At least eight glasses of water a day were necessary. Water keeps the system toxin-free and also lubricates the muscles and tendons.

  Meat was necessary, because I needed the enzymes. But I found that lamb was too full of uric acid for me. Steak was fine. Dairy products clogged my arteries and, of course, fat was verboten. Sugar was a psychological reward, but too much of it (more than one dessert) made me too hungry for more. Fruit, vegetables, fish, pasta, chicken, rice, and steak became my diet. Protein (eggs, chicken, fish) for breakfast helped me lose the weight, because protein burns fat all day long. Food combining was essential. Protein with vegetables, never fruit. Pasta with vegetables, never meat. Fruit before the meal, never after. And never eat dinner later than eight at night. Water, water, water. Even more than the mandatory eight glasses a day. My car rolled with plastic Evian water bottles. If it was chilled, it was easier to consume. So much liquid washing through the system required extra vitamin intake and I took at least ten thousand milligrams of vitamin C every day, plus a vitamin pack of antioxidant vitamins three times a day.

  I bought a mattress made in Japan, which was embedded with little magnets that helped align the electromagnetic frequency of the body to the vibrations of the earth. The Japanese had begun using these magnetic mattresses in their hospitals when they found that patients who slept on them healed much faster.

  With every training-filled day, I got stronger. The weight came off, but what was more important, my body was firm and taut and more flexible.

  I tried to remember my physical state and my attitude six years ago. It seemed a lifetime ago. Had I gone through such a training program then? I couldn’t even remember. I could remember my original decision to return to the stage fifteen years before. That was the big one.

  I had been thirty-five pounds overweight and hadn’t done a plié in thirty years. Oh God, the memory of that regimen of pain brought tears to my eyes when I thought about it now.

  I had returned from a trip to China looking and feeling like the Goodyear blimp, couldn’t get a decent job in movies; I had done myself in where television was concerned with an obnoxious weekly series nobody saw (including me) called Shirley’s World. I had campaigned for George McGovern for a year, only to find that the Democrats were as big a mess as I was. Someone suggested putting together an act for Las Vegas (which most struggling movie stars were doing then in the absence of regular work). I pulled myself up by my dancer’s tights and started all over again. It worked, thank goodness, but the memories of what it took still rattled my sleep sometimes, and the sounds of the chains of pain haunted me now too.

  Now as I climbed the Calabasas Mountains with my buddies at the Ashram, it was comforting to know they were still around and still encouraging. Yet, even they were saying that pain was no longer necessary to gain. Attitudes were changing.

  For a few weeks, I got up every morning at six to climb mountains for five hours, then did an aerobics class, then a weight-lifting class, then jogged for six miles. After that, Mary and I worked for three hours, after which I climbed mountains for another four hours. It added up to something like fourteen hours of workout a day and it was crazy. I wasn’t going to use any of that on the stage, and in my newfound wisdom about exertion I quit. Going the last mile was the old me. Quality in the mile I was treading was more important now. Angelo Dundee, the boxing trainer, had once warned me, “Don’t leave your fight in the gym!” I came out of the gym and worked easier. It was the best decision of my physical life.

  Along with my body training came the retraining of my singing voice. I knew I wasn’t much of a singer, but I could belt and carry a tune. Yet I also knew that there was a better way to approach the art of making sounds than I had been aware of.

  About the same time that I needed a new approach, a friend called me with a suggestion. There was a voice builder in town who worked with a self-discovered technique of not producing musical sounds from the “mask of the nose and face” but rather by forcing the muscularity of the throat open to produce the sound from the very center of the body. Although most of his students were singers, he had had extraordinary success with people who had suffered from an incurable voice disorder called spastic dysphonia (strangulated speech). It
seemed to me that such a technique would work for me too.

  We met. I had my first lesson. Gary Catona was a thin, middle-thirties, baseball cap wearer who loved Italian opera. He had been a singer, and from improper training he had lost his voice himself. He was unable to produce a sound. Out of sheer distress, he developed a technique of forcing the strong, resilient throat muscles open to make a passageway for the sound to come forth. By cataloguing his vocal recovery he laid down the foundation of his voice building system.

  Heretofore he had been taught that the vocal cords were fragile and needed to be pampered. Gary thought otherwise. He literally, through deep open throat techniques, forced the strength of the vocal cords to become more resilient, and found that when he tried to produce sound, the notes, now aligned with a new voice placement, not only returned his voice but enabled him to sing for hours without hoarseness.

  He worked with Larry Carlton, a singer and jazz guitarist whose vocal cords had been reduced to a whisper by a gunshot to the throat. Gary felt that as long as there was even a piece of a healthy vocal cord intact, he could “over build” what was left into a normal voice. It worked—Larry is talking normally and singing again. And others who thought they were condemned to spastic dysphonia for life are talking in rich, baritone sounds as a result of Gary’s techniques. Gary is neither a doctor nor a voice therapist. He says he works outside of traditional approaches as a voice builder.

  My experience with opening my throat was more traumatic than anything I had been through in a dance rehearsal.

  First of all, I had been so strongly trained the wrong way that Gary said my throat was as constricted and tight as any he had ever heard. So we decided to redirect the strength of these constricted throat muscles to force open my throat and free the sound of my voice.

  Whenever I commit to something, I do it completely. Sometimes embarrassingly so. During the first few lessons I gagged, threw up, spit, hacked, coughed, and sputtered. I thought I was ready for nose and throat therapy somewhere in a clinic in Arizona. I carried a large bowl and a box of Kleenex with me to every lesson. Regardless of the trauma to my throat, I found that I was never hoarse when I finished. In fact, my voice was getting stronger and more resonant. That was enough for me, because two shows a night for four weeks are guarantees of hoarseness.

  Slowly my throat opened, and I found that my natural singing voice was not a mezzo-soprano but contralto. I had a natural three-octave range, but I was much more comfortable in the lower register. That meant I had to have the keys to all of my orchestrations transposed.

  Gary pointed out something I had suspected all along. I had been forcing myself to sing too high in performance, because I had been told it was a “brighter” sound. When a person finds his or her own natural voice and adjusts the keys accordingly and sings with an open throat, instead of nasally through the “mask” of the face, the voice is quite strong and capable of remarkable resiliency.

  From the moment I began working with Gary, I felt I not only knew him but was remembering his technique from some long-ago time and place. First of all, I could feel my throat chakra open up as a result of working his way. Gary didn’t know much about the chakra system, yet he was working with consciousness techniques as he taught.

  When I explained that the throat chakra was the energy center of communication and expression, it made sense to him because of the experience of many of his students. He said they experienced an increased dream state revolving around areas that needed resolution in communication and expression in their lives. He said so many of them noticed a decided acceleration in the confrontation of long-denied issues with their parents and lovers and husbands and wives. They were also beginning to communicate more deeply with themselves and finding it easier to express certain aspects of their lives that had long been repressed. Along with changes in consciousness, his students rarely caught colds or sore throats because of the increased blood flow to the throat area during the vocalizing.

  As we talked about all of this, it seemed to us that when the throat chakra is opened, it naturally opens up the emotional center of communication that the throat chakra represents. The very notion of sound coming from the center of one’s being would also activate the heart chakra, which would come out in a more loving form of communication. And communication is two-way—with others, and with oneself. So all kinds of possibilities were being opened up.

  As I heard my own voice sounds and the sounds from Gary and a few of his other students, I felt I was remembering a time of having heard those human sounds out of a long-forgotten past, almost as though it could have been a less constricted time period of communication. Perhaps before we had constricted our emotions and the open, free expression of them, we had been able to communicate with each other without being blocked in that particular energy center. It made sense to me and to Gary too when I mentioned it to him. He didn’t think such notions were ridiculous fantasy at all—on the contrary. In fact, when I began to share some of the past life flashes I had during a voice-opening session, he said many of his students had reported the same experiences; and without any education in metaphysics, they had not known what was happening to them.

  I realized that with Mary and Gary, I had been given two new teachers who were showing me pragmatic new ways to work from within. Nearly all the training I had experienced in my life had come from the outside in. Now in my advancing years, I found I had drawn in people who had been on their own paths in their own chosen fields, where out of deep adversity their only recourse had been inner strength, inner techniques, and inner realization.

  Mary told me that my books had gotten her through her painful hospital years because of their metaphysical-spiritual perspective on life, and Gary hardly knew anything about me as a performer. He knew me mostly from my books too. When I told him I believed his techniques came from some knowledge he had had eons ago, he said it sounded familiar.

  So the teachers (Mary and Gary) appeared when the student (me) was ready. In fact, we each found we were teaching each other. It remained to be seen whether I could translate the new techniques to performance.

  As time passed, I noticed that I was leaving myself less and less time to meditate, to do my own chakra alignment, and to simply take an hour to be by myself and reflect. There were not enough hours in the day, or so it seemed. That was a mistake. But I didn’t see it. There were lots of things I didn’t see as I prepared myself. But in life, as everything is a learning process, I would soon have to come to terms with the truth that I had not decided to go back on the stage simply in order to do a show. There was much more to it than that. But my understanding was to come later. One of my simplistic mistakes was to believe that I could promise myself that I would no longer do anything in my life if it couldn’t be fun. That was truly putting the cart before the horse. I had earned that right, to be sure, but I was soon to learn that “having fun” was not as easy as it sounded. It would take a while for me to see it, but the signs had been there all along.

  While I was adjusting to my new body and new voice, the creative meetings required to put together a new show were in full swing. I had gathered my old team around me. We knew each other, liked each other, and communicated with a kind of creative shorthand.

  Buz Kohan would write lyrics, Larry Grossman the music, and Alan Johnson would stage and choreograph. Our schedules were tight, each person involved with other projects. We hadn’t worked together for six years, and we needed to catch up on each others’ lives.

  Creative sessions between people in show business are not understandable to anyone else observing. That’s why anyone who’s not in show business is called a “civilian.” Emotions are raw, feelings are openly expressed, personal secrets are used as examples of identifiable truth, knowing that they will never be exploited. Jokes and gritty cynicism are the tension relievers, and creative suggestions between people who know each other are rarely couched in pre-presentational apologies. If you’re confident in the team, you can hear
“it stinks” without personal hurt.

  Of course, the star has the final say, particularly one like me with a “mind of her own.” And the sensitivities to my own discomfort at a suggestion were endearing. Each of the four of us functioned with equal security and expertise, never feeling that anyone else was overstepping bounds.

  Much of the creative “processing” took place on the telephone, which sometimes left me with a sense of urgency relating to the time we had (three weeks). Three weeks was not enough. But it was all we had.

  Out of the brainstorming sessions came the concept of the show, which dictated the opening number. So far so good.

  Second numbers in any show are notoriously difficult to conceive. You come out, greet the people with an opening, and then what? If your second number works, you’re usually home free for at least another twenty minutes. Alan came up with a great one that would utilize the dancers with me.

  The next problem was how to end the first act. I wanted to work with an intermission this time out, so I’d have time to warm up my body in the dressing room, ready for the big dance number. When a dancer only acts and talks and sings—no big, body movement—for forty minutes prior to dancing, the body gets cold. The theater owners would love an intermission anyway. They could sell booze and candy to their customers.

  A first act closing needs drama and an inspiration for the audience to return.

  I decided to do “Rose’s Turn” from Gypsy, a dramatic acting-singing piece. I, like every other performer these days, wondered what Frank Rich of The New York Times would think should I decide to play New York. I knew he adored Tyne Daly in the part, and so did I for that matter. However, I opted for doing something I loved every night, rather than succumb to what Rich might hate only once.

  I’d open the second act with my mainstay tour-de-force dance number, which was a tribute to some of the choreographers I’d worked with (hoping I could get through the updated version), and the rest of the show would be some humorous takeoffs on my “New Age” beliefs and reprises of some of the things I had done in films (my hooker medley) and “I’m Still Here,” the Sondheim song I’d sung in Postcards.