Dance While You Can

by Shirley Maclaine

  I LIKED QUEEN ELIZABETH II. SHE UNDERSTOOD HOW HARD WE WORKED ON THE STAGE. So DID LORD GRADE (NEXT TO HER), WHO WAS MY EMPLOYER FOR A TIME. (DOUG MCKENZIE PHOTOGRAPHIC SERVICES LTD.)

  ROSALYN CARTER AFTER MY PERFORMANCE ON BROADWAY… A TRUE STEEL MAGNOLIA. (RICHARD BRAATEN)

  TWO FELLOW SOUTHERNERS. (OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE PHOTO)

  I DIDN’T KNOW THEN I WAS SITTING NEXT TO THE FUTURE BUTCHER OF TIANANMEN SQUARE. (OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE PHOTO)

  WITH GEORGE MCGOVERN AND PIERRE SALINGER, CAMPAIGNING IN THE SNOWS OF NEW HAMPSHIRE. (DONALD K. DILLABY)

  BELLA ABZUG LEARNING HOW TO ACT ON A MOVIE SET.

  FIDEL CASTRO SPEAKING NONSTOP ABOUT EVERYTHING.

  STEEL MAGNOLIAS. DARYL HANNAH WAS OUT GETTING A PIZZA.

  I WAS TRYING TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO HANDLE DEBRA, PERSONALLY AND IN THE PART. (PHOTOFEST)

  JACK AND ME AT N. Y. FILM CRITIC LUNCHEON, WHERE WE BOTH WON FOR TERMS.

  OF COURSE, BECAUSE I WAS THE REAL DANCER, THEY CAST ME AS THE HOUSEWIFE WHO GAVE IT UP. ANNE BANCROFT PLAYED HERSELF. (PHOTOFEST)

  MAYBE I STARTED CHARACTER ACTING TEN YEARS TOO EARLY. ANYWAY, IT WAS FUN SLUMMING INTO THE FUTURE WITH JOHN SCHLESINGER. (PHOTOFEST)

  WHEN YOU’RE DOWN, YOU DON’T BOTHER FEARING A FALL.

  DEBBIE REYNOLDS AND ME IN OUR KARMIC “SKIP THE FLOWERS” RELATIONSHIP. (AARON AMAR)

  MERYL AND ME DISCUSSING FIGURE PROBLEMS.

  FOSSE, GWEN, AND ME AT MY BIRTHDAY PARTY ON THE CHARITY SET.

  BOB FOSSE GAVE ME THIS PART. NOTHING LIKE HOLDING UP THE STAR WITH YOUR BACKSIDE. (PAJAMA GAME) (PHOTOFEST).

  KICK UP YOUR HEELS AND DIE! (SYNDICATION INTERNATIONAL)

  AFTER A FIRST DRESS REHEARSAL YOU WISH YOU HAD SOMEONE ELSE’S FEET. ALAN JOHNSON AGREED, BUT NOT HIS. (JEAN GUYAUX)

  A SELF-PORTRAIT RIGHT BEFORE THANKSGIVING DINNER.

  MY FAVORITE PHOTO OF MOM AND DAD.

  SACHI’S FAVORITE PHOTO WITH THEM.

  WARREN FOCUSED THIS AND TOOK IT WITH ONE LONG ARM!

  ME AND MY LITTLE BROTHER.

  SACHI AND ME AT THE ACADEMY AWARDS THE NIGHT I WON. (WIDE WORLD PHOTO)

  LATEST PICTURE OF THE THREE OF US AT SACHI’S BIRTHDAY PARTY. (SCOTT DOWNIE, CELEBRITY PHOTO)

  CHAPTER 9

  Reprise

  When I am alone at my house in the Pacific Northwest, it is a healing. I wish everyone could have a little spot with tall trees, water, open clear skies, and time. I never understand the importance of it until I’m in those surroundings again.

  Nature is the grand teacher and the trees the tallest instructors. The idea of cutting them down simply for profit is a grave misunderstanding of what real profit is. They speak, they listen, they understand, and they heal. Yet they too are vulnerable, which is so evident after an eighty-mile-an-hour windstorm. As I walk among the mountain paths, sometimes stepping over one of the proud fallen giants, I wonder why this tree instead of another. Perhaps it has completed its own cycle of learning and its consciousness has gone on to another understanding.

  The seasons of the wildflowers could always be trusted to follow in rhythm and harmony, and the accompanying insects were busy daily reminders of the creative reproduction of birds and bees and life.

  This time I experienced six climates in a single day. The morning shrouded in a mist gave me a feeling of enveloped protection. By noon the sun gleamed through, accentuating the glistening moisture on every single leaf and bud like so many sparkling diamonds displayed on green velvet trays.

  Then a breeze came up, chasing the liquid diamonds until the unseen movement churned into a wind blowing the clouds at a speed faster than the plane flying above them.

  The air suddenly turned crisp and hauntingly silent, no movement in the leaves, until a hailstorm of crystal ice rained down, bouncing off the emerald-green carpet below.

  The sun emerged again, a master lighting designer, painting a circular rainbow over Mt. Rainier. And then the miracle, a gentle fall of snow, the great wet flakes melting on the tops of the bushes and pine cones before I could confirm that each one was indeed a different shape.

  It was a cavalcade, a show of natural beauty so awesome that I stood transfixed, unable even to pull out my camera. This happened the day after I hurt my knee. It was worth it.

  For the next two weeks I sat and moved about slowly in my house. I was essentially alone. I wanted to be. I needed to be. Mike shopped for me and cleaned; but otherwise I just sat looking out at the mountain, writing, talking on the phone every now and then, thinking, and doing my therapeutic exercises.

  San Francisco was down the pike a way. I would be ready for it somehow. For now I needed to reflect.

  My injury seemed like a mini-death to me. It made me more compassionate of people who were really in trouble—really dying. I was trying to learn from them. There were so many who were dying these days. What were they going through? I had tried to understand whenever I talked to them before. Now I really cared.

  Each friend who was dying was engaged in his own program of assessment. What had life meant and why?

  And in every single dying friend, the principal concerns were with parents. There was the desperation, confusion, and compulsion to work out the conflicts with their parents before leaving. Nothing and no one seemed more important. Even if it meant attempting to do it though the parents had passed away, they tried to reach into the grave in order to understand. And in every case, they felt their sickness had either been motivated or exacerbated by low self-esteem generated, to a large extent, by the parents.

  “My parents didn’t love themselves, so I never learned how either.”

  “My parents didn’t love me, so how could I love me?”

  There was always the understanding that the parents had been children of parents who suffered the same self-loathing and fear. The apple never fell far from the tree.

  With my problems now I found myself thinking more and more about my father. I remembered when he was dying (he hung on for six months longer than expected), he spoke constantly of his parents and their parents. He became obsessed with his mother’s side of the family, trying to figure out how she came to be the way she was. His father’s passivity was a source of great pain for him and was probably, in the final analysis, the most difficult aspect of his childhood to understand. The tyranny of the passive was elusive, rendering one profoundly guilty if anger over it was expressed. So my father’s obsession became the Family Tree.

  At the end, he talked constantly of the talent that Warren and I possessed. It was a mystery to him. Where did it come from? He never saw himself as the source of any of it. “Must be your Scotch-Irish genes somewhere way back there,” he’d say. And then he’d pull out another book on our family lineage.

  I found it so symbolically touching that he died of leukemia—a blood disease—blood symbolizing the family. His heart and lungs were strong—heart symbolizing the soul (the masters believe the soul resides in the heart chakra) and the lungs symbolizing the belief in God (God being in the very air we breathe).

  No, my Dad had damaged blood. His parents had let him down and given him a hard lesson to understand. Their parents had done the same thing. It was a never-ending lesson in finding one’s self-esteem. I knew my grandparents and had even witnessed some of the dramas between them. But the emotional hooks weren’t there for me. My emotional hooks were with my parents, just as Daddy’s were with his.

  I watched his sister, Ruth, at his funeral. She sat ramrod straight, the image of their mother. There was a kind of pioneer resilience but no tears. She had come from stock where there appeared to be little joy and no expressed sorrow. Life must go on. Individual pain and suffering were part of it, simply to be endured. She and my father had never made peace with each other either.

  I never understood what their problem was. Sibling conflicts can only really be understood by the individuals involved. I wondered if my daughter would ever be able to fathom the intricate dance of deep sibling love and rivalry that went on
between Warren and me. We could barely deal with the profound sensitivities of our feelings for each other. Much of that was because we couldn’t see our parents clearly. And now one of them was gone, taking with him some of the clues.

  I always wondered what kind of weather we’d have on the day of my father’s funeral. It rained—a cleansing, peaceful rain.

  The doctors from Johns Hopkins spoke. They said they each learned from his humanity, humor, and talent for friendship. They praised him as a great teacher and educator; but more than anything, they admired his twinkle and spunk as a human being.

  Mother didn’t cry. She was as resilient as Ruth. She couldn’t sit up as ramrod straight, but the steel in her backbone was not bent by much.

  But when Daddy was buried in the ground, Mother broke down. “We can’t just leave him out here alone in the rain,” she cried. “The dear old soul needs me.”

  That had been true for the fifty-five years they were together.

  Mother was proud there had never been another man in her life and believed, probably correctly, that Dad’s flirtations were all bluster.

  They had choreographed an intricately patterned dance of life for themselves, literally shutting out anyone else who might even come close to understanding their rhythm. Their arguments were legendary, and each of them said, “At least it prevents boredom.” I remembered hearing someone describe boredom once as unenthusiastic hostility.

  I remembered the afternoon Mother finally came to see Daddy in the hospital. She had put it off, because it was too painful for her. He never asked her to come. They communicated through the nurses, never even through Warren or me. Their dance continued to the end.

  She leaned down to kiss him. He responded by lifting his head mischievously. I snapped their picture, which I still have—a memento testifying that they were central in each other’s lives. They were the costars in their drama. The children, and in fact other relatives, were supporting players waiting in the wings.

  When Mother turned to take a chair and tripped, she nearly toppled the IV machine. Daddy screamed, “The woman is trying to kill me. Get her out of here before she succeeds. She never was any good with goddamn machinery. Don’t let her back in here. I want to stay alive.”

  I shrank up against the window. So did Sachi. The stars were acting out their dramatic comedy.

  Mother said nothing at first. Instead she pulled herself up and, as though nothing had happened, smoothly rounded the edge of his bed and sat down.

  Having gotten no rise out of her, Daddy rang his little bell for the nurse, who arrived immediately. “Get this woman out of here,” he ordered. “She’s too damned clumsy to be around sick people.”

  The nurse looked over at Mother in sensitive confusion. Mother just smiled. Crossing one leg over the other and tapping her foot against the foot of his bed, she said, “Ira, I tripped over Sachi’s purse, that’s all. There is no damage done.”

  I looked over at Sachi. She was holding her purse. I surreptitiously looked under the bed where Mother had tripped. There was nothing there.

  Oh God, I thought. This was the dance I grew up with. Could I possibly execute my own steps with the same dexterity as these two? At least when I tripped, I didn’t blame it on anything!

  As soon as Mother left, Daddy’s eyes filled with tears and he said, “I just love to open my eyes and see her face sitting at the foot of the bed.” It was George and Martha, straight out of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I’d probably play Martha someday as a way to figure them out.

  Daddy once asked me if I thought death would be like taking a flying leap at a marble wall. The image was so funny to me that my metaphysical answers paled in comparison. He went on to say that he had been taught many things in his life except for the most important. “Nobody ever taught me how to die. I want to do it correctly, but I don’t know how.” I was stunned at this self-judgment even in death.

  Then he turned around and eloquently described his certainty that God was in everything. He said he could see the colors around our heads and bodies, around the flowers and plants in his room. He said he didn’t believe in a separated heaven or hell—that everything was with us now.

  Another time he asked Mother to sit and read “Invictus” to him. She cleared her throat and, adopting one of her subtle performance modalities, held his hand and spoke: “I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.” He squeezed her hand and tears slid from under his eyes.

  As if on cue, his nurse had walked in. Daddy looked up at her. “The piss brigade is here,” he said. “She’s going to take my piss bottle now so I can contribute to the sewer system of the town.”

  The nurse laughed, evidently used to his broad-country humor, and handed him some juice. He took a sip.

  “Do you have a moose tied up outside?” he asked.

  She looked confused. “No, why?” she asked.

  “Because this juice tastes like moose piss, that’s why.”

  Now she blushed and put her hand under the sheets to retrieve his urine bottle. Daddy looked up at her with sadistic glee.

  “You find it,” he said. “You probably know more about taking it out than I do.” She blushed again. “I want you to line this bottle with fur,” he said, “so I’ll feel right at home.”

  My father’s bathroom sense of humor was even more basic than what I’d heard from Himalayan mountain people.

  “There must be a man out there with a mighty sore pecker,” he’d say to one of the nurses.

  “Why?” they’d ask. “Why?”

  “Because there’s at least four pregnant nurses running around,” he’d answer.

  That kind of humor drove my mother round the bend. “I don’t think it’s funny at all, Ira,” she’d say. “You are vulgar and repulsive.”

  He’d counter by saying he was never going home, because she had ripped his little handle seat off the toilet. “When I sit to take a dump, my goddamn balls dangle in the water. You could at least wait until I die. Then you can do whatever you want with my balls. I never used them anyway.”

  It went on like that—the constant sexual vaudeville. Once when Sachi brought her fiancé home to meet Mother, Mother wouldn’t let him stay in the house. “The neighbors will talk,” said Mother.

  “About what?” I asked.

  “About your daughter sleeping with a man she’s not married to.”

  “How will they know?” I asked. “Maybe they’ll sleep in separate rooms.”

  “The neighbors will know by the way she walks,” said Mother.

  I suppose her rich sexual fantasy necessitated her conservative attitudes. Anyway, Sachi and her fiancé had to go to a motel. Mother never relented.

  “It’s my tradition,” she said, “and I’ll never change. I don’t want to. So stop trying to make me into one of your Californian loose women.”

  She wasn’t posing either. She meant it.

  “I have to hang on to my traditions,” she said. “I have nothing else left.”

  I could see her point.

  A few days after Daddy’s funeral, it snowed. The fresh flowers on his grave froze.

  I went for a walk in the snow. I headed for the neighborhood around the school where I grew up. As the snow crunched under my shoes, I could feel Daddy with me in all his wicked, funny splendor.

  “Your mother is fragile,” he’d say. “She doesn’t know a goddamned thing about machines. She doesn’t know about much of anything.”

  He used to say they had a bargain that she’d go first, because then he’d be the lonely one. But it hadn’t worked out that way. He had tried to hang on and live up to the agreement, but maybe they both knew he was the one who couldn’t have been left alone.

  I walked to the school where I had first gone out for track. I remembered how much I loved the broad jump and high jump. I had had an appendicitis operation just before the track meet. I was back on the field in a week, which upset Daddy because he was worried that I would tear muscles and not be ab
le to dance.

  Now, as I walked in the snow, I slipped my hands in my pockets. I had put one of Daddy’s pipes in there. He had a huge collection of pipes, which we would now wrap carefully in old cigar boxes and store. He had once written a small essay on his reasons for loving pipes. His father had smoked a pipe. He loved the rich mellow smell of the tobacco. His dad wouldn’t even let him hold a pipe, so Daddy took to smoking his toothbrush. When he was old enough, he graduated to the real thing and couldn’t collect enough of them.

  Then he said he graduated from pipes to pens. He had pipes and pens collected from all over the world. They represented so much more than what they were, which I suppose is what motivated him to write essays on their importance. I was struck, when I read them, by the pitiful awe these objects held for my father. Why couldn’t he want more than a new pipe or a new pen?

  He loved watches too. He owned about thirty of them when he died. His father had been a watchmaker and perhaps Daddy needed to be close to what his father had been close to, an object-link to substitute for the imperfect emotional link.

  The reverence with which my father appreciated any small gift brought from an exotic place was a joy to behold. He would turn an ivory statue, or a Russian icon, or a mosaic from Tunisia over and over in his hands, appreciating its beauty, its human craftsmanship, and its cultural expression.

  He’d hold small cuff links up to the light, examine them for hours, return to them later, wax eloquent on their exquisiteness, then put them in a drawer and never wear them. He was “saving” them, he’d say.

  I remembered he told me that his parents had strapped a money belt underneath his clothes when they sent him off to college. The world was cruel; people might steal. He would always have protection if he needed it.