Dance While You Can

by Shirley Maclaine

  Perry brought me the video of my operation; and after heralding it as the best movie I had ever been in, he explained what I was looking at. It could have been a journey to the center of the earth as far as I could see.

  Wafting pieces of flesh floated in disturbed motion, as the microcamera recorded the adventure. Torn flesh looked more like a crimson sea anemone. The blood encrusted in the torn cruciate indicated that the original tear had occurred in Seattle, not in the rehearsal hall in L.A.

  Dr. Finerman hadn’t understood how I could have danced on it in San Francisco at all. Perry said he mumbled something during the operation about my being a wise old gypsy, because I knew my body.

  A stainless steel instrument that looked like a cross between a pair of pliers and a pincer gobbled at torn flesh within my knee and pulled away the excess torn ligament, which would never repair itself, and the torn cartilage. My knee was indeed a universe in which an earth-oriented scientist wielded his detailed technological expertise. Ten years ago, this operation would have been open-knee surgery requiring a year before weight bearing was allowed.

  The colors of my knee-universe were pastel pinks, with harsh strokes of crimson where real damage had occurred. The plier-pincer gobbled away at the ligament and cartilage until what was torn was gone, and I was left with half a ligament and half a cartilage.

  “Enough to dance on,” Perry reassured me. “The ligament is a major knee stabilizer. You’ll just have to build up your muscularity around the missing ligament. You will have to keep your thighs, knees, calves, and ankles very strong. You’ll be rechoreographing all the pressure points when you dance, but that’s what any athlete does when he’s injured. You’ll be fine. In fact, you’ll be great. But you need to work harder.”

  The next day (day four) I went into the International Sportsmedicine Institute to begin my workouts in the pool.

  Dr. Perry had a remarkable technique of hydrotherapy rehabilitation he invented. He strapped twenty-five to fifty pounds of weight, hanging from rubber ropes (the Perry-Bands), around my waist. The weight hung down in the water, producing a hydro-traction and decompressing my back. I was strapped into a life vest with a few flotation bananas around me to keep me afloat, as the weight pulled my midsection down.

  Then he strapped a four-pound sand weight to my ankle, which I would lift intermittently. It took fifteen minutes for me to become seaworthy. And then something hit the wrong pressure point underwater; one of the leg weights fell off.

  I returned to poolside and restrapped myself. Then out to deep water again. I bicycled for an hour underwater, with the flotation devices keeping me afloat and the weights decompressing my back and knee.

  “You want to regain your flexibility as soon as possible,” said Perry. “I know it’s uncomfortable, but do it.”

  Uncomfortable was not the word, but I did it. I thought of Ron Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July. I thought of Mary Hite, who had been through seven years of this kind of painful therapy in order to regain control of her body. I thought of Dr. Perry himself, whose entire left knee had been crushed by a moving hoist. Each of them had endured much more rehabilitation than what I was going through.

  Thus began my associations in Dr. Perry’s pool with other people from “real life” who were rehabilitating injuries much more serious than mine.

  One man hadn’t been able to sit for seven years because of a compressed vertebra in his lower back. A music teacher, who stood beside her piano students all day, had to quit her job because of a back injury. She lay on her back for five months before someone told her about Dr. Perry and his water technique. She was now able to sit up and even stand for a few hours, where every other doctor had said surgery would be required to make that possible.

  When I heard about the man who lost his footing while working on his roof, and fell off and broke his neck, and was told he would never walk again, I wondered what the finger of destiny was telling him. Then I heard the rest of the story. His wife was dying of cancer. After she finally passed away, he died too. Perhaps he gave himself the fall in order to join her more quickly.

  As I listened to the litany of injuries (“I just woke up one morning and haven’t been able to walk since”), I couldn’t help but wonder what else there was underneath each person’s tragic dilemma. In the pool we exchanged theories. There was a lesson for each of us; that was clear. But what whispers that we had each ignored had preceded the final blow?

  As we examined our lives we could see, if we were honest with ourselves, the inevitability of needing to slow down. Simple wear and tear would demand that. And equally, most of us would want to deny that inevitability and attempt to ignore it. So what was it each of us was supposed to look at? What mysteries of our own consciousness were we failing to unravel? Each of us would have a different answer to that; and if we allowed ourselves free time to feel into what the answer might be, we’d see it.

  Even the most confirmed believers in “accident” were moved to modify such a belief when they really honestly looked at what had preceded the “accident.” On some level we each of us had created and participated in our personal “accident,” because that was the only way we felt we could see underneath our conscious behavior.

  As we paddled and bicycled in the therapy pool, we discussed these ideas. We needed to take full responsibility for our lives if we were going to get well, and the first step toward taking responsibility was to admit our unconscious participation. That put us back in control of our own empowerment.

  The theory of accident disempowered individuals as to how they were creating the reality in their lives. It might be painful to accept the responsibility for creating whatever the disaster was, but the disaster itself was the real pain. That was the bottom line. It was our task to unravel the detailed implications in between.

  In my case, I began to think more deeply about what I had done and why.

  My injury occurred to my right knee, my masculine side, controlled by the left hemisphere of the brain. Symbolically that was tied to the father in one’s life, the masculine authority figure.

  Of course, I remembered that he had told me years ago that I should never strive to be anything but a dancer; but that I was not even very good at that. And, of course, I knew that he had found my acting aspirations childish pipe dreams and my singing not even discussable. Yet, in the end, he had been forced to go along, no matter how reluctantly, with my ambitions. I thought I had resolved that lack of support and integrated my understanding of it into my own need to achieve and overcome adversity. But no, there was something else going on now that did not have that much to do with show business.

  I remembered now that the real respect and praise that my father reserved for me came long after my childhood, in the realm and arena of human thought. He loved what I was investigating in my books. He, being a teacher, had been more impressed by my books than by anything else I had ever done. Some kind of intellectual snobbery never allowed him to acknowledge or even, perhaps, to recognize that any really good teacher first uses a certain theatrical quality to grab attention, and then to get the point across. Teachers—good teachers, like my Dad—and good actors have much in common.

  I could see the actor in him. What he saw in me was an innovative investigator and a dispenser of the knowledge I had accumulated about metaphysics and paranormal phenomena.

  Before my father died, he saw himself as having passed the mantle of investigating the mysteries of life over to me. I had accepted it and enjoyed what I could pass on to others.

  When I organized my seminars and spent long weekends in the give-and-take of teaching and learning, I felt my Dad was always there with me. He finally approved of what I was doing! I wore his opal at every seminar, I felt he helped me orchestrate what I said, how I taught, and how to be sensitive in bearing a student’s confusion.

  I felt his energy in my opal, as though he spoke to me invisibly through it. When I was stuck as to how to proceed on a complicated metaphysical point,
I’d touch the opal at my throat, and instantly the correct words would come to me.

  I had not been comfortable in calling myself a teacher, however. I preferred to be called a “sharer.” I felt I didn’t know enough to teach—all I knew was my own experience. I was a fellow student of life.

  So what did this have to do with my right knee injury? Well, one of the conflicts as I put together my new show was whether I was a teacher (a lecturer) or an entertainer. How could I be both? Did I have the right to be both? Didn’t my father respect my teaching more than my performing, because that was what he had done?

  Then I remembered something that had dominated and haunted my father all his adult life. His Ph.D. dissertation on musical theory composition had been turned down at Johns Hopkins University where he taught. He had never gotten his doctorate; and he had said it was because his professor, a Dr. Bamberger, had failed him as a friend.

  She was an older woman who “destroyed his ego,” according to Mother. She “caused” him to fail in his future aspirations, because she didn’t believe in him enough to accept his dissertation. Her turndown of his Ph.D. work influenced the rest of his adult life. It was a rejection that confirmed the terrible lessons in fear of his childhood.

  She had disastrously reinforced his disbelief in himself. He lost his will to succeed and make something of himself—again, according to Mother. He was a truly great man who denied his own greatness. He wanted to contribute to humanity and knew of no other way than to teach. Yet without degrees and titles and years of study as an imprimatur, he never really saw himself as qualified.

  Some years later, the Bamberger turndown was rectified, because Johns Hopkins gave him an honorary doctorate in the humanities. He was thrilled and felt compensated. More than anything, I believe my father wished to contribute to the betterment of the human race. He saw education as the way to do it.

  So toward the end of his life, he viewed me more as an investigative teacher than a performer, regardless of my success in show business. I was venturing into areas of human speculation that he had always longed to question himself. As he lay dying nothing was as important to him as why we were here and where we had come from. I felt much the same way. Yet, I also loved to perform.

  Since his death, the conflict between the two forms of expression had become more pronounced for me. Should I devote myself to the “deeper” questions in life and continue my search, my seminars, and my writing, and perhaps help people investigate their own mysteries, or should I indulge myself in bringing pleasure to people with my little songs and dances as I pranced around the world enjoying being “perky” in my advancing years? It was a puzzlement. And still at my age, having looked quite deeply and resolutely at myself, I had to admit the long arm of my beloved complicated father had reached from the grave, and I had allowed my perceptions of his wishes to sweep me into a fall just as I had reached a turning point. I apparently had not resolved what I wanted to do.

  It occurred to me that perhaps I had allowed the unconscious conflict about my father to pull me to my knees—literally. I had had a typical “knee-jerk” reaction to my father’s hidden wishes. I was unable to stand on my own two legs, because I felt the pull from him to take up the mantle of his calling—teaching.

  Whether he actually wanted me to do that—I don’t know. That doesn’t matter. What matters is I thought he did, and because I didn’t want to defy him—I went down. I hadn’t even speculated on such a thing until now. It hadn’t occurred to me when I fell in Seattle. I had gotten well, I thought. But no, I’m never well unless I understand the reasons for sickness.

  I was beginning to understand now—for the first time—that I wouldn’t have realized my long-buried conflict if I hadn’t injured myself. I made it impossible for myself to go “on” without understanding what I needed to resolve.

  During the weeks of rehabilitation, I had felt compelled to wear my opal. Now I understood why—I needed to clear out the conflict with my father. I knew he knew and was probably doing everything from his vantage point to get the point across to me.

  We were cooperating with each other. How else would I stop to take the time? A knee injury was a small price to pay for understanding the conflict I still had left to resolve in myself about who I was and what I wanted to become.

  Of course, there were people who would say that none of my metaphysical musings were necessary. I had simply fallen and damaged a knee—an accident not worthy of elaborate hidden meaning. But I knew better. There was no such thing as “accident.” Cause and effect was the fundamental agenda of all events. I was beginning to get to the bottom of mine.

  As my rehab continued, I’d hear from members of my company every now and then and also from people I had not had contact with in years. My living room looked like a gangster’s funeral, there were so many flowers. Many people who had had the same arthroscopic surgery called to give me tidbits of help in getting well.

  As I focused myself on being physically disciplined, I became more and more aware of how age was affecting my body. My bones seemed to creak at unpredictable moments. The joints in my hips, ankles, wrists, and fingers were becoming stiff.

  Water … I knew I needed to continue to drink at least eight glasses of water a day. I didn’t much like water, but there were many things I didn’t much like that were necessary to include in my life now.

  At times my mind seemed to slow to a dream rhythm. I was thinking and feeling underneath my thoughts now, instead of always being ahead of myself. I was physically stronger than I had ever been (I was on the stage again, and I noticed that I was rarely out of breath). I had become more scientific and focused in my workout program than ever before.

  But I found that everyday activities of movement were more difficult for me than what I did on the stage. That was because of the unpredictability factor. On stage I knew just what was going to happen and how. In life I never knew who would dart out in front of me while crossing a street or yell to attract my attention, which caused me to wheel around and wrench something.

  Life was making me feel older than entertaining did. I couldn’t rehearse life. I couldn’t tailor it for myself and my needs. Life went on with its own rhythm and natural ebbs and flows, whether I was out of sync with it or not.

  More and more of my friends were dying. I had finally come to the point in my life where death was a constant. I loved George Burns’s remark. He said he was so old that each day he read the obituary columns to find out if he was still alive. If he didn’t see his name there, he knew he’d have a nice day.

  I visited with Jill Ireland two days before she died. I was overcome with admiration at her sensitivity to others in the midst of her own pain. She was fully aware and caring about other people’s problems. She was peaceful; and while angry at her cancer, she was ready to go.

  I wondered how she had reached such a place of acceptance. Was such peace reserved only for the dying? My father had evidenced the same beatific state of being before he died. Why couldn’t we live in that state of consciousness?

  Was that what I was after? Was I looking to “follow my bliss,” as Joseph Campbell said. If so, where was it?

  Many of my friends in show business and the world of dance were dying of AIDS. There was a funeral every week. Many were unable to care for themselves and needed attention, clothing, and food. Projects and organizations were formed to attend to those living with AIDS, as well as those dying with it.

  About twenty people that I had worked with closely had left their bodies with AIDS. And about five really close friends afforded me the opportunity to be there with them every step of the way, which was in some cases more horrible than I could have imagined. I tried to understand the suffering, the slow death, and the lessons inherent in their experiences. I was having trouble with a stupid injury. They were losing their lives.

  When Sammy Davis, Jr., was diagnosed as having throat cancer, I gave up even the sparse social smoking I did. I never inhaled, but what difference di
d that make? It was his throat that was affected, not his lungs.

  Sammy’s sickness affected me a great deal, as it did all of his friends. Sammy tasted the feast of life as though it was his last meal. There seemed to be nothing that he left untried—booze, women, drugs, cigarettes of ail kinds, impressions, instruments, voices, dance steps, drama, comedy, musicals, cars, houses, jewelry, and several religions.

  I wished I had had the freedom and spontaneity to try, without concern for the future, everything he tried. He lived completely in the present, expanding it to the fullest until it became the future. It never occurred to him that he was overdoing anything. Life was to be lived, to be loved, to be laughed at.

  Sammy told me he was going to recover. I had arranged for him to undergo voice building with Gary. Gary believed that his technique could help Sammy’s voice after his therapy because he had worked with radiation patients before. Sammy’s attitude was optimistic, as he appeared on late-night talk shows and posed for picture magazines.

  But when we sat together backstage at a benefit somewhere, his eyes warned me that death lurked behind them. He never spoke of the fear—quite the contrary—but he couldn’t hide the truth. His frail body had been a wiry miracle to me, and his energy came from a source that no one else seemed able to access.

  Sammy was a man who would do anything to be loved, and we all knew it. Whatever his excesses might have been, he was greedy in giving and taking.

  I thought of his life as a child. He had been cultivated and nourished in the spotlight since he was three years old. He was only at home when the spotlight was on. So his sense of his life was BIG and theatrical, because that’s what was real to him.

  I remembered Frank Sinatra, when we were doing a picture together in the fifties, taking me to see Sammy. His show defied the logic of the saying “Jack of all trades and master of none.” He was the master of everything he touched on the stage. And after the show, when we all filed into his dressing room backstage, I felt I had always known him—he had a quality of such instant, eager rapport with people because of his need to identify with others. His dressing rooms were always full of his collection of characters—some savory, some not.