Dancing In The Light

by Shirley Maclaine

  Sachi was also working with spiritual and metaphysical principles. Most of her friends were too. They meditated, practiced their yoga, and visualized light techniques for healing. They were careful about junk food, and prowled the health food stores looking for food from natural sources, experimenting with no salt, sugar-free brownies, and bee pollen and wheat grass for even more energy.

  I always knew when Sachi had been shopping. The refrigerator was stacked with carrot juice and organic fruits and vegetables. To her, a good dinner was a load of raw vegetables surrounding a dish of lemon and mustard dressing, all nestled on a large wooden plate.

  She was also, however, a gourmet cook. She had studied haute cuisine in Paris and in Tokyo and could whip up a masterpiece for the palate out of leftovers. The night she sautéed thinly sliced chicken in a wild-mushroom and butter-wine-shallot sauce, I was mystified. I thought she had discovered some new kind of veallike meat, but it was a thawed-out frozen chicken breast. She never liked having me in the kitchen when she was cooking because that was her perfectionist domain. And she sipped dry vermouth on the rocks while she cooked, just as I had heard the chefs of Europe do. I think she doesn’t like me in the kitchen because she doesn’t want anyone to know how many weight-gaining ingredients she uses to achieve the effect that is so delectable.

  For a while, my diet called for a lot of baked apples. Whenever I made baked apples, I used brown-sugar substitute and nothing else. They were fair. When Sachi made baked apples, they had been prepared with melted butter, cinnamon, nutmeg, and real sugar. There was no comparison. She loved watching me enjoy the baked apples, but was most upset when I walked in and realized how she did it!

  Because of her international education, Sachi had thought of becoming a translator at the United Nations. She spoke and read and wrote fluent Japanese and French plus some Cantonese Chinese. She could read many Oriental newspapers but Japanese was the language she translated the alphabet into. She was socially sensitive in both Eastern and Western cultures and was sometimes confused by the reality that East and West did have a complicated time making the twain meet.

  Soon after she completed her French studies in Paris, she came to Malibu to live. One night we were discussing what she might want to do with her life. I remember she was cutting a piece of fruitcake. She was in a wistful mood that night, and as she gently pushed the knife into the cake, she sighed and said, “Oh, Mom, life is so mysterious, isn’t it?”

  I couldn’t help it. She was so adorable, I laughed out loud. She looked up at me, startled, and said, “What?”

  I said, “Excuse me, sweetheart. Yes, life is certainly mysterious, but could you cut into that fruitcake again, and deliver that line the same way once more?”

  “Deliver the line?” she asked, mystified.

  “Yes, I mean, just do what you did again, saying what you said exactly the same way. Do you remember how you did it?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I always remember how I do something.”

  Oh my, I thought. This could be revealing.

  So, once again, with no preparation, she repeated the “scene.”

  It was uncannily identical.

  She looked up at me. I blinked. I sensed this was an important moment. So did she.

  “I see,” said I.

  I hesitated. Should I pursue this or not? I went on.

  “Okay, now,” I said. “Let’s have some fun. Do the same thing with the fruitcake and deliver the same ‘life can be mysterious’ line, but make me feel sad as though your heart is breaking.”

  “Sure,” she said without even thinking. Again, with no preparation or emotional adjustment, she cut a little more hesitantly into the cake and seemed to be choking back tears as she said, “Oh, Mom, life can be so mysterious,” as though she had been sentenced to die at dawn. She really moved me. As a professional, I thought, oh dear, should I really tell her how talented she is? Her kind of expressive capacity was instantaneously evident. I felt almost guided to go on.

  “Okay,” I said, “let’s do something else.”

  “Sure,” she answered, knowing that not only was this fun, but she might be on to something.

  “Let’s do an improvisation,” I suggested.

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, here’s the outline. You go outside. Knock on the door. I’ll answer it, and your task is to tell me that you have found someone out on the street who has been injured somehow and desperately plead for me to help them. And make me believe it.”

  “Oh,” she said, her face lighting up. “Just knock on the door and then launch into all that?”

  “Yep.”

  “Okay.”

  She walked outside and closed the door. I heard her descend the stairs that led to the beach below. About one minute elapsed before she ran up the steps and pounded on the door. As soon as I heard the intensity of the pounding, I knew how it was going to develop.

  “Mom, Mom,” she screamed. “Open up! Open up!”

  I opened up.

  “There’s a man, a really sweet man, outside on Malibu Road. He’s been hit by a car and he needs help. He’s bleeding, Mom. He’s losing so much blood, we need to call the paramedics before it’s too late.” Her eyes filled with desperate tears as she pulled on my arm to come and look. “Please, Mom, come and look for yourself if you don’t believe me. Come, really. This isn’t acting. He’s really there. Maybe you should look at him before you call the doctors so you can tell them what to bring. But hurry, he’s really in pain. I’m not acting now. Come on. Don’t just stand there.”

  It was all I could do not to bolt down the stairs and beeline it for the street. I stood astonished in the doorway.

  Sachi stared at me.

  “What are you doing, Mom?”

  “I’m wondering if there really is a man on the street.”

  “No, Mom,” she laughed, the tears gone now. “You said make you believe it. I did, didn’t I?”

  “Yes, darling,” I said. “You certainly did, especially when you said, ‘This isn’t acting.’ You’re shrewd too.”

  “Is this acting?” she said.

  I put my arm around her and closed the door. “This is more than acting,” I said. “This is believability.”

  She skipped back to the fruitcake. “Then is acting making someone believe what you say, whether it’s true or not?”

  “Yes,” I sighed, thinking of Ronald Reagan.

  “Well,” she said, “maybe I should go into that. I’ve been doing this sort of thing all my life!”

  In five short minutes, the course of her life had been changed and we both knew it. With stunning alacrity, she understood that she had stumbled across a form of expression that was natural for her. The question was, would she have the discipline to realize that acting took more than talent?

  Within two weeks, Sachi had enrolled herself in one of the finest acting schools in Hollywood and found herself working beside already established actors and actresses who had returned to class to brush up on their honesty. She had no problem being known as my daughter, although she never mentioned it unless someone else did. And before I knew it, she was rehearsing, memorizing lines, wading through my closet for costumes and props, and carrying on long detailed conversations with her scene partners about what was expected of them the next day.

  Word began to filter back to me about her talent. But more than that, people loved having her as friend. Of course, most or the new friends she made were struggling, using ingenious methods to make ends meet, and learning to adjust to the emotional cruelty of the oppressive competition of show business. It made no difference to Sachi. She knew she was in the right business and she would make it one day.

  There was also a profound aspect of therapy in relation to what Sachi derived from acting. During all her years in Japan and England, she had suffered from the cultural requirement to repress her feelings. She was an American, not a Japanese or an English person. The double standard had begun to weigh heavily on her heart.
She needed to express her feelings, her latent fears, angers, and confusions. She needed to mirror herself somehow, pulling out her emotions so she could confront them. She found acting to be a perfect forum, and because she was once removed from feeling “real,” she allowed herself free rein in searching out who she was.

  She soon became a participant in the positive aspects of California culture. She went for long walks in the Calabasas mountains, waded in the ocean, learned all the backstreet shortcuts in the Valley, Beverly Hills, and Santa Monica areas, and haunted the health food stores.

  She was repulsed (thank goodness) by the cocaine toots and never drank more than a Kir (white wine and cassis) before dinner or her vermouth when she cooked. She met a young man who was also a fellow actor, whose family lived in Santa Barbara, so she treated herself to time away from her classes for walks along the trails and mountains, and she camped out under the stars with him.

  At first I was concerned about the drug scene I knew she was bound to encounter in Hollywood. Sending her to school in Japan in the first place had been one way of avoiding that problem, particularly when I was on location most of the time anyway. Her father and I had discussed that early on. As soon as she was of school age, we had agreed that being educated away from Hollywood would afford her the opportunity to have a multicultural support system, avoiding what could potentially have been a tragedy for the child of a movie star. Who knows whether we made the right decision. I’m sure there were other confusions that plagued her as a result of being separated from me so much as a child, and I knew she had been through lonely hours as she searched for herself. But we often talked about that search being one you had to make on your own, and as I gazed at her in front of me now, bubbling with wondrous fun, I was comfortable in the certainty that she was a happy person, full of optimism, and that our relationship had survived the confused stickiness that plagued so many mothers and daughters.

  Sachi and Dennis and Sandy and I celebrated for an hour. We talked of how important it was to celebrate oneself. We talked of how we could each make whatever we desired happen in our lives if we believed it enough. If we couldn’t celebrate ourselves, how could we celebrate someone else? If we didn’t love ourselves, how could we really love anyone else? If we felt good about ourselves, we’d feel good about others. It had taken me fifty years to reach that state of mind, and I wasn’t about to change it even if such an attitude seemed self-aggrandizing. It was real to me. It was working for me. I also felt, and still do, that as long as I keep a positive attitude, it’s only the unlimited beginning.

  Chapter 2

  I dressed in a warm knit suit, said good-bye to Sachi and Dennis and Sandy for a few hours, and went over to Bantam.

  The first person I saw as I walked into the offices was Betty Ballantine, my editor on Limb. I call her G.A. because she was my guardian angel as she shepherded me through weeks of the nine hundred-odd pages that were ultimately cut down to 372! Betty and her husband, Ian Ballantine (the grand old man of publishing), took me under their wings and encouraged me to have heart when I feared that the New York intellectuals would ridicule me. “Just write your personal experience,” they would say. Or, “It’s your reality. Be honest about your own experience and let it grow out of that. We want to read how it happened to you.” So I did. I began to call Ian the Gremlin because he could invisibly maneuver any situation into a positive reality.

  “Well, there you are,” said Betty, walking toward me with her arms outstretched and her snow-white curls winding around her heart-shaped face. “Many happy returns, dear heart,” she said, beaming as though she had said something particularly significant.

  “Thanks, G.A.,” I said. “Why do you look as though you’ve just eaten a canary?”

  “On,” she laughed, “I’ve been thinking and thinking what to wish you on your birthday and it suddenly struck me.” She looked at me intently.

  “Many happy returns,” she said again, with emphasis. “It’s an old saying. What do you think it means?”

  Many happy returns, I said to myself and then the penny dropped.

  “Do you mean that it could relate to each incarnation we choose to return to earth with?”

  “Could be,” she said. “Anyway, I thought it a particularly appropriate wish for you.”

  I thought again. “I don’t know. Couldn’t it mean that you hope someone is happy every time their birthday returns?”

  “Well,” she countered, “maybe, but we’re already here, so what does the return part mean?”

  I stood stock-still in the hallway. “Well,” I said, “you’ve just given me the title of the next book I want to write and I think I’ll begin it on this birthday.”

  “Good,” said the Gremlin, who had invisibly appeared behind me. “When can we have it?”

  “As soon as I close my show I’ll begin. I’m supposed to do a picture, but I think I’ll postpone it. I’ve been waking myself up at night with ideas. I just didn’t know how to structure them. I think I know how now.”

  The Gremlin beamed and rattled the change in his pockets.

  “You two are once again responsible for making my agent a very unhappy man!” I chided. “He thought he had finally gotten me back into show business and then you pop up again.”

  We put our arms around each other and I knew that it would be another year before I went in front of a camera again. When I saw something clearly that felt right for me, it didn’t take me long to make up my mind.

  Jack Romanos, publisher at Bantam, and Stuart Applebaum, chief of publicity, who had accompanied me on my book tour the summer before, walked toward us. “Everyone is ready,” said Jack. “Let’s go on in for your birthday presentation.”

  I walked into the main conference room, where several dozen intelligent, literary-type people stood with champagne glasses in hand waiting to see what I was like.

  Jack stood on a chair and talked about how apprehensive some people at Bantam had been before Limb came out, then said that if the response was any indication of what people wanted to read was a case of how the public was ahead of the publisher. Lou Wolfe, Bantam’s President, then presented me with a dozen roses and two beautifully leather-bound books, one of the hardback and the other of the paperback edition of my book, housed in a magnificent keepsake box. The crowd from Bantam applauded, then asked to hear from me. I looked at my watch. It was 3:55 P.M. In two minutes it would be my birth time. A spiritual guide had told me that the energy one inherits on one’s birthday is very powerful, because the sun and its complementary planets are emitting the same aligned energy that they did the moment you were born. You “own” that energy. It is yours to use in projecting whatever you want of it for the following years. In 1983 I had gone to a mountaintop in Colorado and “projected” positively what I wanted; the success of Terms of Endearment, the Oscar, Out on a Limb, and my Broadway show. I had tried not to allow any doubt or fear to enter my mind. I needed to “know” that what I had projected would come to pass. Everything that I had projected happened. Now, as I stood before the Bantam crowd, I remembered my projections the year before. There was no mountain this time and I couldn’t be alone, so I stood on the chair and thanked everyone. I explained what I had done on my birthday the year before at exactly 3:57, and I asked everyone if they would please take one minute and, in a collective mood, send me some positive thoughts about the book I was going to begin writing as soon as I left the building. No one bowed their heads, but nearly everyone closed their eyes. Some probably thought I was a lunatic, but they indulged me anyway, and I have had enough to do with audiences to know that this one genuinely wished me well.

  I sopped up the positive goodwill I could feel in the room and for one minute we were silent with each other. It was a kind of collective projection.

  When the minute was over and I was officially one year older, I applauded them for going along with me, thanked them, and went out to get some looseleaf notebooks and new smooth ball-point pens.

  Bett
y and Ian knew they wouldn’t have to nudge me and I was satisfied that I knew what I’d be doing for the next year.

  As soon as I got back to my apartment, I called Mort, told him what I was thinking, and he hung up the phone.

  “I’m very busy,” he said. “I’m writing my memoirs. I don’t have time to talk to you.”

  Betty and Ian Ballantine had been pressing me to write more about the relationship I had had with my mother and father. They said they were anxious to know how my childhood had contributed to my life, and what had been the interplay among us. I resisted because I didn’t want to invade the privacy of my brother, Warren. My parents never minded when I wrote about our life together; as a matter of fact, they seemed to revel in hearing how important they had been to me.

  I understood what Ian and Betty wanted, and had been exploring that approach. One’s fiftieth birthday is for sure a time for assessment. However, my thinking had gone along slightly different lines. I wasn’t interested simply in searching out more of my childhood, I was interested in discovering what my parents and I might have meant to each other long before I was born. That was why Betty’s title had appealed to me so much.

  Mom and Dad and I had talked about that too—believe it or not. It all started when I took them the manuscript of Out on a Limb. Mother had just gone through a cataract operation on her eyes and couldn’t read. I wanted them to hear simultaneously what I had written. So I sat them down for three days and read it to them myself. They promised they would keep their hearing aids turned up to maximum and that they wouldn’t argue, either with themselves or with me, until I was finished. I explained that I was going to dedicate the book to them so I wanted them to be the first people to know what I had written.

  “We are the first to know?” asked my mother. It was, as I had surmised, important to her.