My Lucky Stars

by Shirley Maclaine

  I believe there are. If we all, including feminists, more fully acknowledged that we have been bereft of the spiritual feminine for far too long, there would be less violence, anger, and hostility in the world.

  With that recognition, our culture would be soothed. Our films and television would reflect the resulting serenity and we, I hope, would begin our transformation into the new millennium with a consciousness of stability, balance, harmony, and “allowance.” We would return to what we were meant to be—the Power of One.

  THE FEMININE POWER AND LONGEVITY OF SEVERAL FEMALE stars gives the hope and security that we are not lost. They continue to shed their light in my own small universe. They have influenced me deeply and I treasure their friendship.

  Liza Minnelli is the one I’ve known since she was a baby. At the end of each shooting day on Some Came Running after we returned to Hollywood from location, I’d stop by Vincente’s house to see Liza—she was about ten. She’d don a party dress with exquisite trimmings and proceed to dance and sing for me. She’d tell me about her games, her school, her ideas for plays and musicals. Liza was the image of her father, but her talent was Judy’s. She questioned me about the shoot, my wardrobe, why my hair was dyed for the part, whether I fell in love with my leading men, and whether I enjoyed being a star. I could see that her intentions for her life were clear. Yet there she was alone with her nanny, playing show business with a twenty-four-year-old who was grappling with the same questions.

  Over the years, Liza has become the one I go to for advice regarding the world of the stage. How do I handle two shows a night at an altitude of 7,500 feet? Who is the best new lyricist? Does Donna Karan do show clothes? What about that theater in Mexico City? Should I have an intermission? Who is a good drummer? Should I go self-contained or hire an orchestra in each place? On and on. She is a professional par excellence. She is giving, she is wily and shrewd, and she is nearly always right. She has been through personal pain and knows she is in constant rehab. I want her to write her autobiography so that others can know what is possible in themselves. She is an exemplary survivor.

  BARBRA STREISAND IS ONE OF THE “REAL” ONES. IN EVERY way; sometimes too real. She is a universe of her own because she relates that way. To me, that is her most precious characteristic. Her directness and her sometimes harsh candor are the very spine of her honest personality. To be sure, her honesty is specifically her truth, but it is usually laced with such blazing insight that she redefines truth.

  Barbra and I were born on the same day, April 24, seven years apart. She has fascinated me since I first saw her in her debut at the Coconut Grove when she was eighteen and I was twenty-five. I remember she was late going on because her hair wasn’t dry. When she finally appeared in a navy blouse and miniskirt, I knew I was looking at and hearing a talent that was a gift from God. I can see why she is obsessed with sculpting perfection in her life. She begins with something perfect—her voice. Yet she is often insecure with the world that surrounds her because she would like to see it in perfect terms. Though her feet are firmly planted on the ground, she is in a continual cosmic search for the meaning of self. Such a trait is consistent with the sign of Taurus.

  She is attracted to sensual specifics that most people overlook; for example, she will notice a new perfume you’re wearing or whether one of your teeth has been capped. She will detect a spice in an exotic dish, or the particular energy of an individual as his mood changes.

  She has a need to express her appreciation of beauty in the environment that surrounds her. And though she sometimes finds herself maddeningly conflicted, she deeply desires harmony.

  She is very sensitive to the opinions of others while seeming to fly in the face of public opinion.

  She feels compelled to express perfection as she sees it and can become depressed if she feels others are not living up to their own potential.

  She enjoys collecting “things” because she has done without.

  I have seen her argue over the cost of a set of tiles for her home while at the same time she can forfeit millions of dollars because the cameras might disturb the view of her live audience in Vegas.

  I have seen her put her audience before herself several times. She is also frightened of them, but only because she is nervous she won’t be perfect. Forgetting her lyrics is a major nightmare for her.

  She is a film director par excellence. I would trust her completely to direct me in anything she wished. She has taste, humor, and an exceptional sense of timing. Sometimes she goes for portrait perfection to the extreme, but at my age that would be a plus.

  And as a friend she is unceasingly interesting and challenging. She is a sponge when it comes to learning, possessing a Talmudic trait to better herself, and her questions are deep and probing, usually motivated by her obsession with detail.

  Our talks are satisfying and always an equal interchange.

  Regardless of where we are in the world, we will either talk or be together on our birthday. She is sentimental that way and we are family.

  She is a woman I feel attached to, and I love her and appreciate what she does with her life. She is an inspiration to me because whatever baggage she carries around with her as a Taurus is the baggage I carry myself.

  May she shine forever because then I and others like us can see ourselves.

  ELIZABETH TAYLOR IS NOW AND ALWAYS HAS BEEN, AS long as I’ve known her, completely aboveboard about who she is, and who she is not.

  Even when she reigned supreme as Hollywood’s exquisite misty-eyed temptress, she talked of quitting “it” before “it” quit her. She is funny and cynical about having lived the life of a supreme celebrity as early as she could remember.

  In the old days, she would traipse into my small beach apartment, a few lavender dresses slung over her arm for going out to dinner later, and play with my boxer dog, Caesar. He was not house-trained, and whenever he made a mess it was Elizabeth who cleaned it up. Every man I knew was in love with her, more than prepared to drive their cars off of cliffs if she spurned them. I watched in awe as she wove her lovely illusionary spell, yet remained real at the same time. She spoke openly about her personal life, never seeming to be concerned whether her secrets would be safe. Her vulnerability was her strongest protection because she had a nose for whom she could trust.

  While making Around the World in Eighty Days, I had the privilege of watching the beginning of her relationship with Mike Todd. The day Elizabeth met him, she told me she had felt like the mongoose charmed by the cobra. “I know I’m going to marry him,” she said. “It’s beyond my control.” I wondered how that felt.

  The two of them courted each other with flirtatious phone calls. They were a combination for combustion. She was divorcing Michael Wilding, who became too sweet and dependable to be exciting. I watched with such personal curiosity how she would handle the possibility of a new life with an unpredictable, modern-day P. T. Barnum. I was observing her in relation to my own marriage to Steve Parker. How difficult was it for her to leave Michael? He was kind, reliable, and the father of her sons. But the physical attraction had gone out of her marriage. Would that happen to me? I wondered. How did you survive in Hollywood without a husband who was a support system? I remember the day Mike Todd died in a plane crash. The Lucky Liz, his plane was called. At the last moment Elizabeth decided not to take the trip because of the flu.

  When I heard the news, I rushed to her house. She was sitting up in bed, paralyzed with grief, being attended to by Sydney Guilaroff, hairstylist at Metro, who lovingly tried to ease her pain with vodka and orange juice.

  Her desolation was so raw and intense, it curdled her face into agony. I’ll never forget her anguish at God. “Why? Why?” she sobbed. “Why did God take him?” Indeed, I thought. She had needed Mike. I couldn’t understand it either.

  With the tragedies in her life and the accumulation of health problems she later came to “overneed” prescription drugs. She told me of her personal horror with prescrip
tion drug addiction and her desire (along with some others) to sue the AMA for malpractice because they willingly enabled her addiction.

  But when Elizabeth was clean, she was a joy to behold. The primordial pleasure she derived simply from tucking into a mountainous cheeseburger with the works, or barbecued ribs and potato salad, or Chasen’s chili was a lesson in basics. But when she dieted, her silver-screen discipline prevailed. Nothing would induce her to compromise her determination to starve herself. And when she was ill, she was so tragically beautiful, seeming to accept adversity as her destiny. When her violet eyes glisten with sadness, I remember the pain she has experienced, which informs the empathy she has for those who can’t help themselves. She is a woman who never had a childhood. She has never been unfamous. She was and is a goddess of the primitive, salt from the soil, the original earth mother whom the gods from the sky found fair. She is a milkmaid, a Jewish mother, and queen of the jewels.

  But when she lost Mike, it affected me deeply. Didn’t you need a person who was there only for you? A person, a friend, a support system you knew you could depend upon as the Hollywood currents swirled treacherously around you? Yes, you think you do until suddenly they are not there anymore, for whatever reason. That is when you reach down into the untapped core of yourself and find what you are made of. That was to be my own experience some years later.

  NOWHERE WAS THE EFFECTIVE POWER OF WOMEN MORE evident than on the set of Steel Magnolias. The crew (mostly men) stood back in awe as they watched the women work out their creative problems with sensitivity and a minimum of turbulence. The actresses were there for each other at every insecure turn in the road. We were a bonded team.

  We all had houses (it was a long shoot in Natchitoches, Louisiana) and we’d intermingle for hours. My house was next door to Julia Roberts’s on Sibley Lake. Julia was new, had only done a few pictures, but the moment she walked into the rehearsal room it was obvious she was a born movie star. Initially Meg Ryan had been cast as Sally Field’s diabetic daughter, but when a conflict of schedules eliminated her, Julia stepped in. Her cheekbones, her smile, her tall, thin, eye-catching body, and her raucous laughter were meant for stardom. On top of that she was nice. A small-town girl from Smyrna, Georgia, she seemed to feel destined for the screen. Her big brother, Eric Roberts, was already established in films. It was Julia’s turn now and she embraced it completely. Steel Magnolias made her an instant movie star.

  It wasn’t so much her charisma, her carriage or command, that made her magnetic. It was the way she filled the spaces between her words and movements. Her facial expressions were immediately in sync with her feelings. The immediacy was so involving, it was hard to look at anyone else for fear of missing an electrifying moment of raw expression.

  As I watched her work in front of the cameras, I realized she believed everything was truly happening to her. It wasn’t acting, exactly. She went through real discomfort during her diabetic collapse. She was dizzy and sick with anxiety. And when she was dying in the hospital bed, she was terrified that her own death could be imminent. She said she felt herself slipping away and expressed her concern to those of us she was close to.

  When an audience senses that an actor is dangerously real, they are riveted. They are experiencing “It.” When Julia shook with fright at the return of her abusive husband in Sleeping with the Enemy, it was to a large extent real too. She trembled in terror, and often after the director yelled “cut” she found it difficult to come out of the emotion. The audience knows when emotion is that authentic and responds by investing their trust in such a star.

  The director, Herb Ross, with whom I had also worked in The Turning Point, regarded Julia as another of his “baby ballerinas.” That is to say, he wished to have a ballet master’s control over his new discoveries. He wanted her to dye her hair, have her beauty marks removed, and never eat more than a thousand calories a day. He claimed he could detect the effects of an extra Saltine cracker on an actress’s face. Julia stood up to Herbert’s well-meaning dictates very well. Some suggestions—the weight, the hair color—she accepted, but the beauty marks around her eyes remained.

  We older actresses—Sally Field, Olympia Dukakis, and I—had dealt with our own versions of a meticulous Herb Ross. We watched proudly as Julia put his judgments in proper perspective. She was a bit intimidated by our experience and our survival mechanisms and knew it was necessary to develop her own if she was going to be a long-distance runner.

  I watched her write poetry and get up in the spotlight of the Bodacious Night Club on Highway 34, seize the microphone, and sing her heart out. I was not surprised when she married Lyle Lovett. He is a live performer with excellent values, who gives an authentically personal slant to the poetry of his music. When Julia became the first authentic, charismatic female movie star in years, the rest of us cheered. We had recognized it first and like to take a little credit in helping her along.

  Olympia and I paired off right away. Aside from the fact that we were the comedy duo in Steel Magnolias, she was also involved with her cousin Michael Dukakis’s bid for the presidency and had a little theater of her own back in New Jersey that she ran with her husband. We had much to discuss and more than much to laugh about. I liked to kid her that though we were contemporaries, she could still play my mother.

  Sally Field had little Sam, her infant son, with her on location. His nanny handled him during the day, but all Sally’s nonworking hours were spent with Sam.

  Sally is an actress of incredible range and enviable technique. She has been in the business since she was a kid and knows what it’s like to weather transitions of aging, sometime failure, and love affairs relating to work. She also has a practical, down-to-earth approach to life in Hollywood: her family comes first.

  Dolly Parton spent most of her time writing songs and catching up on her music. For an inexperienced actress, she was amazing in her ability to cry on cue and know not only her dialogue but everybody else’s. The temperature was 112 degrees in the shade and we were shooting Christmas scenes. There was Dolly with her high heels, thick wigs, and whatever else it took to turn her out, cool as a breeze, unperturbed by the physical discomfort. I’ve never seen Dolly without her wig; I don’t know that anyone has. She came to the set made up and ready to work while the rest of us struggled with our reflected early-morning images in the mirrors of the makeup trailer.

  When anyone flew off the handle or was cruel to someone else, Dolly would say, “He’s suffering from not being enlightened.” She kept her fabulous figure with a simple procedure. She took a plate full of food, then divided the food into three sections, one for her and two for the guardian angels that she said sat on her shoulders. She never touched their food because they needed nourishment in order to protect her. So deep was her belief in this procedure that it enabled her to retain her figure.

  Daryl Hannah was a tall, lean, fairy-tale earth spirit. Sweet beyond words, kind and considerate out of the ordinary, she never ate much and was deeply involved with environmental concerns and the Contra-Sandinista wars in South America. She was living a tearing relationship with Jackson Browne at the time and very much respected his views on the world.

  Daryl had her huge dog with her and rode horses whenever she could. She came from a wealthy family, but operated as though she had nothing, searching for flea-market bargains. She dressed as though she were a poignant refugee until the moment when she was called upon to be a glamorous star. Then the transformation was startling. Her underfed figure was suddenly poured into a gold lamé, skintight, sequined dress cut far above the knees, revealing exquisite legs, no hips, and a wasp waist. Huge chandelier earrings hung from her ears. Her hair was done in golden ringlets. Whenever all of us went out together, particularly when we attended premieres of our movie, Daryl was the one we waited for—not Dolly—not Julia—not me—not Sally or Olympia. She would undulate her way through the waiting paparazzi, turning their heads as though the rest of us were novices when it came to glamour.
She always apologized for her tardiness, but fascinated us at the same time by describing how her anxious insecurity dissipated as she transformed herself into a movie queen.

  So our gang of wonder women met, worked, and lived together. We cried, laughed, and teased together. I don’t remember a moment of jealousy, envy, or proprietary behavior. In fact, each of us was more concerned for the others than we were for ourselves.

  Herbert said our interpersonal security system was so balanced because we each loved and were satisfied with our parts. I think it was more, much more than that.

  We knew we were part of a new feminine sensibility that was as efficient as that of men, but operated with a compassion and intuition that was much more effective. The crew noticed it right away. At first they wondered if we’d disintegrate from within, running afoul of the usual creative conflicts and differences. When we didn’t, they began to truly study our ways. They saw how we came to each other’s aid when one of us was in trouble with a scene. Sometimes we’d ask the director to leave us alone while we collectively rushed in to help our own. We covered for each other, we cooked for each other, we joked with each other, and we respected each other’s privacy. It was an experience not unlike what people saw on the screen when the movie came out, only we weren’t just in character, we were being ourselves.

  The same thing happened when I made Used People. Our director was a young woman from England, Beeban Kidron. She had directed Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit for the BBC and won an award for it. She was as meticulous and caring as any man I’d worked with, but somehow I felt more comfortable in allowing myself to be opened and orchestrated by her. She sat right under the camera, witnessing every tear and nuance. I never felt invaded or exploited. Though she was younger than my daughter and had almost no experience, I trusted her opinion.

  The creative impulses of women are different from those of men. They are more fluid, more flexible, more tentative, sometimes more difficult to understand and more in need of clarification. But women take the journey of depth and tend to do it together. Men tend to take the journey of efficiency and tend to accomplish it separately.