Dance While You Can

by Shirley Maclaine

  I watched how the makeup artists respected the fears of the giants and applied their artful cover-ups with tenderness, gentle understanding, and real humor. “Keep movin’,” Westmore would say. “Just keep movin’, baby, and no one will notice what you really look like.”

  So we would sit alone with the movie Rembrandts who would sculpt and paint our faces into gods and goddesses for the big black giant (the audience) out there to worship. Sometimes the makeup artists would give us a gift of a certain base or certain rouge color or a lip tint to take home to attempt to wield our movie-magic vanity in real life.

  The men, after having their makeup applied, would sit while the artists of hair gently and with real sensitivity secured a toupee over a bald spot that no one was willing to expose in those days. But the women, after makeup completion, would proceed to the hair department where Sydney Guilaroff presided over a counter fifty feet long, over which hung a mirror reflecting back some of the most famous and adored silver screen queens of the day.

  I remembered the day I walked into Sydney’s room to be met by a stunning lineup of spectacular women in various stages of hairdressing. Gazing back at themselves under artificial light that denied the early morning were Elizabeth Taylor, Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, Kathryn Crosby (she was the only one who came fully dressed with alligator shoes and bag to match), Cyd Charisse, Debbie Reynolds, Jean Simmons, Ava Gardner, Lana Turner, and Marlene Dietrich. I quietly sat just adjacent to the hairdressing counter, awestruck. It was a movie fan’s fantasy. There they were, these Goddesses, chatting and laughing, drinking coffee and laughing, paying close attention to studying their faces in scrupulous detail and laughing, finding lines and contours, and laughing. The act of laughing does magic things to the face, but they were also enjoying themselves, each one a topflight winner, confidently getting prepared for another day of what they were best at doing. They knew they would be camouflaged by a carefully set key light another two hours down the road in front of the camera. Failing the key light, a No. 2 “diffusion” could cover up years of “experience,” as long as the male costar didn’t look too “real” in his close-up. The women always knew they could be photographed through seven layers of veils.

  On this relentlessly sunny morning so long ago, Sydney, clad in his elegant silk shirt, holding a long cigarette holder, flashing a sterling silver lighter, presided over his gaggle of goddesses in a way that somehow deterred competition, because he respected everyone equally. Sydney himself had been a close confidant and friend of Greta Garbo; and at intimate moments after the shooting day, when others had sped home to their families, he would often sit and tell me stories of the glory days when, erectly perched next to Garbo in a big black limousine, he would attend the mysterious Swede to make sure everything was right for a premiere. Once, he told me, he had taken her hand, pressed it to his face, and found that he had embarrassed her. Just once.

  Sydney Guilaroff is a veritable fountain of fantastic memories relating to “the old days.” He should write a book, because his memories are his life. His work is his legacy. The fantasies he created upon our heads were wonders to behold. Those were the days before face-lifts, so Sydney would glue what he called “sticky tabs” on the sides of our faces just above our ears. The tabs had been pierced with holes through which a small rubber band could be threaded and pulled by a hairpin into a pin curl nestled in the hairline, which would never show when the wig was placed over it. Natural face-lifts, to be sure, but guaranteed to give you a headache by mid-morning.

  Dietrich had a trick whereby she used a thin gold chain pulled under her chin and up behind her ears. At each end of the chain were pins that could be secured to two pin curls also nestled behind the ears.

  I remembered the day she took me on the set of Around the World in 80 Days and taught me how to light myself—“camera high, key light low,” she would say. “If you have that, nothing much else can go wrong.” She also said something about eating once every three days and drinking lots of water. Maybe that was how she kept the figure that made the rest of us drool.

  Her behavior at costume fittings was legendary. She made no secret of it. She would stand for five hours at a time directing the placement of sequins and zircons upon her gown, while exhausted costume designers shuffled around her skirts on their knees. Several shifts of costumers were replaced as Dietrich, undeterred, had them move a zircon one more time. She also had a trick whereby, at the nipple point of her dress, she had a 10½-milli-meter pearl sewn in to give her breasts a finished, confirmed “pointed” look. Marlene knew all the tricks. She even taught the practitioners of tricks some tricks. The quintessential pro.

  Elizabeth Taylor always seemed to me to be living inside a kind of misty, dewy bubble. She had grown up in the movie business and had been a star for so long that she could, when necessary, hide herself in the midst of the souped-up protection it afforded its major stars. Her lush beauty and violet-blue eyes, enshrouded in those blue-black lashes, made her seem languid, but she was actually down-to-earth, not to say raucous, bawdy, and wholly, attractively irreverent.

  Audrey Hepburn, on the other hand, was ethereal, lace made of finely threaded steel. Self-control seemed to have been her salvation, yet her large, almond brown eyes seemed haunted by a memory that she alternately used and denied. I used to imagine it was her experience during the war.

  Grace Kelly was thin, very thin, cool; not an ice goddess really, but more of a detached diva. Even though she was crowned royalty in Hollywood, I had the impression that being a Philadelphia blueblood was both more important to her and, at bottom, reflected her real personality. This was before she went off to become true royalty in Monaco. I had heard that all her costars fell in love with her. I imagined that the adventure would be one of cracking the reserve.

  Debbie Reynolds was pert, perky, precious, and punctual. She was bubbling with enthusiasm and right on the button with every comedic assessment she made. I had no way of knowing then, as I gazed at her in the mirror, that our lives would converge later on and that my face one day would be made up to be the face of Doris Mann, a character based in part on Debbie’s life.

  Jean Simmons was a close friend of Elizabeth’s, married then to a man whose real name was Jimmy Stewart. On the screen he was known as Stewart Granger. She had beautiful high cheekbones and a perfectly proportioned face, striking even without makeup. That day, forty years ago, she was wearing a bulky yellow knit sweater, which I was to inherit some ten years later during a particularly cold night at Elizabeth’s house. I remembered that sweater now and suddenly wondered what had happened to it. Had I left it in a foreign city during one of my peregrinations around the world?

  That first day in the hairdressing room, Ava Gardner didn’t say much. But then, and even later, she didn’t have to. She was beautiful beyond description, and nothing she could have uttered might have enhanced the magic of that perfection. I remembered thinking, “Well, at least she has big hips … she’s human.”

  I remembered the day, many years later, when Frank Sinatra told me of a fight he and Ava had had, because she spotted lipstick traces on his handkerchief. “Pride,” he had said, “can destroy you.” He went on a bit about their personal conflicts, but what stuck in my mind was his recognition of pride.

  Frank, as a matter of fact, on that morning when he talked about Ava, had been in one of the makeup rooms, not really caring that the door was open and his bald spot was being painted with a color that delicately matched his own hair. It didn’t matter to him that a faulty light angle usually made the painted head shine.

  Later that same day, I had had one of many Italian “dago” lunches in his dressing room, with Dean and various and sundry others. Frank had a swagger and a command that intimidated people and rightfully earned him the title “Chairman of the Board.” He could also, however, be extremely vulnerable and exceedingly generous in his appreciation of someone else’s talent. I always thought he was responsible for my good performance in Some Came Runn
ing. “Let the kid get killed,” he said to Vincente Minnelli (the director) and to the head of the studio. “If she dies, she’ll get more sympathy. Then she’ll get nominated.” He was right. Frank’s a good guy. At least he always was to me.

  Dean was a favorite of mine. He was one of the original wits. He could look at an inane situation and, out of it, construct twenty minutes of comedy material that could go right on the stage. Whenever we worked together, I felt as though I’d develop a hernia from laughing, never knowing from one take to the next whether we would finally get through what had been actually written.

  Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis had dressing rooms right up the block from me. Jerry was always a high-tech fanatic, who loved the new technologies in sound, film, and tape recording. Dean would go out and hit golf balls. As soon as he got to work (6 A.M.), he’d go out and hit golf balls.

  So one by one we Magi of magic would be turned out of makeup and hair, some having gone through a make-over process taking four hours, onto the streets of Metro.

  The women stars, for a nine o’clock “ready” call, reported to the studio at six, one hour for makeup, one-half hour for wash and set, forty-five minutes under the dryer, another half an hour for comb-out and style. Then the wardrobe department got us. We were stuffed, trussed, and jammed into corsets, scientifically designed brassieres, underwear with lingerie straps that would never reveal themselves, even in a hurricane; and while we stood in our underwear, the body makeup people applied the finishing touches to what used to be real skin and what was now “reel” skin.

  I particularly despised the body makeup. They put it on us with cold water sponges, and I remember one woman whom I seemed to have assigned to me with every picture I did at Metro. She had false teeth, which she clicked and clacked as she ground them while attempting to cover up my freckles. Since body makeup rubbed off on everything, I found myself in a permanent state of tension and concern about soiling the wardrobe. I didn’t know which was worse, my freckles or the tension.

  Everyone hovered all the time. Makeup hovered. Hair hovered. Wardrobe hovered, so that a relaxed naturalness was almost impossible, unless you had been schooled from the beginning. I think that’s what Elizabeth’s bubble was all about. She had designed her bubble to make it bearable. I think I found it bearable because of the discipline from my dancing. From early morning to the last shot, I remembered being in a state of “tolerance.” I can tolerate this, because I’m a ballet dancer. If you can tolerate ballet, you can tolerate anything. Well, almost anything.

  I remembered how Baryshnikov had come to me well into the shoot on The Turning Point complaining that it was so difficult for him, because the psychological and emotional pressure to act was much more draining than what was required of him to dance. “I’m exhausted at the end of every day,” he said, “whereas I would have plenty of energy if I had done three ballets.”

  Yet walking onto a soundstage and into the center of the lit set was more comfortable and more comforting in the old days than it is now. In those days the crews lived for the films they were making. Everything about their lives revolved around the magic they were creating. They were trained, schooled, disciplined, and each one a master of his own job. Perhaps it was because it was less democratic then.

  When I first came to Hollywood, we worked six days a week, sometimes didn’t go home until nine, and then started in makeup again at six the next morning. Then there was the pecking order of control and power. The director was not really the helmsman. The studio head was. And the studio heads breathed films. They were not deal makers; they were filmmakers. A director’s final cut was unheard of then. And very few writers were even allowed on the set. But there was more of a sense of family, or did it seem that way because it was before the deterioration set in?

  Stars took time in between takes to joke and reminisce with the crews. Directors could get away with “waiting for the clouds to be right.” And the star who was beautiful, but couldn’t act, was catered to and helped from every conceivable angle. The publicity departments created the image that the studio head wished to convey to the audience, so that one’s personal life was usually protected.

  Each studio had its own personality; whereas Metro was big, sprawling, and powerful, like the lion that represented it, Paramount was more intimate and intricate. There used to be a fish pond in the center of the dressing rooms at Paramount, where I would go sometimes during my lunch hour to sit and think. Ursula Andress and John Derek had a dressing room next to mine. They were a couple that amused me, because each looked like the other. Later, as I followed John Derek’s career with women, I realized that each woman he chose looked like the female version of himself.

  Lizabeth Scott, a mistress of Hal Wallis, used to take her script apart word by word and put directions that seemed like a good idea in the margins. She would go over them with me, ask me what I thought. I was just learning myself. What did I know? My margins were empty. But since Hal Wallis had “discovered” me (he was also a man I was to sue later because he treated me like a white slave), I thought I should listen to Lizabeth.

  Watching her pore over her script, her platinum blond hair falling into her glistening lip-glossed mouth, I was reminded of Veronica Lake, who had been a favorite of mine when I was a child. I remembered hearing that she had to change her drooping, one-eyed hairstyle during the war because she was setting a bad example for war factory workers, who might get their hair caught in a machine that was producing a B-17.

  Shirley Booth and Anna Magnani, both idols of mine, were the “old people” on the lot. They always ended up working with Danny Mann, the director who had done my screen test out of New York before I came to Hollywood. Of course, they were under contract to Hal Wallis too, as were Dean and Jerry, as was Burt Lancaster, as was Kirk Douglas. Wallis had a nose for talent but no idea how to handle it personally. I remembered how his wife-to-be, Martha Hyer, had asked a friend of mine during her early days at Metro if he would mind fathering a child for her, because he had good bone structure, strong teeth, and a seemingly fine genetic strain.

  The young man turned her down, although he had been quite flattered to have been asked. He later headed up a studio, and we often joked about where that child of his might be now had he consented.

  In those days, Paul Newman was the man who looked like a road company Marlon Brando. And Burt Lancaster pulled away from Wallis, who still thought of him as a trapeze artist, and built his own company.

  Danny Kaye would hold court with friends from all over the world, listen in reverence to the suggestions of his wife, Sylvia, and then proceed with some electric clandestine affair on the side.

  Actors were basically actors in those days. The idea of becoming a director, writer, producer, while one was an actor, was unthinkable.

  Edith Head was the head of wardrobe at Paramount. Many a day we women were rounded up for fittings and ushered into one of Edith’s fully mirrored fitting rooms, where a young, sleek fashion designer, called Pat Bartow, would design many of the costumes that Edith would pick up the Academy Awards for. Edith Head was one of the most stable and intelligent women I worked with, yet she always knew her place in the pecking order of power. I found it remarkable that she never changed, always the black bangs and long straight hair pulled back in a chignon, with her horn-rimmed glasses, scuffed slippers on her feet, and a black dress. Fashion designers seemed addicted to black dresses. I suppose they spent so much time concerning themselves over what others should wear that they wanted no decision-making process about what they themselves wore. The lint on their black dresses was the badge of their hard work and creativity. Every time I had a fitting with Edith Head at Paramount, or Helen Rose at Metro, or Orry-Kelly at United Artists, I was reminded of the truth that they had seen every screen god and goddess in the world stark naked.

  There used to be a massage artist, Jim Kelley, on the lot at Paramount. He was a big burly man who was booked solid all day in between shots and on his lunch hour by act
ors and actresses whose bodies, he claimed, he could change with massage. It was before the day of the “no pain, no gain” addiction. So after the tensions of a hard scene, one by one we would pile into Jim’s office, allow him to pummel us until it really hurt, hoping that the makeup didn’t smear on his sheets or that the hair wouldn’t be disturbed to the point of dishevelment, and walk away feeling that he had done the work for us.

  The commissaries at Paramount and Metro and Fox were the places we would retire to during the lunch hour to be reminded that others were also toiling in their own work. There would be Clark Gable salads, Bette Davis vegetable dishes, Carmen Miranda fruit plates, Dean Martin prosciutto, Frank Sinatra spaghetti and meatballs, or Grace Kelly ice sherbets to pick from on the menu.

  Agents used to come to visit on the lots. (In fact, if you found your agent in his office during the day you knew he wasn’t working for you.) Children sometimes came to visit. Visitors came to visit. Now agents don’t have to come; they are running the studios. And time is far too precious to allow family gatherings.

  In those days we even talked to the newspaper columnists on the lot. Louella Parsons would wander in, half-tanked, with her husband and would remember everything that was said during lunch. Hedda Hopper, crowned in a bonnet of Easter Parade glory, would hold forth on her political angers. Mike Connolly from The Hollywood Reporter and Army Archerd from Variety had memories like steel traps for the gossip that kept their rumor mills and livelihoods going. Everyone seemed to know everything about everyone. Information was traded and dispensed as a tool of power. “I won’t print this if you do that” was a line often heard. If a love affair was blossoming on a set, the crew knew that mum was the word. The wives and husbands were always the last to know if their spouses were “playing around.”

  It seemed to me that it was expected that leading ladies would fall in love with their leading men, and vice versa. It was almost as though the magic of the story should prevail, with a tacit agreement that, unless it was really serious and people were willing to change their lives, the affair would be over at the end of the shoot.