Dance While You Can

by Shirley Maclaine

  There was a more insular emotional environment in those days. The lights were hotter, the candle power more penetrating, the experience of the shoot more intense. We were truly living lives within lives, internal experiences within the experience of objective reality. We were purveyors of fantasy, oftentimes caught up in it. Perhaps that was why audiences caught the fallout of stardust in our eyes.

  The Hollywood dinner parties were grander, more opulent, conducted for the sake of indulgence and show. I attended many a dinner party where Sam Goldwyn, for example, would preside over the head of the table, every single course served by white-gloved attendants, the dishes before us as likely as not on fire. Women were bedecked in jewels, men strutting about in tuxedos. There would be enormous cheeses served on great platters, a cavalcade of desserts, French champagne brimming in English crystal, the whole elaborate ritual from a borrowed culture topped off by demitasse imbibed in two resplendent living rooms, one for the women, and one for the men. This must have been a Hollywood nod to a time when ladies left the dinner table to the gentlemen, cigars, and port. The conversation also repeated the conventions of another day, the ladies discussing clothes, international shopping, furs and furnishings; the men talking business and sport. The social niceties thus observed, the sexes mixed again to view the latest films, which were run in projection rooms outfitted with yet more food, drink, and mounds of carefully sculpted chocolates.

  There was no dope. There was no cocaine. There was no marijuana. There was, instead, booze, the luxury of opulence, and the faith that the magic we were creating was real to the rest of the world.

  Billy Wilder’s cynical humor tickled us. William Wyler’s abstract mystery fascinated us. John Huston’s tales of Irish recklessness exposed our own lack of daring. And Elia Kazan’s New York/East Coast intellectuality often made us feel that we in Hollywood were hopelessly behind in social consciousness.

  The Mirisch brothers had a production company that drew all of the best talent to it at United Artists. The lot was small; there was no makeup department, no hair department. Each individual seemed to perform the function of an entire department elsewhere. This was probably the beginning of independent filmmaking as we know it today.

  Fox had a back lot that was a small country unto itself. There was even a huge lake. I remember the night I was being transported as Princess Aouda in Around the World in 80 Days on a chair carried by four extras, one of whom threatened to drop me in the lake if I didn’t ask Mike Todd, the producer, for overtime. Being one who had arisen from the ranks myself, I’d been prepared to do it until, as they gently let me down on the banks of the river, I spotted Marlene Dietrich up against a tree, dressed all in black leather, smoking a long cigarette, while Mike circled her, berating her with a harangue of some sort having to do with why she was late. I watched, fascinated, and thought I’d get to the extra’s request a little later. Fortunately, they printed that take, and I wasn’t threatened again. I never did bring up overtime to Mike.

  I made several pictures on the Fox lot and enjoyed as a dressing room a bungalow that would be large enough to house a small family today.

  I remembered the relationship I had with Candy the Chimp, whom I worked with on a film called What a Way to Go. Candy and I took a shine to each other. She would come to my dressing room every morning to watch me get made up, while she sipped a cup of coffee with cream and two lumps of sugar. She would then go over the wardrobe, which was not insignificant, hanging neatly on a rack for the day’s shoot. Then she’d climb on my back, and together we’d ride my bicycle to the set. Candy was upset with me at the wrap party when she saw me kissing and hugging so many other people, and finally, in a fit of jealousy, she bit me in the hand and that was the last I saw of her.

  Much later, the Khrushchev visit to America came to the Fox lot, presided over by Spyros Skouras and others. They had asked me to do the Can-Can for Khrushchev. Irene Sharaff’s costumes weighed about sixty-five to seventy pounds. I thought I would go into cardiac arrest doing the entire number without cuts. At the end of it, Khrushchev’s comment was, “The face of humanity is prettier than its backside.” I countered, in juvenile bravado, by saying, “He was just upset that we wore panties.”

  I remembered so well that day, because I had gone to the Fox commissary where the Skouras-Khrushchev debate had occurred. Joan Crawford had sought me out in that commissary. She came to visit me on the set, had lunch with me—and then, back in my bungalow, while she was dressed in what she claimed were her fake diamonds and turquoise (the real ones being left in the safe), I couldn’t help but focus on how predominant her freckles were. I wondered how much body makeup she was subjected to every morning, because I couldn’t remember seeing her freckles in Mildred Pierce.

  She talked of her life, her baby-doll straps, her ambitions in Hollywood, and invited me that night to have dinner with her. The dinner to me was vague, as I thought about it now, but I remembered sitting at a long Citizen Kane table—she on one end, me on the other. The impression created was one of distance, an ambiance of intimidation. Perhaps that’s why I couldn’t remember the subjects we discussed.

  The Fox lot was where I was reunited with Dean Martin, with whom I had done five pictures, Bob Cummings, with whom I had worked in Japan on My Geisha, and Bob Mitchum, which continued the personal relationship that had kindled between us on Two for the Seesaw. Mitchum was a man of high intellect and low expectations—of the world, of himself, who knows why—one of the most intelligent men I had ever met, with a photographic memory and a capacity for booze that could have retired him with the title. He was forever making B pictures, giving as an excuse, “Better they should happen to me than someone else.”

  I remembered lying in a giant champagne glass with him for hours, covered with a golden silk sheet and surrounded by the crew, who were trying to make us look beautiful together, while at the same time showing irritation at our intimacy. Mitchum was a man who, with all his talents, would go to any length to deny them. It was as though he didn’t want to be charged with the responsibility of living up to them. He referred to himself as “a poet with an ax.”

  In that bungalow on the Fox lot he would hold court, telling stories of his bygone days, holding us spellbound with his talent as a raconteur, stretching out the stories, never getting to the point, until sometimes as late as eleven o’clock at night. We would stagger out of the bungalow (other actors and some grips) and drive home, swimming in the word pictures he had spun around us and wondering why we stayed listening hour by hour with a 5 A.M. call ahead of us.

  At the end of one of those storytelling binges, he presented me with some brownies he said he had baked. I ate them for dinner when I got home. An hour later, I thought I had achieved Nirvana. Clearly he had included his own “special” ingredients.

  I remembered that Fox’s expectation of What a Way to Go was that it would be the big hit of the year, while on another soundstage around the corner from where we were, shooting history was being made with a little musical we heard about called The Sound of Music.

  Dream makers were not always correct in the evaluations of their dreams. And where were all these people now? Mitchum was still slugging it out in his granite cigar store Indian fashion, like a walking mountain of endurance.

  Paul Newman had become a respected sociological assessor of our culture’s values, a racing car enthusiast, as well as a fine director. Dean Martin outlasted Jerry. Robert Cummings continued with his vitamin company until, at the age of eighty-something, he still looked fifty. And Dick Zanuck, who was the head of Fox at the time, came to work one morning to find that his parking space had been removed by his father, Darryl, and Dick was banned from the lot. He went on to produce independently some of the best films in town and to marry a woman who provided the push and inspiration he required.

  William Peter Blatty, who wrote the first picture that I did on the Fox lot, called John Goldfarb, Please Come Home, went on to write The Exorcist. He patterned the prot
agonist, Chris MacNeil, after me—using my yellow Jaguar, the French couple who worked for me, J. Lee Thompson, the director who directed me in Goldfarb and What a Way to Go and who had a habit of shredding his scripts and eating them. One day he ate a rewrite, which had no carbon.

  Blatty and I often had long discussions in my bungalow on the Fox lot about the nature of good and evil, whether spirits existed, and whether the polarity in the universe was harmonious.

  We used to have séances with the kids in the neighborhood at my big house in Encino, which is where he told me the idea for The Exorcist was born. He presented me with the book on New Year’s Day. I opened the door. He stood there unshaven and gaunt and said, “Read this. It’s gonna be a hit.” I took it to Sir Lew Grade, with whom I had a contract at the time. He read it and said, “This will never work.” I went on to do another film about the same subject, called The Possession of Joel Delaney, which never made a ripple. Blatty went on to make The Exorcist with someone else and made history.

  I remember Bill Friedkin, who directed The Exorcist, coming to my apartment in New York while he was shooting with Ellen Burstyn, watching me as I made blueberry pancakes for breakfast. He clocked how I moved, talked, sat, rushed around, even how I cursed with Southern “eloquency.” I remember Blatty coming over during the shooting of The Exorcist, discussing the mishaps that were occurring—sets burned down, one of the grips getting killed, and something to do with an air conditioner with a mind of its own, turning itself on and off at will. Blatty said it was the spirits controlling the film. On reflection, I was glad I didn’t make it but got into the positive side of the “force” instead!

  Sitting there in the makeup chair, I found I had fast-framed about twenty years of my past in Hollywood and it occurred to me to wonder why. Was it just the role I was about to play? Or something deeper? And on the heels of that thought I realized I was making the transition into the adjustment of getting older. I could no longer pose as a character actress. I actually was one.

  I guess the transition had really begun after a string of bad films, a television series that was a miserable and unintelligible flop, five years of being out of work, and an excursion into political activism that left me as disappointed with the Democratic Party as I was with the roles I was being offered.

  Being true to my survivalist nature, I pulled myself up by my bootstraps and went back on the stage. Perhaps nothing had ever given me as much pleasure as the collective response of the audience to what I had been trained to do in the first place. It was pure joy for me. Hard work, physically taxing, sometimes terrifying, but it made me feel alive again.

  Soon after that I began playing older parts, people’s mothers, and women whose wisdom and experience showed on their faces. There’s an adage in our business. If you have a hit once every five years, you can still survive and sustain your career. Fortunately, that happened to me. With The Turning Point and Terms of Endearment, it didn’t really matter what I did in between, and I suppose my Oscar for Terms of Endearment signaled a capstone in my long, hard-working career that gave me the freedom to venture into areas that my friends warned me might jeopardize everything I had toiled so hard to achieve. Namely, metaphysics. The journey within.

  So important had that investigation become to me, and so fulfilling its rewards, that now, living in the world as it had become, it was impossible for me to conceive how I could ever have lived without it. With the creeping deterioration that was infecting our world, I wondered how anyone could live happily anymore without some kind of deep internal spiritual belief.

  As I thought about my past, I realized that most of my life had been a search for my own identity, as well as the identities of the characters I had been required to play. This may well be an occupational hazard of acting, or perhaps the root reason why so many people think they want to be actors despite the obvious and multiple uncertainties of the profession. Many are really in search of themselves. And suddenly, sitting in front of a mirror, I felt I had been a fraud. I had said I knew what I was doing. I had said I knew who I was. I had said I had a handle on life and was confident in the future. But now, as I looked back, that perception had not been real. I was not aware enough of who I was to even realize that I had been straining at the very seams of self-image, and using overachievement to deny it.

  When you’re a person to whom money means little, to whom power is burdening, and to whom fame is an invasion of privacy, success has to be defined by different criteria. I was always a person who needed internal assurance, internal fulfillment, and internal knowledge of a greater truth than external achievement offered me. I never denigrated external success, but now I was beginning to appreciate it from a different perspective. Oh, the number of things I had done on a whim without real understanding of my intent or the consequences!

  Yet, when the makeup trailer began to fill with people who came to greet me, bring me flowers, and some just to have a look at how I was holding up after so many years, none could have known what a tapestry of images was passing through my mind as I sat there submitting to the application of yet another expertly designed Hollywood mask.

  It hit me again that some of the people who walked in the trailer to wish me good luck had not even been born when I was already a star. I wondered how they had even heard of me. In fact, more than a few had been more turned on by my books than they had by my movies. There was an unbridled openness, appreciation, and curiosity about who I was now. With varying techniques and overtures people would sidle up to me these days, longing to talk about life and meaning and “our cosmic role in the universe.” How could I articulately explain I didn’t know? I was no closer to the answers now than I had ever been. Having lived a life of social and political activism, having traveled all over the world, having had deep and abiding relationships, some tearing, some joyful, some a mixture of both, having tasted success and failure in equal measure, I couldn’t really explain how it all had happened or why I had done what I’d done. That was all. I wasn’t really sure what any of it meant. However, I was now convinced of one thing. I couldn’t do anything much about the world and the deterioration I saw occurring in so many places. But I could do something about myself. I had finally realized, with all my social activism and political involvements, that the act of changing the world to become a better place began with understanding and changing myself. And I realized, as I chatted with the people in the trailer, that I was involved in some emotional cleanup, a kind of wrap-up and balancing of who I was, what I had been, and what I was going to do with the rest of my life. To them I was a person who had solved many of life’s mysteries; centered, secure, and peaceful. To me, the day that lay ahead was as precarious as it had ever been, except that perhaps I was now learning to accept it as an adventure I had chosen to have fun with and from which, hopefully, I might learn something.

  My makeup completed and the natural “curly wig” adorning my head, I took a long, deep breath, thanked everyone, and left the trailer. The California sunlight blinded me as I walked back to my motor home; this time I wasn’t going to be sick again. I would sit down for a few minutes and do what I had learned to do some years ago. I would concentrate and attempt to figure out what was bothering me, before I went to work.

  CHAPTER 3

  Intermission: Time Out

  I had always been a positive person, rarely given to depression and fear. My anxieties had usually related to whether I would live up to what was expected of me. The happiest times for me were when I felt deserving of reward after good work. I allowed myself my just deserts; and because I was a hard worker, I knew the reward would be deeply fulfilling. As I thought about it now, rewards had more to do with time than anything else. Time to me had always been something that one needed to use, preferably to further creativity.

  I rarely refrained from using time. I couldn’t just let it be—do nothing—let time flow through me, rather than “contribute” as I flowed through it. I had regarded time as a scarce commodity, a rare and
limited essence of life, and could not bear to waste a drop of it.

  Nonuse of time produced profound guilt in me. Wasting time made me fragmented, impatient, and churlish to be around, feeling as though part of me should literally be somewhere else. I felt cut off from myself if I wasn’t achieving something with the “time” at my disposal. It was really upsetting for me not to be fully extended, and probably this painful guilt was at the bottom of my need to overachieve.

  Now in my mid-life, I was faced with what society would claim was a running out of time. The subtle desperation such a concept produced in me was not so much about the advancing acceleration of old age and eventual death but more about whether I had used the time I had been given to its fullest potential. Sometimes I could only sleep peacefully at night when I knew I had accomplished a great deal during that particular day.

  Someone had once defined me as a “terminal Protestant” because of my work ethic values. I understood what they meant. Mine were values that tended to blur the overall picture. The tunnelvision view of the need to achieve the maximum out of any immediate time span shut out past and future. Something about not seeing the forest for the trees.

  I had served time all my life, and now that it no longer stretched out to infinity I was actually contemplating whether it was possible for time to serve me. I could perhaps be the master of time rather than the other way around.

  As human beings we lived our lives as slaves to time. To all other creatures, life (hence, time) was infinite. We alone punched the clock from morning till night, reducing our lives to mathematical fragments. It seemed time itself was an invention of our consciousness. Yet few of us felt, at our accelerated pace, that we had time for anything to be really fulfilling.