Dance While You Can

by Shirley Maclaine

  Meryl could do what she does whether anyone else existed or not. Her thrill in acting seemed to come from abdicating her own identity completely and becoming someone else. It was an identity decision I had never been able to make, nor did I want to. But, as I worked with her, the mystery of why and how she did it filled my days with confused wonder. Was the basis of her ability founded on complete knowledge of surrendering herself or complete detachment from who she was? Or was she a consummate technician who had researched her character thoroughly?

  Since I had become such an ardent student of consciousness and inner reality, she served as an archetypical example for me. To me, acting itself had become a metaphor for life. We could each choose how we would approach our own truth, much in the same way we approached our roles. We were both blessed and cursed with the canvas of freedom we had at our disposal. We could make our illusion any reality we chose. And the million choices open to us with each character were open to us in our own lives as well. We could play with each other or we could play alone. We could believe our inner fantasies and make them work for us in the “real” world, or we could believe only in the objective world and, as a result, feel the inner isolation of emptiness. Of course, one was not mutually exclusive of the other. The trick was how to balance the two.

  As each day passed on Postcards, I felt like writing some postcards of my own. We each grappled with the incongruous marriage of cinema art and technology. Mike’s directorial vision was sometimes not met cinematically, whereupon he had to deal with his tendency toward impatient perfectionism with his crew and cameraman. On the other hand, he was exquisitely aware that the letdowns and defects were not so much about his finished product but more about how he personally was handling the process.

  Each actor who came to work—Dennis Quaid, Richard Dreyfuss, Gene Hackman, Gary Morton, Mary Wickes, to name a few, and myself—seemed to be dealing with the accelerated manner in which we were attempting to keep pace, not only with our desire to do good work, but with an even more serious question of living and functioning in this world with some degree of joy and optimism.

  Because the freeways were choked every morning, sometimes causing delays of up to two and three hours, we often fell behind. The studio that financed our picture was bought by the Japanese, causing concern as to who would ultimately have final creative control.

  The dark-spirited success of Batman worried everyone as to the basic mania-going tendencies of the public. Sex, Lies and Videotape caused a flurry of insecurity in the minds of comedy scientists like Carrie and Mike. How could someone as inexperienced as Soderbergh (the writer-director) have produced something so flawless?

  Tommy Tune came to California to stage a song for me, a gesture of great generosity considering his own out-of-town problems with Grand Hotel waiting for his return in Boston. Tommy was calm, focused, and almost centeredly balanced in his attitude that whatever would be would be. He would go the last mile with his talent and commitment, and the rest was up to providence. Tommy knew that smelling the flowers on the way to the contest was everything.

  Mike even changed his approach to the number the very day before we shot it, which required restaging and an entirely different playing style. Instead of panicking, we slid into the last minute changes with a spontaneous certitude that it was going to be much better and the adventure would be in adjusting to change in an incandescent way, rather than hanging on to the security of the past, which didn’t work as well. Again, the thrill of working with such artists was discovering their personal recognition that the process was just as important as the result.

  I remember the time Mike rehearsed a tracking shot for a full day. It involved a long shot of a helicopter, landing the helicopter, actors stepping out of it, walking to sets, playing a scene, close-ups inside the sets, exiting the set, more walking, and finally opening into a crowd scene with many people who each had business and lines and activity that was choreographed.

  On the board it was scheduled for a three-day shoot. But after rehearsing it for one day, Mike got it in a few hours. While front office memos were being passed in overwrought concern about the time and money going down the drain one day, the next day we were three days ahead of schedule.

  As a matter of fact, even with retakes (two or three days’ worth) and a day off for Memorial Day, the picture wrapped nearly two weeks ahead of schedule. That had never been my experience in all my years in Hollywood. The reason was because Mike had a vision in his mind, and he stuck to it; the actors were well-rehearsed, prepared, cooperative, and loving with each other; the studio stayed out of our way; the catering table was fabulous (health food, junk food, doughnuts, chili, soup, sandwiches, chocolate bark with nuts, birthday cakes when necessary); good, well-furnished motor homes; nice teamsters; a good script; a makeup trailer peopled with experts who went out of their way to attend to us; and reasonable morning calls that respected the creative working rhythms of people who were mostly from New York. But I think the real reason it all went well, swiftly and expertly, was because Mike was happy with his new wife Diane, and he wanted to get back to her.

  Those were all positive aspects of the shoot. But each person was going through his or her own negative struggles, too. As the days passed I began to face, more specifically, that I was truly confronted with getting older. I could feel my body respond with less triumph to exercise. I needed to get up earlier to stretch and digest my food before exercising. I couldn’t pivot as quickly with a comic spontaneity without wrenching my back. Working with choreographed props and business had been a delightful lark in my youth. Now I needed time to work it out. My brain couldn’t retain the lines in a long monologue the way it used to. Most of my professional life I had been able to whip through line memorization with a cursory glance at a scene and know it. Now I literally needed to do what everyone else had always done—study my lines the night before.

  Even some of the new shooting techniques were disturbing to me. I was aware of the developing lines in my face and the stomach and hip bulges in my figure. With one camera, I could maneuver to soothe my vanity; with three I knew two of them were getting angles I couldn’t do anything about. But that wasn’t the real problem. Appearances have never bothered me. Lack of being in control has.

  For instance, people have asked me how I could “let” myself look so ghastly in Postcards in the scene where my daughter finds me in the hospital after a drunken automobile accident. I didn’t “let.” I knew it was necessary for me to look absolutely terrible, almost pathetically vulnerable, so that my daughter could break through and respond to that vulnerability—and help restore the brassy bravado of an aging actress. It was a breakthrough scene in our relationship. And never mind that I had to be made artificially bald! As long as I know what’s happening I’m happy with it. But there was no doubt in my mind now that parts like this were coming to me, or I to them, because my status in life had changed.

  Madame Sousatzka, for example, was a tyrannically possessive music teacher who endeavored to mold a young man’s very existence for the sake of his art. She then needed to summon the courage to let him go so that he could fly, even if with uncertain wings. Perhaps that was why my mother had found the film so painfully moving. Perhaps she identified with that fledgling talent and with the teacher.

  My part in Steel Magnolias was an exercise in humorous cynicism. I played an old bat whose verbal, biting negativity and permanent state of outrage allowed me to dip into my own capacity for crankiness and entertain a whole town by being the local curmudgeon. Expecting the worst in others was an adventure for me.

  In Waiting for the Light I played a bizarre excircus-performer who tricked people into believing in miracles.

  As I graduated into character parts, one thing bothered me as I trod the path of epic character women. There was never a love interest or sensual sensitivity any longer to the parts I was playing. Hadn’t been for years. Did that mean that women in their fifties no longer were perceived as sexual beings? Sure
ly not. Perhaps the parts I was being offered really reflected what was missing in my own life?

  It had been four or five years since I was involved in any kind of “meaningful sexual relationship.” Was I therefore drawing characters to me who were devoid of those same joys in life?

  As for myself, I didn’t really feel I was missing anything. I felt happy and fulfilled and creative and contributive and vital and hopeful. Why then, when I stopped to examine a character I was commissioned to play, did I feel an identification with her in my own life? Were my “reel” characters acting as catalysts for the examination of my “real” life? None of my recent characters had men in their lives. None of my women were even interested in men. They didn’t evidence loneliness, anger, longing, frustration, or even sexual fantasy as a result of a missing partner. Neither did I.

  I seemed to love going to parties and events alone. Except for the pressure of the press, I never minded showing up unescorted anywhere. It felt liberating and fun for me to be able to come and go with my own rhythm. I could leave early if I was bored (which was almost never), or I could stay until breakfast was served (quite often). I had a good time operating on my own, working the rooms full of fabulous people, trading stories and jokes, and dishing about others and their lives, and I noticed that I seemed to be expected to come and go alone; and whenever I took someone with me (a friend from out of town, a vocal coach, etc.), I noticed a spark of prurient interest light up the eyes of the curious who seemed to have their equilibrium disturbed by the thought that I might actually have settled on a new someone with whom to involve myself.

  Perhaps it was my reputation as a spiritual, metaphysical lecturer. Somehow the opposite sex didn’t fit into that image. Intense interest in matters of the spirit apparently negated sex.

  And maybe that was true. I hadn’t really realized that the state of being in my life was essentially sexless until one day I began to count the number of times I had actually made love in the last few years. Let it suffice to say—not many. And I hadn’t even missed it. It had somehow given me up. Where had it gone? Was that it for the rest of my life? There were any number of opportunities, I guess, but the funny thing was—I didn’t notice.

  I found that I couldn’t relate any longer to people who found themselves involved with sexual jealousy, an obsession with someone they couldn’t have, a heart-wrenching love affair, a deep need for “a relationship”—even those in the spiritual movement who, above all, wanted to meet their soul mate. I just couldn’t relate to that anymore. It seemed pointless to long for another to ratify one’s own identity. What was wrong with the one I already had?

  So even at parties and gatherings I noticed (when I thought about it) that men no longer interacted with me with sex as a high priority. It was there certainly, but only slightly. Perhaps I frightened them off. Was that because men still related to us primarily as sexual objects, and I now demanded a different perspective.

  To be fair, I was not the only Hollywood star experiencing the “lifting of sexual pressure.” Quite a few women whom I would describe as “willful achievers” were going through the same phenomenon. We often discussed it. Granted we were each on our own spiritual path, which gave rise to the conclusion that we had found, or were looking for, solutions to our deeper identities that we intuitively sensed had not that much to do with men. And each of these women was as happy as I in the liberation from sexual obsession. It was an addiction, or a dependency, we were glad to be rid of; and, in most cases, they too had woken up one day to find that they hadn’t even thought about it in some time.

  The culture around us, however, was geared to a different modus operandi. Everything around us, on television, in films, in the stories, in the ads, and even in the humor of the day, was constructed to either discuss, joke about, or deeply analyze how to be attractive and consummately expert with our sexual impulses. No one spoke to those of us who were now marching to a different drum. It was as though they didn’t want to know. I was beginning to realize that we had previously been sexual victims of a product selling, profit and loss culture and system whose very basis was dependent on sex addiction.

  If some of us had found that sexual nonaddiction was more peaceful and satisfying, we were decidedly out of the mainstream because it didn’t sell sexual products; and, as a matter of fact, our way of physically presenting ourselves represented our “feelings” as a much more important priority. We were uncomfortable in tight pantyhose, short skirts, uplifting bras, and the “feminine” accoutrements that were designed to achieve the male perception of what a sensual woman should be. You might say we even looked unisex when we were most comfortable. And why shouldn’t we be comfortable? Wasn’t that one of the goals in life—the comfort of being in the skin of one’s own being, rather than gussying up for someone else?

  At first I thought that my comfort in wearing long cotton leg warmers under my clothes was a dancer’s concern for easy muscles, but I’m not so sure. I just liked the warmth of leg-warming cotton under loose-fitting clothes, and it wouldn’t have mattered to me that in the dance of undressing with a new lover, he found that he had to peel off long underwear rather than a bikini. It just didn’t matter to me that his sensual expectations might possibly be dashed. If those were his requirements, I didn’t want him anyway.

  Was I spouting values of liberation here, or was I just getting old and didn’t much care?

  These questions came up for me as I worked through the character traits of the parts I had been attracting. The women were either eloquently cynical in their assessment of life or in a complete state of denial as to their sexual identities. My question was, “Were they a reflection of myself, and, if so, what did I have to learn from that?”

  I seemed in so many ways the feminine opposite of my brother, Warren. He was a man who was exceedingly “left-brained” in his approach to life, needing to control his mechanisms of perfection, intellectually analytical, and above all needing to be in charge of his destiny. He was also a man of sexuality, whose appetite at the moveable feast was legendary. How could we be so different? Were we the clichéd example of male and female crossbred within the same family?

  And what was this business of masculine and feminine anyway? I had always thought I had a pretty good balance between my masculine and feminine traits until a teacher I admired greatly pointed out that I had always been attracted to macho men, because that was the aspect of my own personality that I didn’t yet own. That made deep sense to me. Was I now owning that aspect of myself? I never was attracted to spiritual, sensitive men. I liked the guys who knew what they wanted and with brains and humor went after it. And now? Neither. I wondered if I was denying something or whether I had, as most of my friends believed, outgrown and transcended the “need.”

  We made jokes about evolving enough to finally get above the second chakra (the second energy center of the body being the sexual center). I certainly didn’t rule out falling madly and passionately in love in the future. But when I examined such a thought, I didn’t really want, ever again, the “mad” passionate swirl of a relationship in the way I had always had it before. Perhaps that was the rub, the conflict, the missing link.

  I asked Mike Nichols why he got married again. I’ll never forget his answer. He said, “I was perfectly happy being on my own, ordering up pizza whenever I wanted it—but when a love came along which I knew in my heart was a gift from God, I took it.”

  I had had so many “gifts from God” though. How would I know when it really came from the Source?

  And what would I do if that familiar “love swirl” hit me again, keeping me awake at night at the sheer wonder of its intensity? And what was that intensity based on? Hadn’t it been based on some need in myself to experience myself differently —some all-abounding desire to meld my “is-ness” into the being of another in order to feel whole? Was I, were we all, looking for the other half of ourselves that resonated in our cellular memory from another time and place, reminding us of the
completeness we felt long, long ago when we were one with the universe and therefore with ourselves?

  Perhaps the sexual revolution (of which I was a part) had, in the final analysis, played itself out because we had abused the search for that completeness by looking on the outside instead of the inside? Were the sexual diseases so prevalent in our culture residue examples of the abuse we heaped upon ourselves and each other in the frantic, desperate desire to find what used to be the other half of ourselves, which never did and never would exist anywhere except within each one of us?

  Perhaps I had simply come to the understanding that every sexual relationship I had ever had was really nothing more than the enjoyment of myself while I was involved with it; and now, because of age and a certain amount of wisdom, I had come to the realization that sex was nothing more than a language and dialogue through which we could experience another human soul, which was a reflection of the missing and unrecognized parts of ourselves anyway.

  Perhaps I should take heed from the characters I was playing and recognize, without pressure, that in one’s fifties and sixties, a manless existence could really be the state of the art of living, because the women themselves were more fabulous than ever and the men were the ones missing something.