Dance While You Can

by Shirley Maclaine

  I noticed that when performing so many shows, the most important foods were protein and carbohydrates. Fats were a killer, and dairy products produced phlegm while singing. So I lived on bread, soup, meat, fish, vegetables, and fruit. On my day off, I sprang for ice cream and chocolate.

  The most difficult performance I ever gave in my life was in Las Vegas one night after my company and I had stuffed ourselves on a homemade Mexican meal. The refried beans, cheese, meat, onions, and salsa came up and met me with every step. I felt I couldn’t get off the ground, and even when I did I was afraid to hit bottom again.

  When performing live, everything about your life has to be policed and regulated. One stupid day of throwing caution to the winds can result in heartache, heartburn, and injuries. There is no such thing as running wildly in the rain, or abandoning yourself at a disco, or drinking a bottle of wine with a seven-course French meal. You’ll pay for it in spades in the middle of a number.

  And sleep? You need eight hours. The first thing you do in a hotel is take the receiver off the hook on the telephone so the operator won’t mistakenly put calls through your “do not disturb” order. You cherish your Do Not Disturb sign hanging on your hotel room door; and if you’re a light sleeper, like me, you take a white-sound sleep machine with you everywhere you go. Its constant whir deflects and overrides all the other sounds around, whether it’s traffic below your room or a couple having a lovemaking fight next door.

  You live in a constant state of emergency, free of projected anxiety for only a few hours after you wake up each day. From three o’clock on, your life and orientation are directed toward what you will be doing for only a few hours that night. It seems absurd on the face of it, but every live performer experiences the same thing. This state of being isn’t so intense on a film, because there are many ways to deal with desired perfection. On the stage you have one crack at it per night. Your life depends on it somehow. In films it’s the director’s life on the line.

  So the Rocky Mountains loomed below us as we circled Denver. It looked crisp and invigorating. I had friends in Denver and was looking forward to seeing them again. Perhaps this engagement would be a bit more normal. Perhaps I’d be able to feel like a real live person who could enjoy little things like a walk in the park or a shopping spree or even a hamburger and a movie.

  That was not to be. What no one had mentioned was we would be dancing on a cement stage. Shinsplints are common as a result of dancing on cement. And other bone problems and muscle injuries occur. A cement floor is a dancer’s nightmare.

  As soon as I walked into the theater, called the Auditorium, I felt my back and legs freeze up. Your muscles remember what cement has done to them in the past. Mine remember only too well, and they rebel from the first instant they come in contact with cement.

  Well, there was nothing to be done. Not only was the stage cement, it wasn’t flat. It was raked, and that floor was sheer hell. Pain rippled down our backs and across our shoulders. Our shins were jabbing, skin against bone. Beyond that, the conductor went back to not giving downbeats because the sound was malfunctioning—which also meant I couldn’t hear myself sing again. My props were misplaced, and to top it off, my shoe broke as well.

  I came off the stage after the first act, threw my arms up against my dressing room wall and screamed, “I really hate this. Hate. Hate. Hate.”

  Mike Flowers, who was the witness to my tirade, looked shocked. He knew how expectant I had been of having a good time on the tour, and it obviously wasn’t happening. He tried to comfort me. If I quit, everyone would be out of work.

  I tried to warm up for the second act, but my anger and negativity were out of control. I was in a furious temperamental snit, born out of the fear that everything was conspiring against me to humiliate me in front of the audience.

  “I’m not going back out there,” I yelled. “I hate it. I hate the floor, I hate the acting sketches, I hate my material, I still hate the sound, and that excuse for a conductor-pianist thinks he’s Liberace!” (Actually, he was a good accompanist but not for me. How could anyone have been good for me at this point?)

  Mike looked at me, stunned. I had never behaved like this before. This was spiritual? This was an enlightened human being? I clearly needed to study one of my own books but the adrenaline high that usually supports an entertainer turns on you when you’re in trouble, and, with me, it had all been transformed into anger.

  I flounced and crashed around my dressing room for the entire intermission, giving a better performance backstage than I had presented for the paying audience.

  “What can I do to help?” asked Mike, trying to be loving but more appalled than anything.

  “Who do you have to screw to get out of this business?” I yelled. Mike didn’t know whether to laugh or not. I glared at him as though it was all his fault.

  “Oh, I don’t know, Mike. I don’t know,” I said. “I have so many changes to make in this show just to get through it that I don’t know where to begin. I need Jack French, but I feel guilty about firing the guy we have. He’s a good conductor but apparently not for me. He’s used to Vegas performers who have no nuance in their performing. He doesn’t need to conduct them ’cause it’s one song after another. I’m different. I don’t know what I am, but it’s not what he’s used to.”

  “I know,” said Mike. “Jack has arrived, but he can’t go to work for another two weeks. Can you hold out for this engagement and then through the next one in Seattle?”

  I shrugged.

  I changed into my leotard knowing I would go back out there, even if I got a broken neck from the cement stage.

  “Let’s see what the critics say here,” I said. “If they have the same complaints as Dallas, I’m going to change the show and take out the intermission.”

  Mike looked at me blankly. “You’re going to dance without warming up?”

  “Yes,” I said, patting powder on my nose and calming down. “I’ll have to.”

  “So will you wear your leotard from the top of the show?” he asked, seeing the problem right away.

  What he meant was that I would have to underdress from the top of the show, wearing the dancing leotard from the beginning. That would require a new costume that would blend into the leotard top, cover it, and work for everything up until the dancing.

  “Can you design a costume with Pete Menefee on the telephone?” asked Mike. “What about a fitting, and will it go under the costume for ‘Rose’s Turn’?”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” I said. “We can do it, and we have three days because I want to change the show for the weekend.”

  “Okay,” said Mike. “I’ll get on it right away.” He stopped at the door and turned around. “Remember, you said you didn’t want to do this again unless you could have fun.”

  I looked at him. “I sure did, didn’t I? I wonder if that’s ever going to happen.”

  I left the dressing room and walked back out onto the stage.

  I remembered a saying my mother often quoted to me as a child: “You cry because you have no shoes until you meet a person who has no feet.”

  What right did I have to complain about my piddling problems when so much suffering was occurring in the world? It was ridiculous. But everything was relative, I guess. To me, the most impressive human quality was the compassion a person could have for even the smallest difficulty that another human soul was going through. No feeling was insignificant—none more important than another—because all troubles occurring in a human life were occurring for a reason. Lessons were to be learned and accumulated. Knowledge would come from hardships. And all of it furthered self-enlightenment. I knew from experience that I had always learned more from adversity than from success. What were my lessons now, and how was I participating in erecting obstacles for myself?

  The day after the Denver opening I woke to medieval pain in my body and newspaper reviews that said I should cut out the acting sketches.

  From yet another bath of Epsom sa
lts, I had a long-drawn-out conference call with my creative team. They didn’t understand the critics and wanted me to keep the show as it was. I balked. The reviews were hurting business. We should have been sold out and we weren’t.

  I knew it was inevitable that I’d have to cut the sketches, cut the intermission, and have very little time to warm up. I faced the music, bit the bullet, designed the new underdress costume on the phone with Pete, forfeited twenty thousand dollars in discarded wardrobe, and prepared to do twenty thousand more pelvic tilts than originally planned every morning—one for each dollar down the drain.

  I had a talk with the conductor. He wasn’t happy with me any more than I was with him, mostly because he felt he couldn’t satisfy me. It was true. We agreed that he’d leave after Seattle and Jack would take over. The musicians were happy about that decision.

  Pete put a roomful of “busy fingers” to work in Los Angeles, sewing on sequins for a new opening costume. And I tried to eat less so there wouldn’t be quite so much of me landing after every step on that damn cement stage.

  In the middle of the week in Denver, my agent, Mort Viner, came to my hotel room to have a talk. Mort has represented me since the first day I arrived in Los Angeles from New York. Of course, there were more senior agents at MCA at the time who oversaw everything, but Mort and I grew up together in the business. He was the one who drove me to the Hollywood sign as soon as I got off the plane and said something like, “Today a sign—tomorrow the world.”

  He had shepherded me through films, television, and stage. He had also educated himself in book publishing so he would know the world of books. He claimed he hadn’t read a book since Black Beauty and wasn’t sure he understood that. Where my books were concerned, he only knew a lot of other people must have understood them because they made money.

  The PR man at Bantam, Stu Applebaum, had tried on many occasions to get Mort to write a book about Hollywood and some of his clients. Mort refused, of course, citing fiduciary relationship, but said that he at least could deliver a great title, Hollywood and Viner. It didn’t much matter what followed.

  Mort and I had been through many things together. Agents and stars often form very close relationships when there is a mutual trust. Such was the case with us. He saw me and Dean Martin (whom he also represented, among others) as his children whose lives were up to him to protect and run.

  He had been married a few times (I always thought there was one more wife than he did), and never had children because he didn’t like the idea of getting up in the middle of the night tending to whooping cough and croup, and whoever he fell in love with understood that his theatrical family came first.

  Mort had booked our “phantom tour,” as he called it, before I had agreed to do it. “Balls in the air,” he would laughingly say while waiting for me to either commit to it or read a movie script I liked.

  Mort never saw much point in doing anything unless you enjoyed it. When they made him Executive Vice President of ICM, he only accepted the position provided his official picture in shirt and tie could be taken while wearing his tennis sweats on the bottom half. Mort loved jokes but was as shrewd a businessman as he was a human observer. Living through forty years of Hollywood chicanery is a great teacher. He was also very sensitive to other people’s feelings.

  He sat on the edge of my bed sipping orange juice (Mort didn’t smoke or drink). He looked at me for a long beat. Then he said, “You’re not having any fun, are you?”

  “Not much,” I answered. “I don’t know what’s wrong. Maybe I’ve outgrown it all. Maybe I’m too old to dance. Maybe it doesn’t matter to me anymore.”

  “Why?” asked Mort. “What is it, do you think? When you get out there do you enjoy it?”

  I couldn’t find the answer. “I don’t know. I used to, but maybe I was just as anxious then as I am now. Why am I drawing all this trouble to myself?”

  Mort had learned to accept and tolerate and even seriously employ some of my metaphysical philosophy. He certainly didn’t pooh-pooh it. Many of his own friends were into it too.

  “Well,” he said. “It takes time for a show to shake down. It doesn’t matter what business you’re in, adjustments and stuff have to be made. But what concerns me is even when the shakedown is accomplished, will you enjoy getting up there in the spotlight?” Again I could say nothing.

  “Do you get a kick out of it when they applaud, when they laugh, when they give you a standing ovation?” He was asking all the right questions, but I couldn’t answer.

  “Screw the money,” he said. “It’s not worth the aggravation. We’ll find another way to pay the bills.”

  My mind wandered the stages of the world where I had cavorted and brought some joy not only to others but to myself as well. Why wasn’t that happening now?

  “You love seeing people in different cities who come back and take you to dinner, right? I mean you still love to travel?”

  “Yes.”

  He waited a moment, choosing his next question judiciously. “What happens to you,” he asked, “when you’re standing in the spotlight and you know they’re loving what you’re doing?”

  Mort was so smart. He had hit the nail on the head. Yet I wasn’t sure how to answer him. I hadn’t figured it out myself.

  “Well,” I said, “at first I’m scared. Then it’s okay. But then maybe I feel like a fraud, because I know what it takes to make the magic. It’s all a trick. I don’t like tricks.”

  Mort looked confused. “But all show business is a trick. It’s an illusion. You know that and so does the audience. So why does that bother you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It seems like I should be doing more to contribute to the raising of their awareness than tricks.”

  “Well, you could always run for President, but that’s being more of a trick than anything.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Funny.”

  “Come on,” he said, “you like tricks; you love magic. You always have. What’s changed?”

  I paced around the room eating a piece of bran muffin left over from breakfast. I wasn’t certain what I was feeling.

  “Maybe I find a conflict between surrendering to the natural flow of things and needing to take total control of a stage and an audience in order for the magic to work. I’m contradicting what I advise everyone else to do in their own lives. ‘Surrender to the natural order of things,’ I tell them; but if I surrendered to a cement stage, and body mikes, and a conductor with no downbeat, my show would fall apart. So what am I doing in show business since all of it is about control?”

  Mort blinked. “You lost me on that one,” he said. “At least I think you have. But wait a minute. Isn’t there a way to do both and not call it contradictory?”

  “Sure,” I answered. “That’s easy for you—you’re a Republican.”

  “I don’t have to be,” he said. “Not if it makes me unhappy.”

  He shifted his position on the bed. I could tell this kind of show business conversation was new to him.

  “So you’re telling me,” he said, “that you always have to tell the truth?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Fine. Tell the audience they’re stupid for buying a ticket, because you hate what you’re doing. Tell them how much your legs hurt, and how offbeat the conductor is, and throw in the fact that you can’t hear what you’re singing. See how much they’d love to hear that. See how much truth they really want to hear. Audiences come to a theater because they want to be fooled. Don’t they? I mean if you fall on your face and get up and make a joke, they don’t want to know that you broke your nose. Do they? I don’t know, maybe I’m crazy.”

  I laughed.

  “The bottom line,” he went on, “is if you’re not enjoying yourself, you should walk away; screw it. It’s simple.”

  I guess it was simple really. But why wasn’t I enjoying it?

  “Do you still enjoy making movies?” he asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know.”
r />   “Oh?”

  “Yeah, oh.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know that either. It’s sort of like I can’t wait until they’re finished so I can go on to things that matter to me.”

  Mort’s expression changed. What I was saying was serious now. He sat on the edge of the bed, his face deeply troubled, and yet maybe we were getting to the heart of the matter. Then a humorous smile flickered across his face. He threw up his arms.

  “Maybe you’ve outgrown show business,” he said. “Maybe you don’t get a kick out of it anymore, because you have to be a kind of a kid to stay in it. Maybe you should just do your metaphysics and do seminars and write books.”

  His face was filled with understanding, even though I’m sure he had never thought such a thing was possible for me.

  “Well,” I said, “every time I do an interview or get into a long conversation with anybody, it’s this metaphysical-spiritual psychological stuff that interests me. I love investigating behavior and beliefs in people and discussing the connections they make in their lives that might never occur to them otherwise. That’s what I get a kick out of. I get bored with show business talk, but what I can’t understand is why I still insist that everything about my show go right. If I’m so bored, why don’t I leave it alone?”

  “Because you’re a perfectionist. You’re a professional. You’ve never sloughed off anything.”

  “Right,” I answered. “I still don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  Mort searched for me. “Did you enjoy your seminars, talking about metaphysics for eighteen hours every weekend?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you never got bored?”

  “No.”

  “Did you get bugged if things didn’t go right?”

  “Things always went right.”

  “Well, there must have been some things that you found lacking.”