Dance While You Can

by Shirley Maclaine

  “Maybe you can massage the ligaments into shape?” I asked Bonnie.

  She nodded. “I can help,” she said. “I know that.”

  While she worked on my knee, I visualized the ligaments and cartilage to be healed. I was determined to get up and dance. Bonnie was insistent that I be cautious, not so much now but for the future.

  “You don’t want to force yourself now and then screw up your longevity,” she said. My longevity? How much did I have left anyway? I never thought I’d be thinking in these terms, but I was.

  Bonnie plied and kneaded and gently pummeled my leg from the top and bottom. I felt that I had been correct in removing the bandage tape so she could do it. I was now involved with the fragile dance of instinct. Did I know my body and its requirements better than the doctor? I couldn’t answer yes or no. It depended. For tonight massage was, in my opinion, a better idea than the bandage.

  While on the massage table, I got manic about the audience who expected me to open. I called Alan.

  “How are you, honey?” he asked. “What goes?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” I answered. “I’ve been thinking. What about cutting the choreographers’ number and putting in some stuff that worked from one of our old shows? Maybe it’s time I started thinking about cutting my dancing down anyway.”

  There was a silence on the other end. Then, “That’s possible,” he said. “What have you got that we can put in in one day?” I gave him a rundown of material that I knew worked.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let me get back to you.”

  I called Mort and told him what I was thinking. He hadn’t yet informed the Pantages management of what had happened.

  “I knew you’d think of anything to get yourself up on that stage, but let me tell you something. First, I told you before there is nothing worth risking your health for the future; and second, when people buy tickets to one of your shows they expect you to dance. So no, you can’t cut the choreographers’ number. You just don’t open, that’s all—not now. Maybe later. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, totally unconvinced.

  When I woke up the next morning, my knee felt like a chunk of seized meat. Stiff wasn’t the word—seized from the inside. I couldn’t put weight on my leg without pain. Perhaps it was just “morning after” trauma, I thought.

  I got in my car and drove to the Pantages Theater, where dress rehearsal was scheduled to take place at one o’clock. As I drove over Malibu Canyon and into town via the Ventura and Hollywood Freeways, I tried to project whether I would be making this drive every night for the next five weeks. I couldn’t see or feel the answer. Again I thought of the psychics and channelers who had told me L.A. looked doubtful. What was going on? Was everything already written on the wind, or did we create it?

  I knew the answer. It’s just that when you’re involved with the transpiring of events, it’s difficult to see your participation in their reality.

  I drove up to the stage door of the theater. Slowly I got out of my car. A man rounded the corner, stopped his car, and watched me hobble toward the stage door.

  “Hey, Shirl,” he yelled good-naturedly. “Are you going to be able to dance?”

  I don’t know who that man was. But I didn’t like him. I’ll never forget him. He really pissed me off. I shot him a look in lieu of a bullet.

  “Yes, you idiot,” I said curtly and turned on my heel, which produced a sharp pain. I hobbled toward the stage door and into the backstage area.

  The musicians were warming up. The spotlights were being focused. The floor had been laid and the costumes were hanging, ready for rehearsal, on my little mannequin center stage.

  I didn’t know whether the musicians knew, because the dancers hadn’t arrived yet. I was scheduled to have a music rehearsal. Gary was there waiting for me, because he wanted to go over the vowel placement in some of my songs.

  But people in show business, particularly live theater people, have noses like bloodhounds. They sense trouble out of thin air—all having to do, I think, with keen survival instincts that could spell loss of a job.

  The musicians and stagehands saw that I was limping. I couldn’t conceal it. But I elected not to discuss anything just yet. I had an appointment for an MRI the next day, and for now I was going to concentrate on the music.

  I went through everything. I thought I sounded really good; even the musicians remarked about my voice. “At least something on me works,” I answered with sarcasm that was genuine.

  I could feel the rhythm of the stagehands and crew accelerate in that supportive way that show business people have of being there for each other in every department when crisis lurks.

  The light cues were perfect, the sound (hallelujah!) incredibly pure, and the stage itself felt like a theatrical paradise with sight lines available to every seat in the theater, a sense of intimacy even though seating capacity was three thousand or more, beautiful decor, and an ambiance of theatrical vibrations that seemed to hang in the air from bygone days.

  Oh, I wanted so much to play this theater. Why couldn’t I have been more certain a few weeks ago? Maybe none of this would have happened.

  Alan stepped on the stage from the wings on the left carrying his dog in his arms. “So?” he asked. “What do you think?”

  I told him about the MRI I was going to have on Monday. And by way of making a point, I told him I was going to go through with the opening night regardless.

  “Well,” he warned, “why don’t you get it fixed once and for all; and if it means postponing, then that’s what it means.”

  I turned away from him. If I couldn’t accept what seemed to be going on, how would I be with a really serious calamity—like cancer or some horrible car accident? Would I be in the same kind of denial? Or was it positive thinking? And when did positive thinking end and denial begin?

  I began to go over some of the dance steps. I could hardly move, but I still insisted. I heard Alan say, “This is a really bad fall waiting to happen.”

  Dr. Perry arrived. He saw me dancing and raced across the stage. “You shouldn’t do this,” he said. “You’ll really make it worse. I’m telling you. Wait till we find out what’s going on.”

  I didn’t listen. Dr. Perry, meantime, arranged for me to have an emergency MRI right away. I wasn’t dancing hard or even working into the pain; I was experimenting with the body movement and necessary choreography changes, but I knew in my heart that I couldn’t go on. I knew that performance energy would be dangerous. Once you get out there, it’s as though you’re wound up with a ticket on an express train. You don’t stop till you pull into the station and it’s over.

  I made one turn too many and felt another twinge; my leg started to buckle.

  Perry yelled at me, came onstage, and grabbed me by the arm. He said, “I’ve arranged for an emergency MRI and we are going now before you get injured worse!” So I turned in a 360-degree circle, registered everything around me, and wondered how the theater management would react to yet another cancellation.

  The MRI is a long tube of a machine. They insert you into it, and it takes pictures of the soft tissue that x-rays can’t pick up. I had seen it advertised on Meet the Press with a little boy and a teddy bear.

  The boy asks his mother, “Will it hurt and can I take Sam [teddy] with me?” The little boy comes out fine and so does Sam. So I wasn’t worried.

  What they failed to advertise is that such high-technological equipment (to promote good health for Americans) will cost you $1,800 for one set of pictures. To me that was fine. To Mr. and Mrs. America, they have to stay injured.

  I was inserted into the tube for eighteen minutes (that was $100 a minute). They put hi-fi music earphones on my ears and told me not to move. That was like saying, “Meditate and whatever you do, don’t think of a white elephant.” I heard thumping sounds that interfered with the music enough to keep me still.

  Dr. Perry was waiting for me when I was finished. We then sat with the diagnosticians at the
MRI Clinic.

  Their conclusion: I had a severely torn medial (inside) meniscus (cartilage), which was now floating and migrating. I had bone damage to the knee, which they considered far more serious than the torn cartilage, and there was damage to the anterior cruciate, the ligament that controls stability and movement.

  “I told you,” said Perry. “Someone did not read the arthrogram in Seattle correctly. You danced in San Francisco on pretty serious damage. It’s a good thing you were taped.”

  There was no hope left for me to open on Tuesday. It still hadn’t really sunk in. There was the invited preview to consider, plus all the people coming to the opening and party afterwards. Well, I’m having a humbling experience, I told myself, while feeling that what I really wanted to do was crawl into a cave someplace. I could not bear the idea of failing everyone, quite aside from being robbed of the joy of that opening.

  Old gypsies like me prided ourselves on “being there.” We were beings of reliability, completely dependable, would always come through in a crunch. To deny and defy that would either crush my spirit or make me grow.

  The next morning Perry arranged for me to have a consultation with a surgeon who was available for emergency problems. We knew we would seek several opinions. But we’d start here. His name will stay our secret, because he belonged on a TV series instead of in an operating room. He was gracious enough to see me right away, but I sort of wished he had been too busy. His personality wasn’t designed to inspire the greatest of confidence.

  Mort and Perry went with me. Mort had been an athlete in college and had gone through his own series of football injuries.

  Dr. X was a man who was chained to his moveable chair on wheels. He never rose to make a point or walked to demonstrate. He did, however, apparently feel the need to race around on his chair, talking constantly. A scriptwriter would be hard-pressed to capture his manner and dialogue.

  First he rode all over the examining room on his chair with wheels, going to his wall telephone to take a call from his nurse, who was evidently instructing him in something he was to do. When he finished the conversation, he rode back to me sitting on the examining table and said, “You girls are certainly smarter than we are, aren’t you? Now, let’s see that beautiful leg of yours.”

  I was fascinated to hear such an opening line from a man who was a surgeon, and apparently a pretty good one.

  “I really enjoyed you in Can-Can,” he said, endearing himself to me even more. “Do you still do that kind of kicking? I can see why you fell down!” He laughed uproariously. I was thinking Ed Asner would be good to play him in the TV series.

  “Well, pull up your knickers,” he directed me, “and let’s see what you’ve done to yourself. At least there’s no blood. I keep them laughing in the Emergency Room,” he said. “It’s just the way I am.”

  It sure was.

  I pulled up my slacks as he wheeled himself around in front of me. I looked at Perry. He rolled his eyes. Mort was already looking out the window. I knew he was going over other surgeons in his mind.

  Dr. X squeezed my right knee. His touch was worse than the pain. “How’s that feel?” he asked. “Does it feel like you’ll ever dance again?”

  I wanted to kick him in the crotch, but he wasn’t standing.

  “I guess my dancing again depends on what you tell me to do,” I answered, opting for playing straight in lieu of what the alternative could be.

  “The decision is yours,” he said, looking up at me with a smile on his face.

  “Mine?” I asked.

  “Well,” he went on, “I’ll bet you’re good at making decisions, except for how to keep yourself from falling down.” He laughed again, overcome with enjoyment at his natural “comedic” talent for relieving tension.

  Dr. Perry moved right in to try to salvage the situation, since he was responsible for my being there.

  “We’ve done an MRI,” said Perry. “Maybe you’ll want to talk to the diagnosticians at the clinic who’ve read the pictures. They are concerned about bone damage, which is clearly more serious than a torn medial meniscus. We were wondering how serious the bone damage is.”

  Dr. X wheeled himself to the wall phone again. He picked up the receiver above him. “What’s their number?” he asked. Why a surgeon asking for someone’s phone number seemed so inept, I didn’t know. It just added to what was a budding maniacal mistrust on my part.

  Perry gave him the number, which he gave to his nurse. He wheeled around a few times, no doubt in deep surgical thought. Mort never cracked a smile. Perry crossed his arms as though he was either disgusted or protecting himself from a body blow. Granted, I wanted to throw one, but not at him necessarily.

  The call came through. Dr. X introduced himself and went on to listen to the results of the MRI. He talked some medical-surgeon talk with them but not without a parting shot.

  “Well, the little lady’s sitting right here; she’ll decide.” He hung up. He wheeled himself back toward me. The thought occurred to me that he might actually be a paraplegic. Maybe he couldn’t walk.

  He felt my knee again. “Well,” he said, “I use a general anesthetic during surgery, so which do you prefer?”

  “What do you mean you’d use a general anesthetic? Why not a local?”

  He smiled. “Because you might move and that would be bad.”

  “Why?” I asked, feeling that I was on a sadistic roll with him.

  “Well,” he said, seeming to need the “well” prefix before every sentence he uttered. “I use instruments, and if you move I might make a bone indentation which would be worse than what you’ve already got with your bone.”

  “It is really serious, this bone thing?” I asked.

  Dr. X cocked his head. “Well, you’ve been using these beautiful knees of yours for many years. There’s bound to be some grinding down of the bone if you’ve danced on it for as long as you have. We all get ground down sooner or later.”

  I told him that I hadn’t been dancing for twenty years before I decided to go back on the stage at forty. There was a twenty-year gap with no intense athletic activity. He didn’t hear me.

  “So after you’ve danced for fifty-six years, you have to expect some damage,” he insisted.

  Oh well, I thought. Maybe just being alive this long pounding cement pavements can cause damage.

  “But,” he added, oblivious to anything I seemed to be saying, “it’s your choice.”

  “What’s my choice?” I asked.

  “The kind of anesthesia you want,” he answered.

  “So you’re saying I definitely need surgery?”

  “Sure,” he answered, as though the knife was the solution to everything. “How’s ten o’clock in the morning?”

  “Tomorrow?” I asked, hardly believing that I was continuing to play this ridiculous charade with him.

  “Yep,” he answered, “and I promise I won’t move if you don’t!”

  I looked over at Perry, who was so nonplussed he sat down.

  “Dr. X,” said Perry, “give us your reading on this bone problem. As you heard, one of the clinical diagnosticians wasn’t as alarmed as the other. What’s your position on it?”

  Dr. X looked over at Perry, who was now at his eye level. “You could always do a bone scan. That would tell you more. You might even find more hot spots in the body.”

  “What’s a bone scan?” I asked.

  “You have radioactive isotopes injected into the bloodstream. Where there are hot spots—showing damage—the isotopes register.”

  “I’m going to willingly have myself injected with radioactivity in order to find out how sick my bones are? The radioactive isotopes would make me sick, wouldn’t they?”

  “Maybe,” said Dr. X. “But you drink a lot of water, and it doesn’t last long.”

  “Can you arrange the bone scan immediately, should we elect to do it?” asked Perry.

  Dr. X said he could arrange it at the hospital just next door. “Just walk acros
s the street, and you can do it within a few hours.”

  I jumped off the table. “Let’s go talk,” I said. “Thanks, Doctor, you’ve been very enlightening. I thank you for your time, your expertise, your humor, and for proving to me that the TV networks in this country know what they’re doing when they use hospital characters like you to pull ratings. You must be very popular with your patients and staff, because I know you’d be a big hit on TV.”

  Dr. X sprang from his wheels. “Do you think so?” he asked. “I know I can always keep them laughing in Emergency. That’s probably harder than TV, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, I think,” I answered. “I think, therefore I’m going now.”

  “Okay,” said Dr. X cheerily. “Let me know what you decide. Remember, if you don’t move, I won’t move!” He laughed us all the way to the elevator.

  I was now a full-fledged member of those American citizens increasingly dependent on the idiosyncratic expertise of the medical profession. It didn’t matter if you were a celebrity or not. In fact, perhaps I would have been spared his humor if he hadn’t been compelled to perform for a performer.

  On the street outside, I stopped to retrieve my crutches from the trunk of my car. Standing in the sunshine, Mort and Dr. Perry and I had some decisions to make.

  First of all, a press conference had been called in the lobby of the Pantages Theater to welcome me back to playing live in Los Angeles. It was now clear to me that I wouldn’t be opening. I had to decide how to handle that, plus whether to go through with this bone scan idea or not.

  “How about Dr. Finerman?” asked Mort.

  Perry agreed. “That’s just who I think we should call. I’m sorry about this guy upstairs. He does good work in Emergency, which is exactly where he should stay. Finerman is excellent … UCLA orthopedic surgeon, head of the Orthopedic department. Doesn’t care about publicity … understated. In any case, we should get his opinion next step. I need a telephone.”

  The three of us made our way to the bone scan lobby and sat down.

  “The press conference is in forty-five minutes,” said Mort. “I told Stan Sieden [manager of the Pantages] it didn’t look good, but who’s going to handle telling the press?”