Dance While You Can

by Shirley Maclaine

  In England, he’d speak with a British accent—in Paris, French … and so on. He was a superb imitator, because he wanted to become the identity of another; such was his conflict in the search for himself.

  When I was making Two Mules for Sister Sara in Mexico, I’d go up to Mexico City and watch him perform on the weekends. We’d talk long into the night about the tricks of the trade of live performing. When we made Sweet Charity together, we talked long and deeply about the Rhythm of Life, inspired by the jazz gospel song he sang. Soon after that he began his search into different religions.

  Sammy had a way of making show business enter your living room. Many a time he’d get me (and others) up on the stage with him, because he made performing seem so intimate. When I went into live performing for the first time, I sought the advice of Frank, Liza, and Sammy. Frank said, “Don’t worry. Remember, you change the room by showing up.” Liza said, “Do it because you have something to say.” Sammy said, “Don’t hold back; pull out all the stops.”

  Over a period of forty years our paths crossed many times, and each renewal was a living, continuing experience, as though no time had elapsed in between. So when Dean and Frank and Liza and I had dinner the night before Sammy’s funeral, even though all of us had known the inevitable for some time, the feeling was very much that an era had ended.

  We reminisced about old times (the Clan performing at the Sands in Vegas). Our bunch was never known as the Rat Pack. That was a previous group that revolved around Bogie, much earlier. The Clan came out of the film we made together called Some Came Running. Sammy hadn’t been in that one, but he was in many subsequent films with Dean and Frank.

  Over the years, our relationships have held. I’m not sure why. I think it has more to do with mutual respect for talent than anything else—plus a shared sense of irreverent humor. The practical jokes abounded. Life with Clan members was a theatrical party, where sleep and taking care of oneself were secondary to the FUN. In fact, I wondered in those days if fun wasn’t more important than having discipline and caring for one’s health.

  Now as I sat at dinner with the Clan, reminiscing about Sammy’s life, which ended at only sixty-four, my depression and ennui returned. I wondered whether the priorities of the past shouldn’t have been different.

  Except for Liza, who had made the choice of discipline and sobriety, I was sitting with friends who suddenly seemed to me to be old men. Like a reflection of oneself unexpectedly encountered in a mirror, I was seeing them, and hence, myself, with unwelcome vision. Their dialogue was repetitious and forgetful, their body movements hesitant and halting. Stories were repeated, and the reliving of events in the past seemed to be clearer to them than what was happening at the moment.

  What was becoming of us? Was I showing the same signs of age? Was a live show business era coming to a close, where lyrics and love songs and lush orchestrations and blue-ribbon endings were no longer appreciated, abandoned in favor of athletic movement and relentless marathon MTV musical drive with no meaning, no nuance? Was rebellion and antisocial behavior more “in” than romantic communication?

  At this moment, I was feeling more and more like a matron icon myself, as I survived year after year in a business that swallowed its own young and spit them out. I treasured my accumulated wisdom, but right now I didn’t feel I fit in anywhere anymore. I didn’t want to be old, but I didn’t want to be young either. Everything seemed transient, without longevity. The present became the past before it had a chance to survive the future. Sammy’s death put a point on the transition.

  I tended to spend more and more time alone with my inner thoughts and my writing. I no longer understood the slang and “argot” of the new dialects of show business “English” as spoken by most of the tribes of rock and roll players. I retained a youthful spirit, yet it was tempered with a sigh of experience. It was as though I wanted to sit in my favorite chair, gazing at the frenzy of the world passing before my eyes on CNN. I didn’t feel much like keeping up with the new styles in clothes and behavior. They wouldn’t last long anyway. I felt somewhat suspended in time, waiting to “get with it.”

  The competition in the world and in our business depended on so much “hype,” as though overpopulated numbers of people out there needed to be stimulated in any way possible. Product needed to be sold. I felt beleaguered by the greedy, back-stabbing merchandising techniques I saw around me. It all seemed perfectly acceptable to everyone, since the spoils were so worth it. But not to me.

  Studios went about making “hits” now, instead of films. They were often agreeable to exposing their own magic tricks in an attempt to draw a bigger audience. They were more in the business of show now than in presenting that inspired abstract—the show that is believable and moving because it reveals, whether comic or tragic, a truth about life. Instead, in a desperate attempt to give the audience a sense of authenticity, the money moguls show the violence, show the sex, producing profits by catering to shock effect.

  Of course there were those dedicated creative talents who managed to cope with the hype and cutthroat show biz politics to produce innovative, honest statements on film. I was thrilled that Kevin Costner forced through Dances With Wolves with his creative passion. Dick and Lili Zanuck proved that authentic casting could make money with Driving Miss Daisy. There were always those artists who didn’t succumb to the hype and “requirements” for the big opening weekend. But for the most part, our business had become more about money than not.

  And through it all, I wanted to hang on to my own identity while I was involved with the seeking of it.

  I wanted to feel the experience of being free of monetary concerns and competition and show biz hype. But it was too complicated. I guess I was unhappy settling for just going along.

  I thought of becoming an eccentric writer who ventured out of my retreat once every few months, only to return to reclusion for the sake of sanity.

  Sometimes I even daydreamed about not staying in show business. The negative aspect to being in the spotlight was that to be any good you could not escape the self-centered “me-first” infantilism basic to the human psyche, which was constantly reinforced and even justified by the demands of a “watch-me” profession. It was all so ironic. I was on a self-search, but I didn’t like thinking about myself all the time, or at least I didn’t like thinking about what other people thought of me.

  I wondered if I would be happy down the pike some years with a large family and a farmhouse somewhere … lots of grandchildren running around to play with and teach. I don’t know. I’d probably get bored with that after a while, although I was looking forward to children that Sachi might have someday.

  So where was I? At times I felt I was floundering; then at other times I reveled in giant leaps of understanding.

  I was feeling the world whirl at a faster pace. It was as though sixty seconds’ worth of experience in any given minute was now one hundred twenty seconds’ worth. It was hard to keep pace. There was an energy of some kind accelerating the very air we breathed and the soil we trod upon. The energy was invisible, but its presence pressed in on all living things as though to say “Hurry—Hurry or you’ll be left behind. Hurry and keep pace with the acceleration that’s taking place. Hurry so as not to be discordant with the harmony of the symphony of life.”

  Or could it simply be, in an aging world that now included me, “Hurry, because the time is getting short?”

  In any case, how did one become harmonious with the music of the universe? With the lives we led, it was hard to hear anything but the clanking of the systems we had each become willing partners in building. We had destroyed the natural harmony to fit our material needs. We had defied the laws of nature, and nature seemed determined to cleanse herself of our pollution by fighting back.

  Drought, floods, global warming, fruit flies, snow in summer, heat in winter … Mother Nature and Father Time reorchestrating their symphony to include players who were not willing to play and respect the
natural laws of harmony. They would nourish us only if we would respect them. And that was how it should be.

  So perhaps my ennui was an acknowledgment that I, and most everyone I knew, was going through a transition of cleansing so that true harmony could result. Yet I seemed not to be moving fast enough, or slow enough—as the case may be.

  I took time during my rehab to go to the Pacific Northwest to be alone and do nothing, hoping that a revelation would occur. Nothing of the sort happened. But I seemed to enter a phase, some kind of plateau of healing, perhaps. I became reluctant to even project expectations of changes in myself. I felt that I was almost on hold, like a telephone button waiting to plug into a revelatory conversation.

  When I meditated, I fell asleep. When I hugged a tree trunk, I no longer heard the voice within it. The inner conversation in nature had shifted, and I could no longer decipher it. I felt oddly restless and abandoned; not wanting to be with people, yet not happy with myself as I used to be. It was not exactly depression: it was just nowhere. Perhaps all recovery requires a period like this.

  I did my exercises with discipline but with no joy. I wanted to sleep long hours, yet felt compelled to get up early.

  I found myself arranging and rearranging my closet, the shoes, the handbags, the jackets, the slacks, as though I wanted to reorganize the contents of my life. But it added up to simply shuffling objects around.

  Every friend I had was in some kind of personal crisis either with a marriage, a relationship, children, work, or health.

  There were times when life had a dreamlike quality to it, as though I were moving through a landscape instead of being part of it, actually dreaming it rather than living it. The Buddhists would say that was the real reality.

  Time seemed to bend and shimmer as though I could see it, past and future somehow melding into the present. I would dip into another “time” and place and be certain that it had actually occurred NOW. As long as I didn’t allow myself to become anxious, it was actually rather nice, playful even.

  When I spoke with my mother, she talked of not having heard from my father. She didn’t know why he wasn’t coming home. She feared he had left her because of a recent argument.

  I had to remind her that Daddy had died several years ago. She was relieved that he had died rather than left her, because she was afraid she had driven him away. I reminded her that he had died at Johns Hopkins Hospital of leukemia. She had wanted to know if she was helpful to him at the end. Had she been kind and attentive to him? I tried to reassure her that she had been wonderful, and there was nothing either she or anyone else could have done.

  On a deeper level than I could touch, I identified with the state of being of my mother now. I could feel into her memory loss and understand it. I picked up her panic at being alone. Her best friend had died recently, so her solace every morning on the other end of the telephone would no longer be there. When I asked her how old Evie was when she died, Mother said, “Oh, she was only in her fifties.”

  I said, “Mother, I’m in my fifties. Evie must have been in her late seventies.”

  Mother was shocked. “You are in your fifties?” she asked, not remembering when she had given birth to me.

  “Yes, I’m fifty-six,” I answered.

  “You’re fifty-six? My God, you’re old,” she said.

  “Yep,” I answered, “and your baby son is fifty-three.”

  She gasped. “Warren is fifty-three?”

  I laughed at the black humor involved with old age.

  “Oh, Shirl,” said Mother. “You can’t imagine what it’s like to get old.” I reassured her that imagining it wasn’t necessary. The real thing was rapidly approaching.

  I wondered what my mother was thinking about death, and felt safe in asking. She had always been highly pragmatic about immediate realities.

  “Death is a risky business,” she said.

  “Why?”

  She pondered this one. Then, “Because you never know where you might end up.”

  “Well, are you afraid that you might go to hell?”

  This thought was briskly dismissed. “Of course not,” she said, “I’ve already been there!”

  Trying to introduce a little comfort, I ventured, “Well, you know, you might meet up with some interesting people.”

  My mother’s voice took on a lilt. “Oh, yes!” she said. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to pick who you want to be with!”

  As I waited for a revelation at my house in the mountains, I became more and more impatient and agitated. Sometimes I talked to friends but became quickly irritated and hung up.

  I sat for days watching the rain. It fell on the bushes and trees, turning their leaves to shimmering emeralds. Why couldn’t I make that kind of transformation? I was still disturbed by my conflict between performing and spirituality. Why couldn’t I meld together my spiritual metaphysics and my love for entertaining? Why was there a schism in me? Why the separation?

  Metaphysics and spirituality worked magic. So did the theater. Why couldn’t I see that they were compatible? Why was one a trick to me, and the other real?

  I felt somehow fraudulent, plying my theatrical tricks of the trade in a theater in order to elicit an emotional response. I felt manipulative, even though the audience knew going in that those were the ground rules in theater. It is the one safe place to discard reality and fall in love with fantasy. And the safety is in the collective that surrounds you. Everyone succumbs to the magic, because that’s what they’re there for.

  But I found conflict and contradiction in that philosophy now. I didn’t want to fool people anymore and call it good theater. I didn’t want to be the trickster who wove an illusion that elevated people out of their bogged-down reality. I didn’t want to be commissioned with that kind of responsibility anymore. I wanted them to be able to find the magic in themselves their own way. They were their own tricksters and capable of elevating themselves above the drudgery and despair they too often experienced.

  We were each performers in our own lives, weaving our spells of entertainment in comedy and drama. We were our own producers and directors, casting our scripts the way we wanted, and indeed, insisting on starring in our creations.

  I was having a hard time understanding my own script. For example, I enjoyed doing my seminars, because my intent was clear. I was the flint against which people could ignite the light within themselves. That to me had a contributive purpose.

  What was the meaningful purpose in a stage show when so many human beings in the world were suffering? Suffering from sickness, poverty, and from lack of personal identity and esteem? At least in my seminars, they could perhaps get more in touch with who they were. In my shows, I was asking them, by definition, to forget about who they were. I was bedeviled now by the contradiction, and it was agonizing.

  Then one day a thought struck me. As I was paddling around with my leg weights in the pool, it began to rain … a kind of cleansing rain it seemed to me. Then the rainbirds fell silent, and the drops of water falling on my head propelled my thoughts backward in time … to Greece and the purpose of the theater. I remembered reading that the Greeks, feeling cut off from the spirituality of the gods, needed a ritual by which to reestablish the divine connection. The identification with the godhead required a place in which people could congregate to collectively experience the regeneration of their connection to the gods. That place became the theater.

  The theater offered people a place to rekindle and recapture their spiritual identity. The masked performer was a symbol, the magician who invoked the inspiration from the gods, sharing the spiritual myths and acting them out so that the myths became reality for the audience. The performer became the divine instrument that bonded the audience to the deity. Thus the audience and the performers and the deities became one, intertwined and inseparable.

  The purpose of the theater and its performances then became one of creating uplifting spiritual illusion, which helped bond the human being with
the divine. Such was its metaphysical purpose. The audience and the performers could then share in the divinity of each other.

  When the truth of this concept hit me, I remembered something Picasso had said. When asked if art was truth, he answered, “Art is the lie that reveals the truth.”

  Suddenly I understood how to meld together my two worlds. The art of illusion was the exquisite lie that revealed the truth in any way the observer chose to see it. I, and everyone else, was choosing to perceive life, love, and the pursuit of happiness in a way that best served our growth. What might be one person’s truth was not another’s.

  I could perform in one way and yet be perceived in the same evening three thousand different ways. And each perception was a metaphysical connection to a chosen illusion.

  I was not “tricking” anyone. I was only a catalyst for their bonding with the missing magic in their lives. That made performing and acting an honorable profession, a gateway to realism. The expertise of illusion, which enabled another to recapture and bond with his or her own missing magic, was as profound a contribution to reality as I could ever hope to make.

  I looked up and around me. I wondered what my Dad would think of my revelation. The tangy droplets of rain fell into my eyes, cooling the heat in my head. Suddenly the sun shone on the mountains in front of me, the raindrops immediately around me glistening like a curtain of polished diamonds. I heard myself gasp. Then slowly, as if directed by an all-knowing spiritual magician, an arched rainbow appeared over the mountains of snow. The theatrical illusion was complete.

  I chose to perceive it as an omen, a beautiful ratification of my revelation that theater and metaphysical reality are one and the same. In other words, if one doesn’t believe in illusion, one is not being realistic. I had finally had my revelation, and it had been there all along.