I’m Over All That

by Shirley Maclaine

  • • •

  Fidel Castro was the most curious of the world leaders I’ve met. I was in Cuba after the opening of The Turning Point at a film festival. He took me away from Herb Ross (the director) and Nora Kaye (his wife and famous ballerina). He directed me to his office, where he questioned me about life in America for six hours while the other members of our delegation waited in the hall! He wanted to know about the Kennedys (so did I), Minute Maid orange juice, skyscrapers to the heavens, and, of course, Hollywood. I had heard that before the revolution he had been an extra carrying a spear in Cecil B. DeMille’s extravaganza The Ten Commandments. He wondered where I heard it, but didn’t answer. He asked about Barbara Walters, who had told me he would spirit me off into the sugar cane fields and charm me. I told him that and he loved it.

  He continually talked about los niños (the children) and what he wanted their future to be like. He was dedicated and energetic, but I thought he was rude to the rest of the delegation. He did not ask about the Mafia, even though he knew I knew Sam Giancana and the others through Sinatra. He talked and talked like he does in his speeches and finally said he would see me later. As I was leaving, I complimented him on his uniform. I didn’t know what he meant by “later,” until that evening the doorbell rang in my hotel room. I opened it, and there stood Fidel with a box of cigars in one hand and a glass case with a dove in it in the other. One of his uniforms was draped over his arm. He was alone.

  I wanted to call Barbara Walters, but it was too late.

  He said the cigars were for Jimmy Carter and Brzezinski, and the dove was for me because I was a dove of peace. I didn’t know if he wanted me to change into the uniform. He talked and talked about artistic freedom that needs to support and help the revolution. The fact that his country was nearly completely literate made him very proud. He said he didn’t understand why our leaders were so against him (he didn’t mention assassination). He said he wanted peace between us and he knew I knew Jimmy Carter and asked if I would convey his feelings to the president. I said I would.

  We sat in two chairs with a table between us. Nothing that Barbara had warned me about occurred. (That made me wonder about her.) After a few hours he thanked me for listening to him and again reminded me to give the cigars to the president and Brzezinski.

  What happened when I returned to the mainland was fascinating. First of all, my Cuban housekeeper unpacked my suitcase, saw Fidel’s uniform, and promptly quit. When I went to the White House, Carter was busy so I brought the cigars to Brzezinski. We were in his office when he looked at the gift wrapping and said, “You open these. There might be a bomb inside.”

  I said okay and proceeded to take off the wrapping. The second I lifted the lid, Jimmy Carter left the Oval Office. A buzzer went off, and I jumped back. Oh my God, I thought, Brzezinski was right. Then I realized what had happened. Brzezinski wouldn’t have anything to do with accepting the cigars. Instead he said, “You tell your friend Castro that we will smoke one of his cigars when he gets every last troop out of Angola.” He turned around and walked away. Hamilton Jordan came in and helped himself to the cigars, endearing himself to me always.

  Before I went to Cuba, I had arranged to do a live TV show from the Riviera Hotel on Varadero Beach in Havana. The director, the cast, and even Lillian Carter had agreed to do a time step with me on the sand. It was all financed and, I thought, okayed by the network. I told Fidel about it and he more than graciously offered to help any way he could. But as soon as I returned, all the agreements were somehow off. I don’t know who reneged, whether it was the Cubans or the Americans. I just knew it wasn’t going to happen.

  The same thing happened to me when I was in China. We shot a wonderful film including our delegation’s adventures in China. I called it The Other Half of the Sky. It was really very good and got nominated for a documentary Academy Award. But I couldn’t get anyone to release it. People loved it, and even though I offered it to them for very little, no one would touch it. Ten years later as I was rehearsing for an Oscar show with Jack Valenti, he took me aside.

  “You have a right to know what happened to your Chinese documentary,” he said. I didn’t know what he meant.

  “Our State Department, along with the Chinese, told me [he was head of the Motion Picture Association] that if that film was released in the States, both China and America would boycott each other’s films for ten years. I thought you should know the truth.”

  “Why did they do that?” I asked.

  “Because in your film the women told the truth as they saw it. No government really likes that.”

  I was learning where the real power lay, no matter how attractive Hollywood was.

  In politics, no matter what country you are in, everything is murky, coded, obfuscated. One South American leader, however, is the exception to that. My talks with President Menem of Argentina gave me hope about revealing the truth no one wanted to face. He wanted to talk to me about UFOs. He had read my books and was very personally interested in whether they were real or not. He said he had commissioned part of his military to keep a lookout and not to discredit anyone who said they had seen such things. He himself had seen what he thought was a UFO, but how could we really be sure?

  We had long talks about their possible presence and why they were here. He knew that Jimmy Carter had written about them when he was governor of Georgia, and he knew the president of Mexico was inundated with inquiries because so many craft had been seen and photographed over Mexico, particularly Mt. Popocatepetl. He wanted to know what I thought and had I met with any of them. I told him that Carter knew they were here but couldn’t get his intelligence people to confirm it. The NSA, CIA, and the military held the position that they were the permanent government, and that he, the president, was there only for a limited amount of time.

  Menem was not at all concerned about the religious aspects of the presence of UFOs. The Catholic church had basically acknowledged “fellow beings in the universe” and was not opposed to making this public. But Carter was concerned as to what they were teaching. I told him that they were teaching the laws of physical reembodiment and we shouldn’t be afraid of death. Carter then said, “Are they talking about reincarnation?” I said yes, and he said, “I’m a born-again Christian. I don’t believe in any of that stuff.”

  That was basically the end of the investigative discussion and I have not broached the subject with him since, whenever we are together socially. Menem, on the other hand, was more interested in the truth than his religious convictions. The question of human religions is going to be a difficult one if and when the star beings show themselves with certainty.

  I found the world leaders I met to be mostly politically motivated, but usually certain they were doing the right things for their people. I did say to myself quite often: would a woman leader behave like this? I knew a little about Golda Meir from those who knew and respected her. Gandhi carried on the leadership of her father, Nehru. I did not know Margaret Thatcher, nor did I want to. (I would have been afraid I’d break her hair.)

  But I’ve wondered so often, in the loneliness of the dead of night, what would a woman leader really feel about sending young people off to war, and would she greet a star visitor with an attitude of welcome to help us out of the mess we’ve made of the planet?

  Leaders I Will Never Get Over (Personally)

  Throughout much of my life, my attraction to certain men revolved around what unrealized talent they might have. If I found an exceptionally talented and intelligent man who hadn’t yet been acknowledged, I would dig deep into his subconscious in order to find out why. Brilliant and talented (but unrealized) men became my specialty and my chosen endeavor. Even if I found a political leader attractive, I would intuit what he hadn’t yet found himself capable of achieving.

  When I met Olof Palme (the prime minister of Sweden), he was emotional catnip for me because he was such a liberal, brilliant, yet emotionally repressed Swede. I loved his courage on behalf of
all his liberal beliefs. I met him at a U.N. anti–Vietnam War meeting in New York. He spoke so succinctly about the need to abolish war. He even spoke passionately about Democratic Socialism.

  I remember the moment I fell for him. We were in my New York apartment after the U.N. meeting. He was looking at the pictures on my New York Wall of Life. He smiled and I brushed the hair out of his eyes. He looked at my lips shyly, and I took him in my arms. That was it. We became lovers for years. We met in the Orient several times, and wherever his overseas goodwill trips took him. I took clandestine trips to Sweden and we kept the relationship private even though the Swedish press began to speculate why I was making so many private sojourns to Stockholm. He confided in me his struggles with some of the other world leaders and wondered aloud how the planet’s inhabitants were ever going to solve its problems.

  I introduced him to some of my beliefs regarding reincarnation and the soul’s journey through time. He pooh-poohed all of it but did become interested in whether UFOs and star visitors were a reality we should admit to and deal with. His intellectual persuasion was definitely left-brained and scientific. Being a socialist meant more to him than anything. He was unreligious and bristled at the thought of an all-loving God-Creator. He thought it was all the work of humans and how we comported ourselves. He could be cruelly dismissive toward my growing spiritual beliefs and studies, but I admired his intellect greatly and thought seriously about a union of some kind with him. He was technically married but had had other affairs aside from me. One of his women was an extremely wealthy communist and I found the contradiction intriguing. In hindsight, I wonder if his attraction to fame and money was more true to his personality than his professed attraction to socialism.

  Through my relationship with Palme I learned that the leaders in the world who were Democratic Socialists formed a kind of fraternity with each other. They knew each other’s habits and preferences. Later, when I had a short fling with Pierre Trudeau, he knew about my relationship with Palme. All of the Democratic Socialists were heavily involved in the machinations of the U.N. They were “citizens of the world,” which I found attractive. It appealed to my global liberalism and fit in with my belief in travel as the best source of true education.

  Palme had been easygoing and flexible in our personal relationship; Trudeau was autocratic and dictatorial. Once when Pierre visited me in LA he wanted to see a movie studio. I drove us up to the gate on the Fox lot. Even though the guard recognized me and paid his respects to the prime minister of Canada, he said he couldn’t let us through because no one had given him permission. I’ll never forget Pierre looking longingly at the New York street set from Hello Dolly, the house from The Sound of Music visible in the background, as he was told he wasn’t allowed in. He may have been above it all in his political life, but when it came to the Dream Factory, he was as wide-eyed and eager as anyone else.

  Pierre was conversant with spiritual science, probably because he had had an education in the French Charismatic Catholic point of view. Miracles were part of his faith and his world view. Charismatic Catholics have no problem with metaphysics (that is, things beyond the physical). I noticed that when I’d do press conferences in Paris to promote a movie, the French press wanted to talk about my books. I enjoyed the French intellectual questions very much regardless of how insufferable they could sometimes be.

  I liked playing my live show in Paris too. The audiences understood the deeper meaning of movement and lyrics and the well-thought-out dramatic harmony of the music I had put together. I never saw Yves Montand when I played Paris. But he did send me flowers with a card saying “from one legend to another.”

  My longest-lasting relationship with a political leader was with Andrew Peacock (foreign minister of Australia and Australian ambassador to the United States). I met him while I was playing in Australia (set up by a mutual friend from Princeton). He was charming, funny, and a conservative. He used his voice like a snake oil salesman, which always made me laugh because, as I told him, I was also in the business of professional seduction through voice manipulation. He took my comment good-naturedly.

  Andrew and I traveled all over the world together, as the pictures on my walls attest. He was fun as a traveling companion, and his being a foreign minister opened many doors in high places. He didn’t know about Palme and threatened to have his Secret Service follow me if I was ever caught with anyone else. Once after leaving Palme in Stockholm, I went directly to Paris to meet Andrew. The paparazzi were all over me when I landed. Andrew thought it was because of him, but it was actually about both Palme and him. The paparazzi must have thought I was Mata Hari or something. Andrew and I eluded them by ducking into strange doorways, darting down unknown alleys, and once climbing up the side of a building to get away. Andrew’s image would have been blown had the pictures of our mad dash reached the newspapers, because he had cultivated the image of being blue-blood elegant through and through. He was single, so I told the press I was going to give him a foreign affair he’d never forget.

  We traveled in Canada, France, Cambodia, Thailand, Australia, England, the United States, and Mexico. Whenever I discussed my spiritual and metaphysical ideas with him, he listened, nodded, and more or less said, “It could be. Who knows?” On a UFO stakeout in Mexico near Mt. Popocatepetl, at one moment we thought we saw a craft and Andrew nearly “climbed the sky” to see if it was real.

  As foreign minister he controlled all the information coming out of Alice Springs (supposedly the underground UFO research facility in Australia). Because he was sworn to secrecy, he never told me outright that UFOs were extraterrestrial in origin and were present. But he said and did nothing to disabuse me of such a belief. When I told him about Roald Sagdaev having confirmed that UFOs and the presence of ETs were real, he just smiled. When I told him I had gone to see Jimmy Carter to discuss UFOs, he just smiled again. Andrew was a trained diplomat of the first order and was his own best intelligence gatherer. He was learning more about the subject of UFOs from me than I was learning from him.

  We have been friends for over thirty years, and we value each other very much. He is happily married now for the third time, and I remain friends with his children and his first wife, too.

  When I look back on my relationships with political men of power, I’m always astonished at how incidental they seem to me now. It was more about my need to touch power and influence than it was about the individuals. Is that how it really is with all of our accumulated relationships? At the time they are all-consuming, life-and-death experiences. But in the end it is actually all about us and what we needed or identified with. Because of my years of being politically active, I needed to understand what politicians actually went through. What kept them awake at night? What motivated them to save the world or to destroy it?

  Most interesting to me was the power that they abused in a sexual sense. Political power meant sexual power to them. They could have any woman they wanted. Everyone accepted the fact that if you occupied a position of leadership power, sexual promiscuity went along with it. It came with the territory. Their wives looked the other way, knowing the future would be different when they were all old and gray. I’ve known several political leaders who were ultrapromiscuous, yet later on when their wives died, they suffered from unspeakable sorrow and guilt. The thrill of the clandestine left them alone without companionship later in life. If they had known that, would they have done it again? Probably. Everyone does what they do in order to learn about themselves. Some are just slow learners.

  Does Anyone Get Over Sex and Power?

  Everyone knows that power is an aphrodisiac. I guess that was true for me too, except what I found sexy was the power to help people. To me, that was what leadership was all about. In fact, if I knew someone in power who wasn’t doing his utmost to make things better, it was a surefire turnoff. Obviously, Hollywood people find political power sexy, and political power people find Hollywood sexy.

  I never had any proof that the
Kennedy brothers had intimate relations with Marilyn Monroe, but it wouldn’t be beyond the realm of probability. Once at Arthur and Mathilde Krim’s house in New York, I joined an impressive gathering of movie stars and politicians. Marilyn was there. I saw her go into a private room with Jack. They stayed awhile, until he came out another door. Immediately, Bobby entered the room and stayed until the song that Jimmy Durante was singing was over. I have a picture of that night on my Wall of Life. Of course, the Kennedy brothers and Marilyn could have been talking world affairs and comparing notes, but most of us thought it was the other kind of affairs they were interested in.

  My own relationship with the Kennedys was what I’d call “sexually hilarious.” Before he was president, Jack often drove me in his convertible when he visited Hollywood. He must have been remembering every film he ever saw. We’d drive to Mulholland Drive, look out over the lights of the city and the San Fernando Valley, and talk. He wanted to know about people and their political persuasions. He wanted to know about how pictures were made. He never made a pass at me or anything. In fact, I wondered what was wrong with me.

  Being in Bobby’s company was another story. Once during the Kennedy campaign, Bobby and his cohorts invited a bunch of us Hollywood types to spend a weekend in Palm Springs. I thought, why not? We all had a nice dinner at a huge table. Then we danced to the music of the day. It was amusing for me to see the future attorney general, the man who would go after the Mafia, doing the Twist for all he was worth. Some time after midnight we retired to our hotel rooms. My room was part of a huge suite that the Kennedy campaign had rented. I said goodnight to all the stragglers from the dance floor, showered, and got into bed.

  When I was half asleep, my door opened and a man entered and climbed into bed with me. I didn’t know who it was. I sat up and rolled over onto the floor. I was one of those people who had to know a little something about the person I was having sex with. The man climbed back out of bed and left. I got back into bed. Fifteen minutes later, another man came into the room and climbed in bed with me. I had no idea who he was either. Again, I rolled out of bed onto the floor.