Dance While You Can Read online

  You Can Go Home Again

  “I had written so much about inner peace, balance, and harmony in cosmic terms, when all of it really came down to fallout from Mom and Dad on this earth. What a joke. You think you have a handle on God, the Universe, and the Great White Light until you go home for Thanksgiving. In an hour, you realize how far you’ve got to go and who is the real turkey.”

  Bantam Books by Shirley MacLaine

  Ask your bookseller for the books you have missed

  DANCING IN THE LIGHT

  “DON’T FALL OFF THE MOUNTAIN”

  GOING WITHIN

  IT’S ALL IN THE PLAYING

  OUT ON A LIMB

  YOU CAN GET THERE FROM HERE

  DANCE WHILE YOU CAN

  MY LUCKY STARS

  For Dr. Leroy Perry

  If we can genuinely honor our mother and father we are not only at peace with ourselves but we can then give birth to our future.

  Contents

  PART ONE: MOTHER MOVIE

  1—HOLLYWOOD FREEWAY

  2—MAKEUP TRAILER

  3—INTERMISSION: TIME OUT

  4—MOTOR HOME

  5—SACHI

  6—POSTCARDS

  PART TWO: FATHER STAGE

  7—BACK TO THE STAGE

  8—THE TOUR

  9—REPRISE

  10—LA., L.A., LA.!

  PART ONE

  MOTHER MOVIE

  CHAPTER 1

  Hollywood Freeway

  I sat in my car on the Ventura Freeway going to work at five o’clock in the morning in order to beat the traffic. Everyone else in town seemed to be doing the same thing. The usual speed limit observed was sixty-five or seventy miles an hour. We were doing two.

  I looked out of my window. A creeping civilization on wheels surrounded me. To the left a man ate yogurt out of a container, anxiously stirring some kind of fruit from the bottom. I thought of the dancer’s guilt I used to feel when I went over my calorie quota by doing the same thing. I would have been better off with plain yogurt. Denial was necessary to success somehow.

  To the right of me a woman had her window down and a smile on her face. Puccini came from the front seat in glorious stereo. She had the right idea. If this was going to take eons, she’d spend it listening to Madame Butterfly.

  I moved around in my seat trying to give myself a back adjustment. This was going to take a certain kind of centeredness.

  For thirty-five years I had negotiated these freeways in early morning soggy mist on my way to the movie studios. I had adjusted to them as a gradual lesson in patience. Or had I settled? Was I like the fish that had learned to survive on the pollution of Lake Erie? I was appalled.

  I looked up and over the cars ahead of me. I had to imagine what the skyline of Burbank looked like, because I couldn’t see through the smog. I couldn’t see the mountains either. I felt suspended in time in a polluted morning soup. California had been so glorious when I first came in 1954. This freeway hadn’t even been constructed. It was, instead, a main thoroughfare that allowed Khrushchev, after his visit to our Can-Can set, to see the future of the San Fernando Valley and how it worked. I remembered he had said something about our not needing to be afraid of him and the Soviets: “You will bury yourselves from within.” Is this what he meant?

  I chuckled to myself and thought of the scene around the table in The Magnificent Ambersons when Orson Welles, as a fictitious Henry Ford, described a litany of potential disasters that might result from his new idea. Perhaps the car was not the best invention for man. At that moment, I imagined what it would be like if the “Big One” hit right now. In the event of an earthquake, I’d be inundated by yogurt, Puccini, carbon monoxide, and air that I could feel more than I could breathe.

  My stomach turned over with a very slight little quake of its own. It must have been the fruit I ate, I thought to myself. Or was it nerves?

  I was inching my way along to Warner Brothers, a studio where I had never before worked, to be part of a film that had high-powered talent, high-priced actors, a budget one could easily come in under, and a schedule that would be as luxurious as the catering table.

  Beginning a new film was always a new adventure for me, but as production time passed, it usually became a kind of boring, tedious exercise, sprinkled with the sporadic thrills of the scenes that went particularly well. The long waits between setups got on everyone’s nerves; it was always hurry up and wait, particularly in the morning. I never liked getting up early in the morning: I was a night person, seeming to come alive after the sun went down. “Moon energy,” someone told me once. “Moon energy is female.” Women sparkle at night.

  I took a deep breath, a kind of a deep memory sigh. I couldn’t smell anything, not even the fumes. I had lost my sense of smell the previous January with some strange Asian brand of the California flu. “I probably created this to endure the freeway,” I thought. I remembered just a few weeks ago being in an elevator where five guys with pinkie rings were smoking fat stogies, and it hadn’t bothered me one iota. Previously I could smell a person with a cigar a mile away, particularly one with a pinkie ring. Having no sense of smell has its advantages. But I missed being able to smell the sea air and the pungency of seaweed when I walked out on the balcony at Malibu. The ocean sustained me in California. I could feel my blood run smoothly from the twenty-five postures of yoga I had done on the balcony as the sun rose. It was worth the price I paid in the loss of an extra hour of sleep.

  I turned on the radio, AM980 on my dial, all the news all the time. “You give us twenty minutes, we’ll give you the world,” it continually reminded me. Another hostage had been taken, more corruption in government, a drug bust to the tune of twenty million dollars, a new report that said cholesterol was not bad for me. And Gorbachev had made yet another extraordinary advance in the cause of democracy behind the Iron Curtain. Would the Soviet Union ultimately reap the same fruits of democracy that seemed to be our inheritance on this particular day of freedom in the land of prosperity and openness?

  I sighed again with a kind of hope and pleasure that I had somehow survived it all, and had yet another good job, and was still here, as the song I would sing later on in the film triumphantly insisted.

  Yet movies had not been really interesting to me for some time now. I didn’t like the small talk in between setups: “Where did you eat last night?” “I’ve seen a new store with a great bargain in shoes.” “I found ribs with a sauce that doesn’t have any sugar in it.” Blah, Blah, Blah. I seemed to be the only one interested in meaningful talk these days, which was guaranteed to cause people to either vague out or be intimidated. The “vague glaze” was always followed by the instant need for a coffee or a smoke. I played a game with myself deciding who would vague out and who would be interested by talk about the way the world was going.

  In any case, we could never become involved in a deep discussion, because at any moment we might be called to work. The hurry-up-and-wait syndrome could play havoc with “bonding” with anyone on a movie set. To arrive early or on time and not be used for hours didn’t seem fair to me. It seemed to be a waste of time, and it was on that level that I found being on a film emotionally draining.

  I reached into my tote bag and pulled out the pages of the scene we would shoot on this first day. I had a nearly three-page monologue. Maybe that was why my stomach was upset. Up until last year, I had not spent much time learning lines. Somehow I could always manage when I got to work. But lately either the gray matter was going, the attention to specifics reduced, or I was suffering from what I jokingly called “Actor’s Alzheimer’s.” I also knew that the director was a stickler for having every word correct. I picked up the pages, finding it not at all difficult
to read them as I was driving. I didn’t know which was slower, my memory or the traffic.

  I had been gifted with what we call in the business “a part and a half.” It was fabulous. In fact, I guess you could say it was reminiscent of some of my own life. I was playing a movie star who was still hanging in there, still working, with a daughter who was also talented.

  The day before, we had rehearsed in the home of the movie star on whom my character was based. I was completely unprepared for what I faced when I walked into the living room of her “Beverly Hills House.” There on the walls, peppered with museumlike memories, were pictures of the real me taken from magazine covers, portrait sittings, movie stills, premieres, awards ceremonies, live performances, from my childhood and adolescence—even a shot of me from the chorus of the subway circuit of Oklahoma! when I was sixteen years old that I had forgotten existed. I had suddenly been translated into the character I was playing, while my mind was flooded with memories of my own real career in the theater and films.

  My eyes had filled up with the overwhelming impact of this pictorial reminder of my own show business past, and although I have no problem looking at events in many past lives, here I was overcome with reminiscences of this life. I had gotten to the rehearsal early and wandered through the rooms of Doris Mann’s home, allowing myself to wallow in the emotional feelings of certain red-letter events that beckoned to me from the past. I was in some kind of time warp as the images triggered fast-frame memories of my experiences.

  I looked at a cover of myself and Clint Eastwood and remembered the day on location in Mexico under a tree, 116 degrees in the shade, when he had become impatient with his horse and belted the animal in the nose. At first I was shocked, but then I remembered thinking, What can you expect from a Republican? I had mellowed since then, not only about Clint, but about Republicans.

  I saw a shot of me and Dean Martin and remembered the day of the comedic fight in All in a Night’s Work, which tore the silver ranch mink coat I wore. I asked wardrobe to give it to me at the end of the shoot. The producer refused. No matter. If I wore a mink coat these days, I’d be stoned.

  There was a picture of me at eighteen years wearing false eyelashes, thick, not only with mascara, but with old-fashioned stage beading. They could have turned me upside down and swept the floor with those lashes. My lips were outlined like Joan Crawford’s and glistened with lip gloss that looked as though it might drip off any minute. That had been my eighteen-year-old interpretation of “sexy.” I even remembered the turquoise earrings I wore in that portrait sitting. I wondered where they were now. I had always had such an emotional attachment to personal adornments. It wasn’t the value of the possessions that had meaning to me; it was the reason for their existence that kept me attached. All the nostalgic things we cling to, or even yearn for, really because they are memory triggers.

  In fact, I was still haunted by a pair of green glass earrings that I had seen once when I was sixteen years old in a shop in the Village in New York. They were something like $19.95, far too much for me to afford, so I had bypassed them. I had been looking for those earrings ever since in whatever antique or costume jewelry shop I passed. To this day I wondered why they meant so much to me; but more than that, I wondered why, if they had meant that much to me, I hadn’t splurged and bought them anyway.

  A picture on the wall reminded me of the day I had my ears pierced, going straight to ballet school, and having Madame Perioslavic of the Ballet Theatre School grab me by the ear and toss me across the room because I had been inept in a step I had done. I always wondered if she knew that I had just had my ears pierced. Or had it been some personal sign to me that working with discipline superseded vanity.

  As I wandered through the rooms with my life staring back at me, I realized that I was remembering predominantly two things: one, whatever man I happened to be involved with at the time; and two, how much I weighed. I remembered—to the pound—how much I weighed in each of the pictures. Fascinating, once a dancer always a dancer.

  Being a dancer meant body priority. Being a dancer meant discipline. Being a dancer meant the show must go on. Being a dancer meant you nearly always thought about food. But mostly, being a dancer meant the awareness of physical health and the alignment of your mental attitude. I could never really do anything if I was not moderately happy with it. If I was really unhappy with something, I was prone to leave it, regardless of the consequences.

  As I puttered through the rooms of Doris Mann’s house, I knew that I really understood this character, was happy with her, and had indeed been happy, or reasonably so, with my own life. What was it then that was gnawing away at me? Why the question, What was the point anymore?

  And now, sitting in my car on the Ventura Freeway, I had that same sense of angst. I was happy to be going to work. I was grateful to have the job. I was proud of my talent. I was comfortable and confident of my experience and contribution, but there was that certain something that picked and pricked away at my soul saying, basically, that there was more. Much more. So what was missing? And how did I, with all I had in my life, and all that I had been able to accomplish, have the right to such a vain and arrogant anxiety?

  Probably it hadn’t that much to do with me but more to do with the world and where I fit in and, indeed, where we all fit in. Things seemed to be deteriorating rapidly—just look at the adjustment necessary simply to get to work in the morning.

  I found that I wasn’t enjoying socializing so much anymore. There was an inherent desperation in the interplay and values of people so much centered around money, as though money could shore up confidence in an otherwise bleak future.

  Since I was away traveling so much, I wasn’t often invited to small “pace-setting” dinner parties anymore. People didn’t bother because they usually thought that I was at some wine tasting festival in Romania or involved with a coup d’état in Tibet. But, even on the off chance that I was invited, I usually found myself in the corner talking deeply with one person all night about something that really mattered to me, or I might leave early, preferring to sit and think or watch the waves crash at the edge of the Pacific.

  Was old age setting in? Was I becoming concrete in my habits? Or did I want everything all my way? In fact, I thought as I drove along, would it even be possible for me at this stage in my life to ever have a committed and “unified” relationship again? It had been some time since I experienced that, and I wasn’t at all unhappy in my freedom. I never got lonely, although I spent a lot of time alone. I seemed to need the aloneness. But was I being selfish, I wondered, in not giving a relationship a chance? Or, more to the point, was I too intimidating to men? I looked at some of the problems and some of the pleasures that friends of mine were experiencing in their relationships, and, for myself, anyway, decided none of it was worth the hassle.

  He travels fastest who travels alone, I remembered thinking when I was a teenager. Was I really interested in traveling fast? Where was it I really wanted to go? And what was I really doing on the path to that destination? The moment, I thought. Live in the moment. I knew that’s where real and deep happiness lay. Perhaps I was in that transitional no-man’s-land of realizing something intellectually but not having integrated it emotionally.

  Was I indeed becoming like this traffic? Slow and congested? If so, I should simply accept it, enjoy it, and recognize that there was much happiness to be had in the enforced slowdown of the outrageous speed with which I had conducted my life.

  I remembered how often my mother had commented on the fast pace she said I had set for myself. “I don’t know how you do it, Shirl,” she’d say. “You should slow down sometimes. You look tired.”

  The “tired” line always irritated me. I thought she accused me of looking tired so that she could take care of me again. It would give her a resurrected role to play if I were tired and needed her. I understood the need, but I longed for her to go out into the world and do something else, something really for herself. There
she was, sitting in her wicker chair, wide-eyed at my latest escapade, questioning me with genuine interest, yet somehow simultaneously editorializing that I was just doing too much.

  And now in her old age (eighty-seven) I’d return home from an exciting round-the-world tour filled with stories and happenings to find her waiting for me as though she had put her own life on hold until I returned to instill energy into her again. She had been the one convinced that she was too tired to live.

  Through my mother, I realized the profound importance of living life for myself. She never did. She lived her life for me, for my brother, Warren, and for her husband. She was the emotional support system for the family. She was the thread of continuity. She was who we came home to. She was the reason we ventured out again. And as I was reflecting so much lately on my own life and adventures, I began to realize, with specific deepness, how much I had been motivated by living out the dreams my mother never fulfilled for herself.

  She had been a “dramatics” teacher and actress, reciting lines of poetry with rounded musical tones at my bedside when I couldn’t sleep. She’d mix aspirins and jelly into a teaspoon in the kitchen; and with a book of poetry under her arm, she’d administer the “jelly meddy” and then recite to me until I fell asleep. She was wonderful at it. I think she could have had a career in the dramatic arts.

  I wondered now if she ever beat her pillows in frustration that she never really took her own creativity out of the house. I remembered a few little theater productions she had been a part of, but her participation was usually compromised by my dad complaining that he never got a hot meal anymore, and there was dust accumulating on the mantelpiece. Dutifully Mother returned to hearth and home to live out her creative dreams through her children.

  Had this been her destiny? Had the seeds for my success been sown and nurtured in the small middle-class rooms of a home that housed potential creative giants, married to one another in an unspoken bond of frustration, with a hidden agenda to never live out their own dreams?