Authors: Shirley MacLaine
The price of freedom is sometimes loneliness. We all know that. But how many of us have found loneliness
with
someone? That’s the real sadness.
I, for one, revel in everything my lovers have taught me. But I’m glad they are out of my life and I’m left with real friends.
I’m very fortunate to have about seven real friends in my life. I know I can count on them for anything. And they can count on me. I think I know how to be a friend to another person because I’m a pretty good friend to myself. None of these seven friends lives or works in Hollywood. Hollywood is not the most conducive place to develop friendships. On the other hand, I’ve found it to be my most thorough teacher.
E
veryone, it seems, wants their fifteen minutes (at least!) of fame and seems to be ready to do anything to get it. At my age, I’m relieved that I never received all that much tabloid attention. I never wanted it. The loss of privacy was a price I wasn’t willing to pay. When I watch Jennifer Aniston or Britney Spears go through their personal hells in public for the gratification of the tabloids, it turns my stomach. I know young people who would do anything to have that kind of time in the sun. What are they thinking? I know young people who would give up anything to be “a star.” They don’t even recognize they need to have some kind of talent first. They don’t care. They don’t care if they are publicly humiliated because of their lack of talent. I can’t understand what “fame” means to them—or why it means so much.
Fame is a drug, a drug of annihilation. Why do so many
people want to be famous when they see how it can destroy your life?
Tabloid journalism is the opiate of the people these days. Everyone seems to want to partake of the salacious dramas splashed across their pages, personal tragedies and mistakes and conflicts that were never meant to be made public. The lives of the famous make money for everybody. The price of fame is the resulting isolation of the soul and the abdication of reality. Fame is not real. It is a fifteen-minute illusion. Famous people often cannot see the reality because they are blinded by the glare of the attention.
People in show business sometimes call everyone else a civilian, and we desperately want to know what the civilians want. What will they pay for? What can we do to make them pay even more attention to us? How can we wrestle the love from them that we never felt we had in our own lives? We know that the relation between us and these civilians is tenuous and at the same time symbiotic. We understand that we wouldn’t be famous if it weren’t for them. We want to know them (the civilians) and want to be adored by them, but we want to hang on to our throne of fame one more day, or decade, or lifetime, because we never again want to be like them—
not
famous.
We may go home and visit what we used to be, but we are profoundly grateful we are not one of them anymore. We don’t want to talk about ourselves when we go back home because we know they will not understand. That’s why we call
them civilians. We notice that they love to dissect the details of our fame and fortune; that’s what we represent for them, and we feel used. We know that they know where we came from. And we probably haven’t figured out how our fame happened; we feel guilty and undeserving.
I sometimes watch the reality television show
Toddlers and Tiaras
and cringe at the sight of mothers forcing their daughters to live out their own thwarted desires to be the girl in the spotlight. The spotlight can blind a person. It can sentence you to a life of emotional isolation in its glare. It can make you drop your hat!
So much of the life a famous person lives is pretense. We think we need to look or seem a certain way. Perhaps the biggest negative of fame is what often happens to the children of the famous. They grow up as elitists and in general feel they are entitled to special treatment even though they themselves have done nothing to earn it.
Fame is a false god. Talent and hard work are not.
Again, there are only two businesses on the planet—show business and everyone else’s business. Hollywood is show business perfected and made absolute. It feeds the designers, the food merchants, the hair coiffeurs, the car services, the musicians, the carpenters, the TV channels, the gossipers, the legitimate papers, the airlines, the hotels, the booze industry, the manicure salons, the makeup artists, the tuxedo mannequins, the exercise gyms, the diet gurus, the security agencies,
the real estate market . . . and last but not least, it serves the hunger that civilians have for observing, criticizing, and sometimes even appreciating those who are the merchants of dreams, the purveyors of scandal, and the reflectors of many truths about our human condition.
Even world leaders are seduced by the Dream Factory, because they know (even if only subconsciously) that they are in show business, too. They would rather be famous than anything. They want to learn how to command attention and be adored. What gives some of them such lasting power? they wonder. How does somebody make a comeback stick? The guys who made the camera a means of communication realized pretty quickly that they had the key to all power . . . something like the internet today, but infinitely more able to be controlled and manipulated.
Sitting on the inside of fame looking out, I want to share with you just how insecure our position of power actually feels to us. Every famous person, if he or she is being remotely honest, feels today could be his or her last in the spotlight. We know that our “glamour” is tenuous and completely dependent upon the thoughts and opinions of all those civilians. Yes, we understand that we wouldn’t be doing what we do without them. They are our lifeblood and our future.
We desperately need to understand what the civilians want while we are profoundly grateful we are not one of them anymore. Altogether the underpinnings of our Dream Factory
are to be disguised at any cost because our little world of privilege is built on sand. It can blow away and disappear at any time.
When we act characters, we try to
be
a civilian, but at the end of the day we must come back to who we are—or who we are not. So, we need to do as much research on ourselves as we do on our characters. Therein lies the rub. Are we willing to soul search ourselves so that when emotional or material hard times come we are equipped with the kind of self-knowledge that will see us through? Self-searching while you’re on top is a non sequitur, a contradiction, an unnecessary endeavor, and sometimes even a killjoy. We are told to be happy for what we have—enjoy it because it may not last long. We are not equipped to comprehend how we became successful in the first place, particularly if it happens quickly. We have a kind of “why me?” guilt, like the survivor of a natural disaster. Those who have spent years struggling to no avail are usually quite bitter when success and fame finally come to them, because they find they are just as miserable as they were before.
So many people I’ve observed don’t allow themselves to accept their own success and good fortune. They look the gift horse in the mouth, and because of the fear that success will go away they feel constant neurosis and glamorous misery are the requisite conditions for being “good at their craft.”
I may not be much of an artist; I’m probably good at my craft. But I am happy with what has happened in my life and,
frankly, always have been. Even during the period preceding one of my comebacks, I was enjoying the world, even though no one cared much whether I was in or out or up or down. I never socialized much with the Hollywood crowd. I was usually off on a trip or following the call of a new love affair. Fame and success took a backseat to love and travel.
Now I do both inside myself.
When you understand why you are struggling to be noticed, the fame game is winnable. Otherwise, please, you should fear to go where angels do not tread. Stay un-famous and be less of a prisoner of other people’s opinions and whims. Stay un-famous and be less neurotic. Stay un-famous and learn to know yourself in quietude. That state of being lasts longer than fame anyway, and at much less cost.
T
o me there is nothing better than a persistent truth-seeking journalist. I agree with my Founding Fathers: great reporters and journalists are more important than government.
Over the years, I have truly enjoyed being questioned skeptically by my favorite, Mike Wallace. He was fair and tough. He was neither left- nor right-leaning. And he was fun, particularly if you understood that an ambush was most certainly in progress. I would like to have ambushed him right into my boudoir, but he knew better.
I liked Jack Newfield. He was hell-bent on keeping them honest. I’m sorry he’s gone.
Pete Hamill was another favorite of mine, and one I had the pleasure of living with for a few years. He has now become a great writer about his favorite mistress of all: New York City.
To me, one of the best talk show interviewers was David Frost. He had the knack of going to your heart. He wasn’t
trying to entertain as some of the others do. He was genuinely interested in his subjects. You can see it all re-created in
Frost/Nixon
.
Barbara Walters, whom I like very much, can make anybody cry. She did it to me. She says she doesn’t know why she has that talent. I think it’s because she’s a fair female, the good friend we’ve always wanted to keep us balanced. She tells me she has stopped going to parties and gatherings. I know how she feels. Celebrities give the impression that they are everywhere all the time. A few, like me and Barbara, have wised up.
I never was one to gallivant around in order to be seen. I was much more interested in
looking
.
These days, to get me to go to almost any event would take mountain moving. Besides, it’s mostly about “smalking” anyway. I am appalled at the number of people who are famous for doing absolutely nothing but being seen at parties.
How can someone become famous for nothing? The time and money required for getting “dolled up” and being in fashion is outrageous. Have that many people been deprived of love and acknowledgment in their childhoods?
I was never interested in fashion. I was interested in comfort. The two are antithetical. I was on the worst-dressed list for twenty-five years and didn’t give a damn. Now I’m a senior who wears Chanel because I played Coco in a film and they give me the clothes for free. But even in Chanel, I skip the red carpet.
My relationship with celebrity isn’t like that of most other well-known people. I am more often than not embarrassed by the attention of strangers, and adoration truly upsets me. When I conducted my spiritual seminars in the
80
s, I realized that people were giving me too much credit for their progress in self-awareness. I just lit the flame . . . they saw to it that the flame burned with their own personal truth. Finally, I quit giving seminars, realizing that each person was his or her own best teacher.
My personal relationships with journalists have been fulfilling because they don’t believe everything they’re told and they continually ask questions for clarification. If they are good journalists, they usually have a cynical sense of humor. That appealed to me greatly because I love to laugh at the absurdity of most everything. I particularly liked calling them on their own sense of truth and objectivity as they reported what they saw. I loved being with a crowd of journalists because they good-naturedly questioned me on my metaphysical and spiritual beliefs. None of them concluded I was crazy. They just warned me that other people would say I was. I thanked them and moved on.
I
exercise now because it makes me feel more healthy. That is a good mind-set to adhere to. I hike in the hills with my dog Terry because we both love it. I just have to be careful in rain or snow so that I don’t slip and take a fall.
Exercise classes are too driven by the mirror. I’m over that. I’d rather be in nature. It’s more fun and I can let my mind roam with each step without an instructor screaming encouragements at me.
I observe a low-carbohydrate diet because it makes me feel better. But not too low. If I don’t have enough carbs, I don’t sleep well. Everyone is different. I have to have at least two slices of bread a day, usually at breakfast. I also have to have a little dark chocolate every day. Dark chocolate is good for the pancreas and milk chocolate is good for something else I can’t remember, but I don’t like it much anyway.
I’ve developed an extended tummy, which means I like trousers with a forgiving waistline. I went to a plastic surgeon and asked him if liposuction would help. He said no, at my
age he couldn’t get to the fat underneath. And he said I’d have to go on a starvation diet to lose the stomach accumulation. I decided to relax and enjoy the reality that my dancer’s figure is gone. The important thing now is to be happy and healthy.
I gave up smoking years ago when I had serious coughing attacks. I stopped cold turkey and have not missed it. I never did drink much, but I remember I was once having dinner with my friend, the composer Cy Coleman, at Trader Vic’s in New York. I had too many mai tais and passed out right at the table, my head in my plate. Cy and company went right on talking until I woke up. No one said anything about it. I was glad I could still breathe despite my nose being buried in my dinner.