Authors: Shirley MacLaine
I’ve never done drugs. They never appealed to me. I smoked pot twice while on tour and practically ate the furniture in the hotel room. I never understood the intricacies of recreational drugs. Once at a party the hostess served coke in a silver bowl. I thought it was Sweet and Low and put a silver spoonful of it in my coffee—somebody later told me it was hundreds of dollars’ worth. That was the last time I was invited to her house.
My life in Hollywood was never one where I socialized much. I knew most everybody, but clubs and parties were not all that attractive to me. In between pictures I preferred to get on a Pan American Flight and fly around the world, disembarking when a country called me. When you are young enough to enjoy it, that’s the best kind of exercise there is.
I
hope I will never give up my sense of trust. I believe trusting is the reason I’ve been safe, despite having been caught up in revolutions and protests and human schemes of all sorts.
Trust in Hollywood was more difficult. Clifford Odets called Hollywood the “Big Knife.” I suppose that’s true, but I found the power of trust usually trumped that of the knife. Loyalty, even in Hollywood, is revered. I never changed agents just because there was a lull in my employment. All careers have lulls. I used the lulls to travel or have a love affair. I believe in trust and its rewards. When you genuinely trust someone, even in show business, their own self-esteem usually keeps them from betraying you. At least that’s been my experience. I like to be realistic, but I’m not cynical. There’s no future for me in Hollywood if I let myself become cynical.
Government is another story. There’s just too much that the government never tells us. I want to know the real truth behind Pearl Harbor,
9
/
11
, why we attacked Iraq, what really
happened to Amelia Earhart, why the existence of UFOs is being covered up . . . and a thousand other things. I don’t consider my questions about the government’s role in all these things as being cynical; I call it obsessive curiosity. I like Albert Einstein’s quote: “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”
You could say that I trust that there are many truths we don’t hear about.
I
can get violently angry when I see an act of injustice firsthand. I get perturbed at inefficiency and impatient at a lack of work ethic. But injustice truly infuriates me, particularly injustice and cruelty directed toward innocent human beings (like small children) and animals. In fact, at times it makes me violent. I’ve noticed that showing my violent fury can often put a stop to the injustice I’ve encountered.
I have stopped a parent screaming at and hitting a child by working myself up to the point where I almost hit the parent. It worked for a bit, but as soon as I walked away, the parent was at it again. Once when I was mugged on the street in New York, I screamed and babbled and flung my arms around like a crazy person. Crazy terrifies people! That mugger ran away as fast as he could.
I was so angry when Nixon invaded Cambodia that I threw a chair at the television set. When W Bush invaded Iraq
with his “shock and awe,” I screamed at the television until my voice was gone.
But I’ve never gotten really angry at anything to do with my career or Hollywood. Several producers I know say anger is what keeps them going, what fuels their creative impulses. I don’t feel that way. Thanks to my belief in karma, I know it will all come out in the wash.
I have done several independent films where I never got paid what I’d been promised. There’s no point in suing. That would just cost more. So I wait. I know karma will work its balance. The laws of cause and effect apply in any situation and endeavor. We are all actors on the stage of life and I am creating my own part—even if I don’t always get rewarded for it in the ways or in the time frame I expected!
W
hen you are performing live, your health is everything. Your entire life is prioritized according to what is expected of you on stage that night. There can be no running for a cab in the rain, in case you slip and fall; no wine at lunch or dinner; no screaming with laughter until you’re hoarse. No love affair that renders you anxious or unhappy, and no love affair that makes you want to hurry through the show and get back to making love. There is no other life when you are performing live. But the rewards are worth it. When a live audience is moved to silence in a theater, the Greeks used to say they were experiencing their Godhead. That’s why it’s divine. Silence is your new “God-speak,” when you understand and have proof that you’ve captured their attention completely. But you have to be healthy or you can’t do it night after night.
Performing live in front of an audience is the ultimate test of self-identity. The audience wants to know who you are
above all else. They will never respond to artifice or show business trickery. They want the real you.
That means you have to be willing to tell them. You have to become one of them. You have to become ultra-aware of everything around you. You see no one out there in the dark when you are performing, and yet you are one with them. You are one with the big black giant seated in front of you, and you are a Big Happy.
The miraculous magic of self-expression and the appreciation the audience feels overrides everything. You and they are one, a conglomeration of souls, simultaneously giving and receiving. Souls creating a new reality with a subliminal awareness that we are all one. You bend and flow and soar with the music. You allow it to carry you aloft. You begin to fill every space with body language; no movement is meaningless.
The lights amplify what you are doing and you know the audience can see everything. You are completely exposed. There are levels of subtlety in the music you never realized were there. You forget all the pain you ever felt. You forget technique, anxiety, and everything you ever learned. In fact, you forget who you are, because you have become one with the audience, one with the music, the lights, and the collective spirit of the audience. They send you energy. You send it back. You participate with each other. You are dancing and moving in the light with God.
Yes, it is better than sex. It is being One with all there is.
F
or me these are very difficult days. I find myself overcome with sadness a lot of the time. If I see innocent animals and children hurt, I feel tears sliding down my cheeks and my chest contracts into a tightness that makes me know I’m holding back an avalanche of despair.
The news on TV and in the papers is awful. People everywhere (particularly the young) are rude and insensitive. Computerized voices replace real people at the end of every phone call. People email instead of talking to each other, so no emotion is exchanged. Dogs and cats wander the streets because their owners have been evicted from their homes and couldn’t take them. Small shops and businesses are going out of business so the only place to shop is Walmart.
The weather is so erratic and dangerous, it is almost as though God is angry. People are fighting with each other all
over the world. It costs one million dollars per soldier per year for our “protective exploits” overseas, while people are living on bread and water here at home—and even the water isn’t clean. Our skies are polluted. Out-of-control traffic turns streets into parking lots. Crime is reported like the stock market or sports scores.
Great and proud producers of pictures in days gone by have been foreclosed upon and are now living with their children. Hollywood is slow to dead, except for disaster films, tent pole pictures, and those featuring young, sexy vampires.
People greet each other saying they are fine; no one really says what they are feeling, particularly news anchors who chirp on and on like lunatic birds, joking and teasing each other as though what they’ve just reported has no meaning. Gossip is the entertainment of the day, preferably of the negative sort, so that the rest of us will feel better about ourselves.
The poles are melting. Seas are rising, expectations are lowering, God’s in his heaven, and all is
not
right with the world.
What do we do to feel better? We can’t say it’s all not real. The world is too much with us for that.
I find that if I go out into Mother Nature, I calm down. She has a rhythm that has outlasted all else—even what we do to her. I try to take on her rhythm. It’s more calm and understanding. I try to melt away from the pot-boiling present by enveloping myself with the sounds and sweet movement of the trees and clouds and insects and animals around me. They know what is happening, and they are prepared to be
patient and wait. It’s as though all life around me understands the flow of time except for we humans.
Then, after a while, I begin to understand the Big Truths better. I can see that all life is cyclical. What is happening has happened before and will happen again. This realization makes me feel better because I know this too shall pass. We know we have to get through the night in order to have the day.
I realize we and nature are part of a much larger pattern. We understand the cycles of the seasons and the cycles of night and day. We need to understand more fully the cycles of the stars, which on a much grander scale show us the cyclical energy that makes us behave the way we do.
Suddenly the personality aspects of the zodiac don’t seem so silly. The procession of the equinoxes contains the probabilities of human and natural behavior. The ancients knew this and regulated their lives in large part according to the knowledge they had of the movement of the stars. Does that mean that stars have personalities, and the movement of the stars is the expression of those personalities?
If so, then the age of Pisces (with the two fish swimming in opposite directions) would indeed exemplify the age we’re living in. And Aquarius (the water bearer) would exemplify a new beginning and rebirth.
It’s time. I’ll carry some water.
I
couldn’t tell you what the real color of my hair is now. Somewhere between white and faded mouse gray. When I’m guerrilla traveling and away from a hair salon, it can really be embarrassing. But I don’t have a mirror with me anyway. So who is it really embarrassing for? To be without a mirror for a month or so is an interesting experience. The image of your physical self you carry in your head becomes unreal.
When I worked with Jerzy Kosinski, the author of
Being There,
he told me that he needed to have his picture taken every day and he needed to look at it to prove to himself that he was still alive. His wife was a photographer, which I suppose made it easier. His brilliance as a writer was matched only by his own inner anger. His childhood and background were horrendous. He was abused and abandoned, and for years he didn’t speak. This identity surfaced in the characters he wrote (Chauncey Gardiner for one). Sometimes when we
spoke of his past he would plunge a knife into the top of his desk and draw it across, making a deep gash in the surface. For so many of us, self-image and anger are intertwined. Who do we believe we really are? And who will remind us if we don’t remind ourselves?
Which leads me back to having my hair colored. I know that who I really am is inside of me. That’s why I don’t need a mirror or a photograph to see my true self. Still, as long as I can, I’ll try to make the outside match the spirit I feel on the inside—and for now that means keeping my hair the color I see when I close my eyes.
S
ex is so complicated that the only way to discuss it is
simply
.
I have had many love affairs. I have not had many sex affairs. I was not sophisticated enough for that. I had to have the emotional component. That’s when it gets complicated.
I have found that since sex and I have somewhat gotten over each other in my advancing years, it is such a relief. My relationships with my male friends are less fraught and more equal and honest. We tell each other the truth when the sexual component slows down. I never think about who’s gay and who’s straight anymore.
My close female friends (for whom sex is also slowing down) are my friends for life. We talk about what we did for love and what it felt like when that sexual feeling slunk away. We agree it isn’t anything that drives us to therapy. It is more a question of taking melatonin and estrogen and other chemicals we don’t produce much anymore. None of us were ever into anything like bondage or S&M or the like. If that
had been the case, we probably could have acted out the theatricality of it and continued on. Instead, sex usually got pretty funny, faking orgasms and all. I was the acting coach in the group. Questions came up like whether it made sense to still feel possessive of a partner when you weren’t having much sex anymore, or how to handle jealousy, and whether we should be liberal in what our men still wanted to partake of.
When I look back over my life, I wonder what I was doing with all my hormones and attraction and longings, when I always so strongly felt the need for freedom. Most of the men I was with wanted to get married. I was already married and stayed that way precisely so it wouldn’t really become an issue. My husband and I had a liberal arrangement regarding each other’s lovers. We were friends. We stayed married so we wouldn’t be tempted to marry again. I don’t understand the need for the institution and I could never live a life where I felt tied down to a promise just because my love hormones were raging at the time I promised. After almost thirty years of marriage, my husband and I divorced and he has since passed on. I am living alone with my darling dog Terry, with my creativity, my friends who come over, and the freedom I have always loved and continue to cherish. Sex is not a dead issue for me, but basically it is a
non-issue
—and, in point of fact, I think it always was.