Authors: Shirley MacLaine
In
1957
, Mike Todd gave a party at Madison Square Garden for
18,000
of his closest friends. He wanted me to go to New
York and ride an elephant while throwing hot dogs out to the crowd. The studio wouldn’t let me go (insurance reasons), so he and Elizabeth Taylor had to make do without me. I used to watch him operate on the telephone as he was putting projects together. He excelled in the longtime technique of telling one person he had another already lined up and vice versa. Everyone believed him, because he had pulled it off before. I think he was a reincarnation of P. T. Barnum.
My times with the two Jacks (Lemmon and Nicholson) were filled with fun, teasing, spontaneity, and really good acting, but we never socialized much off the set. They were the professional acting loves of my life. Lemmon was always intricately prepared. Nicholson never knew what he would do. I enjoyed both approaches. It was the cinematic art of opposites. Lemmon loved to be acknowledged and liked having his picture taken. Nicholson would twist his body and move in another direction if he suspected a camera was anywhere nearby.
I now have a third Jack in my life. I’ve just finished a picture with Jack Black called
Bernie.
It was a pleasure to go to work with him every day. In poker or in life, three Jacks is hard to beat.
Danny Kaye smiles down at me. When I was shooting a film with Vittorio De Sica in Paris, Danny came to visit me.
Once he got there, he decided he wanted to fly me to New York for dinner at a Chinese restaurant he knew very well. In fact, he often cooked meals there himself. That’s what he did that night. He piloted the plane across the Atlantic himself, cooked dinner for me, and flew me back to Paris to be ready for work the next day. Why was I so foolhardy where my professional life was concerned? I don’t know. I did such things often in the middle of a shoot. I guess getting every experience I could out of life was absolutely as important to me as having a successful career.
Danny would often fly me to dinner at a good steak house regardless of where I was shooting or where the restaurant was. He also completely remodeled my kitchen, much to the chagrin of the couple who worked for me. I still cook some of the meals he taught me and think sweet thoughts of him.
We had a fabulous relationship, full of love, starlit night skies, food, and humor. Just before he died he insisted he didn’t want a funeral, so it never happened.
My Walls of Life still sing and they sing of talent and longevity. I often think of what I’d do to protect the pictures if I had to make a quick getaway. Would Streisand (we’re born on the same day), Kidman, Siegfried & Roy, Glenn Ford, Debbie Reynolds, Sharon Stone, George C. Scott, Jane Fonda, Michael Caine, Robert Downey Jr., Paul Newman, Anthony Hopkins, Nick Cage, and Elizabeth Taylor come with me?
As I grow older, I find myself reevaluating experiences on my walls and relating to them in the spirit of synchronicity. I’m understanding that nothing is truly random. Somehow, in each of our lives is evidence of the scenario and destiny we have outlined for ourselves in order to discover who we really are, why we did what we did, and where our souls have actually been. These memories (and so many others, including those of past lives) are part of my consciousness now. Is all time occurring at once, as Einstein said? When we have a particularly vivid memory, aren’t people from our past with us in the present? Everything is part of the now, we can touch past and future simultaneously and get a glimpse of this important truth.
Perhaps it is by design that with age our short-term memory disappears and long-term memory is more present, because it is necessary to resolve and come to terms with our lives so we can understand why we created them in the first place. I drive down a freeway and suddenly I’m on the street before it became a freeway. Where I was going and what happened when I got there rushes back to me with urgent importance.
Remember . . . remember . . .
The people from my life are suddenly important to me in different ways and for different reasons than I realized when I was with them. Did I really choose to know them before I was born? Did I actually already know the souls of the people in these pictures and together we are devising a learning process to help one another understand ourselves and each other
more completely? Are strangers just old friends we don’t quite remember?
One intelligent friend told me years ago that I shouldn’t delve with too much curiosity into the “unanswerable” mysteries of life or it could lead to insanity. I really listened to what this friend was saying to me, but I just can’t feel that having a strong sense of curiosity is a bad thing. I have always felt safe
because
I was curious.
I feel that I am encapsulating the magical, mythical, mystery tour of my life now because I am preparing to let go of the past with a deeper understanding of what it meant and why I wrote the scenarios in the first place. I will soon be ready for a new consciousness. I am tired of the word “consciousness,” but I can’t find a better one to substitute for it yet. “Beingness” doesn’t really work either. I know there is a new beginning coming because we can’t go on the way we are. It is dispiriting and soul searing to the extreme. I have come to understand that spirit and soul are the only permanent truths that matter.
I
never cease to be amazed at how far some religious people will go in order to turn their destinies over to God rather than take charge of them themselves. If the Devil really does exist, he would beat his chest with pride at how significant we humans have made him. More movies and books have been made heralding his existence than anyone else . . . because the fear of him makes so much money. Fear seems to be the most communal human emotion, and the easiest to exploit. Fear of God, fear of the Devil, fear of terrorists, fear of death, fear of life, fear of race, fear, fear, fear. Learn how to propagandize fear and you can control a civilization and make a lot of money.
I believe I always traveled alone because I wanted to force myself to get over the fear that had been inculcated in me of daring too much. So my relationship with fear has never been paralyzing. I lived to travel to places where there was conflict because I wanted to learn how to problem solve. I can’t say I
learned how to solve much, but I have learned a great deal about how conflicts come about.
In the early sixties I went to Mississippi to understand what Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown meant when they said the United States of America was born with people who had a gun in one hand and a Bible in the other. I met Rap and listened to the complaints and the well-intentioned protests of the Black Panthers. I understood their anger and their propensity for violence. Then I met John Lewis. He was then, and remains to this day, a saintly human being. He accepted my need to understand, and I think the fact that I was a lone white woman in the middle of the Civil Rights movement in Mississippi made him want to understand me on another level. He arranged for me to live with a black family in Issaqueena County, Mississippi, so I could see for myself what it meant to live as a black person in the South of that time. I stayed with Unida Blackwell and her family for close to a week. I listened to them describe their lives. I cooked with them and prayed with them. Nearly everything they ate was drizzled with Karo Syrup. That’s how they grew up. Their bathroom was an outhouse. That’s how they grew up. They had to heat their water on the stove if they wanted a bath. That’s how they grew up. They were generous and sharing and funny. That’s how they grew up.
One night toward the end of my time there, I looked out a window and saw the Ku Klux Klan burning a cross in front of their small shack. The cross was the Klan’s instrument of
fear and destruction. Unida and I and her family stayed inside and sang gospel hymns, waiting for morning light when I could leave. That burning cross was a sign that my presence was no longer going to be tolerated, and I couldn’t bear for Unida’s family to be in greater danger because of me.
In fact, everywhere I have traveled in the world, the conflicts I’ve seen stemmed from organized religion in one way or another.
My travels in North Africa and the Middle East were most revealing. I spent a great deal of time in Tunisia and I even bought a piece of beachfront property there in Hammamet. Under Bourguiba, Tunisia was a Muslim democracy. As a result, its entrance into the modern industrialized world was gentler than that of some of its neighbors. The people I met and became friendly with often traveled to Europe. Some were Christian. I remember taking Tarak Ben Amar, then a young boy, to school in Rome. He has since become quite a powerful figure in the North African and European film industry, financing, developing, and overseeing many films and television series.
There was never talk of religion when I was together with my Arabic friends. We talked of new ideas, business deals, creative projects, and the like. God was a private matter and history was a favorite topic of conversation, not dogma. That held true in my travels to Morocco and throughout the Middle East. In Egypt I slept in the giant sarcophagus of the Great Pyramid and learned about the Egyptian empire. In
Turkey, I learned of the Catholic ecumenical meetings held in Constantinople in
AD
553
where the teachings of physical reembodiment (reincarnation) were struck from the New Testament on orders from Empress Theodora of Byzantium. She single-handedly erased our spiritual history. I had a past-life experience as a harem girl in the home of a pasha in Turkey and became physically nauseous with the memory of my confinement and lack of freedom. I learned how the major religions intersect and witnessed Coptic Christians living peacefully side by side with Muslims.
At Isfahan I had another past-life experience where I had entertained a large audience at the theater outside under the stars. I remembered how good the acoustics were and felt the warmth of the summer night. I can never pinpoint the actual dates of my past-life memories, only the environment . . . that is, except for the memories I recalled when I walked across Spain doing the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage. That was an experience that altered my life because of the solitude of the walk. I walked ten hours a day for one month, slept in
refugios
(shelters), and begged for food. It helped me put my place in the world into proper perspective. My grandest lesson from that journey has been that of
allow
and
surrender
.
Yes, I am an over-achiever with a sometimes bulldog-like work ethic, but when I walked across Spain by myself, begging for food and sleeping in shelters, I soon learned the art of surrender and allowance.
My pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago de Compostela
was one of the most influential undertakings I ever dared. I went alone, a woman in her sixth decade, walked alone for the most part (this was the most difficult), slept alone wherever I could find a
refugio
or shelter, and had my own thoughts for company. The Spanish paparazzi got word of what I was doing and I was ambushed a few times, which was quite unpleasant for me because I behaved like an insensitive bitch (I made one woman reporter cry) and threw a rock at a camera crew. The villagers began to understand I was not making the pilgrimage for publicity but only for spiritual reasons. After that, they began to point the paparazzi in the wrong direction.
I learned some essential lessons on my pilgrimage. All I really needed for physical comfort was a good pair of shoes, a hat to shield me from the sun, a little something to eat, and clean water. (Oh, one more thing. I hadn’t realized how potassium depleted I would get, so I experienced severe cramping in my arms, legs, and hands. It was awful. For anyone who does this pilgrimage, take potassium tablets with you.) When it was time to rest, I needed a good sleeping bag and an attitude of whatever will be will be.
Nothing was as important as zeroing in on my innate ability to be content with myself, the land, the pain, my intentions, and the power of allowing. I felt in touch with the rhythm of nature for the first time. I could almost hear the trees breathe and the ground groan. I understood that phrase “being one with the all.” The ground under me spoke of the ages, and I touched some past life incarnations that were funny fodder
for Jay Leno. I call it cosmic humor when people make good-natured fun of me. I’ve finally come to realize everything is God’s joke anyway. I’m just one of the characters in the comedy.
The other essential lesson I learned was that I walked too fast and didn’t spend enough time processing each hour. I was wedded to the idea of completing the pilgrimage on July
4
, American Independence Day. I started on June
4
and told myself I should be finished in exactly a month. That was a goal with no “let it be” intelligence to it. Sometimes goal orientation can destroy a deeper and more meaningful experience. Yes, my family and friends were worried if I was safe, and even sane, and I’d promised them it wouldn’t take more than a month, but I should have done it all for me, however long it took. Besides, I found that I loved the unpredictability of being a guerrilla traveler.
Maybe that’s what we do with our soul’s journey from lifetime to lifetime. Maybe we choose our destiny but we never know exactly what we’re getting into until we’re actually there. So my journey in this lifetime with all its success, failure, fame, searching for my true identity, and exploring new lands, is a mirror of my soul’s journey through time to understand not only who I am but who I was, and most of all, what is my relationship with the Creator. Where do I start and where does God stop, if there is such a place? Where does God begin and where do I continue? When I observe nature, animals, and even birds and bees seem to have no problem
knowing where they fit and what their purpose is. Their intentions always seem admirable and in balance. Not so with humans.