Shirley MacLaine has been holding out on us. In best-sellers like Out on a Limb and Dancing in the Light, the New Age Scheherazade has spun improbable tales of her past lives. Turns out her current life can hold its own against anything she may have seen in ancient Atlantis. MacLaine's unflattering portrait of Winger (whose publicist says she is unavailable for comment) is just one of many robust, ribald stories she shares in her juicy new book, My Lucky Stars: A Hollywood Memoir (Bantam).
Ever upbeat, if cutting, MacLaine says she regards the Winger episode—and most of her Hollywood encounters, in fact—as valuable learning experiences. "In a way, these people are teachers," she says. "It helped me understand how to work with people who need to use their neuroses in their work."
To her friends, MacLaine herself is a kind of teacher. "Sitting at a table with Shirley, you feel you should have three chairs," says filmmaker Claudia Weill, who made a documentary in China with the actress in 1973: "one for you, one for her and one for her opinions. She has this amazing lust of spirit. Her life is one great search for meaning." MacLaine dug into that search in the memoir she began in 1993 at her 6,000-acre Santa Fe ranch. To coax back personalities from her past, MacLaine would daub herself with her favorite perfume of the '50s, Calèche, then sit down to write. "These are the people I need to resolve my feelings for," she says. "It was almost like they were saying, 'Write about me.' So I did."
It appears no such telepathic message came from brother Warren Beatty, three years her junior, who barely has a walk-on in her memoir. "He doesn't like being written about. I respect his privacy," says MacLaine, 60, who has no such reservations about Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Robert Mitchum, Danny Kaye and Yves Montand, among others, who receive warm but uncensored treatment. "These were the people destiny provided as my guides. I feel profoundly lucky to have known them."
First among MacLaine's guides were her late parents—drama teacher Kathlyn MacLean Beaty and her husband, Ira, a musician, teacher and real estate agent—who both had frustrated theatrical ambitions. MacLaine describes her father as a bawdy raconteur. Of her undemonstrative mother, she writes, "I used to have to scream...and bite the back of my hand until it bled before I could get a rise out of [her]." Growing up in Arlington, Va., Shirley studied ballet but grew too tall and switched from pointe to pop. Within months of graduating from high school in 1952, she headed for New York City, where she soon found a spot dancing in the chorus of Broadway's Me and Juliet.
In 1954, Alfred Hitchcock discovered the 20-year-old MacLaine standing in for lead dancer Carol Haney in The Pajama Game and cast her in her first film, The Trouble with Harry. Within months, she was on the screen with Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin in the movie Artists and Models. ("I saw Jerry so unabashedly in need of attention that he'd do anything to get it," she writes. "Dean was another matter. He was smooth, kind, subtly witty, good-looking and seemed to be infinitely more complicated than Jerry.") MacLaine joined Martin again in 1958 on the set of Some Came Running, which also starred Sinatra. Soon she was running with his Hollywood Rat Pack as an unofficial mascot. "They were my initiation into spontaneous behavior," she says. "They did whatever they felt like doing."
In Sinatra's case, that could mean shoving his fist through a hotel room wall to get a clear view of Martin's suite or waking a hotel manager to demand room service at 3 a.m., then punching the man in the nose when he arrived with the food and complained. "They were like perpetual kids who just wanted to have fun," says MacLaine, who recounts how the two pranksters would sprinkle cracker crumbs in each other's bed or dump spaghetti on each other's neatly pressed tuxedo "and had tantrums when they didn't get their way."
In 1992, MacLaine joined her old blue-eyed friend, now 79, on a nostalgic crosscountry reunion tour. "He never talks about age," she says. "Sometimes he gets embarrassed by his loss of memory, especially with lyrics." In other ways, though, he seemed the joker of old. On a charter flight between tour stops, MacLaine recalls, "when everyone was asleep, he went back to the galley to get Cracker Jacks and bubblegum, and there was Frank Sinatra down on his knees, stuffing them into everyone's shoes."
There was, of course, a darker side to the man. "Frank was always nice to me, but he muscled others," writes MacLaine, who says he once told her, " 'Just let me know if anybody bothers you, and I'll take care of it.' " Eventually she decided that "if you helped Frank more than he helped you, your relationship was doomed. He was a happy man when he was able to come to your rescue," MacLaine also includes Sinatra's pal mob boss Sam Giancana in her memoirs. One night in 1969 in Mexico City, she recalls, Giancana brutally twisted her arm behind her back after she rejected a plate of his homemade pasta. (Fortunately, she writes, Sammy Davis Jr. persuaded the mobster to back off.) Sinatra has responded to revelations in the book with a dismissive "It's amazing what a broad will do for a buck."
Though MacLaine admits to once having had a crush on Martin, she insists she was nothing more than "one of the boys" to the Rat Pack. In 1954 she married film producer Steve Parker, now 72, who later moved to Tokyo while his wife remained in Hollywood. Their only daughter, Stephanie Sachiko, now 39 and married to an investment banker in Greenwich, Conn., spent some of her childhood school terms with her father—in part, says her mother, because of the demands of MacLaine's career, but also because of kidnap threats.
For most of their 29 years together, the Parkers had an open marriage. MacLaine recounts her affairs with Yves Montand in 1961 ("The relationship was mysterious and evasive and teasing, and I lapped up every second of it"), with Danny Kaye in 1966 ("When we decided to part, we wept") and with Robert Mitchum, who, she observed, "never took the initiative" in their lovemaking. "He enjoyed it certainly, he was sweet and tender, but I never really knew what he wanted. Anything was okay."
Although MacLaine's relationship with her husband had become increasingly remote—they were virtually separated by the mid-'70s—she was stunned to hear from a channeler in the early '80s that Parker had bilked her of millions, systematically transferring her money to his girlfriend's account in Tokyo. MacLaine hired a private investigator, who confirmed the charges. "Steve was one of my greatest teachers," says MacLaine. "I learned that we're all responsible for what happens in our lives. I never understood that until he gave me that gift." In 1983 she gave him a gift—a divorce.
Today, MacLaine says, she has many friends but no significant romantic interest. "I move around too much," she explains. "I have a very full life, and if I never worked again, I'd still have plenty to do." Having just returned from a 2½-month tour of Europe with her one-woman song-and-dance show, MacLaine is currently shooting an NBC movie, Westside Waltz, with Liza Minnelli. She shows no sign of slowing as an author either. Though she has not chosen her next subject, she promises it won't be fiction. "I'm not good at that. I tried it once, and my editor said, 'What's happened to you?' " MacLaine says, with a laugh. "Besides, my life is fiction."
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