Below concludes the lecture script...
With Terms of Endearment, this would be the role that after multiple nominations and losses would of course win MacLaine her deserved and belated Best Actress Oscar. Her speech began stating “I’m gonna cry because this show has been as long as my career. I have wondered for 26 years what this would feel like. Thank you so much for terminating the suspense. Oh my, I am nervous”. MacLaine then went on to address her co-stars. “I have wanted to work with the comic chemistry of Jack Nicholson since his chicken salad sandwich scene in Five Easy Pieces. And to have him in bed was such middle aged joy. I wanted to work with the turbulent brilliance of Debra Winger. She literally inhabited the character so thoroughly that I thought for four months I had two daughters”. In the end MacLaine surmised by discussing potential in the industry and in herself. “God bless that potential that we all have for making anything possible if we think we deserve it. I deserve this. Thank you”. What did it mean to MacLaine to finally win her Oscar; “It was wonderful. I’ve also eliminated several traffic tickets because they remembered that I won an Oscar”.
In 1984 at the Gershwin Theatre MacLaine appeared in Shirley MacLaine on Broadway, a one-woman show spanning her already decades long career and the many facets that have bolstered it over the years. A show that ended each night with her bringing out her Oscar and stating whilst looking in its eye; “I guess I did deserve it”. Just before this finale, she would sing in the closing moments Cockeyed Opimtimist from South Pacific before segueing into John Lennon’s Imagine, before announcing boldly “I’m proof positive that if you really believe you can do something, you can do anything!” If there’s even been proof, it would be with MacLaine. The 80’s also brought with her best-selling books Out on a Limb and Dancing in the Light, a profound and very open discussion of her many forms of spiritual exploration and practises involving meditation, and to most public interest her devout beliefs in U.F.O’s and reincarnation. According to MacLaine she had a previous lie in Atlantis, where she was the brother of a 35,000 year old spirit named Ramtha. MacLaine spoke of spirituality in her book Out on a Limb; “the level of achievement in any civilisation is judged by its spiritual evolvement. Technological advancement is important and attractive, but if it detains, detracts or deters spiritual understanding, it bears the seeds of its own destruction”.
Mike Wallace has interviewed MacLaine many times through the years. In the 80’s he asked her plainly about her spiritualism…
WALLACE: You really believe that you’ve lived lives before?
MACLAINE: There is no doubt in my mind.
After this point the interview got more testy.
MACLAINE: Now, you don’t have to be that unpleasant. It doesn’t become you, you know? I mean, I’m just speaking of my own experiences and my own desires, and it’s kind of a childlike wonder that could really possibly speculate on other dimensions. What’s wrong with that?
WALLACE: Shirley, what the heck as all that got to do with singing and dancing? I mean this seriously.
MACLAINE: Because it’s expression.
Crudely, rudely and with a supreme lack of tact, Wallace moves on and attempts, I think to return to MacLaine’s world of the stage, whilst also letching on the woman.
WALLACE: As we sit here and we talk, and it’s fascinating, good talk, and then I think about those legs.
MacLaine, without missing a beat, brings Wallace hurtling back to his original questions.
MACLAINE: Nothing wrong with lower chakra stuff at all. It’s all part of the body.
It’s perhaps easy to mock MacLaine when it comes to this sort of stuff. Many wouldn’t see it as punching down at all with her being a wealthy world renown actress, despite us being hesitant to mock other’s religions which on a granular level aren’t that much more absurd in notion, but what makes me love MacLaine even more is that she’s always the first to do the mocking. Less mocking, rather knowing jokes. In the brilliant Albert Brooks film Defending Your Life (1991) where the deceased learn of having multiple lives before they head back to their next incarnation, MacLaine appears as a host at the Past Lives Pavilion. Even in 2017 after she hosted at the Oscars and received rapturous applause and a standing ovation, she stated “that’s the nicest reception I’ve had in 250,000 years”.
Other than The Graduate of course, with it being one of my favourite films of all time, when it comes most rewatched Mike Nichols movie, it might very well be the Carrie Fisher penned dramedy Postcards From the Edge from 1990. In this Meryl Streep collaboration, starring here as a pseudo fictionalised version of Fisher herself, as Suzanne, an actress from a famous actress mother currently coming out of rehab and trying to go sober whilst managing her career, relationship with her mother and a dalliance with a Hollywood bachelor along the way. When it comes to re-watchability, it’s certainly the film that I have rewatched the most specific scenes of. I’m sure if one could see what my all time most searched YouTube videos area, then ‘Shirley MacLaine - Postcards From the Edge - I’m Still Here’ would by far rank amongst the top. Around the half hour mark, Meryl’s Susanne sings an impromptu performance of Ray Charle’s You Don’t Know Me and well I’ll be damned if it isn’t the best Streep has ever sang on screen too! But once again it’s all compounded by the emotion and truth. Sure here as Susanne Streep has humour in spades, but it’s always the realism that makes the film work as grand as it does. But as Neil McCauley once said, there’s a flip side to that coin. During Streep’s singing we keep cutting to the reactions of one Miss Shirley MacLaine, silently mouthing along, smiling, touchingly holding back tears, advising Susanne to take off her jacket. Her cocktail of humour, emotion, sexiness, showmanship, singing, dancing and acting makes quite frankly for one of my idols as I’ve already stated and here the role is perfect. The triple bill of Terms of Endearment, The Apartment and Postcards is my go to comfort movie triple bill in fact. Perhaps no role best offers MacLaine in her 90’s era the ability to highlight her greatest strengths like this one. As Doris, she is undeniable. Her power, humour, vulnerability and profound talent and craft makes for yet another sterling performance in her career. As I said before her brilliant and frankly awe-inspiring performance of I’m Still Here is one the highlights of my movie watching life.
In a 1991 interview MacLaine said “I have been in the process of remembering who I am, for by doing that you are remembering the future and that you have a certain destiny. I came to realise... nothing is more important than this life and the people involved in it – your immediate orbit, your family”. Yet over the years the relationship with Sachi and her mother has grown fractured. Sachi Parker released a book in 2013 entitled Lucky Me: My Life With – And Without – My Mom, Shirley MacLaine. MacLaine called the book “virtually all fiction”. Sachi claimed that for many years Steve conned MacLaine into paying $60,000 a month for “space travel expanses”, based off MacLaine’s belief that Steve was now an astronaut clone named Paul. For MacLaine’s comment to Fox about the book, she said simply “it’s a painful moment for me as a mother and as someone who values the truth. I’m shocked and heartbroken that my daughter would make statements that are virtually all fiction. I’m sorry to see such a dishonest, opportunistic effort from my daughter for whom I’ve only ever wanted the best”. It’s hard to reckon with these things when two of the best roles MacLaine ever played were as great, if contentious, but caring mothers. One of which in the end won her their sole Oscar for Best Actress. Mike Wallace asked MacLaine in the 2000’s about her relationship status…
WALLACE: Currently there’s no guy currently?
MACLAINE: No.
WALLACE: You think you’re over the hill for that kind of thing?
MACLAINE: Thank you for putting it so diplomatically. I think the hill one has to trudge in order to understand a man’s baggage is more of a trek than I’d like to take to right now. I’m very happy.
Again, come 2003, to hold MacLaine in the esteem she deserves you must meet her on her own completely sincere level. In 2003, she released Out on a Leash, an ode to her deepest bond of love in her life, with her dog Terry, the Terrier. In it MacLaine wrote “When the third consciousness between humans and their pets is formed, it awakens within itself characteristics that neither of the parties have on either own… it stretches and expands, reach back into the individual awareness of both human and pet and changes both”, MacLaine described Terry as “my confidante, my sense of home, and my deepest venture into the intimacy of myself”. In 2017, MacLaine updated Out on a Leash with a whole new ending, due to Terry’s death, now titled Out on a Leash, how Terry’s death gave me new life. One more gem from the Mike Wallace interview now as Wallace broaches her current view in the public regarding her beliefs and the like. Wallace commented that many people might simply say…
WALLACE: She’s a nut case.
MACLAINE: But she’s healthy.
WALLACE: Wait a second. She’s a nut case, but she’s healthy. Do you resent that?
Then, well, MacLaine goes off on one…
MACLAINE: Listen, they said that about Christopher Colombus. They certainly said it about Jesus Christ. Ho, ho, they killed him for it. I mean they say it about everybody who’s innovative. I think I’m innovative. I am old enough to have earned the right to be innovative and get a big kick out of the people who think I’m a nut case. I’m having a great time.
Could any sentence fit her better?
MacLaine now resides in the Malibu home she has resided in since the late 50’s, which once would host Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr, so many other stars and many members of the Kennedy clan. During the COVID 19 pandemic, MacLaine was contacted by reporter Cindy Adams who replied to her questions by saying that she “couldn’t be happier. I’m out west. I’ve had this ranch for years. I love nature. I’m here with my animals and housekeeper. And watching what’s happening to show business and wondering what’s happening to the world”. She’s still working to this day and she attributes this mostly to her early dancing career; “I was in the chorus a long time and in the chorus you don’t do things to stand out, you do things to keep your job. That’s the way I think, and that’s why I’m still working”. In an interview with Peter Filchia entitled “Shirley MacLaine remembers her Broadway roots”, MacLaine offered this to say; “Regardless of what I have done, seen, and enjoyed. I think of myself as a dancer. It is the essence of my work ethic, my values, and my balance in life”. Talking overall of her career at this late stage she said “I don’t want to quit acting – I really don’t. Even at my age, I have four pictures to do next year. I think [some] co-stars are surprised I’m still walking upright”. MacLaine has commented at times that perhaps she is somewhat disheartened by how much people know of her intimacies and private life. “There have been times when I wish people didn’t know so much about me. But I’ve never been one to filter myself, have I?” For a woman who believes she has lived many lives before and will many after, perhaps it’s a testament to her nature that she still lives this one like she will never have another. She is the definition of leaving it all on the table. In 2019 a reporter asked her about what she thinks might wait for her in her next life. “I’m not interested. First I’m going to take a rest”. Lord knows, it’s been earned, it’s hard work being perhaps the greatest entertainer of a century.
- Thomas Carruthers
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