Shirley MacLaine on a life in pictures

At 90 years old, veteran actor and Oscar-winner Shirley MacLaine was in a spicy mood. Looking through photographs from her long career, captured mostly in black and white, she remarked, “Where are the nude ones?”

Of one picture of her seated on the hood of a Cadillac on the Paramount lot, she said, “Here, I’m just trying to be coy, on purpose. Jesus. What a jerk!”

And another: “Oh, there I wanted to see how my legs photographed.”

They photographed well! “Well, I was born with good legs,” she admitted.

MacLaine always had a seductive spark. She was a pixie-haired triple-threat – singer, dancer and actor. She could turn every well-known head in Hollywood, and then some, like Dean Martin, whom she called the funniest person she ever met. She says she had a crush on him, but it never developed romantically: “No! I sort of was afraid if I got that close, he would be less funny,” she said. “And I think the humor meant more to me.”

Her picture of that love-not-to-be, along with hundreds of others, from fellow Rat Packers to politicians, once adorned MacLaine’s home in Santa Fe. She called it her “Wall of Life.” “I just started filling an empty wall, and loved it,” she said.

She just finished organizing that wall of life into a captioned photographic memoir, called, “The Wall of Life.”

It starts where she did, growing up in Virginia, the daughter of two educators and the older sister of would-be actor and Oscar-winning director Warren Beatty. “He was a little baby pup, and I took care of him and watched out for him,” MacLaine said.

While Warren waited until college to go into acting, Shirley changed her last name to her middle name, and danced her way to New York, even before graduating from high school.

She credits everything to two teachers who offered a bit of prophetic advice: “I remember the day they sat me down and told me I have too much expression in my dancing. I might want to think about acting.”         

As the story goes, MacLaine was cast as the understudy in the original Broadway production of “The Pajama Game.” When the star, Carole Haney, injured her ankle, MacLaine was thrown on stage, with just five minutes’ notice. “I never had a rehearsal,” she said.

She nailed it, or at least Alfred Hitchcock thought she did. He cast her in his next film, “The Trouble with Harry.” It was her first movie.

She’d have lunch with Hitchcock almost every day: “I had these huge Hitchcockian meals!” she laughed. “Make-up and hair came to me and said, ‘Look, you’re going to gain weight,’ and I did! I gained 25 pounds.”

She says producer Hal Wallis had an appetite for her talent, too, and maybe a bit more. As she remembers it, he greeted her at that famous gate on the Paramount lot on her very first day: “He walked out of his office, and then walked toward my car. I rolled down the window. He leaned in and put his tongue down my throat.”

He later gave her a sports car, but not an apology. “What a jerk,” MacLaine said.

She was newly married at the time, to the only man she ever married, businessman Steve Parker, whom she described as the love of her life.

They soon had a daughter, Sachi Parker. Sachi’s parents had a famously open marriage – MacLaine spent most of her time in New York and Hollywood, while Parker and their daughter lived mostly in Japan.

She was, she admits, an unconventional mom, and an unconventional wife.

Her past affairs (if you can call them that) were hardly secret. She’s been pretty open about almost all of them. Yet she also said, “I don’t think I was that attractive. For a while I think, ‘Oh God, I’m not sexy-attractive.’ But then, I had my relationships, and they do think so.”

She was just as open about those she’d never been with, like Jack Nicholson. When she won her Oscar for her role opposite Nicholson in “Terms of Endearment,” he couldn’t keep a straight face when she thanked him: “I have wanted to work with the comic chemistry of Jack Nicholson since his chicken salad sandwich scene in ‘Easy Pieces,’ and to have him in bed was such middle-aged joy!”

She never stopped inhabiting memorable characters. She found roles that suited her and her age in films like as “Steel Magnolias” and “Postcards from the Edge.” She was in her late 70s when she joined the cast of TV’s “Downton Abbey,” and she was in her 80s when she appeared on “Only Murders in the Building.”

For someone who famously claims to have lived several past lives, photos of her current life sure make it look spectacular. No wonder she believes people have come back from the beyond to talk with her about it, like Cecil B. DeMille, who died almost 40 years before she received the lifetime achievement award named after him: “I’m going to take this award home, and of course I will be speaking directly to Mr. DeMille later,” she said. 

MacLaine still lives in Santa Fe. She says she fits here: “I love the old antique-y, it’s-still-here feeling. It reminds me of myself!”

She’s well aware that time is running out to satisfy all her curiosities, but she has been very open about not being afraid of dying: “Oh, no. I’m kind of interested in going there,” she said. “I’m looking forward to being part of the heaven experience. I really am.”

But for now at least, Shirley MacLaine isn’t going anywhere. 

      
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Story produced by Reid Orvedahl. Editor: Mike Levine. 

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Lee Cowan

Lee Cowan is an Emmy award winning journalist serving as a national correspondent and substitute anchor for “CBS News Sunday Morning.”