COVER STORY
Shirley MacLaine, at 50, is still a rising star
It gets applause, even gasps, night after night. It is a simple chorus-girl kick, the torso tilting back for balance, the long, long left leg surging straight up above the head. But it is also an emblem—of a career that has gone everywhere, yet still draws its inspiration and discipline from dance, of a body that at mid-century is still supple and streamlined and surefooted. It is a kick of jubilation, of pride, perhaps of defiance. And of beauty.
Last year, on her 49th birthday, Shirley MacLaine wanted to be alone with her dreams. She trekked up into the Rockies near Cripple Creek, Colo., and wished—or “projected,” as she puts it—that during the next year, the film she was making, Terms of Endearment, would win an Oscar, and so would she; that her book on spiritualism, Out on a Limb, would become a bestseller; that a revamped version of her nightclub act would score a hit on Broadway. Anything can look possible to a woman who once danced an entire ballet on a broken ankle. But that almost greedy welter of ambitions might have seemed outlandish if it had been voiced in public by an actress whose early glory had faded in bad films and a scattershot career and who had said that politics or travel or a search for self-awareness meant as much to her as performing.
On her 50th birthday, Shirley MacLaine was in New York City, and she attended festivities all day long. Her publisher, Bantam Books, celebrated the climb of Out on a Limb to the top spot on the New York Times paperback-bestsellers list. At the 1,992-seat Gershwin Theater, where Shirley MacLaine on Broadway is grossing $475,000 a week, a house record, another bash was thrown by the show’s producers. They had heard the star telling an interviewer that the only thing she had never done was to ride an elephant. So when MacLaine arrived at the theater, she was caught by surprise, and nuzzled, by Targa, queen of the Ringling Bros, and Barnum & Bailey Circus. The pachyderm obligingly knelt to help MacLaine aboard—”She was so sweet and kind,” the star said—though Targa also unfurled her trunk and snatched up most of MacLaine’s chocolate birthday cake. Perhaps the most exuberant event was the Broadway song and dance itself. MacLaine showed off her Joshua’s-trumpet voice, her 50-year-old legs—”25 each,” one appreciative observer remarked—and an appendage that has been with her so often of late that it has come to seem a part of her, the at-long-last Oscar that she won for Endearment.
What a difference a year makes: Shirley the Survivor has become Shirley the Superstar. The aging sprite has ripened into the overpowering character actress. The unfocused dilettante has been redefined as the Renaissance woman. The lovable kook with the carefree sex life and oddball ideas has been transmuted into a role model of a self-possessed, successful woman at 50. Shirley MacLaine, who always attracted affection, now commands respect. Her triumph is proof of the power of positive thinking—and action. MacLaine is lean, fit, happier and more attractive than ever. She has worked hard to keep limber physically and mentally, and she welcomes the birthday that saddens so many people: “I love the idea of 50, because the best is yet to come. I am going to live to be 100, because I want to, and I am going to go on learning.” In a quiet moment, she says simply, “This has been the best year of my life.”
Or, perhaps, of her lives. MacLaine is not only actress, dancer, author, traveler, political activist, feminist, ex-wife and deliberately unmotherly mother. She is also, she says, “a former prostitute, my own daughter’s daughter, and a male court jester who was beheaded by Louis XV of France”—all in past incarnations that she believes she has rediscovered with the aid of mediums, meditation and, in at least one case, acupuncture. Friends and former lovers have tried to persuade her to keep quiet about these prior existences, and about her faith in extraterrestrial intelligence, “out-of-body experiences” and telepathy. But proclaiming those beliefs is just the latest step in a life devoted to taking risks and alleviating what MacLaine calls “a loneliness for myself.”
That relentless quest for self-knowledge has led her to the Masai tribe of Africa, the mountaintop villagers of Bhutan, the Indians of Peru, often on the spur of the moment. She explains, “I would make a beeline out of the country in an effort to find myself I would clarify my value system by plunging into a different one.” She regarded her career at times as a nuisance. “I was most interested in working out my own identity, and the characters I played took away from that,” she says. “Now that I am happier, my desire for travel is ebbing—instead, I go into a room and contemplate a flower.”
Even in this period of greater peace within herself, MacLaine says, the one constant in her life is change: “My strongest personality trait is the way I keep unsettling my life when most other people are settling down.” Romance is sacrificed to her fervor for growth: “I have mostly used relationships to learn, and when that process is over, so is the relationship.” Friends and especially lovers can find her exhausting because she peppers them with endless questions, shifts moods in a matter of seconds and demands that everyone keeps up with her. She admits, “My biggest goal right now is to avoid being judgmental. But I am intolerant of people who don’t move at my pace.” Says Journalist Pete Hamill, with whom she lived for almost seven years: “I don’t think of Shirley as a person who relaxes.” Another former lover, Soviet Director Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky (Siberiade) observes, “Shirley is a missile with self-correction of trajectory and a powerful engine. If you get in her way, she doesn’t explode, she just goes through, and maybe you’ll have a hole.”
MacLaine is a personality of intense contradictions. She is annoyed at being called a workaholic, which by any ordinary measure she is. She bristles at having been known for years as “kooky,” although she made no effort to hide her defiance of convention. She says that she welcomes aging, but likes to be photographed from above, because she considers it “prettier.” She is a shrewd businesswoman, with a net worth, according to a close associate, of more than $15 million, but professes to know virtually nothing of her finances, not even whether she has a percentage of the profits from Endearment. (She does.) She prides herself on being attentive, and almost all her friends tell stories of some remarkably decent gesture. Yet she is also capable of casual rudeness. Hamill describes her as “nicer these days. But for a while she abused weak targets. She had 19 secretaries come and go.” She still likes to feed herself out of serving bowls, using serving utensils, apparently without a thought for the hygiene of the other people in the room. For all her years of searching, she does not present a consistent image of herself: she insists that she is shy, lazy and “made for a mountaintop,” but explains her frenzied schedule by saying, “I just have to do other things, I don’t know why.”
The song on Broadway is an anthem of optimism, for those happy to leave the past behind. “Now.” The word pulsates, over and over, to the rhythm of Marvin Hamlisch ‘s brassy tune. From MacLaine it reverberates to the back of the theater as a boast, a cheer and, in her mind, a Zen-like prayer to live by: let the bygone be bygone, savor the present, and allow the future to take care of itself.
It takes a special presence, and perhaps an unusual life story, to sustain a one-person show. Lena Home did it for more than a year on Broadway by describing her travails as a black actress confronting Hollywood racism. Peggy Lee closed, five nights after the opening, with her reminiscence about losing stardom and finding religion. Kaye Ballard lasted ten unprofitable weeks off-Broadway this spring with a lively yet sometimes bitter recollection of her decades-long struggle to impress her mother. Compared with them, MacLaine is at a disadvantage: she has little suffering to recall. Indeed, she says, “In my mind, nothing really bad has ever happened to me.”
The entertainment that she conceived—in classic show-business fashion, over lunch at the Russian Tea Room with Hamlisch and Lyricist Christopher Adler—has a spritz of autobiography, a soupçon of her movie roles, a dusting of philosophy and a big dollop of dancing. Virtually every word of dialogue MacLaine speaks is about herself, and that is just as she intends it: “Philosophically, celebrating myself is what I am into.” Apart from her one-liners, there is one highly effective if overlong joke: she sings a Harold Arlen medley while the conductor and orchestra, supposedly influenced by the ghosts of George and Ira Gershwin, for whom the theater is named, keep bursting in with Gershwin themes. MacLaine manages to find a wistful, slightly torchy quality in one unlikely number, If I Only Had a Brain from The Wizard of Oz. For the rest of the evening, however, she pounds out lyrics clearly, but at pile-driver pace, denying herself the time to think out loud about what they mean.
The same frenetic style serves her much better as a dancer. Her timing and placement are precise, and she uses her body with humor (sitting on the floor and wiggling backward out of a cancan skirt), sexual invitation (in the bumps and grinds of a vulgar parody of some black choreography), and grace (in the irregular, Twyla Tharpish movements created for her by Director-Choreographer Alan Johnston). She highlights the dances’ meaning with a panoply of facial expressions: she may be the best mugger since Lucille Ball.
She shrugs out of one costume and into another—and, seemingly just as easily, out of one character and into another, making the quick succession of monologues from three of her movies look easy. She tells the audience that she has always worked from the outside in, discovering how a character dresses and moves and only then who the character is. But in In the Movies, the plaintive song that threads together the scenes, she admits, “The part that you’re playing won’t leave you alone.”
She used to be almost indifferent to the Oscar. She was often far better than the scripts of her 39 movies, but that was not always enough to make a performance memorable. Then came Terms of Endearment. Aurora Greenway was the part of a lifetime, and also a trap. Says MacLaine: “Aurora was an impossible, demanding, smothering, self-indulgent woman who made me laugh a lot. I adored her directness, her lack of self-censorship and her capacity to grow.”
Still, to many people the character was unsympathetic—monstrous or, worse, ridiculous. The cancer-ridden daughter, played by Debra Winger, would get most of the sympathy, and Jack Nicholson’s breezy, boozy ex-astronaut would get most of the laughs. Even more perilous for an actress past 40, Aurora had to age, painfully, gracelessly. Unlike stars who demand that the camera flatter them, the vibrant MacLaine made herself look ravaged, the neglected ruin of a beauty.
MacLaine’s style on-screen has always been bold, even overreaching. When she played a pathetic yet appealing doormat in Some Came Running, the role that first earned her an Oscar nomination, in 1958,* TIME called the performance “brilliant overacting.” The same could be said of her Aurora, a woman whose funniest line—”Why should I be happy about being a grandmother?”—is screeched at the pitch and volume of a train whistle. Yet the performance is subtly detailed. In a romantic scene with Nicholson, for example, MacLaine softly taps her chest with her balled hand. The gesture signals rather than spontaneously expresses Aurora’s sentimentality—because, MacLaine explains, the character is not at ease with her body. The model for Aurora, she adds, was the late Martha Mitchell, wife of former Attorney General John Mitchell: “I had met her on the same book-flogging tour. She was an American heroine, correct and courageous, but with levels of instability—at dinner one night, we changed tables seven times.” MacLaine believes that Mitchell’s spirit was with her as she made the film. Says she: “If I ran into any problems, I would call on her, ‘Hey, Martha, help me out.’ ”
The atmosphere on the set was uneasy. Director James Brooks, making his first film,, derailed MacLaine just before shooting started by informing her, after two years of having her develop the character as a Texan with a thick Southern accent, that Aurora was instead a native of Boston. Says MacLaine: “I went into mild hysteria. That one change meant she would have to have a different makeup, a different wardrobe. I asked questions about Aurora’s history that were never answered.” Adds MacLaine, with a hit of affection: “No one would call Jim soft.” Brooks says, “Whenever you talk about someone special, you get into contradictions. Shirley is very set in her ways and at the same time very open. She is utterly free and utterly responsible. There is a chance she is a great woman.”
Winger insisted on remaining in character off-camera as the troubled daughter, and therefore sparred repeatedly with MacLaine. Says Shirley: “Debra insisted that I, and her parents, call her by the character’s name, Emma. I understood the torture that she was going through, but I just don’t work that way. It misses the point to say that we didn’t get along: Debra tears herself apart. But then, this movie was the most loving and tearing professional experience I have ever had, and I think that goes for all of us.” Winger voices decidedly mixed feelings about MacLaine. “Her favorite word for me is ‘turbulent,’ and you almost think she’s going to put ‘poor’ in front of it. Shirley asks questions, and I am not sure that she doesn’t already have the answers. We didn’t hang out—as Aurora and Emma, we were the wrong twosome. The fact that she did Aurora is all that I care about.”
MacLaine has said that Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces opened her to “informal” acting. For him, working with her proved wearing, if worthwhile. Says he: “Shirley is a question machine. She will ask questions into infinity on anything of anyone, of the director, of me, of the wall. When she is working, she gets that one elbow in the palm of her hand, and that fist with the thumbnail kind of clicking her teeth, and the eyes staring at you—you can almost watch the answer drop into some kind of compartment.”
As serious as MacLaine has become about acting, she is still capable of taking on nothing parts in junk movies, as in her starlet days. After Terms of Endearment she made Cannonball II, a Burt Reynolds car-racing farce to be released this June, “because I wanted to work again with my friends, including Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr.” Admits MacLaine: “I never even read the script; I only know my scenes. It would not be on the top of my list of brilliant career moves.” Future possibilities include Baja Oklahoma, from a novel by SPORTS ILLUSTRATED Writer Dan Jenkins, in which she would play a barmaid and songwriter, and, perhaps, a resurrection of her long-planned film biography of Aviator Amelia Earhart. She complains, “I am being shown everything there is for a woman between 32 and 60, but the scripts just are not that great. There is a big problem with women’s roles.”
Her flashing legs momentarily at rest, she recalls how she went to ballet class as a three-year-old because her ankles were wobbly when she walked. The audience ripples with soft laughter at a common bond of mundane experience when MacLaine recalls that she started at the “Julia Mildred Harper School of Ballet in Richmond, Virginia.” In her first performance, Apples for the Teacher, she dropped the apple.
From the start, hers was a life of rebellion. The household that produced Shirley MacLaine and her equally famous younger brother Warren Beatty was, she says, “typical, don’t-rock-the-boat, vanilla, middle-class Wasp.” Their father, Ira Beaty, now 81, was the principal of their grade school, then ended up selling real estate. Their mother, Kathlyn, 81, dabbled in the arts. Says MacLaine: “My parents never fulfilled their creative potential. I grew up surrounded by anxiety and disappointment. Both of them craved attention, and inside the house was, on a subtle level, a vaudeville act. It is no wonder that Warren and I went into show business.” Shirley recalls that she and her brother were well behaved at home, scamps once they got past the confines of the yard. “We used to empty garbage pails on people’s front porches,” she says. “I was a tomboy until I realized that getting punched in the boobs didn’t feel too good.”
But she never stopped studying dance, and her first heartbreak in life came when she grew too tall for the title role in the Washington School of Ballet production of Cinderella. On the advice of her teachers, Shirley at 16 shifted to musical comedy and traveled to New York City where she tried out for a production of Oklahoma! that toured the boroughs. She was cast as the center postcard girl in the ballet by a director who addressed her as, “Hey! You with the legs.”
At summer’s end, Composer Richard Rodgers and Lyricist Oscar Hammerstein offered her a job in the show’s London production, but her father talked her into coming home to finish school. Two years later, in 1952, she moved back to Manhattan and was hired to perform in an industrial show for Servel appliances (on tour through the South, she pirouetted around an ice maker) and then for the Broadway chorus of Me and Juliet.
Barely 20, working as the understudy to Carol Haney in Pajama Game, she had her chance to live the theater’s most enduring legend: Haney was injured, and MacLaine went out a chorus girl and came back a star. Producer Hal Walk’s was in the audience the night MacLaine first stepped in and soon signed her to a multiyear movie contract. Within months she had been cast in her first picture, Alfred Hitchco*ck’s The Trouble with Harry (now playing around the country in re-release). By 1969 she was one of Hollywood’s highest paid stars, commanding a salary of $800,000 or more a picture.
Shirley at first reacted to her fame with delight and a little panic: “I felt I needed protection, some grounding.” In 1954 she married a fellow actor and would-be producer, Steve Parker. She was 20, he 32. They moved from New York to Los Angeles—a city that Parker detests to this day—and the marriage had troubles almost from the start. “Shirley had this drive, this push,” Parker recalls. “She didn’t want to be surrounded by a white picket fence. I would be wanting to putter around in the kitchen, and she wanted to be at the studio.” Says MacLaine: “Steve was very supportive, but he just didn’t want to be known as Mr. MacLaine. From day one, he talked of going to Japan, where he had spent some time.”
After a year, Parker left for Tokyo, where he produced shows and movies (he is now a businessman there), and Shirley came on visits. Their daughter, Stephanie Sachiko, was born in 1956. According to MacLaine, she and Parker had an understanding that each was free to have other relationships; indeed, for a time in the ’70s, she tried “promiscuity—sex for sex’s sake—because I believed it would be liberating for women, who had been subjected to a double standard. But there was just not enough communication.” MacLaine “gradually came to think of Steve as an old friend, not a husband.” MacLaine has acknowledged that she remained Parker’s wife until a 1982 divorce in part to keep herself from marrying again. Says he: “I don’t think we could have stayed together for 30 years any other way. Shirley is a free soul who must have her run.”
Sachi lived with her mother until she was six, then with her father until she was twelve; thereafter, she was in boarding schools, and the family would reunite for vacations. MacLaine characterizes her daughter’s birth as “an accident,” and says she “never” considered having another child. She adds: “I never really embraced the label motherhood. I choose to call it personhood .. . Sachi and I are very close persons to each other. I let her grow up: she knows that anything she does is O.K. with me. We were so close it wasn’t necessary to be together all the time.” That closeness appears real: Sachi, now 27, lives most of the time at her mother’s house in Malibu, and joined Shirley during her Broadway run. They may share a career: Sachi appears as a waitress in a Burt Reynolds comedy thriller, Stick, to be released in August, and, says Shirley, “I am looking for a picture in which I can star with her.”
Although she arrived in Hollywood with only a high school education, and was soon caught up in the self-absorbed film world, MacLaine was eager to broaden her horizons. With the Hollywood Rat Pack she frolicked at the fringe of President Kennedy’s Camelot. Then the civil rights movement confronted the racism that she remembered from her Southern girlhood, and she shipped off to Issaquena County, Miss., to stay with black families, facing insults and threats on the street. She joined in the Viet Nam War protest, and noisily campaigned for Robert Kennedy in 1968, and, full time for 18 months, for George McGovern four years later. Says McGovern: “She was in there slugging it out until the bitter end.” Months after the U.S. reopened relations with China in 1972, she accepted an invitation from the Peking government to lead (and, it turned out, finance) the first delegation of American women; she came back an admirer of Chairman Mao’s revolution. She did not appear in a feature film for almost five years between 1972 and 1977.
Although her brother Warren thought that Shirley might choose to leave show business permanently for politics, MacLaine instead turned from mass movements to inner exploration. In 1974 she submitted to the disciplines of the Ashram, a California retreat near MacLaine’s home. A six-day stay costs $1,300; even for MacLaine, who sometimes exercises as much as three hours a morning, the routine is arduous. Says she: “We get up at 5:30 to do hatha-yoga—body postures and breathing techniques. For breakfast, a glass of orange juice sprinkled with bran. Then a six-mile hike straight up, followed by weight-lifting for 30 to 45 minutes, and calisthenics for an hour and a half. Lunch is half a bean and a leaf, if you’re lucky. After lunch, rest or massage, then a dynamic-tension class in the pool, a six-mile hike straight up, jogging for three miles, another calisthenics class. We can barely lift the half a cup of soup for dinner.” The Ashram has been a force in MacLaine’s life far beyond exercise and nutrition: it was, she says, “a catalyst” in leading her to believe in “karmic consciousness” and reincarnation.
It is an old joke, a vaudeville joke, but it fits a performer who is known to have searched for wisdom. MacLaine describes, to her Broadway audiences, step by step, a trek into the Himalayas, led by emissaries from a far-off holy man. At last she reaches him, asks for his guidance, and hears his musical reply: “Life is just a bowl of cherries. ” The audience laughs and applauds, and from some corners there is a faint sigh of what sounds like relief that there has been no weighty message, no preaching.
Most major stars have a book in them, and with the aid of a ghostwriter, they coax it out. MacLaine, writing without help (although she is extensively edited) has produced three already, and is at work on another. The first, Don’t Fall Off the Mountain, (1970), was part career review, part travelogue, with flashes of mysticism. She followed this bestseller with You Can Get Therefrom Here (1975), a reflection on her political activities and her tour of China that struck some critics as naive; it sold less well. MacLaine’s biggest success as an author is the 1983 Out on a Limb: 176,000 copies were printed in hard-cover and about 1.2 million in paperback. A TV network is negotiating for a mini-series in which she would star.
The impressionistic, slapdash storytelling is in part about MacLaine’s affair with a married politician, camouflaged as a British M.P. but speculated, depending on the continent, to be former Australian Foreign Minister Andrew Peaco*ck or former Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme. The romance, however, is secondary to the book’s mixed bag of metaphysics. MacLaine asserts that Jesus Christ developed mystical powers during years of study among holy men in India. She contends that “trance mediums” have enabled her to recall past lives. Although she privately acknowledges that she encountered a number of frauds, the book’s exuberant tone suggests that almost any spiritual visionary, from William Blake to Edgar Cayce, can win her wholehearted faith.
MacLaine concedes that one of the reasons she has had no major romantic involvement “for a while” is that she “would have to find a man who shared my spiritual beliefs.” Hamill bluntly dismisses these beliefs as “intellectually ridiculous.” Says he: “Shirley always has had a tendency to go cosmic on small evidence, to start with the general and find specifics to buttress her belief. She doesn’t read very much.” He speculates that her fascination with the spirit may, like her past absorption with politics and travel, turn out to be “a phase that she will exhaust, in the same way an actor exhausts a part.” Says Shirley: “I have thought of that.”
If there is a core identity to MacLaine these days, it seems not to be that she is a spiritualist, or an actress, but that she is a writer. Says Shirley: “I couldn’t give up writing. Performing belongs to everyone, writing belongs just to me.” Her books start as manuscripts of up to 5,000 pages, and she is constantly gathering material or disgorging it into notebooks (she stopped using yellow legal pads when she heard that Richard Nixon does). She jots down passages at odd hours, even between takes on a movie set. Her catch-as-catch-can methodology is reflected in the narratives, which jump somewhat randomly in time and space but have an appealing emotional immediacy. MacLaine’s style is chatty and at times endearingly naive; her theme is that of the wide-eyed innocent discovering the wonders of the world. She never sounds jaded. Perhaps the most striking quality in her books is their appearance of utter frankness, about her lovers, her family and herself. On Shirley’s 50th birthday, her mother developed a clot on her lung; Shirley went down to visit three days later and took mental notes on their conversation for future use. Says she: “I have decided that my next book will be about my parents. I want to get her at this moment so it will be etched in my heart for life.”
MacLaine’s earnest intensity is balanced by a keen sense of humor and an unpretentious, often puckish approach to life. Dean Martin calls her “the world’s best laugher” and has traded practical jokes with her for years. Konchalovsky says, “Shirley likes to play, to throw you in the water or to make a small device that falls on your head so something spills all over you.” She has childlike fears: lightning and Chinese firecrackers. Until lately, she prided herself on being able to walk down the street unrecognized, if she chose, simply by changing the proud dancer’s way she carries herself, and she has few of the airs of a star. She prefers taxis to limousines. She generally flies coach. At hotels, she books a room, not a suite.
MacLaine has three residences: a beach-front apartment building in Malibu that she built as an investment, a hideaway in Washington State with panoramic views of Mount Rainier and a comfortably cluttered apartment on Manhattan’s East Side. The furniture there is mostly old and relatively inexpensive. The objects in the living room—oriental bibelots, a taxidermist-mounted dove given to her by Fidel Castro, a pillow embroidered with the slogan LEAVE ME ALONE, I’M HAVING A CRISIS—are all chosen, MacLaine says, for their sentimental associations, not beauty. Says MacLaine: “I did all the decorating myself, here and in Malibu. The style there is ‘early accumulation’— heavy redwood furniture that will still be around after the earthquake comes. I like to make my surroundings comfortable for a man, and for me—I am a big woman (5 ft. 7 in., 134 lbs.), with broad, sprawling movements. Neatness has never been paramount, and to sit in a room of white curtains and satin upholstery is not my idea of home.”
In truth, MacLaine’s idea of home is a sound stage, or a rehearsal hall, or an airplane, or anywhere she can write. Her work may differ from year to year—she calls herself “a communicator”— but work in some form comes first. And she is prepared to suffer for it. For years, she had stage fright so acute that she would go through a show, step by step, in her sleep every night. Her feet are so sensitive that she changes shoes three or four times a day to vary the pressure points. Yet in rehearsal she dances until she has blisters, and for a TV special she recorded take after take until she collapsed in Konchalovsky’s arms, her feet covered with blood.
In a sense, her search—the travels, the psychic exploration—may have been to serve her craft. “Talent,” says MacLaine, “is sweat and knowing yourself, and I feel that mine is increasing with the years.” Dancer Chita Rivera, a friend since the 1950s, says, “Shirley has worked on her spirit, and that gets her legs up.” Perhaps MacLaine’s hard-won inner peace is the reason that her public career is at its peak. Says Shirley: “I used to be addicted to overcoming things. Now, my goal is to get out of my own way.” Konchalovsky offers a convincing appraisal of what may be her greatest gift: “There are very few performers who can be convincingly happy onscreen, but Shirley radiates happiness. She is a clown, a genius of a clown. In every part in which she was fantastic, there was a combination of sentimentality and fun, a Charlie Chaplin co*cktail. You can learn techniques, you can learn how to cry real tears. But you cannot learn how to radiate.”
Aglow with joy and vitality, grimacing and grinning like a pretty Huck Finn, the star leaps into the song-and-dance number that has been a theme song. She is stepping, she is prancing, she is getting her kicks. Her voice rides on the air, chanting a refrain, meant to be self-mocking, that her personality transforms into a cry of triumph. “Nobody,” she sings, “no, nobody does it like me!” —By William A. Henry III.
* Others were for roles in The Apartment in 1960, Irma La Douce in 1963 and The Turning Point in 1977, and for producing a 1975 documentary, The Other Half of the Sky: A China Memoir.
