The Books: “Don’t Fall Off the Mountain” (Shirley MacLaine)

Daily Book Excerpt: Entertainment Biography/Memoir::

Don’t Fall Off the Mountain, by Shirley MacLaine

I wonder if Shirley MacLaine is bad at anything. I’m sure she is – and so she doesn’t spend her energies in those areas … or who knows. Maybe she just works her ass off (I know that is true … this woman works. It’s her dance training. Those people have discipline, man. You could be decapitated and still not miss a dance class.) She’s written a ton of books – some new age ones, and others autobiographies – and they’re fantastic. She’s a writer, too. Not just chattering about her life to a ghost writer and having an editor whip it into shape … She IS a writer. She talks about her writing process (when she “feels” the muse, and when she doesn’t, where she needs to be, what her office needs to be like – all very writer-ish concerns – She knows it isn’t EASY – unlike some people who say what are possibly the most insulting words in the history of the English language: “I could write a great book if I only had the time.” Uh-huh. So the only difference between you and, say, Hemingway, is HE HAD THE TIME?) MacLaine knows writing is a craft, like any other, so she works at it. MacLaine has said that even in childhood, spending so much time at the dance studio, she also knew she was a writer. Anyway, this is just to say I adore her books. Sometimes they’re a bit kooky for me – but they are ALWAYS sincere. They represent a woman who has truly been on a journey … of self-discovery, and questions, and curiosity … Compare this to the condescending tone of Ms. Paltrow’s GOOP (“My life is great because I’m not passive”) … and you will see such a difference. MacLaine has none of that snotty “I’m more enlightened” thing going on. Maybe she does now, but hell, the woman is 300 years old. I hope I can be a little bit snotty at age 300 about what I feel I have learned. What I like about her stuff is that she is honest. She doesn’t come off as perfect or enlightened in her books. She comes off as … human. Making mistakes, hurting people by accident, having to make amends … looking back on some of her choices with regrets … trying to be okay with who she was when she was younger … It’s my type of memoir. (And I’m lucky because she’s written, what, 26 memoirs??)

Her stories about her childhood (you know, with her younger brother, Warren Beatty) are very touching. She sensed, very early on, that her mother had a lot of thwarted dreams and so she poured all of that unexpressed creativity into her children – and when they became famous (and MacLaine always felt that the two of them HAD to become famous, in order to fulfill their parents’ dreams for them) … it was as though their parents were living THROUGH them. On her death bed, Shirley’s mother expressed to Shirley her envy … that Shirley was living the life SHE wanted to have lived … and in a strange way, it was a relief for MacLaine to hear that … because she had always sensed it. Her parents sound like wonderful people.

MacLaine was a dancer. That was her training. She had weak ankles, which was a big problem for her … but she learned to work around it. She was a gypsy from the get-go. Her life would be in a dance studio. MacLaine is very eloquent about her “gypsy” background (and for those of you who don’t know – “gypsy” refers to the kids who sing and dance and make up the chorus lines in every musical ever made … They are ready to go on at a moment’s notice, they take dance classes all week, they audition, they go from job to job … and nobody in the business has the reputation that a true “gypsy” has. Chorus Line is all about that. It’s not about being a star. It’s about fitting in to that chorus line. Easier said than done. Gypsies have the best discipline of anyone in the business.) MacLaine never fell off the tracks, in terms of her lifestyle, or her fame. Her gypsy roots is what she attributes that to. Well, that and being raised well.

MacLaine moved to New York as a teenager and began making the rounds. She got some jobs as a sort of hostess – You know, new refrigerators would be on display in some conference center, and they would hire pretty girls to stand by the appliances and greet customers and show off the new features. MacLaine found herself traveling around by train with a bunch of crazy hard-drinking refrigerator salesmen. She has said, “I was the only virgin on that train.” But soon she started getting dancing jobs. Her big break was getting a job in the chorus line of Pajama Game in 1954.

It was a big deal for many reasons: One, it was partly choreographed by Bob Fosse. MacLaine ended up (later) being one of the few dancers who could really master his asymmetrical S-curve twisted-sexuality type of dancing. It is not easy, and you see lots of Fosse-Lite on Broadway right now, and dammit, it is not the same thing. Watch Ann Reinking in All That Jazz, watch Liza in her concert Liza with a Z (choreographed by Fosse) – and you can see what it’s supposed to look like.

MacLaine ended up forging a great and lifelong relationship with Fosse. Second of all, this was the first moment where MacLaine was given some things to do – outside of the chorus. Nothing big … but lines, bits … George Abbott and Jerome Robbins directed, and the producer was Hal Prince. These are giants.

MacLaine was only in the chorus. But she also understudied Carol Haney’s part.

What happened to MacLaine has now passed into theatrical legend. It is the primary dream of every understudy to have something happen to her like happened to MacLaine. In a way, it is unprecedented. MacLaine jokes that the reason she believes in destiny so much is because of what happened to her during Pajama Game. Makes a lot of sense. You couldn’t ask for a more perfect situation. And it wasn’t just that MacLaine had a good night … it’s that she had a good night and someone important HAPPENED to be in the audience that night. And not only that night – but the random night a couple months later when MacLaine went on again – someone big was in the audience AGAIN. Extraordinary. Oh – and she hadn’t even had had a rehearsal, people. She understudied Carol Haney’s part on paper, but there wasn’t an understudy rehearsal … so she learned the part from peeking out of the wings at Haney doing it. Unbelievable.

One of the greatest stories in American theatre.

So that’s the excerpt from MacLaine’s lovely book that I chose. (Oh, and below the jump – see the Playbill from that original production in 1954. You can see MacLaine’s name listed on the Understudy page, in tiny print … and I also like the air raid warning at the top of the main cast list.)

And watch how she thinks on her feet in the excerpt below … realizing she needed to slow down, to give the audience a chance to laugh. To be able to continue to think in the midst of a high-pressure situation … is the mark of a true pro.

EXCERPT FROM Don’t Fall Off the Mountain, by Shirley MacLaine

On May 9, 1954, The Pajama Game opened in New York to rave reviews both for the show and for Carol. She had been a choreographer’s assistant for years, but now the public thronged to the stage door, clamoring for a glimpse of the brilliant performer they had discovered “overnight”. She was singled out as the musical-comedy find of the decade.

It looked very much as though I, on the other hand, would be chorus girl of the century. Four nights passed. I still hadn’t had an understudy rehearsal, but whenever I wasn’t onstage I watched Carol from the wings, trying to learn the part even though I doubted I would ever need to know it. Only four days after the opening and already I was deeply depressed. I was in another hit! More weekly paychecks, enervating security, and monotony.

After the first Wednesday matinee I went back to the apartment to fix dinner for Steve. Whil we were eating I had a phone call from one of the producers of Can-Can, which had been running about two years. He offered me a job as understudy to his lead dancer.

“We know you must realize,” he said, “that nothing will ever keep Haney from going on in Pajama Game, and our girl is out every now and then.”

I asked him to let me think it over.

While we finished eating, I discussed it with Steve, who felt that if being in another long run was more than I could take, then I should leave Pajama Game immediately. I agreed, and before leaving for the theater I wrote my notice, intending to turn it in that night. Running late, I rushed for the subway and would have done better walking. The train got stuck in its tunnel, and I arrived at the theater panting, late by half an hour.

Hal Prince and his co-producer, the late Bobby Griffith, were pacing the sidewalk at the stagedoor entrance, wringing their hands.

“Where have you been?” they asked.

“Gee, I’m awfully sorry. The subway got stuck, but I’ll hurry. Anyway I don’t go on till the middle of the first act.”

“That’s what you think! HANEY BROKE HER ANKLE THIS AFTERNOON AND YOU’RE ON RIGHT NOW!”

I was carrying my notice in my hand. I stuffed it back into my purse. The world spun around four times – one for each time I had watched Carol do the part. A horrible thought jumped into my mind and kept running: I know I’ll drop the derby in “Steam Heat”, I know I’ll drop the derby in “Steam Heat”.

“Steam Heat” opened the second act and it was the show stopper – a song-and-dance number for a trio of two men and a girl. The routine called for a derby to be tumbled, thrown, spun, and juggled throughout the number.

They hustled me to Carol’s dressing room. I asked someone to call Steve. I shook so hard that someone else had to put the makeup on my face. (I was sure to drop the derby.) A wardrobe woman zipped up my first-act costume and it fitted. Relief. Then came the shoes. Disaster. Her size four wasn’t even big enough for my big toe. I rushed to the basement where I always dressed and found a pair of my own black tennis shoes. They didn’t go with the costume, but if the audience was looking at my feet I was in big trouble anyway.

Above me I heard the audience stamping, impatient because the curtain hadn’t gone up.

John Raitt, the leading man, was learning the words to my songs in case I forgot them, and Eddie Foy, Jr., one of the co-leads, was so nervous that he was throwing up in his dressing room.

I raced up and waited in the wings as the stage manager walked out before the curtain and gestured for attention.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “The management regrets to announce that Miss Carol Haney will not be performing tonight. Her role will be performed by a young lady named Shirley MacLaine. We hope you will enjoy the show.”

His last words were drowned out as the audience set up a terrific boo. Many people rose and made straight for the box office to get their money back. Chaos. Hal Hastings, the conductor, stared up from the pit, a shaken man. He had no idea what key I sang in, or even if I sang at all, but resolutely he raised his baton. The musicians straightened in their chairs, and on cue they struck up the overture to try to drown out the hubbub that was still coming from the audience.

In the middle of the overture, Steve rushed in, and for a moment he just stood there, looking like a zombie.

He reached for my hand. “This should teach you patience,” he said. “And remember – most people don’t get this break in a whole lifetime, so, for everybody who waits, make the most of it.”

Then, muttering the actors’ good luck, “Merde,” he pat-patted me on the fanny and went out to join the audience. His napkin from dinner was trailing from the pocket of his jacket.

The overture ended. I had to go to the bathroom so badly I was afraid to walk.

The curtain went up.

Taking a deep breath, I made it safely to center stage. From the corner of my eye I could see the cast lined up in the wings, watching. A hush came over the audience. They seemed to understand how I felt. The most important people in show business were out there. They had come to see Carol Haney, but I was onstage instead. I took another breath and spoke the first line. My high, raucous voice blasted in the ears. The line was supposed to get a laugh. It didn’t. Just as I began the second speech, they laughed at the first one. I hadn’t waited long enough, hadn’t given them time. Just because I was ready didn’t mean they were. I slowed the tempo of my delivery and soon we were on the same beat. I felt them relax, en masse, and I did too. There is nothing worse than an audience that’s afraid for a performer. Suddenly the flow of communication that I had longed for all my life was there. It wasn’t the applause and laughter that fulfilled me; it was the magnetism, the current, moving from one human being to the others and back again, like a giant pendulum. I was in time with the audience, no longer at odds with it.

John Raitt sang “Hernando’s Hideaway” for me, and I remember how strange Carol’s song sounded in someone else’s voice. For weeks I had been hearing the lines and songs in her voice, and now it took a combined effort to accomplish what she had done alone.

Then came the opening of the second act and “Steam Heat”. Carol’s black tuxedo fitted me and even the derby, custom-made for her head, was fine.

The muted trumpet sounded in the orchestra pit as the curtain opened on the number that had already become a classic in musical comedy. The three of us held our opening positions until the applause of recognition had died down. I held my breath, feeling the weight and texture of the derby on my head, wanting to practice juggle the opening trick one more time.

In unison we danced our way to the footlights, threw our derbies into the air, and caught them simultaneously. The audience clapped again. Maybe I would get through it after all. The trumpet led the orchestra to a crescendo in a swinging wail and the theatre seemed to rock. Each trick went perfectly. Then the music stopped: time for the piece de resistance. We would execute it in silence.

Our backs were to the audience. In unison, we rolled the derbies from our heads, spilled them down our arms, flipped them high into the air and caught them at the last moment before the audience could figure out how it was done. Then it happened. I dropped my derby. There was a gasp from the audience. The derby crashed to the stage and rolled to the edge of the orchestra pit, where it mercifully decided not to fall in. Because my back was to the audience and because I just didn’t realize that I wasn’t in the chorus any more, I didn’t think about controlling my reaction.

“Shit!” I muttered to myself, thinking that only the other two dancers could hear it.

The first three rows gasped again, and the word spread through the theater. Well … I thought. I come all this way, wait all this time, and now … what a way to end!

I rushed to the footlights, picked up the derby, put it on, shrugged a sort of apology to the audience, and finished the number. I remember little else. I can’t remember whether or not they clapped after the routine, and I barely remember the rest of the second act.

The curtain rang down on the show and then up again for curtain calls.

The audience stood. They cheered – and threw kisses. I felt as though a giant caress had enveloped me. The cast backed off, formed a semi-circle around me, and applauded.

I stood there alone, wearing the black-and-white convict-striped pajama jacket that matched Eddie Foy’s convict pants. I reached out, beckoning the cast to close in around me and share the applause, but they only backed off more and left me in the center to bask. I was overwhelmed with loneliness. When you’ve trained as a ballet dancer you are trained to be part of a team. You devote your talent to being a link that makes up the chain. You don’t think in terms of being different or special. The desire lurks underneath, but you continually suppress it. And so with the night I went on in Pajama Game everything changed. I was out in front of the chain and I felt lonely, and yet at the same time I felt so much that I belonged. The curtain rang up and down to prolonged applause. I knew I could step out of the line and be myself any time I wanted to now, I belonged to myself and from then on I would have to devote all of me to developing that self the best way I knew how. No more blacked-out front teeth and Servel ice makers. Everything had changed. A higher level of hard work, toil, and struggle was necessary now. Talent was nothing but sweat.

I returned to my dressing room to collapse. Steve was waiting. “We have a lot of work to do,” he said. “Your drunk scene in the second act was phony, so the first thing is to take you out and get you drunk. Then you’ll know what it’s all about.” Smiling, he wiped the perspiration from my face. “By the way – you were great.”

“Was I really?”

“To them, yes. But you still have a long way to go.”

“Thanks,” I muttered, resenting him for not letting me rest on my laurels.

“By the way, that ‘shit’ was very quaint. I guess you can take the girl out of the chorus, but you can’t take the chorus out of the girl. I’ve just talked to Hal Prince. Haney will be out for three weeks. Now let’s go get drunk.”

The second night I was on for Carol I met another man who helped change the course of my life. Although I didn’t know it then, eventually I would have to fight him in court as well as in arenas that had nothing to do with the judiciary. The words he spoke were the words every young American female supposedly longs to hear.

“Miss MacLaine,” he said, “my name is Hal Wallis, and I’m prepared to offer you a movie contract. In Hollywood.”

He had come backstage after the show and was waiting for me when I emerged from the dressing room.

Hal Wallis …

What I saw was a well-dressed man of clearly more than average prosperity, slightly hunched, with cagy, calculating eyes, and a face like a suntanned pear. I knew the name; I knew he was a big producer. But I couldn’t bring myself to swoon.

“Aren’t you the one who makes all those movies with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis?” I asked.

“Yes. I discovered them, too.”

“Too?”

“Yes. I just discovered you. I was in the audience tonight.”

“You mean you want me to be one of those girls who run up and down the stairs in a yellow sunsuit?”

“Does some other color sunsuit – ah – suit you better?”

It was only a first taste of what was to come.

At Wallis’s suggestion, Steve and I met him later. I was wearing my blue jeans, which matched Steve’s and we met him at the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel to discuss his proposal.

The headwaiter, doubtless alerted for this or a similar breach, let us and our blue jeans in, and steered us toward a table in the corner, where Wallis, swallowing his concern for appearances and flashing a jaundiced grin, rose to greet us.

After drinks we had soup, salad, thick juicy steaks, baked potatoes, and Cherries Jubilee. But Wallis was content to nibble on Ry-Krisp, and as the conversation progressed, I understood why. He had a very special feeling for his forty-odd million. He couldn’t bear to part with a dime of it.

What he was offering me was a seven-year contract with loan-out privileges – most of the privileges being his. After scooping up the last of the Cherries Jubilee, Steve and I decided it would be best to let the offer hang until we could find an agent to represent me. We also wanted to see if there would be other offers.

We thanked Wallis for the dinner and went up to the apartment to work on my drunk scene.

It doesn’t take theatrical agents long to smell where the new flesh is. Waiting on my doorstep were men from three different agencies. If I’d tried to see the same men in their offices a week earlier, Id never have gotten beyond the elevator. Watching Steve handle them, I wondered how I, or any young girl, could ever have coped with all this alone. I relied on him for everything.

While continuing to stave off Wallis, with Steve’s help I concentrated on improving my performance in The Pajama Game. Every night after the show, Steve rehearsed me, bringing in some of his director friends for their advice and criticism. He also found me a reliable agent, one who was not part of an all-consuming corporation, and he saw to it that representatives of every major Hollywood studio came to watch my performance.

They came and they watched, and I wondered why they even bothered. When they talked to me, I found they were interested in only two things:

1. What were my measurements?
2. Would I pose for cheesecake?

Not one of them made me a concrete offer. That left only Wallis, the man with the nose of a bloodhound.

I asked Hal Prince for his advice. “Don’t go to Hollywood now,” he said. “You don’t have enough experience. Stay on Broadway and do a few more shows first.”

“In the chorus?”

“It doesn’t matter. Go to Hollywood now and you’ll never be heard from again.”

My new agent worked out a deal slightly different from the contract Wallis had offered, one that would bind me only five years instead of seven.

I signed with Wallis.

Hal Prince lamented: “You’ll be sorry.”

Carol Haney returned to the show; I went back to the chorus and waited for Hal Wallis to call me to Hollywood.

Two months later Carol came down with a terrible case of laryngitis and was unable to speak. Once again I went on for her, and once again there was someone special in the audience – this time a representative of Alfred Hitchcock.

He came to my dressing room after the show. “Mr. Hitchcock is looking for a suitably fey creature to play the lead in his next picture, The Trouble With Harry,” he said. “I think you will do just fine.”

“Me? But I already have a contract with Hal Wallis,” I wailed.

“Mr. Hitchcock knows that. He would like you to meet him in his suite at the St. Regis tomorrow. If he likes you, he can work something out with Wallis.”