The Books: “My Lucky Stars: A Hollywood Memoir” (Shirley MacLaine)

Daily Book Excerpt: Entertainment Biography/Memoir:

My Lucky Stars: A Hollywood Memoir, by Shirley MacLaine

Wonderful book! It might be my favorite of Shirley MacLaine’s (although granted I have not read her latest). It’s a book of anecdotes and character studies – all the people she worked with and who made an impression on her in her many years in Hollywood. The portrait she paints of Peter Sellers is something that will stay with me always. What an odd complex depressive yet beautiful man. And Anthony Hopkins. Fascinating. Difficult. Emotional. She spends an entire chapter on Frank Sinatra, there’s an entire chapter on the entire shoot of Terms of Endearment (a very very difficult shoot) – and she is just in her best form here, throughout. She’s not a “surface” kind of person, obviously, and the anecdotes she chooses to share really illuminate the person in question (at least through her eyes – it’s her version of, say, Richard Harris, or Frank Sinatra). She does not pull her punches. She’s honest. She’s telling it like she sees it. She does not spare Debra Winger, and yet somehow it doesn’t come off as bitchy. It comes off more as baffled. Like: how on earth am I supposed to deal with this person? But when someone, even someone like Winger, does something extraordinary – or is able to project their particular genius onscreen – MacLaine is more than willing to give the props. MacLaine comes off as the real deal: an insightful intuitive person, someone who knows who she is, but is also willing to grow and learn and be surprised.

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She tells one of my favorite stories about Jack Nicholson, an actor I truly love. Not only do I just love his acting – I just flat out love his whole career, his attitude, his vibe, his energy – whatever you want to call it. When he shows up at the Oscars, wearing sunglasses, I am thrilled. He brings an aspect of anarchy to everything he does … and yet there’s an integrity there, a seriousness about the work … He has such a fine reputation. He has been in the business his whole life, practically, and so one of the things he does on every set is to befriend EVERYONE. The lady who makes the sandwiches, the grip, the gaffer, his drivers, the makeup woman, the coffee guy, the lowly PAs … they all become his best friends. He knows everyone by name. It’s not a game with him, he’s not “playing” them. It’s that … the movie set is his home – probably more so than any real home he actually has. And so whereever he is – he creates a family. He is notorious for this. The stories about him abound. Gifts he gave to the random woman who set up the craft table, because they shared a joke one morning … whatever … He’s kind. He’s generous. He knows a movie is a collaboration – and although he is usually the biggest star in whatever picture he is in – he knows he’s not in it alone. So Jack Nicholson probably has more friends than anyone on earth, if you think about it. He knows everyone. He is about personal relationships. I love that about him and I think it shows in his work. But anyway, back to MacLaine’s story about Nicholson – which is my favorite. Because of the vague air of anarchy that floats around him, I think it sometimes can be overlooked what a professional he is, and how seriously he takes the work. Yeah, it should be fun, but if you’re goofing off or not focusing when you should … out comes the roaring tiger. The shoot of Terms was pretty chaotic- and the responsibility for that lies with the director, as always. He is the one who sets the tone, who protects the actors from the chaos behind the scenes, who keeps things moving forward, under control. At the time of this anecdote, Jim Brooks had totally lost control of his own movie. Here’s the story from the Terms shoot:

When Jack Nicholson arrived back to shoot his scene, he sensed there was trouble. Jack is a master of the intuitive. His nose started to twitch. He was like an animal perceiving a negative vibration – a monstrous dynamic in our midst.

When you’ve been around our business as long a Jack had, you grasp the dynamic on the set immediately.

I could see he didn’t like it. The crew was operating in a disjointed, fragmented way … taking too long … arguing over inane things. Jim was slightly wild-eyed, but looking for a way to use the chaos. The dynamic was insinuating itself, working its destruction.

We were doing the kitchen scene, where Jack had pages of dialogue describing what it was like, as an astronaut, to walk on the moon. Then he noticed the camera crew was not together. The prop guy was late with the food we were supposed to eat in the scene and no one was in charge. The dynamic permeated the set as though it had a personality and an intention. It became an invisible being who was about to jeopardize Jack. Jack was up for practical jokes regardless of how bizarre, but not for the dynamic of unprofessionalism. I sat across from him, watching the buildup of an explosion. Suddenly his eyes narrowed as he did a quick sweep-of-a-look around the set. He was ready to work and they weren’t.

“Hey,” he yelled. “Motherfucker – hey!”

Suddenly he slammed his fists onto the top of the kitchen table with a violence that literally shook the set. The crew froze; no one moved. Everyone had been put on notice and they knew it. Then Jack collected himself. He smiled that devil smile. I could feel the dynamic shrink away.

Jack’s is not a petty temperament. When he is threatened or angry, he can be truly impressive. His repressed violence is nothing to trifle with, certainly not to be manipulated. And he’s not in the same class with those who tinker with danger, as Jim does. Jack is real danger – class-A danger – smiling danger. The kind that renders a crew paralytic. The kind that makes your blood run cold because he’s willing to pay the price. Which is what happened that morning. And from that flashing moment on, the set was reborn into a professional unit inspired to make a movie the way it should be made.

I believe it.

The book is full of gems like that.

Her relationship with “The Rat Pack” (they called her “the Mascot”) makes up a huge part of the book – and it’s really fun reading, but also not exactly what you would think. The dynamic of that group – Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Dean Martin … was not always pleasant, there was some serious misogyny going on, they protected MacLaine and accepted her, but she also knew when it was “boy time” and she wasn’t wanted – but I was mostly interested in the dynamic between Sinatra and Martin. Wow. An entire book could be written about what was going on there between those two men. Martin walked away, was able to walk away … Sinatra never was. He had to hold on. That was all he was about. So perhaps there was something elusive in Martin – that aspect of him that could walk away, of his own free will, from performing – that drove Sinatra up a wall. I don’t know. Sinatra could be a son-of-a-bitch (that’s no surprise) but he could also be the most generous man in the world. When MacLaine came to Hollywood to do Some Came Running – originally in the script, it was Sinatra’s character who died in the end. But Sinatra, with that strange intuition he had at times, said in some script meeting – “No. Let the kid die.” (He always called MacLaine “the kid”). “No. Let the kid die. If you let her die, she’ll get the nomination.” And that is exactly what happened. Pretty amazing, right? Somehow he sensed that it would be better for the story if “the kid” died (he was right) – and he also sensed that if MacLaine was the one to die, she’d get nominated (he was right). Anyway, I really loved all the Rat Pack information … as upsetting as some of it was.

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MacLaine was one of those rare women who, first of all, was not seen in a sexual way by these guys – but she also wasn’t in any way, shape, or form, a prude. She was not a big drinker, and she always had great discipline about how much sleep she got a night, and things like that … but she also loved to have a good time. They taught her how to play poker. She would clean up after them (they were all pigs). They would tease her. They would be big brother-ly towards her. They didn’t just tolerate her, they loved her. She was friends with all of them forever. It was Dean Martin she really loved (as a matter of fact, she convinced herself for about one month – that he was the love of her life. She KNEW it. He was IT. Of course he wasn’t – and Martin knew that, too – but that is just indicative of how strong her feelings were for him. She looked at him and, just like Sinatra, felt that there was only so far she could “get in there” and it captivated her.) They were dear friends – but not intimate friends. Martin wasn’t really intimate with people in that way. But I’ve put one of my favorite photos EVER below the jump … which kind of captures the MacLaine – Martin friendship … and it makes me smile every time I see it.

In 1955, MacLaine appeared in Artists and Models, directed by Frank Tashlin – the second-to-last of the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis movies. MacLaine had grown up loving Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis so this was a thrill for her – but what was not so thrilling was realizing that the team was pretty much breaking up, during the course of the movie. It broke her heart.

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The excerpt I chose today has to do with MacLaine’s fascinating impressions of Dean Martin. As anyone who’s read me for a while knows, I have a low-level obsession with Dean Martin (nothing approaching the Cary Grant, Stalin or Dean Stockwell level – but obsession nonetheless) … and MacLaine’s words here are riveting to me. Because nobody really knew Dean Martin (but we’ll get to him in a bit – when we arrive at Nick Tosches’ startlingly brilliant book about Martin) … and so MacLaine doesn’t try to explain him, or psychoanalyze him – not really. She just describes what she saw, in the man that she knew.

And she tells one of my favorite stories about Martin (him calling the cops … look for it.)

Well done. I love this book.

EXCERPT FROM My Lucky Stars: A Hollywood Memoir, by Shirley MacLaine

Dino Crocetti – Dean Martin – had been born into an environment where the Mob resided as neighborhood characters. In Steubenville, Ohio, he discovered the rackets early and he loved to bet on anything that moved. After school he’d make the rounds of pool rooms, cigar stores, and gambling dens. His offhand stories of the old days captivated me.

I asked him about Vegas and Bugsy Siegel, who dared to build the Flamingo Hotel and make it the first grand establishment for gambling, before anyone else was there.

Dean smiled. “Guess who was in the pit opening night, dealing blackjack?” he asked.

“Who?” I asked.

Me!”

He told me about some of the Mob characters, his stories making it clear they were “not gentlemen”, but he was protective of my knowing too much about such people.

Over the years I saw that Dean was not impressed with the Mob. He grew up with them, and therefore, he shared many of their Old Country traits – privacy of thought and feeling that no one dared to violate, an emotional detachment from the world and everything in it, an unspoken belief in a Catholic God who would forgive even the most heinous crime through confession. But, in his soul, Dean didn’t want to run with the Mob. I always felt he didn’t even like them. He didn’t come when they called. Instead, he played gin, or drank, or did card tricks, or tried out new material for his act on whoever else happened to be around.

For them and everyone else, Dean was a menefreghista, one who simply did not give a fuck.

I did not know all this when I first met Dean. My initial impression was of a man who basically wanted to be left alone. He was nice to everyone; he just didn’t want “nice” to go on too long. Often there would be parties at his home on Mountain Drive, where he and Jeanne lived with their seven children. Three of the kids were Jeanne’s and four were Betty’s – Dean’s first wife. Dean didn’t particularly want to be involved in the upbringing of the children. He told me he felt inadequate, and his own emotional blocks prevented communication anyway. Whenever Jeanne asked him to have a stern talk with one of the children, Dean would take the child into his den and say, “I have nothing to say, but please tell your mother I bawled you out, okay?” The child would comply and sometime later would get a new car.

Dean insisted on being home every night for dinner with his children. It was a ritual that gave him the Old Country feeling that he was the head of the household and connected to his children’s future.

Much of his humor on the set revolved around things that happened in what he called the “big hotel”. He said he’d try to count them all, but he never learned to count that high. He said he had to eat standing up because he had “screwed himself out of a seat” at the table. His family humor gave the impression that his was an emotionally volatile, rough and tumble, interconnected Italian family. It might have been that, but Dean wasn’t a part of it.

Even when Jeanne had dinner parties attended by the most interesting people in town, Dean would usually just go to his room and watch television. More than once he retired to his den and called the cops, saying there was a party at his house and it was getting too noisy. Once I lost my pearls at one of their dinner parties. I wandered around looking for them and ended up in Dean’s den. He was watching television while his guests were having dinner. He said I could sit down. I did and he told me he felt shy about not being educated and ashamed of his limited vocabulary and his lack of political and social knowledge. “I can’t understand what the hell they’re talking about down there,” he said. “So I don’t want them to know I feel dumb.” He then launched into some new material for his club act, which was so funny I laughed until I felt like I had a hernia! Dean was terrified of the intimacy required to carry on a conversation, so he inevitably segued into comedy routines.

That was what I found the most intriguing aspect of Dean. When a man fears intimacy, I’m interested. I try to open him up. It didn’t happen when we worked on Artists and Models; that came later.

On that first film with Dean I was awestruck at his and Jerry’s antics. Even though there was always tension underneath, they seemed to share a compulsive need for the experience of creating and playing to an audience. Perhaps the tension fed that need, or maybe they were simply performers to the core and their world inevitably became a stage.

They careened around the Paramount lot on their motorized golf carts, clanging bells and tooting horns, stopping for a beautiful young starlet to cross the street as they drew a crowd by teasing her into red-faced embarrassment.

If they had an interview with a newspaper reporter, they might cut the tie of a man and perhaps set it on fire, or curl up like a baby in the lap of a woman reporter and suck her thumb. Nothing was out of bounds. They’d flop into cars driven by strangers and scream bloody murder that they were being kidnapped. Dean would light a cigarette with his solid gold lighter, blow out the flame, and toss the gold lighter from the window as though it was a used match. Someone, I noticed, always retrieved it for him.

There were custard pies thrown in the face, butter pats splattered on ceilings, golf clubs and balls slung around like children’s toys. There was Jewish deli in Jerry’s dressing room, and antipasto in Dean’s; visiting musicians with sheet music of new song ideas, comedy writers who realized that the Martin and Lewis heyday was producing moments of genius that should be recorded, and the inevitable producers, directors, and agents who attended to the needs of the talented team Americans would never see the likes of again. The agents, Herman Citron and Mort Viner, were also my agents at MCA, so in many ways I felt part of a new family … a family that defied every value I had been brought up with. I had been schooled in a WASP middle-class environment, to say nothing of having been brought up to respect authority in the world of ballet. It was beyond my comprehension that Dean and Jerry could be so freewheeling as to play practical jokes on one of the studio heads and get away with it. Y. Frank Freeman was a southern gentleman with white hair and a hospitable manner. When Dean and Jerry spontaneously made him the brunt of their humor in the commissary during lunch hour, I watched with openmouthed astonishment.

Because he was the president of Paramount, he often entertained big, established stars at lunch meetings – Gloria Swanson, Audrey Hepburn, and Marlon Brando among them. I think he was proud to be seen escorting the likes of Marlene Dietrich or Anna Magnani through the tables to the executive dining room.

Whenever Dean and Jerry spotted such an event, the potential for deprecating humor was too much for them to pass up.

Their favorite rap was to stop Freeman and “visiting stars” in the midst of the big room and pose as inmates in a prison. “We don’t need to eat this slop,” they’d yell at Y. Frank while smearing butter all over his suit. (Butter was a big prop for their comedy). They’d then pick up their food with their hands (lamb chops, tuna salad – it didn’t matter), squeeze it through their fingers and throw it around the table. Freeman would hover in gentlemanly shock, waiting for their next move. Marlene or Magnani would take a discreet step backward, careful not to provoke inclusion, leaving Y. Frank directly in the line of fire. That’s when Dean and Jerry would really let him have it. One routine was their favorite.

“Okay,” they’d say. “So you’ve called us all here. Tell the people why.”

Freeman’s mouth was painted open by now, causing speechlessness. The diners were just as nonplussed. They watched in shock.

Why?” Dean and Jerry would yell.

“Because,” said Dean and Jerry in unison, “because you all are fired!”

Everybody would laugh, including Y. Frank, because they were secretly acknowledging his power.

Jerry would then stuff french fries up his nose or throw spinach in Dean’s face and tell him he should have washed that morning. Dean would shove cold cuts into his mouth and wag them like a huge flopping tongue. Marlene or Magnani would no doubt long for the Old Country as they smiled in abject terror, wondering when and how they’d be included in the insanity.

Then Dean would take Freeman by the arm and, like a Dutch uncle, lead him out of the commissary saying, “We simply don’t like your attitude in here – you are fired.” Jerry would bring up the rear and both would kick Freeman out the door. “Wash up, collect your pay – and we’ll take care of the girls,” they’d yell.

Marlene and Magnani had been around show business, but never like this.

By now the commissary would be in bedlam at the preposterousness of it all. There were two respected, dignified international icons stranded in the middle of the dining room while the boss of the studio had been kicked out by brash American upstarts. How would this routine end?

“One more thing,” Dean would yell out at Freeman. “This studio is filthy. There’re cigarette butts all over the place.” (He’d light a cigarette with his gold lighter, take a puff, throw the cigarette down, crunch it out, and again throw the lighter away.) “Everywhere I look, cigarette butts!” Jerry came from behind like a spastic monkey. “And have our cars washed immediately,” he’d screech. “In fact, have all our cars washed.”

The commissary would applaud. Dean and Jerry knew this was their exit. They’d gallantly make their way back to the screen goddesses, open their arms, and lead the by now amused beauties to the executive dining room.

I would sit tongue-tied at the sheer audacity of it all. I’d never seen people behave like that. In my world there had been an inferred censor. A silent alarm that instantly sounded caution. I couldn’t do what I had just seen Dean and Jerry do, not in a million years. The irreverence – the disrespect – the outrageous disregard for form and social appropriateness … Where had I been all my life? This stuff was great! It got laughs, it loosened people up, they didn’t take their precarious jobs so seriously – how could they? I’d not met that many Italians and Jews. The ethnic ethos of their comedy was what made Y. Frank squirm. He was from my part of the world. Him I understand. But him was no fun.

Later Freeman would offer Dean and Jerry money just to be quiet for one lunch hour. They’d turn him down, and Freeman would willingly offer himself up on the altar of their zaniness yet another time.

I guess that was it in a nutshell. When you went that far out on a limb, you were successful. If you pulled your punches, you sucked dirt.

Dean and Jerry were my primary education in spontaneous, Katzenjammer antics to let off steam, avoid ulcers, and touch the muse of comic insanity bubbling in each of us.

I observed the havoc Dean caused, however, by sometimes being funnier than his partner. Dean would come to work throwing away comedy lines that you could barely hear. When someone would say, “Huh?” he’d repeat it. A laugh would come, which he would top, then another laugh, then he’d top that until he was on a roll. Soon the entire set was engulfed in the more sophisticated, quirky, literal humor of Dean’s words, which revealed the peculiar slant he had on any given situation. His humor was not as physical as Jerry’s, although it could be – especially with his hands. Dean’s hands were the size of ham hocks, with fingers that curled inward. He had broken several fingers boxing and they were strong from working in the steel mills. His hands encompassed so much space that it was easy for him to palm cards when he was a blackjack dealer. He could deal from the middle, the bottom, or wherever, and never be detected. He entertained me between set-ups with sleight-of-hand card tricks. In between the tricks he’d lob in his funny lines as though he was testing new material. People would crowd closer so as not to miss any of his subtleties.

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