The Books: “Out On a Limb” (Shirley MacLaine)

shirley_maclaine_out_on_a_limb_book.jpgDaily Book Excerpt: Entertainment Biography/Memoir:

Out on a Limb, by Shirley MacLaine

This is the book that tipped her over the edge onto a whole other level of wide-spread cultural consciousness. Out on a Limb was 15 weeks on the NY TImes bestseller list and still, to this day, probably makes her more money a year than she ever made from her films. It was a Bridge Across Forever-type book, or a Secret-type book. It hit. I wonder if there were intimations beforehand of how huge this book was going to be. It must have been very gratifying for MacLaine to realize that what she had to say really resonated with millions of people. It’s her third book, I believe – and this is the one where she talks about her investigation into reincarnation and past lives, a spiritual quest. It came out in 1983. It was a smash hit. An Academy-Award winning actress is obviously a person with some level of fame – but this kind of Deepak Chopra-Jonathan Livingston Seagull brand of fame was different.

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Thankfully, she kept her sense of humor about it all (appearing as herself in the Alfred Brooks comedy Defending Your Life, for example, where she plays a hostess at the “Past Lives Cafe” … she had her own thoughts and feelings and beliefs, but she wasn’t afraid to make fun of it as well, or to lighten the mood.)

Out On a Limb is not, strictly, autobiography – and she comes right out and says it. Certain characters have been made up, some people have been melded together … it’s not meant to be a literal representation … it’s about a quest, a series of questions, and some experiences she had – in Stockholm, England, Malibu … that made her really question where she came from, and what she thinks happens after we die. She’s made characters “composites” … but you’d never know (in my opinion) from the way she wrote the book. Gerry, for example, emerges as a totally real and believable character. David … another one. Cat … the woman who calls MacLaine in a teasing voice, “Fickle Fame Lady” – “Hey, good morning, fickle fame lady!” At first, MacLaine is put off by the words, as well as the tone … is she being made fun of? But soon she realized … wait a minute … my relationship with my own fame IS fickle … I’ve always had to ‘go off’ and be anonymous for long stretches of time in order to balance out the public life I have to leave … so “fickle fame lady” is ACCURATE. Anyway, whether or not these people are composites – I don’t care. MacLaine knows how to write them so that they come to life.

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It becomes not so much an investigation into what her beliefs can do for her … but a journey that has its own rules, it takes her where IT wants her to go, and along the way, she has to make choices: Do I want to take this next step? Some of it is not easy for her – and she writes about that eloquently. She’s just as good with the struggle as she is with the moments of breakthrough.

I suppose it would be typical of me to weigh in on my own beliefs as compared to hers, but yeah, I’m not about that on this here blog. Especially not in a post such as this one. It’s really not my place, anyway. What do my beliefs matter? They’re mine. Hers are hers. So? (On a side note, I find it kind of funny when someone – a new reader – enters into my Search box on my site stuff like: “Christian” “Is Sheila a Christian” “religion” “religious beliefs” “Christian” … it’s all the same IP address and I can sense the increasing desperation and frustration in their Search terms. “God”, “baptism”, “Jesus Christ”, “the light of the world” … I know they’ll come up with nada, (well, actually, now they won’t – they’ll come to this post! Hooray!) so that’s why it’s rather funny – similar to the people who put the following Search terms into the box: “Iraq” “Bush” “abortion” “war” “Obama” … I know these people are going to come up with slim pickins, but some of them seem ferociously determined to find out my view on the issues – which, again, strikes me as bizarre. I mean, take one look at my site. There are pictures of James Dean everywhere, why are you trying to find out my views on abortion? People are weird, that’s all. But most of all, I see the “is Sheila a Christian” question. Seems REALLY important to some people to know the answer! First of all: wow. Why do you want to know? You seem actually nervous about it – like: there’s so much on this site: book reviews, movie reviews, personal stories … Yet you need to know the answer to THAT before you continue reading? Is that what’s going on? Second of all: LOOK AT MY GODDAMN NAME and take a wild guess at what my religious upbringing was. Third of all: do you want to know the answer so that you know how to listen to me, so that you know how to categorize me? If that is the case: then I have nothing but contempt for you. If you’re just curious, then that’s cool – although I highly doubt it. You should listen to me because you like my voice – and you should NOT listen to me if you DON’T like my voice. If it’s a litmus test thing you’re looking for, then … well. That’s just sad. Many Christians are wonderful writers. I read many sites written by Christians. Not because of their beliefs, for God’s sake, but because of the writing skill. Plenty of Christians are douchebags as well as horrible writers. So I don’t read those people. I have no litmust-test in regards to lifestyle/outlook/surface trappings/political convictions … But maybe the nervous-Search-term-nellies only feel comfortable with someone AFTER they know the person’s religion … but again: I have no respect for that point of view either. UPDATE: Interesting: my friend Ted is now reading Middlemarch and has put some of his thoughts about the book in this post here. There is a bit of synchronicity – in his thoughts and mine. Ted writes:

‘If someone’s nature is not like mine it cannot be good.’ I think that is the saddest opinion one can hold.

Me too.

The real question, for me, in terms of Shirley MacLaine is: can she write? Yes, she can.

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Here’s an excerpt I love. It’s actually not one of the more “out there” excerpts … but for some reason, it stuck with me the most.

I just think that the details she chooses to share – in evoking her parents – are perfect. I can just see them. They pop off the page and come to life. Good writing is usually local, meaning: it is not generalized. Good writing rarely uses assumptions or shorthand. MacLaine takes the time here to describe her parents – in ways that are localized. They are hers.

And if you read the excerpt, you’ll see that one of the specific descriptions of her mother is echoed by one of the photos of her here. I couldn’t believe it when I found the photo and had to immediately scoop it up – “that’s her mother! She’s ‘channeling’ her mother!”. I am sure it was an unconscious imitation of her mother … or maybe it’s a coincidence … but after spending some time with Shirley MacLaine in this book, you’re never quite comfortable brushing something off as a “coincidence”. Nevertheless, whatever it all “means”, it did strike me and I thought it was cool.

But tell me her parents don’t come alive in the following excerpt!

EXCERPT FROM Out on a Limb, by Shirley MacLaine

I leaned over and turned on the tub faucet. Warm water always made me feel better. Often, no matter where I was in the world, a tub of warm water could change my spirits into happiness.

Now as I simply held my hands under the warm flow I began to feel more relaxed.

I sighed to myself, climbing into the hot VitaBath soap suds. I thought of my mother. She loved hot baths, too. I remembered how she’d sit in the tub and just think. I always wondered if she might be thinking about how to get out … how to get out of her life. It seemed as though everything Mother did, she did for Dad. And after him, for her children. It was the same story with everyone else’s mother, I guess. Her cooking was punctuated by deep sighs. Often she would manage to burn something, and then she would have to wring her hands. Her lovely hands were the most expressive part of her. I always knew how she felt by watching her long, slim fingers, for they never stopped twisting or being busy with something around her neck or wrists. She was either fiddling with a high-necked sweater (wool against her skin bothered her) or toying with her silver chains. I understood that she enjoyed the sensuality of the chains slipping through her fingers. But there was a contradiction because I sometimes felt she would choke herself out of frustration. I wanted to understand the contradiction, scream for her to clarify what she was feeling – but when she reached a certain pitch of desperation, before I could sort out my own thinking, she’d launch into another project like peeling potatoes or making scotch cakes.

Dad knew that Mother had wanted to be an actress, so he said that most of what she was doing was a performance. The two of them, in fact, were like a pair of vaudevillians. I thought I remembered Dad saying something about wanting to run away with a circus when he was fourteen. He loved railway cars and traveling and said that he felt he wouldn’t even have needed make-up to play a clown. And he hd a way of commanding attention like no one I’ve seen before or since. He usually did it with his pipe. Regardless of where he sat in a room, it became the center. His chair would become a stage and his friends or family, the audience. He’d crook one leg over the other, pick up his pipe and knock it against the heel of his shoe, as though he were bringing a meeting to order. A tiny chunk of ash would spill from the bowl of his pipe onto the carpet beneath him.

The roomful of people would by now be uneasily watchful. Then he’d sigh deeply, uncrook his leg, grunt a little, and proceed to bend over to determine what to do about the ash. This was the master attention-getter. Would he pick it up? Would he gently squeeze the hunk of ash between his fingers so he wouldn’t crush it into powder? Or would he rifle for a matchbook cover in the top drawer of his little pipe stand beside his chair and scoop it up? It never occurred to anyone watching to go to his rescue. This was a scientifically manipulated exercise of such commanding expertise that it would have been like rushing to the stage to help Laurence Olivier recover a prop he had purposely dropped.

Usually Dad picked the ash up with the matchbook cover. However, in mid-bend, out of he corner of his eye, he would spot a piece of lint on the shoulder of his jacket. With the pipe in one hand, matchbook cover in the other, the focus of attention on the ashes, he would slowly but surely proceed to flick any discernible flecks of lint he could find while everyone in the room waited on the fate of the ashes. His complete capture of attention accomplished, he was a happy man. If, however, no one paid any attention, Dad would get unmercifully drunk.

Mother would usually get up and go to the bathroom, returning after she sensed that Dad’s act had run its course, to suggest a nice hot piece of apple pie that she had baked herself. In striding toward the kitchen maybe she’d bump into a piece of furniture which would produce a startled gesture of sympathy from whoever was closest. Meanwhile Dad would suck on his pipe, drink slowly from a glass of scotch and milk, not moving, knowing that Mother had successfully stolen his thunder, trying to understand that every play must have more than one central character. No wonder Warren and I became actors: we learned from the best.

Mother had done a Little Theater play once, all about a mother who went slowly bananas. Rehearsals took her away from the house at least four nights a week. So Dad began to complain that he never had hot meals waiting for him anymore and that there was dust on the mantelpiece. He teased Mother, said that she was becoming a replica of that “bitch” she was playing in that “damn fool play” and warned her that conditions at home were slowly deteriorating. Little by little Mother began to succumb to his pressure. Her gracefully chiseled nose pinched up when she tried to express herself and her speech patterns became erratic. Soon she agreed that she had become the character and therefore it wasn’t worth it. So she quit the play. She had bought Dad’s propaganda, and come back home to tend her family.

Growing up, I too did what was expected of me. I wore standard white blouses, unscuffed saddle oxford shoes, bobby sox rolled down over nylon stockings, and pleated skirts that I neatly tucked under me when I sat down. I brushed my hair one hundred strokes every night and I finished my homework and I might have been Football Queen if my boyfriend hadn’t gotten sick the day the team made their nominations and screwed up my chances. I had a bright-new-penny smile for everyone and never allowed myself to get overtly angry at anybody, because you could never tell where the crucial popularity vote might come from during the next election for Prom Queen. I went on hayrides but wouldn’t do more than kiss. I was a good student but only because I learned how to cheat well. I had real “school spirit”, wore the school colors at all times and when I heard the roll of the school drums before a ballgame my heart would pop with pride. I spent a lot of time after school smoking and carousing in cars with boys … always teasing but never going all the way because Mother had said I should be a virgin when I got married, since my husband would know if I wasn’t. Still, I had to sneak around, because Mom and Dad were more worried about my reputation than what I might actually be doing.

I laughed a lot, mostly out of tenseness, as a kind of outlet for suppressed feelings that often bordered on hysteria. Laughter was a life saver to me. But apparently it upset people too. My friends took to calling me “Silly Squirrely” because I laughed at most anything. They thought I was happy-go-lucky and my “carefreeness” was a topic of conversation. They said I was “such a nut” which I accepted as a compliment at first until I began to realize there was really something wrong. One day in the hallway I was holding hands with Dick McNulty. He told me a joke and I began to laugh. But I couldn’t stop and with a kind of theatrical glee that I didn’t want to control I began to scream with laughter. I laughed and laughed until the principal came and ordered the nurse to take me home. Dad and Mom only wanted to know why I had been holding hands in the hall. They didn’t seem to be interested in why I was laughing so hard.

Dick McNulty was the first boy I ever loved. Three years later he was killed in Korea.

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9 Responses to The Books: “Out On a Limb” (Shirley MacLaine)

  1. brendan says:

    um, ‘TAKE A LOOK AT MY GODDAMN NAME’ to the people wondering about your religious beliefs?

    HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

  2. red says:

    I mean, seriously. Sheila Kathleen Regina O’Malley. Take a wild guess, peeps.

  3. brendan says:

    i just love the blasphemy that you’ve accompanied it with!

    i imagine the concerned party clutching a bible and saying, ‘oh, what was i thinking? just look at her GOD DAMN NAME.’

  4. red says:

    hahahaha Yes. I was raised a goddamn Catholic, mkay?

    Oops!

  5. brendan says:

    just read the excerpt. she’s really a talented writer! i guess i never knew.

    i love the connection between her character in ‘postcards from the edge’ and her mother. awesome.

  6. red says:

    Bren – Yes!! That is just what I thought this morning re-reading it! The mother who wants her daughter to have “her turn” in the limelight – but who isn’t quite ready to give up her own “turn”.

  7. mr. john says:

    Thank you so much for talking about Shirley. I’ve always thought she had been under appreciated as an actress — Irma La Douce and Sweet Charity! C’mon! — but I’d never considered her writing. Now you got me all a buzz. Thanks.

    j.

  8. red says:

    Mr. John – you are most welcome. I have 2 more of her books on my shelf, so there’s more to come!

    I’ve always really liked her acting, too – and it sometimes transcends into what I would call “great”. Like her moment screaming “GIVE MY DAUGHTER HER SHOT” in the hospital in Terms of Endearment – just that whole lead-up to it, and then the impulsive screaming – so so good.

    I recently re-watched Some Came Running, and loved her performance in that as well.

  9. Katherine1 says:

    I love Shirley I think she is a awesome writer and actress. I love her book Out on a Limb. It was great. Of course it started making me wonder about the reincarnation thing. Hmmmm. I have been places where heck I felt like I had been there before things were so familure to me but then I knew I had never been there so didn’t know why I had felt that way. Anyways she is awesome and I love her book.

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