Shirley MacLaine on Sticking Up for Julia Roberts on ‘Steel Magnolias,’ Working With Hitchcock and Her Gross Donald Trump Encounter
Shirley MacLaine is making a ghastly racket. It sounds like a combination of retching and the “aack” noise that the protagonist of that old “Cathy” comic strip used to make whenever she was nauseated, horrified, infuriated or you name it. We’re discussing an encounter that MacLaine had with Donald Trump in the ’80s, when she went to look at an apartment in one of his buildings. “In his head, I could see he was undressing himself and me, and I got out of there very fast,” MacLaine writes in her new book, “The Wall of Life: Pictures and Stories From This Marvelous Lifetime.”
MacLaine is even more animated when I ask her what she made of the real estate developer turned MAGA leader. “Did you hear me shriek?” she asks. “I think that says it all.” She pauses for dramatic effect before delivering a final, emphatic: “Yuck!”
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Even at 90, MacLaine, an Oscar-winning screen legend, is outrageously, unapologetically herself, holding forth on everyone from Billy Wilder (“brilliant but difficult”) to Jimmy Carter (“the friendliest man”) to Peter Sellers (“He stayed in character the whole time”) in a book that is equal parts memoir and photo album. The title refers to a wall of MacLaine’s Malibu home that was covered with snapshots of her friends and family, as well as the roughly 70 years she spent on stage and screen.
“As I was staring at the pictures one day, the past kind of came and visited me again,” MacLaine, who is calling from her house in New Mexico, says. “So I thought, ‘Why don’t I go through all the photographs and take the time to talk about all these people that I’ve met and who they are and what they meant to me?”
It’s a story that took MacLaine from Richmond, Va., where she grew up as the daughter of teachers, to Broadway, where she took the stage as the stand-in for “The Pajama Game” star Carol Haney and delivered a rendition of “Steam Heat” that had Hollywood calling. First up was 1955’s “The Trouble With Harry,” a dark comedy from the “master of macabre” himself. She got along swimmingly with Hitchcock, who used to invite her to share extravagant lunches (she estimates she put on 20 pounds).
“His humor is what I loved the most,” she says. “As a director, he knew what he wanted and how to get it. But I was 20 years old at the time, and I’m not sure I appreciated how lucky I was.”
Hitchcock charmed her, but Hal B. Wallis, the superstar producer who signed MacLaine to a multi-picture deal, exposed her to Hollywood’s darker side. When she arrived at the Paramount lot one day, Wallis greeted her with a kiss on the mouth, and then stuck his tongue down her throat. MacLaine spat in his face.
“I was shocked,” she says. “This was so far before women’s independence, and stuff like that happened all the time, but I’d never had an experience like that before. It definitely influenced my idea of Hollywood. He could have fired me, but he didn’t.”
Early on, MacLaine shared the screen with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin in 1958’s “Some Came Running,” playing a tragic heroine who dies at the end. She got an Oscar nomination and an invitation to be an honorary member of the Rat Pack.
“I don’t know why they liked me,” she says. “They knew I worked hard and that I was smart. I was too young for there to have been anything sexual with them.”
She praises Sinatra for his “self-awareness” as a performer, marvels at Martin’s deadpan and calls Sammy Davis Jr. the “most talented of them all.” “There was nothing he couldn’t do,” MacLaine says.
MacLaine is candid about the parts she took, as well as the roles she passed on playing. She could have been Holly Golightly in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” but turned it down because she didn’t want to go to the costume fitting. “I hated trying on all those clothes,” she says, noting that her decision worked out well for Audrey Hepburn.
But most of the time, she made the right choices, as was the case with her heartbreaking turn as a lovelorn elevator operator in 1960’s “The Apartment,” a romantic comedy that still holds up more than 60 years after it debuted. It paired her with Jack Lemmon, whose comic timing she praises in the book, as well as Wilder, who she describes as “problematic with women.”
“I wouldn’t say he was warm and friendly,” MacLaine says. “He took his German heritage with him.”
Other professional triumphs followed — most notably, 1983’s “Terms of Endearment,” a slice-of-life drama revolving around a domineering widow named Aurora Greenway and her headstrong daughter, Emma (Debra Winger). Aurora was the part MacLaine says was closest to who she is off-screen: “She liked to be in charge of her own environment; I’m the exact same way.”
Not that MacLaine could control Jack Nicholson, who played an alcoholic astronaut who becomes Aurora’s lover. The pair’s chemistry was electric, with Nicholson’s talent for improvisation inspiring MacLaine to let loose on-screen.
“I’m not sure he knows his own brilliance, even now,” MacLaine says. “He always made sure that I felt comfortable, but I was so amazed by his comedy and his intelligence. I think I got to see a side of him that very few women got to see.”
Not every working experience was as harmonious. Shooting 1989’s “Steel Magnolias” gave MacLaine a chance to work alongside Sally Field, Dolly Parton and a young Julia Roberts, who only had a handful of credits at the time. Herbert Ross, the film’s arrogant director, bullied Roberts, finding fault with all of her choices.
“He did not treat her well, and he was so unfair to her,” MacLaine says. “Everyone else could see how talented and beautiful she was, so we didn’t take it too well. She seemed to threaten Herb Ross’ sense of power.”
Ultimately, MacLaine and her castmates rallied around Roberts. “We told him to knock it off and to leave her alone,” she says.
MacLaine was active in politics throughout her life, campaigning for liberal lawmakers like George McGovern and Carter. So it’s surprising that she has nice things to say about Ronald Reagan, the Republican president who transformed the conservative movement. “I liked him a lot,” she says. “He came from Hollywood, so I always felt at home with him. He was so nice.”
MacLaine wasn’t the only member of her family to ascend to Hollywood’s A-list. Her brother, Warren Beatty, became equally famous. Though they talk on the phone every day, they never offered each other career advice or shared the screen together.
“I don’t know why that never happened,” she says. “At one point, I was going to be in ‘Bonnie and Clyde,’ but when he starred in it, I left for obvious reasons.”
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