Shirley MacLaine reflects on her life

Maybe that's why I love show business: We are essentially the producer, director, and star of our own comedy/drama every day, on and off the stage of life. We are all actors on our own stages, creating our own reality. The Fosse years in my life, peopled by his own actors and actresses, who overlapped mine, enabled me to accept and even revel in talented eccentricity. Fosse was an artist whose tortured soul drove him. He never believed he was good enough, funny enough, inventive enough. He never believed he could really love enough or accept love enough. He was painfully broad-stroked and honest in his assessment of himself in All That Jazz. He was obsessed with sex and its meaning in his life, and was threatened deeply by the recognition of the feminine in himself. Underneath, he was a kind, generous, sensitive human being who was addicted to showing the world the obsessive side of himself. Out of these complex neuroses came his great art. His dance movements turned in on themselves just as he did. Unless he was expressing sex. Then they looked like his fantasy of an orgy. The Fosse years taught me that we could use our depraved opinions of ourselves to artistic advantage.

My life in films has been basically an education in human behavior; not only in terms of acting, but also in the science of trust. The Billy Wilder/Jack Lemmon years were instructions in comedy. Irma la Douce and The Apartment were acts of pure trust on the part of Jack and me. We never had a completed script when we started, but Jack had a track record with Billy, and I was new to the equation. Billy trusted the chemistry between Jack and me, and we trusted his judgment. Frankly, I didn't know enough not to trust.

Trust is an important currency in filmmaking. Trust is required in show business as much as talent and the money to finance.

We have to trust our instincts, and we have to trust each other. That is what is meant by a "collaboration."

When I was younger, I innocently trusted nearly everyone and everything. I think I still do. I'm proud that I haven't become jaded or cynical. Instead, I've become a more sophisticated questioner. Given some of my traveling antics, I don't know how I survived. I was caught in a coup d'etat in the Himalayas (Bhutan). I got smuggled illegally into Leningrad University in the Soviet Union and had my passport stolen. I lived with the Masai in East Africa and birthed a few babies inside of a menyatta (village) who were named after me. I took a women's delegation to Communist China (before any other foreigners were admitted) and promptly, along with everyone else, got pneumonia. I traveled alone across the United States and took up with an Indian medicine man in Arizona, who taught me the ways of the Great Spirit while driving around in an old Dodge with $50,000 worth of turquoise jewelry he tried to sell me. Once after a trip through Romania and Czechoslovakia, I came back to Los Angeles but never returned to my house. I turned right around, went back to the airport, and flew to Mexico. I never wanted to stay in one place except to make a movie. In fact, I canceled two movies in order to trek the Santiago de Compostela Camino alone for a month, while my agent back home wondered if I'd ever work again. I went to India for a week and stayed for a month and a half. The wanderlust was an elixir for me. I always went alone and splashed up against totally foreign environments. I learned about myself. In North Africa I studied the Koran outside of mosques with friends I met. In India I studied the Bhagavad Gita while wondering if I had lived there before. Always I was in the search for this "other" truth, this "other" dimension I knew was there. Perhaps in the older, ancient cultures of foreign lands I could find a hint of something besides stardom, success, materialism, and the action of Hollywood and America. In Brazil, I had a friend with a private plane who took me to many of the psychic surgeons and healers in the Amazon. I saw that they were working with the "other" dimensions. I saw them take out human eyes to restore sight to a blind woman. One psychic surgeon removed a human heart, fixed the four-part bypass, restored it to the man's chest, and with "energy" closed the wound without stitches.

I went to Machu Picchu in Peru with a man who said he had had a love affair with an extraterrestrial. He said he was still being guided by her and could call on that guidance anytime. He proceeded to do just that. The Peruvian roads are steep, narrow, and dangerous. He took his hands off the wheel, closed his eyes and the car was "driven." I don't know by what. People don't believe me when I tell them this story. They suspect a trick of some kind, but I saw none. What was even more shocking than the invisibly driven car was the fact that it was okay with me. I trusted that what he said was true. I believe now that I never got in serious trouble or a life-threatening situation because I trusted whoever I was with. Even if some had been life-threatening, I chose to regard them as adventures. Why did I do that? Why wasn't I more left-brained suspicious about so many events? Was I totally gullible? If so, why wasn't I ever really hurt or seriously threatened? Was there really an angel on my shoulder from the beginning? And was the real lesson in life to trust that each of us has one or maybe more angels and guides? Was I talking about religion here, or was I talking about the "other"? Real spirituality did not occur to me until I was forty years old.

Now it's a few days into my chaotic move, and I'm taking a break from unpacking and am watching the 2006 midterm election returns on television. Does America have an angel on its shoulder, I wonder? Although I am a senior citizen who has happily adopted New Mexico as my home for the rest of my years, I was born in Richmond, Virginia. I was raised in the state of Virginia, responsible for eight of our presidents and through which the Mason-Dixon line, dividing the North from the South, runs.

I see now that the people of Virginia will make the decision as to whether the Democrats will control the Senate as well as the House of Representatives. I am proud of that.

Virginia was responsible for my connection to the deep meaning of the Founding Fathers and their intent for a new democracy. Virginia was why I became a political activist. Virginia was why I got deeply involved with the civil rights movement. And later my home in Arlington, Virginia, was across the Potomac River from the nation's capital, close enough for me to observe what went on in Washington, D.C., because I took the bus from Arlington every day to go to dancing school in Washington.

Now as I sit here in New Mexico watching democracy at work, I reflect on how depressed I've been in the last year about what's been going on in Washington.

I have always had an innocent, bouncy, adolescent slant on life — optimistic and maybe even naive. It has served me well, but now I'm not so sure. I always felt that everything happens just as it should — usually for the purposeful good. Now I'm feeling more deeply the need to take greater personal responsibility for what happens in this world and thinking about how I might be participating in the reality before me, not just observing it. I find myself concerned about the addiction to technology in our culture and the crippling of democracy.

To tell you the truth, I feel like democracy. I need to be helped and nurtured along so that I will retain my faith in freedom and the goodwill of people. I need to be helped down the steps of my trailer on a movie set (someone always comes to help whether I ask for it or not). I am helped in and out of cars — cars that are racing along a street that is so wired with modern technology that I wonder how the trees and birds can take it.

Now I find myself worried that the voting machines are being tampered with and that technology has swamped and crippled democracy. Technology has sometimes made my life unbearable. I can't remember my cell phone codes, my bank codes, my pin numbers, or even the phone numbers of my family and best friends because they are stuck in some other "convenient" technological contraption.

When I waited in line at United Airlines only to be told I had to check myself in via computer, I turned around and went back home. I believe Stephen Hawking is correct when he speculates that computers will surpass human intelligence soon. Technology is even making democracy obsolete because we really don't talk to each other much anymore and debate the issues of the day. Most people are on the computer. Not me. I only use a computer to read out-of-state and international newspapers and check in on my website. Nor do I use email. If someone wants to get in touch with me, I want to hear his or her voice. I want to hear the spaces between words; the hesitations when discussing something, the emotion in their voice. And more than anything I hate email computer English. No wonder newspaper reading is way down. People don't know how to read proper English anymore.

Ever since our invasion of Iraq I have been ashamed at how we Americans have mishandled ourselves, our government, and let democracy and our Founding Fathers down. My rage and futile ranting and raving within make me feel old. What happened? How did it all come to this? We have to be saved by the state that was the home of most of our Founding Fathers?

I watch the returns with a feeling of wise resignation.

My dad always teased me about being a bleeding-heart liberal who would join any cause for an underdog. "Stick to your own little row of potatoes," he would warn, but I couldn't play it safe that way. I had the blood of the Founding Fathers pounding through my heart. The pounding was accompanied by the understanding that most of our Founding Fathers had been transcendentalists. They were metaphysically and spiritually motivated. They wanted freedom from the constraints of religion in Europe. Most were Masons, some believed in reincarnation, and Jefferson even wrote his own Jeffersonian Bible, decrying how the Christian religion had been so prostituted.

Because of my patriotism and my Virginia upbringing, I was always interested in what our government was up to. I couldn't bear Richard Nixon and his lies, particularly about Vietnam, so I spent a year campaigning for George McGovern, much to the ridicule of my dad. He said McGovern had Novocaine in his upper lip and sized him up as a real loser. He said he knew Richard Nixon was a son of a bitch but that he was our son of a bitch. He couldn't see McGovern standing up to the Communists or understanding power in any way. I saw McGovern as a senator who didn't believe we should be in Vietnam. Bobby Kennedy once said of McGovern, "He's not the most honest senator we have, he's the only honest one we have."

For me, the experience of campaigning taught me about America, because I went everywhere. I made speeches in front of union hall members, chaired coffee klatches in too many living rooms to remember, did every TV show that would have me, registered voters on the street, marched in any anti-war demonstrations I could find, and turned down every movie that came my way. I was out where Hollywood was concerned. They thought I was crazy to give up show business in favor of McGovern. Many supporters deserted George's ship, knowing it was indeed a lost cause, but for some stalwart reason, still not completely clear to me, I stuck it out to the very end. It wasn't just blind loyalty. I couldn't live with a president who corrupted the Justice Department, the Defense Department, the Oval Office, the FBI, and CIA and who also thought he could get away with treason. That was it — I thought Richard Nixon was guilty of treason and should be impeached even before Watergate was big news.

So sitting in the living room of a hotel suite in South Dakota with McGovern and a few others, I watched the country turn on him — all but Massachusetts — the state of the assassinated ones. It was awful. It was shocking. I could picture my father's "Tsk tsk, I told you so," back home in Virginia, totally unaware that his son of a bitch would disgrace our country and the presidency in another year. After the last soul-searing returns came in, I fled South Dakota and traveled south in a car with a friend. When we reached Texas, he said he missed the cement and action of New York and left. I continued driving. Alone.

As soon as I crossed the Texas border into New Mexico, I knew the license plates were right. "The Land of Enchantment" was enchanting. I made friends with some people and asked why there was so much white salt on the mountains above the desert.

They explained diplomatically that the white was snow. I was in heaven in high desert country. I knew then I would spend the last part of my life here. I had some things to do first, but until then I knew where I belonged. So here I sit, all these years later, above the Land of Enchantment, sageing over my life and our country and wondering if I really have the courage to go into who I really am. What will that journey involve?

In my home, I have what my friends call the "wall of life." It is a wall of pictures ranging from my childhood until now. I take these pictures with me if I move into a new place, and it's always fun to hang them — like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, they fit together to cover an entire wall.

When I have people over, it's always a kick for me when they stop and stand in front of my wall of life and take it in. They see pictures of me as a young dancer, on the sets of my films, me chatting with Gorbachev, Jimmy Carter, Indira Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, George McGovern, and a prime minister or two with whom I had affairs during my "slumming in power" days. When I see photographs from my childhood, I remember that somehow I knew at the age of three in a dancing class that my life would take me around the world and back so many, many times. Dancing and show business became a springboard to everything else I wanted to accomplish in my life.

Excerpted from "Sage-ing While Age-ing." Copyright (c) 2008 by Shirley MacLaine. Reprinted with permission from Atria Books.

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