Any book by Shirley Maclaine is always exciting to read. Her racy homely style of writing and the contents ensure it. This
New York Times bestseller is no exception.
The book mainly deals with her career in
Hollywood. Her amazing staying power could be glimpsed from the fact that she was a part of Hollywood for forty years! No mean when you consider that Hollywood is a huge boiling cauldron of politics, manipulation, machination and jealousy and above all intense competition. And more, the uneasy, dominating fact that determines one’s star rating is the unpredictable public taste. The first requirement is that one should have talent, naturally. That Shirley Maclaine acted in more than forty five films and that she won an Oscar, innumerable Golden Globe nominations (and plenty of awards) amply bear testimony to her talent as an actress.
Shirley Maclaine is enormously interested in the paranormal phenomena which she has described elsewhere in her other books. The present book, though is about her career – her entry and rise to the topmost position in Hollywood.
If there are people who think that acting is an easy and breezy way of making money, reading this book dispels that illusion. Acting in the films is an intensely creative work and exhausting. It is a full time, 24/7 job.
That is just one facet of the Hollywood atmosphere. The other terrible fact is that after one enters Hollywood one cannot help being sucked into it. Most successful stars develop king-sized egos. Peculiarly, many highly gifted actors have strange quirks and twists in their
personalities. When you co-star with such strong personalities you cannot help being influenced by them. You hate some, you admire some, you love some and loathe a few. In the process your own personality is being buffeted from all directions.
Shirley was basically a highly trained ballet dancer. Once she entered Hollywood she got pulled into the glamour world and stayed there for more than forty years.
She must have come into contact with hundreds and hundreds of personalities, but in this book she restricts herself to telling about those with whom she had long-standing deep bonds. Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin were already well-established stars when she made her debut as a wide eyed innocent teenager. But somehow comraderie sprouts among them which gradually turns into a deep, lasting friendship.
Famous stars(and actors) strut across the pages of this book – Marlon Brando, Michael Caine, Anthony Hopkins, Jerry Lewis, Jack Lemmon, Yves Montand, and …..Robert Micthum, with whom she falls deeply in love. Shirley Maclaine frankly and dispassionately describes her affair with him.
Shirley Maclaine describes her meetings with famous world politicians like Khrushchev and Fidel Castro. Castro even has a long private interview with her and uses her as an unofficial, personal ambassador.
What impresses the reader most is the quality of vivacity of the actress. She is always open to new ideas and experiences. Touchingly, she has managed to preserve the sense of vulnerability till the end. Most people who live in the “minefield” of Hollywood – as her friend puts it- become hard and impenetrable. The first chapter opens with such a question. One of her friends asks her how she managed to preserve her capacity to feel hurt in spite of her long stay in the Hollywood.
The answer, ironically and sadly, appears in the last chapter. Shirley Maclaine married just as she made her debut into Hollywood. In the end, after forty long years, after she achieved the height of stardom, popularity and acclaim, after all that, she discovers that her husband was cheating her all along! He had siphoned off all her funds and left her almost broke. The scene where she sobs uncontrollably in the court room during her divorce proceedings is heart-rending.
Many fiction novels have been written on Hollywood. But to read about it by one who is a part of it is quite illuminating.