MacLaine Lives Life on Her Own Terms

NEW YORK — Talk to Shirley MacLaine about Hollywood. Talk to her about spirits walking through her alarm system in New Mexico. Talk to her about Stephen Hawking tapping on a computer at Princeton, telling her the universe is curvy and beautiful like Marilyn Monroe. Talk to her about why she decided she deserved her Oscar for “Terms of Endearment.” Talk to her about writing, about food, about dancing, about producers, directors, left-brain limitations, about the shyness she felt when Jack Nicholson walked on the set of “The Evening Star,” her “Terms of Endearment” sequel.

Talk to MacLaine about anything and you’ll get warm, smart, lively conversation. She is, she’ll be the first to tell you, opinionated. But don’t talk to her about time travel. Not if you tie it to questions about how she reconnected more than a decade later with her role as Aurora Greenway, the Texas matriarch whose terms are not always endearing, but always are, in their prickly, loving way, sincere.

“See, I never got unconnected from her,” MacLaine says, rising from a sofa to greet her interviewer. “She was one of my characters I couldn’t forget, couldn’t leave.

“When Larry [McMurtry, author of the novels on which both films are based] wrote the new book, I thought it was unstructured, but I liked the idea of a continuation of Aurora 20 years later coping with her grandchildren, the grown children of Emma, who had died. I’m more like Aurora than any other character I’ve ever played. She’s pretty sweeping, I’m pretty sweeping. I have a very strong set of standards and values that I might be wrong about, but they have served me well, and that’s what she does. I’m opinionated like her, and to a large extent judgmental. If I think someone is not doing their best, I’ll say so, which is what she does.

“Still, Hollywood has deterred me from being totally, graphically, cruelly honest. She really can be. Aurora tells the total absolute truth. You would think I did. But it’s nothing compared to Aurora. What I was drawn to was that she can do that. Even though I do a lot of it, I don’t do as much as I’d like to. Also, I was the only one there from the beginning. I knew the emotional tone, and I knew what it took to get that emotional tone. I know the characters in the original that were cut. I know the 2-plus hours that are on the floor. I knew what parts didn’t work, all that stuff.”

Essentially, MacLaine returned to Aurora, Oscar in hand, as the new film’s senior member--after enjoying rather less status in the first film. In her new memoir, “My Lucky Stars,” MacLaine writes of discord on the Houston set of “Terms of Endearment” arising from Debra Winger’s view that off-camera antagonism would feed the edgy relationship between MacLaine’s Aurora and Winger, as her dying daughter, Emma.

Director James Brooks supported Winger’s views, MacLaine writes, banning MacLaine from viewing the dailies until MacLaine threatened to quit. When a vindicated MacLaine walked up the aisle to claim her Oscar, she whispered to Winger, “You deserve half of this.” Winger, honest to the end, said, “I’ll take it.” Whereupon MacLaine, in her acceptance speech, said, “I deserve this.”

The first time around, MacLaine recalls, “Jim Brooks took me to lunch at a place you were supposed to like. He probably paid off the waiter. There was no service and the food was terrible and I think he was waiting to see how I handled it. I finally erupted and told the waiter what I thought of it. It was then he decided I could play my part.”

This time, MacLaine had final say in choice of directors, opting for her “Steel Magnolias” screenwriter, Robert Harling, who was writing the “Evening Star” script, too, as directorial candidates kept coming and going, filling page after page with the grief Aurora and her grown grandchildren still were feeling from Emma’s death. Finally, MacLaine said it made sense to have Harling direct, since he knew the material and the story’s dysfunctional family better than any of the directors who were asking for rewrites.

“Aurora’s a matriarch, a true matriarch,” MacLaine says. “She owns all these people in her head. If not for her, the family wouldn’t be there. What would have happened to these kids? The father went off. The mother died. The culture’s falling apart. I do Aurora as a kind of Katharine Hepburn. I see her as New England stock, transplanted to River Oaks. I don’t think she wanted to be part of the Lynn Wyatt social scene. She makes all her clothes. I think she has to be in control of every single stitch of thread and every bit of bacon grease that goes into the eggs in the morning. And all the souffles and the gourmet cooking she’s so good at. The whole point is to have her be a control freak--then pull the rug out from under her.”

It was Bette Davis, MacLaine says, who gave her the good advice that has sustained the last decade of her acting career, namely to start nailing down character parts early--roles such as the ones she enlivened in “Madame Sousatzka,” “Steel Magnolias,” “Postcards From the Edge” and “Guarding Tess.” At 62, MacLaine still emits the dancer’s energy that charmed Broadway audiences when she broke through in “The Pajama Game,” then leapfrogged into movies in “The Trouble With Harry.” She keeps busy writing on sets, maintaining her second career as an author.

“I wrote in the hotel room in Houston, which, by the way, was the same hotel room I used in ‘Terms.’ I wrote ‘Out on a Limb’ when I was shooting ‘Turning Point.’ I’m one of those overachievers. Still, I keep a balance. It comes from my ballet days. Also from my Canadian mother.

“The biggest thing I’m learning about old age is to fall in love with the process and let the goal take care of itself. It’s hard to trust that when you’ve always been so goal-oriented. I like the respect you garner when you’re older, especially, as Jack [Nicholson] says, if you’re doing it well. I’m enjoying working. I’ve written a screenplay. I want to keep acting in parts that would have gone to Bette or Hepburn. I’m ready to make a transition now into lenses and structure. The right light is important, too. If, for example, I’m Aurora going into a love affair with someone 30 years younger, she has to be lit correctly, or that becomes part of the distasteful part of the plot. This is a problem for older actresses. I had to go to the mat with this because they don’t know how to do it.

“You know who taught me how to light myself? Marlene [Dietrich]. She took me by the hand around the set of ‘Around the World in 80 Days,’ where I had this little cameo part. She said, ‘You must have the camera high above the eye and the key light low.’ ”

Although the 13-year gap between “Terms” and “The Evening Star” was at times frustrating, MacLaine says it worked out for the best. She is given to taking the long view. She has remained unswerving in the face of dismissive reactions to her well-known views on spiritualism--which, she says, have been reinforced since spending time in a house she bought in New Mexico.

“It’s got crosscurrents,” she says. “Native Americans, Hispanics, Anglos. I have spirits in my house who walk right through the alarm system. I would get up in the morning, the door would be opened and the alarms never went off. It’s just to tell me they’re there, that this is their place, that I’m just renting it. All the workers and people around my place tell me, ‘Don’t ridicule it.’ Only fearful New York intellectuals, with their rational, logical, linear, left-brain limitations, won’t allow them to speculate that there might be invisible truth. But how can you be alive and not recognize that going on?”

MacLaine says she has come to regard life as a series of journeys. This, she adds, informed her performance. So did going back home to her native Virginia with writer-director Harling to stand vigil when her mother died last year at age 89. “A lot of the scene when Aurora is dying is taken from what . . . I experienced watching my mother. I don’t think my mother wanted to die. She was afraid of it. But I think Aurora wanted to go to Emma and Rosie and the general and her husband. I think she was looking for the next adventure. I really do. So that’s why I played it that way. But I was drawing upon how Mother was when she started to fantasize about her younger life.”

When MacLaine isn’t working, she divides her time between New York, New Mexico and the Malibu apartment building she moved into when she came to Hollywood 40 years ago--not far from the new post-earthquake home her brother, Warren Beatty, shares with Annette Bening and their children.

When “The Evening Star” finished shooting, MacLaine took away more than memories. She also took some of Aurora’s furniture, to give you an idea of how closely she identified with Aurora. “Chairs, a couple of tables, the dining room set. I didn’t take her bed. But I have a little plaque in my ranch house saying, ‘The Aurora Wing,’ ” MacLaine says.

Not that there aren’t memories--not all of which moviegoers will see. The one, for instance, arising from Aurora’s reunion with Nicholson’s wayward astronaut, who returns briefly and walks in on her when she’s gardening.

“When he showed up on the set, I giggled as Aurora,” MacLaine recalls. “We got all that footage. Aurora just got girlish. She blushed and started fixing her hair. And she was worried about her lipstick, and started crossing and uncrossing her legs. Garrett [Nicholson’s character] is just looking at her. It just went on and on. We couldn’t use it because it went on too long. And there won’t be a third film.”