Lucky Me: My Life With--and Without--My Mom, Shirley MacLaine Read online

  They chatted, had a few drinks, and he proposed to her that very night. She didn’t accept until the next day. Their lives were so hectic, however, that they didn’t get around to tying the knot until 1954. They got married between the matinee and the evening performance of The Pajama Game, in which she was appearing on Broadway. Norman Vincent Peale officiated at the ceremony.

  Mom credited Dad with being the most powerful influence on her life. He was a mentor to her, a motivator, a truth-teller, and a sharer of dreams. He encouraged her ambitions and guided her on her search for self-knowledge.

  Perhaps his most significant and lasting contribution was a book he brought to her on the set of The Trouble with Harry, her first film. The book was called A Dweller on Two Planets. It was written back in the 1880s, by Frederick S. Oliver, and was apparently the forerunner to all those books dealing with New Age mysticism. Oliver claimed to be channeling, through the process of visions and “automatic writing,” the words of an ancient spirit named Phylo the Tibetan. Phylo had lived in the city of Atlantis, centuries before, and he had many stories to tell about the advanced Atlantean culture and its parallels to modern life.

  The book, written in florid biblical prose, deals with karma and reincarnation, both subjects that would become central to my mother’s philosophy. Indeed, she traced her interest in spirituality to A Dweller on Two Planets. Why Dad had chosen to give her that particular book was not especially evident, but Mom said he was always an expert at reading people. He could sense what they would respond to; that’s what made him such a good businessman.

  Soon after this, Mom and Dad moved to Hollywood, but when her career started to take off, so did Dad. He didn’t appreciate being known as “Mr. Shirley MacLaine,” and he had business back in Japan, so they decided to live apart.

  Their separateness, and their understanding that they would have an “open marriage,” did not diminish in any sense Mom’s love for my father. I would say she loved him as deeply as anyone in her life. Dad was her true soul mate, even though they lived in different countries for almost their entire marriage.

  • • •

  MY first real memory is of flying across the Pacific Ocean. I can’t say for certain if I’m remembering that very first trip or a subsequent flight, because I did shuttle back and forth several times to visit my mom in L.A. (probably stealing into town under cover of dark, so that those darn kidnappers wouldn’t notice).

  The experience of the flight itself is still very vivid to me. The airline was Northwest Orient, it was a propeller plane, and it took about three days in all. We would make stopovers to refuel on several Pacific islands—Wake, Guam. I remember walking the beach at Wake Island, enjoying the warm ocean breeze, marveling at the exotic seashells, and feeling that I had entered some heavenly realm. There was no sign at all of the horrific toll the war had exacted on these blood-soaked sands just fifteen years earlier.

  Then back on the plane. In those days there were beds on the plane, bunk-style, for long flights. They strapped you in with seat belts when you went to sleep. This was also before they had movies on airplanes—which was before they had individual TV screens, which was before they phased everything out so that we’re back where we started—so you had to provide your own entertainment.

  In my case, that meant singing. I would sing for everybody on the plane. It sounds obnoxious now—if a young child started singing and dancing up the aisles nowadays, you’d have more than one passenger deploying the escape chute. Back in the 1950s, though, it must have seemed charming and wholesome, and emblematic of the best in American youth.

  There was no one to stop me from performing, anyway. I was flying alone. Without guardians or chaperones. I’m told I was as brave and stalwart a little traveler as you could wish for. Still, there must have been times when I felt lonely and scared, because I remember one of the stewardesses sitting beside me, cradling me in her arms, and rocking me gently for what may have been hours. It wasn’t the last time a complete stranger reached out to rescue me when my own family was nowhere in sight.

  I remember finally landing in Japan, my dad waiting on the tarmac for me, in a sharp business suit, with his rakish Clark Gable mustache, looking for all the world like a movie star. No exaggeration—Dad really had that kind of worldly glamour. He was extremely charming, very warm, and a man’s man, fond of handshaking and backslapping. And the more he drank (which he did, quite a lot), the more charming he got. Life was a big party for him—and I had just been invited to join it.

  I ran up to him now and jumped with delight into his strong arms. I was home! Home in a place where I didn’t know a word of the language. Except for my own name, of course. Sachiko.

  You might wonder, why did I have a Japanese name if I wasn’t actually born in Japan or even of Japanese heritage? Actually, my full name is Stephanie Sachiko Parker. Stephanie is the female version of Steve, my dad’s name. And Sachiko…Well, Dad had a story about that, which he told me as we drove to his house.

  He had been stationed in Japan after the war. Just outside Hiroshima. And there was a little girl who used to hang around right outside the barracks.

  She was about two years old, and she was always playing in this empty lot, all by herself. Her clothes were torn and raggedy, she had snot running from her nose, hair all tangled…She looked totally uncared-for.

  So I asked around, found out she didn’t have any family. Both her parents had died from radiation poisoning. From the bomb.

  Poor little kid was all alone. So I took her into the barracks, and the boys and I sort of adopted her. She was a little cutie; we all were in love with her. So much so, that it got to the point where I decided to adopt her for real. She was going to be my own daughter. I had all the paperwork going, should have been a cinch…

  Then she started getting sick, too. Same radiation poisoning. Poor kid. After a while…she died…

  He took a long beat, measuring the silence.

  Finally: Her name was Sachiko.

  When we got home to our house in the Shibuya section of Tokyo, there was a surprise there waiting for me. Her name was Miki.

  Miki was Dad’s Japanese “friend.” His live-in friend, to be precise. She’d been with my dad for many years already, they had become very comfortable together, and she welcomed my addition to the family unit with all the effusive warmth of a reticulated python. The first moment I walked through the door, she fixed me with a cold, silent glare, equal parts jealousy and icy contempt.

  Miki and Dad had met many years before, at a teahouse. Teahouses are places in Japan where businessmen go to relax, and be entertained by the geishas. They’re not really brothels, as Westerners might imagine. Everything is very proper and civilized. The geishas are treated with the utmost respect. If by chance a spark of interest is struck between two consenting parties, there might be a discreet trip up the staircase, but what went on up there was strictly the business of the participants involved.

  The geishas’ primary function at a teahouse is to provide companionship, attentiveness, and entertainment. They sing, they dance, they serve drinks, they keep the conversation moving. They’re always from very good families, and highly educated—they can usually speak three or four languages. A geisha is classy, sophisticated, and very elegant.

  Miki wasn’t a geisha. She was a maid. She started working at the teahouse when she was a little girl. Indeed, when Dad first met Miki, she was only twelve years old. This was before the war, when my grandfather, whom I never met, had his shipping business in Japan, and Dad was in his twenties, enjoying the life of a dashing overseas adventurer. Dad became friendly with the young Miki, and then, as she matured, he became friendlier. I don’t know when they became lovers, but when Dad moved back to Japan after the war, Miki was waiting for him, and they took up where they’d left off.

  Where they’d left off did not include me in the least. The disparity between Dad and Miki’s lifestyle and mine was pretty stark. They were always off to fancy rest
aurants, off to the theater, off to Dad’s yacht, off to Dad’s private island, off to Hawaii, Italy—just having a hell of a time for themselves.

  Mom, it should be noted, knew about Miki. As I said, she and Dad had an open marriage, and were perfectly accepting of each other’s affairs. However, Mom believed that that was all it was—an affair, one of my father’s little dalliances. She didn’t suspect that Miki was, for all intents and purposes, Dad’s other wife. The one he had all the fun with.

  While Dad and Miki were out playing, I wasn’t completely neglected. I had a governess, Eguchi-san, who looked after me and instilled in me all the virtues of Japanese womanhood: meekness, humility, subservience.

  Eguchi-san was not an attractive woman, by any means. As I recall her, she looked sort of like a toad—or rather, to give her the eminence she deserved, a bullfrog. She was short, dumpy, hunched, and round-shouldered, and her wrinkled, bumpy face was perfectly consonant with the rest of her amphibious aspect. She was also very old. At least she seemed very old to me.

  “Remember, Sachiko-san,” she would say, with the wisdom of the ages rattling around in her creaky voice, “the stake that sticks out will get hammered down.” She was fond of these ancient Japanese maxims that encapsulated the whole of life experience in a few well-chosen words.

  “A frog in a well knows nothing of the sea.”

  “If you chase two hares, you will never catch one.”

  “Never, never gossip about people, or their shadows will follow you forever.”

  I adored her. She wasn’t in any sense warm or cuddly. An extremely traditional and strict governess, she considered all rules sacrosanct and not to be transgressed. This gave me a very deep and precious sense of security. I knew where I stood with her. She never kissed me, never hugged me, but she didn’t have to. I knew she loved me.

  And I knew she hated Miki. She never said as much, but I could tell. Eguchi-san similarly sensed my unspoken enmity toward Miki, and that cemented a very powerful bond between us.

  The trouble was, Eguchi-san was there only during the day, between nine and six. At night, when Dad and Miki were out nightclubbing, I had to fend for myself.

  How does a lonely little American girl entertain herself in an empty Tokyo house? Well, I ate lemons. There were always plenty of lemons in the refrigerator, and every night I would eat one, or two. There was something about the pretty yellow color and the lemony smell and the sour taste that was utterly comforting to me. So I ate lemon after lemon after lemon. Years later, whenever I went to the dentist, he would ask me why I had no enamel left on my teeth.

  I don’t remember what else I did to amuse myself, but I got through the evenings somehow. These weren’t unhappy times for me, necessarily, because I didn’t know anything else, and I did have some company: our dog, Taiho, a magnificent Akita husky named for a champion sumo wrestler. I adored him, and cuddled with him every night—we needed each other.

  I loved Japan, I truly did. I wouldn’t have traded my childhood there for anyplace else in the world. It’s a land of breathtaking wonder, and quiet serenity. The majesty of the mountains to the north. The spare simplicity of a rock garden. The opulent bursts of cherry blossoms in the spring.

  My own home was a magical melding of East and West. The house was ranch-style, and most of the rooms were Westernized. In the living room, there was a raised tatami platform, which I would turn into a stage. I would happily perform for guests, singing and dancing and soaking up their applause. There was also a traditional Japanese bath; my dad loved to soak in it, and I would always have to bring him a sake or scotch to accompany his relaxation.

  The backyard of the house was my special place, a dreamlike little world that filled me with enchantment. Each stone and bush, in its size and placement, had meaning. There was a koi pond, stocked with the beautiful expensive fish; some of the koi were almost a hundred years old. A stream flowed down a gentle incline, and in a corner of the yard was a beautiful stone fountain, cut from a boulder, with a bamboo trough feeding the water into the basin, which would fill up and spill over into the stream.

  The centerpiece of the yard was a spectacular cherry blossom tree. I would climb that tree up to one particular branch, high above, and sit there for hours and hours, lost in my own world. The stream would be running just below me, and the pond was to my side, where I could look down and see the fish. I don’t know what I thought about when I was up there all those hours. I was just there. The tree was my friend. I would talk to it. It was something I could count on.

  Eguchi-san took me often to the museums in Tokyo. She was a great lover of the arts, and wanted to introduce me to every aspect of Japanese culture. She would take me anywhere, at any time, in search of an exhibit or a presentation. She taught me how to paint, how to dress, how to arrange flowers. Every moment of life was informed by art. “This is your culture, Sachiko-san,” she would say, ignoring the fact that it wasn’t my culture at all. “It is who you are.”

  At the museum, there were watercolors and sumi ink paintings from various periods, some hundreds of years old. We stopped before a landscape, a house beneath a mountain. Eguchi-san pointed out a single brushstroke on the canvas. “That is the difference between beauty and nonbeauty,” she declared with great authority.

  We came upon another painting, which seemed oddly unfinished—a purplish burst of flowers in one corner, and the rest of the canvas empty.

  Eguchi-san sighed with pleasure. “The emptiness is what makes the painting full.”

  I marveled now at a painting of a cherry blossom tree by a river. Nothing more—simple and elegant. It had been painted some six hundred years before, but was still vibrant with life. “It’s so beautiful!”

  Eguchi-san studied the plaque beside the painting thoughtfully. “Come. Let’s go,” she said, taking my hand.

  “Where?”

  The next thing I knew, we were on a train, heading north into the country. I was hungry, so Eguchi-san took a clementine from her pocket. When I reached for it, she held it back: there was an art to the eating of a clementine, as in all things, and it had to be observed.

  Eguchi-san stripped the rind from the clementine, piece by piece, never hurrying. Then she slowly, carefully punctured the inner skin at the top and peeled the fruit down on the sides, so that the sections opened up like a flower. She held out the flowering clementine in the palm of her hand, and I dug into the juicy flesh. Somehow the slow, patient ritual had lent a febrile intensity to the experience. I devoured the clementine in gulps.

  We got off the train at a country town, Echigo-Yuzawa. We walked down the road, Eguchi-san hobbling along on her cane unhurriedly. “Eguchi-san,” I wondered, “do you know this town? Have you been here before?

  “No.”

  I grew a little worried. “Do you know where we’re going?”

  She shrugged, as if to say, “No. But yes.”

  Before long, the road turned along a river. We walked along the river, and as we turned a bend we suddenly came upon it: the scene from the painting. There it was, the very same tableau, everything still there, just as the artist had seen it so long ago—the cherry blossom tree, the blue sky, and the river. All unchanged.

  “Six hundred years,” said Eguchi-san.

  • • •

  WITHIN three months of arriving in Tokyo, I was speaking Japanese better than I could speak English. In a way, it was my first language. Nevertheless, I felt uncomfortable and out of place at Nishi Machi, the International School that I attended. It may have been because Eguchi-san made me wear seven pairs of brown underpants every day—one on top of the next. This had something to do with her deeply held religious beliefs. It appears that the number seven and the color brown are both considered lucky in certain strains of Shintoism. Still, on hot days, I would have traded some of that luck for a little more ventilation. Using the bathroom was a strategic nightmare.

  Nobody actually sells brown underwear. It’s probably the one color in underwear you�
��d like to avoid. So Eguchi-san would have to create brown underwear, by dyeing my white underwear. She’d get a big pot of water, boil it up, and unwrap these cakes of brown dye. I can still hear that crinkly unwrapping sound now—not as glamorous an evocation as Proust’s madeleines perhaps, but just as potent. Then Eguchi-san would mix the dye in the water, drop in the pairs of panties—more like granny pants, to be honest—stir the mix, and voilà! Instant nerd wardrobe.

  You don’t know what self-conscious is until you’ve walked around school with seven pairs of brown granny pants under your skirt. The slightest gust of wind and I would have had to commit hara-kiri to save face.

  I was extremely shy as it was, and I did my best to fit in unobtrusively with the other kids in the class. There was one girl, however, Yuki, who upended this strategy. She was kind of a tough girl, aggressive and self-confident. I just didn’t get along with her, and I avoided her as much as I could.

  This wasn’t easy. Dad and Yuki’s mother were acquaintances, and there were many visits between our home and theirs. Somehow it came to be accepted that Yuki and I would be playmates. This arrangement did not come naturally to either of us; it was forced upon us, and we both bridled at the indignity.

  In any comparison between Yuki and me, I always came off the worse. Yuki was prettier, Yuki was more confident, Yuki was more athletic. And Yuki was smart. A very good student. I was not. In fact, I was a very bad student.

  You could blame the cultural divide, I suppose, but I believe my dad had something to do with it. You know how some parents are overly supportive, filling their kids with overbearing self-confidence? Dad took a different approach. He had a special nickname for me: the Idiot.

  “Here comes the Idiot!” he’d say when I walked in the door. “The Idiot’s home!”