The Guru: Shirley MacLaine’s Many Lives

“Keep your feet firmly planted on the ground, and your head in the stars.”

Shirley MacLaine never forgot that piece of advice from her mother, Kathlyn. While the Oscar-winning actor and older sister of the legendary Warren Beatty has starred in classics including The Apartment, Steel Magnolias, and Terms of Endearment, she has worn many other hats as well: political activist, world traveler, cosmic teacher, and kooky cultural icon.

MacLaine has written 15 memoirs and metaphysical treatises (including one cookbook), an impressive output filled with humor, candor, and wisdom. Tough as nails but often naively gullible, a teacher with an insatiable thirst for knowledge and a psychologist’s mind, she recounts her love affairs with the likes of Danny Kaye, Yves Montand, and Swedish prime minister Olof Palme (whom she allegedly believes was Charlemagne in a past life).

Perhaps the most entertaining and delightful of her books, My Lucky Stars, recounts her life in Hollywood with a new-age twist. MacLaine seems to have known everyone and experienced everything, whether it be smuggling gifts from Fidel Castro into the Carter White House (to very mixed reactions), feuding with Anthony Hopkins, or being attacked by the mobster Sam Giancana in Vegas, only to be saved by Sammy Davis Jr.

For the reader, MacLaine’s insistence on looking beyond the surface can be overwhelming. She embraces life’s fullness, and its ambiguity as well. For MacLaine, the universe is a place where there are infinite questions, and she wants to ask them all—even if she exhausts those around her in the process. She simply is who she is; take her or leave her. “I never wanted to adopt a mask,” she writes. “I feared that my face would grow into it.”

All the World’s a Stage

Shirley MacLean Beaty was born April 24, 1934, in Richmond, Virginia. Her little brother, Warren, came along three years later. According to MacLaine, the stage was set for the two siblings to pursue stardom—though she’s always circumspect when discussing Warren in her books. Although Ira and Kathlyn raised their children to be outwardly genteel and proper Southerners, the parents were show people with roiling unfulfilled ambitions who dramatically acted out their family psychodramas.

“We were very aware, very early, that we needed to learn how to act in order to get attention,” MacLaine writes in 1995’s My Lucky Stars. “After all, Mother was a teacher of dramatics and a reader of poetry and an actress herself in little theater work. And Dad was a musician, a teacher, and an actor of supremely high standing in the living room. They both had personalities like very subtle vaudevillians; therefore, finding out ‘how it was done’ became a high priority very early in our lives. How else could we compete with them for attention?”