Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 21, 1994 TAG: 9403190108
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: EXTRA-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KAREN DE WITT NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: MALIBU, CALIF. LENGTH: Long
"To me, it's like we're coming to the end of this millennium," MacLaine says in her reasonable, woman-next-door manner. The red-haired, 59-year-old actress pops a tiny marshmallow from her fruit salad into her mouth.
It is one of those perfect California winter days, the kind that make Easterners think about living here despite natural disasters and mystical thinkers. The air is blue. The sun sparkles on the waves off the Pacific Coast Highway. The bougainvilleas are dazzling.
"We're coming to the end of what is really based on the alignment of the planets," MacLaine continues. "You can see it in all these weather changes. You can see it in human behavior becoming more erratic and bizarre. You're bound to look into yourself and say: What's going on here? Why does this all seem like a science fiction movie? Why does the world seem like its having a nervous breakdown?"
MacLaine, who has written seven books about reincarnation and psychic communication, has made it very clear at the outset of this interview that she does not want to be identified with kookiness. But since the 1983 publication of her best-selling "Out on a Limb," in which she described her reincarnations and out-of-body experiences, her name will be forever linked to a certain brand of mysticism.
The reason she is submitting to a barrage of journalistic intrusions over this lunch is to promote her latest movie, "Guarding Tess," in which she plays an irascible presidential widow who drives her Secret Service agents crazy. The movie, which opened to favorable notices, is No. 1 at the box office last week.
But there is no escaping the shallow trays filled with psychic crystals scattered about the apartment or the beachfront doormat that says "Welcome to UFOs and their crews."
People don't need to agree with her particular spiritual stance (she points out that her philosophical outlook is almost mainstream now with Hillary Rodham Clinton talking about a spiritual need to do her work and Bill Moyers dedicating whole television series to alternative medicine), she just thinks it cynical to ridicule her beliefs.
It is, she says, "tacky, tacky, tacky" when people - specifically journalists - make those metaphysical comparisons about her work.
"When a person reviews one of my movies or my show, I really think it is tacky, tacky journalism to make a metaphysical joke about whatever I've done in my theatrical work," she says. "The `I wonder what incarnation this is that she thought whe was playing?' or `She played it like it was from one of her old Egyptian lives.' "
Her neighborhood is upscale, but hardly star-powered. Her house doesn't stand out from the rows of two-storied beachfront homes whose entrances face an unremarkable street. It is a dun-colored apartment building with a Chinese-red metal gate. Behind the gate is a patio anchored by an arched Oriental bridge, again red, and a mass of evergreens.
MacLaine owns the building of six apartments, which she built almost 40 years ago. She lives in one of the second-floor suites behind a door flanked by wind chimes that nod in the breeze. She lived here with Steve Parker, when they were married, and, she adds, "many men."
She now dates Andrew Peacock, the former foreign minister of Australia. Distance is no problem, she says: "I find myself preferring relationships with men that give me a lot of space. We've been friends for years. He comes here. We travel quite a bit together. We see each other more than you would imagine.
"It's not enough, but it's all right. I don't need to be in constant attendance and neither does he."
The apartment is sparse, beige-carpeted and, by Hollywood standards, modest. But it has a wide view of the Pacific. Polished red driftwood furniture dominates the room. Nearby tables hold pictures of MacLaine at various stages in her career; of her and her brother, Warren Beatty; their parents; of friends like Jack Nicholson and Frank Sinatra; of her daughter, Stephanie Sachiko; of her godchildren; of the dalai lama, and of Stephen Hawking, the Cambridge University cosmologist who has Lou Gehrig's disease and can communicate only through a computer.
"Steven Hawking," she says. "I just love that man because he's had to live in his own universe, and from that extraordinary space within himself he is helping us understand the secrets of the outer universe." The two were introduced 10 years ago by their mutual editor at Bantam Books and have been friends ever since.
Despite a reputation for vivaciousness, she is smooth, unruffled, as if moving on casters. And in all the sleepy beige of the room there are only two bright spots: MacLaine's coral-colored hair and a bouquet of bright pink roses and tulips. She is easy over lunch, scrupulously explaining what is in the fruit salad.
Is this the regular regimen of the star?
"Nah," she says. "I love fruit, but I'd just as soon eat a piece of chocolate cake."
MacLaine is lithe and firm and flexible. "I've learned to eat what I want, and once I did that, I started eating better," she says.
But enough of that, she says. This is a lunch to talk up MacLaine's latest picture, and so she gamely throws herself into its promotion.
"What goes on with people who are now out of power, who feel that their privacy is being invaded at every juncture: I just love the frustration and humor in that," she says of her character, Tess Carlisle.
MacLaine has spent four decades in the movie business, playing roles like that of the vulnerable waif in "The Apartment" (1960) to the smart-mouthed hooker in "Irma La Douce" (1963) and, in more recent years, a series of eccentric seniors like the cantankerous Aurora Greenway of "Terms of Endearment," the 1983 film that brought her an Academy Award. She will reprise the role in a planned remake, "Evening Star."
Her last half-dozen movies have featured her playing irascible but lovable women of what she calls "an indeterminate age." She says she has always found playing older women interesting because they have "so much wisdom, the parts are richer." But there is also a slight irritation with the limitations of these roles.
"They sent me the script, which said Tess Carlisle, 75, and I thought: Should I be insulted or should I realize that this is a compliment as long as I can see the gold under here?" MacLaine says. "So I made one change in the script as I read through the whole thing. I just went back and where it said Tess Carlisle, 75, I put Tess Carlisle, 57, and didn't change another damn thing."
What MacLaine longs for - as what 40-plus woman does not - is a film that would portray a woman of a certain age as vital, dynamic, sexy. "If they would only write for someone over 45 a love story," she says.
She adds that she takes the jokes about her beliefs with a grain of salt as long as they are not connected with her creative work. Later that day in an appearance on the "Tonight" show, when Jay Leno congratulates her on her 60 years on the planet, she laughs, "Don't you mean 4,000?"
She explains her attitude: "A sense of humor is a good thing to help carry you through, especially if you wonder whether this is all there is."
And is this all there is?
"I don't think so," she says. "I live it like this is all there is because this is the only time I'll be this.
"But I don't believe in what the Indians and the Buddhists call transmigration of souls. I don't believe that I was an ant."
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by CNB