Hollywood: Mr. Parker's Geisha

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The new geisha was a trifle tall—6 ft. 1 from zoris to lacquered wig—and during dinner one of her contact lenses popped into the noodles. This left one eye brown and the other blue, but the Japanese businessmen at Kyoto's Club Osome were captivated. After a few fan flutters and giggles masked by tapered fingers, she left them and tottered back to her own table with tiny, toe-in steps of studied helplessness. To her friends she murmured, "Hey, I got a job. This company president said I should meet him later."

The girl beneath the wig, rice powder and rubber eyelids was Hollywood's Shirley MacLaine, the rowdy, redheaded comedienne (CanCan, The Apartment) whose behavior, both on and off screen, is more gusher than geisha. She downed her sake like a longshoreman and sneezed into the hot towels. But in three strenuous days last week, she became a creditable novice at the famed Gion geisha school. The reason she is pretending to be a geisha is that she has a role in a movie in which she will portray an American actress pretending to be a geisha. And the reason she has the role is that her husband Steve Parker is producing the movie as a sort of byproduct of one of Hollywood's oddest marriages.

Parker's position is, more or less, that he loves his wife but oh you Kyoto—he spends most of his time in Japan, making documentaries or assembling Japanese vaudeville shows. They see each other three or four times a year, and to anyone who fails to grasp Japan's attractions as against Shirley's, she staunchly defends the arrangement: "If they don't understand, that's their problem." Understanding will scarcely be helped by the movie, My Geisha, although Scriptwriter Norman Krasna says he based it on real life—all about a star's husband (played by Yves Montand) who wants to make it on his own in Japan. Deadpans Shirley: "I've got to be good in this picture, or I'll make my husband look like a schnook."