The Best Year Of Her Lives

• Share

(6 of 10)

subtle level, a vaudeville act. It is no wonder that Warren and I went into show business." Shirley recalls that she and her brother were well behaved at home, scamps once they got past the confines of the yard. "We used to empty garbage pails on people's front porches," she says. "I was a tomboy until I realized that getting punched in the boobs didn't feel too good."

But she never stopped studying dance, and her first heartbreak in life came when she grew too tall for the title role in the Washington School of Ballet production of Cinderella. On the advice of her teachers, Shirley at 16 shifted to musical comedy and traveled to New York City where she tried out for a production of Oklahoma! that toured the boroughs. She was cast as the center postcard girl in the ballet by a director who addressed her as, "Hey! You with the legs."

At summer's end, Composer Richard Rodgers and Lyricist Oscar Hammerstein offered her a job in the show's London production, but her father talked her into coming home to finish school. Two years later, in 1952, she moved back to Manhattan and was hired to perform in an industrial show for Servel appliances (on tour through the South, she pirouetted around an ice maker) and then for the Broadway chorus of Me and Juliet.

Barely 20, working as the understudy to Carol Haney in Pajama Game, she had her chance to live the theater's most enduring legend: Haney was injured, and MacLaine went out a chorus girl and came back a star. Producer Hal Walk's was in the audience the night MacLaine first stepped in and soon signed her to a multiyear movie contract. Within months she had been cast in her first picture, Alfred Hitchcock's The Trouble with Harry (now playing around the country in re-release). By 1969 she was one of Hollywood's highest paid stars, commanding a salary of $800,000 or more a picture.

Shirley at first reacted to her fame with delight and a little panic: "I felt I needed protection, some grounding." In 1954 she married a fellow actor and would-be producer, Steve Parker. She was 20, he 32. They moved from New York to Los Angeles—a city that Parker detests to this day—and the marriage had troubles almost from the start. "Shirley had this drive, this push," Parker recalls. "She didn't want to be surrounded by a white picket fence. I would be wanting to putter around in the kitchen, and she wanted to be at the studio." Says MacLaine: "Steve was very supportive, but he just didn't want to be known as Mr. MacLaine. From day one, he talked of going to Japan, where he had spent some time."

After a year, Parker left for Tokyo, where he produced shows and movies (he is now a businessman there), and Shirley came on visits. Their daughter, Stephanie Sachiko, was born in 1956. According to MacLaine, she and Parker had an understanding that each was free to have other relationships; indeed, for a time in the '70s, she tried "promiscuity—sex for sex's sake—because I believed it would be liberating for women, who had been subjected to a double standard. But there was just not enough communication." MacLaine "gradually came to think of Steve as an old friend, not a husband." MacLaine has acknowledged that she remained Parker's wife until a 1982 divorce in part to keep