24. Shirley, the Coneheads, and Me, You're on an Airplane

24 Shirley, the Coneheads, and Me

Shirley MacLaine told me about an affair she once had with one of her drivers. I don’t remember the details—only that it was night and he was taking her home from work. Sometimes it gets plain lonely out there on the road, with no one to go home to, and no home to go home to, just some not-so-fabulous hotel in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, where birds were dropping dead from the West Nile virus on the hot sidewalks. I loved it there, though.

This was in 2002, when I met Shirley on the set of a TV movie called Hell on Heels: The Battle of Mary Kay. She played Mary Kay Ash, the cosmetics tycoon, and I played Jinger Heath, her nemesis. Our first shot together was a fantasy scene in which Shirley was being rushed to a hospital in an ambulance while she was having a nightmare about me. I appeared over her head, staring at her, and she scream-laughed, “You look JUST LIKE Joan Collins!” And in the fake ambulance, she said her shaman told her that her soul partner would come when she was in her nineties. She also said, “It’s all going to change, you’ll see,” and oh, my good Lord, it really truly has!

One morning, she camped out on the mound of grass in front of the hotel, wearing her white Z-CoiL tennis shoes and a large straw sun hat. She swatted the mosquitos (called “birds” by the locals) and was chilling out with her friend Brie before getting picked up for work. Brie’s husband was the real Indiana Jones. They’d met Steven Spielberg in the eighties through Shirley over in Santa Fe, New Mexico—new age country for the wealthy—where some members of Hollywood’s elite had bought houses to hunker down for the end of the world, which was coming up in May 2003, and then again in December 2012. Now that that’s all over, we can wait for the aliens.

So yes, we talked about the Mayan calendar and Atlantis, and yes, I told Shirley how much I loved Out on a Limb, and that she inspired the kind of woman I’d wanted to become. I have yet to climb Machu Picchu, but with the right intentions, I can eat, pray, and shove my way through any karmically riddled countryside.

One day in the makeup trailer, I was sitting in the hair chair with an entire box of hot rollers in my hair. Shirley picked up her own box and pulled out a wig. “These are just as good, if not better, than the expensive kind,” she said. I gave the approving look of a woman who loves a bargain, nodding my head, and she said it was $16. Then she plopped it on her head and said, “Honestly, Parker, I don’t know why you bother,” and stepped out of the trailer, for effect.

I wanted to impress her, so one morning, in her trailer, I told her my UFO story, which I knew she’d dig. It begins like this: When I was little, around three, I had nightmares about cone-headed aliens, and I’d wake up pounding my head against the wall. This was in our first house, “the little house,” before we moved to “the white house” in Monroe. In the dream, I’d be on a table in the garage, getting prodded in my side by a wand or something, and around five years later, when the Coneheads sketch was on SNL, I remembered that dream.

I did a movie about the Coneheads called The Coneheads. Michelle Burke (from Dazed) was cast as Connie Conehead, and I convinced Lorne Michaels that she needed friends, pitching my best girlfriend, Joey, and me. We both got our SAG rates up 15 percent, and celebrated by drinking Big Gulps of iced coffee from 7-Eleven that were as big as our heads. While shooting, we rode the bus with Ellen DeGeneres and chilled out with Dan Aykroyd, whose brother was a real-life ghostbuster. Dan told tripped-out stories involving multiple dimensions and time travel. I should try to track him down. He’s got great stories and he’d be someone to be stranded on a desert island with.

But yeah, so a few years later, Christopher Guest called Lorne Michaels and asked him if he knew any actresses who could play eighteen and improvise, and Lorne suggested me. “Close encounters of what kind?” you ask.

When I finished my story, Shirley said, “Oh,” unfazed. “Steven believes in UFOs. Lots of us do. Hollywood and the CIA and FBI. It’s all a huge cover-up.” She and Brie had even UFO-hunted together. Fun! I asked Shirley what she thought of my Coneheads dream, and she said, “Oh, honey, there are so many species, too many to count,” and she stepped out of the trailer, for effect.

My friend Craig was with me on that trip and we had an interesting dinner with Shirley and Brie. We were talking karma, showbiz, past lives, love, sex, therapy, and gurus—astrology, Atlantis. Shirley knew a lot about things like reincarnation, and explained it further: that anything in this life could be dated back to something in a past life, so that if we figured out what that connection was, we’d figure out why we had to go through whatever we had to go through, and if we did it right in this lifetime, we probably wouldn’t have to do it again in the next one.

Craig had a story that needed karmic riddling and took center stage. He had a condition called “long face syndrome,” where his jaw grew faster than the rest of his face. When he was sixteen he had to have his mouth wired shut and his chin reconstructed. It was a whole ordeal, to say the least. He couldn’t speak for three months, and on his birthday, his mother blended up brisket and birthday cake, which she fed him through a straw. A great story, which Craig would turn into a book aptly called Why the Long Face?

The next day, Shirley went up to him and said, “I’ve been thinking of your story all night, and what it means. You have so much karma in this lifetime for that to have happened to you, and I just want to know . . .” Pause. “Did all that surgery interfere with your cock-sucking abilities?” And then Craig quipped, “No, because I suck cock like a vegan.” Like he’s not good at “eating meat.” It was an utterly tasteless joke and I stepped out of the trailer, for effect.

Speaking of fruits and vegetables, Shirley had a giant raspberry on the roof of her mouth, some kind of a birthmark. I’ll never forget seeing it when she opened her mouth wide to show us, there on a tiny hump of grass in front of one of the only hotels in Winnipeg. She said that a shaman told her that this raspberry on the roof of her mouth was an indication that she was also a shaman. Then she said it was also great for blow jobs. Ha! Come on! She is one funny lady!

She tooled around with Craig thrift shopping while I was working, and she told him which Frank Sinatra records to get. She spoke about her Rat Pack days, and how Dean Martin—“Dino”—was into her, and how she wasn’t really into him. She was that cool. The one that really pulled at her heart, though, was Robert Mitchum. She said he had the soul of a poet and was into astrology. Hey, when you’ve hung out with the Rat Pack, you can go out on a limb and be as far out as you want.

The last night of work, Craig and I were in my room packing and watching TV when a show about UFOs came on. It was around two in the morning, and there on the screen appeared Brie talking about UFOs. We started screaming, “Oh my God! This is crazy! What are the odds?!” And then, I’m not kidding or making this up: the TV went out—it went to black.

They’re here, everybody. They’re here on this flight.