SHIRLEY MACLAINE

Shirley MacLaine is an actor, dancer, and author, and the winner of the Academy Award, the Kennedy Center Honors, and the AFI Life Achievement Award from the American Film Institute. MacLaine is known for her New Age beliefs and has written extensively about her experiences in past lives. She campaigned for Robert Kennedy in 1968 and for George McGovern in 1972.

One of my early memories is of being in the back room of a big event with Shirley MacLaine, I must have been four or five. I was playing with her row stretch rhinestone bracelet, and she took it off and gave it to me. I kept that bracelet for years, and it always made me feel a special closeness to her. She was friends with my parents in those days.

Shirley MacLaine: We were in Los Angeles mostly and I think Vegas, too. We would meet up with the Rat Pack—Peter Lawford, Sammy Davis Jr., Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Joey Bishop, backstage after a show or go out to a club. Bobby was intensely relaxed. You would never say he was completely relaxed. Even his fun-loving part was intense. But he was funny, he was very, very quick, bright, and witty. And very aware. I never saw him drink. Usually when we were at parties everybody else was pretty soused, but Bobby wasn’t.

KK: You introduced Daddy at the Sports Arena in downtown Los Angeles in 1968. It was a spectacular lineup with Sonny and Cher, Jerry Lewis, Carol Channing, Joey Bishop, Henry Mancini, Angie Dickinson, Alan King, Andy Williams, Mahalia Jackson, Gene Kelly, the Byrds, and even Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in his yellow Rolls-Royce, along with a warm-up band that sang “This Man Is Your Man” to the tune of “This Land Is Your Land.” There were fifteen thousand fans in the arena and hundreds more spilled onto the street.

SM: The crowds adored him. I was with him and Rosey Grier, who was his bodyguard quite a bit of the time in California.

KK: Rosey was a giant, and a member of the Los Angeles Rams’ “Fearsome Foursome,” the most dominant defensive line of their era. But off the field, Rosey was gentle and used to teach needlepoint.

How did you meet Daddy?

SM: Gosh, it was so long ago, I don’t recall. I remember past lives, so you would think I’d have an easier time remembering this one… I think I met him with Jack, maybe through John Lewis.

Earlier, John had arranged for me to stay at Unita Blackwell’s home in Mississippi.

KK: Unita was the SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] voter-registration organizer there, and when her son and three hundred other students were suspended for wearing SNCC buttons, Unita sued the county, the case went to the Supreme Court, and the county was forced to desegregate the schools. Blackwell v. Issaquena is a seminal civil rights case and she is a hero of the civil rights movement.

SM: I met Stokely Carmichael and some of the really explosive black lefties at her home. It looked like the Klan knew there was a white woman in the house and they burned a cross on the front lawn. When that happened, I was just an observer, basically. Unita had been through all that.

KK: What did you do?

SM: There wasn’t anything you could do about it, actually.

They lit it up and ran away. And it was quite a distance from the house.

Later, in 1973, I invited Unita to come with me on my woman’s delegation trip to China.

KK: Wait, Nixon only opened diplomatic ties with China in 1972. Tourism didn’t really start until years later. How did you get visas?

SM: Yes, I’ll tell you who got me in with the Chinese: the shah of Iran.

Can you believe that? The Iranians loved films.

KK: You are just full of surprises. When you were a kid you played baseball on an all-boys team—and you held the record for most home runs.

SM: Oh, you know, I was a tomboy and I did all the stuff that the boys did, and I beat up any boy who beat up a smaller boy.

KK: What was that like, breaking that barrier?

SM: I didn’t see it as a barrier, I saw them as stupid. I don’t know how that happened. I’ve always been very comfortable with the yin and the yang of myself, let’s put it that way.

KK: How would you describe who Robert Kennedy was?

SM: Basically, someone who terrifies bad people. But also I loved the relationship that he had with his brother, the president. And the way they worked together.

KK: Why does he matter, fifty years later?

SM: Good question. Especially asking me that today. Did you see what’s going on? What the fuck is going on?