Between You and Me (29 page)

I didn’t catch up with her until early 1984, when she was basking in the acclaim that had greeted her latest movie, Terms of Endearment.

In that film, she played an eccentric widow and possessive mother whose daughter is dying of cancer, and many critics hailed her performance as the greatest triumph of her career. But that wasn’t the only milestone in her life when I interviewed her shortly before that year’s Academy Awards ceremony. She was a few weeks shy of her fiftieth birthday, and had recently published a controversial book called Out on a Limb, in which she wrote about her belief in reincarnation and extraterrestrial beings. Although I talked to her about Terms of Endearment, I confess I was far more curious about her wacky metaphysics.

W A L L A C E : I’m told that good friends said, “Shirley, for Pete’s sake, don’t write about your karmic destinies.”

M A C L A I N E : It wasn’t for Pete’s sake, it was for Christ’s sake, it was for God’s sake, I mean, on your mother and your friends and everything that is sacred, don’t do this.

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W A L L A C E : Yeah, I mean that—that my daughter was my mother in a prior life and my karmic destinies probably indicate that I used to be a prostitute before, and—and you were a man at one time, and you believe in extraterrestrial beings.

And forgive me for being an old-fashioned—

M A C L A I N E : No, that’s easy, your attitude is easy. It’s very easy to be cynical like you are just now.

W A L L A C E : Skeptical. I reject the word—

M A C L A I N E : Well, it had a panache [sic] of sarcasm in it.

W A L L A C E : Okay, okay.

M A C L A I N E : A large dash of it.

W A L L A C E : Yeah. You really believe that you’ve lived lives before and—

M A C L A I N E : Oh yes, Mike. I don’t— There is no doubt in my mind about it.

W A L L A C E : Uh-huh. And you really believe in extraterrestrials.

Have they— Do they come visit you on the porch? (Reacting to MacLaine’s grimace) “Now you’re being unpleasant, Wallace,” is what you’re saying.

M A C L A I N E : Yes. This is what I was a little afraid of.

W A L L A C E : Hold it!

M A C L A I N E : Now, you don’t have to be that unpleasant. It doesn’t become you, you know? I mean, I’m just speaking of my own experiences and my own desires, and it’s a kind of childlike wonder that could really possibly speculate on other dimensions. What’s wrong with that? Some of I— I mean, we speculate on that dimension every time we pray to God or cross ourselves or kneel down and say, “Help me.”

Our interview ran on 60 Minutes the night before the Hollywood glitterati assembled for their annual gala, at which—as had been

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predicted—MacLaine won her first Oscar. In Terms of Endearment, the feisty widow she portrayed has an affair with her next-door neighbor, a former astronaut played by Jack Nicholson, and she talked about that with her customary candor in her acceptance speech. Directing her gaze at Nicholson, who was seated in the audience, MacLaine thanked him for guiding her through the joys of middle-aged sex.

My relationships with the people I’ve interviewed have varied from one person to another. Much of the time, they didn’t go beyond the interviews. We had our conversations, the pieces built around them were broadcast, and that was it. I never saw them again, or ran into them rarely, and then only by happenstance. On other occasions, the interviews led to more contact that at times evolved into friendships. And that was what happened with Shirley MacLaine.

Yet the chummier we became, the more I intuited that what she had in mind was something more than friendship and her intentions became transparent when she began sending me thoughtful gifts of one kind or another. I remember, in particular, a wonderful cable-knit tennis sweater she bestowed on me. And after I casually mentioned to her that I was fond of ice-cream floats, she began arranging for those confections to be delivered to my office with some regularity. I probably shouldn’t have been surprised by all this attention, because I knew Shirley had a reputation for being attracted to journalists. Back in the days when she was a political activist, she was romantically linked with the columnist Pete Hamill, and before that, she had an affair with Sander Vanocur, who was then a top correspondent for NBC News. But it soon became clear that the design she had for me went beyond a mere fling. She was very close to her mother, who, as a young woman, had given up her dream of becoming a star actress to raise a family, and who then encouraged both Shirley and Warren to pursue careers in show business. Now, these

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many years later, Shirley told me that her mother firmly believed part of her daughter’s karmic destiny was to become the next Mrs. Mike Wallace.

Well!!—as Jack Benny would have put it. Yet I must point out that there was nothing unseemly in any of this. Our flirtation, such as it was, took place in the spring and early summer of 1984. By then Shirley had divorced the businessman who lived in Japan, and my twenty-nine-year marriage to Lorraine had recently come to an end, so each of us was unattached and therefore fair game. Even though we went out a few times, Shirley and I never became intimate. In fact, one of our first dates became a triple date of sorts when we were joined by Mary Yates, who, it turned out, was destined to become the next Mrs. Wallace.

I’m happy to say that my friendship with Shirley has continued to flourish, and to this day she and I remain pals. I also had the pleasure of interviewing her again in 2000, when we did a 60 Minutes update of the story we’d broadcast sixteen years earlier. She had just finished another book about her bizarre reincarnations called The Camino: A Journey of the Spirit, and we talked about some of the men who had been lovers in her current life and in previous existences.

W A L L A C E : You wrote that you had an affair in this life with Olaf Palme.

M A C L A I N E : With—this lifetime, yeah.

W A L L A C E : Yeah. Who was at the time—

M A C L A I N E : Swedish prime minister.

W A L L A C E : Prime minister of Sweden. Who, in a past life, Olaf Palme, was Charlemagne.

M A C L A I N E : Yeah. Well, that’s what it said in my vision.

W A L L A C E : With whom you also had an affair.

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M A C L A I N E : Yes, but one of many.

W A L L A C E : Back when you were a Moorish girl.

M A C L A I N E : That’s right.

W A L L A C E : And you witnessed androgynous people giving birth to androgynous children.

M A C L A I N E : Yes.

W A L L A C E : And you were androgynous.

M A C L A I N E : Yes.

I pointed out that many people, myself included, found her “recollections” preposterous. I asked if it bothered her to be regarded as a

“nutcase.”

“Listen,” she declared, “they said that about Christopher Colum-bus. They certainly said it about Jesus Christ. Ho-ho, they killed him for it. I mean, they say it about everybody who’s innovative. I think I’m innovative. I’m old enough to have earned the right to be innovative and get a big kick out of the people who think I’m a nutcase.”

Just the sort of answer I should have expected from a lady who insists that she had carnal relations with (among others) the first ruler of that vast and ambitious enterprise known as the Holy Roman Empire.

V a n e s s a R e d g r av e

B A C K I N T H E 1 9 6 0 S , W H E N she became vigorously engaged in politics, Shirley MacLaine embraced strong liberal positions on most of the hot-button issues that blazed across that turbulent decade and beyond, well into the 1970s. But her left-wing convictions were

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downright moderate compared to those of a British actress I interviewed in 1979. Even “radical” is probably too mild a term to describe the inflammatory Marxist views of Vanessa Redgrave. In that respect, the American movie star she most closely resembled was not MacLaine but Jane Fonda, and I made the comparison in our 60

Minutes profile of her. Like Fonda, I said in my on-camera open to the story, Redgrave is “an actress who puts her political beliefs up front, before her acting career, and her money where her mouth is.”

In addition to their passionate commitment to left-wing causes, the two actresses had similar pedigrees: Both of them were daughters of renowned actors. In fact, on the night Vanessa was born in 1937, her father, Michael Redgrave, was playing Laertes in a London production of Hamlet that starred Laurence Olivier in the title role. At the curtain call that evening, Olivier proclaimed to the audience,

“Ladies and gentlemen, tonight a great actress has been born.

Laertes has a daughter!”

The daughter of “Laertes” had no trouble fulfilling that prophecy.

Her initial success was on the stage, where, thanks mainly to her work with the prestigious Royal Shakespeare Company in the early 1960s, she became known as one of England’s leading classical actresses. Redgrave then brought her distinctive elegance to a number of movie roles. Her first major film was the 1966 cult classic Morgan, in which she earned an Academy Award nomination for her performance as the ex-wife of a demented artist who goes to extreme lengths to prevent her from marrying another man. Two more Oscar nominations rapidly followed, one for her portrayal of the avant-garde dancer Isadora Duncan in 1968 and the second three years later, when she was cast in the title role of Mary, Queen of Scots.

Along with her growing stature as an actress, Redgrave had acquired a reputationas a political firebrand. One of her first moves in

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that directioncame in1962, whenshe made a controversial visit to Cuba, where, according to rumors at the time, she had an affair with Fidel Castro. By the mid-1970s she had become a fervent Marxist and was devoting more time to public protests than to her acting career.

Still, she managed to keep her politics and artistic life separate until 1977, when the two forces converged in a stormy collision. That was the year she produced and narrated a documentary film called The Palestinian, which was severely critical of Israel and its policies.

That was also the year she played the title role in Julia, in which she costarred with her American soul mate, Jane Fonda. The movie was adapted from an episode in a memoir by Lillian Hellman—the part played by Fonda—and much of it dealt with Hellman’s early struggles to become a writer and her romance with author Dashiell Hammett. The main focus was on Hellman’s longtime friendship with the radiant and mysterious Julia, who, as a member of an anti-Nazi un-derground group in the years leading up to World War II, persuades Hellman to take a perilous train trip from Vienna to Berlin to deliver large sums of money desperately needed to buy freedom for Jews and other victims of Hitler’s oppression.

Redgrave’s performance in Julia earned her a fourth Oscar nomination, but because of her polemical documentary in support of Yasir Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Jewish Defense League launched a campaign to deny her the Academy Award. To its considerable credit, the Hollywood community resisted that pressure, and on the night of the big Oscar bash, she received the stat-uette for Best Supporting Actress. Instead of taking the high road in her acceptance speech, Redgrave lashed out at her antagonists within the Jewish lobby. After thanking her “dear colleagues” in the Academy, she told them, “You should be very proud that in the last few

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weeks you have stood firm and you have refused to be intimidated by the threats of a small bunch of Zionist hoodlums. . . .”

Her intemperate remarks shifted the controversy into a more explosive gear, and fueled my interest in doing a 60 Minutes story on this combative actress. At first she rejected our overtures, but eventually she agreed to be interviewed, and when I talked to her at her home in London in early 1979, Redgrave made it clear that she had no regrets about what she had said at the Oscar ceremony a few months earlier.

R E D G R A V E : Zionism is a brutal, racist ideology, and it is a brutal, racist regime, and it wasn’t built to protect anybody at all except private profit.

W A L L A C E : Is the fact of Israel a conspiracy of Germany and France and the United States and Great Britain and—

R E D G R A V E : Yes.

W A L L A C E : It is?

R E D G R A V E : In a word, yes. It was and is, yes. . . .

W A L L A C E : Why are the Palestinians so interesting to you as a cause, Vanessa? Why not the Cambodians? Why not the Ugandans?

R E D G R A V E : Well, it’s not a case of why not anybody else, but the situation with the Palestinians is unique. They are the only people who have been turned into exile, who don’t have any country at all.

W A L L A C E : The point would be made by Israelis that, first of all, they aren’t the first in history, that, after all, the Jews, who had beenthere two thousand years before, were Palestinians, too.

R E D G R A V E : And why shouldn’t they have a home? But why

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does that mean depriving a whole people of their homes and their land and their rights?

I went on to report that Redgrave’s commitment to the Palestinian cause was just a small part of a grandiose crusade that encompassed the whole world. She was a leading member of something called the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, which, at the time, was the most militant left-wing group in Britain. When I did the story on her, she was one of her party’s candidates for a seat in Parliament, a campaign she had no hope of winning or of even coming close to victory. (When the election returns were counted, the winning Labour candidate had 12,556 votes compared to 394 for Redgrave.) But running for public office ina democratic electionwas merely a sideshow for the Workers’