My Lucky Stars: A Hollywood Memoir by Shirley MacLaine
© Michelle Troutman
1995
ISBN #: 0-553-57233-4
$6.99, paperback
378 pages, illustrations
In previous books (Dancing in the Light, It's All in the Playing, etc.) Shirley MacLaine has chronicled her many past incarnations. In My Lucky Stars she comes down to earth to document her professional lives, from her showbiz start as a dancer to acting and political activism. Between those pursuits she began writing (her first book "Don't Fall off the Mountain" was published in 1970) and developed an interest in metaphysics.
She has described her childhood and dancing training before so she doesn't leave much space for it this time. Her father was a musician and her mother taught theater -- she believes her parents' unfulfilled ambitions influenced her and her brother Warren Beatty to pursue acting.
The book starts with MacLaine's experiences working alongside Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis on her second movie, Artists and Models (1955), as the comedic duo's showbiz partnership neared an end. She saw Lewis as a control freak, but Martin often adopted a nonchalant attitude, preferring acting to directing or writing. MacLaine offers good insight into how Martin's comic drinking persona came to life after he struggled to rebuild his career; often the drink he carried around was really apple juice. Her association with the Rat Pack and members Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra began when they starred in Some Came Running (1958). She and Sinatra toured together in 1992, and he impressed her with his lively lifestyle. In his seventies he still stayed up late, leaving town the same night of a performance, going to a restaurant, then a piano bar. He also continued to play pranks on his friends. She recalls seeing him putting snacks in fellow plane passengers' pockets and gumdrops in people's shoes while they were asleep. She speculates on his connection with the mob and his friend, mobster Sam Giancana, whom she feared -- she relates an odd incident in which Giancana twisted her arm behind her back when she wouldn't try his pasta.
Among the other friends and co-workers she shares the spotlight with is choreographer Bob Fosse. She credits him for her big break in the comedy musical Pajama Game; in return, she brought him to Hollywood to direct her in Sweet Charity (1969). She recounts the idea for his movie All That Jazz (1979) came from a dream that he was dying (he was then in the hospital for a heart attack). She takes credit for nudging the project to life. According to her account, she suggested he make a movie about the dream. Later, she and her
