Hers is the quintessential Broadway story: Acclaimed actress Carol Haney is chosen to star in George Abbott's "The Pajama Game" in 1954. A 20-year-old chorus kid named Shirley MacLaine is signed as her understudy. A week after the opening, Haney breaks her ankle. A quaking MacLaine goes on, and that night - of course - movie producer Hal Wallis is in the audience. He goes backstage and tells MacLaine he's going to make her a movie star.
And he did.But wait, there's more. Flash back to an earlier life.
MacLaine, a tall, 16-year-old ballerina with the Washington School of Ballet, is dancing the Fairy Godmother in the Christmas production of "Cinderella." Before the curtain opens, she does a little warmup showboating: a couple of grands jetes across the stage. Suddenly, she hears a snap and feels a stab of pain in her right ankle (it was broken, she found out later). No matter, she decides, she WILL dance. She pulls her toe-shoe ribbon into a constricting support around her ankle.
And she danced.
Somewhere in there is a kind of circular irony. And maybe more than that.
"I'd call it destiny," mused MacLaine, touring with her one-woman show. "Like, no matter what you do, this is going to happen. I think that's why I've been so respectful of this kind of phenomenon."
MacLaine is referring, of course, to her much-publicized belief in and exploration of reincarnation and other spiritual theories. Her writing, lectures and video, as well as the much-lambasted 1987 television version of her book "Out on a Limb," in which she re-created her spiritual journey for the cameras, have earned her both admiration and disdain. Some believe she's curious and courageous; others, that she's a New Age nut case.
"It's such an adventure to explore these unseen things," she said in a phone conversation from California, where she's just wrapping the film "Guarding Tess" with Nicholas Cage. "What I'm getting a kick out of is that it's now so much in the mainstream that I seem old-fashioned."
Well, hardly. It's true that MacLaine has moved, quite successfully, into middle-aged character parts: Aurora Greenway in 1984's "Terms of Endearment" (she finally won an Oscar for that one and is about to film the sequel, "Evening Star"), the flamboyantly dumpy title character in 1987's "Madame Sousatska," the irascible Ouiser in 1989's "Steel Magnolias."
"There's a definite arc to my career," she said a year ago. "I mean, I used to go get married in films. Now, I die."
Still, her wide-ranging intelligence and diverse artistic enterprises (she writes - seven books to date; she acts in movies; she trots out her song-and-dance stage show whenever she has the time; and she's among the pithiest of talk-show guests, having called David Letterman, on national TV, a seven-letter word that's a profane synonym for his posterior) are the hallmarks of a woman as interested in what's new as in ancient civilizations.
They also reveal a woman of strong opinion, and in fact, MacLaine is legendary for her steel will. To get in shape for her song-and-dance tour after deliberately packing on 25 pounds for "Madame Sousatska," MacLaine spent several weeks following a daily regimen that would make Stallone wince - arising each morning at 6 to spend the day mountain climbing and hiking, doing aerobics and weight-lifting, jogging and dancing.
Amazingly, MacLaine will turn 60 in April. "Amazingly" because, watching her onstage, with her cropped red hair and lithe dancer's legs, she doesn't look much different from the gamine who captivated the world in such movies as "The Apartment," "Sweet Charity," "Irma La Douce" and "Can-Can."
MacLaine was born Shirley MacLean Beaty on April 24, 1934, in Richmond, Va. She began dancing at 2 1/2, when her mother enrolled her in ballet to strengthen her weak ankles, and she has never stopped.
Her father, Ira, was an educator, real-estate salesman and frustrated musician; mother Kathlyn, a housewife who might have been an actress but settled instead for pushing her children toward stardom. And she succeeded. MacLaine's younger brother, Warren, later changed the spelling of the family name to become Warren Beatty.
"I believe the need to be on top of the profession was a way of continuing to act out my parents' unfulfilled dreams, particularly my mother's," MacLaine wrote in her 1991 book "Dance While You Can." "She had always wanted what I now had . . . Our accomplishments were motivated by her burning desire to see us succeed."
It is an apt motivation, perhaps, for one who believes in connectedness to past lives and destiny. You might further surmise that, as a believer in reincarnation, MacLaine would naturally be sanguine about moving into the late innings of this life. And it's true. But experience also has brought peace of mind.
"I like to think that time moves through me. I've wondered why I don't have so many of these anxieties that a lot of friends of mine have, and I think it's because I've approached it from that point of view," she said. "There's so much that accompanies experience, which is the way I'd like to look at and define aging. The stuff that you've realized with the aging process is what you were after in the first place. So I know I wouldn't like to go back again."
More pragmatically, she observed with a laugh, "I can kick as high but not as long. I don't know what I was kicking as long for in the first place!"
She is, and always will be, she said, a dancer - despite a 1990 knee injury that required surgery then and daily exercises today simply to be able to walk properly.