At 90 years old, veteran actor and Oscar-winner Shirley MacLaine was in a spicy mood.Looking through photographs from her long career, captured mostly in black and white, she remarked, "Where are the nude ones?"Of one picture of her seated on the hood of a Cadillac on the Paramount lot, she said, "Here, I'm just trying to be coy, on purpose.
Jesus.What a jerk!"And another: "Oh, there I wanted to see how my legs photographed." They photographed well! "Well, I was born with good legs," she admitted.
MacLaine always had a seductive spark.She was a pixie-haired triple-threat – singer, dancer and actor.
She could turn every well-known head in Hollywood, and then some, like Dean Martin, whom she called the funniest person she ever met.She says she had a crush on him, but it never developed romantically: "No! I sort of was afraid if I got that close, he would be less funny," she said.
"And I think the humor meant more to me." Her picture of that love-not-to-be, along with hundreds of others, from fellow Rat Packers to politicians, once adorned MacLaine's home in Santa Fe.She called it her "Wall of Life." "I just started filling an empty wall, and loved it," she said.
She just finished organizing that wall of life into a captioned photographic memoir, called, "The Wall of Life." It starts where she did, growing up in Virginia, the daughter of two educators and the older sister of would-be actor and Oscar-winning director Warren Beatty."He was a little baby pup, and I took care of him and watched out for him," MacLaine said.While Warren waited until college to go into acting, Shirley changed her last name to her middle name, and danced her way to New York, even before graduating from high school.
She credits everything to two teachers who offered a bit of prophetic advice: "I remember the day they sat me down and told me I have too much expression in my dancing.I might want to think about acting." As the story goes, MacL...