Show Business: The Other Star in the Family

A few hours before his sister Shirley MacLaine won her Oscar, Warren Beatty brought her a gift. Or, rather, he left it at the office of her agent and asked that it be given to her in the car on the way to the ceremony. When she opened it, she started to cry. She recalls, “It was the most caring present I have ever received—very complicated, with many parts, five of which I have figured out the meaning of. It took him months of thought to put it together.” As she tells the story, she starts to sob again. Then she laughs. “I have asked Warren what the other parts mean, but he won’t discuss anything personal. He is not incapable of reaching out, but he has to do it his way.” On hearing that his sister is still so deeply touched by his gesture, Warren grins. “Well, she sent me something nice when I won the Oscar,” he says. A moment later he grabs a spoon and gouges a symbolic boundary line across the table. “As for what goes on between Shirley and me,” he says, “you can safely call it complicated.”

It certainly seems to be. For MacLaine it is perhaps the most intense, enduring, unresolved and potentially explosive relationship in her life. She and Warren, who is three years younger, are intimate but often uneasy with each other. Says Warren: “Families are, after all, individual people, and manners were not invented for nothing.” They have disagreed over Shirley’s outspoken depiction in her books of family matters—including their father’s drinking and his views on race—that Warren feels may be misrepresented and better left unsaid. According to a friend, Shirley also outraged Warren a few years ago by making a joke about his love life on the Oscar telecast. They admire each other’s work, though hints of what sounds like rivalry slip in. MacLaine says she often acted more like an older brother than a sister. Beatty chuckles. Says he: “I’m not going to run with that ball.” Of their common craft, Shirley says wistfully, “Maybe I wanted him to need me more than he did.” Warren says of her book Out on a Limb: “My film Heaven Can Wait was sort of a precursor of what she wrote.”

As children, Shirley and Warren were together a great deal. “We went to the movies all the time,” he says, “and she was also quite an athlete.” Yet they have sharply differing recollections. Shirley depicts her father and mother as conservative and conventional. Warren contends that his parents were implicitly liberal on many matters, and that they raised him and Shirley with “a good, healthy, early feminist point of view.” Warren says it was apparent when Shirley was 16 or 17 that she would succeed in show business, and her swift rise was an influence in his choosing a performing career. When his parents took Warren, then 17, to see Shirley in Pajama Game, he recalls, “I just thought she was wonderful. The realization seemed to come to her in that show that she was more interesting than her techniques as a dancer, about which she had always had a lot of anxieties. She discovered that she could depend on her talent, intelligence and sense of humor and could do anything she wanted.”

Warren praises the on-screen Shirley because “she never came on, even before the feminist revolution took hold, with a lot of fake, superficial, coy, frilly sugar.” Asked to recall a moment when he was especially proud of her, he describes seeing her onstage in Las Vegas. “It was during the period when we were both political activists, and we were not particularly close then. The last time I had seen her, she had let herself go physically. Suddenly—sudden to me, anyway—she was in spectacular condition, with an energy and vitality that I was moved by because she had worked so hard for it.” He praises Shirley’s writing too: “Whether or not you agree with some of the things she comes up with, she is very impressive with all her questions.”

In recent years, the two have been struggling to sustain an entente, if not a complete understanding of each other. Describing how he and Shirley deal with each other, Warren speaks haltingly, and in neutral, abstract words, but with a voice full of feeling: “There are some people whom you have in life who have the capacity for real, passionate commitment to something, and sometimes you may be passionately committed to the same thing. You have to treasure these relationships, and if at times a relationship runs onto rocky shoals, you have to treat yourselves as small Eastern European countries and exchange ambassadors. You have to keep that capacity for commitment alive.”