Shirley, you can’t be serious ...

EITHER Victoria Beckham didn’t know who she was, or Posh, on her way to her car from a party, did know who Shirley MacLaine was, but didn’t care, because she walked past MacLaine as if the latter was nobody.

That was a month ago, at a film premiere.

How quickly, as Gay Byrne would say, how quickly they forget. The little be-spectacled figure in the background of the photograph may no longer be instantly recognisable by younger people, but that’s a function of fast-fading fame, rather than of merit. Because, whichever way you slice it, MacLaine has merit.

Terms of Endearment won her an Oscar to add to her 10 Golden Globes and three Emmy Awards. She’s written 11 books, many of them bestsellers. At 75, this is a woman with a lot of laurels on which to sit, were she so inclined. Instead, she acts, when a good script presents itself, lectures, keeps fit — and writes more books. It’s far from laurels she was reared, and it’s far from tabloid fame she has lived her life.

“I never wanted it. The loss of privacy was a price I wasn’t willing to pay. When I watch Jennifer Aniston or Britney Spears go through their personal hells in public for the gratification of the tabloids, it turns my stomach. I know young people who would do anything to have that kind of time in the sun. What are they thinking?”

To MacLaine, fame is a drug of annihilation and she’s glad she never got hooked on it.

“Stay un-famous and be less of a prisoner of other people’s opinions and whims,” she recommends. “Stay un-famous and be less neurotic. Stay un-famous and learn to know yourself in quietude. That state of being lasts longer than fame anyway, and at much less cost.”

Instead of pursuing her own fame or socialising with the Hollywood crowd, MacLaine, according to herself, “was usually off on a trip or following the call of a new love affair.” The travel included undertaking, in her sixties, the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage walk across Spain, the lowlights of which included crippling cramping in her arms, legs and hands (due to potassium depletion) and occasional ambush by Spanish paparazzi, which irritated her so much she tossed a rock at one camera crew and reduced a journalist to tears by concentrated nastiness.

Books by older showbusiness figures tend to fall into a number of categories. There is the “God, I thought she was dead” niche, recently occupied by Ali McGraw. There is the gathered assortment of yarns about other famous people, leavened with accounts of encounters, good or bad, on film sets of which Michael Caine is the outstanding practitioner.

And there is the compendium of thoughts on issues, designed to pass on lessons learned and insights about life.

MacLaine’s 12th book belongs in this latter type, consisting, as it does, of a series of essays, observations and occasional brief rants on whatever topic catches her eye, all tenuously linked together by the theme of what she has learned to ignore and what she has failed to learn to ignore: what, as the title indicates, she’s over and not over.

“I have learned to ease up on worry, scheming for films or roles, planning for better surroundings, and feeling anger at all our leaders who operate politically rather than humanely,” she says.

“I’m over listening to advertisements, the latest fashions (I never was much for that), events I should attend in order to be seen, red carpet madness. I’m getting more and more free from the expectations of the external world. In fact, the one worry I can’t seem to give up and get over is a lingering fear that being a reclusive, happy, older woman may not be entirely healthy...”

On the other hand, she says she’s not over going to the movies, live theatre and symphonic performances, good food or curiosity. She will, she states, never get over her habit of asking “Why?” Some of the less enlightened of us tend to ask less elevated questions, like “What the hell?” or “Why me?” but MacLaine says she will never finish her search for life’s hidden meanings. Nor, she points out, is she the only one on such a quest.

“Everywhere I’ve travelled in the world, I’ve found that people are looking for something to fill the loneliness inside them; they are after what I think of as “The Big Truth,” she writes. “It doesn’t matter how wealthy or well situated they are; after surface talking, eating, Hollywood gossip, and cultural politeness, the conversation always turns to why are we here, what is the point of life, is God real, are we alone in the universe?”

This writer clearly moves in the wrong circles, where people are short on cultural politeness and leave before they get to the big questions, perhaps because of the need to go home before taking in the amount of alcohol which would amount to drunk driving. Which in turn makes this reviewer less than fascinated by Shirley MacLaine’s conviction that she has lived before and, as soon as she snuffs it, will come back again, either as a human or as some other entity, including the house fly. (She admiringly recalls the Dalai Lama preventing her from swatting a fly on the basis that it might be a reincarnation of someone.)

It is, of course, admirable to have an open mind, as MacLaine says she has. She is convinced that if the rest of us had similarly open minds, humanity could tap into spiritual and other strengths beyond the stars, rooted in our past lives, and available to us by channelling. She may be right, and one must always guard against the instinctive conviction that anybody else’s religion or belief system is ridiculous. But the entertainment value, to a non-believer, of a famous person’s fascination with the thought transference capacity of the Masai, is somewhere between slim and none.

Shirley MacLaine has a devoted readership. They will love this book.

I’m All Over That and OtherConfessions by Shirley MacLaine is published by Simon & Schuster, Hardback €15, Ebook €14.99