Writing Sample 5

“NOT ALL TERMS OF ENDEARMENT”: SHIRLEY MACLAINE, MOTHERHOOD, AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE STAR SYSTEM

On February 1, 2013, ABC’s 20/20 anchor Elizabeth Vargas introduces her interview with Shirley MacLaine’s daughter, Sachi Parker, by recalling the 1981 Joan Crawford biopic Mommie Dearest. In the scene replayed in the 20/20 segment, a monstrous Crawford (Faye Dunaway) hysterically screams at her daughter Christina (Mara Hobel) cowering on the floor. The film reveals, as Vargas describes, “what it was like growing up as the daughter of a Hollywood star.” Vargas’s interview with Parker—which also promotes Parker’s memoir, Lucky Me—likewise supports this image of the deficient parenting of female stars. To Vargas’s repeated exclamations of disbelief, Parker exposes MacLaine as an absentee mother who allowed two-year-old Parker to fly alone from Los Angeles to Tokyo.

Yet, unlike Crawford’s, Shirley MacLaine’s parenting habits were never kept secret: in July of 1961, for example, Redbook labeled MacLaine “Hollywood’s Most Unconventional Mother” and discussed young Parker’s solo intercontinental flights. Thus, despite Vargas’s comparison of Mommie Dearest to Parker’s account, the differences between Crawford’s and MacLaine’s respective representations of motherhood reflect important transformations in the Hollywood star system. In this paper, through interrogating MacLaine’s image in the popular press between 1954 and 1964, I argue that MacLaine’s eccentric child-rearing practices were crucial to her establishment as a star. As MacLaine’s image subverted notions of family life that had dominated star discourse since the 1920s, she shaped a new model of stardom that—though perhaps painful to her daughter—offered a comparatively more complex representation of femininity at the time.