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What Can I Do? By the time she got to junior high, Shirley was already bothered by her height. "I've been 5 ft. 7 in. since I was twelve. I was always the tallest, skinniest kid in the class." Shirley was an accomplished tomboy; she could play ball better (outfield) and run the 100-yd. dash faster than most boys. The fiery red hair and a mass of freckles did not help with the boys. "I thought. 'What can I do about those freckles? I can't wash them away. There must be something else boys like in girls.' But when I did meet other boys, they always felt I put my stage ambitions first—and it was true."
During one recital, "I did a classical Spanish dance to Malagueña. The button on my petticoat popped, and it slipped down further and further and further. I heard everybody laughing and looked down, saw the petticoat, threw the castanets away, pulled the petticoat off, used it like a matador's cape and went into a comedy routine. It was like Cantinflas. The audience roared. I thought, 'They liked it. They laughed. They understood me.' "
Subway Circuit. Summers, while she was still in high school. Shirley studied ballet in Manhattan. When she was 17, she decided she was ready to join a classical ballet company. "Then," says she, "I got smart and didn't. I've got huge feet, and when I get en pointe, it adds twelve inches to my 5 ft. 7 in. It's hysterical—and Charles Atlas is dead." * She got a job in a subway-circuit company of Oklahoma! She was only a chorus girl, but "I thought, 'Dammit, I'm just plain happier here than I would be in a ballet company.' I was certain that I wanted musical comedy. I knew I would be good."
After graduation from high school, Shirley scorned the idea of going to college ("It was too limiting"). She changed her name to MacLaine—no one ever pronounced her own name, Beaty, or her mother's maiden name, MacLean, correctly—and went back to Manhattan. "I wanted to go out and see what was going on. My parents were willing to support me, but I wouldn't take any money from them. I lived on very little, had twelve roommates in one year. They were all looking for husbands and careers. I left the Ferguson girls' club because you had to be in by 11:30." The club was probably not sorry. Shirley and her pals used to amuse themselves by dressing up in outrageous costumes, sitting on the porch and squirting passers-by with water pistols.
"You with the Legs." Shirley's eating spot was the Automat. "I am innately so economical," she explains, "that a lot of people say I'm tight. But in the Automat you could get peanut butter sandwiches on raisin bread for a dime. You could get an iced-tea glass with a lemon in it free, go to the fountain, put water in it, get sugar at the table and have as many free lemonades as you wanted. Of course I had to change Automats pretty often."