Buthan & Nepal

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Buthan & Nepal

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1edwinbcn
Jan. 2, 2013, 1:39 pm

Don't fall off the mountain
Finished reading: 29 December 2012



Don't fall off the mountain is the first autobiography by Shirley MacLaine (1934), describing her youth, early career and travels up to about 1965.

Shirley MacLaine, sister of Warren Beatty, describes her youth of hardship and hard work to achieve success. Early in her career she was asked to stand in for an actress who had to give up her role in the musical The Pajama Game in 1954, and MacLaine, totally unprepared, and quite unexpectedly performed so well, that she was immediately rocketed into stardom, and signed a contract with an agent. In the same year she married Steve Parker, whom she had met in 1952.

In 1955 she started her film career in a movie by Alfred Hitchcock. For her role in this film and subsequent films she won several awards, bringing her fame and wealth.

They lived for a while in Tokyo, where their daughter Stephanie Sachiko Parker was born. However, with Steve permanently living in Tokyo, and Shirley unwilling to settle in Japan and take on the role of house wife, she started dividing her time between work in Hollywood, and her husband in Japan; a long-distance relationship that gradually took on the character of not just being physically long-distance, but spiritually as well.

Her work, preparing for roles in films, took her to study up-close the life and work of prostitutes in Paris (for the film Irma la Douce) and travels to China, the Southern States, and Thailand.

Gradually, MacLaine started spending more time traveling, to discover her own identity and open her mind. This lead to extensive travel to live with a Masai tribe in Kenya, and travels to India and Buthan.

In the final chapters of Don't fall off the mountain (the title refers to her husband's warning to be careful in the Himalayas) MacLaine describes her sojourn in Buthan and the military upheaval in Buthan, which indicate that this part of her travels must be dated to 1964 /5.

An interesting and sincere, well-written biography, which is also interesting from the point of view of anthropological notes about Japan, prostitution in Paris, the Masai of Kenya, and the history of Buthan. As Buthan is and was a very closed country, in may well be that Shirley MacLaine is one of the very few, if not only, Western eyewitness of the political upheaval in that country in 1964/5.

Much more interesting than I had anticipated.




2marq
Feb. 14, 2016, 3:03 am

The Mountain is Young by Han Suyin, 1958 Novel set in Nepal.

Himalaya by Michael Palin, recent BBC TV series tie in.

Katmandu (sic), 1967 travel memoir by Australian adventurer (and probable spy), Colin Simpson.

Lost in Transmission, 2004 travel memoir by Australian, Jonathan Harley.

The Red Chapels of Banteai Srei: And Temples in Cambodia, India, Siam and Nepal, 1962 travel memoir by Sacheverell Sitwell.