Shirley's journey up and around a mountain looking for UFOs and then finding them. ( )

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. ( )

I like all of her books, fits right in with my mystical period and I miss that time a lot ( )

The first and the best of Shirley Maclaine's books ( )

I think this is her book where she went to India, China and Africa. Some interesting and courageous parts. I went to China in 1981, two years later, and saw and felt some of the same places and emotions.

She helps in a Orphanage in Calcutta, saves a prince's life (and I even know someone who was in Tibet at this time and knows this story) and visits a Masai tribe in Africa, giving some aid to a chief's wife who is suffering from syphilis. Bit of an adventure.

Has musings and speculations that are her own.


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