At the age of 90, veteran actor and Oscar winner Shirley MacLaine was in a feisty mood. Scrolling through photos from her long career, captured largely in black and white, she noted, “Where are the nudes?”

About a photo of her sitting on the hood of a Cadillac on the Paramount lot, she said, “Here, I’m trying to be coy on purpose. Jesus. What a jerk!’

And another: “Oh, that’s where I wanted to see my legs being photographed.”

They photographed well! “Well, I was born with good legs,” she admitted.

MacLaine always had a seductive spark. She was a triple threat with pixie hair: singer, dancer and actor. She could turn all the famous heads in Hollywood, and even more, like Dean Martin, who she called the funniest person she had ever met. She says she had a crush on him, but it never developed romantically: “No! I was a little worried that he would be less funny if I got so close,” she said. “And I think the humor meant more to me.”

Her photo of that soon-to-be love, along with hundreds of others, from fellow Rat Packers to politicians, once graced MacLaine’s Santa Fe home. She called it her ‘Wall of Life’. “I just started filling an empty wall and loved it,” she said.

She just finished organizing that wall of life into a subtitled photographic memoir called “The Wall of Life.”

It begins where she grew up in Virginia, the daughter of two teachers and the older sister of future actor and Oscar-winning director Warren Beatty. “He was a little baby puppy, and I took care of him and watched him,” MacLaine said.

While Warren waited until college to pursue acting, Shirley changed her last name to her middle name and danced her way to New York before graduating from high school.

She credits it all to two teachers who offered a bit of prophetic advice: “I remember the day they sat me down and told me I have too much expression when dancing. Maybe I want to think about acting.”

As the story goes, MacLaine was cast as the understudy in the original Broadway production of “The Pajama Game.” When the star, Carole Haney, injured her ankle, MacLaine was thrown on stage within five minutes. “I never had a rehearsal,” she said.

She did a good job, or at least Alfred Hitchcock thought she did. He cast her in his next film, ‘The Trouble with Harry’. It was her first film.

She had lunch with Hitchcock almost every day: “I had huge Hitchcockian meals!” she laughed. “Makeup and Hair came to me and said, ‘Look, you’re going to gain weight,’ and I did! I gained 25 pounds.”

She says producer Hal Wallis was also interested in her talent, and perhaps even more so. As she remembers it, he greeted her on her very first day at that famous gate on the Paramount lot: “He walked out of his office and then walked to my car. I rolled down the window. He leaned forward and stuck out his tongue. down my throat.”

He later gave her a sports car, but no apology. “What a jerk,” MacLaine said.

At the time, she was newly married to the only man she ever married, businessman Steve Parker, whom she described as the love of her life.

They soon had a daughter, Sachi Parker. Sachi’s parents had a famously open marriage: MacLaine spent most of her time in New York and Hollywood, while Parker and their daughter lived mainly in Japan.

She was, she admits, an unconventional mother and an unconventional wife.

Her past affairs (if you can call them that) were hardly secret. She’s been pretty open about almost all of it. Yet she also said, “I don’t think I was that attractive. For a while I think, ‘Oh God, I’m not sexy-attractive.’ But then I had my relationships, and they Doing I think so.”

She was just as open about people she had never been with, like Jack Nicholson. When she won her Oscar for her role opposite Nicholson in “Terms of Endearment,” he couldn’t keep a straight face as she thanked him: “I’ve wanted to work with Jack Nicholson’s comedic chemistry ever since his chicken salad sandwich scene in ‘Easy Pieces’, and having him in bed was such a middle-aged joy!”

She never stopped inhabiting memorable characters. She found roles that suited her and her age in films like “Steel Magnolias” and “Postcards from the Edge.” She was in her late 70s when she joined the cast of TV’s “Downton Abbey,” and she was in her 80s when she appeared in “Only Murders in the Building.”

For someone who claims to have lived multiple past lives, photos of her current life make it look spectacular. No wonder she believes people from the past have come back to talk to her about it, like Cecil B. DeMille, who died nearly 40 years before receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award named after him: “I’m going to take home this award , and of course I will speak directly to Mr. DeMille later,” she said.

MacLaine still lives in Santa Fe. She says she fits in here: “I love the old antique, it’s still there feeling. It reminds me of myself!”

She is well aware that time is running out to satisfy all her curiosity, but she has been very open about the fact that she is not afraid of dying: “Oh no. I am interested in going there go,” she said. “I’m looking forward to being part of the heavenly experience. I really am.”

But at least for now, Shirley MacLaine isn’t going anywhere.

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Story produced by Reid Orvedahl. Editor: Mike Levine.

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