It's All In the Playing by Shirley Maclaine Page B

the choices became literally infinite. I realized that if I were to invent a character like Bella Abzug, I couldn’t possibly do as definitive a job as she had done herself. Each movement of the strong hands, each wrinkle of the high-cheekboned experienced face were strokes on a personality canvas that she assuredly painted herself. And as I watched her acting lines she had actually spoken and heard myself doing the same thing, I had a kind of double vision in time. Which was the past and which the present? I was aware of how I had said these very same lines years ago. So was Bella. And both of us were also aware that we had been acting them then.
    There we were, walking the lines through my kitchen into the dining room. The same dining room. She helped me set my table. The same kitchen, same table. She sat down as I tossed a salad. AU the while we read our lines; portraying ourselves, re-creating what we had done so many times together.
    And as we indulged in this Pirandello adventure I slowly began to make a professional assessment. Bella in real life was too strong for “reel” life. It was astonishing. She was actually bigger than life—too much for an entertainmentpiece. For news or documentary coverage she was perfectly in sync with her attuned image. But for a prime-time television entertainment miniseries, I knew it wouldn’t work.
    The strangest part of it, though, was that she was very convincingly real in playing herself. There wasn’t a fake note in her performance—which is saying a lot for a politician! But the truth of the person she conveyed as herself was simply too strong for television. In fact I began to assess my own performance of myself in a different light. I had never been faced with this issue before. Was it possible to be too much oneself? Too real?
    We finished the reading. Colin and I needed to talk together. Bella respected that.
    “I know,” she said as she straightened her hat and strode toward the door. “Don’t call us—we’ll call you. I’ll see ya later.”
    She let herself out. Colin went to the window.
    “Strangest casting experience I’ve ever had,” he said. “Don’t know what to make of how good she was. But will she translate to television? The expression too much for TV may be apt here. She’s so great as a politician on TV. I’ve seen her. Strong, sometimes strident, but colorful and riveting.”
    He thought a moment longer. “I know what it is that’s bothering me.”
    “What?”
    “We’ve written Bella as a friend and foil for Shirley. It’s about Bella’s reactions to Shirley’s metaphysical and spiritual search. And those reactions are earthy and comic. Now it’s true that that is how she is. But in real life she is so much more than that. Since we are portraying only that reactive comedic aspect of her, essentially the grandness and stature of her political personality overwhelms the limitations of the character we reduced her to be. In other words, she’s overqualified for the part.”
    I looked at him and gulped. “Great,” I said. “But how do you tell a person they can’t play themselves?”
    “Very carefully,” he answered with a grin.
    I went to my den to retrieve John Heard. I could see he had almost finished the script. He looked up at me with an expression of sheer disbelief on his face. Maybe he hadn’t been lying after all. Maybe he was experiencing for the first time the full impact of a script about trance channeling, reincarnation, extraterrestrials, and spacecraft that land. He spoke first.
    “I’m supposed to be in love with an extraterrestrial?” he asked.
    “Yes,” I answered. “Maybe not love in the sexual sense, but certainly in the sense that she changed your life.”
    John didn’t chuckle. He just stared at me.
    “But I’m a Catholic,” he said finally.
    I could think of no sensible response to this and we returned to the living room. We finished reading. He was so uncommonly talented at reading the