SHIRLEY'S BEST PERFORMANCE MacLaine may be out on a limb, but the tree she's shaking is full of money.
By MARLYS HARRIS

(MONEY Magazine) – The public knew her first as the perky young star of the 1960s movie hits Irma La Douce and Sweet Charity and later as a member of the Hollywood Rat Pack and a champion of liberal causes. In recent years, however, Shirley MacLaine has become one of the biggest headliners of the New Age, a resurgence of spiritualism now spreading beyond its California fountainhead. New Agers believe that by getting in touch with spirits, ordinary mortals can gain access to the wisdom of the ages and better understand themselves. In two best-selling books -- Out on a Limb and Dancing in the Light -- and a five- hour ABC miniseries that aired in February, MacLaine has described her personal search for enlightenment through meditation, gurus, crystal consciousness and trance channelers who speak with the voices of ancient spirits. Last spring, the 53-year-old actress decided to pass on what she had learned over the years in a nationwide series of 10 two-day seminars called ''Connecting with the Higher Self.'' Though MacLaine charged $300 a head, demand was so great that she added seven stops over the summer. To find out what MacLaine was preaching for pay, MONEY sent senior writer Marlys Harris to Seattle, the second city on the tour. Her report:

I first heard The Voice on the flight to Seattle. It told me to give in and eat the cherry cheesecake that was sitting on my meal tray and suggested I order a second glass of white wine. Such self-indulgence seemed inappropriate. After all, I was on my way to Shirley MacLaine's seminar on the Higher Self. How could I possibly get up there and connect with it if I was weighed down by sweets and booze? ''Don't worry,'' said The Voice, who sounded like a mouthy New York City taxi driver. ''You'll connect, you'll connect.'' Indeed, how could I fail? Shirley MacLaine, who was to lead the seminar herself, had come in contact with the dead, discovered she had had previous lives (as an Indian princess with a thing for elephants, a Buddhist monk, a peg-legged pirate and a French guillotine victim) and experienced an episode in which her spirit left her body. At least, that's what I recall her telling Phil Donahue. I had attended many high-priced seminars -- on real estate, gold, hard assets, soft assets, financial planning and financial plundering. The tabs made sense to me. After all, those seminar lecturers promise their audiences overnight riches or instant success on the job. But for flocks of educated people to cough up $300 each for two long days in a drafty hotel ballroom to explore their inner beings -- with no prospect of making any money -- well, this I had to see. What became clear the next morning when I scouted the decidedly unethereal Doubletree Plaza Hotel, where the seminar was to take place, was that MacLaine was tapping into a mother lode of moola. About 500 people, most attracted by advertising in the local morning newspaper and New Age publications, had already signed up, and more were pressing for applications from the actress' red-sweatshirted employees. MacLaine's gross for the weekend already totaled $150,000, and by the end of the tour in August, she would take in about $3.8 million -- much more than she could earn by performing in a two-hour feature film or a series of Las Vegas shows. To prepare for the seminar the following morning, I stopped in at Semantics, a downtown rock and mineral shop. Nouveau spiritualists believe that crystals have special powers to amplify energy and thought, so I bought a $20 hunk of crystal fluorite, which is supposed to be an aid in out-of-body experience, and threw it in my purse. Now I was ready. I got to the hotel ballroom a few minutes before the seminar's scheduled 11 a.m. starting time. I found that my fellow metaphysical searchers had already grabbed the best seats. With few exceptions, the crowd was white, and the overwhelming majority were 30 to 55 years old. Women outnumbered men by about two to one. Nearly everyone was dressed in jogging suits, blue jeans and sweaters and other weekend wear. Most seemed savvy, well-spoken, well-groomed and well-off. They had to be. On top of the price of admission, I would learn that many had paid for the hotel stay and air fare from points as far away as New York City, Honolulu and Miami. Right on time, MacLaine bounced up to the stage wearing white sweatpants, a bright green sweater, matching green boots and diamond earrings. The audience gave her a standing ovation, and she exulted, ''I haven't even done anything yet!'' MacLaine's only props were a white wing chair similar to the one used by onetime Oregon guru Bagwan Sri Rajneesh, a huge bouquet of white gladiolus and pompoms, and an easel with a schematic drawing of the human body. She was thrilled, she exclaimed. ''We'll have two whole days to work instead of my telling the entire history of metaphysics in 28 minutes on The Donahue Show,'' she remarked, referring to a grilling she withstood to promote her last book. Of course, as MacLaine pointed out, knowing a lot about this abstruse subject can be a disadvantage. ''I became so educated in metaphysics that I actually became confused,'' she marveled. She wasn't kidding. It became apparent in the course of the seminar that she still only half grasped some of the ideas she had encountered in what she un-self-consciously referred to as ''my 20 years of high-level investigations and esoteric inquiries.'' She informed her listeners that Seattle would be a center of ''New Age searching'' because of ''all the trees.'' Trees have silica, she proclaimed (actually, only trace amounts, less than in the human body), and silica is a crystal that amplifies thought. Following that logic, the Sahara would be a better site, since silica is the biggest component of sand. At another point, she claimed that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of physics, which states that when scientists try to observe a phenomenon, the process of observation always changes it, means that ''consciousness changes everything. If you are angry, your car won't start.'' MacLaine's point of departure for the seminar was a question: ''Is there anyone here who isn't in a crisis, who isn't unhappy?'' I started to raise my hand gingerly but sent it to pat my hair when the room filled with an assenting murmur. No one in the audience would admit to contentment. In fact, according to MacLaine, not only was everyone there in dire crisis but so was the entire world. Reason: we are in transition on our way to a period of spiritual awakening. As a result, all time and space are impinging on us at once, and we are experiencing simultaneously all the incarnations of everybody we have ever been. MacLaine, a bleeding-heart liberal in politics, proceeded to deliver a lengthy version of the New Age message of narrow self-interest -- that understanding of self and fulfillment of self lead to a better life. The central belief is that each person is his or her own god. As such, everybody determines his own destiny. There is no such thing as luck or misfortune. Those who succeed make their own good luck; those who are mistreated were probably asking for it. As MacLaine explained: ''If somebody mugs me, I brought it on myself.'' In fact, she continued, society will not improve until we understand ourselves. What a relief, I thought. No more need I worry about the poor and downtrodden because they chose to be poor and downtrodden. And I don't have to lose weight, earn more money or even make my bed because I am a god and already perfect. Moreover, I am free to be nasty, abusive and greedy because, as MacLaine pointed out, it could be that the worse I am, the more helpful I might be to others; how could victims enjoy abuse without me? Unfortunately, there is a catch: What is the Real Me? Am I a saint or a slimebucket because I want to be or because of social pressure? To find out, I have to cleanse my spirit of all the day-to-day junk and get in touch with something called my Oversoul, or Higher Self. It sits up in a metaphorical Oral Roberts-like tower and supposedly communes with God, who is the wellspring of all energy in the cosmos. My Higher Self can see all my previous -- and future -- incarnations on earth and point me in the right direction. MacLaine cautioned us that out-of-body experiences and conversations with the spirit world are fine, but selfhood is really the aim of it all. No matter how many mystical experiences you have, you must examine yourself or they count for naught. In fact, she confided to her 500 listeners, she knew a woman who had ''very high-level communications with extraterrestrials'' but never made an effort to understand herself, and what happened? The E.T.s dropped her faster than the speed of light. MacLaine then announced, ''This can get quite emotional.'' With that, her attendants passed generic, no-name tissues through the crowd. The lights were dimmed, and we shut our eyes as the actress guided us through a meditation. Taped piano music issued from the speaker system. First, MacLaine directed us to picture each of our seven chakras, or energy centers, as colored balls flecked with crystal. Energizing, or ''raising,'' them is supposed to help boost you up to your Higher Self. Each chakra corresponds to a color and a part of the body, from the red ''base'' chakra at the tip of the spine to the orange sex chakra located you-know-where, up to the violet ''crown'' chakra. We visualized each in turn until all the colors turned to white light that spewed out of our heads and encased each of our bodies in a bubble. Our individual bubbles then floated to a beautiful garden full of multicolored flowers and birds (''Tweet-tweet-tweet,'' spake the tape deck). Through the garden flowed a beautiful green stream (the tape added gushes and trickles). MacLaine told us to wade into the water. From there we could see a magnificent tree full of more birds (''tweet-tweet''). Said MacLaine, ''Underneath the tree is somebody or something that loves you with unconditional love. This is the one you have been longing for. This is the only love that you've never met. This is the one who loves you more than anybody else.'' She told us to cross the stream and approach. Pausing for dramatic effect, she then announced, ''This is your Higher Self.'' A sadness -- a kind of homesickness -- took over the room. Many in the audience began sobbing. E.T. himself could not have acted very differently after phoning home. There was an edge of self-pity to the weeping. ''Boo-hoo, boo-hoo! Nobody loves me as much as my Higher Self,'' the audience seemed to blubber. The only person dumb enough to love me unconditionally, I reasoned, was my 16-month-old baby. MacLaine told us to ask our Higher Selves why we were here -- so I asked. ''Because this is your job,'' explained my HS with some exasperation. Gosh! There it was -- The Voice from the plane. This grinning baby-face that expressed the cynicism of a 55-year-old taxi driver is my Higher Self? Well, MacLaine told us that we should accept our vision of our Higher Self whatever it was. ''If it is a buffalo in heat, let it be,'' she said. She then ordered us to picture someone we loved with whom we had a troubled relationship. ''Ask your Higher Self why you love this person,'' she said. I inquired. ''Beats me,'' declared HS, adding, ''I think we'd better have a hamburger and french fries soon or we'll never get through a whole afternoon of this stuff.'' When the seminar broke for lunch at 2, the participants fled into the lobby and elbowed each other frantically for bathrooms and food. Good manners are apparently not a hallmark of the New Age. To escape the crush, I wandered over to the Doubletree Inn, a companion hotel across the street, and was invited by two fellow seminar-goers to join them for a bite to eat. Both were women in their mid-thirties -- one a wife and mother of three, the other a single woman -- who had journeyed from rural towns about 60 miles away to see MacLaine. As it turned out, their Higher Selves were just as weird as mine: a tulip, and a gust of wind. They complained a bit about the $300 fee, but each had already gulped down two stiff drinks so weren't in too much pain. Besides, they explained to me (an admitted New Age novice) that getting in touch with your Oversoul runs into big money. First, it's usual to have a grounding in metaphysics, a serious philosophical discipline. You can then go on to read dozens of how-to books on metaphysics (at about $10 a pop). The three-volume A Course in Miracles ($23.95 in paperback) is a common starter guide. A meditation class ($50 for four sessions) will temporarily clear your mind of such clutter as laundry lists and telephone numbers. If meditation fails, visits with a hypnotherapist ($50 an hour) will accelerate the mind-cleansing process. From a card reader, you will find out what lies ahead ($10 a session), and an aura reader ($20 a session) tells you whether you are in the mood for it. You might also want to consult a trance channeler who lets you communicate with a spirit entity of a bygone era who will impart untold tons of wisdom (from $40 a seminar to $500 for a private session). A batch of medicinal crystals (from $25 to $500) will amplify your thoughts during meditation. Finally, you probably will have to consult a past-life regressionist ($40 to $100 an hour) to help you figure out whether you were a harlot or a village idiot in the 12th century. You may, after all, have some unfinished business -- call it ''karma'' -- from way back when. Unfortunately, neither of the women's budgets allowed for all this. ''I would really like to try past-life regression,'' sighed the homemaker, ''but my car needs a valve job.''

When the seminar resumed at nearly 4 p.m., we were treated to a series of touchy-feely exercises. MacLaine wanted us to experience our own energy, so we were instructed to rub our palms together. ''Wow!'' people exclaimed with true wonderment. ''Feel the heat!'' Then, each person was supposed to pick a partner. We rubbed palms and touched them to our partners' hands. ''Oooh, what psychic vibrations!'' people around me gasped. ''Jeez,'' grumped my HS. ''Haven't these people heard of friction?'' Next, we were told to touch each other's ''third eye'' -- a spot right between the other two -- and try to perceive something. My partner was a heavy-set woman of 65 or so. We touched each other's third eye. She told me that I was very detached. Pretty perceptive since she didn't know I was a reporter. I received no psychic messages so I hazarded, ''You would like to have more affection in your life.'' That was safe, and she nodded vaguely. I moved on to more palm rubbing and third-eye touching with a second partner, also an older woman. Her insight was an accusing, ''You didn't want to be my partner.'' All right, so sue me. She added that she thought I was a strong person who bore more than my fair share but that I didn't mind. ''So who cares?'' she snarled. I guessed, ''You are a very sharing person.'' Her reply was a misanthropic, ''I was an only child, I never married, I have no friends or relatives, and that's fine by me.'' I had better luck with my third partner, a fiftyish woman adorned with gold jewelry and heavy makeup. She looked as if she were in the market for a man, so I guessed, ''Did someone very close to you leave the scene recently?'' Bingo! Her husband died five years ago. When she touched my third eye, she declared confidently (but incorrectly) that I had just divorced and that I lived on the waterfront near boats. I was not impressed, but practically everyone else was transported. People had had moving experiences and raved about them to MacLaine. For example, some pairs discovered what MacLaine called ''logistic synchronicity'' -- meaning they learned that they had both been born in the same suburb of Seattle -- not surprising to me, considering that most people there were from Seattle. One young man proclaimed that he was a recovering drug addict who hadn't ''used'' in two years. His confession didn't seem to have much to do with third eyes, but the crowd cheered its approval anyway. Our next task was to meditate about somebody who had done us a grievous wrong -- to let it go. The tissue bearers again made the rounds. In this visualization, we sat on the bank of a river with our worst enemy. I had trouble thinking of a somebody who had been seriously hateful to me. Did editors count? ''Nah,'' said my HS. ''They're small potatoes. By the way, want to take in a movie tonight?'' HS was beginning to sound a lot like Ethel Mertz.

That night after seeing Radio Days (I loved it, but HS thought it was ''uneven'' and ''not Allen's best''), I found that my crystal had not fared well. Jouncing around amid the debris in my handbag, it had crumbled into a thousand flakes. You could say it had had its own out-of-body experience. Still, I was curious. I skimmed Healing with Crystals and Gemstones by Daya Chocron ($9.95) and learned that American Indians, African shamans and other folks used the stones to cast spells and perform cures. Modern American ingenuity transformed that faith into technology; thus each variety of crystal can be used for specific ailments -- kind of like monoclonal antibodies. Throat congestion might call for application of an aquamarine and a stomachache may need amber. Just place it on the affected area and meditate. Crystals, of course, are used in watches, VCRs and stereos because they amplify vibrations. Since New Agers believe that thoughts give off vibrations, it's but a small pseudoscientific jump to the conclusion that crystals amplify thoughts. Many spiritual searchers wear tiny crystals on necklaces to keep themselves revved up. A good-looking tourmaline or aquamarine pendant starts at about $65 and easily gets as high as $400. Before they use a crystal, some of them ''program'' it as though it were computer software. One accepted method is to place it under your VCR or tape deck and run a tape-eraser cassette. That will rid the rock of any malevolent vibrations. Then you meditate on the crystal with one mantra thought such as ''love'' or ''light.'' Along with my flaky crystal, I had obtained a vial of ruby elixir from a small Seattle company called Vibrational Supplies. Though nothing more than the liquid produced by either soaking or boiling crystals in water, an elixir is said to pack a spiritual wallop. A three-ounce medicine bottle of the stuff, which comes in 83 flavors -- from sapphire to citrine -- costs $6.50. According to the instructions on the label, drinking seven drops of the ruby stuff mixed in pure water three times a day would promote inner strength and relations with one's father. I didn't want to take it, but my HS nagged, ''Some reporter you are -- no guts!'' I measured out the colorless, odorless liquid and drank. I never got to the second dose. The elixir left me with such an unpleasant aftertaste that an hour later, at nearly 11 p.m., I found myself at a Mexican restaurant stuffing jalapeno peppers down my throat in an effort to burn it out. I yelled at my HS for egging me on. ''I was just joking,'' whined HS. ''I didn't know you were really going to drink it.''

Sunday morning MacLaine held forth sitting in her white wing chair like an Indian guru. The subject was money. For some reason, she felt compelled to defend the $300 seminar fee. She told her audience that she has a right to charge what she is worth. And, after all, there had been expenses -- employees, travel and so on. She had searched for a price low enough to encourage attendance but high enough to discourage gawkers. So, she joked, she settled on $300 -- ''$100 for mind, $100 for body and $100 for spirit.'' ''Some people should have got a third off 'cause they left their minds at home,'' cracked my HS nastily. In any case, MacLaine asserted that the old religious notion that enlightenment requires poverty and self-denial is completely outmoded. ''To be a spiritual person, you should have abundance -- as you define it,'' she said. And, in the New Age lexicon, abundance usually translates to ''gobs of dough.'' MacLaine's spiritualist ventures have proved abundantly rewarding. Her two books, Out on a Limb (1983), with 3 million copies sold, and Dancing in the Light (1985), with 2.2 million sold, have netted her an estimated $3 million in royalties over the years. The miniseries probably earned MacLaine a $1 million package that includes the rights to the book, the screenwriter's credit and her performance in the five-hour TV program. In August she came out with another book on her New Age escapades called It's All in the Playing (Bantam, $18.95), which is slated for a bestseller-size hardcover printing of 350,000. Meanwhile, up on the platform, MacLaine declared that all the profits from her seminars will go to develop spiritual healing centers. Though she did not want to be pinned down about the whens and wheres, she said, she has not spent one dime of seminar earnings on any of herselves (either past or present). Still, every person who attends a MacLaine Higher Self seminar has to sign a release allowing his or her voice to be used in any subsequent audio reproduction of the session. This has created the suspicion among her listeners that Shirley MacLaine is readying herselves to become to the spirit via audio- and videocassette what Jane Fonda is to the body. MacLaine insisted, ''I don't feel comfortable about doing that. I don't want people fixating on me.'' The economics, however, could prove tempting. After all, an actress like MacLaine would normally earn about $1 million for performing in a two-hour feature film -- usually for about nine months of work or less. If she performs in a Las Vegas nightclub act -- something she hasn't done for some years -- she could expect to take in $150,000 for a six-night gig. The seminars will gross nearly $4 million for 17 weekends of work. Even if her overhead amounts to half that, the toll of labor on MacLaine and her body would be considerably less than the high kicking and song belting required of a Hollywood entertainer. ''Why not milk the seminars for more by marketing video- and audiocassettes of guided meditations complete with ''tweet-tweets'' to help the masses get hip to the New Age?'' asked my HS, adding, ''I'll bet you a tub of amethyst elixir that a celebrity with her ego won't be able to resist.'' The money issue dispatched, MacLaine told the audience to do a quickie meditation to ''ask your Higher Self what would be a good question to ask here.'' Those HS's came up with some real doozies. Examples: ''How can you find a reliable past-life regressionist?'' and ''What should I do if my blue throat chakra has orange edges?'' (Answers: ''Ask at your local metaphysical bookstore'' and ''Wow, that happens to me too!'') Right in the middle of this session, however, a woman swooned to the floor. MacLaine rushed over to see what was going on. ''Oooh,'' MacLaine exclaimed. ''She is in ecstasy. The expression on her face! Oh, that's so beautiful.'' You see, according to MacLaine, this woman got hot from kundalini vibrations (a yogic term for dormant energy at the base of the spine that produces enlightenment when channeled to the brain -- a kind of ''get off your butt'' electrical surge). The woman herself later gave this explanation: ''I am a channel for energy, but I was wearing the wrong clothes today.'' One man sitting near me confronted MacLaine with a serious question. He said he worked with AIDS patients. ''People involved in spiritualism abandon AIDS patients on the theory that they chose to get the disease, that they needed it in their lives. Why shouldn't these people be treated with compassion?'' MacLaine didn't do much to discourage her audience from the pursuit of selfishness. People like homosexuals, MacLaine expounded, feel they don't have rights in society and are therefore victimized. They serve us by teaching us to be our brother's keeper, but they also benefit from their own victimization. Through the disease, many patients come to learn for the first time how much they were loved. ''In fact, we are suffering more than they are,'' she declared. ''No, we aren't,'' said the AIDS worker quietly.

After a lengthy bathroom break, we reconvened to meditate about someone we knew who had recently ''passed over.'' The New Age -- as well as several of the world's largest religions -- tend to take the sting out of death because you get eternal life -- in fact, perhaps a whole bunch of lives here on earth. New Age reincarnation, at least as MacLaine describes it, seemed awfully simple. If you have screwed up, not to worry. You can come back for a second try. As the lights went out and the tape deck began thrumming, I thought of my Grandma Bess, who died a year and a half ago. What a comfort it would be to talk to her again. I meditated very earnestly, but my HS interrupted: ''She can't talk to you right now. She's laughing too hard.'' For the last afternoon of the seminar, MacLaine had prepared a showstopper of a meditation. She referred to it grandly as ''the androgyny meditation.'' In other words, s-e-x. To prepare the audience, she delivered a 20-minute lecture on feminine and masculine energy (the yin and the yang respectively) and complained that successful women (she and her past selves included) were unhappy because they manifested too much male energy. Put a lid on that yang, she advised. Indeed, the world's various trouble spots -- Beirut and Northern Ireland, for example -- suffered not from poverty or religious discord but from an excess of yang. To have more love in the world, she told the crowd, we have to bring both energies into balance just like they were back in Lemuria. Lemuria? It turned out that Lemuria was not a suburb of Peoria but a 78,000-year-old kingdom that was the Pacific Ocean's version of Atlantis. At that time, MacLaine says, there was only one sex, which combined both masculine and feminine genitals. ''Sex was done through deep meditation,'' MacLaine announced. Not surprisingly, Lemuria's economy suffered from the consequent underpopulation: ergo the creation of two sexes. MacLaine, however, declared: ''Ever since, we have remembered that moment of androgyny. We have all been searching for that other half of ourselves.'' In other words, the joy of sex in the New Age is having intercourse with yourself. Finally, the lights were turned down, and we began the meditation, which was accompanied by an electronic New Age answer to Bolero. MacLaine directed us to imagine that we were seven-foot-tall Lemurians walking along a crystal ( highway. Beneath our crystal robes, we could feel breasts and male genitals gently bouncing around. Eventually we enter a large crystal pyramid. There is a crystal pool at whose sides stand two crystal statues, one of an unclothed male and one of an unclothed female. We ignorant, unisexual Lemurians are stunned by the sight and immediately climb a crystal ladder and jump in the pool. An attendant takes away our robes and -- zap! -- each of us splits into two bodies, male and female. The two exit the pool on two separate crystal ladders and face each other. At that point, our spirit, apparently a fragment hanging in the air, occupies one of the bodies, and the two grope each other. Later the spirit switches to the other body, and they fondle each other again.

''Whew, hot stuff!'' gasped HS. ''That's almost as good as one of those X- rated numbers from a video store.'' Interrupting that observation, however, came some very heavy breathing from the man next to me. The breathing turned to panting, the panting to groans and the groans -- yik! -- to shudders. This guy was obviously deeply metaphysical. That or he had just been released from 10 years in solitary at the Lemuria state prison. After the meditation ended, MacLaine brought the seminar to an inspirational ending by asking the entire group of 500 to hold hands and form several concentric circles. We chanted ''Om,'' while MacLaine directed us to feel white light spurting out of our heads, creating a huge fountain of light that would burst through the roof of the Doubletree Plaza and spread over Seattle and then the Northwest, through California and down to Guatemala and Nicaragua and Brazil and so on. Somewhere in the French chateau country, we all raised our hands in the air and began oming more fervently, something like a pack of Brownies singing, ''This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine.'' And on that note, the two-day event ended.

Back in my hotel room, my Higher Self demanded dinner -- ''a big steak, I'm really starving,'' HS said. ''Get some chocolate ice cream too.'' While we waited for room service, HS asked, ''So, whaddjuh think of the seminar? Pretty powerful, huh?'' ''Well, I can't complain -- after all, I did connect with you,'' I replied. ''But what happened? Since knowing you I gained five pounds and practically died from an overdose of jalapeno peppers. And I spent two days thinking of nothing but Me, Me, Me -- my Higher Self, my lower self, my previous self, my next self. Frankly, I'm bored. I'd like to think about somebody else for a change -- like Oliver North or Imelda Marcos.'' ''Does this mean . . . ?'' HS' voice trembled. ''I'm afraid so,'' I said. ''Tomorrow, I'm leaving on that jet plane. Alone.'' And, with a crackle of static . . . it was gone.