Lucky Me: My Life With--and Without--My Mom, Shirley MacLaine Paperback – December 3, 2013

I have nothing but respect for Sachi Parker after reading her book. By telling her story she has helped me and countless others who have endured the tremendous hardship of living with a parent with an oversized ego, someone who believes that the world revolves around them exclusively and who acts as if everyone else is to be subjugated to their will and their whims.Talk about karma! Shirley MacLaine herself set this gruesome story, and yes-the writing of this very book- into motion on the day she dropped her 2-year old daughter off at the airport to fly, unchaperoned, across the Pacific ocean to a foreign country to live with what Shirley apparently believed was a CLONE of the child's father, a man Ms. MacLaine did not really know and who turned out to be a crook, a pervert and an emotionally unstable tyrant.Despite being exposed to some horrific experiences which can best be described as emotional terrorism, Sachi tries in vain throughout her life to keep her familial relationships intact. You can hear it in her tone that she has been patient and tolerant to a fault, and that her desire to forgive-though constantly challenged and frustrated by some immense obstacles- is sincere. She questions how she might have contributed to things being the way they are, and tries to bear the blame for the failures and the pain when it does not rightfully belong on her shoulders. She does what many of us in the same situation have done: when the party who is truly in the wrong refuses to accept responsibility for their actions, we make their amends for them out of a sense of pity or embarrassment or whatever. We try to make it up to ourselves, to do their part in addition to our own in the relationship. We don't realize that we are further empowering them to walk all over us and treat us like a doormat. As children we can hardly be expected to know any better.I was a devoted follower of Shirley MacLaine for decades. I enjoyed her films, but it was her books that really grabbed me and fired my own spiritual searching. I read them all and even attended one of her Higher Self weekend seminars in the late 1980's. I'm devastated to learn that I was taken in, that so much of what Shirley has said is suspect and that she does not practice what she preaches, which is abundantly clear when you consider how her refusal to be a mother has resulted in the karmic come-uppance of this book. How can she be "shocked" by it, as she claims to be, and call it dishonest when she has spent Sachi's whole life insidiously nullifying and deliberately sublimating her identity as a person and as a daughter? And to find that Shirley is gullible enough to believe this CLONE story, and to send millions of dollars to a con man for decades while at the same time denying much-needed financial support to her own child makes me question not only her personal integrity but everything she has ever stated or claimed to be true. (Of course ALL the channelers she endorsed are suspect now.) Shirley has crafted her public persona and image quite masterfully. And those of us who were taken in were taken for quite a ride in the course of our supporting her jet-setter lifestyle with our book purchases. Steve Parker wasn't the only con-artist in that marriage!Some of the facts seem incredible, but allowing for the vagaries of memory which plague us all, this story has the ring of truth to it, undeniably. I can feel it in my gut that this isn't a vindictive endeavor. I BELIEVE IT. It is valid, entirely so. And it is meaningful to all of us who have been shunted aside or told to keep quiet all our lives by parents who didn't want to be parents and who resented us for supposedly preventing them from being able to devote all their time, effort, resources and attention to themselves exclusively. Shirley probably wouldn't admit it, but SHE DIDN'T WANT THIS KID. And the fact that she gave birth was certainly not going to stand in the way of her pursuing her own ego satisfaction and self-glorification. Of course she's not unique in this regard. We all face and struggle with similar temptations. But Ms. MacLaine has made the mistake of setting herself up as someone who "has it all" and whom we should therefore look up to, listen to, learn from, support, finance, and congratulate. I can't keep from putting it bluntly any longer: she is a complete and utter FRAUD.Thank you, Sachi Parker, for surviving. I am like you. I had a mother I love dearly but who was monstrous in many respects, not the least of which was her massively overblown sense of self-importance and the grotesque manner in which she emotionally bullied the helpless children in her charge. It isn't easy being the child of someone who never really acknowledges you as a person because your existence threatens them so. Your mother was given a leg-up by so many in her life, but she would not do the same for her own flesh and blood. She tried to tell you she was being "loving" by refusing you the same kind of help without which her own life would have amounted to nothing. Celebrity aside, she had the ability and resources to effortlessly aid you, her only child, in ways that any true mother would aid any child, and she chose not to do so. She did this "for your own good," while she lived like a queen and rubbed your nose in the fact. She let you down and she held you down and-make no mistake- it was her intention to KEEP you down. Because your being down meant she could stay UP. Hollywood is a dog-eat-dog business, and some dogs are so hungry that they eat their young.But you survived.Shirley MacLaine was brilliantly adept at making herself appear to be a highly intelligent and discerning woman. It is galling to learn how densely and mind-numbingly stupid she has been in real life. She wanted the world to think she had it all. I suppose in a way she did: she had it all WRONG. And so another "hero" bites the dust. Another "idol" falls, another self-appointed "guru" is exposed as a phony. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. Because we now see that someone who held herself up as special, better and more deserving than the rest of us, is really just as scarred and just as human, and maybe even more vulnerable for the pitiful need to pull the wool over the eyes of herself, her family and the world at large, trying desperately to make it appear that her life is a glittering parade of happiness and fun, only to end up spending her final years alone and bitter in a house in the New Mexico desert (near Roswell, no doubt) with only a few dogs as her only companions. And that is because only a creature as spiritually advanced as a dog could tolerate her for any length of time.I hope that Sachi will write some more. Now that Shirley's books are in the dumpster I have lots of room on my shelf! We certainly don't need Shirley to write any more books telling us about how's she such a huge a "success" and how she "has it all." We know better now than to believe the empty, nonsensical ramblings of someone so selfish, so deluded. And if we want to know more about True Spirituality, we have Sachi's story to consider and to ponder, don't we. Her dignity, her decency, her honesty and her dedication to the tenets of forgiveness and love and truth and peace are a far better example of what it means to be spiritual than we ever got from her Mom.Hearing her story, and how she has used what she has learned to nurture her relationship with own children, I can't help but feel that Sachi Parker is my idea of a True Success and someone who really does Have It All.

Wow, Sachi had one horrendous upbringing, but it is rare to find any good mothers in Hollywood from the 1940s or 1950s. Even as a child, I thought it was very peculiar that Shirley MacLaine's husband lived in Tokyo and she didn't. Now we find he had her convinced the man she had actually met and married was an astronaut named Paul who was on a secret assignment to another galaxy, and he, Steve Parker, was a genetic clone of Paul. And that the government needed $60,000 a month from MacLaine to sustain Paul's mission and the clone Steve would be in charge of getting that money to Paul. Meanwhile, he was living with a Japanese mistress and kept Sachi the months she was in school, although a Japanese nanny was actually raising her. Shirley's proof of this was a box of telegrams she received from Paul, vowing his love.Parker was a con man. He called his daughter once claiming he was in Italy on business and couldn't help her, and then she finds out he was in the same hotel in Hawaii that she was when he made the call, complete with Italian-speaking operators and long distance static faked in.You have to wonder what happened to Shirley MacLaine and her brother Warren Beatty to make them both so emotionally distant from all the people in their lives, unable to feel any loyalty or responsibility to anyone. Warren seems to have finally married and settled down with kids after breaking the hearts of numerous women, but MacLaine has stayed in the deep end with her mysticism as an excuse for dealing with people in this world.Anyway, Sachi is exposed to things no child should be exposed, exotic Japanese sex clubs her father takes her to, and accidental glimpses of orgies. She's forced to have her first sexual experience with a boyfriend by her mother and her mother's spiritual advisors, then tricked into leaving him by a promise of a television job in Japan that never happens. She's isolated to British boarding schools as a teen, and no one comes to pick her up on holidays or summer breaks. She's at the mercy of whomever she can find to take her in. She gets involved with abusive men, criminally abusive doctors, and the sex life of being an international stewardess, with lovers in every city. Her parents never help her financially. Even buying a cheap car involves a loan she has to pay back.Shirley begrudgingly treats her as an acquaintance once she reaches adulthood and tries to have a career as an actress, but she seldom gets anything better than small parts in minor productions. The few times she had successful auditions at bigger roles, her mother makes sure she doesn't get them. One of the meanest things I read was how Shirley had a scene cut out of her movie "Evening Star" because the actress Marion Ross (from "Happy Days") was so good in it. Sachi marries and has two children and says she was a better mother than her mother, and the book ends with her having some success in a grandmotherly role in a Japanese film. Since the book ended, she's gotten a divorce. Her father dies at the end of the book, and you would think she could easily spit on his grave, but she is sad about it and even claims his ghost paid her a couple of visits. She willfully lets a large piece of property, which she says was worth millions, go by default to her father's wife, who tried to steal it from her right after her father dies. She just makes the woman wait a year to get it. That made zero sense to me.Shirley MacLaine claims this book is all lies, but given the fact that her own recollections of how she raised her child are different in all the books she wrote, and the oddity of ignoring your only child most of every year and leaving her with a man you actually believe is a clone, I believe Sachi's version of this story. You will never be able to look at Shirley MacLaine again with any kind of respect.