Gotta Dance : Bouncing back from an injury, Shirley MacLaine is on a worldwide tour with her song-and-dance revue and her film career is in motion too

“It wasn’t even a step,” Shirley MacLaine grimaces as she recalls the accident May 1 that could have ended her dance career. “Just the preparation for a step, and crrruuunnnch . . . it all tore open. I’ve never felt pain like that in my life.”

The accident, which tore the cartilage in her right knee, caused the postponement of the Los Angeles opening of her new musical revue, “Out There Tonight” (which opens a four-week engagement at the Pantages Theatre Tuesday), and caused serious concerns about her career. “The doctors said I might dance again,” she recalls. “I thought it was a bad dream. I’ve never been injured in my life!”

Several months later, it’s 1 p.m. and 111 degrees in the shade. In the air-conditioned chill of her hotel suite, MacLaine, whose show opened to a sellout audience at Caesar’s Palace the night before, has just awakened and is commencing her exercises. Bent vertically at the hips like a human paperclip, her curly red hair scratching the gray carpet, she grabs the phone and, peering backwards between her legs, begins chattering happily with a friend from Australia. The topics: her show, her upcoming engagement Down Under and her new films, “Postcards from the Edge” and “Waiting for the Light.”

“Postcards,” the Mike Nichols film of Carrie Fisher’s memoir, deals with Fisher’s relationship with her mother, Debbie Reynolds. It opens in Los Angeles Sept. 14 and nationally a week later.

Amid reminders of her accident--her knee is still taped for performances, a protection she hopes to discard before the L.A. opening, and she works out with weights for hours daily to strengthen her leg--MacLaine speaks about the injury, her new projects and a career that has endured longer than many Americans have lived.

“I’ve been dancing for 53 years,” she says, hanging up the phone and straightening up. “And I never had an accident before. I still don’t know what really happened.”

The knee was actually injured twice. “The first time was March 20, after we had been on the road with the new show for three weeks and were in Seattle. About halfway through, I just went down. I wasn’t in pain, but I knew I had dislocated my kneecap. The whole thing seized up and I couldn’t turn. I finished the show--it is genetically impossible for me to walk off a stage, I’d rather die--and they carried me off.”

Final performances in Seattle were cancelled and the next opening postponed for a week while MacLaine treated the knee with therapy and iced it down the rest of the time. “Then, just before the Los Angeles opening, I was in the rehearsal hall and it happened,” she recalls of the second, more serious accident. “It just gave way.” She underwent arthroscopic surgery at UCLA Medical Center. “They filmed the whole thing,” she laughs, “and the big joke around UCLA was that it was the best movie Shirley MacLaine had ever been in!”

After five weeks of all-day every-day physical therapy, she opened to sold-out audiences and critical acclaim in Pittsburgh. The accident even provided a bonus. “Because of the shift in dates,” she explains, “we were able to add Japan, where I open right after Los Angeles, Australia, London and Paris.”

Did she ever doubt that she could make it in time? “No,” she snaps, “that’s the way I am. Everything is a question of attitude.”

Shirley MacLaine started ballet lessons at 2 1/2 years old in Richmond, Va. “From the very first day, I was in love with it,” she recalls. “I can still remember the girls at the barre and about five of the boys.” When she was 12, her parents and younger brother Warren (Beatty) moved to Arlington. “The heavy-duty transition in my life,” she says, “was my enrollment in the Washington School of Ballet,” which she attended daily after cheerleader practice at Washington and Lee High School.

Following graduation, MacLaine moved to New York and had a brief flirtation with American Ballet Theatre. She grew too tall too fast to be a ballerina, but the experience came in handy when she made “The Turning Point” 24 years later.

“I did lots of summer stock,” she says, “10 shows a summer, with acting and dance classes in the winter.” Her big break came in 1954, when she was picked to be Carol Haney’s understudy in “Pajama Game.” The first night she went on for Haney, producer Hal Wallis was in the theater. He subsequently arranged a screen test. The next time she took the stage Alfred Hitchcock was in the theater. He cast her in “The Trouble With Harry,” her first film. “You have to have a mystic streak after that,” she smiles.

Hal Prince was the stage manager for “Pajama Game,” she recalls, “and he told me I was making a huge mistake to leave the chorus and make films.” Since then, she has made 40 movies, five television specials, a series of self-help videos, produced and toured in four one-woman shows, written six books, married and raised a daughter, Sachi, herself an actress. She and Steve Parker, her husband for 27 years, divorced in 1987. She claims she never hears from him and has no idea where he is.

“Postcards From the Edge” stars Meryl Streep in the Carrie Fisher role and MacLaine as Debbie Reynolds (named Doris Mann in the film). The script was written by Fisher.

“Tell me how you liked it,” MacLaine asks anyone who has been to a screening. “Waddya think of it?”

The role includes a performance of Stephen Sondheim’s “I’m Still Here,” with new lyrics by Sondheim, that nearly stops the show--the song has recently been added to MacLaine’s revue. Her battery of visual ad-libs also brought howls of laughter to the preview audience. “Well,” MacLaine laughs, “acting is ad-libbing. Let’s put it this way. I got into the part! Not much plot,” MacLaine says of “Postcards,” which limns Fisher’s battle with drugs and her domineering mother’s response. “Just a slice of life.”

Any parallels to her relationship with Sachi? The question is raised by the presence, in a scene from “Postcards,” of a framed, real-life Life magazine cover from 1959 of MacLaine and Sachi, representing Doris and daughter. “I don’t think I would have the courage to act like Doris even if I felt like it. I think I would feel I had to be more motherly, more sensitive and more . . . democratic,” she smiles.

When asked if there were elements of “Mommie Dearest” in her portrayal--after all, she’s known all the dragon ladies of Hollywood--she asserts, “No, no, the difference is that Doris Mann, who sees everything through her own point of view, also included her daughter in that point of view. The stereotypical Hollywood mothers didn’t--they would put their child on a lower priority level than what they were doing. Doris Mann wants to include her daughter, but she wants her to do it all her way.”

There were reports that Reynolds wanted to play herself in the film and that MacLaine beat her out for the part. MacLaine admits, “I called her as soon as they approached me and asked what she thought. Debbie said, ‘I think it would be great, because you’re funny.’

“The great thing is that everyone making the film really had a keen interest in portraying an accurate slice of life in female Hollywood. I have been through it. A female actor is discussed all the time in Hollywood--weight gain, lines, aging, or who is the boyfriend who might be trouble here? Nobody does that with male actors, at least not as much,” she says.

“And now, it seems a woman is considered out of her prime when she’s past 40,” MacLaine says.

There is a scene in “Postcards” that may come as a shock to MacLaine fans, used to her usual glamorous appearance. Doris Mann is in the hospital, looking ancient: no makeup, balding and no eyebrows. Did MacLaine, halfway through her sixth decade and feeling as she does about Hollywood’s attitude toward women’s age, have any misgivings about being presented so unglamorously? “No,” she says slowly, “I didn’t think of it as taking a chance. That is what the character looked like, and I never thought of myself at all. But then, I never do.”

MacLaine will also be seen in October in “Waiting for the Light,” co-starring with Teri Garr. She plays a circus performer who creates a trick that is taken to be a miracle. It’s “a comedic examination of what happens to the values of a small town when a perceived miracle starts drawing money,” she says, expression wry.

“Welcome UFOs and Crews” proclaim the welcome mats at MacLaine’s five-bedroom apartment in a building she put up in Malibu 30 years ago. The otherworldly welcome acknowledges the controversy generated by the books about her path to self-realization, her interest in out-of-body experiences and reincarnation and the self-help seminars she led for a year or so. The latter, particularly, were frequently met with derision by the press.

Did any of this bother her? “Not really,” she says. The seminars, which drew upwards of 1,800 people paying $300 each, were three-day events. “I really enjoyed them, but the press was making a big deal about it as though I was starting a new religion. That bothered me, and it also bothered me when groupies started to arrive.

“I’m not a guru and I don’t want to be. I’m very uncomfortable with that role.” In the past she has said that the money from the seminars would be used to build a spiritual center, and, she says, it will be. Two hundred acres of Colorado land have been purchased, and as soon as she and her architect determine the appropriate design and material (it will not be built of wood--she is deeply involved in fighting the destruction of trees), it will happen.

Although MacLaine spends most of her free time at her home in Washington state, on the banks of the Puyallup River surrounded by the trees she loves, the Malibu homestead, which is furnished in an unostentatious, rather 1960s style, is full of pictures of a life in the limelight: with Fidel Castro, with Nikita Khrushchev, with Bella Abzug, Jimmy Carter, the Rat Pack, accepting her Oscar in 1984 for “Terms of Endearment.” But closest to her heart are the photographs of her mother, father and brother and all that they represent to her life and career. Questioned why she thinks both children of a relatively obscure couple achieved such fame, the actress becomes serious.

“The hidden agenda here,” she observes, “ is my mother and my dad. They devoted their lives to us. They had their problems, their frustrations and very definitely their sense of disappointment in not having expressed themselves completely.”

She often thinks about her father, Ira Beaty, who died three years ago. He was the principal of an elementary school that she attended in Virginia and later dealt in real estate when frustrated by the “peanut politics” of an education career. “Apparently he really suffered during the Depression,” she explains. “Support of the family was very important to him, so whatever creative interests he had--he taught me to play the violin--were put aside. And Mother (Kathlynn, who splits her time between her son and daughter’s homes) was desirous of being an actress all her life, read poetry and was a great painter.

“I consider myself a communicator.” MacLaine adds. “I’m just using these different avenues, acting, singing, dancing, writing, to communicate . . . probably to communicate the dreams that my parents never realized. I recognized a long time ago that one’s mother and father are the most important people in your life. They’re the ones that mold and encourage and intimidate and cajole.

“In my case there were things my parents wanted to do that they didn’t and, in some ways, I’m doing it for them.”

The story of “Postcards From the Edge” surfaces again: “It deals with problems with parents and working them out in a way that is positive and contributive. Carrie was always concerned that it be done in a loving way, and I think we did. And I’ve had the experience with my mother wanting me to be something and had my own feelings of wanting my daughter to be something.”

This urge to please her parents, she believes, is as much a part of Beatty’s success as her own. “Sure it is,” she says. “Look at ‘Dick Tracy.’ It’s his dissertation on his childhood. And that’s why I think it was so brilliantly done.”

MacLaine’s eyes well with tears. “I think both of us have a need, a deeply felt melancholy respect for the dreams unrealized by our parents, so we fulfill theirs, and ours.”