Shirley MacLaine on Sticking Up for Julia Roberts on ‘Steel Magnolias,’ Working With Hitchcock and Her Gross Donald Trump Encounter

variety.com:

Brent Lang Executive Editor Shirley MacLaine is making a ghastly racket. It sounds like a combination of retching and the “aack” noise that the protagonist of that old “Cathy” comic strip used to make whenever she was nauseated, horrified, infuriated or you name it.

We’re discussing an encounter that MacLaine had with Donald Trump in the ’80s, when she went to look at an apartment in one of his buildings. “In his head, I could see he was undressing himself and me, and I got out of there very fast,” MacLaine writes in her new book, “The Wall of Life: Pictures and Stories From This Marvelous Lifetime.” MacLaine is even more animated when I ask her what she made of the real estate developer turned MAGA leader. “Did you hear me shriek?” she asks. “I think that says it all.” She pauses for dramatic effect before delivering a final, emphatic: “Yuck!” Even at 90, MacLaine, an Oscar-winning screen legend, is outrageously, unapologetically herself, holding forth on everyone from Billy Wilder (“brilliant but difficult”) to Jimmy Carter (“the friendliest man”) to Peter Sellers (“He stayed in character the whole time”) in a book that is equal parts memoir and photo album.

The title refers to a wall of MacLaine’s Malibu home that was covered with snapshots of her friends and family, as well as the roughly 70 years she spent on stage and screen. “As I was staring at the pictures one day, the past kind of came and visited me again,” MacLaine, who is calling from her house in New Mexico, says.