It's hard to describe what Shirley MacLaine's book Sage-ing While Age-ing is about. It seems to cover so many things. It's partly a memoir of this life and stories from the movies, but it touches on her past lives. It's partly metaphysics, the nature of the soul, the definition of love. There's a part about 'star beings' and her sightings of various craft from other planets. And it's partly medical advice about the ageing body: 'Make lemonade,' she writes. 'Lemons, as acidic as they are, alkinise the body.' 'Take melatonin, it's wonderful for the hair.'
It's really several books in one held together by the consistency of one voice, a voice that is strong, optimistic, formidable even. Quirky, caustic. The one thing the voice in the book doesn't ever do is doubt itself.
When we meet in a suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel this is exactly how she is. If the world thinks she's crazy because in another lifetime she was a princess in Egypt with her reincarnated dog, she certainly doesn't acknowledge it. She makes a point in the book that many people would prefer to see her as invisible so they don't have to contend with what she's about: a believer in UFOs and life before life. She's 73 and she knows what happens after a certain age to actresses who were bathed in the glow of Hollywood all their lives - they become crones. She says she's going to do a film (she calls them 'pictures') called Poor Things, a story about two old women who are so frustrated with being invisible that they get away with murder. They can kill unnoticed.
It's hard to believe MacLaine feels invisible. Her presence cuts through the atmosphere without her saying anything. She's fiery but not immediately warm. She's wearing a multicoloured beaded top and loose trousers, strawberry-blonde hair in a bob she made famous in the early Sixties. Her eyes are huge, with spidery lashes.
She looks through you and inspires fear in the photographer's assistant with her question: 'Just how bright is your light going to be?' Invisible, never. Prepared to kill? Possibly. She once said that she'd kill someone if she thought they were going to break her heart. There's a realness in that. Or as real as anything can be for someone who has spent 50 years acting, which she calls 'the ultimate imaginative metaphysical art form. How do we know what's real or not? Did we really fall in love with our co-star? Are those real tears?'
She's wearing rings on the end of her fingers: bejewelled with turquoise, they cover her nails. She calls them 'sky rings'. The colour of the sky. 'Turquoise protects us from radiation. I design these rings myself.' I try some on. She hopes to sell them on her website or in Selfridges. She shows me how easy it is to type with them on.
'I channelled the book. But every writer says that, don't they? Norman Mailer said that to me all the time. Ahh, I'm going to miss him. I really liked him a lot. He was outrageous.' Maybe you were two of a kind? She looks at me as if she has no idea what I am talking about. Pauses.
'He didn't quite let himself go in his ruminations of the spirit. He tried in Ancient Evenings and he definitely understood reincarnation because that was the only cosmic justice that made sense to him. But he fought it all because he was left-brain intellectual. I believe I have a balance there. I was mostly left-brain orientated, and in the past 30 years it changed.'
There's no doubt that MacLaine is a one-off, although she says: 'What's one of those? I think I'm quite conventional. I'm a peaceful person once work ethic is established. If people are around me and whatever I'm doing is efficient, then I'm extremely peaceful. When someone doesn't care about their job or it's all screwed up - no, I am not peaceful, because I'm addicted to making people better than they think they are.'
You are quite controlling, aren't you? 'Maybe it's just that I like them to live up to their potential,' she says coquettishly. Is that because you thought you might not live up to your potential? 'I think when I was in my early twenties and middle twenties I didn't even know I wasn't living up to my potential. A couple of friends told me I wasn't and told me to get my act together, and it made a huge impact on me.'
By her early twenties she had already starred in Hitchcock's The Trouble With Harry. She had done the original Ocean's 11. She was a rat-pack mascot, friends with all of them though girlfriend to none. In 1960 she made Can-Can, a dancing musical with Frank Sinatra and Maurice Chevalier. She had started on Broadway as a hoofer. She was known to be the girl with great legs but a funny face. A face that served her well in Billy Wilder's complex, tragi-comic The Apartment with Jack Lemmon. If you look back at those films now, she was striking: her performances had real guts and stamina. It's odd that she says she didn't have her act together when she was doing so well.
'Well, success does not mean doing well. To get my act together, I realised I had to look more within myself - and I did. How am I supposed to remember what pictures I was doing then? I can't remember much of anything, quite frankly, which I'm very happy about in many ways because it means I can live totally in the now.'
It's hard to believe she doesn't remember making The Apartment, for which she was nominated for an Oscar. She doesn't remember much about Terms of Endearment, for which she won an Oscar in 1984. 'I think it's because energy is speeding up. I have to be more in the now in order to know what I'm doing.'
She must remember something of who she was before. What's the most interesting thing that's changed about her? She pauses to consider the accuracy of her answer. 'Before, I was very ambitious. Not to be successful, but to be creative - and also I was very involved in relationships, particularly men. I had all of these fabulous relationships. I learnt a great deal through them, and now I want more of a relationship with nature and with ruminating and remembering and dreaming, and so forth. I don't like to socialise much. It's a big deal for me to come into town because I live on a ranch in New Mexico.'
She also has a place in Malibu by the ocean. She doesn't like the toxicity of the traffic in Beverly Hills. 'But I adore the people. There's some really creative people living and working here I adore. Particularly if they're eccentric. I used to be disturbed by eccentrics; now I welcome them.'
Is that because she is one of them? 'No, I've never thought I was an eccentric and I don't think so now.' There's a tight pause and then we laugh. She tells me: 'I used to write all the Shirley MacLaine jokes on Johnny Carson. The guys would call me up and say we want two or three Shirleys tonight and I would help them.'
Isn't that weird? 'Not at all. What I found really humiliating were jokes about me that people didn't laugh at. Robin Williams once did a whole Oscar show ripping off my channelling. Oh, he was hysterical.'
It's not that Shirley MacLaine looks or doesn't look 73, but when she grins she has a mesmeric sparkle. What does she mean exactly when she says she used to be really involved in relationships, pursuing men? 'Not pursuing men,' she corrects. 'I would make sure that they pursued me.' And what was her technique? 'Can't remember that either.'
She used to find men intriguing. She had many affairs and an odd 28-year marriage to film producer-turned-businessman Steve Parker - they weren't really together for a lot of it. There was an intense three-year affair with Robert Mitchum. There was Danny Kaye and Yves Montand, and she always had a fascination for politicians, including Andrew Peacock, who at the time was Australia's foreign minister.
Her search for the definition of love was quite thorough. 'Because I was having affairs in every country around the world, an old lover of mine said: "Why don't you just have a licence plate made up that says 'Fuck Americans'?" I thought that was witty.' And was she really having affairs all around the world? 'Mm-mm,' she says, sounding suddenly like the southern belle she never really was.
Did she never enjoy monogamy? 'No. Although I am a serial monogamist. There are three sets of people where sex is concerned. The promiscuous, which I was not; the total monogamist, which I was not; and the serial monogamist, who has very deep but intense relationships while you are in them. I guess I learned what I needed to learn from them and then I usually fixed it so they would move on, not me. I didn't like the guilt of moving away from them. I'm a middle-class girl from Virginia. I don't handle guilt well. But I'm over the hill now,' she says, not particularly sadly.
Is it true she never had her heart broken? A long pause. She whispers, 'Yes, that's true. My heart would be broken, shattered, if something happened to my dog though. I take her everywhere, and you know, we've had a talk. She's going to live till about 2012 and then she'll come back again and it'll be up to me to find her.'
Terry is a rat terrier with a mischievous nature not dissimilar to her owner's. She says they are both very independent spirits, loyal but individual. She credits Terry as co-writer of her book Out on a Leash: Exploring the Nature of Reality and Love. And Terry is 'almost androgynous, that's why she has an androgynous name'. She could talk about her dog all day. She swallowed a diamond ring once. It hasn't come out yet. She's commandeered for her a special coat which says she is a therapy dog, which allows her in forbidden places like aeroplanes. 'I hope when she comes back she'll come back as a smaller dog, so I don't have to lift her up going through airport security all the time.'
I tell her I would very much like my dog to come back, but how will I recognise him? He might come back as a person. 'No, there is no transmigration of souls. People come back as people, dogs come back as dogs. Was it a lap dog, your dog? Did he do lapping?' she says filthily.
I tell her the story of my poodle and how he died, how I told him he didn't have to hang on for me and we would always know each other, how he arched his neck up, took his last breath and died in my arms. She is crying. She wipes her tears away. Any slivers of brusqueness are gone. It's still a conundrum, though, why she should write books about love and say she doesn't know heartbreak. But maybe she has forgotten it.
She and Terry had to be separated when she made Closing the Ring with Richard Attenborough in Ireland. It's set during the Second World War, with MacLaine's character the love interest of three men, until one of them dies when his bomber crashes into Belfast's Cave Hill. The mechanics of the triangle are told both in the present and in the past, and MacLaine gives us a woman who is distanced by life, hardened until a breakthrough moment when she allows herself to feel. I doubt it was hard for her to access that dislocation. She says the pain of the separation from her dog helped her to support Attenborough, who was grieving for the daughter and granddaughter he lost in the Asian tsunami of 2004. Through her dog she can access hurt. 'I knew her in Egypt when she was an anubis. She tried to teach me then; I didn't learn very well. She's come back and I'm learning better.'
She and Attenborough are old friends. They met in 1968 when they played husband and wife in The Bliss of Mrs Blossom. She whispers: 'Do you think people will like this movie? It meant such a lot to him. It's really his story.' By this, maybe she means it's a story about a person who won't allow themselves to grieve. Perhaps it was his release.
Many of the key players in MacLaine's world have been around in previous lives. 'My parents, my daughter, some people I've worked with, two or three lovers - I'll have to count them up now,' she says, counting on her sky-ringed fingers. 'The point is, we encounter people from the past that we didn't finish the learning experience with.' And you finish it this time round? 'Some yes, some no. I did learn from my parents, though - that was fairly complete.
'When I walked across Spain [details of the spiritual journey El Camino inspired another book] I got lost for three days. I ended up at a Spanish military installation. Man, I didn't know where I was. My parents came back to guide me to the trail. The first time they had been together since they were both alive. I was in real danger.'
She used to read her books to her parents. Her father had several out-of-body experiences and saw his best friend appear at the edge of his bed at the moment he died in the Second World War. Her mother 'was extremely contained. She was, after all, Canadian. And as a result of being contained they can erupt. People who met my parents said they reminded them of eccentric vaudevillians.' Her parents had a long and not terribly happy marriage. 'They were unfulfilled,' she says, in a way that makes you feel it was her quest never to be.
Over the years she has had times when she didn't talk to her brother, Warren Beatty. 'Now is not one of them. We are fine now. I think we've been through a couple of lifetimes together. He's going through his left-brain intellectual lifetime now. He's on a very different path to me. But his kids are very interested in what I'm saying.'
It's been written that they fell out because of some of her more radical ideas about reincarnation and UFOs. 'I can't remember,' she says. It's also been written that they differed over his taste in girlfriends, particularly Madonna. She says: 'You know, we are both old people now and he is respectful to his old lovers. I like to remind him as often as possible that I am the senior here, so you'd better listen to me.'
For all the sageing and the ageing, something about her doesn't seem very old at all. She seems naughty, teenage. 'I do have an adolescent part, or maybe younger. I have a kid's nature. I am very interested in doing this movie with Olympia Dukakis, playing these two old women who feel marginalised by their invisibility. Although I like to be invisible. Because I've been noticed so much in my life, I really go the other way. This paparazzi stuff would drive me nuts. I would have driven over 20 paparazzi by now.'
Do you have any addictions? 'Only to sugar. I don't eat a lot of it, but I have to have it every day.' Later on she raids the hotel mini-bar. We share a giant Twix and then a Snickers.
Does she worry about ageing? 'Well, some friends of mine in New Mexico are thinking of building guest houses for our nurses. Worried about ageing? Hmm?' she questions me. Is she worried about a loss of beauty, about dying? 'Dying,' she booms. 'I'll find out if what I've been talking about is real. So I'm looking forward to that. I'm not looking forward to death but I'm not afraid of it. I don't want it to be painful, so I have to be careful not to be afraid of it, because you draw it to you.
'As for beauty, Warren was the beautiful one in the family. That was the given. I didn't see myself that way. Just in the last week I'm falling in love with my wrinkles because I was wondering: should I do Botox? I'm loving the idea that I'm 73 and almost looking like it. I'm going to get some great parts...' She pauses. 'I still need that bright light, though. I had a face-lift about 30 years ago. I'm glad I did it. It's all back to where it was now, though. I do worry about getting heavy. Not so much cosmetically, but what it means for the body. But I won't do liposuction. I go for walks on the beach, up and down hills at Malibu. I do stretching for my back and some of the skeletal problems. Probably caused by dancing in high heels, and dancing on cement instead of wood. I was never that good a dancer to really injure myself, and I was always really cautious.'
Cautious doesn't seem to fit. 'Why, do you think I'm reckless because I say things out loud? We live in an open and free society, as opposed to the oppression of Islamic fundamentalism. It's dangerous to deride, tease and ridicule another person for speaking the truth in relation to these spiritual things.'
Was it also this cautiousness that kept her from getting bones and hearts broken? 'Maybe I wasn't involved enough to have my heart broken. My husband really was the love of my life. He died some time ago.' But didn't he run off with a lot of your money? 'Yes, but that was a good lesson. He put it into projects that he thought were worthwhile, but without asking.' Was that why you broke up? 'No. He was involved with another woman and I was all over the place with different men.'
In the past, MacLaine has said she regretted not spending enough time with her daughter. She's not feeling regretful about that today. She's feeling that she and Sachi 'went through a couple of lifetimes together and our relationship is more like friends anyway'. They went to live in Japan when Sachi was six. She didn't want her to grow up in Hollywood. There was a weird incident with a drunk nanny and kidnap threats, so she was sent to the International School in Tokyo. 'We lived in Shibuya, we all went there together. We were together every summer and a month at Christmas and a month at Easter. And in the early years in Japan I was a hands-on mother.'
It must have been hard to have Shirley MacLaine as your mother. She's just not particularly maternal, perhaps because her mother wasn't. She believes both she and her mother were male warriors in another life. She is curiously distant and curiously full on. She drinks you in and then seems to float off. She wants to know about my lovers. Have I felt that I've met them before in another life? Hasn't everyone? I imagine that she was always the person who was doted on rather than the person who doted.
'I am always the one who sees the potential in other people more than they see it in themselves. It's very burdening for that other person because they feel they can't live up to it. I'm not over that, but I'm not in a relationship and nor do I want one, so that's not going to come up again... Well, it might, and that would be all right. But I am very content in the way I live my life and have been for a while. My passion now is sharing and writing what I understand. Passion for our other truths and how to stop our negative passions. There are men who are attracted to me and want to have a relationship with me, but sometimes I don't even see it,' she shrugs.
It's been written that she was in love with Dean Martin but he was married and it remained unrequited. Was he a lover? 'No, it was a crush for about six weeks.' Was it an unrequited passion? 'I don't know what you're talking about. I did not have that kind of feeling about Dean,' she says impatiently. But then she relents and says: 'He was so funny. We had the same agent and we would all have dinner together. He would try out his material on me because I'm a great laugher. And I would try out material on him, and Mort, the agent, would be the referee. He was an interesting man, Dean. Totally uneducated. And then he self-educated...'
Did you like that about him? 'You mean did I like the idea of a labourer?' She laughs a growly laugh. 'I had a wonderful relationship with somebody like that. It was fabulous. Somebody you could never imagine, but he couldn't handle it because he couldn't see any future in it. He was intimidated. What do you call that, when you are in my position and you have an attraction below your station?' I don't know if there's a psychological term, but I think it's called a bit of rough. 'I like that,' she says determinedly.
It's time for her photo session, the one she wants to do with very bright lights that blur out imperfections. In fact, we are going on to the roof. She's brought a few outfits and she asks me to choose one. I choose the snakeskin trousers because they are so Seventies California. The time when she might have been driving with that special number plate, the 'Fuck Americans' one.
Gamely, she mounts tiny steel steps to the ledge of the roof. We start talking about Terry again. Terry animates her and connects her. She says that when she went on a diet the dog refused to eat, too. She tells me how she loves to bark at yellow signs. How Terry has taught her that she is capable of unconditional love. She enjoys talking about Terry so much she sends her publicists home and orders Martinis to be sent to her suite - hers Tanqueray, mine vodka. She wants us to watch the Democratic candidates' debate. She sits rapt by the television, asking me what I think of each one. Do I think Hillary's too distant? Do I think Obama's too young? The debate finishes. We chat some more. We eat chocolate. She offers her driver to give me a lift home. She appears not to like many people, so I'm strangely touched, but then she realises she's going in the opposite direction. Nothing strange about that.
·To order Sage-ing While Age-ing for £14 with free UK p&p go to observer.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0885. Closing the Ring opens on 28 December