Peking Duck

By R.Z. Sheppard

YOU CAN GET THERE FROM HERE

by SHIRLEY MacLAINE 249 pages. Norton. $7.95.

Actress Shirley MacLaine lost her fear of flying long before Erica Jong's heroine Isadora Wing began cuddling her banalities and faking worldliness like a high school girl boasting about lost virginity. In fact, MacLaine's life far exceeds the fantasies that the fictional Isadora plays out hi Fear of Flying. At 40, MacLaine is an enviable example of the liberated quadraphonic life: a film star who could command $800,000 a movie, a wife and mother who appears to operate a successful open marriage, and a citizen who served as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention and one of George McGovern's most energetic campaigners.

MacLaine is also a writer. Her autobiography, Don't Fall Off"the Mountain (1970), impressed critics, including her own father, a conservative Virginia realtor who attested to the book's directness and honesty. "You portrayed me like I am," he told his daughter. "I'm a bigot. But I'm popular on my block."

MacLaine has inherited her fair share of this sort of charm. In her second book about herself, she skips winningly over the quicksands of human nature and power politics, and still lands on her feet. You Can Get There from Here is basically a comeback saga. In 1971. she stumbled badly in an inane and short-lived TV series called Shirley's World. In the role of a global journalist, MacLaine had hopes of playing herself: an openhearted, open-minded, outspoken female. The show's producers wanted a clever career gal who keeps her pantsuit on and plays mediating momma to her contentious male col leagues. The results were a disaster.

In 1973, she was invited by Mao Tse-tung's government to lead a delegation of American women on a tour of Chi na. Although MacLaine was photo graphed in a bell-bottomed Mao outfit, her group could hardly be called rad ical chic. Among others it included a Puerto Rican, a Navajo, a black civil rights worker from Mississippi, a white George Wallace supporter from Texas, a Republican, a psychologist and a 12-year-old girl. There was also a four-woman camera crew who filmed a rec ord of the trip to produce a 74-minute documentary entitled The Other Half of the Sky: A China Memoir.

Broad Strokes. The tour covered thousands of carefully supervised miles, from bustling Canton to the Yenan, where Mao and the revolution began their own comeback saga. "I found my self thinking with such broad strokes in China," writes MacLaine. This turns out to be one of the understatements of 4763, the Year of the Hare. She enthusiastically quotes official statistics, re ports having seen only happy Chinese faces, and announces the arrival of the "new man," free of competitive greed.

She applauds the national practice of public selfcriticism, a procedure that she believes keeps 800 million Chinese free from corruption.

MacLaine has a few guarded com plaints about industrial pollution, the lack of intellectual and artistic freedom, and Chinese puritanism, which condemns premarital sex while at the same tune forcefully suggesting late marriage.

The cold shower of the revolution also affected the author. She duly reports that during the three weeks she spent in Chi na, her sex drive diminished sharply.

The author's primary urge in China was to revitalize herself through renewed hope. After her professional and polit ical failures, the most thoroughgoing revolution hi human history obviously seemed to represent, to her, success on an awesome scale. Like many of the young Americans who visited Cuba, MacLaine was fascinated with the sort of discipline that had been missing in her life at home. In any event, after Chi na she turned back to show business with renewed vigor.

Her vigor shows less in the China chapters, though, than in the reports about the entertainment world that end the book. Of Frank Sinatra as a Wa tergate Republican, she writes, for in stance: "He had always loved gangsters, in a kind of romantic theatrical way, as though he wanted really to be one. Now he was up there with the best of them."

Now, if Rex Reed would only go to China..

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