Putting a New Gloss on Mary Kay

Shirley MacLaine is on the phone from her home in New Mexico talking about “Hell on Heels: The Battle of Mary Kay.” Her delectably satiric CBS Sunday movie is based on the true story of a nasty corporate war in the mid-’90s between the late cosmetics queen Mary Kay Ash and an ambitious newcomer, Jinger Heath (Parker Posey), who launches a rival company.

But MacLaine actually has a few questions to ask. “What did you think of the laugh at the end?” inquires the Oscar-winning veteran of such films as “The Apartment,” “Irma la Douce,” “The Turning Point” and “Terms of Endearment.”

“What did it mean to you?”

The comedy concludes with Mary Kay, sans her customary white bouffant wig, elaborate makeup and froufrou outfits, looking at the audience and breaking out into a deliciously sly laugh.

I thought her laugh signified that she was in on the joke--she didn’t take her image seriously.

“OK, good,” MacLaine says. Director Ed Gernon “and I really agonized over that. We wanted to make it enigmatic but let the audience take what they wanted to from it. What we were trying to do and see if you got this, we were trying to tell a story of how capitalism impacts and informs the female in relation to independence and ambition and what you are going to do with your life.”

After working for several years in direct sales, Mary Kay Ash retired in 1963 after being overlooked for a promotion. The retirement lasted just a month when she decided to write a book about how women could thrive in the male-dominated business world. At her kitchen table, she compiled two lists: one that featured everything she liked in companies she worked for and the other pointing out where companies needed improvement. Looking at the list, she realized she had created a marketing plan for a successful company. And with her life savings of $5,000 and her then-20-year-old son, Richard, she launched the direct sales company Mary Kay Cosmetics in September 1963.

“She was responsible for making more female millionaires than anyone in the world,” MacLaine says. “Mary Kay was sort of a capitalist evangelical person.”

Ash’s golden rule for herself and her employees was that God came first, family was second and career third. Several of her “revival” meetings, when she rallied and inspired her employees, are depicted in the movie. Her motivational techniques work. Top-selling Mary Kay employees were rewarded with a big pink Cadillac. The company became the largest direct seller of skin care and color cosmetics in the U.S. And even now, a year after Mary Kay’s death at age 83, there are more than 800,000 beauty consultants in 37 markets in five continents.

A Role That Resonates

MacLaine loved playing the outrageous and flamboyant Ash. She relished the woman’s contradictions. “I just stay away from doing anything until I find a part that resonates in all of those qualities. Since we are all so contradictory on some level, that is what makes us human. I adore this character. I don’t even know what this means, but I don’t feel like I’m finished with her.”

To this day, MacLaine says, she can’t explain how she approaches acting. “It’s a very difficult thing to try to explain, all the other things I do like dance, sing and write, I can explain my process. I can’t explain how I act. I don’t know where it comes from. I don’t know how it really works.”

“Hell on Heels” boasts a powder-puff visual style that recalls such Doris Day movies as “Pillow Talk,” and a clever opening sequence that spoofs the famous “Rosebud” scene from “Citizen Kane.”

It was MacLaine who suggested that Gernon, the film’s producer, direct. “He’s one of the big powers at [the production company] Alliance/Atlantis. He’s the one who ran around the world and got great stories.”

“Shirley and I have done two movies together before, ‘Joan of Arc’ and ‘The Salem Witch Trials,’ which is coming in February,” Gernon says. “During those two films, we got fairly close and had a strong meeting of the minds. When I called her about this film, she was interested, but when she read it she wasn’t particularly enthusiastic. I think she felt at first the social satire of the piece was more acerbic than she would have liked. But during our conversations together she began to see the warmth and heart that was buried in the piece, but wasn’t actually yet on the script. She said, ‘I’ll do it if you direct it.’ She made it a condition for her starring in the film.”

It was MacLaine’s suggestion to add the character of a sophisticated New York TV journalist named Annika (Rachael Crawford), who arrives at Ash’s empire to do a story on her. MacLaine sees her as sort of a Greek chorus reporting on the proceedings.

“I wanted the Annika character to be a contemporary, fresh-scrubbed feminist who can sort of be a silent witness to the absurdity of this whole environment,” Gernon says. “Then, strangely, she comes to realize at least on the Mary Kay side of it, that women like her are essentially standing on the shoulders of women like Mary Kay, who was a feminist before there were feminists. There were women like Mary Kay who didn’t do it for a cause. They originally did it because they knew what it was like to put food on the table and take care of kids.”

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“Hell on Heels: The Battle of Mary Kay” can be seen Sunday at 9 p.m. on CBS. The network has rated it TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children).