Shirley Maclaine's daughter Sachi Parker wrote a real page-turner of a memoir. The story goes that when Sachi was in her twenties, she learned that Shirley believed Sachi's father, Steve Parker, was not her real father but a clone of the real one, an astronaut named Paul. For years Steve had conned MacLaine into paying him up to $60,000 a month for “Paul’s space travel expenses.” Sachi, who had lived with her father in Japan for years, had to break it to Shirley that she'd married a con man, which didn't go over well.
From the book...
On her mom’s belief in aliens:
“When we got back to the house, Mom pointed to the balcony. ‘See up there? That’s where I met them.’
‘Met who?”
‘The extraterrestrials. They landed over here on the sand, and then they came up on the porch, and we talked.’”
On her mom’s belief that her father had been cloned and was sometimes there and sometimes “Paul”:
“‘Paul is my real father? How come I’ve never heard of him? Where is he?’
‘Right now, he’s in outer space.’ Mom said this with disarming matter-of-factnes and a quiet sense of pride.
‘He’s in outer space?’
Mom made an equivocating gesture. ‘He’s on a mission for the government.’
‘A mission? What kind of mission?’
She gave me a patient smile. ‘A secret mission, sweetheart. All I know is, he’s in the Pleiades.’”
On her mom’s insistence that the government was a very real Big Brother:
“Mom fixed me with a benev0lently patronizing look. ‘Sachi, you’re very young, and you’re very naïve… The government does all kinds of crazy things. Do you realize they have surveillance satellites up there in space that can listen in on any conversation we have earth?’”
On discovering she had a different blood type than both her parents:
“…how could I be A positive? It wasn’t scientifically possible. I knew damn well Mom was my real mother — there was no escaping that — but was Dad my real father?….I do look like Dad…but I think I also bear a resemblance to, say, Yves Montand (or, for that matter, Alfred Hitchcock).”
So basically, Sachi isn't even Steve Parker's daughter and Shitley conned HIM into babysitting her all those years.
