Washington State Is No Longer Shirley Maclaine's `Guru'

For sale: A $1.2 million, 105-acre abode used for meditation, recreation, and occasionally "Dancing in the Light."

The Northwest "sanctuary" of actress-author Shirley MacLaine - who moved to Graham in 1985 to commune with trees, elk, salmon and all the travel-brochure stuff for which the Northwest is known - is up for sale.

MacLaine - who makes one movie after another and is now in Baltimore doing "Guarding Tess" - is taking her rest and recreation elsewhere. Specifically: the nouveau trendy New Mexico.

With her film schedule, Graham was just too far away.

She bought the 4,879-square-foot ultra-deluxe ranch house in 1982 and spent $300,000 several years later to add 98 acres for a wildlife sanctuary.

When she actually moved in, in 1985, she told a Seattle Times reporter: "I'm so hung up about Washington, I may have made this state my guru!"

According to the real estate brochure, the whole one-woman retreat is: "Poised on the edge of forever" (a book, Shirley?) and features "breath-taking views of majestic Mount Rainier . . . sweeping down to the rush of the Puyallup River."

So besides that, what's included?

A four-bedroom, two-story house with lots of fireplaces, woodstoves and big windows, built on a ridge with a backdrop of Douglas firs, aspen and madrona.

Vegetable and ornamental gardens and 3.6 acres of landscaping with an emphasis on privacy.

A barn with 2.5 acres of custom, split-cedar rail fencing.

A pond with fish, foot bridge.

Puyallup riverfront property (3,500 feet).

A pool and hot tub.

Security gate and system.

If this package sounds vaguely familiar, it should. The house was first listed several years ago at the same price but with a different agency. There were showings but most of them were for curiosity seekers, wanting to meet MacLaine.

Peg Stanfield, a country real estate expert at RE/MAX Cascade Realty in Tacoma, has the listing now.

MacLaine spent three or four months a year in Graham and wrote six books there. Some of them reflect the location: "Don't Fall Off the Mountain," "Dancing in the Light," "Out on a Limb" and (possibly if she was talking distance to Hollywood friends) "You Can Get There from Here."

"It's like my books are in each one of these trees and I just have to look at the trees and decide which one to do next and then the tree writes it . . . or something," she said earlier.

But don't underestimate the call of the cacti.

MacLaine - who is also selling her Malibu beachfront "dreamhouse" - told the Los Angeles Times that she plans to write another book when she settles into her renovated ranch house on 7,500 acres in Abiquiu, New Mexico, land of the famed Southwestern artist Georgia O'Keeffe.

"I feel the high desert calling me," she said.