Shirley Jones (30 page)

I need to have an orgasm every now and again for the release and the pleasurable feeling it creates in me. Masturbation, you see, is great for relaxation, great for the skin, and a wonderful way of feeling and remaining young, I firmly believe.

I’m not the only woman of my age to believe that masturbation is important for our well-being. I have female friends of my age who also love to pleasure themselves. After all, although our bodies may be old and wrinkled, our desires can still remain fresh and young.

When we older women masturbate, at least we don’t have to dress up or apply makeup or worry that we look our age. When we masturbate, we don’t have to put on airs and graces, but can just be ourselves and enjoy ourselves and feel alive and renewed.

Marty and I still have sex, but he is also aware that I masturbate, and it doesn’t bother him at all. The other morning, I came down to breakfast and told him that I’d masturbated the night before, but that it hadn’t gone well.

“What did you do wrong?” he cracked.

Sometimes it simply isn’t the right time and my mind just isn’t tuned in on sex.

I do think a woman should take care of her body however old she is. If you don’t like your body, go to the gym and work at it. I spend an hour a day there, and I always watch what I eat and eat much less meat than I used to.

In 1984, the
National Enquirer
claimed that Marty had driven me to drink and that I had a problem with alcohol. They photographed me at a party with wineglasses everywhere, but they didn’t all belong to me. Marty and I sued and beat the
Enquirer
and their claims were retracted. Nowadays, I have a martini every afternoon at five, but other than that, I never indulge in alcohol.

Luckily, Marty thinks I’ve still got a beautiful body, even though it is old, and every now and again I take all my clothes off in front of him and shake my tits at him, and he loves it.

I love dressing up in glamorous clothes for him, but I’m not one for makeup and I don’t dye my hair. I use a special skin-care product, but my mother always had beautiful skin and at the age of sixty-eight didn’t have a single wrinkle on her face, and fortunately, I think it is genetic.

Sadly, when my mother was in her late sixties, she was in a wheelchair because she had arthritis, and so did both my aunts. I have inherited the disease, and my body is filled with arthritis. I had a knee replacement and will eventually need to have the other one replaced as well.

Marty and I generally live a quiet life in our stone-and-wood, country-style house in Encino, along with our golden retriever, King, and our Welsh corgi, Hannah. Marty is a hoarder, so every room is filled with his papers, his photographs, his show-business memorabilia. The lovely thing about the house, though, is that it has an upstairs floor, where he usually stores everything he wants to keep long-term.

And even if he doesn’t, the house covers five thousand square feet, has five bedrooms, five bathrooms, a playroom for the children, and a movie theater, so there is plenty of space for us both, and we are extremely happy there.

One of my great joys is our house in Fawnskin, on the other side of Bear Lake. Fawnskin is an hour-and-a-half drive from Los Angeles, in the San Bernardino Mountains. Fawnskin used to be an artists’ colony, is 6,827 feet above sea level, and has a population of just three hundred people, which appeals to my small-town mentality.

I’d always wanted a house in the mountains as I’ve always been a big skier. So in 1976, I decided I needed more solitude and to luxuriate in my love for nature and the countryside, and to ski. I went up to Bear Lake and consulted a Realtor there. She wanted to show me houses on Bear Lake itself, but I didn’t want to live right on the lake. Instead, I wanted to live somewhere more isolated, away from people and crowds. And Fawnskin fit the bill perfectly.

She took me up a little dirt road in Fawnskin, with coyotes frolicking in the undergrowth, and showed me this wooden house with a terrace looking out on a vista that feels as if you were standing on a mountaintop in Switzerland and gazing down at the most beautiful view in the world, a view to die for.

I didn’t even go inside the house. I bought it then and there, paying $62,000 for the two-bedroom house and garage on six acres. The house came furnished, with a piano. I redid the whole thing, then bought nine more acres and converted the garage into a guesthouse.

One of my greatest pleasures in life nowadays is to sit on the deck of the main house, my 5:00 p.m. martini in one hand and a box of chocolates in the other, and talk to the coyotes.

Eleven years ago, Marty and I were in Fawnskin. The town is small, with just a tiny market, a tiny deli, plus a Moose lodge. We had lunch at the North Shore Café and noticed a
FOR SALE
sign on a stretch of land across the street, right next to the Moose lodge.

“I just hope they don’t build a 7-Eleven on it,” I said to Marty. Within hours, he checked the price of the land, we got a great deal, and we bought it on the spot. The date was September 10, 2001. The very next day, 9/11 exploded on the world.

When the news broke, Marty and I had exactly the same thought: to create a park on our newly acquired land as a tribute to all those who lost their lives in the tragedy of 9/11.

It all started with our getting a girder from the ruins of the Twin Towers and putting it in the center of our park. Fawn Memorial Park, we called it. On the walls around the park are pictures and statues of the brave firemen and policemen who were killed that day, with a small stage in the middle of it. Some wonderful people helped us with the funding to get the park going, but we still have financial difficulties in maintaining it.

To aid in that, and because I love it, I continue to work as much as possible. I would love to do another TV series or a movie. And if I do, I hope I will be cast against type once more, as I was in
Elmer Gantry
and in
Grandma’s Boy
. Almost half a century divides those two roles, but I loved playing both of them, primarily because I have always liked to shock people a bit. Despite my age, I still do.

I am now seventy-nine years old, and although I can’t believe it, life is still good. I have four sons (I always view David as mine) and twelve grandchildren, and Marty and I have a close and loving marriage.

Now and again, though, the thought has run through my mind about both the men I married—about Jack and about Marty—that I am not altogether sure if they married little Shirley Mae Jones or Shirley Jones the movie star. I guess I’ll never really know.

The main thing is that today I am so thankful that I have a partner I can cry with, laugh with, and who is always there for me. Marty takes good care of me, makes sure all the bills are paid on time, and is thrilled about everything that I do professionally and is glad to be part of it.

Every night as I sit on a chair, sipping my martini, Marty sits on the couch opposite me, and we have conversations about everybody and everything in our lives, and it’s great. We talk about family, friends, and business projects. Marty tells me jokes and makes me laugh continuously.

I love that we share everything, even though we are so very different. Yet we are still together, we still love each other, and whatever anybody else thinks of Marty and of our marriage, I know the truth: I have found my ultimate Prince Charming and I’m living happily ever after with him.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

All my thanks to the great team at Gallery:

Mitchell Ivers (Senior Editor)

Jen Bergstrom (Vice President and Publisher)

Louise Burke (President and Publisher)

Jen Robinson (Vice President, Publicity Director)

Natasha Simons (Editorial Assistant)

John Paul Jones (Associate Director of Copyediting)

Lisa Litwack (Art Director)

Thanks to my agent, Dan Strone, CEO at Trident Media Group, and a true facilitator, and to his assistant, Kseniya Zaslavskaya.

Thanks to Rick Hersh, who introduced me to Dan in the first place.

And thanks to Wendy Leigh, irrepressible cowriter extraordinaire, without whom I’d still be staring at an empty typewriter.

“L
ooking at the world with wonder.” August 8, 1934.

I
told my mother I hated bows.