Shirley Jones (7 page)

I dropped ten pounds so fast that it made my head spin. A week later, on the MGM backlot in Hollywood, where we were filming the country bath scene, which was shot in an ice-cold pond, I passed out from hunger.

Problem was, no one knew the reason. And Hollywood being Hollywood, and gossip being gossip, word spread like wildfire that I was pregnant. Luckily for me, my hairdresser became party to all the cruel gossip and sprang to my defense: “This little girl is as pure as the snow on a Christmas roof. The poor thing hasn’t eaten in a week, and no wonder she has fainted!”

Everyone got the message, and so did I. The next day was my day off, so I sneaked out, bought about ten candy bars, and ate every single one of them!

When it came down to it, I felt more comfortable with the
Oklahoma!
crew than with the cast. To me, my fellow actors were too self-involved, and the crew was more real, more like the people I grew up with in Smithton. Small-town people with values and integrity.

The crew must have reciprocated my affection because, at the end of the picture, they presented me with a gold chain with a beautiful gold disk hanging from it that was engraved with
SHIRLEY JONES, BLESS YOUR BONES. YOUR CREW
. That was the best moment of the entire shoot for me.

As soon as filming of
Oklahoma!
finished, in a strange publicity maneuver, Rodgers and Hammerstein decided to dispatch me all over the country to promote the movie—even though it wasn’t due to be released for a whole year. So without much briefing or advice on how to handle the press, I set off on the promotion tour for
Oklahoma!
—during which I was subjected to interviews with publications like the
New Yorker
,
Newsweek
, often in opulent settings.

One reporter wined and dined me at Sardi’s, but rather ruined my enjoyment of my surroundings by greeting me: “Shirley Jones! At least you could have changed your name. I mean, what could be so simple, Shirley Jones from Smithton, Pennsylvania.”

Richard Rodgers had said the same thing to me, way back when we first met, and I’d resisted his blandishments that I change my name. So this time around, I was prepared with an answer: “Well, I wanted to change it to Shirley Smith from Jonestown, but they wouldn’t let me.”

The reporter was not impressed and afterward complained to
Oklahoma!
’s publicity guy, Nick Pachukis, “She may be the Cinderella Girl, but she’s as dull as dishwater.”

Until then, I’d led an extremely sheltered life. What exactly did everyone expect from me? But I refused to be downhearted and soldiered on, spreading the word about the movie, full of enthusiasm for it, all genuine and heartfelt, and did the job to the best of my ability.

Oklahoma!
opened at the Rivoli Theatre in Manhattan on October 13, 1955. Tickets cost a stratospheric $3.50 ($45 in today’s terms), and the movie played there for a whole year.

Overflowing with excitement, I attended the Los Angeles premiere with my parents, all of us riding to the theater together in a surrey with a fringe on the top.

When the lights went down, and I saw the words
Introducing Shirley Jones
and then my face, bigger than life, up on the screen, I was overwhelmed. I was young, naïve, and, until then, still hadn’t quite grasped the enormity of what had happened to me. One audition and here I was, starring in one of the biggest movies ever made.

The next morning, my reviews were uniformly wonderful, with one glaring exception. Given that Hollywood columnist Louella Parsons was firmly in my camp, it meant that Louella’s rival Hedda Hopper would automatically be wholeheartedly against me.

Hedda Hopper snarled in her review of me, “She’s a onetime Charlie. She’s pretty and she sings well, but it’s a one-picture deal for this girl. She’s never going to work again.”

In contrast, my review from Louella was glowing and included, “This girl is going to be the biggest star in Hollywood.” The lines between America’s top Hollywood columnists were drawn. From then on, Louella would always be in my camp, on my side, and Hedda, against me. At the time, I remember thinking that even if they both agreed about me, or if they reversed their positions, I would survive. Louella or Hedda? It was rather like deciding which one of your veins you wanted your doctor to open.

As soon as
Oklahoma!
had its premiere, Rodgers and Hammerstein sent me out on yet another national tour to promote it. During the tour, journalist after journalist interviewed me about every aspect of my life, and I answered every question truthfully. Except one. Did I have a man in my life?

I always shook my head no, when, of course, I did.

Flashback to May 1955.
Six weeks of rehearsals for the European tour of
Oklahoma!
were due to begin in a New York theater, but before they started, I was issued with a dire warning about Jack Cassidy, the man who would be playing Curly to my Laurey in the show.

“I know he’s handsome, I know he’s talented. I know he’s playing your leading man. But don’t, whatever you do, fall in love with him, Shirley,” said Selma Linch, my agent, Gus Schirmer’s right-hand woman. “Every girl does. Just remember that he’s married.”

She meant so well, Selma did. She just didn’t know that I was—and would always be—the kind of girl who did exactly the opposite of what she was asked, a headstrong girl who flew in the face of advice and went against convention, with her eyes fixed firmly on the next adventure.

And what an adventure!

Jack Cassidy, my costar in the European tour of
Oklahoma!
, was a dashing Broadway star, startlingly handsome with white-blond hair and hypnotic blue Irish eyes, a world-class charmer, who glittered with sexuality, sparkled with charisma, and exuded a sense of danger, overlaid with a suave sophistication far beyond his years, and certainly mine.

The quintessential matinee idol, Jack was urbane, elegant, debonair, and oozed style from every pore. A big spender: money meant nothing to him. As he once characterized it to his son, David, “Money is only green paper.” Buttressed by his cavalier attitude toward finances, Jack wore $1,000 suits during a time when that sum of money could buy a Volkswagen.

He was a dandy, a clotheshorse, and his image always meant far more to him than anything—or anyone—else in his life. According to David Cassidy, his mother, Evelyn, was heard to complain that if Jack had $50 in his pocket, he would give her $10 with which to feed herself and David and spend the other $40 on a suit for himself. Throughout, Jack’s extravagance knew no bounds, and later on in his life his limo bill routinely ran $3,000 a week and he was also the proud owner of 104 pairs of handmade shoes.

To top all that, Jack was extremely knowledgeable about art, literature, interior decorating, gourmet food, fashion, and—above all, as I was to discover—sex.

Not bad for the son of a railroad engineer from Jamaica, Queens, New York, who was one of five children (the youngest of which died in childhood) and came from a tough, working-class Irish-German background.

Jack’s father, Willy Cassidy, was a charming but feckless man, a womanizer and a drunk. In contrast, his mother, Lotte (short for Charlotte), from Hamburg, Germany, was said to have veins filled with ice and to be tough as nails. She was forty-eight when she gave birth to Jack and never forgave him for being a change-of-life child. She neither wanted nor loved him. Jack told me that his mother had farmed him out to a next-door neighbor and had never shown him any kindness or affection.

Lotte beat him relentlessly and made him work around the house for hours, cleaning every surface until it shone to perfection. Finally, instead of rebelling against his mother’s house-proud ways, Jack grew up to become as much of a clean freak as she was, which later caused problems when he was living in a household with three raucous, normal, untidy sons.

Jack may have capitulated in the face of his mother’s insistence on cleanliness above everything else, but he never forgave her for her cruel treatment of him. When she was on her deathbed and begged him to return to the Church (which he had long since rejected), he refused. Nor did he go to her funeral. All of that led to great guilt, and down the line, the guilt that Jack felt about his mother would ultimately rise up and destroy him.

As a small boy, Jack also had a hard time at school. As he wasn’t as big as the other kids, he was forced to either fight them or slip them a few dimes to stop them from beating him up. Life was tough for him. So, like many kids who want to take refuge from the rough-and-tumble of their backgrounds, he escaped into the movies. When he saw handsome, legendary matinee idol John Barrymore up there on the silver screen, Jack knew what he wanted to be when he grew up. He wanted to be John Barrymore, plain and simple.

Ambitious and determined to succeed in the big, wide world, Jack, by the time he was eleven years old, was already delivering ice and coal around the neighborhood and at various times worked as a bellhop, a dishwasher, a clerk, and a stableboy. Then, when he was only sixteen years old, he made his Broadway debut in the chorus of Cole Porter’s
Something for the Boys
and began his theatrical career in earnest.

Appearing in a Cole Porter show was the height of Broadway success for a performer. Born in 1891, Cole wrote some of the most iconic songs in the Great American songbook. “Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love),” “Begin the Beguine,” “You Do Something to Me,” “Night and Day,” and “I Get a Kick out of You” were only some of them. To quote Cole Porter himself, in terms of Broadway stardom, he was “the tops.”

Exactly how Jack made it into Cole Porter’s
Something for the Boys
at the age of sixteen is another story, the details of which I learned later on in my relationship with Jack. By that time, I was already so beguiled by Jack that nothing about him, not even the real story of how he made it to Broadway at such an early age, would ever shock me.

That first day at rehearsals in Manhattan, in response to Selma’s warnings regarding Jack, coupled with further scuttlebutt about him fed to me by the rest of the cast, I steeled myself to be impervious to his much-vaunted charm, to be oblivious of his good looks, his sex appeal, his charisma. A piece of cake, I told myself, particularly as Jack Cassidy was bound to be full of himself like most actors and wouldn’t be worth knowing at all.

Besides, I’d caught a glimpse of him making a call in the backstage phone booth and decided he was way too pretty and definitely not my type of man. That, coupled with the warnings I’d been given about him, made me predisposed to dislike him.

But when he strode across the stage toward me, held out his hand diffidently, and said, “Hi, I’m Jack Cassidy. It’s a pleasure to be working with you,” I was utterly unprepared for just how nice Jack was. Nor was I prepared for his talent, either, when we sang our first song together, “People Will Say We’re in Love.”

The chemistry between us was so palpable, even during that very first duet together, that our jaded European director, Rouben Mamoulian, virtually cracked his whip and snapped, “Now, now, darlings, we only fall in love in the play. It is only onstage that we do this. Do not take this with you outside.”

Jack and I joined the rest of the cast in laughing, but both of us were laughing a trifle uneasily. I had already floated up onto cloud nine and was firmly under Jack’s spell, not just the seductive spell of Jack the man, but the potent spell of Jack Cassidy the singer and the performer.

Rather than gush all over the page about just how great a singer and a performer Jack was, I’ll quote distinguished
New York Times
critic Clive Barnes and his seasoned judgment of Jack’s 1975 performance in the play
Murder Among Friends
: “Stormily brilliant . . . he walks on the set wearing his ego like a cloak and his mind like a dagger.”

I was overwhelmed by the beauty of Jack’s voice that day and felt for a moment that my own voice was wanting. I confided in Jack that I didn’t think I hit certain notes properly, and he said, “You have a beautiful voice, but you close up on certain notes. You need to open up more.” In the most tactful way possible, Jack had given me a singing lesson, and it was a revelation to me.

From the first, the nicest part about Jack was that, unlike other men, he didn’t come on to me strong. He didn’t pounce on me. He was the perfect gentleman, courtly, intelligent, and unfailingly polite.

After that first day’s rehearsal, we each went our separate ways—me to my small apartment at 49 West Seventy-Third Street, which, after having moved out of the Barbizon Hotel for Young Women, I was now sharing with an actress for the vast sum of $75 a month; and Jack home to his house in West Orange, New Jersey, where he lived with his wife, dancer Evelyn Ward, and their son, David.

Evelyn, who was born in 1923 and married Jack in 1948, was, I knew, a great beauty, a cross between Hedy Lamarr and Linda Darnell, with a similar brand of dark, exotic good looks. She was a dancer/actress who later succeeded Gwen Verdon in
New Girl in Town
, but rumor had it that she and Jack weren’t happy together and that he had left her many times. “He is the ladies’ man of the century” was the phrase everyone in the know always applied to Jack. I heard their words, but somehow I was undeterred and my admiration for Jack didn’t diminish.