At five in the morning, after dancing the night away, we all piled into a cab and headed toward our hotel. But just as the cab was about to cross the bridge over the Seine from the Right Bank to the Left Bank, Jack asked the driver to stop.
Then he turned to me and asked if I would like to get out and walk over the bridge with him. I didn’t hesitate. I took his hand in mine, and in silence we walked across the bridge over the Seine, from the Right Bank to the Left, toward our hotel.
As we did, the sounds and sights of Paris assailed my senses: milkmen delivering their wares, young people on bicycles bound for home after a late night on the town, other lovers strolling along the banks of the Seine, hand in hand, as dawn broke.
It seemed to me that our walk across the Seine lasted for hours, and I never wanted it to end. I felt so close to Jack, so very close. Looking back, I believe that dawn walk with Jack, most of it done in silence, changed my life.
But overwhelmed and enchanted as I was with Jack, I still didn’t consider going to bed with him that night. Instead, when we got back to our hotel, I let him walk me to the door of my room, where he gave me a chaste, light butterfly kiss. Then he looked deep into my eyes and said, “I’m going to marry you.”
“But you’re already married!”
“I know.”
Jack then strolled down the corridor to his room.
I told myself sternly that I shouldn’t for one moment believe that Jack meant what he had said. I was fully aware that he had given me a line. I knew that I should probably at the least have been amused by him or, at worst, angry with him. Instead, somewhere deep down, I believed that Jack Cassidy meant every word he’d said to me that night and that he did intend to marry me. Or so I fervently hoped.
The next few days in Paris with Jack sped by like a heightened dream, especially when he presented me with a gold ornament of the Eiffel Tower for my charm bracelet, which he gave me as a memento of our romantic evening together.
However, when we checked out of our hotel at the end of our Paris run, I was brought down to earth from my romantic haze with somewhat of a disconcerting bump.
While I was paying my bill, Jack came up behind me and, in full earshot of some of the cast and crew said, “I hate to do this to you, Shirley, but I seem to have run out of money. Can you pay my bill?”
We had been on just one date together, but I didn’t hesitate. Even though $350 was a lot of money in those days, I paid Jack’s bill then and there without a second thought, while the cast and crew looked on openmouthed.
Afterward, Sari said to me, “You must be crazy! He’s using you.”
Perhaps. But I didn’t care. Although Jack never made the slightest attempt to pay me back, I never asked him to. He was my knight in shining armor, my prince on a white horse. I was in love with him, and I always would be.
We moved on to Rome, where, in between last-minute rehearsals, we went sightseeing like average tourists, admiring the city’s memorable monuments, then spent happy hours picnicking on the beach and swimming in the Mediterranean together.
On July 9, Oklahoma! opened in front of a distinguished audience including the deputy prime minister of Italy, Giuseppe Saragat, Foreign Minister Gaetano Martino, and members of the Roman nobility, all of whom were so enthusiastic that they gave us eight curtain calls.
That night, after the curtain finally fell on the show, in a romantic, little Roman hotel, Jack Cassidy made love to me for the first time.
I was a virgin, having never gone “all the way” with anyone before. I had resolved to lose my virginity with the right man. That night, in Rome, I knew Jack was the right man.
He was a great lover, that night and every night afterward. He could go on for hours, have two or three orgasms, then wake up in the morning and make love to me all over again. He was inventive and extremely well endowed (a blessing that all his sons, in particular David, inherited). He had no inhibitions about sex, no barriers, and he taught me to be the same, to be free about sex and to openly want it and love it.
Through the years, Jack and I had sex wherever and whenever we wanted—on the floor of a sailboat in the middle of the Caribbean, in the dressing room at whichever theater we were appearing in, in the bathtub, and, at the height of The Partridge Family, now and again Jack would pick me up from the studio in the car, then drive us into the garage adjacent to our house, where he would have intercourse with me in the backseat. With me, Mrs. Partridge!
That night in Rome, the only thing that marred my bliss during sex with Jack was the fear of becoming pregnant. He didn’t have a condom, and I hadn’t been fitted with a coil or a diaphragm, either. But although he pulled out at the last moment, he didn’t really hold back and afterward instructed me to get into the bathtub and make sure “to get as much of it out as you can.”
Not the most romantic ending to my first night of love.
Now that Jack and I were having an affair, and the sizzling chemistry between us was so obvious, word of our illicit relationship traveled back to America so fast that it made my head spin. Within days, Rodgers and Hammerstein, set on smashing my love affair with Jack, ordered me home from Europe immediately, earlier than initially planned, to prepare for my next role in the movie of Carousel, in which I would play Julie Jordan, the star-crossed heroine who falls hopelessly in love with bad boy, carnival barker, Billy Bigelow. How could I say no?
Set in 1880 and based on Ferenc Molnár’s 1909 play, Liliom, Carousel was a big hit on Broadway for Rodgers and Hammerstein. The story of rough, macho rogue Billy Bigelow, who at the start of the show has been dead for fifteen years but is given a chance by the “Starkeeper” to go back down to Earth one more time to try to redeem himself, was much beloved by audiences.
Long before I was finally cast as Julie in Carousel, the rumor mill had it that Judy Garland, fresh from her triumph in A Star Is Born, would be playing Julie instead. When I found out that she wasn’t and that the role was mine, I was flattered, as Judy Garland had always been one of my idols.
When I eventually met Judy in the early sixties, I learned the hard lesson that sometimes it is better not to meet your heroes and heroines in the flesh. We were booked to appear on the same talk show together, and I was thrilled and excited at the prospect of meeting the one and only Judy Garland at last. We met backstage, and Judy drank glass after glass of wine.
I told her that I was a great fan of hers and admired her so much, but instead of responding graciously, she just took another glass of wine and walked over to the window.
“When in hell are they going to put us on!” she complained, impatient and irritated at having to wait for her cue. Although I didn’t know it at the time, she was at the tragic end of her life, and in her own world, due to drugs. She died soon after.
Back in 1956, though, with Judy Garland out of the picture, the part of Julie in Carousel was well and truly mine, and Carousel and its beautiful score, which included “If I Loved You” and “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” was to become my all-time favorite musical.
At the time, another, less well-known song from Carousel resonated with me deeply. “What’s the Use of Wond’rin’?” is Julie’s lyrical answer to her friends’ warning her about Billy. The song included the line “What’s the use of wond’rin’ if he’s good or if he’s bad?” and ended with “He’s your fella and you love him. There’s nothing more to say.”
All of which encapsulated the essence of all my many conversations with Sari and my other friends who continued to warn me about Jack, that he was married and a philanderer, and that he would ultimately break my heart. I listened, but to paraphrase the song, Jack was my fella, I loved him, and there was nothing more for me to say.
For the time being, however, Jack and I were destined to be apart. Carousel was scheduled to shoot in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, and he was all set to appear as Leonard Vole in Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution, in Bucks County Playhouse.
During our three-month separation, he w
ould call me every night, and all day long I would look forward to his call. Whenever he could, he came up to Maine to visit me. When, at last, we were reunited after Carousel wrapped, he gave me the wonderful news that he and Evelyn had gone to Mexico and obtained a divorce, and that he was now free to marry me. His Parisian promise had not been a lie, after all, and I was overjoyed.
Before flying up to Boothbay Harbor, I spent eight weeks at Twentieth Century Fox, in Hollywood, rehearsing for Carousel with my costar, Frank Sinatra, and recording all the beautiful songs from the score, together.
From the first, Frank, fresh from his triumph in From Here to Eternity, made it clear that he was so thrilled about starring in Carousel and kept telling me that Billy Bigelow was the best role for a male singer there is. So I didn’t have any qualms about accepting when one of his gofers approached me after rehearsals one day and asked me to stop by Frank’s dressing room.
When I got there, the room was empty. I was about to leave when Frank shouted out from the bathroom, “I’ll be right out.” In a couple of minutes, he appeared, dressed only in slacks, bare-chested, with a towel slung around his neck. The prelude to a pass? Maybe.
The prospect of Frank’s making a pass didn’t bother me because I was never afraid of men wanting to pressure me into going to bed with them. For me, the decision was always mine, and mine alone. In Frank’s case, that decision was a firm and resounding no!
My passion for Jack was one reason for my immunity to Frank Sinatra’s fabled charms. But even if Jack hadn’t been in the picture, I would never have gone to bed with Frank. Sure, I admired his voice, but as a man, he had no magic whatsoever for me. He was so self-involved, and every single conversation centered only around him and no one else.
He was also massively insecure. I remember going backstage after one of his concerts years later and telling him how brilliant he’d been.
“Nah, that last note in my third song? I didn’t make it,” Frank said.
“But, Frank, you were fine.”
“Nah, Shirley, I’m gonna go home.” And he did.
Anyway, at my meeting alone with Frank during the Carousel rehearsals, for a while he prowled around the dressing room in silence. He stared at me out of the corner of his legendary blue eyes. Striking as those eyes were, I felt decidedly uncomfortable under their stare.
Finally, Frank said, “I think this is going to be a terrific picture, don’t you?”
I nodded.
“I think we ought to rehearse together as much as we can, and make the best movie we can.”
I nodded again.
Then Frank sat down on the couch next to me. “You’re a beautiful girl and a beautiful singer.”
Here it comes, I thought to myself, because Frank had a reputation of going to bed with every leading lady he ever worked with.
He leaned closer to me. “I really want to talk to you about this role, who we are, what the script really means,” he said earnestly.
So Frank really did want to talk about Carousel and wasn’t going to make a move on me! I breathed a sigh of relief.
As he knew that I had worked with Rodgers and Hammerstein on Oklahoma! and was under contract to them, he asked me all about them. He quizzed me on how they felt about Carousel, why it was their favorite of all their musicals, and their plans for the movie.
When I left Frank’s dressing room a while later, I was full of admiration for his dedication to playing the part of Billy Bigelow and to making Carousel a giant success.
After we’d finished rehearsing in the studio, I traveled up to Boothbay Harbor ahead of Frank and fell in love with the town at first sight. I had my little cabin on the water and, with my love of nature and animals, was in heaven. I’d grown up in a small country town with cows and horses roaming around, and Boothbay Harbor was so darling, so familiar, so much my kind of place, and I was so happy there. It only remained for Frank to arrive so that we could start shooting Carousel together.
All of us, including Frank, had been told beforehand that some of the Carousel scenes had to be shot twice because of the complexities of the new process, CinemaScope 55, which would help guarantee the movie’s success. We all knew that the new system was a crowd-pleaser and were happy to go along with whatever it took.
On the first day of shooting, we were scheduled to shoot the first scene between Frank and me. I was on set, waiting for Frank to arrive, when his limo pulled up. Frank got out of the limo and took one look at the two lots of different cameras already in position. “I signed to do one movie, not two,” he growled, then got right back into his limo and ordered the driver to take him straight back to the airport. Frank had walked out on Carousel on the very first day of filming.
Producer Henry Ephron (whose first shot as a producer was this, after a distinguished career as a screenwriter and playwright) was on the set and witnessed what happened. With tears rolling down his cheeks, he came over to me and asked if I knew where Gordon MacRae, my wonderful Oklahoma! costar, was. I told him Gordon was in Tahoe, doing his nightclub act. Can you get ahold of him? Ephron asked, and handed me a bunch of quarters.
From a pay phone by the water, I called the Tahoe hotel where Gordon was performing, got him on the phone, and asked him point-blank if he would like to play Billy Bigelow in Carousel.
Gordon didn’t pause for even a second. “Give me three days. I gotta lose ten pounds.”
And after a three-day diet of half a grapefruit and an egg, three times a day, and nothing else, Gordon lost ten pounds, then signed to play Billy Bigelow in Carousel.
Gordon had saved the day and I was glad, but I still couldn’t quiet the little voice inside my head that kept asking over and over why Frank Sinatra had quit a role he so desperately longed to play in a movie that he wanted to be in so much.
The official answer was that “one-take Frank,” as he was known in the business, wasn’t prepared to do two takes for Carousel. But he had known way ahead of time that Carousel would be filmed twice for CinemaScope 55. So why did he balk when he saw two lots of cameras on the set and then walk out without another word?
Through the years, whenever I saw Frank, I tried over and over to get him to answer that question, but with no luck. Every time I broached the subject, he would bristle and say, “Drop it, Shirl!”
On February 14, 1958, I appeared on Frank’s show with him, and in a moment replete with irony we sang the duet “If I Loved You,” the romantic ballad from Carousel, the song that we would have sung in the movie together.
I saw Frank for the last time toward the end of his life at a benefit. He was called up onstage but was so frail that he had to have someone help him up the stairs. Once he got to the microphone, he started to speak, then said, “To hell with this, I can’t get anything out right now!” and turned around and walked off again. As he was coming down the stairs, he gave a nod in my direction and said, “Hiya, Shirl, how ya doing?”
I smiled at him. He died shortly afterward, without ever telling me the real reason he walked out on Carousel.
I finally found out the truth a few years ago, when I was at a press conference and an old-time journalist at the back of the room yelled out to me, “Hey, Shirley, do you know the real reason Frank left Carousel?”
“Sure,” I said confidently. “He had a big thing about not doing the same scene twice. He only ever did one take and was proud of it.”
“No, Shirl, that wasn’t the real reason.”
According to the journalist, at the time Frank was due to start filming Carousel, his grand passion, Ava Gardner, was shooting another film and was getting lonesome for Frank.
She called him and, according to the journalist, said, “You better get your ass down here, Frankie, otherwise I’m going to have an affair with my costar.”
Poor Frank didn’t know that another actress on the shoot was already having an affair with the costar, and that Ava was making an empty threat to Frank.
But because Ava was his dream girl, the woman he
would love for the rest of his life, Frank dropped everything, walked out of Carousel, and flew to be with Ava, to prevent her from having an affair she probably wasn’t going to have anyway. Mystery solved. Part of me felt sorry for Frank and understood why he dropped everything for Ava. And I did love his singing.
A footnote to my Frank Sinatra recollections: When I appeared on his show, I rehearsed beforehand with Nelson Riddle, and Nelson asked me, “What key do you sing in, Shirley?”
“I don’t know. I can’t read music. But I’ll sing it in whatever key Frank wants,” I said, leaving Nelson shocked to the core that I couldn’t read music.
In any event, when Frank sang “If I Loved You,” he sang it with warmth, passion, and emotion. As far as I was concerned, Frank Sinatra was always a gentleman.
I never encountered Frank’s rough-and-ready Rat Pack persona, but I did meet Sammy Davis Jr. down the line and learn more about what made him tick.
Sammy adored Frank. Frank was his mentor, and if ever a hotel wouldn’t allow Sammy to stay there because he was African-American, Frank wouldn’t stay at that hotel, either. When Sammy died, Frank did everything to help his widow, Altovise.
Long before that, in the sixties, I met Sammy when Jack took me over to his home in Beverly Hills one night. Lines of cocaine were laid out on every table, and porno was playing on all the TV screens throughout the house. I just wasn’t interested. Drugs didn’t interest me at all, nor, in those days, did porno. Jack did nothing to pressure me to stay, and we left together without taking cocaine or watching any porno.
Not to say that I was totally innocent as far as drugs were concerned. Around the same time, Jack and I were in bed together one night when he suddenly produced a capsule and said he wanted me to try it.
Shirley Jones: A Memoir Page 6