Shirley Jones: A Memoir

by Jones, Shirley

After Jack refused to leave me and fly to New York and talk to David in person, Evelyn made damn sure that he and I didn’t sail into our new life without suffering. After all, she blamed me for the demise of her marriage to Jack. But I knew the truth. Even though Evelyn viewed me as the scarlet lady who had broken up her supposedly idyllic marriage to Jack, I knew that wasn’t the case. By the time I met Jack, she and Jack had already been separated twice and then got back together again. After that, though, their marriage remained rocky.

  After Jack divorced Evelyn, he paid her alimony and supported David, as well, but then stopped paying the alimony once Evelyn remarried. By that time, my career was doing extremely well, and as a result Evelyn took Jack to court in an attempt to increase David’s child support. I didn’t think she was wrong. I was compelled to take the witness stand and give evidence about my income, and she lost her case.

  Evelyn’s bitterness at losing Jack was at its height at the time of our wedding, although our court battle with her lay ahead of us. Nonetheless, for all the right and proper reasons, soon after our wedding Jack arranged for me to meet David for the first time. Beforehand, we were both aware that Evelyn had done her best to paint me to him as the wicked stepmother, the villainess of the world. Moreover, when David was just a little kid, she had told him all about Jack’s philandering, and he was hurt and puzzled by his father’s attitude toward his mother and his marriage to me.

  In a worthy but misguided attempt to prepare David for meeting me, to soften his attitude toward me, Jack took David to see me in Oklahoma! But after seeing me on-screen, David still viewed me as a wicked stepmother, and I didn’t blame him. So the prospect of meeting David Cassidy, my newly acquired stepson, was daunting to me in the extreme.

  I don’t think Jack had bothered to get to know David properly until David was about seven years old and stayed with us for the first time. He was shy and sat in the corner and never said a word. But he adored his father. The first time he ever went to see Jack in the theater, David was just three and a half years old, and the show was Wish You Were Here, on Broadway. When Jack strode onstage, little David proudly piped up, “That’s my daddy!”

  In the taxi taking David, Jack, and Evelyn (to whom Jack was still married) back home from the theater, David, his eyes still shining, looked up at Jack and Evelyn and said, “When I grow up, I want to do what you do, Daddy.” Jack and Evelyn both exchanged glances and said to David, “Only if you get through high school first.”

  David worshipped Jack. Everything Jack did, everything Jack liked, David ached to follow suit. If Jack loved a show, David wanted to see it. Jack would sing in front of him constantly, and David was overwhelmed by Jack’s talent and wanted to be like him. David was thrilled to watch Jack perform, to hear him sing, and always said, “That’s what I want to be.”

  David was a good child and always did everything Jack asked of him. But as obedient as he was, he still couldn’t measure up to the image of the perfect child that Jack expected him to be.

  When the day of our proposed meeting arrived, Jack had taken care to plan every detail. He arranged for David to come and spend the night at our apartment, then intended that both of us take David to the movies the next day.

  David arrived, and I was immediately struck by what a beautiful child he was, but also by how very much of a lonely only child he seemed to be. Gorgeous-looking, but quiet and clearly scared to death by meeting me. Naturally, he resented me deeply and felt that I had taken his father away from his mother. I can understand his thinking that, but it wasn’t the truth. The marriage was long over before I arrived on the scene.

  But David was now my stepson, he was sweet, adorable, and I was keen to win him over, so I sat down on the couch in our living room, patted the seat next to me, and said, “Come and sit next to me, David, let’s talk.”

  He shook his head.

  Jack was livid.

  I took him aside. “Look, Jack, it’s the first time David has met me. We need to be patient and understanding with him. Because he isn’t a bit happy to be here.”

  Jack didn’t have any patience with children. He wanted to be a child himself and to be the center of attention at all times.

  “Well, he’d better get happy,” he said, which hindsight would later prove to be a telling phrase.

  We took David out to dinner, but he didn’t want to go to the movies the next day. All he wanted to do was go home, so Jack relented and drove him home to New Jersey, where he lived with Evelyn.

  I felt dreadful and as if David had hated me from the moment he met me. Only years later did I find out that he hadn’t hated me at all. He generously said of me, “The first time I met her, I was six or seven and not impressed with whether she was famous. I wanted to hate her, but in minutes warmed to her.”

  At the time, though, David didn’t want to be around me, and I understood and accepted his emotions wholeheartedly. Jack, however, did not and would continually ask me to take David to the park. But David would always refuse because he still blamed me for Jack’s having divorced David’s mother. And his mother continued to fuel the flames of his negative feelings about me.

  When I became David’s stepmother, he didn’t talk to me much at all. We were both acutely aware that his mother was his mother, and I was not.

  I left David alone with Jack most of the time and didn’t push him to relate to me. I knew that pushing him wouldn’t work. He had to come round to me. I didn’t have to come round to him. But by the time he was nine, he was talking to me more, asking me questions about show business, what it was like to get onstage and sing, what it was like making movies. I first heard him sing when he was ten and got his first guitar. It was obvious to me even then that David was a natural.

  Most of the time, as a child, he was with Jack and not with me. But I never felt left out as I wasn’t around a lot and was usually away on location in such places as Rome, Lisbon, and South America. If I was around, I was always acutely aware that David was Jack’s child, and I didn’t try to exert any influence on him. I just didn’t feel that was my role. I also felt it wasn’t my place to intervene between David and Jack. Now and again Jack would ask my opinion about David, particularly when he was in his teens and wanted to go to a club with a girl, and I would give Jack my opinion. Sometimes Jack would follow my advice, other times not.

  If anyone had compelled me to judge Jack’s parenting skills during those years, I’d have been forced to admit that he was never much of a father. He never went to any of David’s Little League games, after promising he would attend. To Jack, one phone call telling David, “I’ll be there in spirit,” took care of any obligation to be there in reality. Jack neglected David shamefully and, down the line, would do the same to our three sons together, Shaun, Patrick, and Ryan.

  I believe, though, that Jack hurt David far more than he hurt Shaun, Patrick, and Ryan. When David was nine or so, I’d often see him crying in the corner because of something Jack had said or done to him, and I did my best to comfort him. That didn’t stop Jack from playing the heavy father and disciplining David far too much, sometimes even paddling him, just as my mother did to me and Jack’s mother did to him. As a result, David became afraid of Jack, and I didn’t blame him at all.

  However, I always nursed the fond hope that David would get to know Jack and the two of them would become closer to each other. One time, when David was twelve, I convinced Jack to go with him on a camping trip in the San Bernardino Mountains, where they were scheduled to stay at a Boy Scouts camp together. Only with Jack being Jack, he and David had little togetherness on that trip.

  When David and all the other kids were fast asleep, Jack, who’d bought some Scotch along with him, sat around the campfire and regaled the other dads with his showbiz stories and his standard repertoire of jokes.

  In the morning, poor David was practically mobbed by all the other fathers eager to praise Jack for his wit, charm, and bonhomie. As always, Jack was the center of attention, just the way he
liked it, and David was overshadowed utterly and completely.

  Later on, Jack started taking David with him when he went on summer-stock tours, and David, at last, had a chance to get to know his father better.

  However, David never lived with us until the summer of 1968, when Jack and I rented a hundred-year-old stone castle, which boasted turrets and stained-glass windows, in Irvingtonon-Hudson, while we were rehearsing for the Broadway show Maggie Flynn.

  David came to live with us, and during that time he became closer to his brothers, Shaun, Patrick, and Ryan. When Shaun was born, I had been worried that David would feel left out and be jealous and vindictive toward Shaun, but David turned out to be quite the reverse. David and Shaun never had any sibling rivalry, partly because David was so much older than Shaun, and later on, as Shaun grew older, he looked up to David. Although David lived with his mother in Orange, New Jersey, whenever he came to visit us, the boys always loved seeing him and vice versa. I think he was happy to be part of a big family.

  David was good-natured and threw himself into playing with Shaun, and later Patrick and Ryan, taking them swimming and riding bicycles with them. David loved to babysit the boys and was extremely responsible when he did.

  The boys particularly enjoyed the pillow fights they often had with David. If David ever tired of playing with his brothers, who were so much younger than him (Shaun was eight years his junior; Patrick, twelve years; and Ryan, sixteen), he could always escape to the pool house, where he sometimes entertained young ladies.

  Ladies, girls, women, had always been a part of David’s life. Like his father, he was highly sexed, and in his autobiography he confessed that he had his first sexual experience when he was nine years old and fondled a friend’s sister. So even as a young boy, he played the field with girls. Throughout his early teens, women flocked to him in droves. Although I never met any of them in person, I was constantly aware that David had girlfriends everywhere, but nothing serious. Jack also knew how numerous these girls were and would sometimes crossly complain, “That’s all he cares about, girls.”

  Whereupon I would laugh and say, “Well, Jack, he’s your son, and that’s all you care about.”

  David also had something else in common with Jack: a giant endowment. David’s brothers called him Donk, for Donkey, and Jack would joke, “Where did you get that? You’re bigger than me,” which probably didn’t help their rocky relationship.

  SIX

  Elmer Gantry

  By now, all the Hollywood power players viewed me as the ingénue from Oklahoma! and from Carousel and didn’t consider me to be anything other than a singer who starred in musicals.

  That infuriated me—I was an actress, and I wanted nothing more than to act in a serious drama and to be taken seriously. In the meantime, when Jack wasn’t starring on Broadway, he and I performed our cabaret act all over the country together.

  We were about to go onstage at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco to do our act when the phone rang.

  “This is Burt Lancaster,” a deep male voice announced.

  Burt Lancaster! Burt Lancaster! My teen idol. Must be a joke, I thought, and hung up.

  Within seconds, it rang again. It really was Burt Lancaster. Burt Lancaster, only not making a social call.

  “This is Burt Lancaster. Have you read the novel Elmer Gantry?”

  I hadn’t.

  “Go get it and read it. We’re making a movie of it, and I would like you to think about playing the role of Lulu Bains. Can you come in and meet Richard Brooks, who is directing?”

  Sure I could.

  Overnight, I read the book and discovered that Lulu Bains wasn’t Laurey or Julie or some musical ingénue but a real, flesh-and-blood woman, the daughter of a deacon, undone by passion and forced into prostitution.

  Burt had seen me playing the alcoholic Sunshine Girl in “The Big Slide,” a Playhouse 90 television drama with Red Skelton, and had never forgotten me. But to play Lulu Bains in Elmer Gantry, I would first have to pass muster with the movie’s fearsome writer, producer, director (all rolled into one), Richard Brooks.

  Known for directing gritty, dramatic movies such as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Blackboard Jungle, Richard Brooks was universally reviled as a martinet. I also knew through the grapevine that he intended Piper Laurie (who had also played an alcoholic in another Playhouse 90 production, “Days of Wine and Roses”) to play the part of Lulu Bains.

  Richard Brooks definitely did not want to cast me as Lulu Bains, and however much Burt Lancaster wanted me to play Lulu and was rooting for me, I was petrified at the prospect of meeting Richard Brooks.

  But I also knew that this was my big opportunity to make the switch from frothy musicals to drama, to be considered a serious actress at last, and not just a singer. It all depended on my winning over Brooks, and I wasn’t at all sure whether I was equal to the task.

  I knew through other actresses and actors who had worked with Brooks that he was an ex-marine and a tough guy. Everyone who’d worked for him on movies hated him. He didn’t allow anyone to play cards between scenes or to read newspapers. Famous for calling the cast and the crew “sons of bitches,” he would think nothing of slapping an extra in the face if the extra was meant to cry in a scene but hadn’t so far managed to wring out a single tear. One hard slap from Richard Brooks, and that same extra was wailing like a baby.

  Down the line, in 1985, during the making of Fever Pitch, which Brooks was directing, he employed that identical tactic on my own son Patrick, who had a small part in the movie. Brooks wanted Patrick to cry in one scene, and as much as Patrick tried to cry on demand, he couldn’t manage it. So even though Brooks was fully aware that Patrick was my son, he still slapped him in the face a few times—and with so much force that Patrick began crying.

  While he was directing Elmer Gantry, Brooks went too far. He suddenly swore viciously at one of the crew. Outraged, the crew member took revenge on Brooks the next day, deliberately running his car over Brooks’s foot. Brooks was rushed to the hospital, but even so, he didn’t modify his treatment of his cast and crew one iota. That was the Richard Brooks who held my career in the palm of his muscular hands.

  Burt Lancaster had prevailed on Brooks to meet me, so there I was one Saturday at the studio in Hollywood, after having flown down from San Francisco, where Jack and I were playing at the Fairmont.

  I’ll never forget that first harrowing interview with him. I wore a tight, white dress so that he could see my figure. He grilled me for an hour and a half. All the time, he was sprawled on a couch, his face turned away from me, while he sucked on his pipe and barked questions at me, which I attempted to answer to the best of my ability.

  Then he handed me the pages of the script in which Lulu Bains was featured, as opposed to the script as a whole. Richard Brooks never allowed any of the actors in his movies to see the complete script, only the pages covering their part.

  Fortunately, following Burt Lancaster’s advice, I had already read the novel, by Sinclair Lewis, so I knew the story and my character. I went out in the corridor, read the pages Brooks had given me, then went in again and cleared my throat, expecting to start reading my part and auditioning.

  Before I did, I made a speech to Richard Brooks, declaring my passion for Elmer Gantry: “I’d play the part for nothing, Mr. Brooks.”

  But instead of letting me read the script for him, Brooks waved me aside. “So do you think you could play Lulu?” he barked.

  I said I thought I could.

  Then he dismissed me. I went home in tears, convinced that Richard Brooks definitely didn’t want me to play the part. My opinion was buttressed the following morning when word came back to me that Brooks hadn’t thought much of me and had no intention of casting me in the role.

  But Burt Lancaster wasn’t giving in, and faced with his star power and persistence, Richard Brooks finally capitulated and the part was mine.

  Knowing that I was far from the flavor du jour in the eyes of
Richard Brooks, Burt strongly advised me to be on set from day one. As Brooks shot in sequence, and my scene came toward the end of the movie, I had ample opportunity to observe him directing. As I did, although I was hugely intimidated by him, he ultimately won my admiration. But that didn’t mean he would reciprocate.

  My first day of filming Elmer Gantry proved to be the biggest challenge of my career. Richard Brooks had personally chosen my costume: a slip that partially revealed my breasts, but not so much as to inflame the censors. I was extremely nervous, but due to Burt, I was also well prepared for the scene.

  Through the years since I made Elmer Gantry, I’ve often been asked if I researched my part, as the deacon’s daughter turned prostitute, by going to a house of prostitution and talking to the ladies there. I didn’t think I needed to go that far. I knew all about prostitutes because Jack had introduced me to some of them, ex-girlfriends of his who had moved from prostitution to acting for a living. So by the time I was to shoot the first scene, which took place in a house of prostitution, I was primed to play my part.

  Nonetheless, that first scene proved to be the hardest scene I’ve ever shot in my life. In that scene I tell the other prostitutes all about the traveling salesman turned evangelical minister Elmer Gantry, what he did to me, and how I came to be working in the house: “Oh, he gave me special instructions back of the pulpit. He got to howlin’, ‘Repent! Repent!’ and I got to moanin’, ‘Save me! Save me!’ and the first thing I know he rammed the fear of God in me so fast I never heard my old man’s footsteps.”

  That line “rammed the fear of God into me so fast” would send shock waves through America when the movie was released. In many places, it was actually cut from the movie, and I received hundreds of letters from fans of Oklahoma! and Carousel demanding to know how I dared play such a sinful character.

  That first day on the set, Richard sat on the sidelines, with his legs crossed, smoking his pipe, and didn’t say a single, solitary word to me or give me a moment’s direction, except to growl, “Okay, let’s see how you do it.” And that was it.