Shirley Jones: A Memoir

by Jones, Shirley

  Bob practically passed out in shock. Then he straightened up and gave me a quizzical look.

  “That was Patrick Cassidy,” I said by way of explanation, as I had already been told that my baby was a boy, and we had decided to call him Patrick, a lovely Irish name.

  Years later, long after I made The Music Man, I assumed that Bob had recovered from being kicked in the stomach by my unborn child. He was appearing on Broadway, and Patrick, who had always been a great fan of his, went to see him.

  After the show, Patick went backstage and was escorted to Bob’s dressing room. He held his hand out to Bob. “My name is Patrick Cassidy.”

  Robert Preston took three steps back. “Oh, no! We’ve already met.”

  Then he gave a big smile, and all was forgotten.

  I was now an Academy Award winner for Elmer Gantry, and the star of one of the last blockbuster Hollywood musicals, The Music Man. While money wasn’t exactly pouring in, by rights it shouldn’t have been a problem.

  But as always, Jack spent money as if it were going out of style. He decided, out of the blue, to remodel our house. As I said before, he was a talented interior designer and brilliant at designing and finishing furniture. So I kept silent while he built a workshop behind the house and started to design and build a sunroom, complete with barbecue and a poolroom.

  In some ways, I was thankful that Jack was only remodeling the house, not insisting that we sell it and buy another one. His biggest dream was always to buy a farm in Vermont, perhaps as a second home, and I dreaded the day when he declared the time was ripe for us to start hunting for it. So I concluded that the workshop was a small mercy, although we couldn’t afford it. Despite the fact that we often didn’t have enough money to pay the bills, I continued to watch in silence as day after day the machinery Jack persisted in ordering was delivered, along with expensive furniture and antiques. If I ventured to broach the sore subject of our finances, he simply tuned me out. He didn’t want to hear about it. You could say that both of us were adept at playing the same game: he didn’t want to hear about my money worries, and I definitely didn’t want to hear about his infidelities.

  Until I made Two Rode Together in 1961 with Richard Widmark, the thought that I might retaliate for Jack’s infidelity and have an affair myself never once occurred to me.

  Sex was the furthest thing from my mind when I met the movie’s director, John Ford, who was to win the distinction of becoming my all-time most unfavorite director, although I did admire his work on such movies as Stagecoach.

  Before I met John Ford, I’d already heard through the grapevine that he wasn’t a woman’s director and that he believed women belonged in bed, that being their only value.

  Apart from Ford’s attitude toward women, the story of Two Rode Together wasn’t particularly inspiring, and John Ford knew it, which didn’t add to his mood during the shoot. The plot revolved round Jimmy Stewart, who played the partner in a saloon, and Richard Widmark, an army lieutenant who was helping my character (who went by the name of Marty Purcell) to find her younger brother, who had been kidnapped by Comanches.

  The first day when I showed up on the set for Two Rode Together, in Brackettville, Texas, I discovered that my part was being totally rewritten, although it was just hours before the cameras were to start rolling.

  Before we started shooting, I tentatively approached John Ford and asked him how he wanted me to wear my hair, and he just growled, “Do whatever you like, but just do it.” He didn’t give me any direction throughout the entire picture, and I thanked my lucky stars that I was working with Richard Widmark, who was kind and helpful to me, and a good actor, as his performances in The Alamo and Judgment at Nuremberg attest.

  Aside from John Ford’s marked lack of concern for me and the part I was playing, I was utterly thrown by the long white handkerchief that he had permanently hanging out of the corner of his mouth, as if he were chewing a straw or something. If ever he deigned to give one of us a direction, he’d yank the handkerchief out of his mouth, yell out a few instructions, then shove it back into his mouth again. By the end of the day, he had chewed it to shreds.

  The first time I saw Ford chewing his handkerchief, I mouthed my shock at Richard Widmark. He shook his head, then leaned forward and whispered in my ear, “Just don’t ask him, Shirley, don’t ask him!”

  So I bit my tongue and said nothing.

  Thankfully, John Ford’s lack of connection with me didn’t mean that the shooting of Two Rode Together was to be wholeheartedly unpleasant for me. I was thrilled to be cast in this movie with Jimmy Stewart, as he was a good friend who was born and raised in Indiana, Pennsylvania, close to my hometown, Smithton.

  From the first scenes, Jimmy was as helpful to me as he could be. Later on, when we worked together in The Cheyenne Social Club, for the only time in my career I dried up. Jimmy said, in his Jimmy Stewart style, “W-w-well, don’t worry, Shirley, j-just say whatever comes into your head, and it will be p-p-perfect for the scene.” I did, and he was right.

  Jimmy Stewart was as endearingly funny and charming offscreen as he was on. In particular, he told me an adorable story about the birth of his twins, whom he worshipped at first sight.

  Thrilled and excited to bring them home with his wife from the hospital, he raced there in his car, narrowly escaping a speeding fine from a watchful traffic warden. Arriving in front of the hospital, out of breath and overwhelmed, he parked his car and ran upstairs to his wife and the babies.

  Jimmy wheeled his wife down to the lobby in a wheelchair and left her there, the twins in her arms, cooing happily. Then he went out to the car and promptly drove straight home, without them! He was so absentminded he had simply forgotten all about them!

  His long-suffering wife later confided in me that this story was not an isolated incident. To describe Jimmy Stewart as befuddled and absentminded, it seemed, was the understatement of the year.

  That first day on location for Two Rode Together, during a break in shooting Richard Widmark came over to me again, clearly feeling sorry for me because it was so obvious that John Ford had snubbed me. I didn’t take it personally, though, as I knew how John felt about women in general.

  Besides, I had two-year-old Shaun with me on location (along with his nanny), and that made me happy.

  As shooting progressed, Richard Widmark made me happier still.

  It all started out because Richard, who was then in his forties and was married to a playwright, had a car at his disposal while we were shooting the movie. So when we had some time off, he offered to show me the countryside. To my delight, I discovered that he loved nature as much as I did, and that he understood that I wasn’t this sophisticated, dedicated actress, but was natural and adored the country.

  So we’d set off in Richard’s gray Ford and he would talk to me about the beauty of the country as we drove, rather like my father once had all those years ago when he drove me to Pittsburgh for my weekly singing lessons.

  Soon, Richard stopped the car in a clearing and started kissing and hugging and touching me. Then he pulled away from me and said, “Don’t worry, we are both married, and I’m not going to take advantage of you. You’re twenty years younger than I am, you’ve got children, and I really care about you. But under different circumstances . . .”

  We kissed again, then and often, in Richard’s car, during our long country drives, and in his trailer, between shots. But I never went all the way with Richard. Despite Jack’s infidelities, I still loved him, and I wanted to be true to my marriage vows. Richard understood.

  On my seventieth birthday, Marty arranged for many of the stars with whom I’d worked to each create a congratulatory video message for me. So there was Richard Widmark, up on the screen, larger-than-life, giving me birthday wishes after all those years.

  “Dear Shirley,” he said, “happy birthday. Miss you a lot. We had such a good time together.”

  We certainly did.

  When I made The Courtship of Ed
die’s Father in 1962, I was happy to be working with Ronny Howard again. He played Eddie, a little boy who was determined to find a wife for his newly widowed father. My character, Elizabeth Marten, ends up marrying his father, Glenn Ford.

  Glenn was half-Welsh and had a prolific romantic track record, which encompassed, among others, Joan Crawford, Debbie Reynolds, and Rita Hayworth, with whom he starred in Gilda.

  While I wasn’t remotely tempted to have an affair with Glenn, from the first, he made it clear that he was eminently available to me. Although I didn’t know it at the time, his attraction to me stemmed from a prediction by his psychic, the legendary Peter Hurkos, on whom Glenn was so dependent that he actually kept a spare bedroom in his house ready and waiting for Peter to stay in. During one of his psychic readings for Glenn, Peter had prophesied that Glenn and I were destined to be husband and wife. I did not concur. I made my lack of interest in Glenn obvious to him, but he still wasn’t giving up. After all, he had the occult on his side.

  New Year’s Eve fell during the shooting of The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, Glenn invited Jack and me to his New Year’s Eve party at his home, near the Beverly Hills Hotel.

  The evening was fun, and we all ate and drank a good deal, then toasted each other at midnight. A few moments into the New Year, Jack came over to me, somewhat sheepishly, and asked if I’d mind his visiting a friend’s house round the corner, so he could have a quick New Year’s drink with him. True to form, I didn’t protest, although Jack’s story was decidedly suspicious.

  By two in the morning, there was no sign of Jack, and I was exhausted. In those days, mobile phones hadn’t yet been invented. I didn’t know where in hell Jack was, never mind with whom, so I just went upstairs and into the nearest bedroom, got straight into bed, and fell fast asleep, still wearing my ball gown.

  I was out like a light until four in the morning, when I woke up with a start, to find Glenn Ford naked, except for his shorts, lying in bed next to me.

  I jumped up and said, “I’m so sorry! Something terrible must have happened to Jack.”

  At that moment, the telephone rang.

  Glenn answered. I couldn’t hear Jack’s end of the conversation, but I imagine he was apologizing profusely.

  But Glenn was impervious. “You’d better get straight over here. Otherwise you won’t have a wife anymore. . . .”

  Within half an hour, Jack was banging on the front door. Glenn let him in and gave it to him straight: “How could you do this to your wife!”

  Jack, always a quick thinker, came up with some excuse about an accident, they had been drinking, and on and on and on.

  It was one of the few times in our marriage when I was so angry with Jack that I began to scream at him, yelling that I couldn’t understand how he could treat me so badly.

  Shocked by my confronting him, Jack apologized abjectly, then focused on his surroundings and realized that Glenn was dressed only in his shorts and that my ball gown was so crushed that it was obvious I’d been in bed.

  I knew that even though Glenn and I had been in bed together, he hadn’t tried anything sexual with me because I was soundly asleep, and I told Jack so. I don’t know if Jack believed me or not or was actually jealous for the first time in our marriage, but if he was, he didn’t show it. Instead, for the rest of his life, Jack always called Glenn Ford “the necrophiliac.”

  When all was said and done, though, Glenn Ford had behaved like a gentleman. So, in his Latin lover style, did Rossano Brazzi, who had starred in South Pacific and with whom I made a movie in Portugal in 1963. It was called Dark Purpose here and L’intrigo in Europe.

  Sardonic actor George Sanders played my boss, an art dealer, I played a naïve American secretary, and Rossano played a mysterious count set on romancing me. As sometimes happens in movies, Rossano seemed fixated on continuing his role once the cameras had stopped rolling. When Rossano and I finished shooting our first scene, we ended up alone on the set together, and he started chasing me around the room.

  When I backed away from him, he tried another approach: “Let’s go out to dinner and then take a hotel room.”

  “What are you saying? I’m married! And so are you,” was my instant reaction.

  “We don’t worry about that in Italy,” retorted Rossano, “My wife doesn’t mind what I do. I like what I do. She likes what I do. We could have a good time while we’re on this movie. And Italian men don’t go by the rules.”

  “Sorry, Rossano,” I said firmly, “American women do go by the rules.”

  Marlon Brando, with whom I made Bedtime Story (which was later adapted into the musical Dirty Rotten Scoundrels), costarring David Niven, always lived his life by his own iconoclastic rules and ignored everyone else’s.

  The movie was partly filmed on location in Cannes, and in Hollywood. Marlon played Freddy Benson, a con man who dons a GI uniform to trick unsuspecting girls into bed, and David played Lawrence Jameson, the king of Riviera con men whose realm is threatened by the arrival of Freddy, and I played Janet Walker, the unwitting object of a bet between Freddy and Lawrence.

  Before making Bedtime Story, Brando had become disillusioned with making movies. The experience of filming Mutiny on the Bounty in Tahiti had soured him on working in movies. According to him, Mutiny on the Bounty had taken forever to make, and he had hated the director and conducted romantic affairs with practically every woman on the island of Tahiti.

  Fortunately, he was happy to be making Bedtime Story because he had always wanted to do comedy, but no one in Hollywood had been prepared to give him that opportunity. So this uproarious comedy was his first shot, and he was thrilled. He also loved that he would be working with David Niven, whom he respected a great deal.

  At the end of the first day of shooting, Brando asked me to come to his dressing room and talk. When I got there, ready to field the inevitable pass, I took a deep breath and said, “Marlon, I’m thrilled to be working with you and David. This is going to be fun for all of us.”

  “Yeah,” Marlon mumbled, “I’ve had it with all the other crap.” We chatted about the movie some more, and that was that. When we started working on our scenes together, it wasn’t easy to work with him, particularly because director Ralph Levy was completely under his sway and allowed him free rein, so it was almost as if Brando himself were directing Bedtime Story.

  Like Sinatra, Marlon was self-involved: everything he had to say or do was more important than anything anyone else had to say or do. However, unlike Sinatra, who was known in the business as “one-take Frank,” Brando was never happy with the first, second, or third take. Part of the reason, I discovered, was because he was unable to remember any of his lines and had all of them written on the palms of his hands or on the side of a table.

  Apart from that, he never got any scene right on the first take. Our first scene was straightforward: we meet and he is desperately trying to seduce me. Nevertheless, it took sixty takes before Brando yelled cut. After that I understood why everyone always said Brando was America’s greatest actor: he exhausted every other actor working with him!

  He was never my favorite actor, either on-screen or off. Despite his image as the ultimate sex symbol, I wasn’t in the least bit turned on by kissing Brando during the scene when I rub oil all over him on the beach. While he was a great kisser, he was not the best I’ve ever had. (That distinction goes first to Burt Lancaster, and then to Richard Widmark.) But apart from that, shooting love scenes is never sexually exciting. You are too busy remembering what you are doing, your lines, the next bit of dialogue . . .

  Brando really wanted to make a success of Bedtime Story because he had always longed to play comedy, and this was his chance. He had great respect for David Niven and his work, and he didn’t make David do so many takes. At the end of shooting each day, Marlon and I would sit around while David told great stories, and Marlon was fascinated.

  When the picture wrapped, David invited Marlon, Jack and me, and a group of David’s friends
to dinner at his house in Brentwood.

  When we arrived on the porch, Marlon’s best friend, Wally Cox, who had started out in New York with Brando at the beginning of his career and always made him laugh, with Cox’s quirky sense of humor, rushed up to us and said, “Marlon is here, but he doesn’t want to face his son. So don’t be surprised by what you see when you come into the house.”

  Jack and I walked into the living room, where a huge table was filled with all kinds of food. Underneath the table was Marlon, sitting cross-legged, hiding from his son.

  He stayed that way for a couple of hours, then, without a word, got up and rushed out into the night. Some bedtime story. . . .

  In Elmer Gantry, I had a seminude scene, but I was to venture further into nudity in the TV movie Silent Night, Lonely Night, which I made in 1969. It was based on Robert Anderson’s play of the same name, which had been produced on Broadway with Henry Fonda and Barbara Bel Geddes.

  Silent Night, Lonely Night movingly told the story of a couple who, by chance, meet on Christmas Eve, when they are both riding on a bus to Amherst. She is visiting her son in school there, though her heart is heavy as she is aware that her husband is having an affair. The man is visiting his wife in a mental hospital and knows that when he arrives, she will no longer recognize him.

  Along the way, he recounts the story of his first affair to the woman, an affair with the town groupie, with whom he had sex one night in the empty school gym. As he relates what happened, my character fantasizes about being the town groupie and having sex with him.

  Before we shot that scene, Danny Petrie, Silent Night, Lonely Night’s director, gingerly approached me and asked how I would feel about taking my clothes off. I was torn between agreeing and refusing because, after all, this was a TV movie and who knew whether a nude scene would get past the strict censors.

  Danny reassured me that Silent Night, Lonely Night was slated for a theatrical release, and that I’d only be seen topless and from behind.