Shirley Jones: A Memoir

by Jones, Shirley

  So I was thrilled when my manager, Ruth Aarons, called with the news that Jack and I had been offered the leading roles in a Broadway musical to be called Maggie Flynn. We both read the script, listened to the music, and adored it. Besides, we loved the idea of continuing to work together, and not being separated on two different coasts.

  The show and the parts were wonderful for both of us, and I luxuriated in the joy of having Jack sing romantic ballads to me onstage once more, just as he had in Oklahoma! at the start of our love affair.

  In Maggie Flynn, I played an Irish lady living in the Bronx during the Civil War, a time in which the authorities were kidnapping black children and taking them away from New York. My character, Maggie Flynn, decided that she wanted to protect them and keep them safe in her basement apartment.

  Jack played Phineas Finn, my husband, a circus clown, who, in a twist of the plot slightly reminiscent of my offstage life with Jack, had disappeared. Consequently, I had a boyfriend, Colonel John Farraday, who wanted me to divorce my errant husband and marry him instead. So John and I became secretly engaged.

  Then Phineas suddenly arrives back on the scene again, and I fall for him once more. Jack was playing himself, a philanderer who was no good and who ended up in jail. But in Maggie Flynn, as in real life, I still loved him.

  Away from the theater, Jack and I rented that castle in Irvington-on-Hudson, and all the kids—including David—lived up there with us.

  The show, which opened on October 23, 1968, was beautiful, in particular the ending, when Jack walks on the stage from one wing, and I from the other, and we meet in the middle and sing a duet together, “Mr. Clown.” The audience always went crazy for this moving, emotional song and seemed to love the show as a whole.

  However, for some unknown reason that, to this day, I am unable to fathom, after just three and a half months the producers closed the show. We had no notice. It was a fait accompli.

  I was deeply disappointed, but Jack took the closure far harder than I did. He had great hopes that he would win a Tony for Maggie Flynn. After all, he had already won one for his acclaimed performance in She Loves Me and had also been nominated for Superman, and Fade Out—Fade In, and I thought he should have won for both. So he had every reason to believe that he could win a Tony for his performance in Maggie Flynn, and that I could win one as well. Jack was indeed nominated for a Best Actor Tony for his part as Phineas, but was beaten by Jerry Orbach in Promises, Promises. And even if Jack had won, he would still have been devastated that the show closed so early in the run. As always, he drowned his sorrows in drink.

  Drink as he did, at that stage in his life Jack was still far too much in control to let his drinking end up damaging his career. To Jack, drinking didn’t just revolve around the lure of the alcohol but around the camaraderie of hanging out with other guys and shooting the breeze together until the early hours of the morning. That was what really mattered to him.

  One evening, after the curtain fell on whichever Broadway show Jack was then starring in, he ended up hanging out at the Copa, as he often did. That particular evening, Johnny Carson was drinking alone at the bar, so Jack joined him, and they had a couple of drinks together. Then Jack moved on to another table to join a couple of friends.

  After a while, the bartender came over and said, “Jack, you’ve gotta help me out. Johnny is as drunk as a skunk, and I’m afraid he’s gonna hurt himself, or somebody else. We’ve got to get him out of here.”

  So Jack went over and said, “Come on, Johnny, I’ll take you wherever you want to go, and we’ll have a drink on the way.”

  Johnny fought him and refused to quit drinking, but in the end Jack got him to leave and got him home in once piece.

  Many times after that night, Jack did Johnny’s show, but Johnny never mentioned that Jack had rescued him from a drunken binge at the Copa.

  Johnny was a difficult, enigmatic man, but when he died, he secretly left a vast fortune to a variety of children’s foundations and women’s organizations, all under an assumed name.

  Generally, Jack aroused positive feelings in both men and women. Once, though, he was invited to attend Burt Reynolds’s roast and came out with a funny line about Burt. Burt lashed back with “While you’re up here, Marty Ingels is walking around in your bathrobe and slippers.” Jack knew Burt quite well and just laughed his comments off.

  Jack was a great raconteur and an amusing drinking buddy. George C. Scott was another of Jack’s drinking comrades and a close friend. George produced The Andersonville Trial, in which Jack appeared in 1970 and for which he got an Emmy nomination.

  However, close as Jack and George were, both Jack and I knew that George was a split personality: a delight when he was drinking, but a monster when he was drunk. One night when he was dating a young actress, Jack and I had a lovely dinner with the two of them at our home, and then they hung out with us in the backyard afterward. George and Jack started drinking pretty heavily, but as I had to get up and go to work extremely early the next morning, I made my excuses and went up to bed. Soon after, his girlfriend also went up to bed and left George and Jack alone together, still drinking.

  I was just dropping off to sleep when I heard an almighty crash, which was clearly the sound of a bottle being smashed to smithereens. I ran downstairs, and there was George, holding a broken bottle up against Jack’s cheek, yelling, “Unless you tell me the truth, I’m going to stab you to death.”

  Jack, never one to lose his cool, even under the direst circumstances, started to edge away from George, extremely gingerly, saying, “You don’t have to do this, George, we’re friends.”

  Luckily, at that moment, George saw me standing on the threshold. I gave him a stern look, whereupon he dropped the bottle and said, “I gotta go.”

  I never did discover why he was threatening Jack, and what he wanted Jack to tell him.

  After Maggie Flynn closed, I was cast in The Cheyenne Social Club, which Gene Kelly directed and was to be shot in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I played Jenny, the madam of a brothel, the Cheyenne Social Club. The script was a delight, my role was fun, and I was glad that Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda were to be my costars.

  As this was my second movie with Jimmy (the first was Two Rode Together), I was extremely comfortable working with him. Moreover, he was such a natural and always ready to help his fellow actors.

  Working with Henry Fonda, however, wasn’t as much of a picnic. He was so remote, so cold, so unlike Jimmy, that it was hard for me to believe that they were best friends.

  Henry Fonda made it extremely clear from the start that he didn’t want to communicate with me or anyone else on the movie, other than Jimmy.

  Whenever we met in makeup, Fonda would be sitting in the makeup chair, ramrod straight, and I would say, “Hi, Hank, how are you?”

  He would just look away and make sure that there was no eye contact between us. I never got to know who he was as a human being, which was probably his intention and just the way he liked it.

  I didn’t let Fonda’s remoteness trouble me. I was so happy working with Jimmy, and I loved my part and the script and everything else connected with the movie.

  Besides, I had just read the best TV-pilot script I’d ever read—for a show to be called The Partridge Family.

  NINE

  The Partridge Family

  By now, David Cassidy, my stepson, was in his late teens. Through the years, I’d felt sorry for him when Jack was too hard on him, particularly when my kids, Shaun, Patrick, and Ryan, were born, and I felt Jack didn’t give David nearly enough attention. But I soon revised my opinion because, as time went on, Jack didn’t give our kids together that much attention, either.

  In his early teens, David let his hair grow long, until it reached right down to his shoulders, and Jack wasn’t crazy about that, nor, it transpired, was my mother. When I was pregnant with Ryan and had just a week to go before my cesarean was scheduled, she came to stay so that she could help me when the baby
was born. Fifteen-year-old David was staying with us. My mother took one look at David, with his shoulder-length hair, and said, “David, that hair looks terrible!”

  David declared defiantly, “I like it!”

  Undeterred, my mother, who, I realized in retrospect, was blind drunk, ran out of the room, got a pair of scissors, and tried to cut David’s hair.

  David dodged my mother as best he could and yelled, “Get away from me!”

  Horrified, I jumped in and grabbed the scissors from my mother. David breathed a sigh of relief, and peace within the family was restored, among the kids at least. But not for me. Twenty minutes later, I went into labor from sheer shock at what my mother had almost done to poor David, and soon afterward, on February 23, 1966, Ryan was born!

  In his teens, David continued on his path as an inveterate womanizer. My son Patrick, too, turned out to be very sexually oriented. Just like his father, and, to be honest, just like me, as well.

  When Patrick was thirteen, I was cooking pancakes one morning when he came running down the stairs shouting, “Mom, Mom!”

  “What happened, honey?”

  “Mom, I’ve just had my first orgasm. I woke up, and it happened!”

  “What?!”

  “Does it often happen when you wake up?”

  I nodded, not exactly sure what to say next, and I certainly did not want to raise the subject with Jack, who could be a strict and autocratic father, as David sadly learned many times in his young life.

  When David was starting out in the theater, and auditioning for jobs, plus attending acting classes whenever he could, Jack insisted that David take a part-time job and found him one himself.

  Jack meant well for his eldest son, I know, trying to instill self-reliance and independence in him, but Jack still made an error of judgment when he got David a thankless job starting out in the mail room of a textile company based in New York City. David was paid $2 an hour, which netted him $38 a week, which hardly paid for his train fare commuting from Irvingtonon-Hudson into the city each day.

  Jack also suddenly decreed that David should not wear his habitual uniform of a trusty pair of jeans, a T-shirt, and tennis shoes to work every day.

  One Saturday, in classic-Jack grand-seigneur style, he announced to David that he was taking him into the city to buy him a suit. David was overwhelmed by Jack’s sudden burst of fatherly interest and generosity and was ecstatic.

  So Jack took David to Jack’s very own tailor, Roland Meledandri, and first selected two suits for himself. Then he turned his attention to David and selected not only a suit for him, but also a stylish overcoat, a flawless sports jacket, and a perfect pair of slacks. David was overjoyed, even more so when the bill for those clothes was presented: $800! His father had spent $800 on him!

  Poor David came down with an unpleasant bump, however, when Jack informed him that David now owed him $800. Every single solitary cent of it. And that Jack expected David to start paying it off at $15 a week. Almost half his $38 weekly salary. To his credit, David worked like a dog and ultimately paid Jack back every single cent.

  Yet, David felt that his father had tricked him into going into debt and felt betrayed. I couldn’t blame David one iota.

  But to do Jack justice, he did try to help David launch his show-business career. Jack paid a photographer to shoot professional photographs of David, then found him an agent and, most important of all, prevailed on our manager, Ruth Aarons, to manage David as well.

  I was glad that his professional life was taking positive shape so early on. Through the years, even when he was a small child, David was always on my side, was never cheeky to me or disobedient. I think he respected me, and whatever I said, went. On the other hand, while he was always nice to me, good to me, we never sat down and had long talks, and he never sent me birthday cards or Christmas presents, unless he was staying with us. We only really got to know each other properly when we made The Partridge Family together.

  Right before I was cast in The Partridge Family, I remember coming out of the house late one afternoon and finding David, who was babysitting that night, in the pool playing with Shaun.

  I was wearing a micro-miniskirt and a tight sweater as I was on my way to have dinner with an agent.

  Shaun looked me up and down. “Why do you dress that way, Mom? No other mother dresses that way. It’s because you are going to do that show. . . .”

  Outraged, and extremely protective of me as always, David rounded on Shaun. “What do you mean! You’ve got a beautiful mother, and why shouldn’t she show her legs?”

  Shaun clammed up, and that was that.

  Before I was offered the part of Shirley Partridge in The Partridge Family, I was offered the leading role of Carol Ann Martin, the mother in The Brady Bunch, the role later played by Florence Henderson. Now that my kids were old enough to be attending school and couldn’t take time off to come on location with me, I was eager to work in TV, so that I wouldn’t have to be away making movies and not see my kids for weeks on end. While the idea of playing the mother in The Brady Bunch was initially attractive to me, I turned it down because I didn’t want to be the mother taking the roast out of the oven and not doing much else. Besides, my agent and my manager were both adamant that taking part in a TV series would inevitably lead to the death of my career as a movie star.

  I didn’t really care if they were right. Spending time with my kids mattered more to me than anything else, and if giving up movies and appearing in a TV show instead would facilitate that, I was happy.

  So when my agent came to me with an offer to do the pilot for a TV series called The Partridge Family, I studied the script extremely carefully and quickly realized from the get-go that it was very different from the saga of the mom taking the roast out of the oven. Shirley Partridge was a working mother, The Partridge Family was a family who actually worked together, stayed together, laughed together, and liked one another in the bargain.

  The show was born during the post-Monkees era when, one night, writer Bernard Slade, who created The Flying Nun and later the hit play Same Time, Next Year, was watching the Johnny Carson show and the Cowsills came on. This family-turned-pop-group was formed in 1965 by Barbara, the mother; and her kids, Bob, Barry, Bill, John, Susan, and Paul. In 1967 and 1968, the Cowsills had hits with “Indian Lake,” “The Rain, the Park & Other Things,” and “Poor Baby.”

  The show The Sound of Music was big right then, so Bernard Slade came up with the idea of creating a sitcom about a traveling family pop group. Initially his concept was to have the Cowsills play themselves, but then he met with them and discovered that none of them had any acting experience, and, worse still, only one family member had much personality. So Bernard decided to hire actors instead.

  The show, conceived as a middle-of-the-road situation comedy with music, was initially going to be called The Family Business. However, Bernard had gone to school in England and had played soccer there. The center-half was a boy named Partridge. Hence his inspiration for the name Partridge.

  The Partridge Family was a little different from most other shows on television at that time, and the plan was that we would sing a new song each show.

  More important than my like of the artistic concept of the show were the private benefits for me. I had no doubts at all about playing Shirley Partridge. First, because she was destined to become the first working mother on TV and I loved the script. Second, because working on the series would let me be an almost full-time mom and raise my kids. I had always relished being a mom, and I would probably have had eight kids if I could. Above all, I wanted to be a different kind of mom from my own mom. And I was sure that I didn’t want to miss my kids’ growing up because I was always away on location without them because they were now back home and at school.

  So without my having to attend a single audition, I was offered the role of Shirley Partridge in The Partridge Family and was hired on the spot. Jack, however, was not in the least bit enthralled by the prosp
ect of my becoming Shirley Partridge. He thought The Partridge Family was trivial and didn’t mince words in giving me his opinion. His opinion, however, was not based purely on his artistic judgment. In truth, Jack, like most actors, wanted to be the star of a TV show himself. The last thing that he wanted was for his wife to become a TV star when he wasn’t.

  Not to mention his eldest son . . .

  David, who was aiming to become a serious actor and had so far appeared on a number of hit TV shows such as Bonanza, didn’t want to test for The Partridge Family. He, too, considered it lightweight. But his manager, and mine, Ruth Aarons, convinced him to go for it. So without Jack’s or my knowing it, he went over to Screen Gems and read for Renée Valente, the casting director, and Paul Junger Witt, the producer/director, and auditioned for the part of Keith Partridge.

  The casting director and the producers liked David enough to invite him back for a screen test, but they wondered how I would feel about working with my stepson. They were afraid that my off-set relationship with him might cause problems between us on set. So they asked me what I thought about working with David on the show.

  I said I had no problems working with him whatsoever. “David is my stepson, not my son. I didn’t raise him and I won’t be tempted to baby him. He’s a good actor, a good singer, and we have a great relationship.”

  With that obstacle removed, the producers breathed a big sigh of relief and screen-tested David, even though at nineteen he was probably far too old to play Keith Partridge, a high school kid. Fortunately for him, he was small for his age, and much as he would come to hate it, he could still pass for a high school kid. So David was cast to play Keith for a weekly salary of $600.

  On the first day of rehearsals, I already knew that David was in the cast, but he had no idea that I was, as well. So when I walked on set, he was completely surprised and asked what I was doing there.

  “I’m playing your mama in this, sweetheart.”