As for David, I’ve always considered him my fourth son, and he’s always treated me with great kindness and courtesy. When we first met, his mother had painted me as a scarlet lady and a wicked stepmother, but as David sweetly said of me years later, “I wanted to hate her, but in minutes warmed to her.” The feeling was mutual.
David is nine years older than Shaun, eleven years older than Patrick and fifteen years older than Ryan. At first, David was afraid that he would be an outsider among my three sons and me, but when he and I started making The Partridge Family together, David grew closer and closer to me and the boys.
He was a sensitive and perceptive boy, and after Jack’s death, I was surprised to learn that he had been aware of how I had always put Jack up on a pedestal and deferred to him and his wishes, even after I had become a star in Hollywood, and Jack had not.
“She was the star, but my father was the maestro,” David characterized it later. “She lived for Jack Cassidy.”
Through the years, it’s been clear to me that David is extremely like Jack. David has his charm, and also his dark side, which led to his battle with drugs, about which he has written so movingly in his book Could It Be Forever?: My Story.
He wasn’t good at school, and if you read his book, it is easy to understand why. He confesses that he started taking drugs when he was twelve years old. From cocaine to everything else. Jack and I both knew that he was doing drugs. We just weren’t sure what.
At the height of David’s fame and fortune, he did have a big ego for a time, but he was young and handsome and his success inevitably went to his head. David has had three marriages, and my happiest memory of him is when he married his current wife, Sue, the mother of his son, Beau. David also has a daughter, Katy, by a previous relationship. She is an accomplished actress.
Marrying Sue and having Beau grounded David. She was a songwriter, a performer, and she adored David. And I was glad that he found her. Beau is twenty-one and is talented and has his own band, called Beau Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. A great name.
Professionally, David is still in great demand and has dates all over the country, in particular in casinos.
He is still close to his brothers. Last Mother’s Day, he left a sweet message on my answering machine:
“Dearest Shirley, I wish you a wonderful Mother’s Day and just to tell you that you have been a major part of my life and a major part of my career.
“You have been such a wonderful mother to me. You have helped me in so many ways. I admire you so much and I am so grateful to have had you in my life, and to have you in my life now. And there’s not a day that goes by without me thinking of something that you once said to me. Thank you, Shirley.”
In 1995, Shaun did Willy Russell’s Blood Brothers with David on Broadway. Shaun and David were playing fraternal twins who had been separated at birth, and David was thrilled that Shaun joined him in the play. Ever since I’d first met David, I was always aware that he had a good heart, and he loved working with Shaun, as Shaun has always been so down-to-earth. Eventually, though, Shaun gave up the theater in favor of creating, writing, and producing shows himself.
In 2001, I actually appeared in one of them, Cover Me: Based on the True Life of an FBI Family, in which I played the mother of a murderer. It was a good part, but Shaun was a tough director, and when I flubbed my lines for some reason, he was most scathing, and rightly so!
In July 2009, Shaun directed Patrick and David in the TV sitcom Ruby & the Rockits. Patrick played Patrick Gallagher, who was taking care of Ruby, the daughter of his rock-star brother, David Gallagher. Although the show pulled a 1.8 million audience in the season premiere, it was shut down after a year. However, today Shaun remains a well-respected writer and producer, and I am proud of him and his brothers, who are all wonderful to me and caring.
I love how they are all so close to one another.
FIFTEEN
Walking On
One of the happiest memories of my career (note: career, not life) was appearing in the TV movie Hidden Places, in 2006, for which I won an Emmy nomination, as I was playing Aunt Batty, against type.
In 2006, too, I was offered a movie part a million miles removed from Laurey, Julie, or Marian the librarian: the part of Grace in the movie Grandma’s Boy.
My agent sent me the script, saying that the producer, Adam Sandler, and the director, Nicholaus Goossen, wanted me to pick which of the old ladies I’d like to play.
Well, the biggest role was Mama (which Doris Roberts ended up playing), but my heart was set on playing the geriatric sex bomb, Grace. The script was funny, vulgar, and I adored it.
Making the movie was fun from morning to night. In one scene us old ladies get high on marijuana, which we thought was sugar. And in another, I am half-naked and rolling around in bed with Nick Swardson, who was born in 1976!
My love scene with Nick, who also cowrote the movie, was hysterical. Despite our vast age difference, I tell him that the moment I met him, I had my eye on him and knew instantly that he was the one for me. Consequently, I won’t let him alone, and in the end we do go to bed together. Along the way, I tell him that I once gave Charlie Chaplin a hand job, and chances are he’s never even heard of Charlie.
After we’ve had sex, he turns around and tells me, “You were my first.”
I answer, “You were my three thousand two hundred and twenty-third.”
The movie was really funny, and to this day teenage guys come up to me and, with a twinkle in their eyes, say, “I just loved you in Grandma’s Boy!”
Quite recently, I was sitting in an airport lounge when an old lady hobbled up to me. “I loved you in . . .”
I expected her to say Oklahoma! or Carousel or The Music Man.
“I loved you in Grandma’s Boy,” she finally said. She was around ninety-six years old.
I loved playing a sexy old lady in Grandma’s Boy, not just because the movie was hysterically funny, but because I’ve always believed that old age and sexuality are not incompatible. And that a woman can retain her sexuality at any age.
Marty agrees with me and, in 2009, convinced Playboy boss Hugh Hefner that it was time that an older woman displayed her charms in the pages of his magazine.
So Hefner agreed to make me his latest centerfold and invited me up to his mansion for a photo shoot.
When I got there, I was presented with an array of beautiful see-through negligees, but from the first, I made it clear that although I was happy to expose my legs, that would be it.
Everyone present agreed that would be fine.
So they made me up, and I spent all day at the mansion. We selected a flimsy, blue negligee, and I posed all over the Playboy Mansion, leaning against doorways, and lying across a glamorous king-size bed, revealing my legs and looking as fetching as possible.
Afterward, Hefner examined the pictures with his eagle eye and pronounced, “Shirley is lovely, and the pictures are lovely, but I want more nudity.”
Sadly, I had shown the camera all of my body that I was willing to show. “That kind of nudity isn’t right for me anymore,” I had to admit, and the subject was closed.
I wasn’t prepared to bare all for Playboy, but I still want to make it clear that I believe that a woman can remain sexual right through her seventies and eighties and beyond. I am living proof of that.
In 1990, I had one ovary and my uterus removed because I had a big tumor there, which luckily was not cancerous. Fortunately this hasn’t affected my sexuality at all.
I’ve always been an extremely sexual woman, easily aroused, and intensely orgasmic. Despite my advanced years, that hasn’t changed a bit, although it can take longer than before for me to achieve sexual fulfillment these days. And it’s often easier for me to achieve it through masturbation and not during intercourse or oral sex.
As I recounted before, Jack initiated me into sex and I had my first orgasm with him, and it was wonderful. Afterward he said, “Whenever you are alone, and you think o
f me, this is what you can do: you can masturbate.”
Jack was my sexual Svengali. He taught me everything about sex, and he taught me how to masturbate and never to be ashamed about doing it. He would watch me masturbating, and I would love it and never be shy or inhibited in any way.
I’m still the same. And I still masturbate. I don’t romanticize what I am doing. I don’t have a bubble bath beforehand or turn out the lights or play sensual music. I just use Vaseline and a finger. And my fantasies.
Although in my movies I’ve kissed some of the world’s most sexy men—Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, Jimmy Stewart, Rod Steiger, and more—and in my private life was married to sex God Jack Cassidy, I never think of any real-life men when I fantasize during masturbation. Instead, I get aroused by imagining a faceless, macho guy.
And while I’m masturbating, I say his dialogue and mine, out loud. If people heard the explicit words I say, they would be shocked. I love words, and I talk the fantasy through. I don’t need satin sheets or French perfume to get sexually excited. Basically, the more I talk the fantasy through, the more aroused I get, and the stronger my orgasms end up being. I can have one or two a session, and I love each and every one of them.
I need to have an orgasm every now and again for the release and the pleasurable feeling it creates in me. Masturbation, you see, is great for relaxation, great for the skin, and a wonderful way of feeling and remaining young, I firmly believe.
I’m not the only woman of my age to believe that masturbation is important for our well-being. I have female friends of my age who also love to pleasure themselves. After all, although our bodies may be old and wrinkled, our desires can still remain fresh and young.
When we older women masturbate, at least we don’t have to dress up or apply makeup or worry that we look our age. When we masturbate, we don’t have to put on airs and graces, but can just be ourselves and enjoy ourselves and feel alive and renewed.
Marty and I still have sex, but he is also aware that I masturbate, and it doesn’t bother him at all. The other morning, I came down to breakfast and told him that I’d masturbated the night before, but that it hadn’t gone well.
“What did you do wrong?” he cracked.
Sometimes it simply isn’t the right time and my mind just isn’t tuned in on sex.
I do think a woman should take care of her body however old she is. If you don’t like your body, go to the gym and work at it. I spend an hour a day there, and I always watch what I eat and eat much less meat than I used to.
In 1984, the National Enquirer claimed that Marty had driven me to drink and that I had a problem with alcohol. They photographed me at a party with wineglasses everywhere, but they didn’t all belong to me. Marty and I sued and beat the Enquirer and their claims were retracted. Nowadays, I have a martini every afternoon at five, but other than that, I never indulge in alcohol.
Luckily, Marty thinks I’ve still got a beautiful body, even though it is old, and every now and again I take all my clothes off in front of him and shake my tits at him, and he loves it.
I love dressing up in glamorous clothes for him, but I’m not one for makeup and I don’t dye my hair. I use a special skin-care product, but my mother always had beautiful skin and at the age of sixty-eight didn’t have a single wrinkle on her face, and fortunately, I think it is genetic.
Sadly, when my mother was in her late sixties, she was in a wheelchair because she had arthritis, and so did both my aunts. I have inherited the disease, and my body is filled with arthritis. I had a knee replacement and will eventually need to have the other one replaced as well.
Marty and I generally live a quiet life in our stone-and-wood, country-style house in Encino, along with our golden retriever, King, and our Welsh corgi, Hannah. Marty is a hoarder, so every room is filled with his papers, his photographs, his show-business memorabilia. The lovely thing about the house, though, is that it has an upstairs floor, where he usually stores everything he wants to keep long-term.
And even if he doesn’t, the house covers five thousand square feet, has five bedrooms, five bathrooms, a playroom for the children, and a movie theater, so there is plenty of space for us both, and we are extremely happy there.
One of my great joys is our house in Fawnskin, on the other side of Bear Lake. Fawnskin is an hour-and-a-half drive from Los Angeles, in the San Bernardino Mountains. Fawnskin used to be an artists’ colony, is 6,827 feet above sea level, and has a population of just three hundred people, which appeals to my small-town mentality.
I’d always wanted a house in the mountains as I’ve always been a big skier. So in 1976, I decided I needed more solitude and to luxuriate in my love for nature and the countryside, and to ski. I went up to Bear Lake and consulted a Realtor there. She wanted to show me houses on Bear Lake itself, but I didn’t want to live right on the lake. Instead, I wanted to live somewhere more isolated, away from people and crowds. And Fawnskin fit the bill perfectly.
She took me up a little dirt road in Fawnskin, with coyotes frolicking in the undergrowth, and showed me this wooden house with a terrace looking out on a vista that feels as if you were standing on a mountaintop in Switzerland and gazing down at the most beautiful view in the world, a view to die for.
I didn’t even go inside the house. I bought it then and there, paying $62,000 for the two-bedroom house and garage on six acres. The house came furnished, with a piano. I redid the whole thing, then bought nine more acres and converted the garage into a guesthouse.
One of my greatest pleasures in life nowadays is to sit on the deck of the main house, my 5:00 p.m. martini in one hand and a box of chocolates in the other, and talk to the coyotes.
Eleven years ago, Marty and I were in Fawnskin. The town is small, with just a tiny market, a tiny deli, plus a Moose lodge. We had lunch at the North Shore Café and noticed a FOR SALE sign on a stretch of land across the street, right next to the Moose lodge.
“I just hope they don’t build a 7-Eleven on it,” I said to Marty. Within hours, he checked the price of the land, we got a great deal, and we bought it on the spot. The date was September 10, 2001. The very next day, 9/11 exploded on the world.
When the news broke, Marty and I had exactly the same thought: to create a park on our newly acquired land as a tribute to all those who lost their lives in the tragedy of 9/11.
It all started with our getting a girder from the ruins of the Twin Towers and putting it in the center of our park. Fawn Memorial Park, we called it. On the walls around the park are pictures and statues of the brave firemen and policemen who were killed that day, with a small stage in the middle of it. Some wonderful people helped us with the funding to get the park going, but we still have financial difficulties in maintaining it.
To aid in that, and because I love it, I continue to work as much as possible. I would love to do another TV series or a movie. And if I do, I hope I will be cast against type once more, as I was in Elmer Gantry and in Grandma’s Boy. Almost half a century divides those two roles, but I loved playing both of them, primarily because I have always liked to shock people a bit. Despite my age, I still do.
I am now seventy-nine years old, and although I can’t believe it, life is still good. I have four sons (I always view David as mine) and twelve grandchildren, and Marty and I have a close and loving marriage.
Now and again, though, the thought has run through my mind about both the men I married—about Jack and about Marty—that I am not altogether sure if they married little Shirley Mae Jones or Shirley Jones the movie star. I guess I’ll never really know.
The main thing is that today I am so thankful that I have a partner I can cry with, laugh with, and who is always there for me. Marty takes good care of me, makes sure all the bills are paid on time, and is thrilled about everything that I do professionally and is glad to be part of it.
Every night as I sit on a chair, sipping my martini, Marty sits on the couch opposite me, and we have conversations about everybody and everythi
ng in our lives, and it’s great. We talk about family, friends, and business projects. Marty tells me jokes and makes me laugh continuously.
I love that we share everything, even though we are so very different. Yet we are still together, we still love each other, and whatever anybody else thinks of Marty and of our marriage, I know the truth: I have found my ultimate Prince Charming and I’m living happily ever after with him.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
All my thanks to the great team at Gallery:
Mitchell Ivers (Senior Editor)
Jen Bergstrom (Vice President and Publisher)
Louise Burke (President and Publisher)
Jen Robinson (Vice President, Publicity Director)
Natasha Simons (Editorial Assistant)
John Paul Jones (Associate Director of Copyediting)
Lisa Litwack (Art Director)
Thanks to my agent, Dan Strone, CEO at Trident Media Group, and a true facilitator, and to his assistant, Kseniya Zaslavskaya.
Thanks to Rick Hersh, who introduced me to Dan in the first place.
And thanks to Wendy Leigh, irrepressible cowriter extraordinaire, without whom I’d still be staring at an empty typewriter.
“Looking at the world with wonder.” August 8, 1934.
I told my mother I hated bows.
Singing in the choir at twelve.
Me in high school.
Happy in my late teens.
With my proud parents after winning Miss Pittsburgh 1952.
At the prom with Bill Boninni.
With my former beau Lou Malone.
In April Love and even more in love with Jack than ever.
Shirley Jones: A Memoir Page 20