Shirley Jones (11 page)

When he was young, he didn’t want to go into the army, so on the application, he said he was gay, which meant that the army didn’t take him. That story shocked and disappointed me.

Jack would never have labeled himself as bisexual, but I do know that he had had sex with men. When he was touring, he told me he roomed with various gay guys. I never questioned him about how many gay guys he’d had sex with. I didn’t want to know. Ignorance is bliss, as they say.

He and director/choreographer Bob Fosse, creator of
Sweet Charity
,
Cabaret
, and
Chicago
, lived together on the road, but I don’t think they had an affair with each other. Fosse was a notorious womanizer, and I do know from Jack that he and Fosse often had threesomes with women. Jack, Bob, and a woman.

In the seventies, when sexual promiscuity was the order of the day for many people, Jack did try to get me into a foursome with the handsome actor Pete Duel, who was just thirty years old, and Pete’s girlfriend. Pete and Jack met when Jack appeared on the TV series
Alias Smith and Jones
, in which Pete played Joshua Smith. They became close and had plans to star in a play together.

Jack and I were living in Bel Air at the time, and Pete and his girlfriend came over for a swim party. We were all in the pool when Jack said, “Hey, let’s all take off our clothes and go inside and have a foursome!”

I got out of the pool at once and said to Jack, “You go ahead, but I think I’ll forgo this.”

Then I went into the living room. After a few moments, Pete Deuel came in, put his arms around me, and said, “You know something, you’re a very special lady.”

“I’m sorry, I know that people do this, but it isn’t something I want to get involved in.”

He said, “I admire you for that.”

And that was it.

Pete Duel was nice, and I was sad when he shot himself to death just a year later.

After Jack and I got married, our first apartment was on East Fifty-Second Street and the East River Drive in New York City. Jack was an incredible designer and loved to design both the interior of a room and the furniture in it. The décor had to be perfect for him to be happy. Sometimes, I felt that I wasn’t perfect enough for him, either. He wanted me to be sophisticated, a woman of the word, a party giver of distinction, a great hostess. At least, half of him did, but I knew deep down that he would have resented it bitterly had I ever well and truly upstaged him. Jack wanted me to remain the small-town girl he’d met and married and who always ceded the spotlight to him.

So I followed my instincts, and although I learned to paint, to read more, to enjoy serious plays at the theater, all to please Jack, I made sure that when I was with him, I always stayed in the background. When we were socializing with other people, I’d spend most of the evening sitting quietly on a chair in the corner, not saying a word and living up to Jack’s nickname for me of Mouse.

Soon after Jack and I were married, I got pregnant. My manager, Ruth Aarons, was horrified, and so was Jack. Ruth represented Celeste Holm, George Chakiris, Janis Paige, and Jack and me. Jack adored Ruth and followed her advice unquestioningly. So, up till then, did I. Now she and Jack were in unison, telling me that I had no alternative but to abort my unborn baby. Both of them said that my career was on the upswing and having a baby right now would be a disaster for it.

Abortion was illegal in those days, and I went through a great deal of soul-searching before agreeing to one. But Ruth was adamant. Having a child would end my career once and for all. So, against all my better instincts, and much against my will, I agreed.

Relieved, Ruth volunteered, “We have a doctor. . . .”

I had the sense that I wasn’t the first of Ruth’s illustrious clients to pay a visit to this doctor. Which didn’t make me feel any better, but at least he wasn’t a backstreet butcher.

Jack took me to the doctor’s office in an unprepossessing downtown-Manhattan building, but was not permitted to stay and wait for me while I had the abortion. I was nervous, but the doctor was kind and made me feel at ease. He gave me some type of local anesthetic, and I watched him as he worked, finally removing a mass of blood, but no fetus, as it was too early for one to have formed inside me.

When it was all over, the doctor told me I was healthy and would be fine, but to go home, put my feet up, and rest. Jack came to pick me up and was warm, loving, and kind and said, “I am so sorry you had to go through this, but Ruth was right that this is the wrong time for you to have a child. But I know you want a child, and we’ll have one. More than one.”

His words were comforting, but nevertheless I still felt emotionally fragile, shell-shocked, and I vowed that I would never have another abortion in my life. I made a solemn promise to myself that as soon as I could, I would get pregnant again and have a family.

In the meantime, I had Jack’s son by Evelyn Ward to contend with, seven-year-old David Cassidy.

Although Jack’s marriage to Evelyn was on the rocks when he and I met, Evelyn loved Jack, she was devastated that he no longer loved her, and didn’t intend to let him go easily. After she finally agreed to give him a Mexican divorce and then discovered that he was set on marrying me immediately, she was intent on getting revenge on us.

During our wedding rehearsal, she called Jack and said that he needed to speak to his son. Then she put David on the phone, and David (who had obviously been coached by his mother) said, “What are you doing, Daddy? Why are you marrying someone else?”

Jack was too shocked to answer David, so he said a few words to him about something else, then hung up. Evelyn wanted to make Jack feel dreadful just before his wedding, and she succeeded.

The night before our wedding, Evelyn called Jack again, claiming that David was hysterical that his father was marrying me and demanding that Jack fly down to New Jersey and explain himself to David, in person.

Jack felt terrible, but not only were we getting married, he had a show to do that night. However guilty he felt about David, he still stood up to Evelyn and said, “I will not, I cannot, leave now. You are going to have to handle this. You have to help David come to terms with the fact that I am marrying someone else.”

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.