Shirley Jones (13 page)

During that scene, part of my reason for kissing Elmer Gantry is that I have arranged for a photographer to lurk outside my window to snatch a picture of the saintly Elmer Gantry kissing me, a prostitute.

Afterward, Jean Simmons, as the Aimee Semple McPherson character, Sister Sharon Falconer, comes to see me to pay me off. I do one of those big scornful laughs because I am not interested in the money, just the attention. That scene, and all the others to follow, were harrowing in the extreme.

British actress Jean Simmons, of
Guys and Dolls
and
The Robe
, was wonderful in the part of Sister Sharon Falconer, and I was shocked and disappointed when she failed to be nominated for the Best Actress Academy Award.

Until
Elmer Gantry
, I was seen as a musical star, not an actress.
Elmer Gantry
and Lulu Bains changed all that for me. I was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role but never dreamed that I would win. My competition was both stiff and stellar: Janet Leigh for
Psycho
, Shirley Knight for
The Dark at the Top of the Stairs
, Mary Ure for
Sons and Lovers
, and Glynis Johns for
The Sundowners
.

I was the dark horse in the Best Supporting Actress category, and I was so resigned to not winning that by the day of the ceremony—April 17, 1961—I hadn’t even prepared an acceptance speech. Realizing that I hadn’t, Jack wrote one for me in the limo, scribbling a few lines on a scrap of paper as we drew nearer to the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, where the Academy Awards ceremony was being held that night.

I didn’t think I had a chance of winning, but I was determined to enjoy the evening, and the beautiful gold-and-silver ball gown that Don Loper had designed for me specifically for the ceremony. It had a massive skirt, which Loper had created to hide my pregnancy.

Elizabeth Taylor sat just a few tables from ours, and she looked utterly stunning. Years later, when she was married to Richard Burton, she invited us to a fund-raiser in her home.

By the time we arrived, Richard was quite drunk, and when Elizabeth introduced me to him, he slurred, “Shirley Jones! You must be Welsh!”

“Yes, I am.”

“No wonder you can sing like that then,” Richard exclaimed. “Can you sing in Gaelic?”

I said I couldn’t.

“Well, then, I’ll teach you!” He grabbed me by the hand, pulled me into one of the bedrooms, and closed the door behind us.

Oh, no,
I thought.
Here we go.

But instead of making a pass at me, Richard started to sing heartily in Gaelic, then handed me a song sheet, exhorting, “Just practice it!”

“But, Richard, it’s far too hard for me. I can’t sing in Gaelic. I wasn’t even born in Wales!”

Richard just laughed, and soon we were singing together at the top of our voices.

Then the door swung open, and there stood Elizabeth, fuming. “You get your ass out here, Richard. We have a few people who wanna say hello to you.” She dragged him away. I am sure she was worried he was going to make a pass at me. Given his track record, she had every reason to be.

But back then, on April 17, 1961, when Elizabeth and I were both nominated for Academy Awards, Elizabeth for Best Actress for her performance in
Butterfield 8
, all of Hollywood was at our feet.

When Welsh actor Hugh Griffith (who won Best Supporting Actor the year before for his role in
Ben-Hur
) announced the winner as “Shirley . . .” in a drink-slurred voice, I thought he was going to say “Shirley Knight.” Then I heard Jack’s whoop of pleasure. And then he kissed me. I had won Best Supporting Actress at the Thirty-Third Academy Awards. In a dream, I got up onstage and recited the speech Jack had scribbled for me on that piece of paper:

Thank you very much. I can only think that I wouldn’t be standing here tonight accepting this Oscar if it weren’t for another Oscar—Hammerstein—and Mr. Richard Rodgers. And also for the belief of Mr. Burt Lancaster, Mr. Richard Brooks, and Mr. Bernie Smith, hiring me and allowing me to play the part of Lulu Bains in
Elmer Gantry.
This is the proudest moment of my career because of them. Thank you all.

That was, indeed, the proudest night of my career. But winning that Academy Award would prove to be the beginning of the end for my marriage to Jack.

When Jack and I first met, I was the ingénue, the Hollywood Cinderella; he was the big Broadway star and my Prince Charming. After I won the Academy Award, our roles reversed, and Jack started to exhibit marked jealousy of my success.

One night soon after I was nominated for the Oscar, after the premiere of Susan Hayward’s movie
Back Street
, Jack and I were invited to a party at the home of Ross Hunter, who had produced it. Ross was a legendary producer who had resuscitated Lana Turner’s career with
Imitation of Life
, had produced a slew of Doris Day/Rock Hudson movies, and would go on to produce
Airport
and
Lost Horizon.

Toward the end of the night, Ross made the big mistake of asking me what it felt like being nominated for an Academy Award. Before I could answer, Jack stood up unsteadily, very much the worse for wear from drink.

“Lemme tell you all about it,” he slurred. For some reason I never could figure out, he laced into Ross directly. “Show business is a lousy business today, Ross.” Jack went into a drunken tirade. He had a point, but this clearly was neither the time nor the arena in which to make it. We were guests in Ross Hunter’s home, his movie had just premiered, and Jack shouldn’t have dominated the conversation like that.

Unperturbed, Ross waved to Jack to sit down and shut up, but Jack wasn’t having any of it.

“Say hello to Norman Maine,” Jack declared, alluding to the character played by James Mason in
A Star Is Born
, who was upstaged by his former-ingénue wife, played by Judy Garland.

Jack was joking, and everyone laughed. I didn’t laugh, though. Jack’s comment was far too close to the bone. I knew that he was having problems with my being the star, especially a star with an Academy Award nomination. I wasn’t happy about the situation, either. Old-fashioned as this may sound nowadays, I wanted Jack to be the star in the family, to be number one, to take over the room, to feel that he was the man of the house.

So from that time on, even more than I had before, I began to play myself down. I would always let Jack do all the talking whenever we were in company together. And like many other wives of unfaithful husbands, I began to assiduously turn a blind eye to his rampant infidelity. I believed I was in part to blame for his infidelity by being more successful than he was.

So-called friends would whisper to me, “Jack’s leading lady is crazy about him and . . .,” but I never reacted. I never confronted Jack or asked him any questions. Instead, I pushed all thoughts of his infidelity right out of my mind. It wasn’t difficult for me to adopt that tactic because I was so secure as a person and as a performer.

You could say that I opted to play ostrich and stick my head in the sand. Even though I had married Jack knowing that he was a womanizer, I had avoided thinking about whether he would be faithful to me. I knew he was a handsome, sexual man who liked women, and I figured that if he was inclined to be unfaithful, then that would happen, and I would just have to put up with it. I also passionately hoped that, somehow, he would be faithful to me anyway.

Looking back through the prism of the years, I still don’t think I would have handled Jack’s infidelity any differently. We had three boys, and although I had married the prince of my dreams, all these other would-be princesses were lurking about, desperate to snare him. And many did, at least for a short time each.

Sadly, I was not alone in marrying the love of my life, then discovering that he had sexual passions other than me. It was an age-old, all-too-common occurrence in marriages. In some ways, I coped with infidelity more easily than might most women. I had my own life, and many men were courting me. That I didn’t succumb to them at that time in my life is another issue. But I did have options, even though I didn’t take them. Despite knowing that Jack wasn’t true to me, I never felt insecure or wanting, nor did I change anything about myself because, through it all, Jack still treated me as if I meant all the world to him.

His approach did change somewhat when we’d been married for about three years and he inexplicably started to be upfront about his infidelities, almost as if he wanted me to approve of them. He declared, “You do understand, Mouse, that when I’m out on the road for a long time, there is going to be a woman in my life? It won’t mean anything, but I’m very sexual, and my infidelities won’t take anything away from you in any shape or form. You are always going to be the love of my life, always.”

“That doesn’t make me happy” was all I could muster, once I’d digested the enormity of Jack’s words.

“I know, Mouse, but I want you to know that it doesn’t mean a thing. That’s just how I am,” he went on blithely.

By that time, Shaun and Patrick were already born, I was more deeply in love with Jack than ever, and I guess I just put his infidelities to one side. I thought to myself,
If this is the man whom I married, and this is the way it is going to be, then I am going to have to accept it
. After that, the subject was closed, and neither Jack nor I ever raised it again.

Whenever I heard that he was having affairs all over town, I just lived with it. He was always discreet, and I never got anonymous phone calls or poison-pen letters rubbing my face in his infidelities.

I never caught him with another woman; I never doubted his love for me. I never asked myself why I wasn’t enough for him. I was his wife, and that was enough for me. Besides, he was the father of my children, and he always came home to me in the end, so I was happy.

As the years went by, now and again other people did make allusions to Jack’s womanizing ways. In 1971, he appeared with Bette Davis in the movie
Bunny O’Hare
, playing a police lieutenant, and soon after Bette and I were on
The Tonight Show
together.

Afterward, Bette took me aside and asked if I was still married to Jack Cassidy. I asked why she wanted to know, and she shook her head disapprovingly. “When I was making the movie with Jack, he said, ‘Bette, just remember that I am going to get you into the goddamn bed before this movie is over.’ ”

I don’t think Jack meant what he was saying to Bette. He was just teasing her. But if he wasn’t, if he did try to get her into bed and succeeded, I didn’t care. Jack loved me, and the more women he had, the less threatened I became. Just one woman, who was so special to Jack that he gave up all other women, however, would be quite a different story, one that would threaten me immeasurably, one I would one day be forced to grapple with.

Jack’s infidelity was one negative aspect to our marriage, and his lack of parenting skills was another. I had to be both mother and father to the children. Jack was open about his being so much more interested in his career than in his sons. He would accept any theatrical job anywhere, even if it meant he would miss important events in the children’s lives.

Whenever I was offered a movie that shot over Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, or the children’s birthdays, I would stipulate in my contract that I had to have those days off. If the movie company refused to allow me those days off, I immediately turned down the job. Whenever possible, I took the children with me on location, along with their nanny, and I was content.

“He’s yer feller and you love him,” Oscar Hammerstein wrote, “and all the rest is talk.” All in all, I loved Jack deeply, and that was all that counted for me.

SEVEN

The Music Man

The Music Man
, the Broadway hit show by Meredith Willson (who termed it “an Iowan’s attempt to pay tribute to his own state”), was to be one of the last big Hollywood musicals ever made. I’d seen the Broadway production, with Robert Preston, for which he rightfully won a Tony, and adored the musical. While I was still set on consolidating my career as a dramatic actress, I was delighted to be playing Marian Paroo, the librarian who is, against her will, romantically beguiled by charming con man, “Professor” Harold Hill, who arrives in River City promising to form a marching band with the boys there, but who plans to abscond in the eleventh hour.