Shirley Jones (21 page)

There was no replacement for him because David
was
the show. We were all sad, but we were also aware that it was just a matter of time before the show was canceled anyway. For some unknown reason, in 1975, ABC had scheduled us against
All in the Family
, which was an edgy adult hit, and
The Partridge Family
, which was primarily made for kids, didn’t have a chance to win the ratings battle against it.

Throughout 1972 and 1973, our third season, we had been on top of the world. We had tied with
The Waltons
as the nineteenth most popular show that season.

But during our fourth season, from 1973 to 1974, our numbers started to tumble dramatically.

March 23, 1974, was the last broadcast of
The Partridge Family
. I was sad to see the show end. If it hadn’t been canceled, I would have been happy to carry on playing Shirley Partridge for another four years. For me and all the rest of the cast, this was the end of an era.

Just after the wrap party, David took Susan Dey out for dinner. As he said afterward, he fondly imagined that they would stay friends forever. After dinner, the two of them went for a drive together and reminisced about how they’d first met when she was an inexperienced actress, and they both started crying.

Afterward, David put Susan in touch with Ruth Aarons, who became her manager, and also with Lenny Hirshan, his agent at William Morris, who became Susan’s agent. For a few years after the show ended, David and Susan stayed friends. She went on to make a great success in
L.A. Law
, in which she appeared as Grace from 1986–92. By then, she and David had grown apart, and nowadays they are completely out of touch, which hurts David tremendously. I was also hurt that out of everyone on the show, only Susan consistently refuses to take part in any TV reunions of
The Partridge Family
.

As for the rest of the cast, Brian Forster went on to study zoology and became a professional race car driver. Suzanne Crough, who played Tracy Partridge, went to college and afterward ran a bookstore; and Dave Madden became a great success in the sitcom
Alice
.

For a time, David and Danny Bonaduce became best friends, and Danny opened for David at some of his concerts. But because Danny sometimes didn’t show up on time, David stopped using him. Nowadays Danny has his own radio show and is successful in his own right.

I wasn’t mad at David for leaving
The Partridge Family
, but for some reason we hardly talked to each other at the wrap party. Afterward, he took a year off, went to Hawaii, and hung out on the beach, playing his guitar and chilling out. In retrospect, I realized that he’d earned his time alone and time in which to savor his freedom from all the fame and fortune that had been showered on him so suddenly.

I had no regrets about my time on
The Partridge Family
. David and I had worked together on
The Partridge Family
for four and a half years, for sometimes as long as twelve hours a day. During that time, we got to know each other pretty well and grew closer, which was wonderful, and that closeness endures to this day.

The Partridge Family
was a marvelous experience for me, not only as a hit show, but because it gave me so much time in which to focus on my boys.

Sadly, though, the stratospheric success of the show took its toll on my marriage to Jack.

As the months went by and
The Partridge Family
became an American phenomenon, and Shirley Partridge became America’s favorite mother, Jack embraced the role of Norman Maine to my Esther Blodgett of
A Star Is Born
even more wholeheartedly than before. Not that he was ever suicidal like Norman Maine, but his overriding sense of inferiority in the face of my success drove him into the arms of other women even more often than before.

One night, at the height of the show’s success, I was having cocktails at Café Escobar with my good friend Betty Cantu and her husband, Fred, when all of a sudden Jack walked in with his arm around a beautiful young girl and the two of them sat down in a booth on the other side of the restaurant.

As they did, Jack never once took his eyes off his beautiful companion for long enough to notice me. Seeing my husband so enthralled with a young and beautiful girl (who I knew was currently working with him on a show) just tables away from me was devastating for me. I froze.

Betty, Fred, and I were sitting in the booth nearest to the small stage, on which a three-piece mariachi band along with a pianist strumming show tunes were performing.

Observing my shock and anger at seeing Jack with another woman, Fred Cantu leaned across the table and said, “Shirley, why don’t you get up onstage and sing a song, just to see how Jack reacts?”

Almost like a sleepwalker, I got up onstage and in a whisper introduced myself to the band, and they struck up the song I requested, “It Had to Be You.”

The moment I sang the first line of the song, Jack looked up and blanched. But—in quintessential Jack Cassidy fashion—he retained his sangfroid and carried on chatting extremely flirtatiously to the young girl with him. So I launched into a second song, “Blue Moon.”

But I had also been drinking and was so upset that I threw caution to the wind, stormed off the stage, and stalked over to the booth where Jack and the girl were sitting.

“Fancy meeting you here, Jack. Just one of those things, is it?” I said, alluding to one of the songs we loved to sing together.

Jack didn’t bat an eyelid and calmly said, “Shirley, this is—”

“I don’t care who she is.”

I stormed out of the restaurant.

To my surprise, Jack finally lost his fabled composure and rushed out of the restaurant after me. Right there, on the pavement in front of the restaurant, I let loose. For one of the few times in our marriage, I let him have it. “You son of a bitch!” I screamed.

But even though he’d been caught red-handed with another woman, Jack wasn’t about to admit anything and immediately spun me a risible story about the girl and why he was having dinner with her. She wasn’t just an actress, he said. She was also a secretary and had just finished helping him with some correspondence. Afterward, he said, she claimed to be starving, and he had taken pity on her and invited her for a quick dinner at Café Escobar. And so on. I knew he was lying, so I just walked away from him and went home on my own. Then I did my best to calm down and put aside my anger, so that when he came home a short while later, I didn’t mentioned the incident to him or ever refer to it again.

In my heart, I did believe that the Café Escobar incident meant nothing to Jack, and that the girl he was with really was “just one of those things,” another girl in a long line of girls with whom he dallied briefly, then discarded.

At the time,
The Partridge Family
was on hiatus, and Jack and I were considering touring in our own show,
The Marriage Band
, a musical celebration of marriage, which took a couple through their first meeting, their wedding, their first child, and finally their harmonious life together.

Some irony . . .

In January 1972, out of the blue, Jack asked me to have a pizza with him at a little local Italian restaurant. I’ll never forget what happened next.

With little preamble, he announced, “I think we need a separation, Mouse.”

I genuinely thought I’d misheard him. “A separation? Did you say we need a separation? But why?” I said, fighting back the tears.

Jack shifted in his seat. “Mouse, I need to live by myself right now. I don’t want a divorce. I just need to be by myself. I just can’t be here for the kids and for you anymore. It’s an age thing,” he said lamely.

I blurted out the first thing that sprang to mind. “So is there another woman, Jack?”

Jack shook his head. “There is not,” he said adamantly. “I just think we ought to try a separation and see what happens.”

At that point, we had been married for fifteen years, and despite Jack’s eternal craving for attention, his lack of jealousy, his excessive drinking, and his constant infidelity, I truly loved him and was happy with him. I was devastated.

“I don’t understand, Jack, but if that’s what you want, fine,” I managed to stammer, after a while.

“Just give it time, Shirley.”

I choked back my tears and left the restaurant, alone.

I only lost control when I arrived home and burst into floods of tears. Then, for some inexplicable reason, I switched onto a strange type of automatic pilot. I took down all the scrapbooks of our life together, put them on the dining-room table, and kept adding more and more new pictures to them. I pasted picture after picture into the album as the tears coursed down my cheeks.

Jack had followed me home a little later, and by the time I had stopped crying, he was in his office, crying his heart out, as well.

He said, “I’m moving into an apartment, but I don’t really know why.”

“You have to do what you want to do,” I said.

Soon after, on January 15, 1972, Jack did move out. The kids were angry with him. David stopped talking to him altogether. My mother, though, said, “I feel sorry for you, but maybe it is a good thing.” She’d always hated Jack.

I knew Jack was living in an apartment in Hidden Hills, but neither I nor the kids ever visited him there. Then he called and told me that he was going into therapy and suggested that I do, too. So we both went to see the same therapist, only separately. At the end of the therapy, I didn’t feel as if I’d received any lightning bolts of wisdom.

But I did learn that the moment I had started to grow up, Jack had been unable to handle it and probably never would.

ELEVEN

When You Walk Through a Storm

When Jack, out of left field, broke the news to me that he wanted us to separate, I was still appearing in
The Partridge Family
. All my friends and all the cast members knew that I was separated from Jack and were kind and supportive to me.

Soon after Jack left me, out of a sense of self-preservation, unhappy as I was, I started dating. I met the father of one of Patrick’s friends, a divorced amateur tennis player, who was so proficient at the game that he could have turned professional. We ended up in bed together at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and the sex we had together was nice. Later on, he bought me some jewelry, nothing expensive, but nonetheless a warm and loving gesture. However, our relationship quickly fizzled out. Then I met an attorney and dated him for a while, but after Jack, I found him boring.