Shirley Jones (23 page)

One night, soon after he had flown back from Death Valley, and we were both supposed to be getting changed to go onstage, I walked into the living room and found Jack crouched in the corner of the room, stark naked.

We had to go onstage in half an hour, so I stayed as calm as I possibly could and explained that we needed to do the show.

Jack met my gaze serenely, then said, “I finally know now that I’m Jesus Christ.”

It flashed through my mind to say that Jesus probably never played cabarets, but I stopped myself from making a joke.

Then Jack fixed me with a hypnotic gaze and launched into a rambling monologue, which ended with “Shirley, my father is here. My mother is on her way. I have to speak to them. So lock yourself into your bedroom, as I am not sure what I am doing.”

I couldn’t deny to myself anymore that Jack was seriously mentally ill. And that right then he was in the middle of a nervous breakdown, with all that entailed. I had no choice but to admit the truth. Mindful of his warning, and aware of the dangers in staying around someone in a manic stage and capable of harming himself and anyone in his vicinity, I followed Jack’s advice and took refuge in my bedroom, and the lock clicked. Jack had locked me in.

I picked up the phone and called our business manager, Howard, in LA and gave him a blow-by-blow account of Jack’s bizarre behavior, ending with my considered opinion that Jack was in the throes of a full-blown nervous breakdown.

I explained to Howard that I didn’t want Jack to be carted away to a hospital here in Las Vegas, but that I wanted him to be transported to a Los Angeles hospital. Howard assured me that he understood my feelings and that he was primed to leave for the airport at once and would fly to Las Vegas straightaway and bring Jack back home to Los Angeles with him.

Moments after I hung up with Howard, Shaun called. “Don’t worry, Mom, we’ll come and get Dad.”

I was intensely touched by his concern and his offer of help in this crisis. But I told him that he needn’t come himself. Howard was on his way and would take Jack home.

By now, the enormity of the situation had hit me, and I was crying my heart out, shaking and begging Jack to open the door and let me out of the bedroom, but to no avail.

Within an hour, Howard, who had had the presence of mind to rent a private jet, arrived at the suite. But Jack refused to open the door. However, I could hear Howard pleading through the door with Jack, begging him to get dressed and let him take him back to LA.

“Shirley can do the show on her own tonight and carry on that way till you’ve served out your contract,” Howard explained to Jack in as conciliatory a way as possible.

That pulled me up short. Jack might be in the midst of a nervous breakdown, but that didn’t mean that the world had stopped dead. We still had a show to do, and like any actor, I knew without a shadow of a doubt that the show always has to go on.

So after Howard managed to gain admission to our suite and opened the door for me, I went onstage and announced to the audience that Mr. Cassidy was unable to perform that night due to illness. “The show is about love and marriage,” I said, “and it was obviously written for two people, not one. So I hope it won’t seem funny that I’m singing both parts.”

Then I did half the show (rather than struggle through all of it) on my own. Fortunately, the audience was completely unaware of the sad events that were occurring behind the scenes and seemed to love it.

Later, I learned that Howard had literally picked Jack up, thrown a robe on him, got him to the airport, and then onto the plane. According to Howard, Jack didn’t protest, but was still in a manic state and all during the flight kept saying, “My mother is up there. The plane is going to crash because she’s going to bring it down.”

Then he switched tacks: “That spider over there! That’s really my mother. She’s been reincarnated as a spider, I swear!”

Jack’s madness had a strange kind of logic as his mother was named Charlotte, as is the spider in
Charlotte’s Web
. And she had certainly spun a web of guilt around Jack. When he was a child, she had beaten him severely; consequently his relationship with her was always strained, and he did not attend her funeral. Hence the guilt, which, I believe, was partly responsible for his psychotic episodes.

When he got back to Los Angeles, thankfully he agreed to seek medical treatment for his mental health, and I hoped against hope that the treatment would work, but sadly it did not.

One evening toward the end of 1973, I came home one night after appearing in a concert, to find that Jack had lit blazing fires in every fireplace in the house, each of which was piled high with wood. He kept throwing more and more wood and paper on the fires, and the resultant heat was unbearable.

The moment he saw me, he immediately took his pants off and said, “Let’s make love.” Petrified by his state of mind and wanting to placate him, I followed him into the next room, where he threw more wood onto the fire in the fireplace there, then ran out of the room and threw more wood onto every single other fire in the house, as well.

I begged him to stop, but he wouldn’t. So I followed him back into the bedroom, terrified of what he would do next. And what he did next was horribly predictable, given Jack’s highly sexed nature. He lay down in front of the bedroom fireplace, where the flames were blazing sky-high, and began to masturbate. I just stood there, watching, paralyzed. When he finished, he threw more and more wood into the fire, then more paper, just like a pyromaniac. I was terrified. In contrast, Jack seemed riveted by the roaring fire, mesmerized by the spectacle he had created.

“Isn’t it beautiful! Look how peaceful the flames are! This is the way we should all be!” he murmured.

Then he tore off again to fetch more wood to add to all the fires burning in the house. I was frightened in the extreme, convinced that at any minute he would set the whole house on fire, with both of us and our boys asleep in it.

The thought of Shaun and Patrick and Ryan yanked me out of my terrified stupor. By now it was two in the morning. I snuck out of the room when Jack had his back to me as he continued to throw yet more paper into the fire. He was so intent on what he was doing that he didn’t notice that I’d slipped out of the room. In another room, and in a whisper, I called my psychiatrist, Dr. Rosengarten, and gave him chapter and verse on what Jack had done, what he was, even now, doing.

Highly alarmed, Dr. Rosengarten told me to sit tight and remain exactly where I was at that moment. “I’m calling an ambulance,” he said.

With my heart in my mouth, I went downstairs, just in time to see Jack arranging wads of paper all around the coffee table, obviously planning to set the coffee table alight any second. Thankfully, before he could strike a match and create an inferno right there in our home, the ambulance screeched to a halt in our driveway and out jumped two orderlies carrying a straitjacket. Seeing them, Jack stood rooted to the spot. As they moved to start strapping him into the straitjacket, the shock of what was about to happen to him caused him to suddenly snap out of his mania.

Now acutely aware of what was going on around him, that he was being strapped into a straitjacket, Jack fixed me with a look so terrible that, even today, I still can’t erase it from my memory and said, “Mouse, are you really going to let them do this to me? Are you really going to let them take me away?”

I was lost for words and stood back as the orderlies led Jack into the ambulance. Just as they were about to close the door and drive off with him, he yelled out of the window, “Shirley, I’ll never forgive you for this.”

As the ambulance roared off toward Westside Hospital, a private psychiatric hospital, I doubted that he ever would.

Over and over, I asked myself if I had done the right thing. But I truly believed that I had had no choice. Yet I completely understood Jack’s anger toward me and his sense of betrayal, and I could hardly forgive myself for what I’d done to him. But looking back, I believe that I didn’t have a choice. If I hadn’t called the ambulance that night, Jack might well have become so unhinged that he might have set our house on fire, with our sons in it. Their lives had been in danger from Jack’s rash actions, his mental illness. I knew I had had no other choice but to have him taken away.

To this day, I am still haunted by the sight of the man I’d loved and lived with for a greater part of my life, the father of my children, the man whom I worshipped and adored, being led away in a straitjacket like a wild animal.

That night, the doctor and I traveled in a car following the ambulance, and at the hospital I was compelled to sign the papers committing Jack to the hospital for treatment.

His psychiatrist arrived soon after and gave me his diagnosis that Jack was manic-depressive, which nowadays is known as bipolar. We now know it to be a condition suffered by many tortured geniuses, but back then it was a terrifying diagnosis. The doctor said that he planned to put Jack on a dose of lithium to control his bipolar episodes.

Jack remained hospitalized for three days at Westside Hospital, and I was by his bed constantly, watching over him, but he still raged against me, refusing to utter a single word to me.

After seventy-two hours, according to the law, Jack was able to check himself out of Westside Hospital. He moved into a motel and refused to take the lithium that had been prescribed for him. Perhaps he didn’t want to accept the doctor’s diagnosis that he was bipolar, but his avowed reason for not taking the lithium was that he hated the idea of taking drugs. I was too upset to remind him that he was hardly a stranger to taking drugs.

Finally, he must have come to terms with his condition, as he checked into Cedars-Sinai Hospital and spent two weeks there, working with a psychotherapist. He started taking his medication religiously, but still carried on drinking, which was a lethal combination.

While he was at Cedars-Sinai, he and I talked every day, and slowly, very slowly, the ice between us began to melt. I even began to hope that we still had a chance to forge a new and better life together.

But after two weeks, Jack checked himself out of Cedars-Sinai and flew to New York, where he moved into one of the best and most expensive hotels in Manhattan and started spending money as if there were no tomorrow.

Of course, there was no tomorrow. Not for our future together.

The truth about the man I loved, and about our marriage, was penetrating my consciousness at last, so that I finally started to come to terms with the harsh reality that my life with Jack, my dream man, my white knight, my sexual Svengali, might well be ending forever.

TWELVE

And Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark

Against all the dictates of my heart, my emotions, in November 1974 I filed for divorce from Jack. However, he didn’t accept my decision. In the six months before the divorce became final, he repeatedly begged me to reconsider, to take him back. You don’t stop loving someone whom you have loved for eighteen years, but I knew in my heart that I could no longer risk my emotions and, more important still, the safety of my children by staying married to Jack. His mental state meant that allowing the children to be around him was to risk their lives. So although Jack and I had separated before and reconciled, I held firm and refused to rescind the divorce.

I was heartbroken at the end of my marriage to Jack, but all the odds had been stacked against us. Besides, by then I had met another man who was becoming increasingly important to me, comedian Marty Ingels.

On February 3, 1976, in response to Jack’s letter begging for us to reunite, I wrote him the following letter:

Dear Jack,

Your letter moved me and moved every emotion that I possess. As your words always did in the past. I know it took a lot of soul-searching for you to write it. You asked me for an answer but perhaps there hasn’t been enough searching on my behalf to give you an honest or direct one. You said you had grown up in the last year, well so have I. It only made me realize how much growing I have to do.

In the beginning I thought my life was over with you, and I guess it was. Nothing helped, not even our three children, who through it all had survived very well. And I hope have few scars.

Then I did pick up a few pieces and put them back into place even stronger than before and I had the help of a wonderful kind man who made me laugh and gave of himself totally in every way.

You said one becomes more cautious and less vulnerable with age and growth and that is certainly true with me. I don’t mean I have lost the willingness to give. But it doesn’t come as freely or as willingly. I think I am happy now but not totally fulfilled. But then I don’t know if any of us can expect that to come out of life. I think we came close to total happiness at many times and I live on those memories too. But at this time in my life I can’t go back to living on a memory.