Shirley Jones (24 page)

It’s not enough for me, Jack, I don’t think I can continue to live my life without Marty, because as I said at the beginning of this letter everything is day-to-day existence. But I know I want to keep it this way for now.

I will always have love in my heart for you, Jack, and thoughts for you daily. And who knows what the future will hold. Your children will always be there for you if I have any say about it and and if you continue to want them. And I will be there for you if you ever need or want me. But I can’t live side by side with you. Be happy and content, dear Jack. You deserve it.

Love,

Shirley

I continued my relationship with Marty, and Jack began dating actress Lois Nettleton. But we still had three children together, so we remained in contact, despite everything.

In November 1976, Jack and I met for dinner at a local restaurant, ostensibly to talk about the kids. Patrick was doing well at school, in particular in sports, and longed to have his father come to some of his games. True to form, Jack always said yes to everything but never showed up.

So we talked about the kids, and then Jack stopped short and said, “Are you happy with this guy?”

He had never mentioned Marty by name, and this time was no different.

I told him that I was.

“I’m glad,” he said. Then he asked me if I would come and see his apartment, as I’d never been there before.

I was wary because I sensed that he would try to get me into bed for old times’ sake, but I agreed to go.

Once we arrived there, he made me a drink, and I sat down in a chair opposite him, out of his reach.

Then he held out his hands to me. “Shirley, I still love you, and I want you to come back. I can’t imagine being without you for the rest of my life. You belong with me. This is the last time I shall ever ask you to come back with me, but we belong together.”

In some ways, I still felt the same about Jack, but deep down I knew that there was no hope for us. I loved Jack deeply, but I was no longer in love with him. He was in so much pain, and I felt for him so much, but nevertheless I knew that we could never again live together.

“Jack, I still love you, and I always will, but I’ve got someone else now.” I stood up. “I’ve got to go.” I felt lost and alone, yet certain that I was doing the right thing.

As proud as ever, Jack didn’t try to stop me from leaving. Instead, he stood up, took off the beautiful blue scarf he was wearing around his neck, and placed it around mine.

Then we hugged.

And I left, choking back my tears.

Jack Cassidy, the only man in my life whom I’d ever truly loved, the grand passion of my youth, was in such bad shape, so sick, so alone, and yet I had to face that I could no longer help him or be with him.

While I cried for his pain, and for both the sadness and the happiness of our past together, I knew that that past was now well and truly behind us, and our life together was over.

On December 11, 1976, Jack called me one more time. It was Patrick’s birthday on January 4, and Patrick wanted a particular brand of bike as his birthday gift. Jack and I chatted for a while about that, and I asked him to do his best to be at Patrick’s birthday party so that he could give the bicycle to Patrick himself. Jack said he would try.

I knew that he would. But bitter past experience had taught me that it was doubtful he would succeed, and that inevitably Patrick would once more be disappointed by his father.

“Shirley, I’ve got the tree up. Why don’t you come over and have a Christmas drink with me,” Jack suddenly said.

I sensed that he didn’t intend for us just to have a Christmas drink together, but that he hoped against hope to be able to turn back the clock once more.

“I can’t, Jack.”

“You mean you don’t want to?”

I didn’t answer.

“Don’t you understand, Mouse? We had what dreams are made of,” he said after a long silence.

Those were the last words Jack Cassidy ever spoke to me.

“I know that, Jack. I think about it all the time,” I said.

And I still do.

At four in the morning on December 12, I received a call from my manager’s secretary, who lived on the same road as Jack. Without any preamble, he broke the news that Jack’s apartment had been gutted in a raging fire. A body had been found, but the burning heat had melted the person’s jewelry and burned the face so that it was charred beyond recognition and no one could identify it.

We all knew that Jack had had a friend staying in his apartment because Jack intended to drive to Palm Springs that weekend with Lois Nettleton. And Jack’s car, a classic silver Mercedes convertible, was still in his garage. So all of us, me and Jack’s sons—David, twenty-six; Shaun, eighteen; Patrick, fourteen; and Ryan, ten—hoped against hope that the charred remains did not belong to Jack.

Of all the boys, at this point Ryan was closest to Jack. Sadly, Jack and David were no longer talking. But as soon as David learned the tragic news of the fire and heard of the possibility that the charred remains might be all that was left of his father, he rushed over from his home in Beverly Glen.

He was crying when he arrived. “Oh, my God, it can’t be him, it can’t be him.”

Later in the day, after dental records were checked, and the gold signet Cassidy-family-crest ring was found near one of the burned fingers, we learned, without a shadow of a doubt, that the charred corpse was, indeed, that of Jack Cassidy.

As the news sank in, David held Shaun and Patrick and Ryan in his arms, and the four of them, Jack Cassidy’s four sons, all held one another and cried. At that moment, David said later, he felt his father’s spirit surge through him. And he felt that Jack had not lived in vain. He had created all four of them, and now they were united, as one.

The police pieced together what had happened to cause this horrific inferno that led to Jack’s tragic and untimely death. On that night, the night on which Jack had invited me to come to his apartment for drinks, the invitation that I had refused, Jack went instead to Dominick’s, his favorite Italian restaurant on Beverly Boulevard, right across from Cedars-Sinai Hospital, for dinner by himself.

Eyewitnesses at the restaurant claimed that Jack had spent the evening with two men, and that at the end of the evening he left the restaurant with them. The police were never able to establish the identities of those men. I even tried to do that myself, as I wanted to interview them, so that I could find out what had happened during the last hours of Jack’s life. But I was unable to find them, or to discover who they were and the nature of their connection with Jack. To this day, their identities remain a mystery to me and to the boys.

All we knew is that Jack was drunk when he came home that night, that he lay on his Naugahyde couch, smoked a cigarette, then fell asleep. In his sleep, he must have dropped his cigarette onto the couch, and the couch exploded in flames. Jack was burned to death.

Horrifically, in the eleventh hour, he must have woken up, seen the blaze all around him, and started crawling to safety. But blinded by all the smoke and flames, instead of moving toward the apartment door to the corridor and safety, he lost all sense of direction and crawled toward the balcony instead. Which is where his body was found, on the floor, facing the balcony.

At the time of his death, Jack was only forty-nine years old—which, in an eerie coincidence, was exactly the same age at which my father had passed away. At least Jack had died knowing that his career was at last on an upswing. He had been nominated for an Emmy for his role on the TV production
The Andersonville Trial
, he had costarred with Paula Prentiss in the series
He & She
, and he had finally just recently made two extremely successful movies,
The Eiger Sanction
, with Clint Eastwood, and
W. C. Fields and Me
, in which he played his idol John Barrymore.

So David, Shaun, Patrick, Ryan, and I could at least take comfort in that Jack had died seeing his dreams of movie stardom on the verge of fruition. He had also been constantly haunted by his fear of growing old and aging visibly. But now, of course, that was not to be. Yet however much I tried to console our sons and myself about Jack’s death and to focus on the positive, it was incontrovertible that Jack had died far too soon. His death was so unnecessary and so sad.

Four hundred people, including Milton Berle, who had first worked with Jack when he was only eighteen years old and they were both appearing in
Spring in Brazil
on Broadway together, attended Jack’s funeral at the Chapel of the Pines in Westwood Memorial Park. Toward the end of the ceremony, I stood up and talked to the mourners about the Jack Cassidy I had known, about our marriage, our life together.

I began, “Jack was an extraordinary man with an uncanny sense of humor and a gifted talent. He was one of a kind and the world suffers a great loss that he was taken from it so soon.” I ended by repeating Jack’s very last words to me: “Don’t you understand, Mouse? We had what dreams are made of.” In many ways, we did.

No matter how happy I am with Marty today, and despite that we have now been together for more than thirty-six years, both Marty and I know the truth:
I still love Jack Cassidy, and I will carry on loving him until my dying day.

After Jack’s death, all his sons had to come to terms with his memory and his legacy in general. They remembered his charm, his great talent, but were bitter when strangers accosted them on the street and raved about Jack’s star quality. Where were they when Jack was out of work and struggling? the boys wondered.

They remembered their father for his positive qualities, his hard work and professionalism, his grasp of the business, and his bursts of unexpected generosity. For example, when David was about eight years old, Jack suddenly went out and came back with an eighteen-inch TV for him. At that time most small boys didn’t have their own TV sets, but Jack gave one to David, and for a while David was considered the coolest boy on the block.

The boys also couldn’t help remembering the more negative aspects of Jack as a father. There were his fits of rage and his angry shouting in a theatrical voice so loud, so strong, that the boys trembled in fear when they heard it. And then there was his drinking. David remembered going to dinner with Jack one night and watching as he downed no less than seventeen glasses of Scotch and soda!

They also remembered that he was always skilled at creating toys and furniture, and in particular at building train sets to scale. One Christmas, the boys were thrilled that he had built an intricate railroad, just for them. Except that the boys never got to play with it, not once. Jack did, though, over and over, and never let his sons go near it.

Even when the boys were just children, Jack was always virulently competitive with them. When he was married to Evelyn, she always complained that whenever he wrestled with little David, although David wasn’t even seven years old, Jack never let him win.

With hindsight, I now realize that Jack was such a child himself that he could never let his children have their time in the sun or allow them to eclipse him in any way, because, to Jack, the limelight belonged to him and only him.

Apart from having divorced him, my crime, in his eyes was to have taken some of the limelight from him. I was not surprised, when Jack’s will was read, to discover that I was no longer in it. He left Patrick and Ryan and Shaun $50,000 each, but David was not left anything. He and Jack had been quarreling bitterly around the time that Jack wrote out his final will.

But nothing could deprive either David or Shaun or Patrick or Ryan of the positive elements of Jack’s heritage: the charm, the good looks, and the talent. Nor me of the happy memories of my life with Jack.