Shirley Jones (27 page)

Jack was probably right, but now Ronald Reagan was president, and here I was, singing for him. Afterward, I slept in the White House, in a bedroom adjoining Reagan’s playroom, which housed his pinball machine, and which was decorated with pictures of the movie stars with whom he’d worked.

That same night in the White House, Nancy Reagan came up to me and said, “You and I started in Hollywood at the same time. Look what’s happened to you!”

I glanced around the White House. “Look what happened to
you
, Nancy!”

In all, I sang for President Reagan three times. Although my family were Democrats, I’ve always been a Republican. But I also sang for President Johnson, when I performed
Oklahoma!
in a shortened version, which we enacted on the front lawn of the White House. President Johnson had his dogs with him, and we chatted about our mutual love for man’s best friend.

The first American president for whom I ever sang was President Eisenhower. Jack and I sang duets for him and Mamie Eisenhower at the White House, and afterward we joined the president and the first lady for dinner, along with twenty other people. Mamie was funny and bossy. In a way, she made fun of the president, saying, “Stop eating with that fork!” and “Why don’t you talk to so-and-so.”

After Gerald Ford was no longer president, I attended a reception for him at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he was staying on his own. Afterward, to my surprise, he came over to me and asked me to dance.

After we danced, to my amazement he said, “Oh, that was lovely! Can you come to my room for tea tomorrow?”

I was nonplussed, but I accepted.

At four the next afternoon, sharp, I went up to the former president’s room, nervous about what was about to unfold between us.

But Ford was ahead of me. As he opened the door to the suite and motioned me to sit down at the already-laid tea table, he said, “I just want to talk to you about your career and your business.”

We were alone together, and I was still nervous that he was about to make a pass at me. But, true to his word, he just asked me questions about the business. When it was time for me to leave, he simply shook my hand and said, “I enjoyed meeting you. I enjoyed dancing with you. Thank you.”

I’ve also sung for both President Bushes. I sang at the Republican National Convention for the first President Bush, before he was elected president. He was lovely and Barbara Bush was funny, with a great sense of humor.

One time, after a concert, Marty and I went to a party at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and Marty went up to Barbara and said, “Hello, my name is Marty Ingels. I’m Shirley Jones’s husband.”

And Barbara said, “My name is Barbara Bush. And I’m George Bush’s wife. Don’t you hate these parties? So boring.”

In the seventies and the eighties, Marty carved out two new and lucrative careers for himself. First, he became the world’s first celebrity broker, and it happened quite by chance.

It all began in 1972, when an old friend from the army, Larry Crane, called him, begging for advice. Crane desperately needed a big star with a great voice to be the spokesman for his record company.

Marty listened, waiting for the punch line. Soon enough, Larry told him that he was calling from a New York restaurant where, to his intense frustration, for the entire evening he had been sitting at a table opposite the one where the perfect spokesman for his record company was sitting: none other than my old friend Rossano Brazzi, Latin lover supreme, an actor and singer with a perfectly pitched baritone voice.

Marty listened, puzzled. Why didn’t Larry just stroll over to Rossano’s table, introduce himself, and make his pitch to him, himself? Larry demurred and said that he just wasn’t the kind of guy who could do something like that. Marty, however, was born for the job, Larry said.

Marty was hugely flattered, just as Larry had intended him to be, and after hanging up, Marty called the restaurant and demanded to be put straight through to Mr. Rosanno Brazzi, who was dining there. Within seconds Marty was on the line to Brazzi. Without introducing himself or evoking my name or
Dark Purpose
, the movie Rossano and I had made together, he informed Rossano, “I should be awarded a Nobel Prize for having tracked you down here!”

Rossano started laughing, Marty chimed in, and within moments Marty had made the pitch on Larry’s behalf, and Rossano had agreed to the deal. Only one problem, Rossano said, where was Marty right at that moment? And who would be giving him his contract?

“After you hang up, a gentleman will come to your table and hand you his card, and that will be the man who will give you your contract,” Marty said in an inspired moment of quick thinking.

Then he called Larry back, and at Marty’s behest, Larry walked a couple of feet across the restaurant to Rossano, handed him his card, and within a week, Larry had signed Rossano Brazzi to be the star spokesman for his record company. From then on, Larry Crane considered Marty to be the hero of the year.

Over the next few months, Marty repeated his miracle over and over and, at different times, convinced a dazzling assortment of stars, including Bing Crosby, Buddy Greco, Don Ho, Arthur Fiedler, Rudy Vallee, Jerry Lee Lewis, Trini Lopez, and Louis Prima to work with Larry Crane in New York. To Marty, the process was so simple that it resembled taking candy from a baby.

Along the way, he realized that he had unwittingly identified a big gap in the market: companies wanted to hire celebrities to promote them, but most celebrities were protected by talent agents who didn’t want to let them out of their sight, never mind make a deal for them to work with a commercial enterprise.

Marty vowed to change all that. With my encouragement, he cleared out one of our bedrooms and put a desk and two phone lines in it. After
Advertising Age
in New York ran a short feature about Marty and his new celebrity brokering business, his phones started ringing off the hook. Most of the requests were for Marty to link a caller who represented a charity with a celebrity spokesperson.

Although Marty wouldn’t be paid by the charities, he went ahead and started working for the charities anyway. He hired John Wayne to work for the Cancer Foundation, Robert Mitchum for the Boys Club, Burt Lancaster to work with UNESCO. On the commercial front, he arranged for commercials for Howard Cosell for Canada Dry, Robert Wagner for Timex, and Orson Welles to make a commercial for Lincoln.

Marty’s biggest challenge of all, we both thought, was to convince Cary Grant to narrate a documentary on the American presidency. Unfortunately, Marty never did seal the deal with Cary, but the journey was interesting, and our brief contact with Cary Grant, fascinating.

We invited Cary to come over to our house in Beverly Hills so that we could discuss the potential deal with him in a relaxed, informal setting. But on the day of our meeting with Cary, Marty was so nervous that he didn’t think he would be able to say even one word to Cary when he arrived. So he asked me to step in and save the day. I agreed.

Cary appeared, looking as handsome and urbane as ever, and he and I sat on the living-room couch, and Marty sat opposite us. Then our “conversation” began.

“Shirley, would you ask Cary how he feels about narrating the documentary,” Marty said.

“Cary, did you hear what Marty asked? He wants to know how you feel about narrating the documentary,” I said.

And so it went, like something out of a bad Kafka book. However, for one moment Cary and I did communicate for real. Seeing how handsome he still was, I asked why he didn’t still appear in movies.

Cary sighed. “I just don’t look like Cary Grant anymore.”

There was no answer to that, so I remained silent.

Then we went back to talking about his narrating the documentary. At least, I did, prompted by Marty, with Cary responding. After about half an hour of excruciating dialogue between Cary and me, orchestrated by Marty every step of the way, Cary got up and went into our guest bathroom.

While we waited for him to come out, Marty and I exchanged gloomy glances. This was not going well.

Then Cary emerged from the bathroom, a big grin on his face. “Shirley, Marty, everybody should have what you have in your guest bathroom!”

Marty and I were dumbstuck.

“That hook on the back of the guest-bathroom door,” Cary went on. “Wonderful. That way you can take your coat off and hang it up while you are . . .”

After Cary left, Marty had a special sign made and put it under the hook, which read
CARY GRANT’S FAVORITE HOOK
.

But before Cary did leave, I remember his turning around and saying, “I hope you both know that, from now on, we are going to be living in a world of plastic.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, either.

Not booking Cary Grant was one of Marty’s few failures in the celebrity broking business. He connected such clients as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Joan Collins, Muhammad Ali, Joe Montana, and Scott Carpenter to advertisement campaigns, and I was hugely proud of him.

One morning in 1982, Marty was casually fielding a call on behalf of his client Robert Culp. Then Marty was disconnected and called back, but by mistake reached the telephone number of Gordon Hunt, an executive at Hanna-Barbera.

“We’ve got the rights to Pac-Man!” was the first thing Gordon Hunt said to Marty. Marty was intensely puzzled. What had a luggage company to do with Robert Culp’s next job? he asked himself.

So Marty launched into his pitch for Robert Culp, only to have Gordon Hunt stop him in his tracks and compliment him on his voice.

Marty does, indeed, have a remarkable voice, strong, rich, gravelly, and with a marked Brooklyn accent. All of which caused Gordon Hunt to offer him the chance to become the voice of Pac-Man in the cartoon series
Pac-Man
.

The company had already auditioned 173,000 voices for the part of Pac-Man, but none of them had been right, Gordon Hunt explained. But Marty, with his evocative Brooklyn accent, and his comedian’s perfect sense of timing, was Pac-Man incarnate, Gordon Hunt declared.

Marty got the job as Pac-Man, and for two wonderful years traveled once a week to the studio in his pajamas, then recorded three weeks of episodes of Pac-Man’s voice in an afternoon. He made more money from being the voice of a cartoon character than he had made in his entire career as a comedian. So he gave up his celebrity brokering business, and no longer dealt with a string of Hollywood legends.

Through the years, I’ve met other show-business legends and have drawn my own conclusions about them.

In 1969, I appeared on
This Is Tom Jones
with Tom Jones and absolutely loved him, but we didn’t have an affair. We sang together, both having the last name Jones, both coming from Wales, and when I confessed to him that I had never been to Wales, he charmingly said, “You have to come there. And I’ll show you around. . . .” The meaning was clear, but I wasn’t in the least bit tempted.

I also worked with Jerry Lewis in Las Vegas. I’ve always admired him as a performer, and Marty adores Jerry because Jerry gave him his first break in show business. Jerry is a super-duper talent, but I found him far too full of himself. He would never talk to me the way a regular person does.

I remember when he remarried and adopted his first daughter and I admired her photograph. “Isn’t your daughter beautiful!” I said.

“Yes, she’s the light of my life, besides my business,” Jerry responded.

Other than that, I could never get a straight answer from him about anything. Every conversation always revolved around Jerry, and nothing else. But I still appreciated it that he was always so good to Marty.

Marty was also close to Danny Kaye and adored him, as well. Years before I introduced Marty to Danny, I found out that Danny could be a bad boy. One day I was in a restaurant, wearing a low-cut sweater, when Danny came over and put his hand right on my breast and said, “That’s pretty nice. . . . You’re a beautiful girl, and I admire you.”

“Thank you, Danny,” I said, and removed his hand from my breast.

On February 13, 1997, Marty and I did an
Oprah
segment on marriage, along with Marion Ross and her husband. As always, Marty was afraid to fly, so we took the train from Los Angeles to Chicago together.

We did the show, during which Oprah made it clear that she wasn’t crazy about Marty and his big mouth. When the show was over, and all us guests walked off the stage, Oprah didn’t follow her usual practice and come backstage to talk to us guests. We were all surprised.

Then one of the other guests on the show raised the subject of our fee.

“Fee? What fee?” one of the production assistants said indignantly, before breaking the news to us that Oprah would not be paying any of us for appearing on her show.

“This is Chicago, not LA or New York,” the production assistant said, somewhat reprovingly.

None of us guests were buying that we ought not be paid the AFTRA scale of $600 for our appearance on
Oprah
. At Marty’s behest, all us guests on that show signed a petition demanding to be paid the AFTRA scale. In the end we were paid, but Oprah never forgave Marty and me, and we were never invited to appear on her show again.