Shirley Jones (6 page)

When I learned that Mae West was appearing in person at a nightclub called Twin Coaches, which was on a little country road in Belle Vernon, a mile from Smithton, I immediately booked to see the show. Belle Vernon being a small town like Smithton, someone must have seen me buying the tickets for Mae’s show, as soon after, I received a telephone call from one of her assistants inviting me backstage to see her after the show.

It was summer, and that day the temperature had climbed to a sweltering one hundred degrees and rising. When I was taken backstage to see Mae, I discovered her lying on a couch, half-naked, with a fur coat draped over her. Tentatively, I asked if she would pose for a photograph with me.

Mae looked me up and down. “Honey, where’s your fur?”

“I don’t have my fur with me, Miss West. It’s summer.”

Mae pulled herself up to her full height (which wasn’t much, despite her towering high heels). “I don’t take photos without a fur, and nor should you.” She stalked over to the closet, pulled out a fur coat, and flung it at me. “Put that on, then we’ll take a photo together.”

I did. And was photographed with Mae West.

Just me and Mae, side by side. In furs!

My audience with Mae West, however, was not an accident. When she learned that I was coming to see her show, she specifically asked to meet me and invited me backstage afterward.

Mae West was a legend, a movie star, and world famous.

And me? I was Shirley Mae Jones, a chorus girl from a small town in Pennsylvania, who’d never made a movie in her life.

But that was the moment when all that was about to change. Mae invited me backstage to see her in her dressing room because she knew it. The news of my casting as Laurey in
Oklahoma!
had spread like wildfire, promoted by the Rodgers and Hammerstein organization itself, in the world press: it was the story of a small-town Cinderella bound for Hollywood and stardom. Mae West had read about me, and hence my invitation.

As far as the world had been told, I was now that fairy-tale heroine, and I was destined to live happily ever after on the silver screen—and off.

All that remained was for this Cinderella to meet her Prince Charming.

THREE

A Wonderful Feeling

Winning the part of Laurey in
Oklahoma!
was every young actress’s dream, but for me, the making of the movie turned out to be a nightmare.

Based on the play
Green Grow the Lilacs
by Lynn Riggs,
Oklahoma!
is the story of settlers in Oklahoma’s Indian territories and centers around farm girl Laurey Williams and her two suitors, the good-natured cowboy Curly McLain and the saturnine farmhand Jud Fry.

Oklahoma!
had been Rodgers and Hammerstein’s biggest Broadway hit so far and was now going to be their first movie together. Consequently, both of them were determined that the movie version of
Oklahoma!
would equal, or even surpass, the show’s success.

To that end, they oversaw every detail of the $6.8 million movie from start to finish.
Oklahoma!
may have been the world’s first Todd-AO 70 mm production, masterminded by Mike Todd, who had invented the new wide-screen process, but Rodgers and Hammerstein were set on stamping their mark on every single scene, every single performance, in the movie. Which meant that the intensity of their focus on me—as the movie’s leading lady and Hollywood’s latest Cinderella—was obsessive in the extreme.

I knew they had given me a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and that I was more than lucky to be playing Laurey. Moreover, they were paying me the princely sum of $500 a week, a fortune in today’s money.

So I made up my mind not to be difficult and to go along with whatever they required of me. So although I was furious when they decreed that my upper lip be waxed because it had a smidgen of peach fuzz on it, I gritted my teeth and submitted to it.

I might not have been so malleable had I known that the procedure was going to be so painful (and, at the time, primitive). First the beautician smeared the hot wax on my upper lip, then ripped off the wax and the hair with it, after which she left ice cubes on my upper lip for thirty minutes. I was in agony, and furious when the fuzz grew back darker than before, which meant that I had to have electrolysis, which I hated.

When the next decree came down from on high that I should have all my teeth capped because of a gap between two of them, I flatly refused, and Rodgers and Hammerstein backed off and changed the lighting instead. Not a great start to my first movie, which everyone, including me, had believed would be straight out of a fairy tale for me.

I was thrilled, though, when I learned that director Fred Zinnemann, of
High Noon
and
From Here to Eternity
fame, would be directing me in this, my first movie. Luckily for me, Zinnemann would live up to his reputation as a talented director with a brilliant instinct for bringing out the best in his actresses.

After our first scene together, he asked me if I had ever acted in front of a camera before.

Stricken, and afraid that my inexperience had shown, I shook my head, crestfallen.

“Don’t change anything. You’re a natural,” the great Fred Zinnemann said, to my relief.

I had assumed that the movie would be shot in Oklahoma, but then Zinnemann realized that present-day Oklahoma had far too many oil wells dotted about the landscape to pass for 1906, the year in which the story was set.

Instead, he settled on Nogales in Arizona’s San Rafael Valley and set about re-creating Oklahoma there. Three months before shooting began, a crew was sent ahead to plant ten acres of wheat and corn, to move sod and peach trees, so that the terrain would resemble that of Oklahoma. Then the crew built a barn, a silo, a windmill, and a farmhouse.

In July 1954, the three-hundred-strong cast and crew of
Oklahoma!
moved to Nogales and shooting began. Little did I know that for the next nine months, I’d be working a fifteen-hour day, seven days a week. Actors, you see, didn’t have a union in those days battling for them to work equitable hours.

Consequently, my day during filming routinely began at four thirty in the morning and ended late at night. I didn’t mind the hard work, though I did now and again ask myself if I wanted to work that hard for the rest of my life. But I loved the script and adored the songs, and working with Gordon MacRae was heaven. I adored him at first sight and even developed a mild crush on him as filming went on, but took great pains to fight it.

Rod Steiger, however, was another story. A Method actor, the acclaimed star of
On the Waterfront
and a perfect foil to Marlon Brando, Rod, a handsome if eccentric character, was also somewhat of a ladies’ man. Though married to an actress named Sally Gracie, that didn’t prevent him from making a play for other women whenever he felt like it.

He was nine years older than me, and while he didn’t exactly make a physical pass at me as Richard Rodgers had, he asked a great many leading questions that left me with no doubt whatsoever about his true intentions toward me.

“Are you one of those girls who wants to wait until you are married before you do anything?” was his opening gambit.

“Perhaps,” I said.

More questions followed. “Have you ever had an affair with a man?” Rod asked.

I knew what he meant. Had I ever been to bed with a man? Had I ever had sexual intercourse? I hadn’t, and I told him so.

Undeterred (or perhaps spurred on) by my innocence, Rod said, “Well, then, would you like to have your first affair with me?”

I shook my head.

“Why not? What’s the matter with you?”

I didn’t answer.

That was Rod Steiger’s one and only attempt at seducing me. Afterward, I discovered that the canny Fred Zinnemann had taken Rod aside and asked him to take care of me because I was so young. Chastened, Rod agreed. Fortunately for me, he was enough of a gentleman never to break his word to Zinnemann.

Soon after, he approached me somewhat sheepishly and said with a question implicit in his voice, “I was told that you are very young and that I mustn’t do anything to upset you. . . .”

“You didn’t,” I said, and the subject was closed. Rod and I ended getting along so well that after filming finished and he was cast to play Jud in the European stage tour in which I would be playing Laurey again, I was delighted. So, too, initially, was the tour’s director, Rouben Mamoulian, who had directed the Broadway version of
Oklahoma!
and, as a movie director, was much beloved by Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and Hedy Lamarr.

However, experienced as Mamoulian, a fiery Armenian, was as a director, during rehearsals he was in for a surprise when he encountered Rod Steiger’s unusual acting technique. Unprepared for Rod’s Lee Strasberg style of Method acting and Rod’s tendency to mumble (more pronounced onstage than in the movie), he kept yelling for Rod to speak up. Rod studiously ignored him.

Worse still, in the smokehouse scene when Rod, as Jud, clashes with Gordon MacRae, as Curly, Rod suddenly pulled out an apple and chomped loudly on it right through the whole scene.

Enraged, Mamoulian yelled, “Get out of my theater! Get out of my life!”

Stunned, Rod said, “What the hell is the matter with you?”

“You’re fired!”

Poor Rod never did understand why.

I guess I should have taken note of the negative aspect of Rod’s much-vaunted Method training but probably didn’t, as years later I considered training at Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio, the bastion of the Method system, myself.

Fortunately, before I was due to make a final commitment to the Actors Studio, I was invited to sit and watch eight classes there. As I studied Lee Strasberg and his approach to his hapless students, I was appalled. One student was instructed by Strasberg to pretend to be a dog and lick the floor beneath his paws. He complied.

Another student was told to imagine that he had blood running down his chest, while Lee Strasberg conducted a nonstop monologue. Nothing Strasberg said had any connection with the play the actor was appearing in, or the character he was playing.

I quickly concluded that the Actors Studio approach was not for me. I much preferred the Bette Davis school of acting. She was kept waiting one day to do her scene at the Studio while another actor interminably discussed his motivations for taking off his shoe, his mood, his emotions.

In the end, an exasperated Bette burst out, “Just drop it on the floor. It’s only a goddamn shoe!”

I agreed with Bette. After observing my fourth class at the Actors Studio, I walked out. The Actors Studio and Method acting were definitely not me.

Although I didn’t know it at the time, at the start of the filming of
Oklahoma!
Oscar Hammerstein was worried that I might put on weight and enlisted Charlotte Greenwood, then in her sixties, who played Aunt Eller in the movie, to monitor my eating.

With her encouragement, I began to eat a little less. But after I was caught committing the cardinal sin of tucking into a cherry pie during lunch break, Fred Zinnemann (probably at Oscar Hammerstein’s behest) suggested that it was time for me to quit eating desserts and go on a diet instead.

Now, I had been raised on home-cooked meals and didn’t have a clue about counting calories and embarking on diets, but I quickly got the picture. I didn’t like the look of it, but I agreed and cut down on the desserts for a start.

That still wasn’t enough for Oscar. A few days later, he sat me down and said, “Shirley, you’ve put on a pound or two, my dear. It looks as if Gloria Grahame is sending you care packages.”

The intimation was clear: although Gloria, a glamorous MGM star who had appeared as the temptress Violet in
It’s a Wonderful Life
, was cast as Ado Annie, and not Laurey, if I didn’t toe the line, our roles could swiftly be switched, and I would be relegated to playing Annie, and Gloria given my part of Laurey, instead.

So I braced myself and started my diet. Only back then, there wasn’t much publicity about diets, and while I was supposed to go on one—a crash diet at that—I didn’t get any guidance or any vitamins to help me through it. So I just used my own judgment. From then on, I lived on grapefruit and toast and nothing else. Literally.