Shirley Jones (8 page)

Jack and I rehearsed
Oklahoma!
together in Manhattan for six weeks before leaving for Europe and the tour, night after night gazing into each other’s eyes as we sang “People Will Say We’re in Love,” as the sexual chemistry between us sparked, then intensified.

Three nights before the cast and crew of
Oklahoma!
were to fly to France, a party was thrown for us on an excursion ship sailing up the Hudson River. At the last minute, I decided not to take a date with me, knowing that if I had one, Jack wouldn’t be able to dance with me. More than anything else in the world, I wanted to dance with Jack Cassidy that night.

My plan worked, and Jack and I danced cheek to cheek to “People Will Say We’re in Love,” which by now we considered to be “our song.” He held me close, and the chemistry between us was palpable. I knew exactly what the cast and crew watching us were thinking, but I didn’t care.

I did care, somewhat, though, for the opinion of my best friend, Sari Price, whom I’d known since
South Pacific
and who was to room with me during the European tour.

As we packed for the tour, Sari had been relentless in her warnings about Jack, a relentless prophet of doom, determined to puncture all my illusions about him: “Oh, Shirley, I’m so worried about you. He’s going to break your heart. You’re going to be in for a terrible time. Please, please don’t fall in love with him.”

I know Sari meant well and wanted only the best for me, but nothing, not even her words of wisdom, could rain on my romantic parade. I was twenty-one years old, Hollywood’s Cinderella, the star of
Oklahoma!
the movie, and about to embark on the biggest adventure of my life so far—Paris in June, with the first man I’d ever met who’d truly swept me off my feet—and nothing was going to tarnish my excitement and my passion. The Paris stage of our tour—which was scheduled to go on to Rome, then London—was part of “An American Salute to France,” which had been arranged by the chairman of ANTA (the American National Theatre and Academy), with the aim of enhancing the relationship between America and France. General Eisenhower himself was a major supporter of our tour and, before we left, issued a message of encouragement to all of us.

Three days later, we probably needed it. The ANTA tour was not a conventional theatrical enterprise, and everything about it turned out to be Spartan, to say the least. Which meant that instead of flying by commercial airline, we were slated to take a military transport to Paris.

The flight lasted more than twenty hours, and we all sat on the hard cabin floor, as the plane didn’t have any seats in it. But we didn’t care. We were flying to Paris, France, and that’s all that mattered to us. So we endured the cabin floor, snacked happily on our packed lunches, and laughed a lot.

Once we were booked into our rooms in the Hotel Splendide, on the Left Bank, Sari and I were in for a shock. Our minuscule room had no closet big enough for all our clothes.

Learning of our plight, Jack offered to trade rooms with us, and we accepted, charmed by his kindness and courtesy. When Jack invited us to dinner that night, along with his roommate, a character actor of some note, Willy Kuluva, Sari and I accepted.

The European tour of
Oklahoma!
premiered at the Théâtre Champs-Élysées on June 19, 1955, with president of France, René Coty, and the US ambassador to France, Douglas Dillon, attending. Afterward, Arthur O. Sulzberger noted in the
New York Times
that Jack was “a good-looking young man with a fine, rich voice,” and that I “was warmly received for her portrayal.”

So I was, but as the warmth of the audience cascaded over me, I was secretly nursing a special, private warmth all my own.

The warmth and romance of my first evening in Paris, with Jack Cassidy.

FOUR

Everything’s Going My Way

June 18, 1955, the Tour d’Argent Restaurant, the Eiffel Tower, Paris.

I wore a white lace dress, white high heels, and my hair was pulled back in a ponytail and tied with a white ribbon. As I gazed across the table into Jack’s blue eyes and then, for a second, glanced back out the window at the shimmering lights of Paris below us, I felt as if I were starring in the most romantic movie ever made.

For some unknown reason (one probably secretly engineered by Jack), Sari and Willy hadn’t joined us for dinner as promised. So here I was with the notorious Jack Cassidy, sipping my first glass of champagne and supping on my first escargots.

The setting was spectacular, the atmosphere sublime, but Jack’s conversation eclipsed even the high glamour of the night. Great seducer that he was, he alternated between regaling me with his own stories (working with Mary Martin, with Ethel Merman, and with Cole Porter) and asking me a myriad of questions about my life and my career.

What was it like making
Oklahoma!
? What were Rodgers and Hammerstein like? What did I think of Rod Steiger? Then on to my childhood, my family, my hopes, and my dreams.

Along the way, I told him about the Jones brewery, about Stoney’s beer, and about Stoney Jones. Jack loved my stories, and from then on his secret nickname for me would be Stoney Jones, which later on he inexplicably alternated with Mouse, a strange choice of nickname, but one that I never questioned.

Jack didn’t just romance me that night, he also dazzled me with his intellectual acumen. He quoted Thoreau; discussed politics, religion, and economics; and was always articulate and informative. I was enchanted, captivated, enthralled.

That night in Paris, Jack and I talked the evening away at the Tour d’Argent, then moved on to a notorious nightclub reportedly owned by one of Marlene Dietrich’s lesbian lovers. There, we met Sari and Willy and danced till dawn, oblivious of how
Oklahoma!
was premiering that night and we all were expected to give the performances of our lives in the show.

At five in the morning, after dancing the night away, we all piled into a cab and headed toward our hotel. But just as the cab was about to cross the bridge over the Seine from the Right Bank to the Left Bank, Jack asked the driver to stop.

Then he turned to me and asked if I would like to get out and walk over the bridge with him. I didn’t hesitate. I took his hand in mine, and in silence we walked across the bridge over the Seine, from the Right Bank to the Left, toward our hotel.

As we did, the sounds and sights of Paris assailed my senses: milkmen delivering their wares, young people on bicycles bound for home after a late night on the town, other lovers strolling along the banks of the Seine, hand in hand, as dawn broke.

It seemed to me that our walk across the Seine lasted for hours, and I never wanted it to end. I felt so close to Jack, so very close. Looking back, I believe that dawn walk with Jack, most of it done in silence, changed my life.

But overwhelmed and enchanted as I was with Jack, I still didn’t consider going to bed with him that night. Instead, when we got back to our hotel, I let him walk me to the door of my room, where he gave me a chaste, light butterfly kiss. Then he looked deep into my eyes and said, “I’m going to marry you.”

“But you’re already married!”

“I know.”

Jack then strolled down the corridor to his room.

I told myself sternly that I shouldn’t for one moment believe that Jack meant what he had said. I was fully aware that he had given me a line. I knew that I should probably at the least have been amused by him or, at worst, angry with him. Instead, somewhere deep down, I believed that Jack Cassidy meant every word he’d said to me that night and that he did intend to marry me. Or so I fervently hoped.

The next few days in Paris with Jack sped by like a heightened dream, especially when he presented me with a gold ornament of the Eiffel Tower for my charm bracelet, which he gave me as a memento of our romantic evening together.

However, when we checked out of our hotel at the end of our Paris run, I was brought down to earth from my romantic haze with somewhat of a disconcerting bump.

While I was paying my bill, Jack came up behind me and, in full earshot of some of the cast and crew said, “I hate to do this to you, Shirley, but I seem to have run out of money. Can you pay my bill?”

We had been on just one date together, but I didn’t hesitate. Even though $350 was a lot of money in those days, I paid Jack’s bill then and there without a second thought, while the cast and crew looked on openmouthed.

Afterward, Sari said to me, “You must be crazy! He’s using you.”

Perhaps. But I didn’t care. Although Jack never made the slightest attempt to pay me back, I never asked him to. He was my knight in shining armor, my prince on a white horse. I was in love with him, and I always would be.

We moved on to Rome, where, in between last-minute rehearsals, we went sightseeing like average tourists, admiring the city’s memorable monuments, then spent happy hours picnicking on the beach and swimming in the Mediterranean together.

On July 9,
Oklahoma!
opened in front of a distinguished audience including the deputy prime minister of Italy, Giuseppe Saragat, Foreign Minister Gaetano Martino, and members of the Roman nobility, all of whom were so enthusiastic that they gave us eight curtain calls.

That night, after the curtain finally fell on the show, in a romantic, little Roman hotel, Jack Cassidy made love to me for the first time.

I was a virgin, having never gone “all the way” with anyone before. I had resolved to lose my virginity with the right man. That night, in Rome, I knew Jack was the right man.

He was a great lover, that night and every night afterward. He could go on for hours, have two or three orgasms, then wake up in the morning and make love to me all over again. He was inventive and extremely well endowed (a blessing that all his sons, in particular David, inherited). He had no inhibitions about sex, no barriers, and he taught me to be the same, to be free about sex and to openly want it and love it.

Through the years, Jack and I had sex wherever and whenever we wanted—on the floor of a sailboat in the middle of the Caribbean, in the dressing room at whichever theater we were appearing in, in the bathtub, and, at the height of
The Partridge Family
, now and again Jack would pick me up from the studio in the car, then drive us into the garage adjacent to our house, where he would have intercourse with me in the backseat. With me, Mrs. Partridge!

That night in Rome, the only thing that marred my bliss during sex with Jack was the fear of becoming pregnant. He didn’t have a condom, and I hadn’t been fitted with a coil or a diaphragm, either. But although he pulled out at the last moment, he didn’t really hold back and afterward instructed me to get into the bathtub and make sure “to get as much of it out as you can.”

Not the most romantic ending to my first night of love.

Now that Jack and I were having an affair, and the sizzling chemistry between us was so obvious, word of our illicit relationship traveled back to America so fast that it made my head spin. Within days, Rodgers and Hammerstein, set on smashing my love affair with Jack, ordered me home from Europe immediately, earlier than initially planned, to prepare for my next role in the movie of
Carousel
, in which I would play Julie Jordan, the star-crossed heroine who falls hopelessly in love with bad boy, carnival barker, Billy Bigelow. How could I say no?

Set in 1880 and based on Ferenc Molnár’s 1909 play,
Liliom
,
Carousel
was a big hit on Broadway for Rodgers and Hammerstein. The story of rough, macho rogue Billy Bigelow, who at the start of the show has been dead for fifteen years but is given a chance by the “Starkeeper” to go back down to Earth one more time to try to redeem himself, was much beloved by audiences.

Long before I was finally cast as Julie in
Carousel
, the rumor mill had it that Judy Garland, fresh from her triumph in
A Star Is Born
, would be playing Julie instead. When I found out that she wasn’t and that the role was mine, I was flattered, as Judy Garland had always been one of my idols.