Shirley Jones (12 page)

I believe, though, that Jack hurt David far more than he hurt Shaun, Patrick, and Ryan. When David was nine or so, I’d often see him crying in the corner because of something Jack had said or done to him, and I did my best to comfort him. That didn’t stop Jack from playing the heavy father and disciplining David far too much, sometimes even paddling him, just as my mother did to me and Jack’s mother did to him. As a result, David became afraid of Jack, and I didn’t blame him at all.

However, I always nursed the fond hope that David would get to know Jack and the two of them would become closer to each other. One time, when David was twelve, I convinced Jack to go with him on a camping trip in the San Bernardino Mountains, where they were scheduled to stay at a Boy Scouts camp together. Only with Jack being Jack, he and David had little togetherness on that trip.

When David and all the other kids were fast asleep, Jack, who’d bought some Scotch along with him, sat around the campfire and regaled the other dads with his showbiz stories and his standard repertoire of jokes.

In the morning, poor David was practically mobbed by all the other fathers eager to praise Jack for his wit, charm, and bonhomie. As always, Jack was the center of attention, just the way he liked it, and David was overshadowed utterly and completely.

Later on, Jack started taking David with him when he went on summer-stock tours, and David, at last, had a chance to get to know his father better.

However, David never lived with us until the summer of 1968, when Jack and I rented a hundred-year-old stone castle, which boasted turrets and stained-glass windows, in Irvingtonon-Hudson, while we were rehearsing for the Broadway show
Maggie Flynn
.

David came to live with us, and during that time he became closer to his brothers, Shaun, Patrick, and Ryan. When Shaun was born, I had been worried that David would feel left out and be jealous and vindictive toward Shaun, but David turned out to be quite the reverse. David and Shaun never had any sibling rivalry, partly because David was so much older than Shaun, and later on, as Shaun grew older, he looked up to David. Although David lived with his mother in Orange, New Jersey, whenever he came to visit us, the boys always loved seeing him and vice versa. I think he was happy to be part of a big family.

David was good-natured and threw himself into playing with Shaun, and later Patrick and Ryan, taking them swimming and riding bicycles with them. David loved to babysit the boys and was extremely responsible when he did.

The boys particularly enjoyed the pillow fights they often had with David. If David ever tired of playing with his brothers, who were so much younger than him (Shaun was eight years his junior; Patrick, twelve years; and Ryan, sixteen), he could always escape to the pool house, where he sometimes entertained young ladies.

Ladies, girls, women, had always been a part of David’s life. Like his father, he was highly sexed, and in his autobiography he confessed that he had his first sexual experience when he was nine years old and fondled a friend’s sister. So even as a young boy, he played the field with girls. Throughout his early teens, women flocked to him in droves. Although I never met any of them in person, I was constantly aware that David had girlfriends everywhere, but nothing serious. Jack also knew how numerous these girls were and would sometimes crossly complain, “That’s all he cares about, girls.”

Whereupon I would laugh and say, “Well, Jack, he’s your son, and that’s all you care about.”

David also had something else in common with Jack: a giant endowment. David’s brothers called him Donk, for Donkey, and Jack would joke, “Where did you get that? You’re bigger than me,” which probably didn’t help their rocky relationship.

SIX

Elmer Gantry

By now, all the Hollywood power players viewed me as the ingénue from
Oklahoma!
and from
Carousel
and didn’t consider me to be anything other than a singer who starred in musicals.

That infuriated me—I was an actress, and I wanted nothing more than to act in a serious drama and to be taken seriously. In the meantime, when Jack wasn’t starring on Broadway, he and I performed our cabaret act all over the country together.

We were about to go onstage at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco to do our act when the phone rang.

“This is Burt Lancaster,” a deep male voice announced.

Burt Lancaster! Burt Lancaster! My teen idol. Must be a joke, I thought, and hung up.

Within seconds, it rang again. It really was Burt Lancaster. Burt Lancaster, only not making a social call.

“This is Burt Lancaster. Have you read the novel
Elmer Gantry
?”

I hadn’t.

“Go get it and read it. We’re making a movie of it, and I would like you to think about playing the role of Lulu Bains. Can you come in and meet Richard Brooks, who is directing?”

Sure I could.

Overnight, I read the book and discovered that Lulu Bains wasn’t Laurey or Julie or some musical ingénue but a real, flesh-and-blood woman, the daughter of a deacon, undone by passion and forced into prostitution.

Burt had seen me playing the alcoholic Sunshine Girl in “The Big Slide,” a
Playhouse 90
television drama with Red Skelton, and had never forgotten me. But to play Lulu Bains in
Elmer Gantry
, I would first have to pass muster with the movie’s fearsome writer, producer, director (all rolled into one), Richard Brooks.

Known for directing gritty, dramatic movies such as
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
and
Blackboard Jungle
, Richard Brooks was universally reviled as a martinet. I also knew through the grapevine that he intended Piper Laurie (who had also played an alcoholic in another
Playhouse 90
production, “Days of Wine and Roses”) to play the part of Lulu Bains.

Richard Brooks definitely did not want to cast me as Lulu Bains, and however much Burt Lancaster wanted me to play Lulu and was rooting for me, I was petrified at the prospect of meeting Richard Brooks.

But I also knew that this was my big opportunity to make the switch from frothy musicals to drama, to be considered a serious actress at last, and not just a singer. It all depended on my winning over Brooks, and I wasn’t at all sure whether I was equal to the task.

I knew through other actresses and actors who had worked with Brooks that he was an ex-marine and a tough guy. Everyone who’d worked for him on movies hated him. He didn’t allow anyone to play cards between scenes or to read newspapers. Famous for calling the cast and the crew “sons of bitches,” he would think nothing of slapping an extra in the face if the extra was meant to cry in a scene but hadn’t so far managed to wring out a single tear. One hard slap from Richard Brooks, and that same extra was wailing like a baby.

Down the line, in 1985, during the making of
Fever Pitch
, which Brooks was directing, he employed that identical tactic on my own son Patrick, who had a small part in the movie. Brooks wanted Patrick to cry in one scene, and as much as Patrick tried to cry on demand, he couldn’t manage it. So even though Brooks was fully aware that Patrick was my son, he still slapped him in the face a few times—and with so much force that Patrick began crying.

While he was directing
Elmer Gantry
, Brooks went too far. He suddenly swore viciously at one of the crew. Outraged, the crew member took revenge on Brooks the next day, deliberately running his car over Brooks’s foot. Brooks was rushed to the hospital, but even so, he didn’t modify his treatment of his cast and crew one iota. That was the Richard Brooks who held my career in the palm of his muscular hands.

Burt Lancaster had prevailed on Brooks to meet me, so there I was one Saturday at the studio in Hollywood, after having flown down from San Francisco, where Jack and I were playing at the Fairmont.

I’ll never forget that first harrowing interview with him. I wore a tight, white dress so that he could see my figure. He grilled me for an hour and a half. All the time, he was sprawled on a couch, his face turned away from me, while he sucked on his pipe and barked questions at me, which I attempted to answer to the best of my ability.

Then he handed me the pages of the script in which Lulu Bains was featured, as opposed to the script as a whole. Richard Brooks never allowed any of the actors in his movies to see the complete script, only the pages covering their part.

Fortunately, following Burt Lancaster’s advice, I had already read the novel, by Sinclair Lewis, so I knew the story and my character. I went out in the corridor, read the pages Brooks had given me, then went in again and cleared my throat, expecting to start reading my part and auditioning.

Before I did, I made a speech to Richard Brooks, declaring my passion for
Elmer Gantry
: “I’d play the part for nothing, Mr. Brooks.”

But instead of letting me read the script for him, Brooks waved me aside. “So do you think you could play Lulu?” he barked.

I said I thought I could.

Then he dismissed me. I went home in tears, convinced that Richard Brooks definitely didn’t want me to play the part. My opinion was buttressed the following morning when word came back to me that Brooks hadn’t thought much of me and had no intention of casting me in the role.

But Burt Lancaster wasn’t giving in, and faced with his star power and persistence, Richard Brooks finally capitulated and the part was mine.

Knowing that I was far from the flavor du jour in the eyes of Richard Brooks, Burt strongly advised me to be on set from day one. As Brooks shot in sequence, and my scene came toward the end of the movie, I had ample opportunity to observe him directing. As I did, although I was hugely intimidated by him, he ultimately won my admiration. But that didn’t mean he would reciprocate.

My first day of filming
Elmer Gantry
proved to be the biggest challenge of my career. Richard Brooks had personally chosen my costume: a slip that partially revealed my breasts, but not so much as to inflame the censors. I was extremely nervous, but due to Burt, I was also well prepared for the scene.

Through the years since I made
Elmer Gantry
, I’ve often been asked if I researched my part, as the deacon’s daughter turned prostitute, by going to a house of prostitution and talking to the ladies there. I didn’t think I needed to go that far. I knew all about prostitutes because Jack had introduced me to some of them, ex-girlfriends of his who had moved from prostitution to acting for a living. So by the time I was to shoot the first scene, which took place in a house of prostitution, I was primed to play my part.

Nonetheless, that first scene proved to be the hardest scene I’ve ever shot in my life. In that scene I tell the other prostitutes all about the traveling salesman turned evangelical minister Elmer Gantry, what he did to me, and how I came to be working in the house: “Oh, he gave me special instructions back of the pulpit. He got to howlin’, ‘Repent! Repent!’ and I got to moanin’, ‘Save me! Save me!’ and the first thing I know he rammed the fear of God in me so fast I never heard my old man’s footsteps.”

That line “rammed the fear of God into me so fast” would send shock waves through America when the movie was released. In many places, it was actually cut from the movie, and I received hundreds of letters from fans of
Oklahoma!
and
Carousel
demanding to know how I dared play such a sinful character.

That first day on the set, Richard sat on the sidelines, with his legs crossed, smoking his pipe, and didn’t say a single, solitary word to me or give me a moment’s direction, except to growl, “Okay, let’s see how you do it.” And that was it.

Until then, I was accustomed to directors actually directing me, but Richard Brooks said nothing. Not a word. Nada. Neither before the scene or after it.

That night, I went home in tears, convinced that Richard Brooks hated me and that the very next morning I was going to be fired.

Then the telephone rang.

“Shirley, this is Richard Brooks. I owe you an apology. I just saw the dailies of the scene you did, and you were brilliant. You were great in that scene. And I predict that you are going to win the Academy Award.”

From that moment on, Richard Brooks was in my corner, and I even went on to do another movie with him,
Happy Ending
, in which he cast me as a kept woman, a lady of easy virtue, which was how he would forever view me after Lulu Bains and
Elmer Gantry
.

In my second big scene in
Elmer Gantry
, Burt, now in character as a superstar minister, comes to see me and wants to give me money because he knows that I was once a nice girl who fell into prostitution because of him. He tries to hand me the money, and I finally take it and slide it into my stocking top.

Then he kisses me passionately—a wonderful experience for me, as Burt Lancaster was a world-class kisser, better than any actor who’d ever kissed me on camera before, and any actor who would kiss me on camera afterward.