Shirley Jones (15 page)

“Dear Shirley,” he said, “happy birthday. Miss you a lot. We had such a good time together.”

We certainly did.

When I made
The Courtship of Eddie’s Father
in 1962, I was happy to be working with Ronny Howard again. He played Eddie, a little boy who was determined to find a wife for his newly widowed father. My character, Elizabeth Marten, ends up marrying his father, Glenn Ford.

Glenn was half-Welsh and had a prolific romantic track record, which encompassed, among others, Joan Crawford, Debbie Reynolds, and Rita Hayworth, with whom he starred in
Gilda
.

While I wasn’t remotely tempted to have an affair with Glenn, from the first, he made it clear that he was eminently available to me. Although I didn’t know it at the time, his attraction to me stemmed from a prediction by his psychic, the legendary Peter Hurkos, on whom Glenn was so dependent that he actually kept a spare bedroom in his house ready and waiting for Peter to stay in. During one of his psychic readings for Glenn, Peter had prophesied that Glenn and I were destined to be husband and wife. I did not concur. I made my lack of interest in Glenn obvious to him, but he still wasn’t giving up. After all, he had the occult on his side.

New Year’s Eve fell during the shooting of
The Courtship of Eddie’s Father
, Glenn invited Jack and me to his New Year’s Eve party at his home, near the Beverly Hills Hotel.

The evening was fun, and we all ate and drank a good deal, then toasted each other at midnight. A few moments into the New Year, Jack came over to me, somewhat sheepishly, and asked if I’d mind his visiting a friend’s house round the corner, so he could have a quick New Year’s drink with him. True to form, I didn’t protest, although Jack’s story was decidedly suspicious.

By two in the morning, there was no sign of Jack, and I was exhausted. In those days, mobile phones hadn’t yet been invented. I didn’t know where in hell Jack was, never mind with whom, so I just went upstairs and into the nearest bedroom, got straight into bed, and fell fast asleep, still wearing my ball gown.

I was out like a light until four in the morning, when I woke up with a start, to find Glenn Ford naked, except for his shorts, lying in bed next to me.

I jumped up and said, “I’m so sorry! Something terrible must have happened to Jack.”

At that moment, the telephone rang.

Glenn answered. I couldn’t hear Jack’s end of the conversation, but I imagine he was apologizing profusely.

But Glenn was impervious. “You’d better get straight over here. Otherwise you won’t have a wife anymore. . . .”

Within half an hour, Jack was banging on the front door. Glenn let him in and gave it to him straight: “How could you do this to your wife!”

Jack, always a quick thinker, came up with some excuse about an accident, they had been drinking, and on and on and on.

It was one of the few times in our marriage when I was so angry with Jack that I began to scream at him, yelling that I couldn’t understand how he could treat me so badly.

Shocked by my confronting him, Jack apologized abjectly, then focused on his surroundings and realized that Glenn was dressed only in his shorts and that my ball gown was so crushed that it was obvious I’d been in bed.

I knew that even though Glenn and I had been in bed together, he hadn’t tried anything sexual with me because I was soundly asleep, and I told Jack so. I don’t know if Jack believed me or not or was actually jealous for the first time in our marriage, but if he was, he didn’t show it. Instead, for the rest of his life, Jack always called Glenn Ford “the necrophiliac.”

When all was said and done, though, Glenn Ford had behaved like a gentleman. So, in his Latin lover style, did Rossano Brazzi, who had starred in
South Pacific
and with whom I made a movie in Portugal in 1963. It was called
Dark Purpose
here and
L’intrigo
in Europe.

Sardonic actor George Sanders played my boss, an art dealer, I played a naïve American secretary, and Rossano played a mysterious count set on romancing me. As sometimes happens in movies, Rossano seemed fixated on continuing his role once the cameras had stopped rolling. When Rossano and I finished shooting our first scene, we ended up alone on the set together, and he started chasing me around the room.

When I backed away from him, he tried another approach: “Let’s go out to dinner and then take a hotel room.”

“What are you saying? I’m married! And so are you,” was my instant reaction.

“We don’t worry about that in Italy,” retorted Rossano, “My wife doesn’t mind what I do. I like what I do. She likes what I do. We could have a good time while we’re on this movie. And Italian men don’t go by the rules.”

“Sorry, Rossano,” I said firmly, “American women
do
go by the rules.”

Marlon Brando, with whom I made
Bedtime Story
(which was later adapted into the musical
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
), costarring David Niven, always lived his life by his own iconoclastic rules and ignored everyone else’s.

The movie was partly filmed on location in Cannes, and in Hollywood. Marlon played Freddy Benson, a con man who dons a GI uniform to trick unsuspecting girls into bed, and David played Lawrence Jameson, the king of Riviera con men whose realm is threatened by the arrival of Freddy, and I played Janet Walker, the unwitting object of a bet between Freddy and Lawrence.

Before making
Bedtime Story
, Brando had become disillusioned with making movies. The experience of filming
Mutiny on the Bounty
in Tahiti had soured him on working in movies. According to him,
Mutiny on the Bounty
had taken forever to make, and he had hated the director and conducted romantic affairs with practically every woman on the island of Tahiti.

Fortunately, he was happy to be making
Bedtime Story
because he had always wanted to do comedy, but no one in Hollywood had been prepared to give him that opportunity. So this uproarious comedy was his first shot, and he was thrilled. He also loved that he would be working with David Niven, whom he respected a great deal.

At the end of the first day of shooting, Brando asked me to come to his dressing room and talk. When I got there, ready to field the inevitable pass, I took a deep breath and said, “Marlon, I’m thrilled to be working with you and David. This is going to be fun for all of us.”

“Yeah,” Marlon mumbled, “I’ve had it with all the other crap.” We chatted about the movie some more, and that was that. When we started working on our scenes together, it wasn’t easy to work with him, particularly because director Ralph Levy was completely under his sway and allowed him free rein, so it was almost as if Brando himself were directing
Bedtime Story
.

Like Sinatra, Marlon was self-involved: everything he had to say or do was more important than anything anyone else had to say or do. However, unlike Sinatra, who was known in the business as “one-take Frank,” Brando was never happy with the first, second, or third take. Part of the reason, I discovered, was because he was unable to remember any of his lines and had all of them written on the palms of his hands or on the side of a table.

Apart from that, he never got any scene right on the first take. Our first scene was straightforward: we meet and he is desperately trying to seduce me. Nevertheless, it took sixty takes before Brando yelled cut. After that I understood why everyone always said Brando was America’s greatest actor: he exhausted every other actor working with him!

He was never my favorite actor, either on-screen or off. Despite his image as the ultimate sex symbol, I wasn’t in the least bit turned on by kissing Brando during the scene when I rub oil all over him on the beach. While he was a great kisser, he was not the best I’ve ever had. (That distinction goes first to Burt Lancaster, and then to Richard Widmark.) But apart from that, shooting love scenes is never sexually exciting. You are too busy remembering what you are doing, your lines, the next bit of dialogue . . .

Brando really wanted to make a success of
Bedtime Story
because he had always longed to play comedy, and this was his chance. He had great respect for David Niven and his work, and he didn’t make David do so many takes. At the end of shooting each day, Marlon and I would sit around while David told great stories, and Marlon was fascinated.

When the picture wrapped, David invited Marlon, Jack and me, and a group of David’s friends to dinner at his house in Brentwood.

When we arrived on the porch, Marlon’s best friend, Wally Cox, who had started out in New York with Brando at the beginning of his career and always made him laugh, with Cox’s quirky sense of humor, rushed up to us and said, “Marlon is here, but he doesn’t want to face his son. So don’t be surprised by what you see when you come into the house.”

Jack and I walked into the living room, where a huge table was filled with all kinds of food. Underneath the table was Marlon, sitting cross-legged, hiding from his son.

He stayed that way for a couple of hours, then, without a word, got up and rushed out into the night. Some bedtime story. . . .

In
Elmer Gantry
, I had a seminude scene, but I was to venture further into nudity in the TV movie
Silent Night, Lonely Night
, which I made in 1969. It was based on Robert Anderson’s play of the same name, which had been produced on Broadway with Henry Fonda and Barbara Bel Geddes.

Silent Night, Lonely Night
movingly told the story of a couple who, by chance, meet on Christmas Eve, when they are both riding on a bus to Amherst. She is visiting her son in school there, though her heart is heavy as she is aware that her husband is having an affair. The man is visiting his wife in a mental hospital and knows that when he arrives, she will no longer recognize him.

Along the way, he recounts the story of his first affair to the woman, an affair with the town groupie, with whom he had sex one night in the empty school gym. As he relates what happened, my character fantasizes about being the town groupie and having sex with him.

Before we shot that scene, Danny Petrie,
Silent Night, Lonely Night
’s director, gingerly approached me and asked how I would feel about taking my clothes off. I was torn between agreeing and refusing because, after all, this was a TV movie and who knew whether a nude scene would get past the strict censors.

Danny reassured me that
Silent Night, Lonely Night
was slated for a theatrical release, and that I’d only be seen topless and from behind.

He promised, too, that he would clear the set, which he did when we eventually shot the scene. During my nude scene, Lloyd Bridges, my costar, was kind and understanding and helped me not to feel too self-conscious. Thanks to him, the scene went well, and when
Silent Night, Lonely Night
was released, I was thrilled to be nominated for my first Emmy.

I did my second nude scene with Lloyd as well, when we made
The Happy Ending
together in 1969. I played Flo, a good-time girl who’s had a series of affairs with married men; our costar was Bobby Darin, who played the hustler Franco.