Shirley Jones (17 page)

Against my better judgment and all my principles, I enjoyed my affair with Stephen Elliott. He was bright, intellectual, and had a great sense of humor. We talked a great deal, and I learned a lot from him. Unlike Jack—who was all about Jack—Stephen was riveted by me and wanted to know everything about me. He studied me intently, my character, my desires, my likes, and dislikes.

Unlike Jack, Stephen was 100 percent interested in me. In how I looked, what I wore, what I said, where I went, how I handled my kids. Whereas Jack was only interested in Jack.

Within a few days, Stephen knew me better than Jack ever had, even down to observing, “You are beautiful everywhere, except your feet.” I felt loved, wanted, and he made me laugh (my fatal weakness).

Toward the end of the tour, Jack came up to visit me and to see the show. Afterward, we had dinner with Stephen, and he and Jack appeared to get on really well, and I was relieved.

However, back in our room, when I was already in bed and Jack was getting undressed, he suddenly turned round and said, “So how is your affair with Stephen going?”

“What did you say?” I said, playing dumb.

“You are having an affair with him, aren’t you?”

I had no intention of confessing the truth. What had happened between Stephen and me belonged to us, not Jack. It was our private story and I wanted it to stay that way.

So I looked Jack straight in the eyes and said, “No, Jack. Why, in heaven’s name, are you saying that?”

“Come on, Shirl, it was really obvious to me tonight.”

“Jack,” I said firmly, “Stephen and I are good friends, and that’s it.”

Jack smiled. “Sure you are . . . but it’s okay.”

He knew—he just knew!—and he was almost thrilled. Later on, he interrogated me about what happened between Stephen and me in bed and made it obvious that he wanted to know all the details of my sex life with Stephen. Moreover, the thought of my having an affair with another man had clearly made Jack even hotter for me.

But I still kept denying that I had had an affair with Stephen Elliott. It belonged to me, not Jack, and that was how I intended it to stay. You could say that I conducted my extramarital affair with Stephen in exactly the same way as Jack had conducted his extramarital affairs with all of his women: no guilt, no confessions, and no repercussions. I guess I learned to do that just by watching Jack and following his example.

In the end, Stephen ended it between us. “You are still very much in love with your husband, and that’s obvious,” he said.

I admitted that he was right, and I was. I loved Jack as much as ever, but I had had fun with Stephen. Everyone in the show probably knew the truth. Stephen was single, and afterward he said that what happened between us had been wonderful. And in the true show-business tradition of “On location, nothing counts,” when the show ended, so did our affair.

It was a charming interlude, but my heart was never in it.

Despite Jack’s nonchalance regarding my affair with Stephen, he still wanted to remain married to me. To that end, he suggested that we work together again, which was financially beneficial to us, but also meant that I would be transported back to the early days of our love affair, when we worked together on the European tour of
Oklahoma!
and Jack was my costar and my mentor.

So Jack came up with the idea of our doing a tour of
Wait Until Dark
, in which I would play the part of the blind girl, Susy Hendrix, and he would play the villain, Harry Roat Jr. Jack had had plenty of experience in playing villains during his career (from Macheath in
The Threepenny Opera
to the murderer Leonard Vole in Agatha Christie’s
Witness for the Prosecution
), but I had never played a blind girl before.

I spent three weeks at The Lighthouse, a New York center for the blind, where I studied blind people. I learned that no two blind people handle their disability in the same way, and that a blind woman is more likely to veer to the left, and a blind man is more likely to veer to the right. I also consulted with Lee Remick, who created the part of Susy Hendrix in the original Broadway production of
Wait Until Dark
.

I prepared for the part of Susy by learning to keep my eyes out of focus, a difficult thing to do, but crucial when playing someone blind.

Jack was brilliant as Roat, and during one particularly harrowing scene, he had to hit me hard, something neither of us relished. But the scene was crucial to the plot, so we both went along with it.

Before the tour began, we held a full dress rehearsal for our family and friends. Ryan, who was then just two years old, was in the audience, in retrospect, an unwise decision on our part. When we got to the scene in which Jack went for it and started to hit me, Ryan began screaming pitifully, “Look, Daddy’s hitting Mommy! Daddy’s hitting Mommy!”

The entire audience turned and stared at him in horror. Jack and I froze for a second, then fled from the stage into the auditorium, where Ryan was crying his heart out. We both held him, comforted him, and assured him, “Don’t be upset, baby, it’s only a play.”

After that, we made sure that our sons never saw either of us in any of our performances that might upset them. And I banned them from seeing me in
Elmer Gantry
until they were way into their teens.

During the run of
Wait Until Dark
I found that working with Jack was wonderful, as always. I learned so much from him when we were onstage together—how to move better, how to project more. His stage presence was magical, and some of it always rubbed off on me.

So I was thrilled when my manager, Ruth Aarons, called with the news that Jack and I had been offered the leading roles in a Broadway musical to be called
Maggie Flynn
. We both read the script, listened to the music, and adored it. Besides, we loved the idea of continuing to work together, and not being separated on two different coasts.

The show and the parts were wonderful for both of us, and I luxuriated in the joy of having Jack sing romantic ballads to me onstage once more, just as he had in
Oklahoma!
at the start of our love affair.

In
Maggie Flynn
, I played an Irish lady living in the Bronx during the Civil War, a time in which the authorities were kidnapping black children and taking them away from New York. My character, Maggie Flynn, decided that she wanted to protect them and keep them safe in her basement apartment.

Jack played Phineas Finn, my husband, a circus clown, who, in a twist of the plot slightly reminiscent of my offstage life with Jack, had disappeared. Consequently, I had a boyfriend, Colonel John Farraday, who wanted me to divorce my errant husband and marry him instead. So John and I became secretly engaged.

Then Phineas suddenly arrives back on the scene again, and I fall for him once more. Jack was playing himself, a philanderer who was no good and who ended up in jail. But in
Maggie Flynn
, as in real life, I still loved him.

Away from the theater, Jack and I rented that castle in Irvington-on-Hudson, and all the kids—including David—lived up there with us.

The show, which opened on October 23, 1968, was beautiful, in particular the ending, when Jack walks on the stage from one wing, and I from the other, and we meet in the middle and sing a duet together, “Mr. Clown.” The audience always went crazy for this moving, emotional song and seemed to love the show as a whole.

However, for some unknown reason that, to this day, I am unable to fathom, after just three and a half months the producers closed the show. We had no notice. It was a fait accompli.

I was deeply disappointed, but Jack took the closure far harder than I did. He had great hopes that he would win a Tony for
Maggie Flynn
. After all, he had already won one for his acclaimed performance in
She Loves Me
and had also been nominated for
Superman
, and
Fade Out—Fade In
, and I thought he should have won for both. So he had every reason to believe that he could win a Tony for his performance in
Maggie Flynn
, and that I could win one as well. Jack was indeed nominated for a Best Actor Tony for his part as Phineas, but was beaten by Jerry Orbach in
Promises, Promises
. And even if Jack had won, he would still have been devastated that the show closed so early in the run. As always, he drowned his sorrows in drink.

Drink as he did, at that stage in his life Jack was still far too much in control to let his drinking end up damaging his career. To Jack, drinking didn’t just revolve around the lure of the alcohol but around the camaraderie of hanging out with other guys and shooting the breeze together until the early hours of the morning. That was what really mattered to him.

One evening, after the curtain fell on whichever Broadway show Jack was then starring in, he ended up hanging out at the Copa, as he often did. That particular evening, Johnny Carson was drinking alone at the bar, so Jack joined him, and they had a couple of drinks together. Then Jack moved on to another table to join a couple of friends.

After a while, the bartender came over and said, “Jack, you’ve gotta help me out. Johnny is as drunk as a skunk, and I’m afraid he’s gonna hurt himself, or somebody else. We’ve got to get him out of here.”

So Jack went over and said, “Come on, Johnny, I’ll take you wherever you want to go, and we’ll have a drink on the way.”

Johnny fought him and refused to quit drinking, but in the end Jack got him to leave and got him home in once piece.

Many times after that night, Jack did Johnny’s show, but Johnny never mentioned that Jack had rescued him from a drunken binge at the Copa.

Johnny was a difficult, enigmatic man, but when he died, he secretly left a vast fortune to a variety of children’s foundations and women’s organizations, all under an assumed name.

Generally, Jack aroused positive feelings in both men and women. Once, though, he was invited to attend Burt Reynolds’s roast and came out with a funny line about Burt. Burt lashed back with “While you’re up here, Marty Ingels is walking around in your bathrobe and slippers.” Jack knew Burt quite well and just laughed his comments off.

Jack was a great raconteur and an amusing drinking buddy. George C. Scott was another of Jack’s drinking comrades and a close friend. George produced
The Andersonville Trial
, in which Jack appeared in 1970 and for which he got an Emmy nomination.

However, close as Jack and George were, both Jack and I knew that George was a split personality: a delight when he was drinking, but a monster when he was drunk. One night when he was dating a young actress, Jack and I had a lovely dinner with the two of them at our home, and then they hung out with us in the backyard afterward. George and Jack started drinking pretty heavily, but as I had to get up and go to work extremely early the next morning, I made my excuses and went up to bed. Soon after, his girlfriend also went up to bed and left George and Jack alone together, still drinking.

I was just dropping off to sleep when I heard an almighty crash, which was clearly the sound of a bottle being smashed to smithereens. I ran downstairs, and there was George, holding a broken bottle up against Jack’s cheek, yelling, “Unless you tell me the truth, I’m going to stab you to death.”

Jack, never one to lose his cool, even under the direst circumstances, started to edge away from George, extremely gingerly, saying, “You don’t have to do this, George, we’re friends.”

Luckily, at that moment, George saw me standing on the threshold. I gave him a stern look, whereupon he dropped the bottle and said, “I gotta go.”

I never did discover why he was threatening Jack, and what he wanted Jack to tell him.

After
Maggie Flynn
closed, I was cast in
The Cheyenne Social Club
, which Gene Kelly directed and was to be shot in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I played Jenny, the madam of a brothel, the Cheyenne Social Club. The script was a delight, my role was fun, and I was glad that Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda were to be my costars.