Shirley Jones (29 page)

Through the years, all my four boys have constantly made me proud and happy. Ryan is a set director and always works extremely hard. Even as a little boy, his room was always picture-perfect, his shoes and clothes put away. He is extremely tidy, just as his father, Jack, always was.

When Ryan was forty-five, he married a beautiful Vietnamese girl, and he had his first child, a daughter, Megan Mae, and we were all thrilled.

Although he is the youngest Cassidy boy, in the last five years, in a strange way, Ryan has emerged as the head of the family. He’s the one his brothers call if ever they have a problem. I never expected that to happen, but I am glad.

Of all of Jack’s kids, Patrick is the most verbal. He’s fun to be around, and his sense of humor resembles Jack’s incredibly. Like his father, he’s a Broadway star. He’s got an amazing voice and has appeared in seven Broadway shows.

For me, the highlight was his 2004 starring role in
42nd Street
, first, because he was brilliant in it, but also because I was starring in the show with him. Which made us the first mother/son ever to appear in the same Broadway show together, an achievement of which I shall always be inordinately proud.

When Patrick first asked me to play Dorothy Brock to his Julian Marsh in
42nd Street
, I wasn’t sure that I would be able to do it. After all, I was seventy years old and hadn’t appeared in a Broadway show since
Maggie Flynn
, all those years ago, and what a debacle that was!

But Patrick convinced me that I was capable of playing the part of Dorothy Brock and playing it well. When we had our first rehearsal and I really got into the part, he was so impressed by my performance, and so emotional, that tears flowed from him.

So there I was, living in New York and doing nine shows a week for four whole months. Patrick and I lived in the same apartment building, but not in the same apartment, and I loved every minute of living so close to him again and working with him, as well.

Being onstage with Patrick also brought Jack back to me forcefully. Patrick, too, continually evoked his father, asking what Jack would have done at a particular point in the show, how he would have handled a particular song, and how he would have played the part in general.

Doing
42nd Street
with Patrick was a wonderful experience and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

Patrick is a great performer like his father, and from the time that Patrick was a teenager, he was also the womanizer of the century, just like his father. We clashed bitterly over his wanting to bring girls home with him, so that he could go to bed with them there, in our house.

I put my foot down and told him that no way, under no circumstances, was he allowed to bring a girl home and have sex with her in our house. Like it or not, Patrick had no choice but to accept my decision.

Later on, he invited a beautiful African-American girl to be his prom date. I was cool with that, but then I got a call from her parents saying that they didn’t want her to go to the prom with Patrick because it wasn’t right. The same thing happened again when Patrick started dating a Jewish girl; her parents called and said that although Patrick was a nice man, he wasn’t Jewish, so they didn’t want their daughter to date him.

But Patrick did find happiness for a time with the actress Bernadette Peters, who is fourteen years his senior. The age difference didn’t trouble Patrick, or me. I admired Bernadette, and so did Patrick. She is a wonderful woman, and they had a wonderful time together.

Nowadays, Patrick is doing well in his career, and today he produces shows more often than he appears in them, and fortunately, his private life, too, is a great success. He is married to a beautiful choreographer, and together they have two marvelous sons.

As for David, I’ve always considered him my fourth son, and he’s always treated me with great kindness and courtesy. When we first met, his mother had painted me as a scarlet lady and a wicked stepmother, but as David sweetly said of me years later, “I wanted to hate her, but in minutes warmed to her.” The feeling was mutual.

David is nine years older than Shaun, eleven years older than Patrick and fifteen years older than Ryan. At first, David was afraid that he would be an outsider among my three sons and me, but when he and I started making
The Partridge Family
together, David grew closer and closer to me and the boys.

He was a sensitive and perceptive boy, and after Jack’s death, I was surprised to learn that he had been aware of how I had always put Jack up on a pedestal and deferred to him and his wishes, even after I had become a star in Hollywood, and Jack had not.

“She was the star, but my father was the maestro,” David characterized it later. “She lived for Jack Cassidy.”

Through the years, it’s been clear to me that David is extremely like Jack. David has his charm, and also his dark side, which led to his battle with drugs, about which he has written so movingly in his book
Could It Be Forever?: My Story
.

He wasn’t good at school, and if you read his book, it is easy to understand why. He confesses that he started taking drugs when he was twelve years old. From cocaine to everything else. Jack and I both knew that he was doing drugs. We just weren’t sure what.

At the height of David’s fame and fortune, he did have a big ego for a time, but he was young and handsome and his success inevitably went to his head. David has had three marriages, and my happiest memory of him is when he married his current wife, Sue, the mother of his son, Beau. David also has a daughter, Katy, by a previous relationship. She is an accomplished actress.

Marrying Sue and having Beau grounded David. She was a songwriter, a performer, and she adored David. And I was glad that he found her. Beau is twenty-one and is talented and has his own band, called Beau Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. A great name.

Professionally, David is still in great demand and has dates all over the country, in particular in casinos.

He is still close to his brothers. Last Mother’s Day, he left a sweet message on my answering machine:

“Dearest Shirley, I wish you a wonderful Mother’s Day and just to tell you that you have been a major part of my life and a major part of my career.

“You have been such a wonderful mother to me. You have helped me in so many ways. I admire you so much and I am so grateful to have had you in my life, and to have you in my life now. And there’s not a day that goes by without me thinking of something that you once said to me. Thank you, Shirley.”

In 1995, Shaun did Willy Russell’s
Blood Brothers
with David on Broadway. Shaun and David were playing fraternal twins who had been separated at birth, and David was thrilled that Shaun joined him in the play. Ever since I’d first met David, I was always aware that he had a good heart, and he loved working with Shaun, as Shaun has always been so down-to-earth. Eventually, though, Shaun gave up the theater in favor of creating, writing, and producing shows himself.

In
2001
, I actually appeared in one of them,
Cover Me: Based on the True Life of an FBI Family
, in which I played the mother of a murderer. It was a good part, but Shaun was a tough director, and when I flubbed my lines for some reason, he was most scathing, and rightly so!

In July 2009, Shaun directed Patrick and David in the TV sitcom
Ruby & the Rockits
. Patrick played Patrick Gallagher, who was taking care of Ruby, the daughter of his rock-star brother, David Gallagher. Although the show pulled a 1.8 million audience in the season premiere, it was shut down after a year. However, today Shaun remains a well-respected writer and producer, and I am proud of him and his brothers, who are all wonderful to me and caring.

I love how they are all so close to one another.

FIFTEEN

Walking On

One of the happiest memories of my career (note:
career
, not
life
) was appearing in the TV movie
Hidden Places
, in 2006, for which I won an Emmy nomination, as I was playing Aunt Batty, against type.

In 2006, too, I was offered a movie part a million miles removed from Laurey, Julie, or Marian the librarian: the part of Grace in the movie
Grandma’s Boy
.

My agent sent me the script, saying that the producer, Adam Sandler, and the director, Nicholaus Goossen, wanted me to pick which of the old ladies I’d like to play.

Well, the biggest role was Mama (which Doris Roberts ended up playing), but my heart was set on playing the geriatric sex bomb, Grace. The script was funny, vulgar, and I adored it.

Making the movie was fun from morning to night. In one scene us old ladies get high on marijuana, which we thought was sugar. And in another, I am half-naked and rolling around in bed with Nick Swardson, who was born in 1976!

My love scene with Nick, who also cowrote the movie, was hysterical. Despite our vast age difference, I tell him that the moment I met him, I had my eye on him and knew instantly that he was the one for me. Consequently, I won’t let him alone, and in the end we do go to bed together. Along the way, I tell him that I once gave Charlie Chaplin a hand job, and chances are he’s never even heard of Charlie.

After we’ve had sex, he turns around and tells me, “You were my first.”

I answer, “You were my three thousand two hundred and twenty-third.”

The movie was really funny, and to this day teenage guys come up to me and, with a twinkle in their eyes, say, “I just loved you in
Grandma’s Boy
!”

Quite recently, I was sitting in an airport lounge when an old lady hobbled up to me. “I loved you in . . .”

I expected her to say
Oklahoma!
or
Carousel
or
The Music Man
.

“I loved you in
Grandma’s Boy
,” she finally said. She was around ninety-six years old.

I loved playing a sexy old lady in
Grandma’s Boy
, not just because the movie was hysterically funny, but because I’ve always believed that old age and sexuality are not incompatible. And that a woman can retain her sexuality at any age.

Marty agrees with me and, in 2009, convinced
Playboy
boss Hugh Hefner that it was time that an older woman displayed her charms in the pages of his magazine.

So Hefner agreed to make me his latest centerfold and invited me up to his mansion for a photo shoot.

When I got there, I was presented with an array of beautiful see-through negligees, but from the first, I made it clear that although I was happy to expose my legs, that would be it.

Everyone present agreed that would be fine.

So they made me up, and I spent all day at the mansion. We selected a flimsy, blue negligee, and I posed all over the Playboy Mansion, leaning against doorways, and lying across a glamorous king-size bed, revealing my legs and looking as fetching as possible.

Afterward, Hefner examined the pictures with his eagle eye and pronounced, “Shirley is lovely, and the pictures are lovely, but I want more nudity.”

Sadly, I had shown the camera all of my body that I was willing to show. “That kind of nudity isn’t right for me anymore,” I had to admit, and the subject was closed.

I wasn’t prepared to bare all for
Playboy
, but I still want to make it clear that I believe that a woman can remain sexual right through her seventies and eighties and beyond. I am living proof of that.

In 1990, I had one ovary and my uterus removed because I had a big tumor there, which luckily was not cancerous. Fortunately this hasn’t affected my sexuality at all.

I’ve always been an extremely sexual woman, easily aroused, and intensely orgasmic. Despite my advanced years, that hasn’t changed a bit, although it can take longer than before for me to achieve sexual fulfillment these days. And it’s often easier for me to achieve it through masturbation and not during intercourse or oral sex.

As I recounted before, Jack initiated me into sex and I had my first orgasm with him, and it was wonderful. Afterward he said, “Whenever you are alone, and you think of me, this is what you can do: you can masturbate.”

Jack was my sexual Svengali. He taught me everything about sex, and he taught me how to masturbate and never to be ashamed about doing it. He would watch me masturbating, and I would love it and never be shy or inhibited in any way.

I’m still the same. And I still masturbate. I don’t romanticize what I am doing. I don’t have a bubble bath beforehand or turn out the lights or play sensual music. I just use Vaseline and a finger. And my fantasies.

Although in my movies I’ve kissed some of the world’s most sexy men—Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, Jimmy Stewart, Rod Steiger, and more—and in my private life was married to sex God Jack Cassidy, I never think of any real-life men when I fantasize during masturbation. Instead, I get aroused by imagining a faceless, macho guy.

And while I’m masturbating, I say his dialogue and mine, out loud. If people heard the explicit words I say, they would be shocked. I love words, and I talk the fantasy through. I don’t need satin sheets or French perfume to get sexually excited. Basically, the more I talk the fantasy through, the more aroused I get, and the stronger my orgasms end up being. I can have one or two a session, and I love each and every one of them.