Shirley Jones (9 page)

When I eventually met Judy in the early sixties, I learned the hard lesson that sometimes it is better not to meet your heroes and heroines in the flesh. We were booked to appear on the same talk show together, and I was thrilled and excited at the prospect of meeting the one and only Judy Garland at last. We met backstage, and Judy drank glass after glass of wine.

I told her that I was a great fan of hers and admired her so much, but instead of responding graciously, she just took another glass of wine and walked over to the window.

“When in hell are they going to put us on!” she complained, impatient and irritated at having to wait for her cue. Although I didn’t know it at the time, she was at the tragic end of her life, and in her own world, due to drugs. She died soon after.

Back in 1956, though, with Judy Garland out of the picture, the part of Julie in
Carousel
was well and truly mine, and
Carousel
and its beautiful score, which included “If I Loved You” and “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” was to become my all-time favorite musical.

At the time, another, less well-known song from
Carousel
resonated with me deeply. “What’s the Use of Wond’rin’?” is Julie’s lyrical answer to her friends’ warning her about Billy. The song included the line “What’s the use of wond’rin’ if he’s good or if he’s bad?” and ended with “He’s your fella and you love him. There’s nothing more to say.”

All of which encapsulated the essence of all my many conversations with Sari and my other friends who continued to warn me about Jack, that he was married and a philanderer, and that he would ultimately break my heart. I listened, but to paraphrase the song, Jack was my fella, I loved him, and there was nothing more for me to say.

For the time being, however, Jack and I were destined to be apart.
Carousel
was scheduled to shoot in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, and he was all set to appear as Leonard Vole in Agatha Christie’s
Witness for the Prosecution
, in Bucks County Playhouse.

During our three-month separation, he would call me every night, and all day long I would look forward to his call. Whenever he could, he came up to Maine to visit me. When, at last, we were reunited after
Carousel
wrapped, he gave me the wonderful news that he and Evelyn had gone to Mexico and obtained a divorce, and that he was now free to marry me. His Parisian promise had not been a lie, after all, and I was overjoyed.

Before flying up to Boothbay Harbor, I spent eight weeks at Twentieth Century Fox, in Hollywood, rehearsing for
Carousel
with my costar, Frank Sinatra, and recording all the beautiful songs from the score, together.

From the first, Frank, fresh from his triumph in
From Here to Eternity
, made it clear that he was so thrilled about starring in
Carousel
and kept telling me that Billy Bigelow was the best role for a male singer there is. So I didn’t have any qualms about accepting when one of his gofers approached me after rehearsals one day and asked me to stop by Frank’s dressing room.

When I got there, the room was empty. I was about to leave when Frank shouted out from the bathroom, “I’ll be right out.” In a couple of minutes, he appeared, dressed only in slacks, bare-chested, with a towel slung around his neck. The prelude to a pass? Maybe.

The prospect of Frank’s making a pass didn’t bother me because I was never afraid of men wanting to pressure me into going to bed with them. For me, the decision was always mine, and mine alone. In Frank’s case, that decision was a firm and resounding no!

My passion for Jack was one reason for my immunity to Frank Sinatra’s fabled charms. But even if Jack hadn’t been in the picture, I would never have gone to bed with Frank. Sure, I admired his voice, but as a man, he had no magic whatsoever for me. He was so self-involved, and every single conversation centered only around him and no one else.

He was also massively insecure. I remember going backstage after one of his concerts years later and telling him how brilliant he’d been.

“Nah, that last note in my third song? I didn’t make it,” Frank said.

“But, Frank, you were fine.”

“Nah, Shirley, I’m gonna go home.” And he did.

Anyway, at my meeting alone with Frank during the
Carousel
rehearsals, for a while he prowled around the dressing room in silence. He stared at me out of the corner of his legendary blue eyes. Striking as those eyes were, I felt decidedly uncomfortable under their stare.

Finally, Frank said, “I think this is going to be a terrific picture, don’t you?”

I nodded.

“I think we ought to rehearse together as much as we can, and make the best movie we can.”

I nodded again.

Then Frank sat down on the couch next to me. “You’re a beautiful girl and a beautiful singer.”

Here it comes,
I thought to myself, because Frank had a reputation of going to bed with every leading lady he ever worked with.

He leaned closer to me. “I really want to talk to you about this role, who we are, what the script really means,” he said earnestly.

So Frank really did want to talk about
Carousel
and wasn’t going to make a move on me! I breathed a sigh of relief.

As he knew that I had worked with Rodgers and Hammerstein on
Oklahoma!
and was under contract to them, he asked me all about them. He quizzed me on how they felt about
Carousel
, why it was their favorite of all their musicals, and their plans for the movie.

When I left Frank’s dressing room a while later, I was full of admiration for his dedication to playing the part of Billy Bigelow and to making
Carousel
a giant success.

After we’d finished rehearsing in the studio, I traveled up to Boothbay Harbor ahead of Frank and fell in love with the town at first sight. I had my little cabin on the water and, with my love of nature and animals, was in heaven. I’d grown up in a small country town with cows and horses roaming around, and Boothbay Harbor was so darling, so familiar, so much my kind of place, and I was so happy there. It only remained for Frank to arrive so that we could start shooting
Carousel
together.

All of us, including Frank, had been told beforehand that some of the
Carousel
scenes had to be shot twice because of the complexities of the new process, CinemaScope 55, which would help guarantee the movie’s success. We all knew that the new system was a crowd-pleaser and were happy to go along with whatever it took.

On the first day of shooting, we were scheduled to shoot the first scene between Frank and me. I was on set, waiting for Frank to arrive, when his limo pulled up. Frank got out of the limo and took one look at the two lots of different cameras already in position. “I signed to do one movie, not two,” he growled, then got right back into his limo and ordered the driver to take him straight back to the airport. Frank had walked out on
Carousel
on the very first day of filming.

Producer Henry Ephron (whose first shot as a producer was this, after a distinguished career as a screenwriter and playwright) was on the set and witnessed what happened. With tears rolling down his cheeks, he came over to me and asked if I knew where Gordon MacRae, my wonderful
Oklahoma!
costar, was. I told him Gordon was in Tahoe, doing his nightclub act. Can you get ahold of him? Ephron asked, and handed me a bunch of quarters.

From a pay phone by the water, I called the Tahoe hotel where Gordon was performing, got him on the phone, and asked him point-blank if he would like to play Billy Bigelow in
Carousel
.

Gordon didn’t pause for even a second. “Give me three days. I gotta lose ten pounds.”

And after a three-day diet of half a grapefruit and an egg, three times a day, and nothing else, Gordon lost ten pounds, then signed to play Billy Bigelow in
Carousel
.

Gordon had saved the day and I was glad, but I still couldn’t quiet the little voice inside my head that kept asking over and over why Frank Sinatra had quit a role he so desperately longed to play in a movie that he wanted to be in so much.

The official answer was that “one-take Frank,” as he was known in the business, wasn’t prepared to do two takes for
Carousel
. But he had known way ahead of time that
Carousel
would be filmed twice for CinemaScope 55. So why did he balk when he saw two lots of cameras on the set and then walk out without another word?

Through the years, whenever I saw Frank, I tried over and over to get him to answer that question, but with no luck. Every time I broached the subject, he would bristle and say, “Drop it, Shirl!”

On February 14, 1958, I appeared on Frank’s show with him, and in a moment replete with irony we sang the duet “If I Loved You,” the romantic ballad from
Carousel
, the song that we would have sung in the movie together.

I saw Frank for the last time toward the end of his life at a benefit. He was called up onstage but was so frail that he had to have someone help him up the stairs. Once he got to the microphone, he started to speak, then said, “To hell with this, I can’t get anything out right now!” and turned around and walked off again. As he was coming down the stairs, he gave a nod in my direction and said, “Hiya, Shirl, how ya doing?”

I smiled at him. He died shortly afterward, without ever telling me the real reason he walked out on
Carousel
.

I finally found out the truth a few years ago, when I was at a press conference and an old-time journalist at the back of the room yelled out to me, “Hey, Shirley, do you know the real reason Frank left
Carousel
?”

“Sure,” I said confidently. “He had a big thing about not doing the same scene twice. He only ever did one take and was proud of it.”

“No, Shirl, that wasn’t the real reason.”

According to the journalist, at the time Frank was due to start filming
Carousel,
his grand passion, Ava Gardner, was shooting another film and was getting lonesome for Frank.

She called him and, according to the journalist, said, “You better get your ass down here, Frankie, otherwise I’m going to have an affair with my costar.”

Poor Frank didn’t know that another actress on the shoot was already having an affair with the costar, and that Ava was making an empty threat to Frank.

But because Ava was his dream girl, the woman he would love for the rest of his life, Frank dropped everything, walked out of
Carousel,
and flew to be with Ava, to prevent her from having an affair she probably wasn’t going to have anyway. Mystery solved. Part of me felt sorry for Frank and understood why he dropped everything for Ava. And I did love his singing.

A footnote to my Frank Sinatra recollections: When I appeared on his show, I rehearsed beforehand with Nelson Riddle, and Nelson asked me, “What key do you sing in, Shirley?”

“I don’t know. I can’t read music. But I’ll sing it in whatever key Frank wants,” I said, leaving Nelson shocked to the core that I couldn’t read music.

In any event, when Frank sang “If I Loved You,” he sang it with warmth, passion, and emotion. As far as I was concerned, Frank Sinatra was always a gentleman.

I never encountered Frank’s rough-and-ready Rat Pack persona, but I did meet Sammy Davis Jr. down the line and learn more about what made him tick.

Sammy adored Frank. Frank was his mentor, and if ever a hotel wouldn’t allow Sammy to stay there because he was African-American, Frank wouldn’t stay at that hotel, either. When Sammy died, Frank did everything to help his widow, Altovise.

Long before that, in the sixties, I met Sammy when Jack took me over to his home in Beverly Hills one night. Lines of cocaine were laid out on every table, and porno was playing on all the TV screens throughout the house. I just wasn’t interested. Drugs didn’t interest me at all, nor, in those days, did porno. Jack did nothing to pressure me to stay, and we left together without taking cocaine or watching any porno.

Not to say that I was totally innocent as far as drugs were concerned. Around the same time, Jack and I were in bed together one night when he suddenly produced a capsule and said he wanted me to try it.

“It’s really great,” he said, “and particularly wonderful if you do it during sex.”

Such was my trust in Jack that the next time we had sex, when he cracked open the capsule, I sniffed the drug amyl nitrite (also known as poppers) for the first time in my life. I couldn’t help confessing to Jack that the effect was amazing and enhanced my orgasm immensely. From then on, whenever Jack could get some amyl nitrite, we used it together during sex and loved how it increased our enjoyment.

As for porno, one night during the late sixties, my idol Anthony Newley invited Jack and me to dinner with him and his wife, Joan Collins, at their Beverly Hills home. I was elated to be meeting Tony, whom I admired so much as a singer.

The evening started off with drinks. Tony, the perfect host, was funny and charming, and Joan, who was wearing a low-cut something or other, seemed like an interesting woman.