Shirley Jones' Stories

Years before he married Annette, I was coming out of Saks Fifth Avenue, in Beverly Hills, when Warren, always a world-class Casanova, strolled up to me and said,

“You are so beautiful. Would you go out with me?” “I’m married, Warren,” I said, surprised that he didn’t know.

“That doesn’t make any difference.” He sounded genuinely surprised that I would for even one second consider my marital status the slightest impediment to our embarking on a liaison.

As poised and exuberant as Shirley MacLaine was and is, in recent years I managed to surprise her soon after I’d stopped dying my hair and let it go naturally white. Shirley took one look at me, and her eyes widened in shock and she said, “Shirley Jones, that’s very brave of you. I take my hat off to you. You’ve got a lot of guts to let your hair go white in this business.”

.... When I learned that Mae West was appearing in person at a nightclub called Twin Coaches, which was on a little country road in Belle Vernon, a mile from Smithton, I immediately booked to see the show.

Belle Vernon being a small town like Smithton, someone must have seen me buying the tickets for Mae’s show, as soon after, I received a telephone call from one of her assistants inviting me backstage to see her after the show. It was summer, and that day the temperature had climbed to a sweltering one hundred degrees and rising.

When I was taken backstage to see Mae, I discovered her lying on a couch, half-naked, with a fur coat draped over her. Tentatively, I asked if she would pose for a photograph with me.

Mae looked me up and down. “Honey, where’s your fur?” “I don’t have my fur with me, Miss West. It’s summer.” Mae pulled herself up to her full height (which wasn’t much, despite her towering high heels).

“I don’t take photos without a fur, and nor should you.” She stalked over to the closet, pulled out a fur coat, and flung it at me. “Put that on, then we’ll take a photo together.” I did. And was photographed with Mae West.

My audience with Mae West, however, was not an accident. When she learned that I was coming to see her show, she specifically asked to meet me and invited me backstage afterward. Mae West was a legend, a movie star, and world famous

And me? I was Shirley Mae Jones, a chorus girl from a small town in Pennsylvania, who’d never made a movie in her life. But that was the moment when all that was about to change. Mae invited me backstage to see her in her dressing room because she knew it. The news of my casting as Laurey in Oklahoma! had spread like wildfire, promoted by the Rodgers and Hammerstein organization itself, in the world press: it was the story of a small-town Cinderella bound for Hollywood and stardom. Mae West had read about me, and hence my invitation

Rod Steiger :

Rod Steiger, however, was another story. A Method actor, the acclaimed star of On the Waterfront and a perfect foil to Marlon Brando, Rod, a handsome if eccentric character, was also somewhat of a ladies’ man.

Though married to an actress named Sally Gracie, that didn’t prevent him from making a play for other women whenever he felt like it He was nine years older than me, and while he didn’t exactly make a physical pass at me as Richard Rodgers had, he asked a great many leading questions that left me with no doubt whatsoever about his true intentions toward me.

“Are you one of those girls who wants to wait until you are married before you do anything?” was his opening gambit.

“Perhaps,” I said. More questions followed. “Have you ever had an affair with a man?” Rod asked. I knew what he meant. Had I ever been to bed with a man? Had I ever had sexual intercourse? I hadn’t, and I told him so.

Undeterred (or perhaps spurred on) by my innocence, Rod said, “Well, then, would you like to have your first affair with me?” I shook my head. “Why not? What’s the matter with you?” I didn’t answer.

That was Rod Steiger’s one and only attempt at seducing me. Afterward, I discovered that the canny Fred Zinnemann had taken Rod aside and asked him to take care of me because I was so young. Chastened, Rod agreed. Fortunately for me, he was enough of a gentleman never to break his word to Zinnemann.

Soon after, he approached me somewhat sheepishly and said with a question implicit in his voice, “I was told that you are very young and that I mustn’t do anything to upset you. . . .” “You didn’t,” I said, and the subject was closed.

Rod and I ended getting along so well that after filming finished....

Rod and I ended getting along so well that after filming finished and he was cast to play Jud in the European stage tour in which I would be playing Laurey again .....So, too, initially, was the tour’s director, Rouben Mamoulian

However, experienced as Mamoulian, a fiery Armenian, was as a director, during rehearsals he was in for a surprise when he encountered Rod Steiger’s unusual acting technique. Unprepared for Rod’s Lee Strasberg style of Method acting and Rod’s tendency to mumble (more pronounced onstage than in the movie), he kept yelling for Rod to speak up.

Rod studiously ignored him. Worse still..... Enraged, Mamoulian yelled, “Get out of my theater! Get out of my life!”

Stunned, Rod said, “What the hell is the matter with you?” “You’re fired!” Poor Rod never did understand why. I guess I should have taken note of the negative aspect of Rod’s much-vaunted Method training but probably didn’t, as years later I considered training at Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio,

the bastion of the Method system, myself. Fortunately, before I was due to make a final commitment to the Actors Studio, I was invited to sit and watch eight classes there.

As I studied Lee Strasberg and his approach to his hapless students, I was appalled. One student was instructed by Strasberg to pretend to be a dog and lick the floor beneath his paws. He complied.

Another student was told to imagine that he had blood running down his chest, while Lee Strasberg conducted a nonstop monologue. Nothing Strasberg said had any connection with the play the actor was appearing in, or the character he was playing. I quickly concluded that the Actors Studio approach was not for me.

I much preferred the Bette Davis school of acting. She was kept waiting one day to do her scene at the Studio while another actor interminably discussed his motivations for taking off his shoe, his mood, his emotions. In the end, an exasperated Bette burst out, “Just drop it on the floor. It’s only a goddamn shoe!” I agreed with Bette. After observing my fourth class at the Actors Studio, I walked out. The Actors Studio and Method acting were definitely not me

She is one of 12 women to win an Oscar for playing a Hooker

Why did she cling to that hairdo?

Jack Cassidy :

......That night, after the curtain finally fell on the show, in a romantic, little Roman hotel, Jack Cassidy made love to me for the first time. I was a virgin, having never gone “all the way” with anyone before.

I had resolved to lose my virginity with the right man. That night, in Rome, I knew Jack was the right man. He was a great lover, that night and every night afterward.

He could go on for hours, have two or three orgasms, then wake up in the morning and make love to me all over again. He was inventive and extremely well endowed (a blessing that all his sons, in particular David, inherited).

He had no inhibitions about sex, no barriers, and he taught me to be the same, to be free about sex and to openly want it and love it.

Through the years, Jack and I had sex wherever and whenever we wanted—on the floor of a sailboat in the middle of the Caribbean, in the dressing room at whichever theater we were appearing in, in the bathtub, and, at the height of The Partridge Family, now and again Jack would pick me up from the studio in the car, then drive us into the garage adjacent to our house, where he would have intercourse with me in the backseat. With me, Mrs. Partridge!

That night in Rome, the only thing that marred my bliss during sex with Jack was the fear of becoming pregnant.

He didn’t have a condom, and I hadn’t been fitted with a coil or a diaphragm, either. But although he pulled out at the last moment, he didn’t really hold back and afterward instructed me to get into the bathtub and make sure “to get as much of it out as you can.”

Not the most romantic ending to my first night of love.

Now that Jack and I were having an affair, and the sizzling chemistry between us was so obvious, word of our illicit relationship traveled back to America so fast that it made my head spin.

Within days, Rodgers and Hammerstein, set on smashing my love affair with Jack, ordered me home from Europe immediately, earlier than initially planned,

Long before I was finally cast as Julie in Carousel, the rumor mill had it that Judy Garland, fresh from her triumph in A Star Is Born, would be playing Julie instead. When I found out that she wasn’t and that the role was mine, I was flattered, as Judy Garland had always been one of my idols.

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

Frank Sinatra :

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.

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....

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.

Thanks for this, OP! I just ordered the complete Partridge Family DVD set in a fit of nostalgia. Looking forward to more.

Frank had walked out on Carousel on the very first day of filming. Producer Henry Ephron 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!”

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.

Her frankness about sex is kind of creepy, especially how she talks about her son's and stepsons inheriting their big penises from their father. Something isn't right about this.

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.

She didn’t have a maid on call that night but, instead, had made dinner herself. I was most impressed that she served three different kinds of food so we would have a choice between chicken, fish, or steak. Her cooking was good, and we ate quite a lot.

Afterward, the four of us moved into the beautiful living room and lounged on a big couch while we all had after-dinner drinks and chatted about show business.

All of a sudden, Tony Newley got up and announced, “Right, we’ve got some porno movies. Why don’t we all get naked and watch together?” Although the rest of the invitation was unspoken, this was the era of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, and it was clear what Tony was leading up to—swinging.

Jack gave me a piercing look. “How do you feel about that, Shirley?

I shook my head. “Not me.”

To his credit, Jack said straight out, “My wife is a very beautiful and sexy woman, but she really isn’t interested in anything like that. And, listen, guys, it’s late for us.” And we left.

That was then. Now, though, although swinging has never appealed to me in the least, I have to admit that in recent years, my attitude toward watching porno movies has undergone a radical transformation.

To return to the Rat Pack once more: Everyone has always assumed that Frank Sinatra was the leader of the Rat Pack. But in reality, Dean Martin was the true leader.

Dean dictated how a number should be done. Dean told me that now and again when Frank wanted to rehearse a number, Dean would say, “Nah, I want to go and play a round of golf,” and that’s what he’d do instead.

Then he just turned up for the show and performed his part in the act his way, with no rehearsal. He did drink, of course, but not during a show. Drinking onstage was just part of his act.

When Frank said at the very end that he wanted to take the Rat Pack show on the road one more time, Dean said, “I don’t want to go on the road again. I’m outta here,” and the Rat Pack never appeared onstage again.

I adored Dean Martin, appeared on his show four times, and thought he was great. He was so spontaneous. He never rehearsed anything. If I had to do a song with him, he would go through it a couple of times, and that would be that. Dean and I were fond of each other, and we were neighbors in Bel Air.

I always took my kids to the Hamburger Hamlet on Sunset Boulevard, and when Dean was no longer performing, that became his hangout as well, and I always used to see him there. One night, Marty and I had dinner in the back room of the Hamburger Hamlet. When we came out to get our car, Dean was sitting at the bar, alone, watching TV. His teeth were out, he was munching spaghetti, and he was drunk.

He saw us and said, “Hi, Shirl, howya doing, honey?” and we chatted for a minute or two. I glanced out the window and noticed that his white Rolls-Royce was parked outside, but that he didn’t have a driver waiting for him in it So I said, “Listen, Dean, why don’t you let me and Marty drive you home?”

He shook his head. “Nah, I’ll be fine.” “You’ve been drinking,” I said as gently as possible. “Don’t be silly, Shirley. I know what I’m doing. I’m gonna drive myself home. I do it all the time.” I gave him a kiss on the cheek, and Marty and I left.

Soon after, Dean was dead. Was Dean Martin an alcoholic? I don’t know. Whatever the truth, it isn’t my way to be judgmental. After all, I’m the daughter of a brewer, and I do like my martini every afternoon at five. But that’s it. In fact, Marty and I won a major lawsuit in the eighties after the National Enquirer claimed he had driven me to drink!

Their story claimed that I was drunk by three every afternoon. The entire cast and crew of The Partridge Family confirmed that was not the truth, and Marty and I won the lawsuit. We deserved our victory, but I do know all about drink and drinking. First, because of the family business, and all those hours I spent as a child playing pool and pinball in bars, then because I was married to Jack (who introduced me to drinking), and also because one of my favorite parts was playing an alcoholic Sunshine Girl in the Playhouse 90 production “The Big Slide,” with former circus clown and vaudeville comic Red Skelton.

I bought and read Shirley Jones' book.

I know that we live in a time when everything is out in the open but I wonder If Shirley maybe gave us Too Much Information. She said that David Cassidy's nickname is 'Donk" because he's hung like a donkey. And at the end of the book she talks about herself masturbating with a jar of Vaseline in her hand and telling her then husband Marty when she can't, on occasion, reach a climax this way. It was like something out of a tabloid.

[quote]Her frankness about sex is kind of creepy, especially how she talks about her son's and stepsons inheriting their big penises from their father. Something isn't right about this.

She has a reputation as something of a good two shoes from The Partridge Family, the same way Julie Andrews does for The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins. So she was probably keen to demolish that because it makes you seem boring. And of course scandal doesn't hurt when you are peddling a book.

Jack Cassidy' bisexuality :

We’d long been lovers, but I wanted my wedding night to be special. My trousseau, I decided, should not be white, given that I was no longer a virgin. Instead, I made up my mind that on this special night, I would transform myself into the ultimate vamp. I purchased a sheer, black lace baby-doll outfit, with black satin high heels. Funny wedding night

After I laid it all out on our bed, I slipped into the bathroom to freshen up. When I came out, Jack was dressed in my outfit, complete with high heels. Then the doorbell rang, and there was my agent, Gus Schirmer, with a bottle of champagne in hand. When he saw Jack, the look on Gus’s face was priceless

August 6, 1956, wasn’t just our wedding day. That day the New York Times announced that Gordon MacRae and I would star in “You’re the Top,” a ninety-minute CBS tribute to Cole Porter in October, which turned out to be the show that indirectly led to my fateful appearance in Playhouse 90’s “The Big Slide.” Cole Porter gave Jack his first big break on Broadway.

Soon after our wedding night, Jack told me exactly what motivated Cole to hire an inexperienced sixteen-year-old from Jamaica, Queens, to dance in the chorus of his sophisticated Broadway show. Despite the years that have passed, I remember Jack’s story word for word.

Most women who married a handsome man and assumed that they were going to live happily ever after with him, but then heard the story I heard from Jack, would probably remember it word for word as well.

Me: “So, Jack, did you ever meet Cole Porter?”

Jack: “Meet him! I had sex with him.”

Me (after I’d picked myself up off the floor): “You did?”

Jack: “He was about to cast a new show. I wanted a job in it, and that was the way to get it. Somehow, someone invited me up for drinks at Cole Porter’s apartment at the Waldorf, and then everybody left and I was alone with Cole.”

Me (holding my breath): . . . Jack: “I told a few funny stories, probably flirted with him some. Then the conversation stopped, and I took my penis out and said, ‘Do you want some of this?’ ”

Jack’s endowment was so vast, so desirable, that I had no doubt whatsoever about Cole Porter’s answer

I was shocked, but not dreadfully, when Jack said straight out, “I’m not gay, but if I need a job, I’ll do whatever it takes to get it.”

For whatever reason, partly because I loved him so much and for me he could do no wrong, and partly because my career had evolved so quickly, so easily, and so painlessly and it had not been that way for Jack, I understood.

In a way, I was happy that Jack had told me the truth. I didn’t want him to keep anything from me. Besides, I didn’t want to hear about Jack and Cole Porter from anyone else.

But when I read Gerald Clarke’s biography Truman Capote, based on his interviews with Truman, I got a much more negative slant on the Cole Porter story than the version Jack presented me with.

Clarke quotes Capote as revealing, “There was another story Cole told me that I didn’t use because it sounded rather unpleasant and I liked Cole. It was about his long affair with that actor, Jack Cassidy.” Long affair? Jack didn’t give me the impression that he had more than a one-evening encounter with Cole.

According to Clarke, Jack was uncharacteristically cruel to Cole, and I still have difficulty in believing the following story Capote claimed Cole Porter had told him: “Cassidy would say, ‘Do you want this cock? Then come and get it.’ “

Then he would stand away so that Cole, whose legs had been paralyzed in that awful riding accident, would have to crawl toward him. Every time Cole got near, Cassidy would move further away.

This went on for half an hour or forty-five minutes before Cassidy would finally stop and let Cole have it.” Difficult as it is for me to accept the possibility of truth in Capote’s anecdote, I do know that Jack did have a dark side.

When he was young, he didn’t want to go into the army, so on the application, he said he was gay, which meant that the army didn’t take him.

That story shocked and disappointed me. Jack would never have labeled himself as bisexual, but I do know that he had had sex with men. When he was touring, he told me he roomed with various gay guys.

I never questioned him about how many gay guys he’d had sex with. I didn’t want to know. Ignorance is bliss, as they say.

He and director/choreographer Bob Fosse, creator of Sweet Charity, Cabaret, and Chicago, lived together on the road, but I don’t think they had an affair with each other.

Fosse was a notorious womanizer, and I do know from Jack that he and Fosse often had threesomes with women. Jack, Bob, and a woman.

In the seventies, when sexual promiscuity was the order of the day for many people, Jack did try to get me into a foursome with the handsome actor Pete Duel, who was just thirty years old, and Pete’s girlfriend. Pete and Jack met when Jack appeared on the TV series Alias Smith and Jones, in which Pete played Joshua Smith.

They became close and had plans to star in a play together. Jack and I were living in Bel Air at the time, and Pete and his girlfriend came over for a swim party.

We were all in the pool when Jack said, “Hey, let’s all take off our clothes and go inside and have a foursome!” I got out of the pool at once and said to Jack, “You go ahead, but I think I’ll forgo this.” Then I went into the living room.

After a few moments, Pete Deuel came in, put his arms around me, and said, “You know something, you’re a very special lady.” “I’m sorry, I know that people do this, but it isn’t something I want to get involved in.” He said, “I admire you for that.” And that was it. Pete Duel was nice, and I was sad when he shot himself to death just a year later

After Jack and I got married, our first apartment was on East Fifty-Second Street and the East River Drive in New York City. .... Sometimes, I felt that I wasn’t perfect enough for him

He wanted me to be sophisticated, a woman of the word, a party giver of distinction, a great hostess. At least, half of him did, but I knew deep down that he would have resented it bitterly had I ever well and truly upstaged him.

Jack wanted me to remain the small-town girl he’d met and married and who always ceded the spotlight to him So I followed my instincts, and although I learned to paint, to read more, to enjoy serious plays at the theater, all to please Jack, I made sure that when I was with him, I always stayed in the background.

When we were socializing with other people, I’d spend most of the evening sitting quietly on a chair in the corner, not saying a word and living up to Jack’s nickname for me of Mouse.

Soon after Jack and I were married, I got pregnant. My manager, Ruth Aarons, was horrified, and so was Jack. Now she and Jack were in unison, telling me that I had no alternative but to abort my unborn baby. Both of them said that my career was on the upswing and having a baby right now would be a disaster for it.

Abortion was illegal in those days, and I went through a great deal of soul-searching before agreeing to one. But Ruth was adamant. Having a child would end my career once and for all. So, against all my better instincts, and much against my will, I agreed.

Relieved, Ruth volunteered, “We have a doctor. . . .” I had the sense that I wasn’t the first of Ruth’s illustrious clients to pay a visit to this doctor. Which didn’t make me feel any better, but at least he wasn’t a backstreet butcher.

David Cassidy:

...At the time, though, David didn’t want to be around me, and I understood and accepted his emotions wholeheartedly.

Jack, however, did not and would continually ask me to take David to the park. But David would always refuse because he still blamed me for Jack’s having divorced David’s mother. And his mother continued to fuel the flames of his negative feelings about me. When I became David’s stepmother, he didn’t talk to me much at all. We were both acutely aware that his mother was his mother, and I was not

If anyone had compelled me to judge Jack’s parenting skills during those years, I’d have been forced to admit that he was never much of a father.

He never went to any of David’s Little League games, after promising he would attend. To Jack, one phone call telling David, “I’ll be there in spirit,” took care of any obligation to be there in reality.

Jack neglected David shamefully and, down the line, would do the same to our three sons together, Shaun, Patrick, and Ryan. 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

Jack sounds like he was a horrible man. Why'd she marry him? It was that dick. She was dickmatized.

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

She really was a Size Queen, wasn't she? That jar of Vaseline in her hand is starting to make sense.

Thanks OP

It's so inappropriate to speak about her kids like that. Florence Henderson pulled that same shit with her book, when she accused the former mayor of NYC of giving her crabs, her "date" with TV son Barry Williams...it all just sounds like a sordid, famewhorish way of getting attention.

Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton :

....Elizabeth Taylor sat just a few tables from ours, and she looked utterly stunning. Years later, when she was married to Richard Burton, she invited us to a fund-raiser in her home.

By the time we arrived, Richard was quite drunk, and when Elizabeth introduced me to him, he slurred, “Shirley Jones! You must be Welsh!” “Yes, I am.” “No wonder you can sing like that then,” Richard exclaimed. “Can you sing in Gaelic?” I said I couldn’t. “Well, then, I’ll teach you!”

He grabbed me by the hand, pulled me into one of the bedrooms, and closed the door behind us. Oh, no, I thought. Here we go.

But instead of making a pass at me, Richard started to sing heartily in Gaelic, then handed me a song sheet, exhorting, “Just practice it!” “But, Richard, it’s far too hard for me. I can’t sing in Gaelic. I wasn’t even born in Wales!”

Richard just laughed, and soon we were singing together at the top of our voices.

Then the door swung open, and there stood Elizabeth, fuming. “You get your ass out here, Richard. We have a few people who wanna say hello to you.” She dragged him away.

I am sure she was worried he was going to make a pass at me. Given his track record, she had every reason to be.

... Like many other wives of unfaithful husbands, I began to assiduously turn a blind eye to Jack' rampant infidelity. I believed I was in part to blame for his infidelity by being more successful than he was.

So-called friends would whisper to me, “Jack’s leading lady is crazy about him and . . .,” but I never reacted. I never confronted Jack or asked him any questions. Instead, I pushed all thoughts of his infidelity right out of my mind.

It wasn’t difficult for me to adopt that tactic because I was so secure as a person and as a performer. You could say that I opted to play ostrich and stick my head in the sand. Even though I had married Jack knowing that he was a womanizer, I had avoided thinking about whether he would be faithful to me.

I knew he was a handsome, sexual man who liked women, and I figured that if he was inclined to be unfaithful, then that would happen, and I would just have to put up with it.

I also passionately hoped that, somehow, he would be faithful to me anyway. Looking back through the prism of the years, I still don’t think I would have handled Jack’s infidelity any differently. We had three boys, and although I had married the prince of my dreams, all these other would-be princesses were lurking about, desperate to snare him. And many did, at least for a short time each.

Sadly, I was not alone in marrying the love of my life, then discovering that he had sexual passions other than me. It was an age-old, all-too-common occurrence in marriages. In some ways, I coped with infidelity more easily than might most women.

I had my own life, and many men were courting me. That I didn’t succumb to them at that time in my life is another issue. But I did have options, even though I didn’t take them. Despite knowing that Jack wasn’t true to me, I never felt insecure or wanting, nor did I change anything about myself because, through it all, Jack still treated me as if I meant all the world to him

She sounds a little confused at R33; I assume that the drunk Richard Burton would have been trying to get her to sing in Welsh, not Gaelic. Maybe she thinks they're the same language. Also, in all these quotations she seems pretty intent on letting us know how concerned she was about the constant passes famous men made at her, and how self-controlled she was most of the time.

His approach did change somewhat when we’d been married for about three years and he inexplicably started to be upfront about his infidelities, almost as if he wanted me to approve of them.

He declared, “You do understand, Mouse, that when I’m out on the road for a long time, there is going to be a woman in my life? It won’t mean anything, but I’m very sexual, and my infidelities won’t take anything away from you in any shape or form. You are always going to be the love of my life, always.”

“That doesn’t make me happy” was all I could muster, once I’d digested the enormity of Jack’s words. “I know, Mouse, but I want you to know that it doesn’t mean a thing. That’s just how I am,” he went on blithely.

By that time, Shaun and Patrick were already born, I was more deeply in love with Jack than ever, and I guess I just put his infidelities to one side. I thought to myself, If this is the man whom I married, and this is the way it is going to be, then I am going to have to accept it. After that, the subject was closed, and neither Jack nor I ever raised it again.

Whenever I heard that he was having affairs all over town, I just lived with it. He was always discreet, and I never got anonymous phone calls or poison-pen letters rubbing my face in his infidelities. I never caught him with another woman; I never doubted his love for me. I never asked myself why I wasn’t enough for him. I was his wife, and that was enough for me.

Besides, he was the father of my children, and he always came home to me in the end, so I was happy. As the years went by, now and again other people did make allusions to Jack’s womanizing ways.

In 1971, he appeared with Bette Davis in the movie Bunny O’Hare, playing a police lieutenant, and soon after Bette and I were on The Tonight Show together.

Afterward, Bette took me aside and asked if I was still married to Jack Cassidy. I asked why she wanted to know, and she shook her head disapprovingly. “When I was making the movie with Jack, he said, ‘Bette, just remember that I am going to get you into the goddamn bed before this movie is over.’

R16, I agree. I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that Jack Cassidy was her first lover. She may have gotten her attitudes about sex from him and been tutored in his (from what I've heard) somewhat degenerate ways. Maybe she was influenced not to have any boundaries, or still enjoys thinking of herself as the pure-maiden-turned-nympho. The comment about her sons' and stepson's genitalia is way over the line.

I don’t think Jack meant what he was saying to Bette. He was just teasing her. But if he wasn’t, if he did try to get her into bed and succeeded, I didn’t care.

Jack loved me, and the more women he had, the less threatened I became. Just one woman, who was so special to Jack that he gave up all other women, however, would be quite a different story, one that would threaten me immeasurably, one I would one day be forced to grapple with.

Jack’s infidelity was one negative aspect to our marriage, and his lack of parenting skills was another. I had to be both mother and father to the children. Jack was open about his being so much more interested in his career than in his sons.

He would accept any theatrical job anywhere, even if it meant he would miss important events in the children’s lives. Whenever I was offered a movie that shot over Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, or the children’s birthdays, I would stipulate in my contract that I had to have those days off. If the movie company refused to allow me those days off, I immediately turned down the job.

Whenever possible, I took the children with me on location, along with their nanny, and I was content. “He’s yer feller and you love him,” Oscar Hammerstein wrote, “and all the rest is talk.” All in all, I loved Jack deeply, and that was all that counted for me.

Glenn Ford :

...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.”

Marlon Brando :

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.

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.

For the first time in my marriage, I was unfaithful to Jack. And I didn’t feel guilty at all. At last, the goose was doing the same thing as the gander. . . . 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.

She turns down Pete Duel and all the others, but she finally decides to fuck around she picks Stephen Elliott? WTF.

R45 Whatever floats your boat

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

Johnny Carson :

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

Henry Fonda :

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 was glad that Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda were to be my costars.

I was extremely comfortable working with him. Moreover, he was such a natural and always ready to help his fellow actors. Working with Henry Fonda, however, wasn’t as much of a picnic.

He was so remote, so cold, so unlike Jimmy, that it was hard for me to believe that they were best friends. Henry Fonda made it extremely clear from the start that he didn’t want to communicate with me or anyone else on the movie, other than Jimmy.

Whenever we met in makeup, Fonda would be sitting in the makeup chair, ramrod straight, and I would say, “Hi, Hank, how are you?” He would just look away and make sure that there was no eye contact between us.

I never got to know who he was as a human being, which was probably his intention and just the way he liked it. I didn’t let Fonda’s remoteness trouble me. I was so happy working with Jimmy, and I loved my part and the script and everything else connected with the movie. Besides, I had just read the best TV-pilot script I’d ever read—for a show to be called The Partridge Family

By now, David Cassidy, my stepson, was in his late teens. Through the years, I’d felt sorry for him when Jack was too hard on him, particularly when my kids, Shaun, Patrick, and Ryan, were born, and I felt Jack didn’t give David nearly enough attention. But I soon revised my opinion because, as time went on, Jack didn’t give our kids together that much attention, either.

In his early teens, David let his hair grow long, until it reached right down to his shoulders, and Jack wasn’t crazy about that, nor, it transpired, was my mother.

When I was pregnant with Ryan and had just a week to go before my cesarean was scheduled, she came to stay so that she could help me when the baby was born. Fifteen-year-old David was staying with us. My mother took one look at David, with his shoulder-length hair, and said, “David, that hair looks terrible!”

David declared defiantly, “I like it!” Undeterred, my mother, who, I realized in retrospect, was blind drunk, ran out of the room, got a pair of scissors, and tried to cut David’s hair. David dodged my mother as best he could and yelled, “Get away from me!” Horrified, I jumped in and grabbed the scissors from my mother.

David breathed a sigh of relief, and peace within the family was restored, among the kids at least. But not for me. Twenty minutes later, I went into labor from sheer shock at what my mother had almost done to poor David..

When David was starting out in the theater, and auditioning for jobs, plus attending acting classes whenever he could, Jack insisted that David take a part-time job and found him one himself. Jack meant well for his eldest son, I know, trying to instill self-reliance and independence in him, but Jack still made an error of judgment when he got David a thankless job starting out in the mail room of a textile company based in New York City.

David was paid $2 an hour, which netted him $38 a week, which hardly paid for his train fare commuting from Irvingtonon-Hudson into the city each day.

No comments about scissoring with the delicate, some say flower-like, Miyoshi Umeki while making "Eddie's Father?"

Jack also suddenly decreed that David should not wear his habitual uniform of a trusty pair of jeans, a T-shirt, and tennis shoes to work every day. One Saturday, in classic-Jack grand-seigneur style, he announced to David that he was taking him into the city to buy him a suit.

David was overwhelmed by Jack’s sudden burst of fatherly interest and generosity and was ecstatic.

So Jack took David to Jack’s very own tailor, Roland Meledandri, and first selected two suits for himself. Then he turned his attention to David and selected not only a suit for him, but also a stylish overcoat, a flawless sports jacket, and a perfect pair of slacks.

David was overjoyed, even more so when the bill for those clothes was presented: $800! His father had spent $800 on him!

Poor David came down with an unpleasant bump, however, when Jack informed him that David now owed him $800. Every single solitary cent of it.

And that Jack expected David to start paying it off at $15 a week. Almost half his $38 weekly salary. To his credit, David worked like a dog and ultimately paid Jack back every single cent.

Yet, David felt that his father had tricked him into going into debt and felt betrayed. I couldn’t blame David one iota.

But to do Jack justice, he did try to help David launch his show-business career. Jack paid a photographer to shoot professional photographs of David, then found him an agent and, most important of all, prevailed on our manager, Ruth Aarons, to manage David as well.

Jack, was extremely jealous that David was in The Partridge Family with me.

To be fair to Jack, he said from the start that he thought David was taking a wrong career path, that he’d be far better off taking singing and acting lessons and working on Broadway instead. I didn’t necessarily agree with Jack, but as a stepmother, I always tried to remain outside of the arguments between Jack and David.

I had top billing in the show, which aired on Friday nights at 8:30 p.m. The initial plan had been that I would be the band’s lead singer on the show, but then Ruth Aarons suggested David for the part of Keith Partridge and informed the producers that he could sing and play instruments, as well, and would be terrific singing all the songs, which were happy-go-lucky, light, and positive.

Once the producers heard David sing and play, they decided that he was perfect and would make a wonderful lead singer for the band. I was happy for him

I had a strong sense that the show would be a hit. It was new and funny and the music was good, and David had a chance to make it as a teen idol. The music wasn’t my thing, but I felt that it could succeed with the kids of this new generation

Sadly, at the time when David and I started working in The Partridge Family together, and David’s career hit the heights and he attained instant stardom, Jack’s career was downward spiraling.

Too many of the Broadway shows in which he’d appeared had closed early, through no fault of his own, and he was feeling a failure and all washed-up.

As David became an overnight sensation, Jack’s bitterness reached a crescendo. Perhaps his helping David so much at the start of his acting career only embittered Jack more when David failed to follow Jack’s advice and become a jobbing actor and became a rock star instead.

When David became the rock star of the century, Jack was the prophet of doom, telling him, “Rock stars blaze, but then they burn out very quickly, and if you follow this route, your career will be over in a year.”

David was making hit record after hit record and didn’t want to hear it. Without actually saying it to Jack, David made it eminently clear that he was cleaning up financially and becoming a bigger star than Jack ever was—or ever would be.

David assumed that Jack’s attitude was purely motivated by jealousy, but in the end Jack was right. He prophesied that David would end up with money, but that would be all he would have.

And Jack was ultimately vindicated. As The Partridge Family soared in the ratings, and David went on to sell twenty million records, he would grow to hate and despise what he was doing.

Jack Cassidy was a rotten father

OP, Thank you!

Throughout the series, Susan Dey continued to be crazy about David, but he didn’t handle her emotions for him particularly well or sensitively.

Often, he would come back from his weekend rock concerts and tell her stories about how he had to get security guards to hide him from all the female fans. He would also tell her about all the ones from whom he didn’t hide and the great sex he’d had with them.

Susan listened and gave a good impression of accepting the situation stoically, but I knew how hard it was for her because I knew exactly how she felt about David.

Finally, I took him aside and told him that he had to be careful talking to Susan because he was hurting her badly. At first, David didn’t understand. I think he may have viewed Susan as the sister he had never had, but I saw the situation differently.

She had a great big crush on David, and he didn’t reciprocate her feelings. But she wouldn’t listen to my advice to stay away from David, and I found myself warning her over and over against getting involved with him. I began to realize that I was sounding exactly the way Sari had when she’d tried so desperately to warn me about Jack all those years ago.

And David was Jack all over again. During the series, girls besotted with David would come to visit him in Los Angeles, and some of them ended up on my front lawn. They traveled from all over America, and most of them took the train or the bus, as they were too young to drive. I’d wake up in the morning and find one or two of them sleeping on my front lawn

So I’d go out and talk to them, and they would jump up and say, “I’ve come all the way from Iowa, and I really want to meet David!” Or “I want to move in with you and have you be my mother and David my brother.” Or “I want to join your band and travel around the country in the Partridge Family bus with you and David and the rest of the family.”

I’d patiently explain to them that David didn’t live at my house, and that he had his own place, and that The Partridge Family was a fantasy, not reality.

I felt so bad for those kids. They were so crushed, so disappointed, that their dreams didn’t become reality. But I felt worse for their parents and how worried they had to be about their daughters.

“Do your parents know you are here?” was my inevitable first question to them. The girls would invariably shake their heads, miserable. “I called them along the way and told them I was coming to see David,” they would say. “Well, you must go right home again because this is TV, this is make-believe and not real life. David doesn’t live here, and we don’t have a band.” I would say in a kind but firm voice.

Then I would call the parents and put their minds at rest that their daughters were safe, and next I would buy the girls a ticket home, and the parents would later reimburse me.

Afterward, I felt bad for the kids who genuinely believed that The Partridge Family was real, that I was the mother, had five kids, and we were all in a band together. I had to set them straight, sure, but The Partridge Family did indeed have a grain of truth.

The writers often came over to my house and spent the day with me and the kids and took notes nonstop. What happened in our family might become the theme of a Partridge Family episode.

By the third season of The Partridge Family, David had become the rock star of the century, but that wasn’t making him happy.

He became disgusted with singing what he termed “bubblegum songs” and wanted to go on to bigger and better things and sing hard-rock music in earnest, much in the style of his heroes Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix.

So he decided to leave the show. If he had asked my advice, I would have told him to be happy with what he’d got, because that was my philosophy of life. (Besides which, I hated hard-rock music.) But he didn’t discuss the subject with me and decided to leave the show.

There was no replacement for him because David was the show. We were all sad, but we were also aware that it was just a matter of time before the show was canceled anyway.

March 23, 1974, was the last broadcast of The Partridge Family. I was sad to see the show end. If it hadn’t been canceled, I would have been happy to carry on playing Shirley Partridge for another four years. For me and all the rest of the cast, this was the end of an era. Just after the wrap party, David took Susan Dey out for dinner. As he said afterward, he fondly imagined that they would stay friends forever.

After dinner, the two of them went for a drive together and reminisced about how they’d first met when she was an inexperienced actress, and they both started crying. Afterward, David put Susan in touch with Ruth Aarons, who became her manager, and also with Lenny Hirshan, his agent at William Morris, who became Susan’s agent. For a few years after the show ended, David and Susan stayed friends.

[quote]David had become the rock star of the century,

He wasn't even the rock star of that year, much less the century.

As the months went by and The Partridge Family became an American phenomenon, and Shirley Partridge became America’s favorite mother, Jack embraced the role of Norman Maine to my Esther Blodgett of A Star Is Born even more wholeheartedly than before. Not that he was ever suicidal like Norman Maine, but his overriding sense of inferiority in the face of my success drove him into the arms of other women even more often than before

In January 1972, out of the blue, Jack asked me to have a pizza with him at a little local Italian restaurant. I’ll never forget what happened next.

With little preamble, he announced, “I think we need a separation, Mouse.” I genuinely thought I’d misheard him. “A separation? Did you say we need a separation? But why?” I said, fighting back the tears. Jack shifted in his seat. “Mouse, I need to live by myself right now. I don’t want a divorce. I just need to be by myself. I just can’t be here for the kids and for you anymore. It’s an age thing,” he said lamely.

I blurted out the first thing that sprang to mind. “So is there another woman, Jack?” Jack shook his head. “There is not,” he said adamantly. “I just think we ought to try a separation and see what happens.”

At that point, we had been married for fifteen years, and despite Jack’s eternal craving for attention, his lack of jealousy, his excessive drinking, and his constant infidelity, I truly loved him and was happy with him. I was devastated. “I don’t understand, Jack, but if that’s what you want, fine,” I managed to stammer, after a while.

I discovered that Jack had lied to me all along. A friend of mine told me that he was living with Yvonne Craig, To top the hurt and indignity of discovering Jack’s liaison with Yvonne Craig, to my fury I also discovered that before he moved in with her, he had been paying the rent on her luxurious apartment.

All that in a time in which he was not making a great deal of money and, as always, I was supporting both of us. Finally, I confronted him, and he confessed the truth. He hadn’t wanted to tell me, he said, because he hadn’t wanted to hurt me. Which, of course, was ridiculous.

You took the words right out of my mouth, R60. And she said it twice!

Soon after, Yvonne left Jack as a result of his accidentally running over her dog in the driveway and killing him—or so the story went, according to Jack.

He was never able to be alone, so now he wanted me to take him back. I didn’t have to think too long about my answer. We had three children together, he was their father, and despite everything I still loved him.

....I had become friends with one of the dancers in the chorus, a girl whom I’ll call Jean. She was slim, pretty, with dark hair, tall, boasted the classic dancer’s body, and was not busty.

I wasn’t threatened by her because Jack adored big bosoms in a woman more than anything else. As it turned out, he was prepared to drop this particular preference when a woman really appealed to him. Or was prepared to do anything to please him.

So one night after the show, Jack turned to Jean and said, “Honey, come and have a drink in our suite with us.” I wasn’t the least bit surprised. Jean was a nice girl, and we both liked her. But nothing in my previous life or my marriage to Jack could have prepared me for what happened next.

The three of us sat around, drinking and talking. Jack and I drank Scotch and water, and so did Jean. I was relaxed, happy, and when Jack leaned close to me and kissed me passionately, I kissed him back passionately. Then he turned to Jean and kissed her passionately as well.

I’d been drinking, so I didn’t go into shock. Almost in a trance, I watched as Jack started taking Jean’s clothes off. To my amazement, she seemed to be all for it.

In retrospect, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she and Jack had planned what would transpire between the three of us that night. “Mouse, now you take your top off, as well,” he said. I did, and he kissed me again, almost as if rewarding me for stripping off my clothes so readily in front of Jean.

Then Jean moved closer to Jack, and he hugged her. Then the three of us hugged.

The next thing I knew, we were all in bed together. A thought flashed through my mind: “This will please Jack. And who knows, maybe this is something I should try. Maybe I’ll enjoy it.”

Jack started directing the two of us. “Kiss Shirley, Jean.” She did, and I let her. I’d never kissed a woman before, and Jean’s lips were far too soft for my liking. But I went ahead and kissed her right back.

I had never fantasized about having sex with a woman before—nor would I ever do so afterward—but that night I was willingly engaging sexually with another woman just to please my husband.

At the back of my mind I was sure that Jack had been to bed with Jean before, and that he’d planned this, going to bed with both of us at the same time. I didn’t get the slightest sense that night that he was in love with Jean.

Consequently, when he gave her oral sex, I felt that he was taking part in a physical exercise—which he was thoroughly enjoying—but nothing more than that. I didn’t want to scratch Jean’s eyes out, and I didn’t feel competitive with her, either. I wasn’t jealous or insecure. I just sat and watched. After a while I started wishing that the entire enterprise were over.

Then Jack took Jean’s hand and put it between my legs. I lay back while she masturbated me, and I had an orgasm. Having orgasms had never been that difficult for me because I was always very sexual and easily turned on, so that night in Las Vegas with Jack and Jean was no different.

Meanwhile, Jack carried on directing us. “Isn’t this fun? You are going to feel so good about this, Shirley.” Jack, Jean, and I spent three hours in bed together, going through all the various permutations of lovemaking . . . although perhaps that’s the wrong word. Love had nothing to do with it—it was just sex.

To Jack, having sex was just like eating a slice of pie: part of his life, and meaningless. For all I knew, he had probably already had sex with all the other dancers in the show, as well. Until now, I had looked away.

But now I was in bed with one of them. As dawn was breaking over the Strip, Jean said, “Good night. It was a lovely evening. I really enjoyed it,” and then she left. Afterward, Jack and I hugged, then we fell asleep in each other’s arms.

Damn

My god, what a sordid tale of Jack Cassidy's trashy behavior and Shirley's lack of self-respect or spine.

[quote] We were all in the pool when Jack said, “Hey, let’s all take off our clothes and go inside and have a foursome!” I got out of the pool at once and said to Jack, “You go ahead, but I think I’ll forgo this.” Then I went into the living room.

This was my favorite part of all.

I am going to use that line all the time from now on. "You go ahead, but I think I'll forgo this."

The next morning, Jean came up to me and whispered, “I hope you weren’t too embarrassed about last night. I really apologize if it was a bad night for you.”

I shook my head. “No, Jean, it wasn’t.”

Jack was in the seventh heaven about what had happened. “Jesus, Shirley, isn’t Jean a great girl?” I nodded and said nothing because I interpreted his comment as meaning that Jean was a great girl to have around for sex but for nothing else.

I was his wife, he loved me, and I knew that Jean wasn’t for him. But what the three of us did together that night wasn’t for me, either.

Jack knew it, and he intuited what I was about to say before I said it, which was “Jack, I love you, and I want to be with you, but I don’t much enjoy having threesomes with you.”

If Jack hadn’t fully come to terms with my sexual boundaries before, after that night in Las Vegas with Jean, he now understood conclusively that threesomes were just not my thing.

From then on, I assumed that he went his own way, sexually speaking, and, I guess, had threesomes with other women instead

My mother is the ultimate 1950s women: prim, proper, and a bit sanctimonious. She has always adored Shirley Jones. I can't wait to tell her what I've been reading on this thread.

Off camera, in the real world, the Swinging Seventies were in full bloom, and Jack was determined to explore every aspect of the new sexual freedom.

He wanted it all: swinging, pornography, drugs, group sex. I carried on just looking away and ignoring his infidelities. But when all the stress of his career failures, the drugs, the wild nights, and the multiple sexual partners started to take their toll on him, I had to confront the horrendous truth about what was happening to him.

After he first came back to me after our separation, I couldn’t help noticing a change in him. I knew he was drinking too much, taking too many drugs, as well as receiving “vitamin shots” from a Las Vegas doctor. Forever afterward, I wondered what was in those shots but never found out.

Jack had always been the consummate professional, but now he sometimes forgot his lines onstage and instead started ad-libbing wildly, leaving me confused about my next line or my next move.

He started taking sleeping pills at night and then pep pills in the morning, and once or twice, to my shock, he actually missed a show altogether.

One night, when we were playing a theater in Warren, Ohio, he went out to get some cigarettes (by then he had a four-pack-a-day habit). After about an hour, he arrived back at the hotel and came up to the suite again.

He walked through the door and then slammed it hard behind himself, dramatically. I saw that his eyes were glazed over and that his hands were shaking involuntarily. Then, in a hushed voice, he said, “I just had a long conversation with my mother.”

Jack’s mother had been dead and buried for years. I was speechless.

He went on in a rush of words, “I met her on the street on my way back here. She was standing under an old oak tree in the square, and I stopped and talked to her. We had a long conversation. She warned me to be very careful of my smoking. She said that my cigarettes were going to kill me.”

At the time, I placated Jack and didn’t pay any attention to his words. I dismissed his mother’s supposed warning that Jack’s cigarettes would end up killing him. I only remembered that “warning” years later, when one of Jack’s cigarettes did ultimately kill him.

By then, of course, it was too late. For years, Jack felt his career hadn’t ever hit the heights of which he had dreamed..... Along the way, he was offered the part of Ted Baxter in The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The part had, in fact, been written specifically for Jack, but, perhaps because it came too near the truth about himself—who really wants a mirror held up to themselves?—he made the rare error of turning the part down.

Later on, though, he did a guest shot on an episode of the show, which aired on October 23, 1971, in which he played the part of Ted’s twin brother, Hal, a photographic model.

Despite turning down The Mary Tyler Moore Show, he was now a regular guest on TV quiz and talk shows and had established a strong presence on television as a witty bon viveur, playing himself really. But despite his success on television, he continued to yearn to conquer Hollywood

One night, soon after he had flown back from Death Valley, and we were both supposed to be getting changed to go onstage, I walked into the living room and found Jack crouched in the corner of the room, stark naked.

We had to go onstage in half an hour, so I stayed as calm as I possibly could and explained that we needed to do the show. Jack met my gaze serenely, then said, “I finally know now that I’m Jesus Christ.” It flashed through my mind to say that Jesus probably never played cabarets, but I stopped myself from making a joke.

Then Jack fixed me with a hypnotic gaze and launched into a rambling monologue, which ended with “Shirley, my father is here. My mother is on her way. I have to speak to them. So lock yourself into your bedroom, as I am not sure what I am doing.” I couldn’t deny to myself anymore that Jack was seriously mentally ill.

And that right then he was in the middle of a nervous breakdown, with all that entailed. I had no choice but to admit the truth. Mindful of his warning, and aware of the dangers in staying around someone in a manic stage and capable of harming himself and anyone in his vicinity, I followed Jack’s advice and took refuge in my bedroom, and the lock clicked. Jack had locked me in.

I picked up the phone and called our business manager, Howard, in LA and gave him a blow-by-blow account of Jack’s bizarre behavior, ending with my considered opinion that Jack was in the throes of a full-blown nervous breakdown.

I explained to Howard that I didn’t want Jack to be carted away to a hospital here in Las Vegas, but that I wanted him to be transported to a Los Angeles hospital. Howard assured me that he understood my feelings and that he was primed to leave for the airport at once and would fly to Las Vegas straightaway and bring Jack back home to Los Angeles with him.

When he got back to Los Angeles, thankfully he agreed to seek medical treatment for his mental health, and I hoped against hope that the treatment would work, but sadly it did not.

One evening toward the end of 1973, I came home one night after appearing in a concert, to find that Jack had lit blazing fires in every fireplace in the house, each of which was piled high with wood. He kept throwing more and more wood and paper on the fires, and the resultant heat was unbearable.

The moment he saw me, he immediately took his pants off and said, “Let’s make love.” Petrified by his state of mind and wanting to placate him, I followed him into the next room, where he threw more wood onto the fire in the fireplace there, then ran out of the room and threw more wood onto every single other fire in the house, as well.

I begged him to stop, but he wouldn’t. So I followed him back into the bedroom, terrified of what he would do next. And what he did next was horribly predictable, given Jack’s highly sexed nature.

He lay down in front of the bedroom fireplace, where the flames were blazing sky-high, and began to masturbate. I just stood there, watching, paralyzed.

When he finished, he threw more and more wood into the fire, then more paper, just like a pyromaniac. I was terrified. In contrast, Jack seemed riveted by the roaring fire, mesmerized by the spectacle he had created. “Isn’t it beautiful! Look how peaceful the flames are! This is the way we should all be!” he murmured.

Then he tore off again to fetch more wood to add to all the fires burning in the house. I was frightened in the extreme, convinced that at any minute he would set the whole house on fire, with both of us and our boys asleep in it.

The thought of Shaun and Patrick and Ryan yanked me out of my terrified stupor. By now it was two in the morning. I snuck out of the room when Jack had his back to me as he continued to throw yet more paper into the fire. He was so intent on what he was doing that he didn’t notice that I’d slipped out of the room.

In another room, and in a whisper, I called my psychiatrist, Dr. Rosengarten, and gave him chapter and verse on what Jack had done, what he was, even now, doing. Highly alarmed, Dr. Rosengarten told me to sit tight and remain exactly where I was at that moment. “I’m calling an ambulance,” he said.

With my heart in my mouth, I went downstairs, just in time to see Jack arranging wads of paper all around the coffee table, obviously planning to set the coffee table alight any second. Thankfully, before he could strike a match and create an inferno right there in our home, the ambulance screeched to a halt in our driveway and out jumped two orderlies carrying a straitjacket.

Seeing them, Jack stood rooted to the spot. As they moved to start strapping him into the straitjacket, the shock of what was about to happen to him caused him to suddenly snap out of his mania.

Now acutely aware of what was going on around him, that he was being strapped into a straitjacket, Jack fixed me with a look so terrible that, even today, I still can’t erase it from my memory and said, “Mouse, are you really going to let them do this to me? Are you really going to let them take me away?”

I was lost for words and stood back as the orderlies led Jack into the ambulance. Just as they were about to close the door and drive off with him, he yelled out of the window, “Shirley, I’ll never forgive you for this.”

As the ambulance roared off toward Westside Hospital, a private psychiatric hospital, I doubted that he ever would. Over and over, I asked myself if I had done the right thing. But I truly believed that I had had no choice.

Yet I completely understood Jack’s anger toward me and his sense of betrayal, and I could hardly forgive myself for what I’d done to him. But looking back, I believe that I didn’t have a choice. If I hadn’t called the ambulance that night, Jack might well have become so unhinged that he might have set our house on fire, with our sons in it.

Their lives had been in danger from Jack’s rash actions, his mental illness. I knew I had had no other choice but to have him taken away. To this day, I am still haunted by the sight of the man I’d loved and lived with for a greater part of my life, the father of my children, the man whom I worshipped and adored, being led away in a straitjacket like a wild animal.

That night, the doctor and I traveled in a car following the ambulance, and at the hospital I was compelled to sign the papers committing Jack to the hospital for treatment. His psychiatrist arrived soon after and gave me his diagnosis that Jack was manic-depressive, which nowadays is known as bipolar.

We now know it to be a condition suffered by many tortured geniuses, but back then it was a terrifying diagnosis. The doctor said that he planned to put Jack on a dose of lithium to control his bipolar episodes

Jack remained hospitalized for three days at Westside Hospital, and I was by his bed constantly, watching over him, but he still raged against me, refusing to utter a single word to me.

After seventy-two hours, according to the law, Jack was able to check himself out of Westside Hospital. He moved into a motel and refused to take the lithium that had been prescribed for him. Perhaps he didn’t want to accept the doctor’s diagnosis that he was bipolar, but his avowed reason for not taking the lithium was that he hated the idea of taking drugs. I was too upset to remind him that he was hardly a stranger to taking drugs.

Finally, he must have come to terms with his condition, as he checked into Cedars-Sinai Hospital and spent two weeks there, working with a psychotherapist. He started taking his medication religiously, but still carried on drinking, which was a lethal combination. While he was at Cedars-Sinai, he and I talked every day, and slowly, very slowly, the ice between us began to melt.

I even began to hope that we still had a chance to forge a new and better life together. But after two weeks, Jack checked himself out of Cedars-Sinai and flew to New York, where he moved into one of the best and most expensive hotels in Manhattan and started spending money as if there were no tomorrow. Of course, there was no tomorrow. Not for our future together.

The truth about the man I loved, and about our marriage, was penetrating my consciousness at last, so that I finally started to come to terms with the harsh reality that my life with Jack, my dream man, my white knight, my sexual Svengali, might well be ending forever

Against all the dictates of my heart, my emotions, in November 1974 I filed for divorce from Jack.

And this is one of the reasons people go into show business....everyone is horned up and sex is really easy to get. Too bad she and that other goodie 2 shoes mom Florence Henderson couldn't get together for a sister act climaxing in lesbian sex.

At four in the morning on December 12, I received a call from my manager’s secretary, who lived on the same road as Jack. Without any preamble, he broke the news that Jack’s apartment had been gutted in a raging fire.

A body had been found, but the burning heat had melted the person’s jewelry and burned the face so that it was charred beyond recognition and no one could identify it.

We all knew that Jack had had a friend staying in his apartment because Jack intended to drive to Palm Springs that weekend with Lois Nettleton. And Jack’s car, a classic silver Mercedes convertible, was still in his garage.

So all of us, me and Jack’s sons—David, twenty-six; Shaun, eighteen; Patrick, fourteen; and Ryan, ten—hoped against hope that the charred remains did not belong to Jack.

Of all the boys, at this point Ryan was closest to Jack. Sadly, Jack and David were no longer talking. But as soon as David learned the tragic news of the fire and heard of the possibility that the charred remains might be all that was left of his father, he rushed over from his home in Beverly Glen.

He was crying when he arrived. “Oh, my God, it can’t be him, it can’t be him.”

Later in the day, after dental records were checked, and the gold signet Cassidy-family-crest ring was found near one of the burned fingers, we learned, without a shadow of a doubt, that the charred corpse was, indeed, that of Jack Cassidy.

The police pieced together what had happened to cause this horrific inferno that led to Jack’s tragic and untimely death. On that night, the night on which Jack had invited me to come to his apartment for drinks, the invitation that I had refused, Jack went instead to Dominick’s, his favorite Italian restaurant on Beverly Boulevard, right across from Cedars-Sinai Hospital, for dinner by himself.

Eyewitnesses at the restaurant claimed that Jack had spent the evening with two men, and that at the end of the evening he left the restaurant with them. The police were never able to establish the identities of those men.

I even tried to do that myself, as I wanted to interview them, so that I could find out what had happened during the last hours of Jack’s life.

But I was unable to find them, or to discover who they were and the nature of their connection with Jack. To this day, their identities remain a mystery to me and to the boys.

All we knew is that Jack was drunk when he came home that night, that he lay on his Naugahyde couch, smoked a cigarette, then fell asleep. In his sleep, he must have dropped his cigarette onto the couch, and the couch exploded in flames. Jack was burned to death.

Horrifically, in the eleventh hour, he must have woken up, seen the blaze all around him, and started crawling to safety. But blinded by all the smoke and flames, instead of moving toward the apartment door to the corridor and safety, he lost all sense of direction and crawled toward the balcony instead. Which is where his body was found, on the floor, facing the balcony.

....In 1988, I sang “God Bless America” for President Reagan at the last night of the Republican National Convention. The occasion was moving, and I was honored to be singing for the president Afterward, I slept in the White House, in a bedroom adjoining Reagan’s playroom, which housed his pinball machine, and which was decorated with pictures of the movie stars with whom he’d worked.

That same night in the White House, Nancy Reagan came up to me and said, “You and I started in Hollywood at the same time. Look what’s happened to you!” I glanced around the White House. “Look what happened to you, Nancy!”

In all, I sang for President Reagan three times. Although my family were Democrats, I’ve always been a Republican.

But I also sang for President Johnson, when I performed Oklahoma! in a shortened version, which we enacted on the front lawn of the White House. President Johnson had his dogs with him, and we chatted about our mutual love for man’s best friend....

I’ve also sung for both President Bushes. I sang at the Republican National Convention for the first President Bush, before he was elected president. He was lovely and Barbara Bush was funny, with a great sense of humor.

One time, after a concert, Marty and I went to a party at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and Marty went up to Barbara and said, “Hello, my name is Marty Ingels. I’m Shirley Jones’s husband.” And Barbara said, “My name is Barbara Bush. And I’m George Bush’s wife. Don’t you hate these parties? So boring.”

[quote]Eyewitnesses at the restaurant claimed that Jack had spent the evening with two men, and that at the end of the evening he left the restaurant with them.

Maybe they were his guardian angels.

[quote]Although my family were Democrats, I’ve always been a Republican.

With all that sex going on?

In 1969, I appeared on This Is Tom Jones with Tom Jones and absolutely loved him, but we didn’t have an affair. We sang together, both having the last name Jones, both coming from Wales, and when I confessed to him that I had never been to Wales, he charmingly said, “You have to come there. And I’ll show you around. . . .” The meaning was clear, but I wasn’t in the least bit tempted.

I also worked with Jerry Lewis in Las Vegas. I’ve always admired him as a performer, and Marty adores Jerry because Jerry gave him his first break in show business. Jerry is a super-duper talent, but I found him far too full of himself.

He would never talk to me the way a regular person does. I remember when he remarried and adopted his first daughter and I admired her photograph. “Isn’t your daughter beautiful!” I said. “Yes, she’s the light of my life, besides my business,” Jerry responded

Other than that, I could never get a straight answer from him about anything. Every conversation always revolved around Jerry, and nothing else. But I still appreciated it that he was always so good to Marty.

Marty was also close to Danny Kaye and adored him, as well. Years before I introduced Marty to Danny, I found out that Danny could be a bad boy.

One day I was in a restaurant, wearing a low-cut sweater, when Danny came over and put his hand right on my breast and said, “That’s pretty nice. . . . You’re a beautiful girl, and I admire you.” “Thank you, Danny,” I said, and removed his hand from my breast.

I guess Shirley know that Danny Kaye was homosexual. Such a bad boy!

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.

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. I need to have an orgasm every now and again for the release and the pleasurable feeling it creates in me.

It's a shame this is filtered through a bad ghostwriter. She does come off as creepy. Her husband was gay, which is why he didn't care if she treated.

Sounds like Shirley could start a second career as a sex-telephone worker.

Did she have to have sex with Richard Rodgers to get Oklahoma?

Shirley Jones hates hard rock music? Fuck that cunt.

When we older women masturbate, at least we don’t have to dress up or apply makeup or worry that we look our age. When we masturbate, we don’t have to put on airs and graces, but can just be ourselves and enjoy ourselves and feel alive and renewed.

Marty and I still have sex, but he is also aware that I masturbate, and it doesn’t bother him at all. The other morning, I came down to breakfast and told him that I’d masturbated the night before, but that it hadn’t gone well. “What did you do wrong?” he cracked.

Sometimes it simply isn’t the right time and my mind just isn’t tuned in on sex. I do think a woman should take care of her body however old she is. If you don’t like your body, go to the gym and work at it. I spend an hour a day there, and I always watch what I eat and eat much less meat than I used to.

Sadly, when my mother was in her late sixties, she was in a wheelchair because she had arthritis, and so did both my aunts. I have inherited the disease, and my body is filled with arthritis. I had a knee replacement and will eventually need to have the other one replaced as well.

Luckily, Marty thinks I’ve still got a beautiful body, even though it is old, and every now and again I take all my clothes off in front of him and shake my tits at him, and he loves it

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

Yikes, way too much information.

Here's my Jack Cassidy story.

The first Broadway show I ever saw was Cyrano in 1973. After seeing it with my mother and sister in preview in Boston, we went to see the finished show in NY. We got booked by a great travel agent into the Algonquin Hotel. After the show we were having cocktails in the lobby, (I was having a soft drink, I was16) a stylish foursome came strutting through the lobby. Jack Cassidy was in the lead with a great looking lady wearing a satin lady tux on his arm. Every head in the room turned to watch him walk through this lobby like he was the greatest thing in the world. CHARISMA! He looked like he owned the whole fucking world. It was only when this group was walking out the door that my mother realized that the satin tux lady was Alexis Smith. A few of us actually walked out the door just to watch them walk down the street.

That was the first time I understood the word, magnetic.

Spring 1973, six years before he died.

I am now seventy-nine years old, and although I can’t believe it, life is still good. I have four sons (I always view David as mine) and twelve grandchildren, and Marty and I have a close and loving marriage.

Now and again, though, the thought has run through my mind about both the men I married—about Jack and about Marty—that I am not altogether sure if they married little Shirley Mae Jones or Shirley Jones the movie star. I guess I’ll never really know.

The main thing is that today I am so thankful that I have a partner I can cry with, laugh with, and who is always there for me. Marty takes good care of me, makes sure all the bills are paid on time, and is thrilled about everything that I do professionally and is glad to be part of it.

Every night as I sit on a chair, sipping my martini, Marty sits on the couch opposite me, and we have conversations about everybody and everything in our lives, and it’s great. We talk about family, friends, and business projects. Marty tells me jokes and makes me laugh continuously.

I love that we share everything, even though we are so very different. Yet we are still together, we still love each other, and whatever anybody else thinks of Marty and of our marriage, I know the truth: I have found my ultimate Prince Charming and I’m living happily ever after with him.

R94 her second husband Marty Ingels died in 2015

She sure knew how to pick her husbands!

This is all just so gross. "Vaseline and a finger," omg. Shirley, no!

Good Lord, she makes for a stunning old lady!

Of course, I'd feel better if this had been Jaye P. Morgan or even Mae West. But it's Shirley Fucking Partridge!!!

I can't believe that she's a Republican either!!

[quote]Later on, though, he did a guest shot on an episode of the show, which aired on October 23, 1971, in which he played the part of Ted’s twin brother, Hal, a photographic model.

They were not twins, just brothers.

[quote]Shirley Partridge became America’s favorite mother

Fuck you, Sylvia!

So Jack Cassidy was fucking BATGIRL?

I could've done without the detailed masturbation talk. She tried too hard to be salacious and it doesn't come off well overall. Not much deep thought to this autobiography. Maybe a better ghost writer could've made it more meaningful. I feel sorry for David. Jack wasn't much of a dad at all.

Fucking hell, I didn't need to know about Mrs. Partridge and the Vaseline.

Susan Dey (Laurie Partridge) as a young model. She was so pretty. I wonder why "The Rock Star Of The Century" didn't like her?

I always thought that Susan had a thing for older men...

Shirley should have stopped after Jacks death. I don't want to read about her finger banging. Gross. Marty Ingels always seemed retarded to me. He was a fucking pig.

Marty Ingels was just a notorious asshole. He constantly embarrassed her in public, but she never seemed to really care.

Thanks OP, as always, I love your thread.

Did Vaseline pay for product placement in her book?

Tiger Beat

I'm so disappointed in her writing about such personal things. She tarnished her entire reputation in one fell swoop with those classless revelations.

After these tasteless revelations, now all I need to hear is how Phylicia Rashad and Debbie Allen munched each other's carpets?

She was still smoking in her 40s:

Gosh, R111, how did Bobby and David meet? Were they friends?

OP, does Shirley talk about it in her book?

Jack's death sounds suspicious to me. Those mystery men and him not being on the couch, the supposed point of origin from the cigarette theory. Wouldn't he have been passed out in the same spot.Wouldn't it take an accelerant to melt his jewelry?

Also, I'm wondering if she was trying to divorce him and if he possibly wasn't going to go away quietly. She seemed bitter about being the bread winner.

It's interesting how angry he was about the fireplace incident. Maybe she was laying the groundwork to make him look like a pyromaniac and set him up.

It could have been the police whom had their suspicions and were really the ones who wanted to talk to those two men. I think I remember it being a big mystery on what really happened....

[QUOTE]Her frankness about sex is kind of creepy, especially how she talks about her son's and stepsons inheriting their big penises from their father. Something isn't right about this.

Perfectly normal in my book !

The Fiery Death Of Jack Cassidy

Holy cock, he got Batgirl!

Did Le Douche buy this apartment building with Shirley's money? That might have pissed her off. Ya think?

Oh my god, R118, did you see the state of his charred apartment? It's a nightmare-scape.

R119, see R102.

From The Find A Death Link Above:

**He left behind about $150,000, noting specifically that ex wife Shirley and son David receive nothing, and a large portion going to the Motion Picture Country Home. Shirley was named beneficiary of a life insurance policy.**

So, it sounds like there was animosity and a LIFE INSURANCE POLICY.

Oh, please. She didn't murder him. I've never heard the slightest hint that his death was suspicious.

R124 They say follow the money. Shirley seems sketchy and weird to me.

I recall reading at the time that SHIRLEY had collapsed upon hearing what had happened to JACK in his apt.

THIS is why Datalounge is a national treasure.

"E! Mysteries & Scandals" If you Google and read there are a lot of conflicting reports about the night of the fire. Why? Also, if you pay attention to the dates, '73 -' 76 is when Jack all of a sudden turned into a ghost seeing pyro.

That was right around the success of the Partridge Family and the divorce. I think I read Shirley also had a boyfriend. She probably didn't want to give him half, but had to. Not accusing her of anything.. It's just suspicious, to me anyway.

Thanx OP!

R126 She's an actress=drama queen.She divorced him, so that says she was sick of his antics.

She probably got her confidence back from the PF and made good money. She wanted out from the philandering phuck up but didn't want to pay him.

If he bought that apartment complex, she had to have paid him very well. If she loved him, she wouldn't have shared that psycho fireplace story.

It just seemed calculating for that chapter to placed right before the death chapter.

Gig for when she gets greedy again..

Shirley with her donkey dick bookends

KILL IT WITH FIRE!!!!!!

I'm sorry, but do DLers find Jack Cassidy hot? He has ferret face. I know some think about his endowment first, but ...

His skin was so burned his intestines came out. The log between his legs must have burned for hours.

R135 He seemed handsome and debonair in the way that he carried himself. I think he made a good villain because he really was sinister.To be so jealous of his sons and use his wife's hard earned money to pay for his mistress is unforgivable. He looks like The Devil in this picture.

I had an office mate who had a friend who used to attend Hollywood orgies. Said Shirley was an active participant.

Well, this thread has certainly been an eye-opener. It's funny and slightly disconcerting when someone who appears so wholesome and for want of a better word 'square' turns out to be a big ol' freak in the bedroom.

(I've always liked Shirley but I do wish someone had taken her aside before publishing her autobiography and ordered her to lose the Vaseline reference... I cannot unsee this now)

I always thought there was something wrong with Jones' goody two shoes image. I thought what kind of woman would marry a cruel, bisexual cad like Cassidy and then an parasitic, asinine Jew like Ingels. Now I realized she was as warped as her husbands.

I have to hand it to her, she really delivered the dirt in this one.

I would HOPE that she cleared the "Donk" anecdote with poor David beforehand, but his penis size has been such an object of ribald gossip for so many years she may have just decided to address it directly in print and let it go at that.

Patrick Cassidy states:

“My dad was born in Queens but affected this mid-Atlantic accent. The old neighborhood accent only came out when he got mad at us.”

Jack Cassidy ran away from Queens at 16 and got a job as a bellhop at the Waldorf-Astoria, where, he later said, he learned from the rich guests what clothes to wear, what wine to order and how much to tip.

So, in essence, a cunning and calculating complete fraud.

[quote] I'm sorry, but do DLers find Jack Cassidy hot? He has ferret face. I know some think about his endowment first, but .

As a little gayling I couldn't stand him. When he'd appear on shows like Password or Mike Douglas, I'd go into my room and do my homework (unlike when Ann Miller or Ethel Merman were on and I'd sit in rapt attention a foot in front of the TV while my mother ironed). There was just something about him I didn't like. When I heard about the fire I imagined his apartment with tacky wall to wall shag orange carpeting that instantly went up in flames.

I noticed Shirley threw some shade at Jack, pointing out that his couch was Naugahyde and not leather.

His sons David and Shaun, on the other hand, were major crushes of mine.

[post redacted because linking to dailymail.co.uk clearly indicates that the poster is either a troll or an idiot (probably both, honestly.) Our advice is that you just ignore this poster but whatever you do, don't click on any link to this putrid rag.]

Oh so close, yet so far away.

R140

Pretty succinct wrap up.

[quote]But Collins, 80, has denied that the incident ever occurred and has demanded that the anecdote be stricken from the pages of the self-titled autobiography.

Oh, Joan. We already know that it's true. Just leave it in.

Sean, which is basically a male version of Shirley

I was thinking about this thread last night and realized that aside from the sex, there is very little else in this book.

SJ has been in show business for a long time, been in big screen musicals, won an Oscar in a big move, had a hit TV show, yet there wasn't much in the book about those experiences.

And count me as someone else who always found Jack Cassidy as creepy. (He was a great Columbo murderer.) So, learning he was jealous of the success of his children and wife as well makes me questions SJ's sanity.

It's funny. Everyone I knew always thought David Cassidy was sexy, but when Sean came along everyone thought he was too effeminate and not sexy. He was the unsexy Hardy Boy.

R141 I missed the DONK reference. Was that covered here?

I can't believe the death of Jack Cassidy has me so intrigued. The book was was her platform to share with us whatever she chose to. I can't shake the details put into the fireplace incident.

It was like she wanted to drive it home with what an insane firebug he was. Keep in mind this was in the midst of the divorce discussions /proceedings and how easy it was back then to have someone "committed"

She had powerful friends and I think she left out all the ones she did bang (Vaseline free) that may have helped her in a nasty divorce.

David detested him and was at the height of his financial success. They aren't sure of the actual cause of the fire and he seemed way more burned than the usual burn victim. They are still looking for two mystery men.

The Find A Death Link totally contradicts Shirley's version. Mere speculations on my part.

R151

It's mentioned in R29

"Long before I was finally cast as Julie in Carousel, the rumor mill had it that Judy Garland, fresh from her triumph in A Star Is Born, would be playing Julie instead. "

What an insane rumor. When she did ASIB Judy Garland was in her early thirties and looked 45. And she was supposed to play the fresh, youthful Julie? What bullshit!

R148 Shaun looks like Shirley fucked Liza.

I've been going back and forth about Shirley's sex revelations. Is my reaction rooted in sexism or ageism or a combination of both. If Van Johnson contrasted his lust days as a cock jockey with latterday satisfaction via a jar of Vaseline and a finger, would I have much the same reaction? Probably.

I can see why people think it makes her look desperate. Did she dow a lot of TV interviews talking up these details?

At the end of the day, I think it's good to be honest and open about sex, especially women. I remember thinking "right on" when Cybill revealed that she'd tried a Cybill sandwich. I can't say that I'd want to follow suit in exploration but.... I wonder how many posters decrying Shirley are avid consumers of porn, presenting hole threads, etc.

I agree that not everything must be shared but I don't think anything Shirley wrote was shameful. And I bet some of you are secretly delighted at learning the Donk nickname.

Jack had a grear voice. Warch for his "Love Walked In". Also starring DL fave Dolores Gray.

From People Magazine April 1977:

Jones, 43, his regular lady of the past two and a half years. Since the death of Shirley’s ex-husband, Jack Cassidy, last December,

Looks like Marty was in the picture during the getting "committed" incident and maybe thought up the idea and lit the fireplaces.

Jack seemed shocked and was so angry that I don't think he could have been in the middle of a psychotic break. It seems like a drastic move to get him out if the picture. Shirley probably played along because she was pissed about losing her money and the whole scene.

I don't think Marty was mentioned in those chapters. Maybe he was in the apt. that night or sent someone. I think he was crazy enough to do it. Again, just a thought.

Jack Cassidy IS Ingrid Bergman in GASLIGHT.

[quote] Luckily, Marty thinks I’ve still got a beautiful body, even though it is old, and every now and again I take all my clothes off in front of him and shake my tits at him, and he loves it

This is what I do with George.

She seems to think Jack Cassidy was the sexiest and most handsome man ever born.

Meh.

Did Jack leave Shirley or did she leave him? When did he buy that apartment building? Did the divorce take almost all of her Partridge Family money?

Did Marty step in when she was down and out? She seemed like she couldn't get over Jack and that made Marty crazy with jealousy.

Did they have trained dogs to sniff for accelerant in the mid 70's? Why was his jewelry melted? By his injuries it seems someone poured gas or something all over him. Especially on his face.That seems like someone who was jealous.

Anyone else think it's strange or maybe a fire expert here that would know.

Some of you boys really need to take the stick out of your ass. Old lady enjoys sex, what's the big deal?

[quote]So, in essence, a cunning and calculating complete fraud.

In other words, an actor.

So....Mrs Partridge was a carpet muncher

Jack left a 10 page will which I can't find anywhere online. I do know he left out Shirley and David. Shirley was still trying to make a claim on his life insurance up until 1984.

I guess unbeknownst to her (and Marty) Jack pulled the old switch-a-roo and changed beneficiaries. The legal jargon is endless in link.

Jack may have had trust issues after the straight jacket incident He was dead just 20 months after final marriage settlement I did read he had 150,000 in cash.

I guess he sunk his money into that building, which I think was smart. Why was Shirley supposedly going to dinner with him if she was dating Marty? Did she have a key to his apt?

"When David became the rock star of the century...."

Boy, does she sound stupid. He was never a rock star at all, much less the one "of the century." He WANTED to be one. He wanted to be a rock star God like Clapton and Hendrix, but he was nothing more than a teen idol. A good one, but still nothing more than that, and of course the career of a teen idol flames out fast. He really blew it when he did the Rolling Stone article, featuring the photo of him sort of naked and the revelations that he gets stoned and drunk and does groupies. After "The Partridge Family" was over he was never taken seriously as a musician or actor. He tried starring in a tv series called "David Cassidy: Man Undercover", in which he played some kind of undercover cop, but all it did was make him even more of a laughingstock. Doing "The Partridge Family" is probably, no matter what he says, the biggest regret of his life.

Bobby Sherman, another teen idol, guest starred on "The Partridge Family." As for as I know he and Cassidy were neither friends nor enemies. Hollywood gossip magazines tried to make it seem like he and Sherman and Susan Dey were in a love triangle. One headline blared: "David Cassidy/Susan Dey/Bobby Sherman...WHO WILL WIN HER HEART?" There was no love triangle. I think Cassidy said in his memoir that he and Dey had a brief fling, but that's all there was between them. Dey would go on the marry Lenny Hirshan, an agent 25 years her senior. After they divorced she went on to marry Bernard Sofronski, an agent 12 years her senior. I guess her experience with teen idols made her more inclined to go for older men.

All the sex talk about penises and masturbation and orgies is probably designed to sell books. Jones was probably told "sex sells!', so she thought she'd really play up that aspect. It makes her sound like an idiot, though. She kind of sounds like female porn stars who gush about their love of sex. And she's an old lady! It just seems gross and unseemly. There's nothing wrong with liking sex when you're a senior citizen but to carry on about it like she does just makes her sound like an old dumb slut.

After everything she's said about Jack Cassidy (and who knows how much of it is actually true) I still like him. He was a piece of work. The one I don't like is her second husband Marty Ingels, who was ugly and annoying and unfunny. He seemed like such a dick, such a clod. What did she see in that crumb? Oh well, to each his own I guess. But I don't understand her love for such a creep.

[quote]When I heard about the fire I imagined his apartment with tacky wall to wall shag orange carpeting that instantly went up in flames.

Sort of like you did, when staring raptly at Ethel Merman and Ann Miller.

R148 R150

S-H-A-U-N

How can she come off as an old dumb slut?

I bet that slob Marty put her up to writing the book. She started out so classy and beautiful. I admit Jack is fascinating but he was also the beginning of her end.

Maybe Marty whacked Jack and she was afraid of him. She tried to leave him many times, but took him back over and over.

Shaun hated Marty but David didn't. They may have been on the same page as far as Jack went.They could have been in cahoots on the possible hit.

There was hardly any smoke in Jack's lungs. Wouldn't something smolder if it was a cigarette causing the fire. What if he was doused and burned alive!?

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. Why wasn't this speculated on and investigated more throughly? They probably had their suspicions but couldn't prove it.

And I'd have gotten away with it, if it weren't for you old queens!!!

It's not ageism or a horror of old people having sex, people. It's not even a horror of sweet little Shirley Jones saying it. It's the level of detail, and words like "Vaseline" and "my finger" and "shaking my tits at him." It's disgusting to put that down in a book. Who cares? Who needs to know that about anyone?

"Shaking my tits" makes me smile. Her phrasing is pretty matter of fact. She doesn't come off at all like she's trying to titillate. Same with the donk. I'd call it a cheerful sexuality and that is pretty unusual.

I also like the idea that she did a Playboy shoot and was like "You want to see more than my legs? Pass."

The only thing Jack was good at was his 3 guest-villain shots on "Columbo".

I can't believe he killed Batgirl's dog.

Why the hell did she attempt a Playboy spread if she wasn't inclined to do much "nudity?" Didn't she KNOW that is what Playboy does: feature nude photographs of women? What an idiot! Playboy DID do at least one spread on an older woman: Vikki LaMotta, the wife of the boxer Jake LaMotta. She did a nude Playboy spread at age 51 and looked very good in it.

Her fondness for masturbation reminds me of a dumb YOUNG slut: Linda Lovelace. Her crazy manager/husband Chuck Traynor supposedly told her what to do and say at all times, but who knows? In a book entitled "Inside Linda Lovelace" she is quoted as saying "Then, at age twelve, and now at age twenty-two I am an incorrigible masturbator." She goes on to talk about her love of sex: "If I didn't love what I did no money on earth could make me do it. Like my work? Friends, I love every second of it, on and off camera." She sounds dumb as a box of hair, babbling about fucking and sucking and diddling herself. So does Shirley Jones.

I've always thought Patrick was the hottest and from recent pictures he's matured into a sexy silver fox. I've never seen any dirt on him. He seems to be the most normal/least screwed up of the lot.

I don't mind Shirley baring all-- it's how she did it. Sex is very tricky to write about even for skilled authors. As another poster said above it appears as if Shirley didn't have a decent ghostwriter, which is how we ended up with pedestrian passages that come across as creepy.

Patrick is the best combo of Shirley and Jack's looks. I saw a vid on Youtube from the early 80s recently. It was about the girl group era coming back in stage shows. It showed Patrick rehearsing for a show. I would have. I still would and he could be my father.

Jack didn't seem disturbed in the least to me. They got divorced, settled up and he bought a nice place to live. He was also earning money all along.

She professed him being the love of her life, yet trashed him throughout the book. He's not here to defend himself and I think that's pretty low. That's her children's father.

I totally think her and Marty conspired to kill Jack. She's shown us she's not who she appears to be.

She's got that Stepford Wife, glazed over look her eyes and that sneaky perpetual smirk on her face AND she was married to a crass, classless Ogre for 40 years!! Birds of a feather....

What did the book prove? Marty's dead and she trashed her entire life and career. I'm beginning to think she was sexually molested or a victim of MK Ultra.. Or both.. Because something isn't right.

So, when they put Vaseline on the camera lenses for her close ups, does Ol' Shirl get a tingle..you know, DOWN THERE??

Maybe that old nympho diddled poor Donk and he's scarred for life!

Jack was always something of a fire bug. Watch here, when he's introduced he inexplicably lights a lighter close to his face.

R183 I found this strange website while looking for clues pointing to "Ol Slippery Shirl" and it seems obsessed with Jack's lighter.

OP, I'm sorry for going on this detective spree in the middle of the thread.. Please do continue... Do you think they had anything to do with it after reading the whole book? I'd love to know.

Holy fucking shit is this really turning into fucking goddamned conspiracy thread?

No, R180, you fucking broken moron, Marty and Shirley didn't murder Jack Cassidy. Nor did MK Ultra, whatever the fuck that is.

Get help.

These are titillating anecdotes, but she writes for shit.

R186 I do think it's a possibility. A strong one. Marty was friggin loon and what respectable elderly woman with 4 grown sons and grandchildren discusses her masturbating practices? Mk Ultra is actually a real thing.

1) She does come off as a bit simple. Maybe it's the writing style or maybe she's just a dimwitted actress. Also: she's a Republican. Dumb.

2) All you hens clucking over Shirl being "frank" about her sex life..if it was DAVID Cassidy revealing all about his big dong and slathering Vaseline all over it, you'd be wanking in your wheel chairs and getting jism all over your caftans. Yeah, she comes across as a tad tacky (again, that awful writing style) but why can't women be frank about their sexuality? Good for her, even if she sounds a tad dimwitted.

3) She's too dumb to have killed Jack. Enough with your silly conspiracy theories.

I just remembered that I used to work with a woman who was friendly and sweet (and not particularly bright) who also liked to bring up the fact "my boys all have big dongs...like their daddy!" My mouth fell open when I heard her say that out loud the first time.

She was trash...I think she herself had been in the military and several of her kids were.

Trash talks that way. No big deal to them. Something to be proud of.

Is MK Ultra a new brand of petroleum jelly? Can you get me some?

I think she does come off as not the brightest, but also this bizarre way of having such a healthy ego and such confidence in her appearance that she sticks with what she wants - which was Jack - without all the drama. Think of the Neile McQueen and Ali MacGraw stories, or Janice Dickinson, and here is Shirley Jones married to Jack Cassidy, whom she's in sexual thrall to, and adores. He's this complete debauched, degenerate, and she is serene. No scenes, no huge fights, etc. No wonder he stayed with her forever. He still wanted to fuck her, and he could never "own" her - he only got her to do the threesome once, and her refusal to get provoked by him probably kept him hooked.

She does sound a bit like one of those actresses who is known for being sweet and wholesome, and it bothers them so much they go overboard in the other direction. It's like Julie Andrews' whole career while married to Blake Edwards - although I always figure he was obsessed with deconstructing Mary Poppins and she went along with it. God those movies were stupid (the ones Edwards made with her).

I heard the Frank Sinatra parts of this story on the radio about two years ago. Shirley Jones was telling the story to a Shirley Eder type - a woman who sounded approximately her age, knew it all, been around, sounded like a smoker. She and Shirley were saying what a waste of time it was for Sinatra to ditch Carousel to go chase Ava Gardner, because he lost Gardner anyway. That he ran down there to prevent an affair "But she had it anyway."

I think Shirley's secret was she was self-involved. A lot of these Hwood guys are about conquering and destroying. Shirley seems that she just serenely got out of it what she wanted and ignored the rest, and it must have driven him crazy. She never let his drama become her drama, kept showing up for work and being a professional, and pretty popular. That probably means she could work with anybody and they could always count on her, because she wasn't affected by other people's chaos. I mean, God, it took Jack Cassidy trying to burn the house down for her to divorce him.

I've never understood her and Marty whats his name. I do see the appeal in Jack Cassidy - if you've ever seen them together on television they have tons of chemistry. How do you go from that to Marty Ingalls?

BTW I believe Joan Collins that the foursome story never happened. It was probably Anthony Newley and some girlfriend. Collins has never been a wild child. She's been married a bunch of times, and that's it. Of all the stories I've read about 1950s and 1960s Hollywood, she's around, but she's never named in the crazier stuff. I think she's somewhat similar to Shirley Jones in that she was in Hollywood but could remain internally detached. That's how she always comes across. It's the women who think of themselves as romantics or after true love that end up participating in sordid crap trying to prove themselves to some guy they haven't figured out is a narcissistic psychopath.

She's also got exes who would probably be happy to tell tales on her, but they don't. At least not this type.

I don't think she ever loved Marty. If you've ever seen them interview together she literally cringes with embarrassment. It's painful to watch.

She was obsessed with Jack, Jack was done. Marty was obsessed with her but knew Jack was the competition he was never going to beat.

If you read in the FindADeath forum and pay attention to the timeline '73-'76 you'll see that's when all the drama started. Basically when Looney Tune Marty entered the picture.

I want to retract my stupid Mk Ultra statement as I was over tired when I wrote it. I stand by my suspicions of Marty (and possibly Shirl) 100%.

The fire marshal report makes no sense. For some strange reason it's been sealed.. Why?? Marty was sue crazy and I guess people didn't want to deal with him....

How many of you responders saw Maggie Flynn? With all the hype about General Flynn, more attention needs to be paid to Maggie Flynn.

He was also gorgeous in Longtime Companion R179. He and John Dossett made a cute couple.

June Allyson hits Marty Ingels with suit.

Marty Ingels steals a hat (caught on tape)

" All you hens clucking over Shirl being "frank" about her sex life..if it was DAVID Cassidy revealing all about his big dong and slathering Vaseline all over it, you'd be wanking in your wheel chairs and getting jism all over your caftans."

Not really. I think if David Cassidy went on about his sex life the way Shirley Jones goes on about hers he would be considered just as stupid as she is. I seriously doubt many people would be "wanking" over it. I'm pretty YOU would be, though. I get the impression you pull your pud a LOT.

He looks like The love child of Buddy Hackett and "Sach" from The Bowery Boys..

From Link:

He was in two episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show before they got rid of him. He admitted in later interviews that he was impossible to work with, going through massive mood swings and alternately being too friendly to people and then too hostile. When he got cast in I'm Dickens, He's Fenster, he had problems, too. And one time when he guested on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, he had what he later described as an on-air nervous breakdown and he walked off the set during the program.

r189 Maybe we're hens, but we've never be the heifer in heat that old Shirl will always be remember for now.

^^^remembered^^^^

I had never heard any f these stories. I always thought her Lilly white reputation was true. Wow. Imagine your elderly step mother writing a book in which she talks about the size of your penis. No wonder he's losing his mind

I'll bet Shirley enjoyed Jack's gigantic shlong long after the divorce. It must have made Marty crazy with jealousy.

R204 She was still having "dinners" with him. Maybe she did go there that night and he caught them in bed! There were conflicting reports on his whereabouts that last night. The fire could have been to destroy evidence.

I really can't blame Shirley. Let's face it we've all gone crazy over a big cock.

I'm more interested in the two men with him the night of the fire who have never been identified. Sounds to me like a drunken Jack picked up some rough trade, took them home, and things went wrong somehow.

It looks like "The Coroner To The Stars" Thomas Noguchi may have handled it. No wonder it's all screwed up.

Patrick starred on Broadway in the infamous "Leader of the Pack" with Dinah Manoff.

At the same time, Ryan did several episodes of Facts of Life. They had brought him and Patty Duke's kid on at the same time. But I guess Ryan didn't go over well, as he was not asked back for season 7.

True words, r206, true words.

I went to find a death, and the summing up of Jack Cassidy said he and Shirley Jones still held a candle for each other. In 1976 before he died he said "I still love Shirley. If I had taken care of the marriage we'd still be married." Shirley is quoted as saying he still wanted to come back, and the terrible thing is that she wanted him, and if he was alive, and despite Marty, that's probably what would have happened.

If they were still having dinners, then they were still hopping into bed together, but no way would she kill him. She's not a killer, and he is her great passion. Maybe if his dong fell off, I'd have some suspicion, but since it was still attached, I'm pretty sure she'd do all she could to keep him alive.

BTW this autobiography was published in 2013. It made a little bit of faux scandalous news - oh my, look at Shirley Jones' sex life with Jack! But she basically still comes off as Shirley Jones, only with a big sex drive where her husbands were concerned. It's not like she was out there swinging. She had one threesome at her husband's behest, and one affair to his gazbillion. Seems like just about every woman in Hwood married to a ladies man was persuaded to have a threesome sooner or later. Shirley just had one - that's more of a limit than Jane Fonda managed to establish when married to Roger Vadim. She wasn't coerced, she was drinking and then more like "Ok I'll give this a try. I'll have an open mind." and decided it wasn't for her. It's the way she handles things like that that makes her still consistent with being Shirley Jones.

Enough with the conspiracy theories. OP we need more exerpts!

I was just reading some interesting stuff about Jack Cassidy on imdb. He had an uncle named... BEN DOVA. LOL. And Mr. Dova was a survivor of the Hindenburg.

[quote]The main thing is that today I am so thankful that I have a partner I can cry with, laugh with, and who is always there for me. Marty takes good care of me, makes sure all the bills are paid on time, and is thrilled about everything that I do professionally and is glad to be part of it.

Shirley's sons HATED Marty Ingals. They fucking hated him. Ingals bled Shirley dry financially with a string of questionable business ventures. The family was constantly perplexed by their mother staying with this grifter for all those years and all the shit he caused her and her sons frequently begged her to leave him.

Yeah, no one would expect Joan Collins to have been involved in freaky sex.

How old is Joan now, 85 or 90? A story like that could really hurt her "career".

r215 Let's see:

Doris Day married Marty Melcher and he used her for years and drove her into bankruptcy. He also drove her brother to a fatal attack by working him into the ground.

Debbie Reynolds married Harry Karl and he took all of her money.

Debbie Reynolds married Eddie Fisher and he left her for Liz and never saw his own children.

Shirley Jones married Marty Ingels and he made a complete fool out of her.

Marilyn Monroe married Arthur Miller and he would later smear her in his play "After the Fall."

Moral of the story: Hollywood blondes should have stayed away from money-hungry, fame seeking Jews. They ruined them.

[quote]Moral of the story: Hollywood blondes should have stayed away from money-hungry

Didn't Carol Channing's husband do some weird thing with some of her money?

[quote]Didn't Carol Channing's husband do some weird thing with some of her money?

Yes -- he put it all into corn futures.

[quote] She professed him being the love of her life, yet trashed him throughout the book. He's not here to defend himself and I think that's pretty low. That's her children's father.

Mary!

What do you want her to do, keep her secrets of her EX-husband (remember they were divorced when he died) to the grave?

Howard Stern had Marty Ingels on some years ago, around 2000/2001.

One of Shirley's sons called in and there was a very entertaining shouting match between Ingels and the Cassidy for quite some time. It was like Howard just sat back and let the two of them shout at each other till they wore themselves out. Good fun for all Howard's listeners.

In 1969 before actual porn hit theaters in the days of "Myra Breckenridge and "Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls", Anthony Newley wrote, directed and starred in a movie "Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?" His co-star was then wife Joan Collins. The film received an X rating.

I always thought Shirley had a "mothering" thing because she married those two needy demanding little boys.

She didn't trash Jack Cassidy. His issues were well-known. She also has him come across as loving, protective, supportive in his way. He never seems to have fucked around with her career or tried to control that, which makes him stand out from other Hollywood husbands. He doesn't seem to have siphoned off her money when she was thriving and he wasn't. That also makes him stand out. He didn't play mind games with her. He was a degenerate sexually, but I'd rather be married to him than married to Cary Grant as described by Dyan Cannon He was an alcoholic bi polar guy - how is Shirley Jones reporting that while also letting us know how much she loved him = trashing him?

I do think she may have misremembered his financial status at the end of his life, or maybe I'm reading it wrong. Maybe he was perfectly comfortable financially, but just frustrated at the middling state of his career. Find a Death says he owned the building he died in - he lived in the penthouse, but owned the whole thing.

"Doris Day married Marty Melcher and he used her for years and drove her into bankruptcy. He also drove her brother to a fatal attack by working him into the ground."

I never heard that Doris Day had a brother who died of a heart attack due to Marty Melcher's "working him into the ground." I read her autobiography a long time ago and I seem to recall that he died in some kind of accident. Anyway, she had two brothers; one died before she was born, and the other was "a few years older." I've tried to verify how he did die by doing research online but all I've been able to find out about him is that he was "a few years older" than Day. At any rate, it's unfathomable why she married Marty Melcher. Everybody hated him but her. I do remember in her memoir a scene where they're both walking on the beach and Day remarks how they have no sex life but that it doesn't seem to matter. And she tells him that she wants to "grow old" with him. My God, the man was a total asshole who squandered her money and signed her up to do a tv series with telling her. What on earth about him could have inspired her devotion? I guess Doris Day had a lot of emotional problems.

Shirley filed for divorce from Marty about 5 years before he died but she took him back. Does she mention this in the book? Now that we've read about jack I'm curious about their relationship. She always looked embarrassed to be near him

Does anyone know why Shirley Jones married Marty Ingalls? We know her kids hated him and she pretended to adore him, but he is so completely different from the love of her life, Jack Cassidy, it makes no sense. Why him? What's the story?

Did Melcher sign Doris up for the TV show? Are you sure?

I remember reading that when she read the script for "Caprice", she said "Boy, I'm sure glad I don't have to do this." and Melcher that yes, she did.

And, that, was a truly awful, awful movie (1967). Co-Starring Richard Harris. What I remember from that movie is that Harris had a bed that was attached with chains to the ceiling so it could actually swing.

You can see it in this trailer for the movie.

"Did Melcher sign Doris up for the TV show? Are you sure?"

After his death she found in his paperwork a script for "The Doris Day Show." He indeed had made arrangements for her to star in her own tv show without her knowledge. She did do a tv series for a few years. She later said:

"It was awful", Day told OK! Magazine in 1996. "I was really, really not very well when Marty [Melcher] passed away, and the thought of going into TV was overpowering. But he'd signed me up for a series. And then my son Terry [Melcher] took me walking in Beverly Hills and explained that it wasn't nearly the end of it. I had also been signed up for a bunch of TV specials, all without anyone ever asking me."

Her own TV series and TV specials?! How perfectly ghastly.

My take on Shirley, Doris and Debbie is that their work came first. They chose men who for the most part didn't interfere with that.

I remember that after Melcher died, Doris also sued the lawyer and financial manager who had been "managing" her money and was able to win a judgement against him. What I remember most, though, is that the judge ended up telling Doris that she was an intelligent woman and should have been paying attention to her own situation, not just passing that power on to other people. Although the court awarded her a judgement of over $22 million, she ended up settling for $6 million.

Marty likes attention. In the days in which I was starring in film after film, I went out in Hollywood but did not often attend parties to go to openings. Now I’m always on the red carpet because Marty adores it. When I can’t accompany him, he walks down the carpet with a cardboard cut-out of me, dressed in a gown, on wheels!

HE WALKS DOWN THE CARPET WITH A CARD BOARD CUT-OUT OF ME, DRESSED IN A GOWN, ON WHEELS!

I guess like Doris (my favorite) and Debbie, they go from a selfish man who rips their heart out to a man who smothers them with attention. They mistake that obsession with love..

R116 Jack's death is the least suspicious thing that ever happened. It was just a matter of time. The man was a well know fire bug.

Here he just won The Asshole Of The Year award and brought cardboard "Shirl" along for the honor.

From link:

$400, 5-foot-5 cardboard cutout of his wife, actress Shirley Jones, a nominee who was off in Australia filming.

"A man comes up to me, very well-dressed, and he asks me, 'Are you Mr. Ingels?' He says, 'I knew you were going to bring this and you cannot bring this inside."'

Several conversations later, they let him in, sans Shirley. She was checked at the door and spent the show stuck in a closet.

In what he says added injury to insult, Ingels was charged $1,100 for tickets, stuck in the cheap seats in the Shrine Auditorium and wasn't even allowed to collect Jones' nominee's basket of goodies.

Nobody could have signed Doris Day up for television specials or television shows if she, a hugely successful performer, hadn't decided it was prudent to make some low lie her POA and give him control over her professional life. What is it with these women who over compensate in the other direction? What are they overcompensating for? Get a decent husband, get a professional to manage your career, and sign off on your own goddamn projects. And use of your money. And everything else. Jesus. All these women - I think Debbie Reynolds is among them - who were ripped off by their husband's, how the hell could it have happened if they didn't sign over power to them? And what does it mean when a relative nobody requests that kind of power over the finances and career of someone much more successful and knowledgable than they? Why do the women do it?

Most of these stories of women giving control of their finances to their husbands, etc., were from decades ago.

R237, women from Doris Day's generation grew up in a world in which women could not open a checking account at a bank without a man-- their father or their husband-- being a co-signer on the account. While it's disappointing that Doris and Debbie and who knows how many other female stars from that period let themselves be exploited by unscrupulous losers, it's not exactly surprising given the social norms of the time. Also performers and artists in general (men included) aren't always good with finances and often outsource money management to others.

I also think that these women might have given their husbands such power in order to let them feel "manly" and in control of something, since they would have felt threatened by their wives' being so successful and well known. Women were made to feel that their success emasculated their husbands, and I wouldn't be surprised if they eagerly embraced handing over financial control to their husbands in order to feel "taken care of" as well.

Anyway, in those days many women were financially screwed over by marriage. As R239 says, married women had many legal and financial disadvantages.

I keep confusing her with Shirley Knight. Oops.