Free Shirley Jones by Shirley Jones Page A

and their plans for the movie.
    When I left Frank’s dressing room a while later, I was full of admiration for his dedication to playing the part of Billy Bigelow and to making Carousel a giant success.
    After we’d finished rehearsing in the studio, I traveled up to Boothbay Harbor ahead of Frank and fell in love with the town at first sight. I had my little cabin on the water and, with my love of nature and animals, was in heaven. I’d grown up in a small country town with cows and horses roaming around, and Boothbay Harbor was so darling, so familiar, so much my kind of place, and I was so happy there. It only remained for Frank to arrive so that we could start shooting Carousel together.
    All of us, including Frank, had been told beforehand that some of the Carousel scenes had to be shot twice because of the complexities of the new process, CinemaScope 55, which would help guarantee the movie’s success. We all knew that the new system was a crowd-pleaser and were happy to go along with whatever it took.
    On the first day of shooting, we were scheduled to shoot the first scene between Frank and me. I was on set, waiting for Frank to arrive, when his limo pulled up. Frank got out of the limo and took one look at the two lots of different cameras already in position. “I signed to do one movie, not two,” he growled, then got right back into his limo and ordered the driver to take him straight back to the airport. Frank had walked out on Carousel on the very first day of filming.
    Producer Henry Ephron (whose first shot as a producer was this, after a distinguished career as a screenwriter and playwright) was on the set and witnessed what happened. With tears rolling down his cheeks, he came over to me and asked if I knew where Gordon MacRae, my wonderful Oklahoma! costar, was. I told him Gordon was in Tahoe, doing his nightclub act. Can you get ahold of him? Ephron asked, and handed me a bunch of quarters.
    From a pay phone by the water, I called the Tahoe hotel where Gordon was performing, got him on the phone, and asked him point-blank if he would like to play Billy Bigelow in Carousel .
    Gordon didn’t pause for even a second. “Give me three days. I gotta lose ten pounds.”
    And after a three-day diet of half a grapefruit and an egg, three times a day, and nothing else, Gordon lost ten pounds, then signed to play Billy Bigelow in Carousel .
    Gordon had saved the day and I was glad, but I still couldn’t quiet the little voice inside my head that kept asking over and over why Frank Sinatra had quit a role he so desperately longed to play in a movie that he wanted to be in so much.
    The official answer was that “one-take Frank,” as he was known in the business, wasn’t prepared to do two takes for Carousel . But he had known way ahead of time that Carousel would be filmed twice for CinemaScope 55. So why did he balk when he saw two lots of cameras on the set and then walk out without another word?
    Through the years, whenever I saw Frank, I tried over and over to get him to answer that question, but with no luck. Every time I broached the subject, he would bristle and say, “Drop it, Shirl!”
    On February 14, 1958, I appeared on Frank’s show with him, and in a moment replete with irony we sang the duet “If I Loved You,” the romantic ballad from Carousel , the song that we would have sung in the movie together.
    I saw Frank for the last time toward the end of his life at a benefit. He was called up onstage but was so frail that he had to have someone help him up the stairs. Once he got to the microphone, he started to speak, then said, “To hell with this, I can’t get anything out right now!” and turned around and walked off again. As he was coming down the stairs, he gave a nod in my direction and said, “Hiya, Shirl, how ya doing?”
    I smiled at him. He died shortly afterward, without ever telling me the real reason he walked out on Carousel .
    I finally found out the truth a few years ago,