Free Shirley Jones by Shirley Jones Page B

when I was at a press conference and an old-time journalist at the back of the room yelled out to me, “Hey, Shirley, do you know the real reason Frank left Carousel ?”
    “Sure,” I said confidently. “He had a big thing about not doing the same scene twice. He only ever did one take and was proud of it.”
    “No, Shirl, that wasn’t the real reason.”
    According to the journalist, at the time Frank was due to start filming Carousel, his grand passion, Ava Gardner, was shooting another film and was getting lonesome for Frank.
    She called him and, according to the journalist, said, “You better get your ass down here, Frankie, otherwise I’m going to have an affair with my costar.”
    Poor Frank didn’t know that another actress on the shoot was already having an affair with the costar, and that Ava was making an empty threat to Frank.
    But because Ava was his dream girl, the woman he would love for the rest of his life, Frank dropped everything, walked out of Carousel, and flew to be with Ava, to prevent her from having an affair she probably wasn’t going to have anyway. Mystery solved. Part of me felt sorry for Frank and understood why he dropped everything for Ava. And I did love his singing.
    A footnote to my Frank Sinatra recollections: When I appeared on his show, I rehearsed beforehand with Nelson Riddle, and Nelson asked me, “What key do you sing in, Shirley?”
    “I don’t know. I can’t read music. But I’ll sing it in whatever key Frank wants,” I said, leaving Nelson shocked to the core that I couldn’t read music.
    In any event, when Frank sang “If I Loved You,” he sang it with warmth, passion, and emotion. As far as I was concerned, Frank Sinatra was always a gentleman.
    I never encountered Frank’s rough-and-ready Rat Pack persona, but I did meet Sammy Davis Jr. down the line and learn more about what made him tick.
    Sammy adored Frank. Frank was his mentor, and if ever a hotel wouldn’t allow Sammy to stay there because he was African-American, Frank wouldn’t stay at that hotel, either. When Sammy died, Frank did everything to help his widow, Altovise.
    Long before that, in the sixties, I met Sammy when Jack took me over to his home in Beverly Hills one night. Lines of cocaine were laid out on every table, and porno was playing on all the TV screens throughout the house. I just wasn’t interested. Drugs didn’t interest me at all, nor, in those days, did porno. Jack did nothing to pressure me to stay, and we left together without taking cocaine or watching any porno.
    Not to say that I was totally innocent as far as drugs were concerned. Around the same time, Jack and I were in bed together one night when he suddenly produced a capsule and said he wanted me to try it.
    “It’s really great,” he said, “and particularly wonderful if you do it during sex.”
    Such was my trust in Jack that the next time we had sex, when he cracked open the capsule, I sniffed the drug amyl nitrite (also known as poppers) for the first time in my life. I couldn’t help confessing to Jack that the effect was amazing and enhanced my orgasm immensely. From then on, whenever Jack could get some amyl nitrite, we used it together during sex and loved how it increased our enjoyment.
    As for porno, one night during the late sixties, my idol Anthony Newley invited Jack and me to dinner with him and his wife, Joan Collins, at their Beverly Hills home. I was elated to be meeting Tony, whom I admired so much as a singer.
    The evening started off with drinks. Tony, the perfect host, was funny and charming, and Joan, who was wearing a low-cut something or other, seemed like an interesting woman.
    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