By Andreas Kessaris for Curtains Up!
Here’s a story for you: Shy, pretty small-town girl enters beauty contest as a lark and to her surprise wins. That leads to an audition for a part in the chorus of a Broadway show where she is discovered by no less than Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein, who cast her in a big-budget version of the smash musical Oklahoma! That small-town girl goes on to marry a handsome leading man, win an Academy Award, and have a long, successful and respected career, co-starring with the likes of Frank Sinatra, Burt Lancaster, Jimmy Stewart and Marlon Brando. Is this the plot of some schmaltzy Hollywood take on the old Cinderella story? No. It is the true story of Shirley Jones’ life, as told in her new book with the extremely creative title Shirley Jones: A Memoir (seriously, I’m glad she chose something simple rather than go for an obtuse cliché like C’mon, Get Happy, although that is the title of one of the chapters).
While reading Shirley Jones: A Memoir I immediately realized two things: 1. She wrote this herself and 2. She is going to be frank, (both of which I appreciate). Jones wastes no time getting to the point of any matter in a terse and straight-forward fashion. The story begins with her childhood in small-town Pennsylvania and moves chronologically through her life, with some digressions here and there which were useful and informative without becoming a needless distraction; Jones avoids the pitfalls of most autobiographies by not being egocentric and believing every little detail is important. This moves the book at a steady pace and prevents it from becoming a boring exercise in self-aggrandizement.
Make no mistake this book is not a piece of fluff. Jones shatters her squeaky-clean image with passages about kinky sexual encounters and masturbation (I’m not kidding), as well as stories of three-ways and invitations to partake in group sex and spousal exchanges (most of which she refused, and considering who it was with I don’t blame her), and a skin-crawling piece about how Richard Rogers made a “cold-blooded” pass at her when she was just a teenager. There are many intimate details of her stormy first marriage to Broadway song and dance man Jack Cassidy, and her current husband, alleged comedian Marty Ingles. But Shirley Jones: A Memoir is more honest than trashy and Jones is thankfully just telling it like it was rather than using the book as a platform to sling mud and settle old scores.
Unfortunately Jones does fall into some of the same traps as other memoirists: Repetition and redundancies. In a wide-margin book with less than three hundred pages, she somehow manages to have dozens of repeated facts, some on the same page (at one point I thought that a paragraph was just printed twice in a row by mistake…sadly it was not). She also is guilty of the same crime Paul Anka committed in his book: Too many exclamation points! We don’t need to be told where we should be surprised, thank you. The book contains several factual errors, for example when Jones refers to actor Stephen Elliot as the man who played Liza Minnelli’s father in the original Arthur movie. In fact he played the father of Jill Eikenberry’s character (I didn’t even have to look that up…it was talented veteran actor, the late Barney Martin, better-known to TV fans as Morty Seinfeld, who played Liza’s father in that film). This leads me to ask: Who proof-read this book? Whomever it was, they should be barred from ever working in the publishing industry again.
Overall Shirley Jones: A Memoir is not by any stretch of the imagination a great piece of literature, but it isn’t dreadful either. I found it to be more of a delightful and interesting romp for any fan of Shirley Jones as well as anyone into old-time, behind-the-scenes insider show biz stories. I guarantee one thing: You will never look at Mrs. Partridge the same way again.
