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Shirley Jones was born Shirley Mae Jones in Charleroi, Pennsylvania in 1934. She showed her singing talent as a small child, and started taking formal lessons at the age of 12. Over the next few years she would listen to Gordon MacRae on the radio and in movies (he was 13 years older than her, and a major star), and she dreamed of singing with him someday (as no doubt millions of teenage girls did). As soon as she graduated high school, she went to New York and auditioned for South Pacific, and she not only got a part, but Rodgers and Hammerstein were so taken by her that they signed her to a personal contract, and she was the only person they signed! She next understudied the lead in the Chicago version of Rodgers and Hammerstein's next play, Me and Juliet, and in 1955 they cast her in the movie version of Oklahoma (which had been on Broadway for 2,212 performances, starting in 1943, a record at that time), opposite Gordon MacRae! The huge success of that movie led Rodgers and Hammerstein to make Carousel the following year. Shirley was again cast as the lead, opposite Frank Sinatra as Billy Bigelow. But the producers intended to film the movie in both CinemaScope and Todd-AO, which would require each scene to be shot twice. Sinatra quit the movie over this, and Shirley convinced Rodgers and Hammerstein to re-sign Gordon MacRae on a few days' notice (and ironically, the technical people found a way to only shoot each scene once). The movie was another major hit, but the time of huge budget musicals was winding down, and Shirley returned to performing on Broadway, and took some non-musical film roles, including as a prostitute in Elmer Gantry, where she won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar. In 1960, she starred in The Music Man opposite Robert Preston, the last of her great musicals. In 1956, she had married actor Jack Cassidy, becoming stepmom to his 6 year old son, and they had three sons together. In 1970, she was cast as the lead of the TV show The Partridge Family, and her stepson David played her eldest son on the show. In 1974, the show went off the air, and Shirley and Jack divorced (he would die in a fire two years later), and in 1977 she married wacky comedian turned agent Marty Ingels. Mr. Ingels passed away in 2015, and as of 2021, Shirley is still alive at the age of 87.

Important Added Info: Note that this still has been personally autographed (signed) by Shirley Jones! Note that this still is printed on AGFA paper, but we believe it to surely be an original still. Sometimes, studios would run out of stills and have extras printed on different stock.

Note that this autographed item is part of a remarkable collection. In our last all-signed auction, we auctioned nearly 500 items from this collection and now we are auctioning 162 more items!
     In the 1970s, our consignor was a teacher who taught a film class, and he also part-time ran the local movie theater (and he saved all the presskits from the movies the theater showed).
     Starting in the late 1970s through the late 1980s, he wrote to famous celebrities, and enclosed an 8x10 from his collection, and he wrote a literate personalized letter, talking about his work as a film teacher, and discussing his favorite movie by that star.
     He received signed photos back from a good percentage of the people he wrote to, and if the people simply sent him a stock photo back, he did not save it, but if he felt the autograph was genuine, and if they added a personalized note, then he did save them.
     In the late 1980s, he pretty much stopped sending letters and photos, simply because he was just too busy. So this photo (and the vast majority of the other photos we are auctioning for this consignor) were obtained in the 1980s, through personal correspondence with this star. This is of course excellent, because back at that time celebrities were not selling their signatures nearly as much, and many of the stars were pretty forgotten and were happy to get letters from people like our consignor!
     He of course does not have any "Certificates of Authenticity", but he only kept ones he felt were surely authentic, and those are the ones we are auctioning. However, bidders can certainly compare the signatures to known examples on the internet to judge for themselves. As is true of all the signed items we are currently auctioning, we give every buyer 30 days in which to review what they purchased and they can return any item as long as it is within 30 days of the end of the auction. On non-signed items, we give a "lifetime guarantee" on everything we auction, but on signed items, we give the above modified guarantee of 30 days after the auction closes.

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Bruce Hershenson,
306 Washington Avenue, West Plains, MO 65775