Cindy Ord/Getty ImagesWhy Mrs. Partridge, you don't say!
Shirley Jones' self-titled memoir arrived today in a hot blaze of glory, with the 79-year-old actress' descriptions of her late ex-husband Jack Cassidy's manhood and a youthful threesome among the revelations singled out as must-read anecdotes.
According to reports, the actress also writes that having orgasms has always been easy for her, thanks to her "highly sexed" nature, and that Cassidy had multiple affairs during their 19-year marriage, including one with songwriter Cole Porter.
But though she describes Cassidy as a "sexual Svengali" who taught her "absolutely everything," it sounds like Jones is plenty hot for her current husband of 35 years, comedian Marty Ingels.
"Luckily, Marty thinks I've still got a beautiful body, even though it is old, and every now and again I take all of my clothes off in front of him and shake my [breasts] at him, and he loves it," Jones writes.
Anyway...
All this excitement got us thinking about other stars of a certain age who let it all hang out in memoirs written in their often-still-titillating twilight years. Here are six more eyebrow-raisers from the silver-haired set:
1. Christopher Plummer: In his 2008 memoir In Spite of Myself, the now-83-year-old Oscar winner detailed his prolific career, including his heady early days of doing theater in his native Canada, during which—among other dalliances—he had a sexual encounter with one of his married leading ladies at a party while carrying on a conversation with her husband. Another memorable tidbit wasn't even about himself, but about Tallulah Bankhead telling her husband, actor John Emerey: "I don't go down anymore, dahling; it gives me claustrophobia."
2. Rita Moreno: Holy smokes! The 81-year-old West Side Story star's self-titled memoir came out earlier this year packed with tales about past romances with icons like Marlon Brando, Elvis Presley and Dennis Hopper—the latter two of whom used to make Brando jealous. "Every aspect of being with Marlon was thrilling," Moreno wrote, "because he was more engaged in the world than anyone else I've ever known." Calling him "sensual, generous, delightfully inventive would be gravely understating what he did not only to my body, but for my soul." Sounds like an offer that would be hard for anyone to refuse.
3. Frank Langella: The 75-year-old star of stage and screen pulled all sorts of skeletons from the closets of dozens of celebrities (most of them dead) in his 2012 book Dropped Names: Famous Men and Women as I Knew Them. Langella had romantic encounters with Elizabeth Taylor and Bette Davis, flashed Sir Laurence Olivier, and was hit on (unsuccessfully, he wrote) by Anthony Perkins, Roddy McDowall and Noël Coward, the latter of whom propositioned him in front of JFK and Jackie Kennedy. Yvonne De Carlo treated him "like a pretty girl in the back seat of a convertible on a hot summer night." Langella, Raul Julia and Jill Clayburgh all starred in a play together in the 1980s and backstage became "a pulsating Oreo cookie with nothing remotely chaste about where our hands and mouths wandered."
Thank you, Frank.
4. Carrie Fisher: The 56-year-old Star Wars icon's story in 2008's Wishful Drinking about mom Debbie Reynolds buying her and her grandmother a vibrator as a, er, stocking stuffer for Christmas when she was 15 seems kinda quaint now, doesn't it? "Well, I have to admit, I enjoyed mine, but my grandmother refused to use hers," Fisher wrote. "She was concerned that it would short-circuit her pacemaker. She said that she had gone this long without an orgasm; she might as well go the whole way."
5. Clive Davis: The twice-divorced (from a woman) Sony Music exec and legendary record producer came out as bisexual in his 2013 memoir The Soundtrack of My Life, revealing that he had a "satisfying" first sexual encounter with a man in the "Studio 54 era." "On this night, after imbibing enough alcohol, I was open to responding to his sexual overture," wrote the 81-year-old, who disclosed that he has had two monogamous same-sex relationships since 1990.
6. Farley Granger: Following in the footsteps of Tab Hunter and Richard Chamberlain, the Strangers on a Train star, who died in 2011, also came out as bisexual in his 2007 memoir, Include Me Out. "I lost my virginity twice in one night," he wrote about having an encounter with a female prostitute and then a fellow Navy officer when he was 21 and stationed in Honolulu. Granger details affairs with major Hollywood names of both sexes, including Ava Gardner, Shelly Winters, composer Leonard Bernstein and Gypsy and West Side Story writer Arthur Laurents.