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didn’t stop everyone who—even today—ever heard my middle name from assuming that I was named after Mae West.
    When I learned that Mae West was appearing in person at a nightclub called Twin Coaches, which was on a little country road in Belle Vernon, a mile from Smithton, I immediately booked to see the show. Belle Vernon being a small town like Smithton, someone must have seen me buying the tickets for Mae’s show, as soon after, I received a telephone call from one of her assistants inviting me backstage to see her after the show.
    It was summer, and that day the temperature had climbed to a sweltering one hundred degrees and rising. When I was taken backstage to see Mae, I discovered her lying on a couch, half-naked, with a fur coat draped over her. Tentatively, I asked if she would pose for a photograph with me.
    Mae looked me up and down. “Honey, where’s your fur?”
    “I don’t have my fur with me, Miss West. It’s summer.”
    Mae pulled herself up to her full height (which wasn’t much, despite her towering high heels). “I don’t take photos without a fur, and nor should you.” She stalked over to the closet, pulled out a fur coat, and flung it at me. “Put that on, then we’ll take a photo together.”
    I did. And was photographed with Mae West.
    Just me and Mae, side by side. In furs!
    My audience with Mae West, however, was not an accident. When she learned that I was coming to see her show, she specifically asked to meet me and invited me backstage afterward.
    Mae West was a legend, a movie star, and world famous.
    And me? I was Shirley Mae Jones, a chorus girl from a small town in Pennsylvania, who’d never made a movie in her life.
    But that was the moment when all that was about to change. Mae invited me backstage to see her in her dressing room because she knew it. The news of my casting as Laurey in Oklahoma! had spread like wildfire, promoted by the Rodgers and Hammerstein organization itself, in the world press: it was the story of a small-town Cinderella bound for Hollywood and stardom. Mae West had read about me, and hence my invitation.
    As far as the world had been told, I was now that fairy-tale heroine, and I was destined to live happily ever after on the silver screen—and off.
    All that remained was for this Cinderella to meet her Prince Charming.

THREE

A Wonderful Feeling
    Winning the part of Laurey in Oklahoma! was every young actress’s dream, but for me, the making of the movie turned out to be a nightmare.
    Based on the play Green Grow the Lilacs by Lynn Riggs, Oklahoma! is the story of settlers in Oklahoma’s Indian territories and centers around farm girl Laurey Williams and her two suitors, the good-natured cowboy Curly McLain and the saturnine farmhand Jud Fry.
    Oklahoma! had been Rodgers and Hammerstein’s biggest Broadway hit so far and was now going to be their first movie together. Consequently, both of them were determined that the movie version of Oklahoma! would equal, or even surpass, the show’s success.
    To that end, they oversaw every detail of the $6.8 million movie from start to finish. Oklahoma! may have been the world’s first Todd-AO 70 mm production, masterminded by Mike Todd, who had invented the new wide-screen process, but Rodgers and Hammerstein were set on stamping their mark on every single scene, every single performance, in the movie. Which meant that the intensity of their focus on me—as the movie’s leading lady and Hollywood’s latest Cinderella—was obsessive in the extreme.
    I knew they had given me a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and that I was more than lucky to be playing Laurey. Moreover, they were paying me the princely sum of $500 a week, a fortune in today’s money.
    So I made up my mind not to be difficult and to go along with whatever they required of me. So although I was furious when they decreed that my upper lip be waxed because it had a smidgen of peach fuzz on it, I gritted my teeth and submitted to it.
    I might