The Theater: The Trouper

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In 1943, while Shirley was co-starring with Ralph Bellamy in Tomorrow the World, Ed Gardner came to her dressing room and asked for a divorce. Says her friend, Bill McCaffrey: "This thing came from left field and it floored her. Gardner had another dame." Shirley kept on giving excellent performances, but for months she wandered in a backstage daze. To quiet her nerves, the stage manager sent her to a chiropractor who dabbled in amateur psychoanalysis. Each day, Shirley would get into a one-piece bathing suit, lie on his operating table, and talk. She explains: "His idea was that he could tell a lot about your mental tensions by watching your body movements while you talked. And, sure enough, I'd find my arms writhing like snakes when I'd get onto certain subjects. After three months I stopped going to him because I was feeling so much better and I didn't want to be dependent on him or anybody."

Shirley and Gardner are now good friends ("He comes to all my plays and cries like mad"), and she has met his two sons by his second wife. But when Gardner asked if he could bring his wife backstage to meet Shirley, Shirley said no.

Off the Book. A young investment broker named William Baker helped ease the blow of Shirley's divorce. He had met the Gardners during a Nantucket vacation, and when he heard of the divorce, began calling on Shirley. Within four months they were married, although Baker was no longer a broker but a corporal in the U.S. Army. When Tomorrow the World closed, Shirley camp-followed her husband through the South until 1945, then returned to Manhattan for her first musical, Hollywood Pinafore, in which she played the part of a gossip columnist called Louhedda Hopsons. During the war years, Shirley, who is an expert dancer, cut many a rug at the Stage Door Canteen.

At war's end, she once more retired briefly from the theater. Her husband had bought a Bucks County farm stocked with Holsteins and Guernseys. While he managed the 64 acres, ,she happily rearranged furniture in the farmhouse. It was a serene time. Baker was a shy, modest fellow, who painted and wrote in his spare time. When he suffered a heart attack, they reluctantly left the farm.

The Theatre Guild persuaded Shirley to take a part in Come Back, Little Sheba, which was scheduled for a one-week tryout at the Westport, Conn. Country Playhouse. After three days of rehearsals, Playwright Inge and Director Mann were desperate. They had concluded that Shirley simply could not handle the role. They were chiefly upset by her stock-company approach to rehearsals: she merely walked through the part, mumbling her lines. Tearing their hair, Inge and Mann begged the Theatre Guild to get rid of Shirley and hire Joan Blondell in her place. Then, on the fourth day, Shirley was suddenly "off the book." She began playing with such intensity and finesse that Inge and Mann hastily changed their minds. In Westport, Sheba was a hit. Theater people poured up from Manhattan to shout bravos at the leading lady. Shirley confessed: "I didn't want to do Sheba until I saw how much the audience liked it."