POPS CONCERT SLATED AT ARTS CENTER : SWEET IMAGE SHADOWS SHIRLEY JONES

Since her movie debut in 1955, when she portrayed the country-fresh sweetheart Laurey in “Oklahoma,” Shirley Jones has lived with the image of being Hollywood’s eternal ingenue, one of America’s singing darlings.

But, as Jones likes to tell it, the image has been both a blessing and something of a curse.

“I’m still stuck with the nicey-nice parts. They (producers) aren’t about to let me play the Joan Collins roles. Not the real bitches,” said Jones recently, as she sat in her Beverly Hills home, her “Elmer Gantry” Oscar standing over the fireplace, other career mementoes covering every wall.

“To most people, I’m still Laurey, still Julie or Marian the librarian, even though I’ve played all sorts of other roles--a prostitute, a call girl, even a murderer.”

At 52, Shirley Jones still looks like someone out of “Oklahoma,” “Carousel” and “The Music Man,” exuding a girl-next-door winsomeness and unaffected, middle-America heartiness.

Jones knows this persona is her stock in trade. A frequent performer on the nationwide pops concert circuit, Jones sticks to a repertoire that is familiar and comfortable.

Friday and Saturday, when she appears with the Pacific Symphony at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, she’ll offer some Christmas standards, a little Meredith Willson and a lot of Richard Rodgers & Oscar Hammerstein II.

(Performances at Segerstrom Hall in Costa Mesa will be at 8:30 p.m. Friday and 3 and 8:30 p.m. Saturday.)

It is appropriate that Jones sing such numbers as “People Will Say We’re in Love,” “If I Loved You” and “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” After all, the homespun, “Shirley Jones” image, she said, began with Rodgers & Hammerstein.

Go back to 1952. Picture Jones, then an unknown in the New York theater, at her first Broadway audition, singing “Oklahoma” tunes before the awesome duo themselves.

Days later, Rodgers & Hammerstein put Jones in the nurses’ chorus in “South Pacific,” which was still running on Broadway. Then came a featured role in the duo’s newest, “Me and Juliet.” Then the coveted role of Laurey opposite Gordon MacRae’s Curly in the movie version of “Oklahoma.”

All this within a year of Jones’ first audition. Not bad for an 18-year-old fresh out of Smithton, Pa., a Miss Pittsburgh beauty contest winner who had sung only in high school and a few times with the Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera.

Jones explained it this way: “They wanted someone just like me for the (“Oklahoma” movie) part. Someone who’s fresh, unknown. Someone who really was the girl from next door.

“But it was still the big-studio, star-building era. I hated it. They treated me like an absolute child. They were going to take this little girl from a small town and teach her everything--what to say, wear, eat, whom to date.”

After “Oklahoma,” Jones was given more roles as an all-American sweetheart in such Hollywood films as “Carousel,” “April Love” and “The Music Man.”

But this kind of stardom did bring some important career compensations, she said.

Jones got the chance to act opposite some of the movies’ most formidable male stars, including James Cagney, Marlon Brando, Burt Lancaster, James Stewart, Henry Fonda and the Mexican idol Cantinflas.

There was also “Elmer Gantry” and the role of the prostitute Lulu Baines.

“Lulu was a lot of just plain luck. For television, I had just played an alcoholic (“The Big Slide” with Red Skelton.) Even then, I was a last-minute replacement. But Burt (Lancaster) and (‘Gantry’ producer) Bernie Smith happened to see me in it. They figured I could play Lulu.”

Richard Brooks, “Gantry’s” director-screenwriter, also took to the notion. “He (Brooks) likes to take that kind of risk. I mean, here’s real off-the-wall casting. People back then were still thinking of me as Pat Boone’s sweetheart (in ‘April Love’),” Jones said.

“Elmer Gantry” brought 1960 Academy Awards for Brooks (for his screenplay based on the Sinclair Lewis novel), as well as for Lancaster and Jones.

Although more off-beat dramatic roles followed in television, including parts as a compulsive gambler and as a child murderer, Hollywood still cast her only in the usual lightweight, folksy romances, she said.

“Most of them (producers) still couldn’t see me in any other kind of role. They kept saying, ‘We know you can act; we know you can do the dramatic things, but the public wants you sweet and nice.’ ”

This image solidified in the early 1970s, she said, when she played the mother of a lovable rock-band clan in “The Partridge Family,” a highly successful, family-oriented ABC-TV series that featured her stepson, David Cassidy.

“That series did it. After that, it was real hard to change my image. Mrs. Partridge was synonymous with mother’s milk.”

Her motion picture appearances are now sporadic and her last television series, the NBC sitcom “Shirley,” ended in early 1980 after only a short run.

But Jones is still a familiar figure on television--for the past four years she has been the pitchwoman in Ralph’s supermarket commercials--and the theatrical revival circuit, as well as a headliner at pops concerts. A frequent guest on television variety shows, she’ll take on a serious role next year when she appears as the wife of an Alzheimer’s victim in a dramatization scheduled to be presented by the Public Broadcasting Service.

Jones is married to comedian-actor Marty Ingels. The couple, who are spokesmen for the Foster Parents Plan, the international organization that finds sponsors for Third World children, sponsor a boy in Kenya and a girl in Malaysia.

“I like my life. I’m doing things that I care about, especially if it has to do with families,” said Jones, who is now a grandmother (to son Shaun Cassidy’s three children).

“I’m a very positive person. I’m a survivor. I don’t let things get me down.

“I’m certainly more fortunate than so many others who started out with the image I’ve had. You know, the pretty little girl next door who can sing.”

“No, I’m not angry over the type-casting,” Jones said. “They (producers) are probably right. This is what the public expects of me. I’ve learned to live with that.”