Jeannie Out Of The Bottle (12 page)

Both Peter Lorre and Walter Pidgeon were already way into their sixties when we started shooting, but each of them was still flirtatious and entertaining. I had lunch with them in the commissary every day, and they were so cute with each other and with me that I really relished being in their company. Walter was a real Casanova and would wink at me and say, “Barbara, my dear, if you’d been around when I was younger, you wouldn’t have stood a chance.” Peter had a little bit of the devil in him, along with great kindness, and every inch of him laughed when he laughed. But when he wasn’t laughing, he gave me excellent career advice, including one particular gem: “Barbara, no matter how successful you become, always sign your own checks. I didn’t—I let my business manager sign them on my behalf—and that’s why I’m still working today.”

Later, I discovered that Peter had hired a close friend to be his business manager, primarily because he wanted to concentrate on acting and not be bothered by mundane tasks like paying the window cleaner. He had implicitly trusted that friend with his wife, his child, his life, and his money. But the friend had robbed him blind, and Peter was now practically penniless.

That didn’t stop him from fighting over the check with Walter every day and insisting on paying for my lunch. When I protested, Peter said, “Not only are you a young, pretty girl, but you’re a contract player as well, so you can’t pay for lunch.” Before one lunch with Peter and Walter, I took the waiter aside and tried to slip him some cash for our lunch, but he categorically refused to take it. Mr. Lorre and Mr. Pidgeon had made a deal with him, he said; Miss Eden must never be allowed to pick up the check.

When I had one last try and challenged Peter and Walter to let me pay the check, they had a fit. Peter was practically down to his last penny, but he still paid for my lunch, that day and every other day during the shoot.

They don’t make ’em like that anymore.

After the fiasco of Cleopatra, Fox’s extravaganza starring Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and Rex Harrison, which failed to ignite the box office sufficiently to justify the (then) stratospheric $44 million it cost to make, the studio underwent a dramatic change in fortunes and closed down. My last movie there was The Yellow Canary, with Pat Boone.

I was now free to make movies for whichever studio I wanted, and I was delighted. One of the positive consequences of leaving Fox was that in the future I would work at MGM, the cream of all the studios, where the hairdressers, makeup artists, and wardrobe staff were the best in the business, the costumes were hand-stitched, and endless care was taken in lighting actresses so they would look more beautiful on the screen than they did in real life.

Working at MGM was like going to an exclusive charm school, where actresses were taught every trick in the business to enhance and exploit their natural assets. An example: we were taught that, unlike brunette hair, blond hair always has to be smooth and blow-dried, otherwise it will look frizzy, as if it has been accidentally singed in a fire.

At MGM, we were taught to wear the same color hose as our shoes, to create the illusion of longer legs, and to wear pale nail polish to make short fingers look longer and more graceful. At MGM, I also learned to apply false eyelashes, and wore them there for the very first time, to great effect.

I worked at MGM with Tony Randall on Seven Faces of Dr. Lao, and canny Tony divined one of my weaknesses (other than ice cream and chocolate): gin rummy. As the movie included a lot of night shooting, between takes we would sit in my dressing room and play the game together.

Tony never lost a single game, and after a while I realized that he was winning a small fortune from me. So I started to watch him more closely. Then it dawned on me: he was sitting opposite a mirror that was reflecting my cards back to him. In other words, he’d been cheating, and how!

Tony and I never played gin rummy together again. Meanwhile, it swiftly transpired that he had other games on his mind, and seemed determined that I play them with him. I kept reminding him of Michael and my marriage, but Tony, a devil with women, was oblivious to all of that. He was a funny man, though, and all his approaches to me were couched in humor. So although they came to nothing, he made me laugh uproariously in the process, and I will always cherish his memory for that.

Married or not, I performed my fair share of love scenes during my Hollywood years, and in most of my movies invariably played girls who ended up being either kissed or rescued, and sometimes both.

One screen kiss I’ll never forget was with Pat Boone, when we made All Hands on Deck. As the plot had it, our kiss was designed to be relatively chaste. But Pat had never before played a role that called for him to kiss his co-star. Consequently, while kissing Pat Boone on camera was just part of a day’s work for me, to Pat, his first on-screen kiss was a major event.

It turned out that his wife and three daughters felt exactly the same, because just as the director was about to shout, “Action,” they all trooped onto the set. A second before Pat and I first locked lips, I heard one of the little daughters whisper, “Watch out! Daddy’s going to kiss someone who isn’t Mommy!”

But All Hands on Deck wasn’t always a barrel of laughs, primarily because the director, Norman Taurog, was a really, really mean man. He was child star Jackie Cooper’s uncle, and when Jackie was a little boy acting in the movies, Norman was notorious for sticking a pin into him so that he’d cry real tears in a scene. During All Hands on Deck, Norman hollered at everybody, with the exception of Pat. On the rare occasions when Pat was late to the set, Norman would take it out on the crew, and on everybody else in the bargain. So we all hated him. And he continued to be so much of a bully that even Pat, who was a really nice, easygoing guy, grew to hate him in the end.

One morning Pat and I were doing a scene on the bow of a U.S. Navy ship. Norman was in an inflatable raft next to the ship, along with the cameraman filming the scene. All of a sudden, Pat and I heard a splash next to the ship. We looked down and saw that the raft with Norman on it was sinking. All of us just watched the raft slowly go down, and I’m afraid I couldn’t stop myself from laughing. We were only just off Long Beach, so the water wasn’t that deep.

I wasn’t laughing much, though, on my next movie, Brass Bottle, with Burl Ives, in which Burl played a djinn, a genie. Working on Brass Bottle is probably my least favorite Hollywood memory. On the other hand, the movie would prove to be a good-luck charm for me: Sidney Sheldon saw it, it sparked the germ of I Dream of Jeannie, and he remembered my performance in it.

On the surface, Burl Ives was genial and kind. He was wonderful on the set, when other people were around, but at the end of the day, when it was dark, I didn’t dare risk walking by his dressing room.

He’d stand by the door like a big bad bear and beckon: “Come here, little girl. Come here.” Then he’d lunge straight at me. Luckily, I was quick enough on my feet to sidestep him, then I’d run like hell.

The first time it happened, I couldn’t believe my eyes. This darling, warm Santa Claus of a man, who was in his mid-sixties (which, as far as I was concerned, seemed like a hundred and ten) was actually making a pass at me. Incredible!

Less incredible, but still intimidating, was Warren Beatty, who was filming The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis on the sound stage next to where I was shooting How to Marry a Millionaire. Whenever I was on my way to makeup, he’d loom out of the shadows and scare the living daylights out of me by whispering, “Barbara Eden! Barbara Eden! I’m gonna come and get you right now!”

I understand that this may sound very sappy, but I genuinely was still wet behind the ears, and so I really did find Warren to be dreadfully scary. I think that he sensed my naiveté and enjoyed the effect he had on me. Every time I’d see him about to spring out at me, I’d run a mile to avoid him.

I suppose that in some ways Warren was darling, but I always think that darling is as darling does. And, to be honest, I wasn’t altogether sure what I’d do if he did eventually catch me, because I was so attracted to his physicality. My salvation, however, was that he didn’t have the kind of qualities I generally look for in a man.

Not at the time, that is. I’ll do a Jeannie blink forward twenty years or so: I’m between marriages and up for a part in a Warren Beatty production. Wardrobe and makeup have finished with me, and I’m now waiting in my trailer to be called to the set.

The trailer door swings open and there, in all his mature glory, is Warren. Without a word, he saunters up to me, kisses me on the lips, and then saunters straight out again.

I didn’t get the part. Nor was the movie ever made. End of me and Warren. End of story. Cut.

JUST BEFORE I Dream of Jeannie swirled into my life like some kind of magical tornado, I did the TV series Rawhide. Clint Eastwood starred as Rowdy Yates and I appeared as Goldie, a dance hall hostess, in a two-part episode, “Damon’s Road,” which aired in November 1964, just before I began shooting I Dream of Jeannie.

My appearance on the show was a radical departure from Rawhide’s usual classic cowboy plot, as that episode had a musical comedy slant and included a fair bit of singing and dancing. Coincidentally, I had a short scene in that episode in which I wore a harem girl costume, virtually identical to the one I’d soon be wearing on I Dream of Jeannie.

However, Rawhide’s Goldie, in contrast with Jeannie, wasn’t lighthearted or humorous in the least. To the tune of bizarre tinkling music, I appear onstage in my rather provocative harem costume and do a lot of solemn pouting, wiggling, and fluttering of my rather heavy eyelashes, while the audience of cowboys whoops and hollers. Then Clint rides into the arena on his horse and stops the show.

There was more, including a scene in which I sing “Ten Tiny Toes,” but my Rawhide stint was really only interesting in that it brought me into close proximity with yet another male Hollywood sex symbol, Clint Eastwood.

Although I was unaware of it at the time, I was pregnant when I shot that two-part Rawhide episode. When my pregnancy was finally made public, Clint sent me a production still of myself as Goldie, inscribed with the words “And we never even knew you were pregnant.”

Apart from having a good sense of humor, Clint was intensely attractive, already exuding a superstar glamour. Women flocked to him in droves. He was then married to his first wife, Maggie, but as he has publicly admitted in a Playboy interview, they conducted a somewhat open marriage. Nonetheless, whenever I saw Maggie Eastwood, I could tell that she was suffering dreadfully, particularly when Clint’s primary girlfriend, Roxanne Tunis, a beautiful, statuesque stuntwoman, openly canoodled with him on the set.

Roxanne routinely sat on Clint’s lap in full view of the cast and crew (many of whom knew Maggie and felt embarrassed for her). Roxanne was obviously a fixture in his life. She and Clint went on to have a child together, a daughter whom Clint has publicly acknowledged.

During the time we worked together on Rawhide, Clint enjoyed the attention of other girls as well, simply because they constantly offered themselves to him. Every inch a man, Clint was clearly flattered and didn’t always refuse to engage with them romantically.

However, I still hadn’t come up against any threats from other women to my marriage, no matter how young and beautiful they were. Despite the fact that Michael and I had been married for almost seven years, I was still secure in his love, and he in mine.

Looking back, I suppose part of my attraction for Michael lay in the fact that although I was an extremely hardworking actress, I remained the epitome of a classic early sixties wife, the kind who existed in the far-off era before women’s liberation. Of my own volition, I even addressed Michael as “Daddy,” and didn’t feel in the least bit self-conscious or ashamed of it. However far women have come since those days, I still don’t feel any need to apologize for how I related to my husband in the past. That’s just how it was back then, old-fashioned though it may all seem now.

I guess Clint and Maggie were ahead of their time in having an open marriage. I’m not being judgmental, but that kind of marriage never would have worked for Michael and me. We were far too intertwined, far too devoted to each other. We were a team.

Talking of male-female teams reminds me of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. In 1976, I made The Amazing Dobermans with Fred. He was seventy-seven at the time, sweet and self-effacing, and a consummate professional. There was no ego. He was doing an extremely small film, but he was quite happy to just sit around and wait for his call.

During a break, I mentioned how much I admired Ginger, and Fred said, “Oh, yes, feathers!”

“Feathers?” I asked, curious.

“Ginger was a great dancer,” he said. “But she had a very dominant mother who decided which costumes she’d wear in the movies she made with me. Every time Ginger and I would dance, I’d sweat profusely, so the feathers on her gowns would get stuck on my face and on my arms. I was so irritated by all the feathers that I finally asked Ginger not to have feathers sewn on her costumes anymore.”

“But she always wore feathers in all her movies!” I cut in.

“Exactly,” said Fred with a small smile. “Her mother refused to allow her to leave the feathers off her costumes. And Ginger complied.”

Fred Astaire was such a nice, gentle man, but with that anecdote he lifted the lid on the tensions simmering beneath the pristine surface of his legendary relationship with Ginger Rogers. They’d been a team, yes, but her mother clearly called the shots.

Another legendary star who came into my life briefly was Cary Grant, whom I met in the mid-sixties, shortly before I began working on I Dream of Jeannie.

As a challenge, I accepted a part in a stage musical, The Pajama Game, with John Raitt (now better known as Bonnie’s father), but as I hadn’t sung in public since singing with the band in San Francisco, shortly before the show opened I began to suffer an acute case of stage fright. Apart from my long absence from the theater, I also felt considerably hampered because the show was being put on in a theater in the round, and I’d never performed in that kind of venue before. I was petrified that I wouldn’t be able to find my entrances or exits.