Jeannie Out Of The Bottle (6 page)

But thanks to Miss Holloway’s advice, I was going to try. So off I went, my heart in my mouth, to Ciro’s on Sunset, where a Copa-style line of ten chorus girls danced fourteen ensemble numbers a night and, along the way, added to Ciro’s erotic allure.

At the audition, my worst fears that I’d be truly humiliated by my own shortcomings were immediately confirmed when the choreographer positioned a group of Ciro’s dancers in the front row and asked me to stand right next to them. The pianist thumped out a tune, I did a high kick, and my shoe flew right off my foot, up in the air, and down onto the stage again with a clunk.

I could have died, but the choreographer just motioned to me to pick it up and carry right on dancing, so I did. But as much as I struggled to follow the other girls’ footwork, I couldn’t keep up with the intricate dance steps and felt like a klutz of the first order. Then the music stopped, and the choreographer asked ten of us to come back to the club the following day. I nearly fainted when I found out I was one of them.

But I needed the job, so, like it or not, I went back to Ciro’s again. At the second audition I realized that I wasn’t the only klutz on the block. After watching many of us galumph around the stage like elephants, it began to dawn on me that Jolene had been absolutely right. Ciro’s wasn’t about excellence in dance. It was about something else altogether: pretty girls.

However, that realization didn’t stop me from worrying about my own lack of dance ability. It was only years later that George Schlatter, who managed the club and later went on to produce Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In (and married Jolene along the way), cracked that I must have been nuts to worry about my footwork at the audition or while performing in the show. “We hired you because we knew the customers would never look at your feet, darling, but much further up,” he said.

I was young and naive and just didn’t fully understand the real reason male customers flocked to Ciro’s in droves. But at least I wasn’t lying about my age, like some of the other girls. A number of them, I later discovered, were much too young to be working there.

To my everlasting surprise, after the second audition I got the job, and what I look back on as my month in purgatory began. During my first few days at Ciro’s, we rehearsed every afternoon, and I spent most of the time stumbling around, losing my shoes, treading on the other girls’ feet, and, as soon as a break was called, bolting into the ladies’ room, where I sobbed my heart out.

Then at four I’d rush over to the bank and start working there. After the bank closed, I’d speed back to Ciro’s again, just in time for the ten o’clock show, where, to my horror, I was put in the front row of the chorus, presumably because I was so much shorter than all the other girls.

After a week, it was obvious to me that working at Ciro’s and at the bank just didn’t mix. Since I was making so much more money at Ciro’s, I quit the bank and concentrated on my job in the chorus at Ciro’s instead.

Fortunately, a dance team called the White Sisters took pity on me and spent some time teaching me the dance routines. I followed their instructions as best I could, but although I ended up not being such a klutz anymore, I still didn’t feel comfortable working at the club. From my perspective, dancing at Ciro’s felt like being on another planet. To top it all off, most of the girls mixed with the customers between shows—it wasn’t mandatory, and I did not, but it happened a great deal.

Then George discovered that I could sing, so I was given the additional job of singing with Bobby Ramos and his band in between shows. The first show started at ten, the second at midnight, and each of them lasted an hour.

A short time later, I was given a number of my very own to perform in the show: Miss Adelaide’s song “Take Back Your Mink,” from Guys and Dolls.

Suddenly the other girls were at my throat like a herd of long-legged hyenas scenting fresh blood. Before, my failure to mingle with the male customers between shows had passed without comment. Now the girls—most of whom had the longest legs not in captivity and the sharpest nails in existence—turned on me with a vengeance, sniggering, “Here comes the Little Virgin.”

They probably didn’t like me any better after one of the girls was asked by Sammy Davis Jr. to give me a message. A big scowl disfigured her pretty face as she whispered to me, “Sammy would like to take you out.” He was at the height of his career then, a big star (though his Rat Pack days were yet ahead of him), but I still wasn’t about to go out with one of the customers.

Besides, I’d heard all about Sammy’s wild parties, which he threw at his house high in the Hollywood Hills. George later confided to me that as soon as Sammy first saw the house (which once belonged to Judy Garland, and which had just been put on the market by the new owners) he fell in love with it and wanted to buy it then and there. But he was realistic enough to know that the current owner would never sell to someone of the Negro race (as African Americans were then called). So George stepped in and bought the house for Sammy, then transferred ownership over to him.

Anyway, I’d heard all about the girls who went to those parties, and sometimes ended up staying there. So I politely refused Sammy’s invitation, and resorted to the white lie that I had a boyfriend, which at the time I didn’t.

My innocence really ought to have been a protection in the jungle that was Ciro’s, but it was not. It was more like a red rag to a bunch of heifers. When the girls found out that I regularly went to church, they mocked me endlessly. And later on I discovered that the male staff was secretly taking bets on who could first deflower the Little Virgin.

One night, George, who always kidded around with me, but in the nicest way, came over and told me that Elvis Presley had called him and asked if he could take me out on a date. I assumed George was kidding and told him so. I thought no more of it until just recently, when George and I were reminiscing about old times together and he told me that Elvis had indeed called him and asked him to arrange a date with me. Fascinating, in light of what happened between Elvis and me many years after I worked at Ciro’s.

Fortunately, though, the other girls never found out that Elvis wanted to take me out. If they had, I’d have been toast. I was in way over my head at Ciro’s and I knew it. I was surrounded by a bunch of tough, if beautiful, girls who all obviously despised me. Their venom reached such a crescendo that one day, just before the show, when we were lined up to use the bathroom (a little wooden cubicle, which for some unknown reason had a lock on both the inside and the outside) in our dressing room, they all ganged up on me.

When I entered the toilet enclosure, I suddenly heard a click. Hoping against hope that they hadn’t done what I feared they’d done, I tried the door handle. Sure enough, it didn’t open. Livid, I banged on the door, yelling, “Let me out! Let me out!”

There were hushed whispers outside the door, a few giggles, then the sound of footsteps receding. I banged on the door again. Then I heard the orchestra strike up the opening bars of my song. I dissolved into tears.

After a few minutes I heard the key turn in the lock, and the stage manager flung open the door. I fell into his arms, sobbing with a combination of relief and anger. Onstage, the number following mine was already in full swing. The girls had achieved their goal; I didn’t sing “Take Back Your Mink” at Ciro’s that night.

If I hadn’t needed my salary so much, I probably would have thrown in the towel that night and never gone back to Ciro’s again. But quitting was never my style, and I needed the job, so I gritted my teeth, and forced myself to go back to Ciro’s the very next night. I went through my routines like a sleepwalker and ignored the other girls whenever possible. Which was probably just as well, because afterward, through the grapevine, I learned that they had all been severely reprimanded for what they had done to me, and for their malice and lack of professionalism. And while George later went on to dismiss the girls’ cruelty to me as a sort of initiation or test they regularly gave to new Ciro’s recruits, I just didn’t see it that way at the time, and it hurt my feelings immeasurably.

A week later I was vastly relieved when, in the gentlest terms possible (some yarn centering around a dancer who needed the job so she could support her baby), George fired me. I almost cried with joy.

Looking back, though, I think Ciro’s and Jolene did me a favor, because working there got me out of the rut of slaving away in a bank and propelled me into my new existence as a full-time, if struggling, actress.

At this point—particularly after my abortive stint at Ciro’s and perhaps because, living in the Studio Club, the spirit of Marilyn may well have started to influence my choices—I jettisoned my plaid pinafores and went on a shopping spree at Jax in Beverly Hills, where I bought a sexy pink gingham dress with spaghetti straps and a scoop neck, as well as a pair of tight-fitting yellow pants, which probably accentuated what George Schlatter had kiddingly termed my “bubble butt.”

Then I saw a Studio Club ad for a young actress to read with an actor auditioning at Warner Brothers. Remembering the Warner Brothers talent scout Solly Biano and how he had rejected me, I shivered at the words “Warner Brothers.” But I squared my shoulders and answered the ad, and before I knew it, I was walking through the studio gates once more. Only this time Uncle Grandville wasn’t waiting outside in his car to console me if I failed.

At first, the memory of the casting director made me feel nauseous, but I quickly recovered and did the scene with the actor. Afterward, the studio’s acting coach, Don Cutler, offered me the chance to study with him on a daily basis, free of charge.

I was thrilled. I still hadn’t been cast in a movie or a play, and very much wanted to improve my acting technique.

I took Don Cutler’s class at Warner’s every morning. One day I was walking toward the classroom when I heard a male voice behind me shout, “Hey, you!”

I didn’t turn around. I just kept on walking.

“Hey, you! You in the yellow pants!”

I wanted to run, but my ingrained sense of politeness triumphed over my fear. I turned around to face Solly Biano, the man who had told me to go back to San Francisco.

I almost fainted dead on the spot. I didn’t belong at Warner’s. He was sure to have me thrown off the lot.

He gave me a big smile.

“Are you an actress?” he said.

I nodded mutely.

“Has the studio tested you?” he said.

I shook my head, incredulous. He didn’t recognize me! Okay, I wasn’t wearing white gloves or plaid anymore, but I was still the same girl he had rejected out of hand just five months earlier.

“Then we’re going to test you right away,” he said, and threw me another brilliant smile.

So the man who’d rejected me in the first place, the man who’d temporarily broken my spirit but then put iron in my soul, actually arranged for me to have a screen test at Warner Brothers after all.

And although I didn’t get a contract at the studio, I’d learned a valuable lesson: no matter who rejects you in life, no matter how bad you feel, no matter how much that rejection hurts you, just keep on going. Put one foot in front of the other and ignore people’s negative judgments, because those can change or even be forgotten.

So I carried on auditioning and didn’t let the continual rejection get me down, until one day my persistence finally paid off.

I was over at Universal, doing another reading with yet another aspiring actor, when I met an agent, Wilt Melnick, a friendly man in his thirties with sandy hair and an engaging smile, who offered to represent me.

“But there is just one condition,” he said.

My heart sank. By now I had wised up to Hollywood men and their “conditions,” and I wasn’t giving in to any of them. I raised an eyebrow and waited for the inevitable.

“The name Barbara Huffman sounds like a doctor,” Wilt went on. “Change your name and I’ll represent you.”

In retrospect, I wonder whether a certain Desperate Housewives actress named Felicity was ever faced with a similar dilemma. However, having met her at the 2006 Academy Awards (when she was nominated for Transamerica) and chatted about my former last name and her current one as well as our distant Huffman relatives, I know that she never once bowed to any hotshot Hollywood agent who demanded that she jettison her last name. Perhaps she was made of sterner stuff than I was, or perhaps times have simply changed.

In 1955, though, when Wilt Melnick issued his ultimatum that I change my name, I only hesitated for a few moments before replying.

“Mr. Melnick,” I said, “just as long as I can carry on being called Barbara, you can give me any last name you like.”

He gave me a long, appraising look.

“You seem kinda innocent,” he said. “So let’s call you Eden, like the garden.”

That’s how Barbara Eden was born.

By coincidence, Wilt Melnick also represented Kim Novak, though our paths never crossed again. However, early in my relationship with Wilt, I had a narrow escape from someone else also associated with the Studio Club—Howard Hughes.

Wilt called me there early one morning to tell me that I should expect a midnight call from Howard Hughes.

A warning light flashed in my head, but I trusted Wilt, so I kept silent.

“He’ll ask you to come straight over to Republic Pictures to meet him, but don’t be worried. He’s really on the up-and-up. He’s just an eccentric. Midnight is when he always interviews actresses. Those are his legitimate office hours and you’ll have no problems with him,” he said.

I wasn’t reassured and made a deal with my roommate, Barbara Wilson, that if Howard Hughes called, she’d chaperone me at the midnight meeting.

Fortunately, Howard Hughes never did call me, but I still can’t help wondering what was going on in Wilt’s mind when he suggested that I go over to Howard Hughes’s place at midnight. I’d like to think that he was just looking out for me professionally. And I want to give him the benefit of the doubt, but perhaps I was—and still am—more than a little naive.