Barbara Eden - Jeannie Out of the Bottle

Copyright 2011 by Barbara Eden

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

Crown Archetype with colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Eden, Barbara, 1934
Jeannie out of the bottle / Barbara Eden with Wendy Leigh.1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Eden, Barbara, 1934 2. Television actors and actressesUnited StatesBiography. I. Leigh, Wendy. II. Title.
PN2287.E384A3 2011
791.450280924dc22
[B] 2011001058

eISBN: 978-0-307-88695-8

Jacket design by Laura Duffy
Jacket photography by NBC/Photofest

v3.1

For my loving husband, Jon,
my devoted manager, Gene Schwam,
and of course Sidney Sheldon.

December 1, 1964, Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, California

Its the end of the first day filming the I Dream of Jeannie pilot, The Lady in the Bottle, and three of usthe seriess creator, writer, and producer, Sidney Sheldon; Larry Hagman, who plays Captain Anthony Nelson; and Iare in the company limo speeding the thirty miles from Malibu back to Hollywood after a long day on location at Zuma Beach, the scene of Captain Nelsons first meeting with Jeannie.

Still in my flimsy pink chiffon harem-style pantaloons and minuscule velvet bolero, I shiver from head to foot, snuggle into my brown cloth coat, and wish Id been allowed to keep my full-length mink from my days as Loco in the TV series How to Marry a Millionaire.

How to Marry a Millionaire ran for two years, butalthough Im happy to be playing Jeannie, and thrilled that my first day went so wellIm not counting on the I Dream of Jeannie pilot being sold at all. But its a job, and Im glad to have gotten it, though Im still stunned that Sidney Sheldon didnt cast a tall, willowy, raven-haired Middle Eastern beauty queen as his Jeannie instead of a short American blonde like me.

The limo glides to a halt at a traffic light, right next to a maroon Mustang convertible sporting Kansas license plates and driven by an elderly man and his middle-aged wife.

Without any warning, Larry rolls down the limo window, leans out, and to my utter amazement yells at the couple, Someday Im going to be a star! Someday youre going to know who I am!

When I recover from my surprise, I think, A star! Why in the blazes would heor anyone else, for that matterever want to be a star?

I blink my Jeannie-style blink and flash back two years to April 10, 1962, on the sound stage at Twentieth Century Fox, where I am filming Five Weeks in a Balloon with Red Buttons, and Marilyn Monroe is filming Somethings Got to Give on sound stage 14, which is adjacent to mine. EvieEvelyn Moriarty, my stand-in since I first arrived at Fox in 1957, and Marilyns as wellannounces in her inimitable twang, Barbara, my other star has asked to meet you!

I know she means Marilyn Monroe, because thats how she always refers to her, and I am both thrilled and curious to meet Marilyn at last. After all, Evie has been confiding in me about her for years. So although I am dressed for the movie like a clown in baggy plaid pants and a massive white shirt, when Evie grabs my hand and pulls me over to the Somethings Got to Give sound stage, where Marilyn is about to start a wardrobe test, I follow her without a moments hesitation.

Fox sound stages in those days were huge, like small cities, and this one is a massive cavern, with a little lighted circle in the middle. A trailer in the background serves as Marilyns dressing room, where the legendary costume designer Jean Louis is working with her on her wardrobe for Somethings Got to Give as well as the sensational figure-hugging gown she will soon be wearing when she sings Happy Birthday to President Kennedy at Madison Square Garden.

But, of course, none of us knows any of that yet. Nor do we have a glimmer that Somethings Got to Give will be Marilyns final movie. Had we known what lay ahead for her, we would have been shocked to the core.

Then the trailer door opens, and Marilyn materializes on the set. Evie grabs my hand and utters the immortal line, Marilyn, I want you to meet my other star.

My other starthats how Evie describes me, the former Barbara Jean Huffman, to Marilyn Monroe!

I step into the spotlight with Marilyn. She takes my hand. We have a conversation, during which I try to put everything Evie has revealed to me about Marilyn firmly out of my mind (Ill tell you more later) and instead do my utmost to focus on this vision of loveliness in front of me.

So Im standing there, the image of Bozo the Clown on a bad day, but Marilyn is the most beautiful thing Ive ever seen in my life. She just glows. There is something in the ether swirling about her, in her, through her, around her, and if James Cameron, the director of Avatar, had seen her, hed have cast her as one of his special people. Shes every inch a star, but after what Evie has confided to me, I dont envy Marilyn, not an iota.

And I dont envy any of the other stars Ive met and worked with up till now, either. None of them, not Elvis Presley (who tried to seduce me by confiding his vulnerabilities to me), not Paul Newman (who, strangely enough, had a complex about his physical appearance), not Lucille Ball (who was forced to cope with her husbands very public infidelity on practically a daily basis). Stars each and every one of them. But happy and fulfilled? I wonder.

As for me, right now Im an actress, not a star, and Im content with that. But here in the limousine speeding back to Hollywood after the first day of filming the I Dream of Jeannie pilot is Larry Hagman, clearly burning with red-hot ambition to become a star, and, more important, passionately believing that I Dream of Jeannie will instantly make him one.

This is what Sidney Sheldon said many years later about Larrys unbridled ambition: Suddenly, Larry found himself in a show with a beautiful half-naked girl and there was no way that it would be his show. I tried everything, but it was always only Jeannie the public was interested in, and through five seasons he became frustrated and very angry.

On a good day, I understood and sympathized with Larrys frustration and anger. On a bad day well, Ill tell you about those bad days, and you can judge for yourselves. First, though, another Jeannie blink.

Its 1938 and Im at school in San Francisco. Im one of the poorest children in the school, and certainly not one of the prettiest. I may be proud of my school shoes (the only other pair I own are church shoes), but Im not in the least bit crazy about the pigtails my mom wants me to wear all the time because she thinks they look cute.

My mother is so proud of those pigtails that I never once complain when she braids them tightly every morning. Today, at the end of class, a couple of the boys have fun pulling them over and over again real hardmaybe because they dont like me, maybe because they like me too much and are trying to get my attention. I dont really know. All I do know is that they are hurting me a lot.

As soon as I can, I yank myself away and run home in floods of tears. My mother takes one look at me and declares, Rise above it, Barbara Jean! Rise above it! And I think,