Jeannie Out of the Bottle - Barbara Eden [1]
But, of course, none of us knows any of that yet. Nor do we have a glimmer that Something’s Got to Give will be Marilyn’s 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 star—that’s 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 (I’ll tell you more later) and instead do my utmost to focus on this vision of loveliness in front of me.
So I’m standing there, the image of Bozo the Clown on a bad day, but Marilyn is the most beautiful thing I’ve 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, he’d have cast her as one of his special people. She’s every inch a star, but after what Evie has confided to me, I don’t envy Marilyn, not an iota.
And I don’t envy any of the other stars I’ve 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 husband’s 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 I’m an actress, not a star, and I’m 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 Larry’s 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 Larry’s frustration and anger. On a bad day … well, I’ll tell you about those bad days, and you can judge for yourselves. First, though, another Jeannie blink.
It’s 1938 and I’m at school in San Francisco. I’m 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 I’m 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 hard—maybe because they don’t like me, maybe because they like me too much and are trying to get my attention. I don’t 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, Rise above it? Rise above it? I’m only four years old. How the heck can I rise above anything?
But I love and trust my mother, so I dry my tears, try to rise above my bullying schoolmates, and, by some kind of a miracle, actually succeed. From that time on, my mother’s early decree to “rise above it” will become indelibly engraved on my psyche. It will become my own private mantra, the way I live