Jeannie Out of the Bottle - Barbara Eden [12]
But Miss Holloway brushed all my objections aside with a flick of one of her ubiquitous chiffon scarves.
“Whether you win the contest or not, you have to try, Barbara Jean,” she said. “Go down and audition, and if they reject you, it doesn’t really matter. At least you will have tried.”
I nodded glumly.
But instead of being pleased and grateful that I was taking her advice, Miss Holloway had a parting shot for me.
“And Barbara Jean, you really do need to toughen up,” she said.
My mother presumably agreed, because instead of recoiling in horror at the thought of me entering a beauty contest, she got to work and made me a sparkling royal blue strapless gown with a low waist and a hoop skirt, so that I’d look my best at the pageant.
I realize that nowadays thousands of young girls enter beauty pageants without batting a single false eyelash, but for me it was torture to parade up and down in my bathing suit while a panel of judges appraised me from head to toe. I felt as if I might as well have been naked. And I was unutterably shocked when I won the title of Miss San Francisco, along with a blue satin ball gown and a teeny-tiny diamond ring.
But my beauty pageant ordeal wasn’t over yet. As Miss San Francisco, I was now obliged to enter the Miss California pageant. I didn’t expect to win, and I didn’t, but I liked the other girls, and we had a good time together. When the contest was over, I was flattered to be voted the friendliest and most cheerful girl in the pageant, the one with the best personality—a good egg. Other than that, I was relieved that my beauty pageant career was now well and truly over.
I guess, though, that Miss Holloway was right about one thing: taking the plunge and appearing in the beauty pageant did give me confidence, although it didn’t serve to toughen me up in the least. That would come later, if at all.
Again following Miss Holloway’s advice to audition for everything, I auditioned for and got a part in Spring Crazy, a musical written by former Ziegfeld Follies dancer Mary Hay Barthelmess and her daughter. And although the show closed after just three performances, having appeared in it meant that I was able to get my Actors’ Equity card, a necessity for a working performer.
As time went on, I realized that winning the Miss San Francisco title had also been a bit of luck for me because, as a result, I was interviewed on a couple of local talk shows, and on one of them I met a portly gentleman with a walrus mustache, the comedian Solly Hoffman. His stock in trade (or should I say shtick?) was record pantomime, which is miming to a record.
After the show, he came up with the idea that we should do an act together. Never one to turn down the chance of a job (except, as I’ll tell you much later, under the most stringent of circumstances), I immediately agreed, and the act Hoffman and Huffman was born.
From then on, Solly and I entertained for Hadassah, the Shriners—you name it. The act always started with Solly miming to a song. He would introduce me as the shaineh shiksa (the beautiful gentile girl), and I’d do three songs. The act invariably ended with us doing a record pantomime to “Aba Daba Honeymoon,” the song made so famous by Debbie Reynolds, another shaineh shiksa.
So that was my life during my late teens: singing with bands, clowning with Solly Hoffman, working in the bank, and studying acting. It was hardly surprising that I didn’t have a minute in which to date anyone.
Well, all right, I’ll ’fess up; I did manage a second or two. His name was Al Ansara, and when I said his last name, it lingered in my mouth like the taste of rich milk chocolate. Naturally, I had no idea how much the name Ansara would come to mean to me a few years down the line. Al was a student at San Francisco University, a workaholic like me who was putting himself through school by driving a truck part-time.
Each afternoon when I left