Jeannie Out of the Bottle - Barbara Eden [19]
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