Jeannie Out of the Bottle - Barbara Eden [2]
My mother’s edict stayed with me through all my years of tangling with Hollywood’s most high-testosterone players: Warren Beatty, Burl Ives, Tom Jones, Tony Randall, Tony Curtis, O. J. Simpson, and more. And through all the lonely years when—on the verge of a breakdown after my younger son was stillborn—I performed in Las Vegas, shared George Burns’s dressing room, and smiled through my tears as best I could.
Most of all, her words echoed in my mind during those five seasons of working with Larry Hagman on I Dream of Jeannie, which sometimes felt like I was walking on hot coals. But before I tell you about some of the most challenging moments, I want to make it crystal clear that I think Larry Hagman is a terrific actor and I’d work with him again any day, not just because of his talent but because he is a warm and kind human being.
Let me Jeannie-blink an example for you. We have a guest director on the show, whose name I have mercifully blanked out simply because the memory of him is so unpleasant. He is an old-time movie director, the relative of some studio bigwig. He is long past his prime as a director and probably should have retired, because he is now borderline senile.
As it is, he is extremely frustrating to work with because he doesn’t always make himself clear when he sets up a scene, so that none of us knows where we are supposed to stand or what we are supposed to do. The end result is that we work long hours in the studio without getting much film in the can. One day a situation ensues that goes something like this:
CAMERAMAN: “Cut!”
DIRECTOR: “Who said cut?”
CAMERAMAN: “I did, sir!”
DIRECTOR: “Why did you say cut? You’re not supposed to say cut!”
CAMERAMAN: “I said cut because someone walked in front of the camera, sir.”
DIRECTOR: “Who did that? Who did that? Whoever did that, they’re fired!”
CAMERAMAN: “But that was you, sir!”
(I suppose that I Dream of Jeannie director was a minor improvement over director Irwin Allen, with whom I worked on a couple of movies, although at the time I didn’t quite see it that way. Irwin wasn’t senile, just wildly eccentric, and imagined that he was Cecil B. DeMille. Instead of yelling “cut,” he would fire a gun into the air.)
Toward the end of a day of working on I Dream of Jeannie with that senile, tyrannical old movie director barking ludicrous orders at us incessantly, I am close to tears. So, during a short break in the filming, I run off the set and hide behind a piece of scenery, far removed from all the action. And I stay there, sobbing away as silently as possible, while my makeup pours down my cheeks and all the crew and cast run around trying to find me.
Of course, Larry, a clever man in all sorts of ways, is the one to finally find me in my hiding place. He puts his arms around me gently and says, “Don’t cry, Barbara. That’s my act!” Bless his heart! I am simultaneously touched and surprised—touched that Larry is being so kind to me, and surprised that he is being so honest about his on-set emotional breakdowns, which sometimes actually did culminate in him crying in front of all of us.
But I Dream of Jeannie wasn’t just a hotbed of drama and intrigue. It was also a comedy, and Larry and I had plenty of fun along the way as well. A classic Larry story involves the two of us and a lion named Simm, a veteran of The Addams Family, who appeared with us in an episode entitled “The Americanization