Jeannie Out of the Bottle - Barbara Eden [22]
No one could get close to Johnny even at that early stage in his career, least of all me—mainly because CBS gossip had it that, married or not, offstage Johnny had a taste for curvy blondes. As a result, whenever I was around Johnny, I wore armor, metaphorically speaking, and he probably sensed my reserve.
Perhaps I overreacted, because in fact Johnny always behaved like a perfect gentleman. As it happens, he lost his cool in my presence only once. A hapless secretary, unaware that Johnny was allergic to cats, brought hers to the studio, and Johnny visibly bristled when he saw it. The secretary was ordered off the set, and the show went on without any further incident, but I could tell that Johnny was upset.
Offstage Johnny was acutely sensitive, but onstage, like most comedians, he protected himself with a hard shell that might as well have been made of stainless steel and Teflon. That shell was impervious to any hurts, any slights, any rejections, and Johnny, like countless other comedians, wore it like a second skin and always would.
Decades later, I made six guest appearances on The Tonight Show. Johnny was nice to me, if impersonal. One time, at the end of the show, he threw in a brief mention that we’d worked together early in his career. I could tell that the memory of the days when he wasn’t a big star deeply embarrassed him, and he didn’t mention it again, either in public or in private.
However, when we both had Las Vegas acts but were appearing in different hotels, Johnny called out of the blue and invited me to spend the afternoon with him in his suite at Caesar’s, complete with his own private rooftop swimming pool. I considered Johnny’s invitation to be a friendly one, not romantic, and because I felt isolated and lonely in Las Vegas, I might have accepted. But my experience with the arid Las Vegas air was that if I went out in it for longer than a few minutes, I’d lose my voice entirely. I had two shows to do that night, so I couldn’t afford to risk it. I sent word to Johnny, couched in the most courteous of terms, that I couldn’t make it to his hotel. He was miffed, and from that moment on, whenever we met at parties or at other Hollywood events, his behavior toward me was cold, distant, and forbidding.
My early appearances on Johnny’s show didn’t exactly catapult me to stardom, but they did help advance my career slightly. A short while later, I was chosen by a group of Los Angeles press agents to be one of fifteen “Baby Wampus Stars”—supposedly up-and-coming starlets.
I enjoyed meeting the other girls, who included Jill St. John, Angie Dickinson, and Barbara Marx, who later married Frank Sinatra. A group of us were photographed for Life magazine at Harold Lloyd’s glamorous estate, which boasted a beautifully decorated and gigantic Christmas tree that he left up year-round.
When I still failed to get any acting jobs, I posed for some pinup shots. There was never any question of my posing for anything salacious, although I did don a bathing suit for a photo session with the notorious Russ Meyer.
Around that time, I was photographed in a bikini for the cover of Parade, the Sunday newspaper magazine. I considered that I looked fairly demure in the photographs. Unfortunately, my great-aunts Nora and Nell vehemently disagreed, and they called to issue a sharp reprimand. How could I display my body to the world in such a wanton way?
As gently and kindly as possible, I explained that it was really a very modest swimsuit.
However, they refused to be pacified until my grandmother stepped in and calmed them down a bit. But the fact remained that until they died, Great-Aunt Nell and Great-Aunt Nora never approved of my modeling.
In many ways, though, they were on target. Modeling wasn’t really for me, and I basically disliked doing it. So I was thrilled when Wilt called with the good news that I’d been cast in a small part on The Ann Sothern Show, a popular TV