Jeannie Out of the Bottle - Barbara Eden [23]
My first on-screen appearance! I pored over the script excitedly and discovered that I was to play a fur-clad agent and deliver just three or four lines. I flashed back to Emma’s prediction and smiled to myself. Make my mark on TV? Not with just three or four lines, I wouldn’t.
If I had indeed harbored any delusions of grandeur regarding my appearance on the show, they would have quickly evaporated when—just as I had finished in makeup—Miss Sothern (given what happened next, I can’t conceive of referring to her as Ann) stalked onto the set, a maid dressed in a classic black-and-white uniform in attendance. Then Miss Sothern swept right over to me, looked me up and down, turned around, and stalked away again. No response to my tentative hello. No smile, nothing.
I stood frozen to the spot, not knowing what to do next. Then the makeup man beckoned me to come back to makeup again because, he said, he needed to fix my face.
I sat quietly, bewildered and not quite understanding what was going on, while he redid my makeup.
The truth became agonizingly obvious when I heard him whisper into the phone, “I’m sorry, Miss Sothern; there’s nothing I can do to make her look bad.”
Before I could get over my shock at the implications of what he’d said, I was called back on the set again.
There Miss Sothern fixed me with a look so glacial that it could have frozen Vesuvius.
“We don’t need a rehearsal. Let’s just shoot this and get it over with,” she snarled in my direction.
For my first job in front of the camera, I said my lines as best as I could, then left, shaken to the core by my encounter with Miss Ann Sothern.
A witch on wheels, if ever there was one.
Fortunately, my next TV job, on a pilot, The Jan Sterling Show, proved to be a far pleasanter experience. Jan, an award-winning film actress, couldn’t have been nicer (and off camera she had a great line about her husband and son: “Mummy works for toys, Daddy works for bread and butter”), so my faith in Hollywood divas was restored. Not that I was just working in Hollywood. I did a play, Voice of the Turtle, at the Laguna Playhouse with James Drury, which was notable in that I was spotted in it by a Twentieth Century Fox director, Mark Robson, who was soon to play a big role in my career.
Meanwhile, Wilt managed to get me a bit part in my first movie, as a college girl in Back from Eternity. I was grateful to get a job acting in a movie at last, and relieved that my Studio Club roommate, Barbara Wilson, was cast in the movie as well.
On the first day at the studio, I found it extremely weird to be working with producer-director John Farrow (Mia’s father), who carried a cane everywhere with him. Perplexed, Barbara and I managed to waylay another extra and in a whisper asked her about it.
She gave a wry smile and said, “Just stay away from him if you can, because he loves to goose us girls with it!”
We took her advice.
Next, I got an even smaller part in an episode of the TV show The West Point Story, and then played a secretary in the movie Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?
One of the highlights for me during that time was meeting Orson Welles, who interviewed me for a part in an unspecified movie. The interview turned out to be one of the most powerful and electric experiences of my life.
When I arrived at Orson’s Melrose Avenue office, his secretary ushered me into a small room. Behind a rather small desk sat an enormously fat man exuding an energy I’d never before encountered. This was before he spoke a word. When that glorious voice rolled out, I became a dishrag. The interview went well (when I was able to speak), but the project never materialized.
Orson had sex appeal galore. And, flashing forward, so did another star I met, only socially this time, at a charity golf tournament: Burt Lancaster. He had an extremely seductive personality. The way he stood, the way he talked to you, the way he looked right into your soul with those black-lashed eyes of his—he was one of the sexiest men I’ve ever met, and a lovely, nice human being.
Let me do a Jeannie blink