Jeannie Out of the Bottle - Barbara Eden [24]
I was over the moon. I was living in the Studio Club just like Marilyn Monroe once had, and now I had been offered a contract by her very own studio, Twentieth Century Fox. But, as they say, it never rains but it pours, because in his next breath he told me that I Love Lucy wanted me for a cameo as Diana Jordan in the episode “Country Club Dance.”
The episode centered around a country club dinner dance at which Ricky, Fred, and a number of other husbands are too bored and complacent to dance with their middle-aged wives. A visiting cousin, the much younger Diana, sashays onto the scene and the husbands all vie for her attention and compete to see who will dance with her first. Diana picks Ricky and dances with him while the other husbands jostle to be next. Meanwhile, the wives watch, incensed.
While the script has them restore the balance the following day, when the wives turn on their own glamour and beguile their husbands at last, the plotline was a little too close to real life for my comfort.
Everyone loved Lucille Ball, but there was no doubt whatsoever that Desi Arnaz was a world-class philanderer. It was common knowledge in Hollywood that he had a taste for young, curvaceous blondes and that Lucy was deeply unhappy about Desi’s infidelity. Worse still, he was blatant about his activities, and once even publicly boasted, “A real man should have as many girls as he has hairs on his head.”
Now, I’m not a prude, but as far as I’ve always been concerned, married men are completely out of bounds to me. I made up my mind then and there that no matter how handsome Desi might be (and he was extremely handsome), no matter how persuasive (and with that Latin-lover charm, I had no doubt at all that he would be), I wouldn’t succumb to his romantic blandishments. I wouldn’t cause any trouble or hurt Lucy in any way.
Besides—and this has always been true throughout my career—when I work, I don’t play. I focus single-mindedly on my role and won’t allow anything or anyone to distract me from it. Usually that’s very easy, but not on I Love Lucy, where Desi seemed to pop up wherever I was during rehearsal.
My solution? To hide from him whenever I saw him coming. Not a particularly subtle ploy, I know, but I was unable to come up with anything more effective.
During rehearsal, Lucy took me aside and said, “You’re good, Barbara. You don’t usually find a pretty girl who can project and be funny at the same time. But make sure to put that pretty little face of yours out there. Let the camera love your face. Don’t look away from it.”
That was Lucy. So different from Ann Sothern, and generous almost to a fault to a younger actress.
The day of the final shoot, I locked my dressing room door, put on my dress for the show (a nice if not particularly flattering number), and then tiptoed out, hoping against hope that Desi wasn’t around and waiting to pounce on me.
Instead, I bumped straight into Lucy’s assistant, who informed me that Lucy wanted to see me in her trailer dressing room at once.
Oh boy! I thought. Have I done something to make her mad?
I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong, but I was still petrified. I followed the assistant into the trailer, where Lucy ordered, “Take that dress off.”
Literally trembling from head to foot in fear, I did what she told me.
Then she handed me another dress.
Remembering Ann Sothern, I looked at it and thought, Probably a sack dress.
Then I put it on. It was the tightest, sexiest dress I’d ever seen, one that showed off all of my curves.
“Take it off again,” Lucy said.
I did, and she and one of her friends spent more than an hour adding sparkles all over the dress so that it would look even more shiny and glamorous.
Now that’s the kind of woman Lucille Ball was. She was really smart and really dedicated to her show, and even though she realized