Jeannie Out of the Bottle - Barbara Eden [25]
Even to this day in Hollywood, you still hear stories about how Desi broke Lucy’s heart, but she still put her show first because she was smart and she was a professional.
Funnily enough, when I finally filmed the scene in which Desi and I dance together, he turned out to be a complete gentleman on camera and kept his distance from me. I was vastly relieved.
Afterward, the director took me aside and said, “You know, every time we have a young girl in the show and Desi goes after her, Lucy suffers so much. You were the first one who handled things professionally. Thank you.”
Lucy also obliquely thanked me for evading her husband’s advances: she offered to put me under contract for her new production company, Desilu. By then, though, it was too late. Twentieth Century Fox had finalized their offer for me to become one of their contract players, and it was far too good for me to turn down: seven years at $200 a week. I was on my way to making it in Hollywood at last!
WHEN I FIRST arrived at the Twentieth Century Fox studios, I instinctively gravitated toward the warehouse in which the wardrobe department resided, where the costumes worn by Betty Grable and Alice Faye, actresses now long gone from the studio, still hung with their names stitched inside them.
I spent hours wandering through the wardrobe department, asking questions about the clothes and the stars who once wore them, and, in the process, became increasingly aware of the fleeting quality of Hollywood and of stardom, and of the ever-present potential for tragedy inherent in both.
Jayne Mansfield, who starred in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, was a classic example (although I had no contact with her when I worked on the movie). Young, beautiful, sweet-natured, and far more intelligent than she was given credit for by the public and the press, she was to meet her death in a gruesome car accident. It seemed to me that her life story epitomized the quintessential Hollywood tragedy.
Then there was Debbie Reynolds, to whose “Aba Daba Honeymoon” Solly Hoffman and I had mimed. At the studio she was often on the telephone, issuing orders to the staff at her home. Very grand, I thought, secretly envying her and her happy marriage to Eddie Fisher. I could not know that Debbie’s idyllic-seeming marriage would soon be shattered when Eddie left her because he had fallen head over heels in love with Elizabeth Taylor.
Elizabeth was signed to MGM (although she did make Cleopatra at Twentieth Century Fox, and there would be a ripple effect with consequences for me and my nascent career), and when I met her years later, I could hardly talk because I was so stunned by her beauty. Joan Collins was another great MGM beauty. Many years later, when composer Leslie Bricusse and his wife, Evie, invited my current husband, Jon, and me to their home in Acapulco, there was Joan by the pool, swathed in a white caftan, wearing a white turban, reclining on a chaise longue. Jon took one look at her and went, “Oh my God, she’s so beautiful!” I wasn’t amused by my husband’s unadulterated enthusiasm for Joan Collins and snapped, “That’s quite enough of that, Jon.”
A Jeannie blink back to the past again: During my first few months at Fox, I experienced my fair share of disappointments. The first involved Mark Robson, my mentor and the man who had discovered me and brought me to Fox in the first place. Mark wanted me to read for the part of Betty in Peyton Place, which was projected to be a mammoth box office hit. I was elated at the prospect.
I was sent for wardrobe tests, a sure indication that the part was in the bag for me. Then Terry Moore, who had been in Mighty Joe Young and Come Back Little Sheba and had been involved with Howard Hughes, and who had initially turned the role down, changed her mind and accepted it after all.
I was bitterly disappointed,