Jeannie Out of the Bottle - Barbara Eden [38]
Point taken—by me, at least. A few days later, during a break in shooting, Red and I, still dressed in our bright plaid pants from the movie, were having lunch on the grass at Lake Sherwood. Suddenly I looked over his shoulder, and there, a hundred feet behind Red, was the lion, prowling around, his tail switching.
“Don’t move an inch, Red,” I warned. “The lion’s out.”
Red almost jumped out of his skin.
“Where is it? Where is it?” he yelled at the top of his voice.
I glanced over his shoulder. The lion was now forty feet away, contemplating the two of us as if we might make a good lunchtime snack.
“Just stand still, Red. You know we’re not supposed to move!” I said.
Whereupon Red flung himself between me and the lion, as if to protect me, and started leaping up and down and screaming, “To hell with that! To hell with that!”
At that moment, thank heavens, the trainer raced up to the lion and yanked him away from us.
So the poor lion missed snacking on two actors in bright costumes, and Red and I narrowly escaped certain death.
About the same time as I made Five Weeks in a Balloon, Fox loaned me out to MGM for The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, co-starring Claire Bloom and Laurence Harvey. Laurence, who later would be much acclaimed for his tour de force in The Manchurian Candidate, exuded style and sex appeal and was a classic bon vivant. When we were on location in a little medieval village in Germany, he actually had his magnificent white Bentley shipped over there because he missed it so much.
The villagers, who’d never seen a movie star before, never mind a dashing one driving a great big Bentley, watched with their eyes popping out of their heads as Laurence roared over the quaint cobbled streets in his car, bound for some gourmet restaurant he’d somehow managed to discover in the area.
Usually I tagged along with our makeup artist in tow. One time Laurence insisted on taking us to his favorite restaurant, which he loved because, as he put it, “They make the best steak tartare in the world, Barbara, darling. You haven’t lived till you’ve tried it.”
I gulped, then came clean and admitted that I didn’t eat anything raw, let alone raw meat.
Laurence blithely brushed my objections aside and commanded the maitre d’ to prepare the steak tartare at our table. As he did, I fought back my desire to puke. Laurence, breezily unaware of my battle, gushed away at me happily—“Here you go, Barbara, darling. Sheer nectar”—and shoved a forkload of what I considered to be raw hamburger straight into my mouth.
I made a credible show of enjoying the steak tartare, but it was a miracle that I made it back to the hotel without throwing up every single bit of it all over Laurence’s precious white Bentley!
I had much more fun when I worked on Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, which I made at Fox with Joan Fontaine, Walter Pidgeon, and Peter Lorre of Casablanca fame.
Both Peter Lorre and Walter Pidgeon were already way into their sixties when we started shooting, but each of them was still flirtatious and entertaining. I had lunch with them in the commissary every day, and they were so cute with each other and with me that I really relished being in their company. Walter was a real Casanova and would wink at me and say, “Barbara, my dear, if you’d been around when I was younger, you wouldn’t have stood a chance.” Peter had a little bit of the devil in him, along with great kindness, and every inch of him laughed when he laughed. But when he wasn’t laughing, he gave me excellent career advice, including one particular gem: “Barbara, no matter how successful you become, always sign your own checks. I didn’t—I let my business manager sign them on my behalf—and that’s why I’m still working today.”
Later, I discovered that Peter had hired a close friend to be his business manager, primarily because he wanted to concentrate on acting and not be bothered by mundane tasks like paying the window cleaner. He had implicitly trusted that friend with his wife, his child, his