Jeannie Out of the Bottle - Barbara Eden [39]
That didn’t stop him from fighting over the check with Walter every day and insisting on paying for my lunch. When I protested, Peter said, “Not only are you a young, pretty girl, but you’re a contract player as well, so you can’t pay for lunch.” Before one lunch with Peter and Walter, I took the waiter aside and tried to slip him some cash for our lunch, but he categorically refused to take it. Mr. Lorre and Mr. Pidgeon had made a deal with him, he said; Miss Eden must never be allowed to pick up the check.
When I had one last try and challenged Peter and Walter to let me pay the check, they had a fit. Peter was practically down to his last penny, but he still paid for my lunch, that day and every other day during the shoot.
They don’t make ’em like that anymore.
After the fiasco of Cleopatra, Fox’s extravaganza starring Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and Rex Harrison, which failed to ignite the box office sufficiently to justify the (then) stratospheric $44 million it cost to make, the studio underwent a dramatic change in fortunes and closed down. My last movie there was The Yellow Canary, with Pat Boone.
I was now free to make movies for whichever studio I wanted, and I was delighted. One of the positive consequences of leaving Fox was that in the future I would work at MGM, the cream of all the studios, where the hairdressers, makeup artists, and wardrobe staff were the best in the business, the costumes were hand-stitched, and endless care was taken in lighting actresses so they would look more beautiful on the screen than they did in real life.
Working at MGM was like going to an exclusive charm school, where actresses were taught every trick in the business to enhance and exploit their natural assets. An example: we were taught that, unlike brunette hair, blond hair always has to be smooth and blow-dried, otherwise it will look frizzy, as if it has been accidentally singed in a fire.
At MGM, we were taught to wear the same color hose as our shoes, to create the illusion of longer legs, and to wear pale nail polish to make short fingers look longer and more graceful. At MGM, I also learned to apply false eyelashes, and wore them there for the very first time, to great effect.
I worked at MGM with Tony Randall on Seven Faces of Dr. Lao, and canny Tony divined one of my weaknesses (other than ice cream and chocolate): gin rummy. As the movie included a lot of night shooting, between takes we would sit in my dressing room and play the game together.
Tony never lost a single game, and after a while I realized that he was winning a small fortune from me. So I started to watch him more closely. Then it dawned on me: he was sitting opposite a mirror that was reflecting my cards back to him. In other words, he’d been cheating, and how!
Tony and I never played gin rummy together again. Meanwhile, it swiftly transpired that he had other games on his mind, and seemed determined that I play them with him. I kept reminding him of Michael and my marriage, but Tony, a devil with women, was oblivious to all of that. He was a funny man, though, and all his approaches to me were couched in humor. So although they came to nothing, he made me laugh uproariously in the process, and I will always cherish his memory for that.
Married or not, I performed my fair share of love scenes during my Hollywood years, and in most of my movies invariably played girls who ended up being either kissed or rescued, and sometimes both.
One screen kiss I’ll never forget was with Pat Boone, when we made All Hands on Deck. As the plot had it, our kiss was designed to be relatively chaste. But Pat had never before played a role that called for him to kiss his co-star. Consequently, while kissing Pat Boone on camera was just part of a day’s work for me, to Pat, his first on-screen kiss was a major event.
It turned out that his wife and three daughters felt exactly the same, because just as the director was about to shout, “Action,” they all trooped