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A brilliant, imaginative writer, he wrote the screenplays for a dazzling array of Hollywood classics, including Easter Parade, Annie Get Your Gun (along with Irving Berlin), The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer, and TV’s The Patty Duke Show. I Dream of Jeannie, his latest project, I knew from our mutual friends, was very close to his heart, and he totally believed in it.

So Sidney and I had tea together at the Beverly Hills Hotel, during which time he airily dismissed my doubts about not being a five-foot-nine dusky brunette from foreign climes, but rather a pint-sized, curvy American blonde. We chatted about comedy writers we’d both worked with, and life in general, and the hours sped by. At the end of our tea, I felt as if I’d made a wise new friend, but I still never imagined that Sidney would cast me as Jeannie.

So you could have knocked me down with a feather (shades of Ginger Rogers) when, just a few days later, Sidney called and said, “Congratulations; you are now officially my Jeannie!”

I was pleased to have gotten the job, but I didn’t exactly jump up and down for joy. After all, I had no idea how the pilot would turn out or if it would be picked up by a network. Still, a job was a job, and I was determined to do my best.

I was then working flat out on Rawhide at Universal, so when Sidney called and asked me if Larry Hagman, one of the actors whom they were considering for the part of Captain Tony Nelson, could rehearse with me, I suggested that we rehearse in my dressing room at the studio during a break from Rawhide.

“Fine,” Sidney said. “We know you can act, we know he can act, but what we want to check out is whether or not the two of you have chemistry.”

Now, chemistry between two people is something so magical, so indefinable, that not even the best actors can fake it, nor can the greatest director bring it out in them if it doesn’t exist.

I knew very little about Larry except that he was Mary Martin’s son, which really intrigued me, as my mother had always been a fan. From as far back as I could remember, she had always held Mary up to me as the perfect example of a brilliant singer and entertainer.

Born in Texas, the daughter of an attorney and a violin teacher, Mary Martin got her start in show business appearing on the radio in Dallas. She first made her mark in Cole Porter’s Leave It to Me, in which she sang the showstopper “My Heart Belongs to Daddy.” She went on to make ten movies for Paramount, and then skyrocketed to stardom when she was cast as Nellie Forbush in South Pacific, which went on to break Broadway box office records and then run in London for five blockbuster years.

Mary garnered yet more fame and fortune when she starred in Peter Pan, for which she won a Tony, then in Annie Get Your Gun and The Sound of Music, for which she won yet another Tony. Meanwhile, Larry was growing up in Texas, far removed from his mother, who had sent him to live with his grandmother when he was still a little boy.

Down the line, I learned that Larry had always resented his mother for putting him in Black Fox Military Academy when he was less than ten years old. (Even then, my mother sprang to Mary’s defense and argued that Mary probably didn’t have any other choice.) And when Mary Martin married Richard Halliday, who later became her manager, the young Larry had problems relating to him.

However, show business was in his blood, and nothing could prevent him from pursuing it with a vengeance. Like his mother, Larry launched his acting career in Dallas, where he worked in the theater. Following that, he spent five years in the chorus of the London cast of South Pacific, in which he played a Seabee (a member of the construction battalion of the U.S. Navy), along with Sean Connery. Later, he joined the U.S. Air Force and was stationed in England, where he met and married Maj Axelsson, a Swedish fashion designer, and he remains married to her to this day, in one of show business’s most enduring matches.

During his four years in the