Jeannie Out of the Bottle - Barbara Eden [45]
Clearly destined for a bigger arena than daytime soaps, Larry struggled through nine months of unemployment, then finally won the part of Tony Nelson in I Dream of Jeannie. According to Sidney in his autobiography, The Other Side of Me, “Larry wanted to show the world that he could be as successful as his mother. The result was that he put himself and everyone else under tremendous pressure.”
All that said, from our first meeting I was bowled over by Larry’s charm and his talent as an actor. Sidney and the I Dream of Jeannie producers had wanted to ascertain whether or not Larry and I had chemistry together, and as soon as we began the scene, I had no doubt whatsoever that we did. Our acting rhythms were in synch, and the scene in which Captain Nelson and Jeannie first meet worked like a perfectly crafted, intricate piece of clockwork.
We both had exactly the same sense of timing, and the sparks between us invariably flew. Not that there was ever any kind of romance between us. If Warren Beatty, John F. Kennedy, and Tony Randall couldn’t lead me astray, Larry Hagman certainly couldn’t. Nor did he try. Besides, like Joanne Woodward, his wife, Maj, made sure to always stay close to the set.
Larry had been married to Maj for most of his adult life and wasn’t particularly experienced with women. When I flung my arms around him there in the dressing room, just as the script called for me to do, I sensed him recoil slightly.
I was immediately hit with the realization that Larry was intrinsically shy with women. Much later, he admitted that I had been right. “That day in the dressing room, I thought to myself, Here’s this woman attacking me in her dressing room! What the hell am I getting into?”
I was only playing my part exactly as it was written, but Larry was genuinely shocked. From that time on, though, the tables would be turned, and it would be Larry who would be doing all the shocking.
On the subject of shock, though: Before the pilot of I Dream of Jeannie was even made, the NBC censors stepped in and laid down the law with regard to what they considered would shock our audience. NBC executives had had a preview of the script and were horrified by what they considered to be a scandalous premise and an even more scandalous script. So on November 17, 1964, their Broadcast Standards department issued a list of stiff guidelines for the show.
However ridiculous the guidelines may seem from the perspective of today, as TV Guide pointed out, “I Dream of Jeannie is actually one of the most daring shows on TV. It is the only show, for example, in which an attractive unmarried girl has the free run of a bachelor’s apartment.” And as far as NBC was concerned, the matter of Jeannie and morality had to be taken extremely seriously in the show—as seriously as if she were a real-life woman and the story we were telling was fact, not a figment of Sidney’s deliciously overwrought imagination.
NBC’s vigilance, as difficult as it may be for anyone who wasn’t around in the early sixties to understand, was not unusual. For example, in the case of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, on which I once played a sex education teacher, the network censor cut the word “sex” from the script.
This is what NBC decreed so as to preserve the moral tone of I Dream of Jeannie: (1) It was imperative that my harem trousers be lined with silk so my legs didn’t show through the transparent fabric. (2) Jeannie’s smoke was banned from disappearing under Captain Nelson’s bedroom door. When the series was up and running and some of the episodes had been shot but not aired, the NBC censor went crazy about one particular episode, and we had to reshoot it because, as he solemnly