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declared, “The smoke must never spend the night in the bedroom of a man.” From then on, if the smoke representing Jeannie ever went under the bedroom door, it had to be seen to come out again, otherwise the audience might assume that the smoke—aka Jeannie—was still in there, a definite no-no. (3) Openmouthed kissing between Tony and his fiancée, Melissa, was banned. (4) Nor was Jeannie permitted to be provocative or flirtatious. As Broadcast Standards phrased it, “Avoid the seductive and sexual innuendos when Jeannie says, ‘And I am going to please thee very much.’ It would be helpful here to have her mention some specific pleasures such as jewels or money.”

I never considered Jeannie to be provocative or flirtatious, by the way, because I always thought of her as a tomboy, not a vamp.

During the run-up to the pilot, I was involved in countless discussions regarding Jeannie’s hair, makeup, and clothes. Celebrated Academy Award–winning costume designer Gwen Wakelin created the harem outfit that I wore in the first season, although toward the very end of the season, on my suggestion, whenever it was appropriate, Jeannie graduated to wearing ball gowns and other more conventional clothes. I also picked the color pink, my favorite color, for the harem outfit, although the color didn’t really matter at all in the first season, as it was shot in black and white.

At that time, most TV shows were already being shot in color, but because the executives behind I Dream of Jeannie didn’t want to spend the $400 extra per episode, the first season was scheduled to be shot in black and white. Sidney was so outraged that he offered to invest his own money in having the show shot in color, but the executives still refused to budge.

Sidney also was kind enough and democratic enough to ask me to select which color I wanted the inside of the bottle to be, and I picked purple, my other favorite color. In fact, at the time, I loved purple so much that my dressing room was decorated in purple—purple walls, purple carpet, purple everything.

Gwen designed my iconic hairstyle by creating a ponytail with a braid secured around it, topped by a circle of velvet through which my ponytail was pulled to give it height.

Director Gene Nelson came up with the idea of Jeannie’s blink, but I realized that it wasn’t a strong enough gesture, so that’s when I got my ponytail going, and added a nod as a way of signaling a flashback or a flash-forward in time.

In every episode of I Dream of Jeannie, although the audience might not have realized it at the time, I kept a little bit of home—of Michael—close to my heart by wearing the one-carat diamond pendant he’d given me on a chain around my neck. Michael and I had bought it downtown in a wholesale jewelry mart because I wanted one so badly, and wearing it helped me feel close to him. My I Dream of Jeannie diamond wasn’t an especially high-quality diamond, but I still have it. And it meant a lot to me that Sidney and the producers gave me the go-ahead to wear it during I Dream of Jeannie.

Yet although my input was sought regarding Jeannie’s style and wardrobe, I had no illusions that the show belonged to anyone other than Sidney, who had created it and would be writing and producing every single episode.

Larry Hagman, however, was not so sure. When he got the part of Captain Nelson in the pilot, he swung into action to exercise as much control over the show as he could. He appeared in 80 percent of the pilot and every episode that followed, and later he was paid $150,000 a year for the role—peanuts in comparison to the mega-bucks today’s TV stars get paid, but an enormous sum in those days. Larry was set on I Dream of Jeannie making him a star. In a way, you could hardly have blamed him, as even before we started shooting, the magnitude of his role really did seem to merit those great expectations. That hope would fuel his actions right from the start of filming the pilot.

That was fine by me, and I genuinely hoped that Larry would satisfy his heartfelt ambitions, but as soon as I studied the script in