Jeannie Out of the Bottle - Barbara Eden [47]
Even on the first day of shooting the pilot on Zuma Beach, Larry made no bones about the fact that he despised the script. Consequently, he decided to ad-lib whenever possible, which drove the director, Gene Nelson, completely crazy.
Gene, a former actor and now an experienced and well-respected director who had directed The Donna Reed Show (then a big hit) and The Farmer’s Daughter, with Loretta Young, initially bore the brunt of Larry’s rebellious nature.
Without much provocation, Larry was consistently temperamental and confrontational. Most of the time it seemed like he was spoiling for a fight. He was driven by the conviction that the show would be a big hit. Plus he was a perfectionist par excellence and wanted to get the pilot right.
At first, Larry’s need for control didn’t trouble me one bit. I was far too focused on the show and on making Jeannie a memorable character. In countless interviews, journalists have asked me how much of Barbara Eden there is in Jeannie, but the truth is this: none. I played Jeannie as Sidney wrote her, and if I infused anything into my portrayal of her, it was as a result of asking myself how it would feel to be catapulted into another world about which you know nothing and to come face-to-face with automobiles and appliances, objects you’ve never heard of or seen before.
I gave Jeannie’s relationship with Captain Nelson an equal amount of consideration. Clearly she had never had a boyfriend, and when suddenly this gorgeous man materializes in front of her, she is almost terrified. I say “almost” because I always felt that Jeannie was innately wise. Wise, but nevertheless still a fish out of water, in the great American movie tradition that embraces both Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz and Mr. Smith in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
That first day at Zuma Beach, however, the weather proved to be my biggest problem. It was freezing, and there I was in my pink chiffon costume, shivering on the beach, while Larry was snug as a bug in his NASA uniform and all the rest of the crew were swaddled in wool and cashmere.
Toward the end of the day, I had become literally blue with cold, and was immensely grateful to the crew for offering me a glass of brandy—my first—which warmed me for a time but didn’t take the edge off the cold completely.
I soldiered on as best as possible, hoping against hope that Gene Nelson would call it a day. Cold as I was, I still took great pains to properly enunciate the Persian dialect I’d been taught by a UCLA professor whom Sidney had hired for the purpose (although later on, for some reason, they switched Jeannie’s mother tongue to Babylonian).
I was just inwardly congratulating myself for having succeeded, when all of a sudden a gargantuan wave hammered me. I almost lost my balance, and was soaked to the skin. I didn’t give a fig about that, though I was aware that the wave had been big enough to seriously injure me.
Apart from Larry’s outburst in the car on the way back home from Zuma Beach, the first day passed without further incident. We shot the rest of the pilot at the Columbia studio on Gower, where, despite being cocooned in the safety of a sound stage, life wouldn’t always be easy.
We were scheduled to shoot a scene in Captain Nelson’s apartment during which I was supposed to jump in the air and land on the sofa next to him. Relaxed and happy to do the scene, I blithely executed my jump, only to hit my head on Larry’s knee and crack my tooth. Blood flowed everywhere, but Larry was very, very sweet to me, as were the rest of the cast and crew.
We wrapped the pilot without any further incident. And as it transpired, it would end up being my favorite I Dream of Jeannie episode of them all.
After we shot the pilot, the producers, Screen Gems, showed it to selected audiences, and