Jeannie Out of the Bottle - Barbara Eden [51]
One time I was in a play in Ohio when he came down with a terrible case of flu. The poor little boy was racked with fever, and Michael was out of his mind with worry. He did the best he could to take care of Matthew, but I knew that my son also desperately needed a mother’s touch. I couldn’t walk out of my job in mid-season, so I sent a frantic SOS to my mother up in San Francisco. Mother, bless her, rose to the occasion: she threw some clothes into a suitcase and boarded the next plane to LA. Under her gentle and loving care, Matthew’s health improved by leaps and bounds.
But I was so traumatized by not having been there when he was sick, then having to miss his second birthday because of a commitment in Las Vegas, that when Bob Hope invited me to entertain the troops at Christmas that same year, I reluctantly declined. My refusal may have seemed selfish to other people, but having missed Matthew’s birthday, I was determined that I should not miss the first Christmas of his life when he was old enough to be aware of the holiday. I wanted to see him opening his gifts, and I’ll always be grateful that I did.
In a way, Matthew grew up with Jeannie, in much the same way Candice Bergen grew up with Charlie McCarthy, her ventriloquist father Edgar Bergen’s celebrated dummy.
As soon as Matthew was able to talk, one of his first sentences was “Momma Jeannie!” enunciated when we perched him in front of the show. After a while, I realized that he was talking not about me at all but about the show. Other times, when he would watch the show (and he seemed to want to watch it all the time), he would point at the set and ask, “Where is Jeannie?”
I’d tell him, “I’ll be on in a minute, honey.”
His reaction? “Where is she?” Then, a little while later, while he watched a scene featuring only Larry and Hayden Rorke, he’d say, “Where are you, Mommy?” as if he expected me to be on the show every single second.
Soon I learned that other little children also believed implicitly that I Dream of Jeannie represented a slice of real life, and that Jeannie herself was a flesh-and-blood woman capable of making magic whenever and however she liked.
When Matthew was a little baby, I took him to the market, where he rode in a seat in my cart, and a little girl and her even smaller brother came up to us. The little girl was wearing her school uniform and seemed as meek and mild as an angel. All of a sudden she looked at me, pointed at her brother, and declared, “Turn him into a frog!” Her brother promptly burst into tears—and you could hardly have blamed him!
It wasn’t too surprising, then, that as a child, Matthew always had such a difficult time distinguishing between illusion and reality, between what was happening on camera and what was happening off. When he was a year old, I took him to watch me guest on The Mike Douglas Show. In a gag that took place at the end of the show, Leonard Nimoy carried me off the set while I kicked, screamed, and protested vociferously. Watching on the greenroom monitor, little Matthew burst into floods of tears, and no amount of explaining that Mommy was fine and was only playacting would comfort him.
It would probably take a psychoanalyst to understand Matthew’s inner thoughts, but it was understandable that seeing his mother on TV practically every night was more than a bit confusing for a little boy.
I had to prevent myself from advising him to “rise above it” when, as a very small boy, he went to nursery school and afterward complained, “The other children keep bugging me and asking me if I’m magic.”
“So what do you say to them?” I said.
“I tell them, ‘No, I’m not. She is,’ ” he said, somewhat proudly.
Such was the international appeal of the series that when I traveled to Hong Kong on a promotional tour for I Dream of Jeannie and