Jeannie Out of the Bottle - Barbara Eden [53]
Along the way, Tony said something extremely inappropriate to me. Matthew happened to overhear every single word, and he went ballistic and threatened to deck Tony. I tried reasoning with him (“rise above it” and so on), but that didn’t work with Matthew, and it was all I could do to stop him from avenging my wounded virtue and socking Tony Curtis in the jaw.
An international tabloid scandal concerning Matt and another household name was narrowly averted when, in 1992, I made an appearance on shock jock Howard Stern’s radio show. It goes without saying that I wasn’t keen to be on the show, but my manager asked me to do it, and I guess we had a movie to promote. So I gritted my teeth and sailed through the show, turning a deaf ear to some of the more salacious comments made during my brief stint.
Two minutes after we went off the air, I was in the midst of making my escape from the studio as quickly as was polite when I received a heated call from Matthew.
I hadn’t warned him in advance that I was guesting on the show, because I hoped fervently that he’d never find out, but as chance would have it, he was driving his truck through the streets of Los Angeles at the exact moment when my interview went out over the air, and he heard every word of the segment.
I concentrated my energy on preventing Matthew from instantly heading to the studio, where Howard Stern was still on the air, and giving him hell for the way he’d treated me. Matthew was fit to be tied, and it was all I could do to convince him that it takes all sorts to make the world of entertainment go round.
When that failed, I resorted to taking the blame myself. “Howard Stern didn’t force me to go on his show, Matt,” I reasoned with him. “I went on it by choice. And I knew exactly what I was doing and what I was in for.”
He still was far from happy. And it was only a couple of hours later, after I had recovered from my shock that he’d heard the show, that it finally occurred to me I should have had the presence of mind to quiz Matthew on what exactly he was doing listening to The Howard Stern Show in the first place!
However, I caught myself wishing that Matthew had been around the time when I was asked by a sports magazine to present an award to O. J. Simpson. The ceremony took place at Jack Lemmon’s office on Beverly Drive. It was just another job to me, but out of respect to the magazine and to the event, I wanted to look my best, so I wore a peach chamois leather pantsuit to the ceremony.
From the moment I walked into the room, O.J. was all over me like a bad case of measles, flirting outrageously and making a series of suggestive remarks. I’m not unaccustomed to men speaking to me that way, but when they do, I somehow manage to tune them out. I did just that with O.J.
I posed for pictures with him, smiling as sunnily as I was able. Meanwhile, O.J. was ignoring everyone else in the room and just talking to me; he acted as if I were the award he’d been given. And although I tried to evade his advances as politely as possible, as luck would have it (or is it that old Murphy’s law again?), a journalist on hand to report on the ceremony must have picked up on the underlying tension between us. In the article on the award ceremony, the journalist quipped acidly, “O.J. didn’t seem to care much about the award. All he could see was Barbara.”
It’s true that O. J. Simpson did come on to me in an extremely blatant and aggressive way, but I did nothing to encourage him. Nevertheless, the journalist went so far as to unfairly blame me for having invited O.J.’s advances, simply because I was wearing tight pants. I was hurt and angry.
Sometime afterward, I was invited to Nicole Brown Simpson’s birthday party and O.J. came up to me, all wide-eyed and innocent, and said, “Oh, Barbara, I hope I didn’t upset you at that award ceremony. I hope I wasn’t rude to you.” Of course he did upset me, and of course he was rude. I merely