Jeannie Out of the Bottle - Barbara Eden [54]
A few years later, I saw Nicole and the children at an airport and said hello to her. She looked very tired and was in the midst of telling the children, “We have to go and see Daddy now.” I could tell that she was deeply unhappy.
Time for a Jeannie blink back to my I Dream of Jeannie years. Although I worked extremely hard, I was content, both in my own career and in my marriage to Michael. When we were shooting the show, I would get up at five every day, arrive at the studio for makeup at six, and work until seven in the evening. In those days, none of the cast went to dinner together afterward, or to a bar or a club. We just rushed straight home and studied our scripts in preparation for the next day’s filming.
Now and again, however, Michael and I did make time to get together with friends like Steve and Neile McQueen, who lived in a small house in Bel Air, where we’d sometimes go to dinner. Later on, I was so shocked when Steve and Neile announced they were getting divorced, because when we were together it was so clear that they adored each other. After their divorce, we lost touch. Then some years later I was at Columbia Studios, heard someone calling my name, and turned around—and there was Steve!
He hadn’t changed a bit. It was as if time had stood still. We had coffee together and laughed, joked, and reminisced about the past. Steve was a genuinely good human being, a kind friend, and I remember him with great affection.
Which brings me back to I Dream of Jeannie, the show with which I will always be associated, the show that consumed five years of my life. Even with the wild roller-coaster ride I had with my talented, iconoclastic drama king of a co-star, Larry Hagman, I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
THIS MAY BE one of the biggest understatements ever made, but for Larry Hagman, the I Dream of Jeannie years were not happy ones. To this day, I believe he much prefers to be remembered for his role as J. R. Ewing in Dallas rather than for his role as Major Tony Nelson in I Dream of Jeannie.
To be fair to Larry, he wasn’t the cause of every single solitary drama out of all the many that unfolded on the I Dream of Jeannie set. One good example was during season three, while we were shooting “Genie, Genie, Who’s Got the Genie,” which aired on January 16, 1968. My mother visited the set for the very first time, and saw me locked into the interior of a safe, with only a gigantic lipstick and a purse for company.
All of a sudden, a flat from the set fell across the safe. Only quick thinking by a crew member saved me from being hit by it. We started the scene again, but then the lipstick toppled over and practically knocked me out.
My mother, watching, gave a big start and said, “Barbara, I never knew that making a TV series was so dangerous!” Of course she didn’t. She hadn’t witnessed Larry in full flight yet.
In his memoirs, Larry claimed not to be able to remember the I Dream of Jeannie years, but I find that difficult to believe, given the high-octane quality of his explosive on-set shenanigans.
On one unforgettable occasion, when Larry didn’t like a particular script, his answer was to throw up all over the set. Nerves? Method acting? I didn’t stick around long enough to find out, but took refuge in the sanctuary of my dressing room instead.
In many ways, Larry was like a very talented, troubled child whose tantrums sometimes got the better of his self-control. The crew, however, quickly lost patience with him and vented their frustration by cutting him dead as often as possible and tormenting him however and whenever they could. Once when Larry demanded a cup of tea (as opposed to his habitual champagne), the crew, exasperated by his high-handedness and demands that a scene be reshot because he didn’t like that particular segment of the script, put salt in his tea instead of sugar.
When the unsuspecting Larry took a sip and spat the tea out in disgust, the entire set rocked with suppressed laughter from the delighted crew,