Jeannie Out of the Bottle - Barbara Eden [56]
One of the results of Larry’s power play with Sidney was that he followed Sidney’s advice to try to calm down while shooting I Dream of Jeannie. To that end, Sidney arranged for Larry to see a therapist, and, reluctantly or not, Larry went along with the idea. However, in keeping with the anything-goes ethos of the early sixties, the therapist ostensibly advised Larry to smoke pot and drink champagne on the set, to help himself relax.
Larry, being Larry, naturally didn’t do anything by half measures. Henceforth, instead of being nervous, on edge, and confrontational, he started every day at the studio by drinking vast quantities of champagne, and in between scenes, he sequestered himself in his dressing room, smoking pot and downing yet more champagne, all in the interests of attaining a state of calm serenity. The result? Mayhem, as I’ll tell you.
Surprisingly, the past master at handling Larry at his worst turned out to be Jackie Cooper, the former child star. Jackie was no longer an actor and had now graduated to the position of vice president of Screen Gems, the production company responsible for I Dream of Jeannie. Whenever Larry reverted to his usual modus operandi of questioning everything and everyone, as in “Do we have to do this? Do we have to do that?” Jackie would shoot back, “Do we have to pay you, Larry?” and despite himself, Larry couldn’t prevent himself from laughing.
Larry even continued laughing when we had Groucho Marx, our first male guest star on I Dream of Jeannie (but I pity those that followed). Groucho, a close friend of Sidney Sheldon’s, made a cameo appearance on the show in season two, in “The Greatest Invention in the World.” Really, the most remarkable thing about Groucho’s appearance on the show (which was extremely brief) was the fact that he waived his considerable fee—not out of friendship for Sidney, but simply because he didn’t want to be liable for taxes. Instead, he requested that he be compensated for his appearance on the show by being given a new TV set. He was.
Although I didn’t remind Groucho of it at the time, I’d worked with him on his own show, years before, when I was Barbara Huffman and living at the Studio Club. I hadn’t had any lines in the show, as I was basically just one of the dumb blond models he tended to hire and put in the background of the show. I was very young at the time, and my clearest memory of my walk-on in Groucho’s show is that I was wearing a big gold ring on my left ring finger.
He took one look at it, wiggled his big cigar at me, and said, “Oh, so you’re married, eh?”
I wasn’t at the time, so I shook my head decisively.
Groucho wiggled his cigar at me again.
“Well, Miss Huffman, you’re definitely sending a wrong message with that ring, then,” he said with a wink.
Fortunately, Groucho’s appearance on I Dream of Jeannie didn’t upset the apple cart as far as Larry was concerned. Larry didn’t have any problems working with Groucho, perhaps because Groucho was eighty years old and Larry didn’t see him as competition.
Generally, though, people on the set felt that in Larry’s mind, when it came to I Dream of Jeannie, he was the cock of the walk, and he definitely didn’t want another rooster on his territory. He wanted to be the only leading man on the set, and to trumpet that the I Dream of Jeannie set was his domain and only his.
So it figured that when Sammy Davis Jr. guested on “The Greatest Entertainer in the World” in season two, it brought out the very worst in Larry. Having a star of Sammy’s magnitude on I Dream of Jeannie would automatically upstage him.