Jeannie Out of the Bottle - Barbara Eden [61]
Truthfully, I didn’t really understand what the fuss was about, and I still don’t. I mean, every time I raised my arms on the show, my navel popped out, but clearly, neither the viewers nor the censors had ever noticed.
Now, though, that clever George Schlatter had made an issue of baring my belly button on national TV, NBC’s honchos sat up and swung into action. A meeting was called for the studio’s top brass, who all sat around a vast conference table debating the wisdom of exposing my belly button to the TV audience. George was present at that meeting and afterward joked, “I’ve never seen so many suits sitting around the table discussing a belly button!”
The verdict? Blackout on my belly button. Herminio Traviesas, NBC director of standards and practices, ruled that I was banned from showing it on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. Extraordinary—no appeal, no reprieve, nothing. My belly button remained shrouded for many years to come.
Even when the show went on location to Hawaii, where we shot three episodes in the sweltering heat, all the girls on Waikiki Beach wore bikinis, but I was asked to wear a chaste one-piece. At the time I thought the scenario was hilarious, but I didn’t have a choice in the matter, so I made the best of it.
Making the best of it became my credo after Larry and I first heard that Jeannie and Tony were due to be married in the series. We were united in our reaction—sheer disgust—because we both knew that the wedding heralded the end of the show. After all, I Dream of Jeannie’s abiding theme was Jeannie’s unrequited love for Major Nelson, his belief that she was just a figment of his imagination, and her stubborn insistence that she was real. Marrying her to Major Nelson derailed the plot and the series as a whole, and both Larry and I knew it.
However, filming the wedding proved to be fun. We shot it at Cape Canaveral (now the Kennedy Space Center), and when the episode was aired, it got one of the highest ratings of the entire series. But the writing was on the wall.
I wasn’t particularly worried about the financial repercussions for my career if the show was canceled. During the third year of the show the producers had bought me out for a substantial sum, and although the show is still shown throughout the world today, I don’t earn any residuals from it. However, I don’t mind and never have. I was well paid.
After the wedding episode, we filmed fifteen more episodes, but we knew that it was just a matter of time before the show shuddered to a halt. Today we would say that when Jeannie and Tony got married, the show “jumped the shark.” Larry, perhaps more than me, anticipated the impending demise of I Dream of Jeannie with a great deal of trepidation.
The fallout from Larry’s misgivings about the show being on its last legs was—as Bill Daily was once quoted as saying—that he now spent most of his time hiding in his trailer. He flatly refused to talk to me or to anyone else. Not the most congenial way in which to co-star in a comedy series.
When I received the news from an agent that the show had been canceled (he baldly announced, “They didn’t pick I Dream of Jeannie up again”), I felt just as if I had lost my family, albeit one with a wild, delinquent terror of a brother.
I adored being Jeannie. She was a part of my life for five years. Making I Dream of Jeannie was one of the most joyful experiences of my life. I loved playing Jeannie, and still think back on her with great affection, but I look at her as separate from me. She’s not me. She’s Jeannie.
EVEN WHEN I was filming I Dream of Jeannie, I had always worked in my Las Vegas nightclub act and taken other roles on television and in movies. After the show was canceled, I just carried on working wherever and whenever I could.
And wouldn’t you know it—my first post–I Dream of Jeannie job was with Larry! A Howling in the Woods was the uninspiring story of a justifiably jumpy wife who kept hearing (no prizes for guessing) a howling in the woods. In