Jeannie Out of the Bottle - Barbara Eden [62]
My strongest memory of A Howling in the Woods was shooting by the shores of Lake Tahoe and being asked by the director to film a scene in a little boat on the lake. The director and the cinematographer were in the boat with Larry and me, as they needed some close-up shots of the two of us on the lake together.
All of a sudden, right in the middle of the lake, the boat’s engine started sputtering, then cut out completely. To our dismay, we discovered that we only had one oar with us in the boat. What had happened to the other one, no one knew.
So there we were, marooned in a tiny boat on Lake Tahoe. We quickly agreed that our only option was to sit back and wait to be rescued. We knew that when the rest of the crew realized how long we’d been away from shore, they’d come looking for us.
However, when that might happen was anybody’s guess. Moreover, it was lunchtime, we were all starving, and the only thing we had to eat between us was a little packet of M&M’s that I had in my pocket. To our relief, we were rescued after one and a half hours.
Larry and I had a certain amount of camaraderie while making A Howling in the Woods together. But it was a strange feeling not to have my I Dream of Jeannie family around me anymore. I wasn’t happy that the show had ended, but I wasn’t depressed. That came later.
Instead, I threw myself into my Las Vegas nightclub act with a vengeance. The idea of returning to my singing roots and appearing in my very own Vegas act had taken root while I was still appearing in I Dream of Jeannie and wanted to work during the hiatus between seasons.
My new career kicked off after two young men who’d made a hit record with Shelley Fabares got in touch with me and asked if they could do a demo with me. Well, I’ve never been one to back down from a career challenge, so I agreed, and we cut an album and then took it to my agent, Shep Fields.
Unfortunately, Shep rejected the boys and the demo album out of hand, but the idea of a solo Las Vegas act clearly stayed with him. And in 1967 Shep secured a contract for me.
At first I was confident and not the least bit nervous about taking on Las Vegas. A writer and a musician were hired to create the act. When we rehearsed the show, I felt good about it, and my prospects of success seemed high.
It was only two days before the show was due to open at the Shamrock Hotel in Houston (kind of a dress rehearsal for the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas) that it finally dawned on me how truly terrible it really was. It might have been perfect as a high school production, but it wasn’t what I believed a large-scale Vegas production ought to be.
Let me give you a flavor of the fiasco that my first Las Vegas show seriously was. The curtain opens, and there onstage is a larger-than-life replica of my Jeannie bottle. Meanwhile, I’m out of the view of the audience, scurrying up a ladder and into my bottle, where I am supposed to sit and sing my first song.
This is what those writers came up with (more or less): “Sitting in my bottle, on my Persian rug / Thinking of Aristotle, and drinking from a jug.” Then the script had me morph into an embryo, curl up, and sing something along the lines of, “Today I will open my eyes! Blink! Today I’ll be moving my fingers! Blink! Today I’ll be taking my first steps! Blink! Today I’m alive!”
An embryo, in Las Vegas. Gee whiz!
The show went on and on in the same vein, culminating with me standing onstage wearing a gray wig and belting out a song in my guise of an old lady. Entertainment? I don’t think so.
At the eleventh hour, in desperation, I contacted veteran choreographer Nick Castle (who had choreographed Betty Grable, Ann Miller, Gene Kelly, and Fred Astaire and staged countless TV and Las Vegas shows) and begged him fly to Las Vegas to fix mine. When he arrived, I showed him what we had, eager to find out what he thought of the show and what he felt he could do to salvage it.
After a few minutes in which Nick seemed lost in thought, he pronounced