Jeannie Out of the Bottle - Barbara Eden [65]
“How in the hell can they expect me to make an audience laugh when they’ve got a dead guy in the audience right in front of me?” he growled.
“A dead guy?” I said, my eyes practically popping out of my head.
Shecky walked back onstage again to take a final bow, so he couldn’t immediately answer my question.
When he came offstage again to the sound of uproarious applause, he didn’t keep me in suspense for long.
“Well, Barbara, I’m trying to make jokes and there’s a dead guy out front,” he said.
At first I thought he was trying out a black humor comedy routine on me, but I didn’t laugh.
Nor did Shecky. He went on, “A guy in the front row had a heart attack, so they hustled his wife out of the room and put a tablecloth over the guy and left him there.”
I thought back to my last song. Of course! Although the spotlights had been shining straight into my eyes, I remembered noticing a big expanse of white cloth in the first few rows, though I hadn’t been able to make out what it was.
“He had the heart attack while you were singing,” Shecky explained helpfully. But at least he had the good grace not to make a crack about “killing him softly with your song” or “knocking them dead.”
Working in front of humans is one thing; working in the same show as an elephant is quite another. When I played the Nugget in Reno in 1986, I sang songs like “I Go to Rio,” “I Will Survive,” and “I Can’t Smile Without You,” and the twice-nightly shows were opened by Bertha, the Nugget’s very own performing elephant.
My contract at the Nugget stipulated that I had to do two shows a night, seven nights a week, but lucky Bertha got one day a week off, so that she could enjoy a day of first-class grooming, with massages and manicures. I was almost jealous.
Seriously, though, I’ve always loved elephants. They’re such darlings, intelligent and very family oriented. So for many years I have collected elephant ornaments wherever and whenever I happen to find them.
Since my time working with Simm, the African lion on I Dream of Jeannie (and as a Leo myself), I’ve always adored lions as well. And it wasn’t a coincidence that when I made my 1972 special, Love Is … Barbara Eden, we had a young male lion in the act with me. The idea was that the lion would be onstage with me, standing in the middle of a Mylar circle and looking kingly.
However, when his trainer led the lion over to the Mylar, the poor lion assumed that it was water, tentatively tried to stick his paw in it, then shook the paw as if it had gotten wet. Undeterred, I started singing “The Look of Love” to him (why in heaven’s name the script called for me to do that, who knows), and he promptly lay down on the floor and fell fast asleep. So we did another take. This time I was fortunate that he didn’t fall asleep. Instead, he started chewing my chair and really enjoying the taste of it. He chewed away, happy and content, until an exasperated Gene hollered down from the rafters, “Get rid of the lion!”
So much for my special touch with lions!
One of my favorite Las Vegas stars was George Burns. I first worked with him in June 1972 at the Frontier Hotel. He was a gentleman, and so much fun to be with.
When I arrived at the hotel, I discovered that George’s dressing room was a large house trailer with two bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen, while mine was just a very small room. That was fine by me, but when George found out, he was livid and said, “Why are you stuck in that little room down there, Barbara? Let’s share my trailer!”
George was seventy-three years old at the time, and I moved into his trailer and used it as my dressing room without giving a single thought to my reputation. During the run, George’s friends Jack Benny and Edward G. Robinson often came to the dressing room to chew the fat with him. Most of the time I would just sit around listening to their funny stories and their perceptive critiques of George’s act, and I enjoyed every minute of it.
The most fun thing about George,