Jeannie Out of the Bottle - Barbara Eden [66]
When George and I started working together, his beloved wife, Gracie Allen, had long since died, and he had his young girlfriend, a student at UCLA, with him. Every morning I’d look out of my hotel room window and see George swimming back and forth in the pool and this young girl sitting there doing her homework. Funnily enough, each time I worked with George in Las Vegas, he always had a different young girlfriend with him. Were the girls for real or just for show? I couldn’t tell you. But he was a good guy, fun to be with and really nice to me.
Although he probably didn’t realize it at the time, George turned out to be also a major influence on young Matthew’s life. Years after George and I played Vegas together, when Matthew was a teenager, Michael and I had dinner with George in Las Vegas.
George asked, “So does the kid want to be an actor?”
“Very much,” I said, and grimaced.
“Couldn’t be better,” George said adamantly.
Michael and I both shook our heads.
George raised an eyebrow. “But show business has been so good to you two,” he said, wagging a finger at us disapprovingly.
After dinner, Michael and I had a long debate about Matthew and his future career. In the end, after much discussion, we ultimately concluded that we shouldn’t stand in the way of Matthew becoming an actor after all.
And all because of George Burns.
In a way, you could say that he really did play God that night, because he certainly did create a new world for Matthew.
Las Vegas being Las Vegas, I also rubbed shoulders with other performers, many of them show business legends, among them Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Dean was fun, a lovely man, and I adored working with him. He never rehearsed, but no one really expected him to. Offstage he was exactly the same person you saw onstage or on TV—a cool guy with a little drink in his hand. A real one, of course.
When I was appearing in Lake Tahoe, Liza Minnelli, who was headlining at the hotel across the road, came to see my second show and visited me in my dressing room afterward. We sat on the floor and laughed like crazy and had a good time together. She was just darling. For a while I felt like we could become good friends. But in subsequent meetings I sensed that although she was always warm and friendly to me, she still kept a shield in front of her; it protects her, but no one can ever really crack it and get through to the real Liza behind it.
Along the way, I also often guested on other people’s TV shows. When Gene Kelly was a guest on one of the TV shows I hosted, I found out at the last minute that I was scheduled to do a tap dance with him. That was terrifying in the extreme.
I was vastly relieved to find that Gene was a kind and patient teacher who was prepared to rehearse the number over and over with me. Afterward, I rehearsed for a few hours more on my own, just to make sure I got it right. In the end, I was fairly confident that I’d mastered the routine, and was even looking forward to doing it with Gene on the show.
Imagine my dismay, then, when at the final rehearsal he came over to me with a towel around his neck and said, “Hey, kid” (he called everyone he worked with “kid,” no matter how young or old they were), “you know, I think I want to change something in the routine.”
I visibly blanched, but I was much too in awe of Gene to protest. So we spent the next few hours learning the new steps, and then I put in