Jeannie Out of the Bottle - Barbara Eden [68]
On plane trips between stops, the rest of us were usually asleep, exhausted, but Bob rarely slept and spent much of the journey cutting and splicing the day’s TV tape. He was eighty-five at the time.
On average, we slept four hours a night, and the plane refueled in midair. One night I was sleeping the sleep of the dead when all of a sudden I woke up with a start: it was Bob, telling me that the plane was being refueled and that I ought to watch. I nodded and then fell straight back to sleep again. But you can bet your boots that Bob stayed awake all night and watched that plane being refueled.
On another tour, Connie Stevens was traveling with us on a C-130 cargo plane. Bob had the lower part of a bunk bed, because of his age, but Connie and I were supposed to sleep on the floor. Bob took pity on us and said that if we ever wanted to, we could take a nap in the top bunk. So one night, fed up with sleeping on the floor, Connie and I slept toe to head in the bunk above Bob’s. Or at least we tried to—our sleep was hampered by the fear that the top bunk would break in the middle of the night, land on top of Bob, and crush him, which would lead to the headline “Two Blondes Kill Bob Hope!”
Aside from being part of Bob’s USO tours, I regularly appeared on his TV specials (on the Christmas specials our tradition was always to sing “Silver Bells” together), sang with him to an audience of fifteen thousand in Chicago, and in 1968 I opened the new Madison Square Garden with him. On that momentous occasion, I made my entrance into the arena in a brown fur coat, carrying a big bunch of balloons, then removed the coat to reveal a ringmaster’s costume underneath. From then on, I sang and danced in a series of outfits: an ice skater’s costume (in which I danced to “The Skater’s Waltz”), a cowboy getup, and a tennis dress. The whole sequence ended up with me dressed as Uncle Sam, all intensely patriotic and the epitome of good old-fashioned American values, everything for which Bob Hope so proudly stood. Later that same year Bob and I did a special together at NASA in Houston, at the end of which he brought all the astronauts onstage, which was great fun. And when Bob was seventy-five, we performed in Australia at the Perth Entertainment Centre in front of an audience eight thousand strong. Bob didn’t work with anyone he didn’t like, so I guess he liked me as much as I liked him.
Although Bob Hope was such a big star, he was a regular guy. I’ll never forget the time in St. Louis when we were working at the Fox Theater and Bob suddenly said, “Let’s go get an ice cream cone.” So we just walked down the main street together, eating ice cream cones, and nobody bothered us. They had such respect for Bob, as I did.
We shared the same sense of humor, I think, and I always loved it when we did a comic duet of the song “Help Me Make It Through the Night.” A little naughty and suggestive, but that was Bob, and when all was said and done, it was good, clean fun.
My relationship with singer Tom Jones, however, is quite another story. I worked with Tom in England in March 1969, during a break from I Dream of Jeannie, and flew to England with my manager, Gene Schwam, my conductor, Doug Talbert, and my hairdresser, Mary Skolnik, to guest on This Is Tom Jones. My guest spot consisted of me singing a duet with Tom, “The Look of Love,” while we strolled along the Thames embankment together.
I’ve always known that my strength as a singer lies more in my acting ability than in my singing voice, so my method has always been to act my songs, very