Jeannie Out of the Bottle - Barbara Eden [70]
Almost beside himself with fury, my manager, Gene, shouted to someone to get the head union official immediately.
When the man appeared, tall and classically tough-looking, Gene flatly informed him, “Sorry, we can’t rehearse because there’s no stage. And if we can’t rehearse, Miss Eden can’t sing tonight.”
The union official came right up to Gene and stuck his face close to his.
“Miss Eden had better sing tonight,” he said, “or you better get a fast pair of roller skates.”
Gene didn’t hesitate. “Okay,” he said.
Just before I was about to go onstage at eight, I got word there had been a further delay in building the stage. By ten in the evening, there was still no stage.
At eleven-thirty a union official came to get me, so I assumed the stage had been completed. But when I arrived in the packed ballroom, to my shock the stage still hadn’t been built, and all the musicians were sitting ready in their chairs right in the middle of the floor.
So without any rehearsal, I faced an audience of a thousand union men, each and every one of them dressed in black tie and tails (I thought they looked like a bunch of penguins) and all hollering at the top of their voices, “Where’s Jeannie, where’s Jeannie?”
I started the show with a rousing, fast song, but then switched moods and sang a soft version of “MacArthur Park” and “Didn’t We.” Even so, all the way through the songs, the guys were yelling, “Hey, Barbara, where ya from?” and “Honey, sing ‘Melancholy Baby,’ ” and, “Come on, Jeannie baby, flash us your navel!”
All of a sudden, as if someone had given them a secret signal, a big group of union guys surged toward me and started to sing “Sweet Georgia Brown,” a completely different song from the one I was struggling to get through.
When someone turned the lights out, that did it—Gene and I sneaked out of the building as fast as we could, grabbed a cab, and hightailed it to La Guardia.
Touring brought with it other, less intimidating moments. Once I was appearing in concert in Detroit (in a theater the stage of which was built over an ice-skating rink), and my friend Mary shared a room with me. Just before we went to bed, I saw that she was readying herself to sleep stark naked.
As diplomatically as possible, I said, “But Mary, what if there’s a fire in the middle of the night?”
“There won’t be, Barbara, there won’t be.” She laughed, then turned over and went to sleep, naked as the day she was born.
The fire alarm rang out about an hour later.
I grabbed my show costumes, my makeup, and my music and made for the door. Mary, meanwhile, made a terrified dash for her clothes and threw them on as fast as she could. And, to my credit, I didn’t even say I told you so. Together, we dashed out into the freezing streets, in the middle of a heavy snow.
One of the hotel maids kindly offered us the opportunity to sit in her car, and we gratefully accepted. A few minutes later, a fireman rapped on the car window, asking us if we’d left anything important in the hotel room. I thanked him and said that all we’d left behind was some nail polish.
Without a word, he walked away. Ten minutes later, he brought us down our bottles of nail polish, having risked his life to go back to the hotel room to get them. Mary and I were speechless.
Then we took one look at Gene, who’d come down in a red leather jacket and red shoes, and we both screamed, “Gene! You’re dressed for a fire,” and burst out laughing.
Sadly, the days of untrammelled fun and laughter were numbered.
In Michael’s studio. Michael is a very talented artist, and these paintings of his mother, his sister, and his father are perfect examples of his work. (Photo Credit i2.1)
With Michael in the garden of our second home in Sherman Oaks. We were happily married and looking forward to the future with hope and optimism.
Michael and I are blissfully happy with our newborn son, Matthew. (Photo Credit i2.2)
I’m with one-and-a-half-year-old