Jeannie Out of the Bottle - Barbara Eden [78]
On the subject of presidents, when I was working at the Fairmont Hotel in Atlanta, future president Jimmy Carter, then governor of Georgia, came to see the show with his daughter, Amy. After the show, he invited me to the governor’s mansion, where I met his wife, Rosalynn. Amy was jumping around on the furniture, eating an orange—sweet, innocent, and unaffected.
Still worse than Chuck’s name-dropping was his continual drive to be the center of attention, his constant and overweening need for applause. Before we met, he had been a popular after-dinner speaker. Now that we were an item, the demand for him to perform speaking engagements increased, and Chuck loved it. His yearning to be onstage at all times was such that I sometimes caught myself wondering if he was the actor, not me.
The truth was that he wanted to be the star. Looking back, I see that although he was a brilliant man and a talented salesman, Chuck was very insecure. He was like a spoiled child who wanted to hog all the attention and couldn’t endure it if he didn’t get it. He just had to entertain at all costs, even if the jokes he cracked constantly weren’t funny.
The problem was that I was the entertainer, not him, and in his heart he knew it and resented me. And the longer we spent together, the stronger his resentment. In fact, one of his favorite quotes, which he later served out with relish to journalists who asked him about our marriage, was, “Before I met her, I always told jokes at parties and had developed a reputation as an emcee and raconteur. Now people come up to her and say, ‘Hey, aren’t you the famous Barbara Fegert?’ ”
All my doubts aside, I was in love with Chuck and he with me, and soon I was dividing my time between Los Angeles and Chuck’s luxurious apartment on the forty-second floor of the Water Tower. He had a bachelor pad with spectacular views of the lake and the glittering lights of the city below.
The apartment boasted a bedroom with mirrored ceilings and a Jacuzzi. Chuck was so proud of that bedroom, because it epitomized the playboy image he always tried so hard to project (not that it was entirely false). Many of his friends were playboys, late-night parties were de rigueur for him, and whenever Sinatra was in town (which was often), he and Chuck hung out together.
At the start of our relationship, I commuted between LA and Chicago, and Chuck did the same, later grousing that he had made the trip thirty-one times. Then, in the same breath, he’d boast to the press, “Barbara is such an old-fashioned girl, she refuses to live with me. Her values are so traditional.”
From the first, part of the problem was that I still wanted to work, and work I did. We tried to spend as much time as possible together, but I kept being offered jobs, and I took them, not just because I loved working but also because I didn’t want to put my life on hold and become a stay-at-home wife. That wasn’t whom Chuck had fallen in love with or who I intrinsically am. But the reality was that while Chuck loved to have me work, he also hated it because it took time away from him, and also because, no matter how hard I tried not to, I inevitably upstaged him.
I told myself that because my career made Chuck feel so insecure, the only solution was for me to marry him. That way, I reasoned, he would know that we were a unit, a couple, and then he’d be secure, settled, and content and we’d go on and have a good life together.
So although I was riddled with doubts about the wisdom of what I was about to do, I agreed to marry Chuck. The wedding took place in a storybook setting: a lakeside horse ranch, with a large main house, owned by one of Chuck’s friends. Unfortunately, I was one and a half hours late for my own wedding. Not that it was my fault (the hairdresser driving me there got lost), but in retrospect, it seems symbolic.
Despite my mother’s distaste for Chuck, she still attended the wedding, though afterward she sniffed, “He acted like the bride, not the groom.” At that point, I