Jeannie Out of the Bottle - Barbara Eden [81]
The last straw was when, after we had planned to take a long summer vacation together, I received an offer to star in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and accepted it without consulting Chuck about my decision. In retrospect, I realize that, in the interests of keeping my husband happy, I probably shouldn’t have taken the job, but the part was good, and I really wanted to do the show.
Chuck was livid. Increasingly, he did all he could to put me down whenever the opportunity arose.
He was rude, controlling, and virulently competitive with me. For example, one evening, a maitre d’ welcomed me at a restaurant. Chuck erupted in fury and yelled, “I’m the one who pays the bill. He should greet me, not you!” A minor incident, but indicative of Chuck’s bitter mind-set and innate dissatisfaction with me and with our marriage.
One night we went to see Richard Burton in Camelot, then playing in Chicago. I’d loved Richard Burton ever since seeing him in The Robe (in which, incidentally, Michael also appeared), and I was excited to see him onstage in person.
I loved the show, but Chuck yawned loudly most of the way through the first act. As soon as the curtain came down for the interval, he got up, grabbed my arm, and said, “Come on, Barbara, we’re leaving!”
I was mortified, both because I was enjoying the show so much and because I was acutely aware of how big a snub it is to an actor if someone leaves the theater before the play is over, particularly if that person is someone you know. Although we hadn’t yet met Richard Burton, we had mutual friends, and we were scheduled to have dinner with Richard and his wife, Suzy, after the show.
“We can’t walk out in the middle of the show, Chuck,” I said. “Richard Burton will realize and be devastated.”
Chuck snorted. “Don’t be so vain, Barbara. You think you’re so important? Look at how many people there are in the audience. Burton won’t give you a single thought. And he certainly won’t notice that you’ve walked out.”
Crushed, just as he had intended, I gave in, and we left the theater.
A couple of hours later, we met Richard and Suzy at the designated restaurant for dinner, as arranged.
We had hardly sat down when Richard flashed me an accusatory look with those searing blue eyes, which could burn through your heart and soul.
“I’m so sorry you left the show at the interval, Barbara. You missed the whole second act,” he said.
I could have curled up and died, I felt so horrible. I was so ashamed, and spent the rest of the evening tongue-tied and humiliated while Chuck told anecdote after anecdote, the life of the party.
Our marriage clearly was on a collision course with disaster. Chuck grew to resent me more and more, and relished telling me in one breath how much he hated me and in the next how much he loved me. He was aggressive, erratic, out of control. It took me much too long to register that he was abusing alcohol and cocaine.
The signs were all there: the rage, the paranoia, the hypersexuality. One night he came home late after partying most of the evening. I was already in bed, and because I didn’t want any scenes, I pretended to be fast asleep. In the dark, I heard Chuck stumble into my special makeup chair and then fling it across the room.
In the morning, while Chuck got ready for work, I kept my eyes firmly shut, feigning deep sleep. He made no attempt to wake me. After he left, I showered and got dressed, then cast around for my makeup chair, but it was nowhere to be seen.
I spent the next hour scouring our three-thousand-square-foot apartment from floor to ceiling, and finally found my makeup chair on a high ledge above the guest room closet, where Chuck had obviously hidden it. A cruel practical joke, and a lesson: everything that I cared about, everything I needed, was unimportant to him, and needed to be damaged or thrown away.
Night after night, he was out partying, and when he came home, if I was still awake, he