Jeannie Out of the Bottle - Barbara Eden [84]
That final illness was cruelly drawn out and caused her a great deal of pain and suffering. I later learned through one of her friends that she had been having difficulty breathing at night for a very long time beforehand, but she continued to ignore her symptoms, and never gave me a clue, either. My guess is that she simply followed her own dictate and rose right above it—until, of course, it was impossible for her to do so anymore.
My mother passed away in November 1986, and I continue to miss her today more than I could ever say. When she lived with me, when I was working, each morning, she would take Matthew to school—Buckley, a private school, and to and from sports practice. And when Matthew was with his father (with whom I thankfully shared joint custody), she and I would go on fun and adventurous trips together, sometimes work-related, other times not.
Everywhere we traveled, even Australia and Fiji, my mother picked up a rock as a souvenir of where we’d been together and what a great time we’d had there. I labeled her souvenirs “Mommy Rocks.” Many a suspicious customs officer examined them, picked them up, turned them over, tapped them on the table, and rubbed their rough surfaces, utterly bemused. However, after hearing my mother’s wide-eyed explanation, the customs officers grinned, nodded, and let us through.
Stanley and I were together for seven years, but neither of us was passionate enough about the other to take the ultimate step of getting married. After all, I’d been married twice, and I told myself that trying marriage for a third time was a recipe for disaster. So Stanley and I broke up. And guess who is the current love of his life? None other than Michele Lee, who introduced us to each other in the first place. Hollywood musical chairs, you could call it.
I spent a great many years working on a long series of made-for-television movies, some fun, others not, some worthwhile, others patently not. We can take a whistle-stop tour of some of them.
In 1974 I appeared in a real howler of a TV movie of the week, The Stranger Within, in which I gave birth to an alien baby, ate a great deal of raw meat, and drank a lot of coffee. Sigmund Freud probably would have had a field day analyzing that script!
In 1977, I worked on Stonestreet: Who Killed the Centerfold Model? (a pilot that, ultimately, did not get sold), playing an undercover cop. My sister, Alison, was an extra. Alison also stood in for me in some of my other movies, not because she wanted to be an actress but because my mother was dying and we both knew that Alison and me working together would make her so happy.
In the Stonestreet script my character went undercover as a hooker, plying her trade in a very rough part of LA. I wore a red wig, a minuscule skirt, a plunging top, and towering stilettos.
As I sashayed along Hollywood Boulevard for a long shot, a white Cadillac screeched to a halt beside me. A man leaned out of the window, beckoned, and said, “Get in, honey.”
I gave him a wide smile and said, “Not right now. You’re on Candid Camera!”
He tore away as if the cops were after him.
Later that day, they shot me walking down another stretch of Hollywood Boulevard, past a peep show. In the middle of the shot, a man ducked out of the peep show and ruined the entire scene.
The infuriated director yelled, “Cut!” but the poor man was frozen to the spot.
The director went to war. “If you don’t move right now, I’ll print it and send a copy to your mother,” he said.
The terrified man scurried off like a bunny rabbit pursued by a pack of ravenous wolves.
Watching the scene was a young actress who was playing a ticket booth attendant and had only one line in the movie. Even then, with a faint smile playing on her unusually