Jeannie Out of the Bottle - Barbara Eden [85]
I gave her a few words of encouragement about her acting career, which in essence delivered the message, Don’t give up. Carry on!
And carry on Ellen Barkin did. She went on to make The Big Easy and Sea of Love, carving out a stellar movie career for herself. To top that, in her private life, she married and divorced one of the wealthiest men in America. Not bad for a girl who wanted to give up acting all those years ago.
In 1981, I appeared in Return of the Rebels with Don Murray, in which the young Patrick Swayze had a small part. He was gentlemanly and polite to me, and I was struck by how close he was to his family and how whenever they came to visit him on the set, he was so warm and kind to them. Patrick was a good guy, and his death from pancreatic cancer at the age of fifty-seven was tragic.
In 1985, NBC ordered a two-hour I Dream of Jeannie sequel, I Dream of Jeannie: 15 Years Later, in which I played both Jeannie and her evil sister (I always loved playing the sister because, as they say, the devil always gets the best lines).
This time around Sidney Sheldon wasn’t available to take creative control of the movie, as by then his career as a novelist was well under way, with books like The Other Side of Midnight selling in the millions.
Larry also didn’t appear in I Dream of Jeannie: 15 Years Later, for the very good reason that Dallas was now a massive hit and a cultural phenomenon, and he didn’t want to switch horses in midrace, as it were. So Wayne Rogers played Tony, and was very good in the part, although very different from Larry. Wayne, who starred in the hit TV series M*A*S*H and then went on to become an investment broker and a financial commentator on TV, nowadays manages my money!
However, donning my Jeannie costume once more after an interval of fifteen years was a very strange feeling. The moment I put it on, I got goose bumps all over my body. I looked in the mirror and felt as though time hadn’t passed at all.
The plot of the movie was a bit strange, but probably appropriate for its time. When the story opens, Jeannie has at last realized her own value. She’s married to Major Nelson, has a child with him (played by Mackenzie Astin, the twelve-year-old son of Patty Duke and John Astin), and has become more assertive than she was at the start of the series. Deciding that Major Nelson is taking her too much for granted, she moves out of their house, rents an apartment on her own, and attempts to live the life of a 1980s liberated woman. Not the world’s most scintillating script, but a worthwhile and fun exercise in nostalgia.
Moreover, two good things emerged out of the show for me. First, I was allowed to display my belly button at last! And I Dream of Jeannie: 15 Years Later placed a close second to a World Series game in the ratings, to become the eleventh-highest-rated television movie of 1985.
In 1987, I was cast as Laura Harding in The Stepford Children. It was not a particularly thrilling experience. The script featured a robot clone of me. So I had to spend four hours wearing a leotard and stockings, covered in plaster, with straws inserted into my nostrils so I could breathe.
My mother had just died, and my sister, Alison, was working as my double. Both she and I were extremely uncomfortable when we discovered that we had a big scene to shoot in a cemetery. But work is work, so we gritted our teeth and got through the scene, trying hard to forget about our mother’s recent burial and concentrate on the action.
A happier experience was the TV movie Your Mother Wears Combat Boots, in which I worked with Matthew, then twenty-four. I was playing a woman whose husband was killed in Vietnam after his parachute failed to open during a crucial jump. Years later, the son she had with him is in his late teens and she believes that he is in college. However, to her