Jeannie Out of the Bottle - Barbara Eden [86]
We filmed at Fort Benning, in Georgia. My scene with Matt went like this: I’m dragging my duffle bag across the grounds when Matt comes riding by on a bike. I ask him to direct me to a particular building. Then Matt comes out with his one and only line in the movie: “The white one!” Ever the proud mother, I thought he delivered his one line with a great deal of presence.
The whole shoot presented an extreme physical challenge for me, as the script called for me to undertake a series of parachute jumps. It was scary, but I wanted to prove that I could do it. I worked alongside soldiers, who put me through a parachute training course. It was fun but nerve-racking.
Finally the great day came on which the result of my parachute training was due to be immortalized on film. Feeling strong and brave, I braced myself to climb up three towers, each higher than the last.
I scrambled up the first rickety wooden tower with nary a second’s thought, and certainly not even a smidgen of fear. Once I reached the top, a harness was hooked onto my back, I jumped off, the parachute opened, and I floated down to the ground. I did that once. Then, brave as anything, and following the script to the letter, I moved over to the next tower and parachuted off there as well.
Then I got to the third and highest tower. At the base I hesitated for a second, and the sergeant watching said, “You sure you’re up for this?”
“Of course I am,” I said indignantly.
But the sergeant persisted. “You mean you don’t want a double?”
“Well, I did climb the other two,” I said, and looked at the sergeant questioningly.
“Are you sure you don’t want a double?” he repeated.
I shook my head and started climbing. Three-quarters of the way up the tower, I looked down and saw that the other two towers were below me. As I did, the tower started to sway in the wind.
“You want a double?” the sergeant yelled.
I certainly did!
My next TV outing proved to be frightening as well, but in a very different way: a role in four episodes of Dallas, starring, of course, none other than Larry Hagman.
While Larry and I hadn’t been in touch much in the intervening years since we were together on I Dream of Jeannie, I had watched with a combination of awe and pleasure as Larry’s J. R. Ewing became the stuff of which TV history was made. When J.R. was shot in March 1980, a record 350 million viewers throughout the world tuned in, then united in global speculation regarding the identity of his killer.
Naturally, Larry joined in the heated debate, too, his tongue firmly in his cheek. Not even he knew who really shot J.R., as the producers had cunningly opted to shoot several alternative endings to the episode in which the killer was unmasked, each one featuring a different killer. The speculation reached such a feverish height that bookies all over the world made a terrific amount of money from all the people placing bets on the identity of the man—or woman—who had shot J.R.
Funnily enough, when pushed to make a guess about the identity of his would-be assassin, Larry finally said: “Barbara Eden did it!” I was flattered that he thought of me, but couldn’t quite ignore the subtext inherent in his casting me as a killer. At the same time, given Larry’s off-set demands and the villainy of his on-camera character, I couldn’t help gleefully recalling his insistence at not being viewed as the bad guy in I Dream of Jeannie.
As it turned out, I was going to be the villain this time around, as my character, the dastardly Lee Ann De La Vega, screamed double-crossing diva. According to the script, J.R. did Lee Ann wrong when they were at college together: she became pregnant and he ditched her, after which she had an abortion that almost killed her. Now that she had become rich beyond her wildest dreams, her primary goal in life was to wreak revenge on J.R. and pay him back roundly for all his past iniquities.
An archvillainess, she actually succeeded in taking over Ewing Oil, then engineering the situation so that