Jeannie Out Of The Bottle (18 page)

One night Michael, Charles Bronson, and I went to see Don Rickles in Las Vegas. When we walked into the room, he looked out into the audience, spotted me with my hair in big curls, and yelled out, “So you’re married to a little girl, Michael Ansara!” We all laughed. As the show progressed, Rickles was at his funniest and most vitriolic, and the insults got stronger and stronger. He insulted Michael, he insulted Charlie, and he took on a few other audience members, but he never insulted me. Afterward, when we went backstage, he took me aside and said, “Barbara, I’m so sorry; I can’t insult you. I can’t say ‘Barbara’ and insult you, because, you see, I love my wife.” Don Rickles, a wonderful comedian, was sometimes vicious and sometimes hurtful, but underneath he was a true romantic with a heart of gold.

At the height of the success of I Dream of Jeannie, I was receiving bags and bags of fan mail from all over the world. The series was so popular that in 1966, a Jeannie doll was released by Libby. There was also a Madame Alexander Jeannie doll, a Jeannie baby doll, and a Jeannie Barbie.

On the subject of I Dream of Jeannie objects, the original Jeannie bottle was a Jim Beam liquor decanter created in 1964 to help promote sales around Christmastime, painted with a leaf design in gold. It was the first of many designs and bottles used on the series. Years after the series became a hit, fans created their own versions of Jeannie bottles, which have become collectors’ items.

I still own the original Jeannie bottle from the second season, which I keep locked in a bank safe deposit box. Before I deposited it there, I discovered that my Jeannie bottle truly did have magical powers. Until then I’d been keeping it on display in my library. But when a major earthquake struck Los Angeles in 1994, the library was totally destroyed. When I inspected the debris, however, there, shining out from the rubble like a glittering beacon, was my Jeannie bottle, wedged on top of a gigantic pyramid of books, as if by magic.

Part of the magic of I Dream of Jeannie, I suspect, was the aura of mystery surrounding the show and the characters. Famously, I never was allowed to expose my belly button on the show. Throughout the series, I kept getting letters from fans asking me if I had one, and visitors on the set always asked me to show it to them. I’d joke, “A nickel a peek!” but I never ripped away the last of the seven veils and revealed it.

However, the day came when, during the fourth season of I Dream of Jeannie, George Schlatter, my clever friend who used to produce Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, came up with the brilliant idea of unveiling my hitherto unexposed belly button on an episode of his blockbuster TV show.

George had designed a tiny proscenium stage that would fit over my stomach. The plan was that a big fanfare would sound, the curtain would open, and a huge klieg light would shine on my belly button at last.

I was content to go along with George’s off-the-wall idea, but NBC went ballistic. When I asked the producers to explain what was wrong with me unveiling my belly button on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, they just stared into space and ignored me. I wouldn’t have given the issue any thought, but ever since the series began, I’d been receiving stacks of mail from U.S. soldiers posted abroad, who wrote, “I am so looking forward to seeing your belly button.” Now that the belly button unveiling was nigh, I didn’t want to disappoint them.

Truthfully, I didn’t really understand what the fuss was about, and I still don’t. I mean, every time I raised my arms on the show, my navel popped out, but clearly, neither the viewers nor the censors had ever noticed.

Now, though, that clever George Schlatter had made an issue of baring my belly button on national TV, NBC’s honchos sat up and swung into action. A meeting was called for the studio’s top brass, who all sat around a vast conference table debating the wisdom of exposing my belly button to the TV audience. George was present at that meeting and afterward joked, “I’ve never seen so many suits sitting around the table discussing a belly button!”

The verdict? Blackout on my belly button. Herminio Traviesas, NBC director of standards and practices, ruled that I was banned from showing it on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. Extraordinary—no appeal, no reprieve, nothing. My belly button remained shrouded for many years to come.

Even when the show went on location to Hawaii, where we shot three episodes in the sweltering heat, all the girls on Waikiki Beach wore bikinis, but I was asked to wear a chaste one-piece. At the time I thought the scenario was hilarious, but I didn’t have a choice in the matter, so I made the best of it.

Making the best of it became my credo after Larry and I first heard that Jeannie and Tony were due to be married in the series. We were united in our reaction—sheer disgust—because we both knew that the wedding heralded the end of the show. After all, I Dream of Jeannie’s abiding theme was Jeannie’s unrequited love for Major Nelson, his belief that she was just a figment of his imagination, and her stubborn insistence that she was real. Marrying her to Major Nelson derailed the plot and the series as a whole, and both Larry and I knew it.

However, filming the wedding proved to be fun. We shot it at Cape Canaveral (now the Kennedy Space Center), and when the episode was aired, it got one of the highest ratings of the entire series. But the writing was on the wall.

I wasn’t particularly worried about the financial repercussions for my career if the show was canceled. During the third year of the show the producers had bought me out for a substantial sum, and although the show is still shown throughout the world today, I don’t earn any residuals from it. However, I don’t mind and never have. I was well paid.

After the wedding episode, we filmed fifteen more episodes, but we knew that it was just a matter of time before the show shuddered to a halt. Today we would say that when Jeannie and Tony got married, the show “jumped the shark.” Larry, perhaps more than me, anticipated the impending demise of I Dream of Jeannie with a great deal of trepidation.

The fallout from Larry’s misgivings about the show being on its last legs was—as Bill Daily was once quoted as saying—that he now spent most of his time hiding in his trailer. He flatly refused to talk to me or to anyone else. Not the most congenial way in which to co-star in a comedy series.

When I received the news from an agent that the show had been canceled (he baldly announced, “They didn’t pick I Dream of Jeannie up again”), I felt just as if I had lost my family, albeit one with a wild, delinquent terror of a brother.

I adored being Jeannie. She was a part of my life for five years. Making I Dream of Jeannie was one of the most joyful experiences of my life. I loved playing Jeannie, and still think back on her with great affection, but I look at her as separate from me. She’s not me. She’s Jeannie.

EVEN WHEN I was filming I Dream of Jeannie, I had always worked in my Las Vegas nightclub act and taken other roles on television and in movies. After the show was canceled, I just carried on working wherever and whenever I could.

And wouldn’t you know it—my first post–I Dream of Jeannie job was with Larry! A Howling in the Woods was the uninspiring story of a justifiably jumpy wife who kept hearing (no prizes for guessing) a howling in the woods. In a piece of less-than-imaginative casting, none other than Larry Hagman played my husband.

My strongest memory of A Howling in the Woods was shooting by the shores of Lake Tahoe and being asked by the director to film a scene in a little boat on the lake. The director and the cinematographer were in the boat with Larry and me, as they needed some close-up shots of the two of us on the lake together.

All of a sudden, right in the middle of the lake, the boat’s engine started sputtering, then cut out completely. To our dismay, we discovered that we only had one oar with us in the boat. What had happened to the other one, no one knew.

So there we were, marooned in a tiny boat on Lake Tahoe. We quickly agreed that our only option was to sit back and wait to be rescued. We knew that when the rest of the crew realized how long we’d been away from shore, they’d come looking for us.

However, when that might happen was anybody’s guess. Moreover, it was lunchtime, we were all starving, and the only thing we had to eat between us was a little packet of M&M’s that I had in my pocket. To our relief, we were rescued after one and a half hours.

Larry and I had a certain amount of camaraderie while making A Howling in the Woods together. But it was a strange feeling not to have my I Dream of Jeannie family around me anymore. I wasn’t happy that the show had ended, but I wasn’t depressed. That came later.

Instead, I threw myself into my Las Vegas nightclub act with a vengeance. The idea of returning to my singing roots and appearing in my very own Vegas act had taken root while I was still appearing in I Dream of Jeannie and wanted to work during the hiatus between seasons.

My new career kicked off after two young men who’d made a hit record with Shelley Fabares got in touch with me and asked if they could do a demo with me. Well, I’ve never been one to back down from a career challenge, so I agreed, and we cut an album and then took it to my agent, Shep Fields.

Unfortunately, Shep rejected the boys and the demo album out of hand, but the idea of a solo Las Vegas act clearly stayed with him. And in 1967 Shep secured a contract for me.

At first I was confident and not the least bit nervous about taking on Las Vegas. A writer and a musician were hired to create the act. When we rehearsed the show, I felt good about it, and my prospects of success seemed high.

It was only two days before the show was due to open at the Shamrock Hotel in Houston (kind of a dress rehearsal for the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas) that it finally dawned on me how truly terrible it really was. It might have been perfect as a high school production, but it wasn’t what I believed a large-scale Vegas production ought to be.

Let me give you a flavor of the fiasco that my first Las Vegas show seriously was. The curtain opens, and there onstage is a larger-than-life replica of my Jeannie bottle. Meanwhile, I’m out of the view of the audience, scurrying up a ladder and into my bottle, where I am supposed to sit and sing my first song.

This is what those writers came up with (more or less): “Sitting in my bottle, on my Persian rug / Thinking of Aristotle, and drinking from a jug.” Then the script had me morph into an embryo, curl up, and sing something along the lines of, “Today I will open my eyes! Blink! Today I’ll be moving my fingers! Blink! Today I’ll be taking my first steps! Blink! Today I’m alive!”

An embryo, in Las Vegas. Gee whiz!

The show went on and on in the same vein, culminating with me standing onstage wearing a gray wig and belting out a song in my guise of an old lady. Entertainment? I don’t think so.

At the eleventh hour, in desperation, I contacted veteran choreographer Nick Castle (who had choreographed Betty Grable, Ann Miller, Gene Kelly, and Fred Astaire and staged countless TV and Las Vegas shows) and begged him fly to Las Vegas to fix mine. When he arrived, I showed him what we had, eager to find out what he thought of the show and what he felt he could do to salvage it.

After a few minutes in which Nick seemed lost in thought, he pronounced his final verdict on my first Las Vegas show.

“Can’t fix it. Throw it out, Barbara. Just stand onstage and sing,” he declared.

Unfortunately, the show had to go on, just as it was, until the end of the run. But the following year I put Nick’s suggestions into practice: I stood on the stage and sang, and I danced a little. My new Las Vegas nightclub act was given a tryout at the College Inn, Chicago, in August 1969. When the audiences didn’t throw rotten tomatoes at me, I gave a massive sigh of relief, then took my act to the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas.

Like many other female entertainers who worked Las Vegas, I hired the incredibly gifted Bob Mackie to design my gowns for the show. Renowned as the “Sultan of Sequins” and the “Rajah of Rhinestones,” Bob had won seven Emmys and designed gowns for Diana Ross, Liza Minnelli, Raquel Welch, Cher, Barbra Streisand, and, interestingly enough, Lucille Ball (who, judging by how beautifully she embellished my gown for the “Country Club Dance” episode of her show, was clearly fond of a rhinestone or two herself). Most of all, Bob was celebrated for his long-term association with Carol Burnett, for whom he made the most fabulous gowns.

When it came to designing the wardrobe for my nightclub act, in a quest to make me look as glamorous as possible, Bob placed beads strategically all over my gowns. However, the gowns were so skintight that wearing underwear was totally out of the question. As a result, when the light struck me a certain way, the orchestra members could see my body in every intimate detail. They were unperturbed: this was Las Vegas and they were 100 percent unshockable.

My mother, however, proved to be quite a different story. A few years ago, I ran into Tony Orlando, who had headlined at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas at the same time as I did. “Your mother was very protective of you,” he began.

“Not particularly,” I said, slightly surprised, but pleased that he’d mentioned my mother, who had passed on twenty years before.

Tony laughed.

“You don’t know the half of it,” he said. “Every night, when you were singing, I stood in the wings to watch you. But then your mother would notice and glare at me. ‘You can’t stay here. Not with Barbara wearing that!’ she said, and shooed me away from the wings.”

I looked up to the sky for a second and said a quick but heartfelt thanks to her.

Which reminds me of the time in 1973 when Gene Schwam, my manager to this day, called me out of the blue and asked me point-blank: “Barbara, are you interested in making a million dollars?”

Well, of course I was, I told him.

There was a long pause at the other end of the line.

“Brace yourself, Barbara,” Gene said. “It involves nudity!”

“How much?” I asked, hoping against hope that he would say a glimpse of cleavage or maybe a peek at my navel.

No such luck. It turned out that Playboy had offered a million dollars for me to pose nude in the magazine.