Jeannie Out Of The Bottle (9 page)

Meanwhile, Tony had somehow found out about Michael and had gone berserk when I refused to see him anymore. He called me constantly, waylaid me at the studio, and became so menacing that I was forced to ask the security guards at the gate to stop him from entering the lot.

I’ve never scared easily (not even when I had a death threat further along in my career, which I’ll tell you about later), but Tony was totally out of control and I was terrified.

One night Michael and I were snuggled up on the couch in my apartment when the telephone rang. I picked it up and heard Tony’s voice, muffled but instantly recognizable.

“Goodbye, Barbara. Goodbye,” he said in a slurred voice, and hung up.

Within minutes, Michael and I were speeding over to the Highlands, the apartment complex where Tony lived. As we approached his apartment, we could already smell the gas.

Michael, ever a man of action, smashed through a window and climbed in, and I followed.

Inside the apartment, Tony was on the sofa, unconscious. Gas was pouring out of the oven. I grabbed a cloth, pressed it against my nose and mouth, and switched the gas off, while Michael dragged Tony outside to safety. An ambulance raced him to the hospital. To our great relief, Tony ultimately survived his suicide attempt.

But from that night on, I viewed Michael with new respect. He had stood by me in the midst of a crisis. He hadn’t panicked, but had been there for me, a rock. He was strong, dependable, and gorgeous, but he was also eminently decent. Above all, he was a good man, and I hadn’t met many of those in Hollywood. The town was full of boys trying to be agents and boys trying to be actors, but no real men. Michael was and is a real man.

Right after Tony’s attempted suicide, I accepted Michael’s marriage proposal. We were so in love, so eager to be married and spend the rest of our lives together, and we couldn’t wait to tell our nearest and dearest the wonderful news.

Naturally, I expected all our friends and family to be happy that Michael and I were getting married, and in particular Booker McClay, the Cupid who’d introduced us to each other in the first place.

To my surprise, when I broke the news to Booker, he was less than enthusiastic about my marrying Michael.

A few days passed, then he sent word that he wanted to see me in his office again. He didn’t beat around the bush. “Barbara, we—the studio—think you ought to wait a while before marrying Michael,” he said.

Wait? This from the man who’d set up our first date? I was dumbstruck.

“You see, Barbara, we don’t think you realize how many women hang around Michael on the Broken Arrow set each day. Women are flooding into Hollywood on Greyhound buses from all over the country hoping against hope to see him. He’s surrounded by women who are crazy about him,” Booker said grimly

I drew myself up to my full height. (Not that impressive when you are only five foot three, but you get the picture.)

“That’s lovely,” I retorted loftily. “Because I don’t want someone whom nobody else wants!”

Now it was Booker’s turn to be dumbstruck.

That night Michael and I set our wedding date for six weeks later.

Neither of us dreamed that Booker’s negative reaction to our plan to marry was just the tip of the Twentieth Century Fox iceberg. Afterward, we found out that the studio honchos were distraught at the prospect of us marrying.

Their reaction was based on the fact that I was currently the youngest girl whom Fox had under contract; they hadn’t even planted any items in any columns yet about me dating anyone, and now I was already talking marriage! Worse still, the sponsors of Broken Arrow were extremely worried that if Michael married me, his megawatt appeal to legions of women throughout America would instantly dissipate.

None of that bothered either of us, of course, and we just went ahead and booked the church, irrespective of anyone’s objections. Naturally, we invited Booker to be our best man, and, to his credit, he accepted.

Now that the date was set, I discovered that I didn’t have a thing to wear to my own wedding. But as I was basically working ten hours a day on How to Marry a Millionaire, I hardly had any time to scout around for the perfect wedding dress. To my delight, Mary Tate, the show’s wardrobe mistress, came to my rescue and took me shopping for one. The only dress that I really liked was a white shantung silk suit that was about four sizes too large for me. Luckily, Mary arranged for the wardrobe department to cut it down to size so that it fitted me perfectly.

Next, my aunt Margie jumped in and lent me a hat, so that took care of something borrowed. A bigger problem, though, was how to stop my mother and her friend Elinor Hoffman—the kind and generous lady who’d given me the $100 that paid for my studies at the conservatory—from crying all the time. They weren’t crying for happiness, either—they both thought I was too young to get married.

Michael and I held our ground and brushed aside everyone’s objections to our union. We married on January 17, 1958, at St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church. Afterward, my aunt and uncle held a small reception for thirty guests.

Our wedding took place on a Friday. The following morning, I was scheduled to pose for publicity pictures. On Sunday, both Michael and I had to memorize our scripts in time for Monday morning, when we had to report to work on adjoining sound stages at Fox. So much for a honeymoon!

We moved into a duplex apartment off Sunset. I decorated the entire place in cream, and we were thrilled when Elinor Hoffman presented us with a precious miniature cream-colored poodle to match. We named her Maggie. We both loved Maggie and loved our home, but we weren’t particularly domestic—though Michael cooked chicken once, his first and his last home-cooked meal. In the main, we thrived on TV dinners, books, conversation, and the powerful electricity generated by our brand-new love.

We were the very model of Hollywood actors—our careers were paramount, though we both wanted to have a child two years down the line. But I was still appearing in How to Marry a Millionaire, which went on to run for fifty-two episodes over two years, and Michael was still in Broken Arrow. Parenthood would have to wait.

Meanwhile, we were consolidating our finances. When I started working on How to Marry a Millionaire, the studio didn’t increase my $200 weekly salary. However, Michael, always my biggest and most vociferous champion, and a man with an excellent head for business, argued persuasively that it wasn’t fair for me to work twelve hours a day—and in sky-high heels at that—and not have my salary augmented. So Wilt stepped in and made a great deal for me whereby Fox paid me an extra $1,500 a week over my contract salary, then a king’s ransom. Which was just as well, because later in 1958, after a total of seventy-two episodes over two years, Broken Arrow was canceled. We had no warning; the series was extremely popular, as was Michael, who was now a household name, and the cancellation was a big shock for both of us. The downturn in our finances was not particularly easy to manage, but fortunately, both Michael and I had a natural tendency toward thrift. However, our finances were once again battered after How to Marry a Millionaire was canceled in 1959. I went back to being a Fox contract player again, and my salary was back to my original $200 a week.

I might have started feeling a bit despondent if Wilt hadn’t called with a wonderful offer: a part in Flaming Star, a cowboy movie starring Elvis Presley, the hottest male sex symbol in the universe. I’d first seen Elvis on The Ed Sullivan Show after my mother excitedly called me and insisted that I had to switch on the television and watch his performance. I did and was struck by his intense star quality and sex appeal.

In the movie, Elvis played Pacer Burton, the son of an Indian mother (Dolores del Rio) and a white father, born in Texas and torn between opposing worlds. Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando were originally cast in the parts that Elvis and Steve Forrest would eventually play, but they backed out. Elvis had liked the script and thought the role a good one to play for his comeback after two years with the U.S. Army in Germany.

My role in the movie was originally cast with actress Barbara Steele, but at the last moment her accent was judged to be too British for the part. I was to play Ros, a rough-and-ready cowgirl who wore trousers and kept her hair in a long braid. I found it refreshing not to have to fuss so much about my clothes, hair, and makeup in the movie.

Elvis and I first met when preproduction of Flaming Star began on August 1, 1960. Shooting was scheduled to begin on August 16 at the Canejo Movie Ranch in Thousand Oaks. Exteriors were to be shot in Utah.

By now, I’d met countless stars, but the prospect of meeting the great Elvis Presley and working alongside him was still daunting. Luckily for me, he happened to be a big fan of Michael’s—he loved Broken Arrow and in particular the character of Cochise—so that broke the ice between us.

I was surprised that Elvis even knew Michael, and I asked him how he’d managed to catch Broken Arrow, given his frenetic work schedule. He told me that he couldn’t leave his hotel room at night for fear of being mobbed, so he stayed locked inside and watched TV for most of the night. That answer afforded me a poignant insight into Elvis’s world, one that surprised me.

It was immediately clear to me, though, that Elvis cared passionately about acting and that he had his heart set on Flaming Star becoming a critical as well as a commercial success.

Before shooting began, Elvis had two weeks of riding lessons. He was the star of the movie, so I didn’t question why no one suggested I have riding lessons as well. Surprising, really, in light of what happened next.

By the time shooting began on August 16, Elvis could ride extremely well, whereas I had never ridden a horse before in my life. Although a couple of ranchers gave me one basic lesson, I was happy when the wrangler assured me that they would be using a stunt double for any scenes in which my character was supposed to be riding a horse.

There was one particular scene in which Steve Forrest was at the top of a hill on his horse and my stunt double was supposed to ride up the hill screaming out my lines. However, at the very last moment she was nowhere to be found, and without giving me any advance warning, the wrangler put me on the horse after all.

“Don’t worry, the horse knows what to do,” was all he said, and off the horse galloped up the hill, with me hanging on for dear life.

To my horror, I saw that we were heading straight for an irrigation ditch. My heart was pounding so loudly that I felt as if it were about to bust out of my chest, but to my everlasting relief, the horse made the jump.

I was just beginning to relax when my horse suddenly reared and then raced straight toward a tree with a great big hanging limb that swung threateningly in the wind.

“Duck!” yelled the wrangler.

I ducked, just in the nick of time.

As I did, the director blared, “Say your line, Barbara, say your line!”

Shaking from head to foot, I blurted out the line. Then the horse was off again, racing down the hill, while I hung on for dear life. Finally he skidded to a halt at the bottom. I was about to scramble down, when the director roared, “We’ll do another take!”

I did just that, while Elvis stood and applauded.

It only took a couple of seconds with Elvis for me to recognize that he was really just a nice southern boy who had been taught by his momma to mind his manners and say please and thank you, just as I’d been taught to do by mine.

In fact, Elvis was far less flamboyant and far more low-key than Colonel Tom Parker, his manager and the man who’d discovered him. The Colonel roared onto the set every day in his big convertible Cadillac. Swaggering around in his white suit and ten-gallon hat and puffing on a big cigar, Colonel Parker was definitely one of a kind, a maverick with no inhibitions and, some said, no scruples, either.

As for me, I rather liked the Colonel, because he never disguised who or what he was, nor how venal his motivations actually were. Bizarre as it may have seemed to all the rest of us on the movie, each morning the Colonel came onto the sound stage and set up a table on which he displayed Elvis’s records, as well as books and magazines featuring him. I don’t think anyone bought a single item, but the Colonel remained cool and unflustered.

As Elvis confided to me on the set of Flaming Star, “You know, Barbara, people say that I should leave the Colonel, but if it weren’t for him, I’d still be that kid playing in a little bar down in Memphis. I know he’s getting a big cut out of what I make, but he deserves every cent of it.”

That comment was typical of Elvis: open, honest, and revealing. In between shots, we had similar intimate conversations on all sorts of subjects.

Elvis needed to have family and close friends around him for most of the shoot because he was fundamentally insecure. His father, Vernon, was usually on the set with him; it was obvious that Elvis loved his daddy and they were very easy with each other. He also had a group of guys with him at all times—his “cousins,” as he introduced them to me. We all used to sit outside on the set and shoot the breeze together.

Years after Elvis’s death, when I was on Larry King Live, one of the cousins called in. By then I knew that none of the guys I’d met all those years ago were related to Elvis at all, so I took the call, laughed, and said, “You stinkers! I honestly thought you all really were his cousins, but you’re not!”

Elvis also confided in me about his new love, Priscilla Beaulieu, an army colonel’s daughter who was only fourteen when they met while he was stationed in Germany. Subtle as always, he broached the subject delicately by asking how Michael and I managed our marriage when one of us was away on location. “How do you handle being married to a man other women like so much, Barbara?” Of course, he was thinking of Priscilla and whether or not she would be able to cope with the armies of female fans forever pursuing him. I did my best to reassure him that so far, I had been able to rise above any jealousies or insecurities I might have because Michael was so damned attractive to legions of women.