John Raitt was a fabulous actor with a great baritone voice, and he was also something of a ladies’ man. But he was incredibly helpful and encouraging to me. Nonetheless, on opening night I was quaking in my shoes. To compound my terror, just before my entrance I stood backstage and peered into the audience, unable to make out any of the faces except one: Cary Grant’s!
Cary Grant was in the audience with his future wife, Dyan Cannon. And I was sure that I was about to give the worst performance of my entire career right in front of one of the greatest Hollywood legends who’d ever lived. I felt as if I were about to be instantly dispatched straight to hell in a Hollywood handbasket, with no escape, no reprieve.
The band struck up my entrance music. The ground seemed to shift beneath me, and for a moment I thought I was about to faint. I considered making a break for it. But then common sense and a devil-may-care touch of recklessness kicked in out of the blue, and I told myself, Go down there, Barbara Jean, and make a great big fool of yourself! Just do your best and let the chips fall where they may—as long as you don’t fall flat on your face as well!
With that, I stormed onstage and—holy mackerel!—I got through the show in one piece. I didn’t make a complete and utter fool of myself, Cary Grant didn’t storm out of the theater in disgust, and Dyan Cannon didn’t split her sides in derision at my performance.
Instead, John Raitt invited me to join him, Cary, and Dyan for dinner. The consummate charmer and a quintessential English gentleman, Cary made my evening by being unfailingly kind to me and telling me over and over how wonderful I’d been in the show.
I knew he was lying through those perfect, gleaming teeth, but I didn’t care. I felt so marvelous, so grand. And I’ll always be grateful to Cary for making me feel that way.
However, my meeting with another Hollywood legend and one of Cary’s most beloved co-stars, Katharine Hepburn, ended up playing out somewhat differently. During the early eighties, I was invited to see her in West Side Waltz, at Los Angeles’s Ahmanson Theater. My date was Henry Wolltag, a very good-looking, tall, and elegant silver-haired British gentleman in his early sixties, with perfect manners.
She was predictably brilliant in the show, and I couldn’t wait to go backstage and congratulate her afterward. I’d even hesitantly prepared a few things to say to her when we met, including Evie’s revelation that Marilyn had longed to look like Katharine. I was pleased at the prospect of relaying the compliment to her.
So after the show, Henry and I went backstage to pay a call on Miss Hepburn. We were ushered into her dressing room. And I had hardly taken a breath, never mind uttered a single word to her, when she swept straight past me and right up to my dashing British beau, and started batting her eyelashes at him most fetchingly.
Soon they were engaged in animated conversation, while I stood there in the background, like a discarded store mannequin. There was just one second when Miss Hepburn deigned to throw me a cursory glance, then spun around and turned her back on me without a single word. I was dismissed, and how!
Clearly, Katharine Hepburn had no time whatsoever for attractive blondes. And I sincerely hoped that poor Marilyn had never met her in person, either, as she probably would have been most unhappy to be on the receiving end of Miss Hepburn’s disdain. As for me, I chalked it all up to yet another tale in the saga of my encounters with Hollywood divas.
Lauren Bacall was another formidable Hollywood diva with whom I crossed paths when she was starring in Applause onstage in Los Angeles. My agent arranged for me to meet Lauren, as she was scheduled to take a break from the production and I was slated to replace her.
We met at the theater between shows and she looked me over briefly, with hardly a smile or a flash of warmth. I had expected to be fascinated and beguiled by her, but when I left her dressing room I was just saddled with the impression that she was large, commanding, and definitely in charge. I had no clue as to her impression of me, but guessed that it wasn’t remotely positive.
My guess was confirmed when, the following morning, she contacted the producers of Applause and, for reasons not revealed to me afterward, informed them that she had now decided not to take a hiatus from the show after all. I wasn’t altogether sorry, as Applause truly was Lauren Bacall’s show and I was happy to keep it that way.
Hollywood is a far smaller town than people outside the business tend to realize, and—all that negative publicity about casting couches aside—a great many shows are cast by serendipity. I Dream of Jeannie was one of them.
Let’s Jeannie-blink to the summer of 1964. Sure, I’d read about I Dream of Jeannie in the trade press, that it was a fantasy about a female genie, but there was nothing in the article about any bottle yet, or what kind of an actress the show’s creator, writer, and producer, Sidney Sheldon, was planning to cast as his Jeannie. The word, though, through the grapevine, was that he and the show’s producers were holding clandestine meetings with Miss Greece, Miss Israel, and other sultry five-foot-nine beauty queens with a view to auditioning them for the part.
I never dreamed that Sidney would consider me for the role of Jeannie. But then I didn’t know that he’d seen Brass Bottle, or that we had a number of mutual friends who were comedy writers and seemed to like and admire my work.
So I almost passed out in shock (also partly ecstasy) when Sidney called me, unheralded, and announced, “I hear you are my Jeannie!”
I never did discover who suggested me for the part, but Sidney, of course, knew a good line when he had one, so—after I picked myself up from the floor—I still didn’t assume that the part was mine. I believed that he was seeing a slew of other actresses far better suited to playing Jeannie than I was.
When I accepted Sidney’s invitation to have tea with him at the Beverly Hills Hotel’s Polo Lounge, I did so with very low expectations that anything would come of it. But I like very few things in life better than tea and cakes, preferably chocolate ones.
Let me pause to say a few words about the incomparable Sidney Sheldon, one of the most prolific and successful writers of all time. Born in Chicago, the son of a salesman, he attended eight different schools as a child, and discovered his writing talent when he was just twelve and he wrote, produced, directed, and starred in his very own mystery thriller.
After graduating from Northwestern University, he decamped to Hollywood, where David O. Selznick hired him to vet a script for the princely sum of $3. After that, Darryl Zanuck hired him to read and analyze scripts for a slightly higher salary and on a more permanent basis, after which Sidney’s career soared.
A brilliant, imaginative writer, he wrote the screenplays for a dazzling array of Hollywood classics, including Easter Parade, Annie Get Your Gun (along with Irving Berlin), The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer, and TV’s The Patty Duke Show. I Dream of Jeannie, his latest project, I knew from our mutual friends, was very close to his heart, and he totally believed in it.
So Sidney and I had tea together at the Beverly Hills Hotel, during which time he airily dismissed my doubts about not being a five-foot-nine dusky brunette from foreign climes, but rather a pint-sized, curvy American blonde. We chatted about comedy writers we’d both worked with, and life in general, and the hours sped by. At the end of our tea, I felt as if I’d made a wise new friend, but I still never imagined that Sidney would cast me as Jeannie.
So you could have knocked me down with a feather (shades of Ginger Rogers) when, just a few days later, Sidney called and said, “Congratulations; you are now officially my Jeannie!”
I was pleased to have gotten the job, but I didn’t exactly jump up and down for joy. After all, I had no idea how the pilot would turn out or if it would be picked up by a network. Still, a job was a job, and I was determined to do my best.
I was then working flat out on Rawhide at Universal, so when Sidney called and asked me if Larry Hagman, one of the actors whom they were considering for the part of Captain Tony Nelson, could rehearse with me, I suggested that we rehearse in my dressing room at the studio during a break from Rawhide.
“Fine,” Sidney said. “We know you can act, we know he can act, but what we want to check out is whether or not the two of you have chemistry.”
Now, chemistry between two people is something so magical, so indefinable, that not even the best actors can fake it, nor can the greatest director bring it out in them if it doesn’t exist.
I knew very little about Larry except that he was Mary Martin’s son, which really intrigued me, as my mother had always been a fan. From as far back as I could remember, she had always held Mary up to me as the perfect example of a brilliant singer and entertainer.
Born in Texas, the daughter of an attorney and a violin teacher, Mary Martin got her start in show business appearing on the radio in Dallas. She first made her mark in Cole Porter’s Leave It to Me, in which she sang the showstopper “My Heart Belongs to Daddy.” She went on to make ten movies for Paramount, and then skyrocketed to stardom when she was cast as Nellie Forbush in South Pacific, which went on to break Broadway box office records and then run in London for five blockbuster years.
Mary garnered yet more fame and fortune when she starred in Peter Pan, for which she won a Tony, then in Annie Get Your Gun and The Sound of Music, for which she won yet another Tony. Meanwhile, Larry was growing up in Texas, far removed from his mother, who had sent him to live with his grandmother when he was still a little boy.
Down the line, I learned that Larry had always resented his mother for putting him in Black Fox Military Academy when he was less than ten years old. (Even then, my mother sprang to Mary’s defense and argued that Mary probably didn’t have any other choice.) And when Mary Martin married Richard Halliday, who later became her manager, the young Larry had problems relating to him.
However, show business was in his blood, and nothing could prevent him from pursuing it with a vengeance. Like his mother, Larry launched his acting career in Dallas, where he worked in the theater. Following that, he spent five years in the chorus of the London cast of South Pacific, in which he played a Seabee (a member of the construction battalion of the U.S. Navy), along with Sean Connery. Later, he joined the U.S. Air Force and was stationed in England, where he met and married Maj Axelsson, a Swedish fashion designer, and he remains married to her to this day, in one of show business’s most enduring matches.
During his four years in the U.S. Air Force, Larry produced and directed shows for American airmen stationed in Europe. Then he moved to Manhattan, where he appeared in Broadway and off-Broadway plays, including Once Around the Park, Career, and The Nervous Set. After that he switched gears and moved on to television, where he found a home in the soap opera The Edge of Night and stayed on the show for two years.
Clearly destined for a bigger arena than daytime soaps, Larry struggled through nine months of unemployment, then finally won the part of Tony Nelson in I Dream of Jeannie. According to Sidney in his autobiography, The Other Side of Me, “Larry wanted to show the world that he could be as successful as his mother. The result was that he put himself and everyone else under tremendous pressure.”
All that said, from our first meeting I was bowled over by Larry’s charm and his talent as an actor. Sidney and the I Dream of Jeannie producers had wanted to ascertain whether or not Larry and I had chemistry together, and as soon as we began the scene, I had no doubt whatsoever that we did. Our acting rhythms were in synch, and the scene in which Captain Nelson and Jeannie first meet worked like a perfectly crafted, intricate piece of clockwork.
We both had exactly the same sense of timing, and the sparks between us invariably flew. Not that there was ever any kind of romance between us. If Warren Beatty, John F. Kennedy, and Tony Randall couldn’t lead me astray, Larry Hagman certainly couldn’t. Nor did he try. Besides, like Joanne Woodward, his wife, Maj, made sure to always stay close to the set.
Larry had been married to Maj for most of his adult life and wasn’t particularly experienced with women. When I flung my arms around him there in the dressing room, just as the script called for me to do, I sensed him recoil slightly.
I was immediately hit with the realization that Larry was intrinsically shy with women. Much later, he admitted that I had been right. “That day in the dressing room, I thought to myself, Here’s this woman attacking me in her dressing room! What the hell am I getting into?”
I was only playing my part exactly as it was written, but Larry was genuinely shocked. From that time on, though, the tables would be turned, and it would be Larry who would be doing all the shocking.
On the subject of shock, though: Before the pilot of I Dream of Jeannie was even made, the NBC censors stepped in and laid down the law with regard to what they considered would shock our audience. NBC executives had had a preview of the script and were horrified by what they considered to be a scandalous premise and an even more scandalous script. So on November 17, 1964, their Broadcast Standards department issued a list of stiff guidelines for the show.
However ridiculous the guidelines may seem from the perspective of today, as TV Guide pointed out, “I Dream of Jeannie is actually one of the most daring shows on TV. It is the only show, for example, in which an attractive unmarried girl has the free run of a bachelor’s apartment.” And as far as NBC was concerned, the matter of Jeannie and morality had to be taken extremely seriously in the show—as seriously as if she were a real-life woman and the story we were telling was fact, not a figment of Sidney’s deliciously overwrought imagination.
NBC’s vigilance, as difficult as it may be for anyone who wasn’t around in the early sixties to understand, was not unusual. For example, in the case of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, on which I once played a sex education teacher, the network censor cut the word “sex” from the script.