Barbara Jean Huffman, a Playboy centerfold?
I didn’t have to think twice about my answer!
My first Vegas act at the Frontier opened with a line of chorus girls, not that far removed in spirit from the Ciro’s chorus line all those years ago. And in the line was a bubbly blond dancer with a giggle that would one day launch a thousand jokes. Just before my entrance, she and I would chat in the wings. Even then, Goldie Hawn knew exactly what she wanted and where she was heading in terms of her career. I remember her proudly telling me that she was going to Hollywood and that a very important person was going to help her. I never discovered his name, but he was clearly true to his word.
During that first season in Las Vegas, I made a number of unpleasant discoveries. First, just as Elvis had confided to me all those years ago on the set of Flaming Star, any singer worth his or her salt playing Las Vegas had to stay in the hotel room most of the time. Despite all the superficial glamour and glitter on offer in the entertainment capital of the world, playing there was very uncomfortable for me because of the loneliness—the same loneliness Elvis had suffered from. It was uncomfortable for another reason, too—the dry Las Vegas air played havoc with the vocal cords.
Performing live had some downsides I’d never expected. On one dreadful occasion, performing at a hotel in Arizona, I received a threatening letter telling me that if I didn’t stand outside a particular church in town at a particular time, I would die. Initially I tried to ignore the letter and even was stupid enough to try to tell myself to “rise above it.” But then my common sense took over and I told my manager about the letter. He called the police, and in a flash guards were posted outside my dressing room and my hotel room, and bodyguards followed me wherever I went, day and night, which was a great relief. But the police still viewed the death threat against me with extreme seriousness. So at the appointed time, a policewoman who bore a strong resemblance to me was sent to stand outside the church. Thank the Lord, the stalker never materialized and I never heard from him again.
Another time, I was in Switzerland on a PR trip with my close friend Dolores Goldstein, whose son went to school with my son, Matthew. While we were there, Dolores, who was screening my phone calls, took what seemed like a harmless call from a young man who seemed to know various people who worked for me (including my manager and some of his office employees). He said that he had just graduated from college with honors, and would I be so kind as to autograph a picture of myself for him and mail it to him?
It was a sweet, innocent request. At the time I thought nothing of it, and so I wrote on the photo, “I am so happy you did so well at college. You deserve it.”
A few weeks later, Dolores got a call at the Showboat, in Atlantic City, where I was doing my act, asking if she knew the young man who had asked for the picture. To her consternation, Dolores was told that he was at the hotel and had insisted not only that he knew me but also that he knew many people who worked or traveled with me, including her.
According to the police, he kept demanding to see me. He was behaving extremely suspiciously and insisting that I knew him. As proof, he handed the police the picture I had signed. Much later, it finally dawned on me that the autograph did give the impression that we knew each other well. I’d been set up.
At the time, though, Dolores didn’t want to frighten me, so she said nothing to me about the young man. Instead, she assured the police that neither she nor I nor anyone else in my employ knew him. She was shocked when the police asked her to go downstairs, where the young man was in custody, and walk past him. Their argument was that if his face lit up with recognition when he saw her, his story would be proved true. But if he gave no sign whatsoever of knowing Dolores, the police would know that he was as suspect as she had said he was.
With a great many misgivings, and without telling me, Dolores walked past the young man. Seeing her, he didn’t give even a flicker of recognition. So the police threw him out of the hotel, and Dolores, believing that the situation had been defused, didn’t tell me that anything had happened.
However, a couple of days later, she and I were having dinner in the hotel restaurant when she received a call from the police warning us that the young man had somehow eluded security and snuck back into the hotel. At that point, Dolores came clean and told me the truth. The police promptly whisked us out the back door of the restaurant and up into my suite. From then on, I had twenty-four-hour security and was glad of it.
Performing in front of a live audience can have its fair share of surprises.
I played on the same bill as the brilliant comedian Shecky Greene for three years at the MGM Grand. One evening my act seemed to go exceptionally well, and the audience gave me a rousing ovation. Afterward, feeling tired but happy, I stayed in the wings to watch Shecky’s hilarious routine, the way I always did.
Shecky was always upbeat and genial after he finished his act. But that night when he took his bows and then walked offstage, I could sense that something was seriously wrong.
“How in the hell can they expect me to make an audience laugh when they’ve got a dead guy in the audience right in front of me?” he growled.
“A dead guy?” I said, my eyes practically popping out of my head.
Shecky walked back onstage again to take a final bow, so he couldn’t immediately answer my question.
When he came offstage again to the sound of uproarious applause, he didn’t keep me in suspense for long.
“Well, Barbara, I’m trying to make jokes and there’s a dead guy out front,” he said.
At first I thought he was trying out a black humor comedy routine on me, but I didn’t laugh.
Nor did Shecky. He went on, “A guy in the front row had a heart attack, so they hustled his wife out of the room and put a tablecloth over the guy and left him there.”
I thought back to my last song. Of course! Although the spotlights had been shining straight into my eyes, I remembered noticing a big expanse of white cloth in the first few rows, though I hadn’t been able to make out what it was.
“He had the heart attack while you were singing,” Shecky explained helpfully. But at least he had the good grace not to make a crack about “killing him softly with your song” or “knocking them dead.”
Working in front of humans is one thing; working in the same show as an elephant is quite another. When I played the Nugget in Reno in 1986, I sang songs like “I Go to Rio,” “I Will Survive,” and “I Can’t Smile Without You,” and the twice-nightly shows were opened by Bertha, the Nugget’s very own performing elephant.
My contract at the Nugget stipulated that I had to do two shows a night, seven nights a week, but lucky Bertha got one day a week off, so that she could enjoy a day of first-class grooming, with massages and manicures. I was almost jealous.
Seriously, though, I’ve always loved elephants. They’re such darlings, intelligent and very family oriented. So for many years I have collected elephant ornaments wherever and whenever I happen to find them.
Since my time working with Simm, the African lion on I Dream of Jeannie (and as a Leo myself), I’ve always adored lions as well. And it wasn’t a coincidence that when I made my 1972 special, Love Is … Barbara Eden, we had a young male lion in the act with me. The idea was that the lion would be onstage with me, standing in the middle of a Mylar circle and looking kingly.
However, when his trainer led the lion over to the Mylar, the poor lion assumed that it was water, tentatively tried to stick his paw in it, then shook the paw as if it had gotten wet. Undeterred, I started singing “The Look of Love” to him (why in heaven’s name the script called for me to do that, who knows), and he promptly lay down on the floor and fell fast asleep. So we did another take. This time I was fortunate that he didn’t fall asleep. Instead, he started chewing my chair and really enjoying the taste of it. He chewed away, happy and content, until an exasperated Gene hollered down from the rafters, “Get rid of the lion!”
So much for my special touch with lions!
One of my favorite Las Vegas stars was George Burns. I first worked with him in June 1972 at the Frontier Hotel. He was a gentleman, and so much fun to be with.
When I arrived at the hotel, I discovered that George’s dressing room was a large house trailer with two bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen, while mine was just a very small room. That was fine by me, but when George found out, he was livid and said, “Why are you stuck in that little room down there, Barbara? Let’s share my trailer!”
George was seventy-three years old at the time, and I moved into his trailer and used it as my dressing room without giving a single thought to my reputation. During the run, George’s friends Jack Benny and Edward G. Robinson often came to the dressing room to chew the fat with him. Most of the time I would just sit around listening to their funny stories and their perceptive critiques of George’s act, and I enjoyed every minute of it.
The most fun thing about George, though, was that in between shows he’d announce, “Okay, Barbara, let’s go get some soup!” Normally when I played Las Vegas I never left my dressing room between shows, because if I did, I was always stopped by autograph seekers. It’s flattering, but not when you’ve got limited time and are headed out to a restaurant for dinner. But strolling through the casino with George was fine. He’d just amble through the crowds with me and say to all the fans who came up to him, “Hi, hi, sorry, no time now,” and keep on walking till we reached the restaurant, where we’d sit down and have our soup. While we ate, a crowd usually gathered around us, but no one bothered us.
When George and I started working together, his beloved wife, Gracie Allen, had long since died, and he had his young girlfriend, a student at UCLA, with him. Every morning I’d look out of my hotel room window and see George swimming back and forth in the pool and this young girl sitting there doing her homework. Funnily enough, each time I worked with George in Las Vegas, he always had a different young girlfriend with him. Were the girls for real or just for show? I couldn’t tell you. But he was a good guy, fun to be with and really nice to me.
Although he probably didn’t realize it at the time, George turned out to be also a major influence on young Matthew’s life. Years after George and I played Vegas together, when Matthew was a teenager, Michael and I had dinner with George in Las Vegas.
George asked, “So does the kid want to be an actor?”
“Very much,” I said, and grimaced.
“Couldn’t be better,” George said adamantly.
Michael and I both shook our heads.
George raised an eyebrow. “But show business has been so good to you two,” he said, wagging a finger at us disapprovingly.
After dinner, Michael and I had a long debate about Matthew and his future career. In the end, after much discussion, we ultimately concluded that we shouldn’t stand in the way of Matthew becoming an actor after all.
And all because of George Burns.
In a way, you could say that he really did play God that night, because he certainly did create a new world for Matthew.
Las Vegas being Las Vegas, I also rubbed shoulders with other performers, many of them show business legends, among them Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Dean was fun, a lovely man, and I adored working with him. He never rehearsed, but no one really expected him to. Offstage he was exactly the same person you saw onstage or on TV—a cool guy with a little drink in his hand. A real one, of course.
When I was appearing in Lake Tahoe, Liza Minnelli, who was headlining at the hotel across the road, came to see my second show and visited me in my dressing room afterward. We sat on the floor and laughed like crazy and had a good time together. She was just darling. For a while I felt like we could become good friends. But in subsequent meetings I sensed that although she was always warm and friendly to me, she still kept a shield in front of her; it protects her, but no one can ever really crack it and get through to the real Liza behind it.
Along the way, I also often guested on other people’s TV shows. When Gene Kelly was a guest on one of the TV shows I hosted, I found out at the last minute that I was scheduled to do a tap dance with him. That was terrifying in the extreme.
I was vastly relieved to find that Gene was a kind and patient teacher who was prepared to rehearse the number over and over with me. Afterward, I rehearsed for a few hours more on my own, just to make sure I got it right. In the end, I was fairly confident that I’d mastered the routine, and was even looking forward to doing it with Gene on the show.
Imagine my dismay, then, when at the final rehearsal he came over to me with a towel around his neck and said, “Hey, kid” (he called everyone he worked with “kid,” no matter how young or old they were), “you know, I think I want to change something in the routine.”
I visibly blanched, but I was much too in awe of Gene to protest. So we spent the next few hours learning the new steps, and then I put in a few more hours practicing them alone.
On the night of the show, I was step-perfect. Gene, however, was not. Afterward, he took me aside and with a twinkle in his eye said, “You know who the audience is going to think did the routine right, don’t you?”
“I know, Gene,” I said, throwing up my hands in despair. “You, of course.”
And I was correct, because everyone I talked to who saw the show marveled at the perfection of Gene Kelly’s dancing, whereas my efforts passed without comment.
Lee Marvin, famous for his rough, macho-man persona, guested with me on a TV special but turned out to be a pussycat. When he had to lift me during one of our routines, he kept asking, “Are you all right, Barbara? You’re so little. Are you all right?” I assured him that I was.
Many years before meeting me, Michael dated Cher’s mother, Georgia Holt, and when I was on Cher’s show, she joked, “I used to sit on Michael’s knee when I was little, Barbara.”
I burst out laughing, but that wasn’t unusual when Cher and I were together. She always made me laugh so much—we were like two schoolgirls together. I worked with Sonny Bono as well, but fun as that was, working with Cher, whether singing or in a skit, was always my preference. She’s bright, sassy, and very grounded.