In March 1965 I was a guest on a show with Mickey Rooney, Dean Martin, and Kate Smith. Mickey is an incredible performer, really out there, but of course he’s very small. Dean was medium height. Kate, in contrast, was really big, both in height and in width. At the end of the show, the four of us were slated to sing a medley of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “My Old Kentucky Home” together, all standing in a row; Kate, then Dean, then me, then Mickey. It crossed my mind that we looked like a flight of steep steps.
We started singing our song together. Then Mickey raised his hand and the band stopped playing. He took Kate aside and they started whispering together. Looking at them, I could guess what they were whispering about. The end result? I was placed in the middle, like strawberry jam in an oddly shaped sandwich.
For many years, one of my greatest joys was touring with Bob Hope—or rather, Mr. Hope, as I respectfully addressed him when we met in person. To me, Bob Hope was always the quintessential all-around entertainer and a great comedian. If you see some of his early movies, you know he was not merely a comedian but a good actor as well. He was smart, and a fabulous raconteur to boot.
Offstage, however, he was a bit of a rascal with women.
As I got to know Bob better, I discovered that he nurtured the archaic, chauvinistic conviction that all women were divided into two distinct categories: ladies and the other kind. And he had very firm ideas about exactly who was a lady and who was not.
Fortunately for me, he decided early on in our acquaintance that I belonged in the “lady” category. After that, he was very protective of me, primarily because he felt I merited it. So one time, when some football players were on Bob’s show and became overly familiar with me, Bob took them aside and said sternly, “No, no, guys, she’s not for you. Besides, there’s a big Indian at home.”
The guys backed off, and I was grateful. Bob himself always treated me with the greatest respect. I loved him and treated him with due respect in return. In that spirit, we toured the world together in 1988 on his USO-sponsored “Around the World in 8 Days” tour, and Bob was kind enough to allow Matthew to join us on it. Together with Bob, we circled the globe in eight days, traveled twenty-seven thousand miles, and in the process entertained twenty-five thousand servicemen stationed in the Persian Gulf. The tour took us from Honolulu to Clark Air Base in the Philippines, Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, the battleship USS Iowa, the USS Okinawa, and Bahrain.
Our first stop was the USS Midway, a nuclear aircraft carrier positioned at the mouth of the Persian Gulf. We spent one night aboard, and I remember being so happy that I was finally able to wash my hair.
Our final show was supposed to be at Lajes Field in the Azores, but winds of fifty-one knots kept our C-141 Starlifter transport from taking off. Bob, however, was unfazed and continued hitting golf balls off the deck of the Okinawa. Ultimately, we didn’t make it to the Azores because of the weather, but helicoptered to Bahrain, where we spent several days. I remember a lovely party at the American embassy there; I thought I was back in Jeannie’s home! From there we flew to Italy in C-130s, which normally carried troops and equipment—very basic and raw!
On plane trips between stops, the rest of us were usually asleep, exhausted, but Bob rarely slept and spent much of the journey cutting and splicing the day’s TV tape. He was eighty-five at the time.
On average, we slept four hours a night, and the plane refueled in midair. One night I was sleeping the sleep of the dead when all of a sudden I woke up with a start: it was Bob, telling me that the plane was being refueled and that I ought to watch. I nodded and then fell straight back to sleep again. But you can bet your boots that Bob stayed awake all night and watched that plane being refueled.
On another tour, Connie Stevens was traveling with us on a C-130 cargo plane. Bob had the lower part of a bunk bed, because of his age, but Connie and I were supposed to sleep on the floor. Bob took pity on us and said that if we ever wanted to, we could take a nap in the top bunk. So one night, fed up with sleeping on the floor, Connie and I slept toe to head in the bunk above Bob’s. Or at least we tried to—our sleep was hampered by the fear that the top bunk would break in the middle of the night, land on top of Bob, and crush him, which would lead to the headline “Two Blondes Kill Bob Hope!”
Aside from being part of Bob’s USO tours, I regularly appeared on his TV specials (on the Christmas specials our tradition was always to sing “Silver Bells” together), sang with him to an audience of fifteen thousand in Chicago, and in 1968 I opened the new Madison Square Garden with him. On that momentous occasion, I made my entrance into the arena in a brown fur coat, carrying a big bunch of balloons, then removed the coat to reveal a ringmaster’s costume underneath. From then on, I sang and danced in a series of outfits: an ice skater’s costume (in which I danced to “The Skater’s Waltz”), a cowboy getup, and a tennis dress. The whole sequence ended up with me dressed as Uncle Sam, all intensely patriotic and the epitome of good old-fashioned American values, everything for which Bob Hope so proudly stood. Later that same year Bob and I did a special together at NASA in Houston, at the end of which he brought all the astronauts onstage, which was great fun. And when Bob was seventy-five, we performed in Australia at the Perth Entertainment Centre in front of an audience eight thousand strong. Bob didn’t work with anyone he didn’t like, so I guess he liked me as much as I liked him.
Although Bob Hope was such a big star, he was a regular guy. I’ll never forget the time in St. Louis when we were working at the Fox Theater and Bob suddenly said, “Let’s go get an ice cream cone.” So we just walked down the main street together, eating ice cream cones, and nobody bothered us. They had such respect for Bob, as I did.
We shared the same sense of humor, I think, and I always loved it when we did a comic duet of the song “Help Me Make It Through the Night.” A little naughty and suggestive, but that was Bob, and when all was said and done, it was good, clean fun.
My relationship with singer Tom Jones, however, is quite another story. I worked with Tom in England in March 1969, during a break from I Dream of Jeannie, and flew to England with my manager, Gene Schwam, my conductor, Doug Talbert, and my hairdresser, Mary Skolnik, to guest on This Is Tom Jones. My guest spot consisted of me singing a duet with Tom, “The Look of Love,” while we strolled along the Thames embankment together.
I’ve always known that my strength as a singer lies more in my acting ability than in my singing voice, so my method has always been to act my songs, very much the way that Rex Harrison did in the musical My Fair Lady. So when I sang “The Look of Love” to Tom, I sang the lyrics with warmth and passion, true to the sentiments behind the words. We strolled along the Thames embankment together and finished up at the top of a stone staircase in the moonlight. When the music stopped and the cameras were switched off, Tom took my hand, looked deep in my eyes, and said in his gravelly Welsh baritone, “Can I show you London, Barbara?”
My first reaction was that his request was a friendly offer made by a Brit to an American who’d never visited London before, and to whom he was gallantly volunteering to show the sights. But then he started caressing my hand sensually.
If I had any further doubts about Tom’s intentions in offering to show me London, my manager immediately clarified the matter for me. “He thought you were coming on to him, because you put so much passion into the song. He really thought you meant every word of the lyrics you were singing to him,” he whispered to me.
At that moment, the director called for Tom and me to do another take of the duet. This time I didn’t inject an iota of passion, meaning, or intensity into my voice, but just sang the words in a monotone, almost by rote. The moment the director yelled, “Cut,” Gene rushed over to me and said accusingly, “You’ve toned it down, Barbara. What’s wrong with you?”
“But Gene, you’re the one who warned me that Tom believed I meant what I was singing to him! And that gave him the wrong idea about how I felt about him, big-time!” I said indignantly.
“You can handle Tom Jones, Barbara. I know you can,” he replied. “Give the song everything you’ve got.”
So I did. I sang “The Look of Love” to Tom as if he were the love of my life, the man I desired more than any other man on the planet. And again Tom must have believed me, because the moment the camera was switched off, he put his arm around me and said, “Can I show you London, Barbara?”
I whispered back, “But Tom, I’m married!”
“Well, so am I!” Tom replied, quick as a flash.
We parted company and I had dinner all by myself in my hotel room, then went to bed.
At four in the morning, the phone suddenly ripped me out of my sleep. In a daze, I picked up the receiver, terrified that something might have happened to Matthew or to Michael.
But I needn’t have worried.
“Barbara, can I show you London?” Tom said again in that sexy baritone.
“Tom! It’s four in the morning!” I said.
Tom chuckled. “Don’t you worry about the time, Barbara. I’ll show you London right now!”
“Tom, we’ve got a show to do tomorrow! And it’s your show!” I said, as if I were reprimanding a naughty boy, which, of course, he was at that moment.
He hung up the phone without another word.
About three hours later, I arrived at the studio and went straight into makeup. Tom was already there in the chair, having his makeup done.
“Good morning, Tom,” I said, trying to act as if nothing had happened between us just hours before.
Tom turned away from me abruptly and didn’t answer.
A few moments later the makeup artist left the room, and Tom finally looked me in the eye.
“Four in the morning, Tom?” I said.
“Oh, you were lucky, Barbara,” he retorted. “I nearly knocked your door down.”
I don’t want to disillusion anyone, but the truth is that if Tom Jones had indeed knocked down my door, I might well have succumbed.
Generally, I was always delighted by the enthusiasm and loyalty of my audiences. When I played Hot Springs, Arkansas, there was a tremendous tornado; windows were torn out of shops and houses, and cars were upended, but we still had an enthusiastic audience at the show that night.
Other times, however, the audience’s enthusiasm can be overwhelming, not to say a little scary. In the early seventies, I headlined at the Waldorf-Astoria for a convention of the heavy equipment contractors’ union. I was to wear a sheer Bob Mackie gown covered in beads. Dinner was scheduled for six, and the show was supposed to begin at eight.
In the middle of the afternoon, I donned my Bob Mackie and got ready to go onstage to rehearse for an hour. To my extreme annoyance I was then informed that the stage hadn’t yet been built. I tried to remain calm.
Almost beside himself with fury, my manager, Gene, shouted to someone to get the head union official immediately.
When the man appeared, tall and classically tough-looking, Gene flatly informed him, “Sorry, we can’t rehearse because there’s no stage. And if we can’t rehearse, Miss Eden can’t sing tonight.”
The union official came right up to Gene and stuck his face close to his.
“Miss Eden had better sing tonight,” he said, “or you better get a fast pair of roller skates.”
Gene didn’t hesitate. “Okay,” he said.
Just before I was about to go onstage at eight, I got word there had been a further delay in building the stage. By ten in the evening, there was still no stage.
At eleven-thirty a union official came to get me, so I assumed the stage had been completed. But when I arrived in the packed ballroom, to my shock the stage still hadn’t been built, and all the musicians were sitting ready in their chairs right in the middle of the floor.
So without any rehearsal, I faced an audience of a thousand union men, each and every one of them dressed in black tie and tails (I thought they looked like a bunch of penguins) and all hollering at the top of their voices, “Where’s Jeannie, where’s Jeannie?”
I started the show with a rousing, fast song, but then switched moods and sang a soft version of “MacArthur Park” and “Didn’t We.” Even so, all the way through the songs, the guys were yelling, “Hey, Barbara, where ya from?” and “Honey, sing ‘Melancholy Baby,’ ” and, “Come on, Jeannie baby, flash us your navel!”
All of a sudden, as if someone had given them a secret signal, a big group of union guys surged toward me and started to sing “Sweet Georgia Brown,” a completely different song from the one I was struggling to get through.
When someone turned the lights out, that did it—Gene and I sneaked out of the building as fast as we could, grabbed a cab, and hightailed it to La Guardia.
Touring brought with it other, less intimidating moments. Once I was appearing in concert in Detroit (in a theater the stage of which was built over an ice-skating rink), and my friend Mary shared a room with me. Just before we went to bed, I saw that she was readying herself to sleep stark naked.
As diplomatically as possible, I said, “But Mary, what if there’s a fire in the middle of the night?”
“There won’t be, Barbara, there won’t be.” She laughed, then turned over and went to sleep, naked as the day she was born.
The fire alarm rang out about an hour later.
I grabbed my show costumes, my makeup, and my music and made for the door. Mary, meanwhile, made a terrified dash for her clothes and threw them on as fast as she could. And, to my credit, I didn’t even say I told you so. Together, we dashed out into the freezing streets, in the middle of a heavy snow.
One of the hotel maids kindly offered us the opportunity to sit in her car, and we gratefully accepted. A few minutes later, a fireman rapped on the car window, asking us if we’d left anything important in the hotel room. I thanked him and said that all we’d left behind was some nail polish.
Without a word, he walked away. Ten minutes later, he brought us down our bottles of nail polish, having risked his life to go back to the hotel room to get them. Mary and I were speechless.