Watching the scene was a young actress who was playing a ticket booth attendant and had only one line in the movie. Even then, with a faint smile playing on her unusually attractive face, there was a memorable quality about her that was impossible to ignore. When we wrapped for the night, she came over to me and said, “Miss Eden, I really don’t know whether or not I want to carry on in this business.”
I gave her a few words of encouragement about her acting career, which in essence delivered the message, Don’t give up. Carry on!
And carry on Ellen Barkin did. She went on to make The Big Easy and Sea of Love, carving out a stellar movie career for herself. To top that, in her private life, she married and divorced one of the wealthiest men in America. Not bad for a girl who wanted to give up acting all those years ago.
In 1981, I appeared in Return of the Rebels with Don Murray, in which the young Patrick Swayze had a small part. He was gentlemanly and polite to me, and I was struck by how close he was to his family and how whenever they came to visit him on the set, he was so warm and kind to them. Patrick was a good guy, and his death from pancreatic cancer at the age of fifty-seven was tragic.
In 1985, NBC ordered a two-hour I Dream of Jeannie sequel, I Dream of Jeannie: 15 Years Later, in which I played both Jeannie and her evil sister (I always loved playing the sister because, as they say, the devil always gets the best lines).
This time around Sidney Sheldon wasn’t available to take creative control of the movie, as by then his career as a novelist was well under way, with books like The Other Side of Midnight selling in the millions.
Larry also didn’t appear in I Dream of Jeannie: 15 Years Later, for the very good reason that Dallas was now a massive hit and a cultural phenomenon, and he didn’t want to switch horses in midrace, as it were. So Wayne Rogers played Tony, and was very good in the part, although very different from Larry. Wayne, who starred in the hit TV series M*A
S
H and then went on to become an investment broker and a financial commentator on TV, nowadays manages my money!
However, donning my Jeannie costume once more after an interval of fifteen years was a very strange feeling. The moment I put it on, I got goose bumps all over my body. I looked in the mirror and felt as though time hadn’t passed at all.
The plot of the movie was a bit strange, but probably appropriate for its time. When the story opens, Jeannie has at last realized her own value. She’s married to Major Nelson, has a child with him (played by Mackenzie Astin, the twelve-year-old son of Patty Duke and John Astin), and has become more assertive than she was at the start of the series. Deciding that Major Nelson is taking her too much for granted, she moves out of their house, rents an apartment on her own, and attempts to live the life of a 1980s liberated woman. Not the world’s most scintillating script, but a worthwhile and fun exercise in nostalgia.
Moreover, two good things emerged out of the show for me. First, I was allowed to display my belly button at last! And I Dream of Jeannie: 15 Years Later placed a close second to a World Series game in the ratings, to become the eleventh-highest-rated television movie of 1985.
In 1987, I was cast as Laura Harding in The Stepford Children. It was not a particularly thrilling experience. The script featured a robot clone of me. So I had to spend four hours wearing a leotard and stockings, covered in plaster, with straws inserted into my nostrils so I could breathe.
My mother had just died, and my sister, Alison, was working as my double. Both she and I were extremely uncomfortable when we discovered that we had a big scene to shoot in a cemetery. But work is work, so we gritted our teeth and got through the scene, trying hard to forget about our mother’s recent burial and concentrate on the action.
A happier experience was the TV movie Your Mother Wears Combat Boots, in which I worked with Matthew, then twenty-four. I was playing a woman whose husband was killed in Vietnam after his parachute failed to open during a crucial jump. Years later, the son she had with him is in his late teens and she believes that he is in college. However, to her deep distress, she discovers that he has secretly joined the army instead.
We filmed at Fort Benning, in Georgia. My scene with Matt went like this: I’m dragging my duffle bag across the grounds when Matt comes riding by on a bike. I ask him to direct me to a particular building. Then Matt comes out with his one and only line in the movie: “The white one!” Ever the proud mother, I thought he delivered his one line with a great deal of presence.
The whole shoot presented an extreme physical challenge for me, as the script called for me to undertake a series of parachute jumps. It was scary, but I wanted to prove that I could do it. I worked alongside soldiers, who put me through a parachute training course. It was fun but nerve-racking.
Finally the great day came on which the result of my parachute training was due to be immortalized on film. Feeling strong and brave, I braced myself to climb up three towers, each higher than the last.
I scrambled up the first rickety wooden tower with nary a second’s thought, and certainly not even a smidgen of fear. Once I reached the top, a harness was hooked onto my back, I jumped off, the parachute opened, and I floated down to the ground. I did that once. Then, brave as anything, and following the script to the letter, I moved over to the next tower and parachuted off there as well.
Then I got to the third and highest tower. At the base I hesitated for a second, and the sergeant watching said, “You sure you’re up for this?”
“Of course I am,” I said indignantly.
But the sergeant persisted. “You mean you don’t want a double?”
“Well, I did climb the other two,” I said, and looked at the sergeant questioningly.
“Are you sure you don’t want a double?” he repeated.
I shook my head and started climbing. Three-quarters of the way up the tower, I looked down and saw that the other two towers were below me. As I did, the tower started to sway in the wind.
“You want a double?” the sergeant yelled.
I certainly did!
My next TV outing proved to be frightening as well, but in a very different way: a role in four episodes of Dallas, starring, of course, none other than Larry Hagman.
While Larry and I hadn’t been in touch much in the intervening years since we were together on I Dream of Jeannie, I had watched with a combination of awe and pleasure as Larry’s J. R. Ewing became the stuff of which TV history was made. When J.R. was shot in March 1980, a record 350 million viewers throughout the world tuned in, then united in global speculation regarding the identity of his killer.
Naturally, Larry joined in the heated debate, too, his tongue firmly in his cheek. Not even he knew who really shot J.R., as the producers had cunningly opted to shoot several alternative endings to the episode in which the killer was unmasked, each one featuring a different killer. The speculation reached such a feverish height that bookies all over the world made a terrific amount of money from all the people placing bets on the identity of the man—or woman—who had shot J.R.
Funnily enough, when pushed to make a guess about the identity of his would-be assassin, Larry finally said: “Barbara Eden did it!” I was flattered that he thought of me, but couldn’t quite ignore the subtext inherent in his casting me as a killer. At the same time, given Larry’s off-set demands and the villainy of his on-camera character, I couldn’t help gleefully recalling his insistence at not being viewed as the bad guy in I Dream of Jeannie.
As it turned out, I was going to be the villain this time around, as my character, the dastardly Lee Ann De La Vega, screamed double-crossing diva. According to the script, J.R. did Lee Ann wrong when they were at college together: she became pregnant and he ditched her, after which she had an abortion that almost killed her. Now that she had become rich beyond her wildest dreams, her primary goal in life was to wreak revenge on J.R. and pay him back roundly for all his past iniquities.
An archvillainess, she actually succeeded in taking over Ewing Oil, then engineering the situation so that J.R.’s fiancée, Vanessa, broke off their engagement and walked out on him. Lee Ann’s revenge was complete.
When I arrived at the studio on my first day, I was shaking with nerves, not just because I would be working with Larry again after all those years, but also because when you take a role in an established series, you feel like a blundering outsider and ache to fit in with the rest of the cast, but worry that you may not.
That the Dallas producers had cast me as Lee Ann with their collective tongue very firmly in cheek became highly obvious the moment I arrived at wardrobe and discovered that my first outfit was a pink suit. Pink! Hardly a subtle reminder of Jeannie.
Larry, I knew, didn’t want to be reminded of I Dream of Jeannie. He’d made that very clear to me throughout the years, not wanting to take part in any I Dream of Jeannie retrospectives or I Dream of Jeannie–related talk shows (except one joint appearance on Today) and doing his utmost to distance himself from the show whenever he was interviewed.
So as I waited to shoot the first scene in which Larry and I were scheduled to act together, I was quaking in my pink high heels. I thought maybe the sight of me might cause him to suddenly implode.
My first entrance was scripted so that I stalk straight out of an elevator and come face-to-face with J.R. So there I was in my pink suit, the elevator door opened, and Larry cracked, “Oh my God! We’re going back in time!” I never discovered whether or not that line was part of the script or one that Larry had improvised himself. After all, this was his show and he finally had carte blanche to rewrite the script whenever and however he wanted, so I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if he had taken advantage of it. Either way, that line was a good one.
Whether intentionally or by accident, whether Larry had any input into it or not, the script of my episode seemed to be full of double entendres that harked back to I Dream of Jeannie. In one instance, J.R. takes one look at me and asks, “Haven’t we met somewhere before?” Looking at Larry across the set, I really did suddenly experience the weirdest sensation, as if we had indeed gone back in time together. My favorite out of the four Dallas episodes I appeared in was episode 343. Wearing a long blond wig fixed with a pink bandeau, I reminisce about how wonderful it was dating J.R. in my youth. Then I switch gears and talk about the shock of revealing my pregnancy to him and his subsequent reaction: denying that he was the father and wanting nothing to do with me.
Then I describe my horrific abortion done by a butcher of a doctor in a cheap, tawdry hotel, how I almost died, and how, as a result, I was forced to quit college. “I don’t just want to get back at him,” I declare, venom dripping from my every word. “I’m going to change his life totally, just like he once changed mine.” Melodramatic in the extreme, my role was a gift to an actress, and I loved playing it.
The shows all went well; I very much enjoyed working with Patrick Duffy, and both Larry and Linda Gray were extremely nice to me. Even better, the fans seemed happy that Larry and I had reunited, if only for four episodes.
Despite some of the more bizarre past memories of Larry, I still thought of him fondly, and was gratified that he had met with such stratospheric success in Dallas. The series would run for a record fourteen seasons, from 1978 to 1991, and along the way, Larry could hardly have been blamed for having acquired some starlike mannerisms and demands. He’d been waiting to become a star for so long and was clearly primed to enjoy every moment of his stardom.
However, I was a little surprised, not to say shocked, when my friend Dolores came to visit the Dallas set, and beforehand was briefed by one of Larry’s people that she was not permitted to talk to him unless he addressed her first, nor was she allowed to look at him.
That same year, I made I Still Dream of Jeannie, an NBC movie of the week. This time, the plot has Major Nelson spirited away into space on an extended secret mission, leaving Jeannie on earth. There, her jealous sister—as always, feverishly working against her—insists on enforcing a universal genie rule that stipulates that Jeannie has to find a temporary master, otherwise she is doomed to leave earth and Major Nelson forever.
Ken Kercheval, who played Cliff Barnes in Dallas, plays a schoolteacher whom Jeannie enlists to help her in her quest. Jeannie encounters a myriad of obstacles, including having to negotiate life in the singles scene, 1990s-style.
The thought of reprising a role I’d played twenty-five years before was pretty scary, and I was tentative about accepting it. For one thing, I was sure that the audiences would expect me to have exercised a brand of magic and still look the same. After some deliberation, I decided not to allow vanity to get the better of me. Although Jeannie was not my alter ego, I was still deeply attached to her, and, after a great deal more soul-searching, I took the part. I never regretted it.
It must also be said that in the years since I Dream of Jeannie was first on the air, and despite the myriad of roles I’d played since then, it was virtually impossible for me to shake the ghost of Jeannie, even if I’d wanted to.
Here’s a classic, if unpleasant, example: in 1991, I made a TV movie, Her Wicked Ways, in which I played a White House reporter. Heather Locklear also played a reporter. She was lovely and great to work with, but her husband, Tommy Lee, was quite another story.
We were on location in Washington, D.C., when in the middle of the night, the phone rang. I said hello, and heard Tommy Lee’s voice.
TOMMY: “Oh, my! I’m looking for my wife. Where is she?”
ME: “I don’t know. You must have dialed the wrong number.”
TOMMY: “Well, who am I talking to, then?”
ME: “You’re talking to Barbara.”
TOMMY: “Well, hello, Barbara. You wouldn’t know Heather’s room number, would you, darling?”