After all, Wilt was a top Hollywood agent and, unlike me, had no illusions about the town or the industry. In fact, how he got me my first job is just one example of the way in which the business worked back then, and the way in which the men who ran it viewed women—and probably still do.
“They want a sexy blonde over at CBS. So wear the gingham dress,” Wilt instructed me.
The gingham dress? It was March and unseasonably cold, but I wasn’t about to argue with Wilt. I threw on the dress, flung a woolly white coat over it, and drove right over to CBS.
The lobby was colder than a Sub-Zero refrigerator. In a moment of rebellion, I went up to the interview but didn’t take my coat off.
The next morning Wilt called, irate. “Barbara, you didn’t get it. Tell me you wore the dress. Tell me you wore it!”
Well, I could never bring myself to lie to Wilt.
“I wore the dress, Wilt, but I didn’t take the coat off,” I said.
To do him justice, he didn’t give me a hard time.
Instead, he got me a second interview for the same job, but he didn’t mince his words when he prepared me for it, either.
“For God’s sake, Barbara, wear that tight gingham dress, and this time take that goddamn coat off!” he said.
Grateful to get another chance at the job, I wore the dress, and even before I arrived at the building I took my coat off. At the same time, I consoled myself that at least that way, I knew that I wouldn’t have to peel off my coat at the audition like some kind of a stripper.
The director was urbane, kind, and polite. He asked me where I’d studied, then after a minute or two thanked me and I was dismissed. Gingham dress or not, I hadn’t gotten the job.
But just as I was walking down the hall, a man lolling by the watercooler chatting with a group of other men detached himself, came over to me, and asked what I was doing in the building.
I explained I was there for an interview but that I clearly hadn’t gotten the job. The man seemed sympathetic and asked me who my agent was, and that, I thought, was that.
When I got back to the Studio Club, there was a message to call Wilt.
“Bar, you got it!” he said, jubiliant.
Mr. Watercooler, it turned out, was Nat Perrin, the producer of the show for which I’d just auditioned.
My very first job. Twelve spots on twelve live shows as a dumb blonde who sang off-key and appeared in skits with the star of the show, a new performer named Johnny Carson.
Later, I found out that the reason why the director hadn’t immediately cast me in the show was because, as he later explained to me, apologetically, “When I found out where you had studied and for how long, I assumed that an intelligent girl like you could never pass for a brassy blonde who sings off-key. I’m afraid I jumped to the wrong conclusion.”
Nat Perrin had set him straight, so now I had my first job, on The Johnny Carson Show, a live summer replacement for Red Skelton’s show that was projected to run over the summer of 1955. Johnny was only twenty-nine at the time, married to his first wife, Jody, but restless, insecure, and, I discovered afterward, drinking too much, perhaps to assuage his nerves at getting his big break at last.
Those nerves were never on display during the show, though. Johnny was brilliant at what he did, and really clever, but I could tell that the only time when he was really comfortable was when he was onstage. In private, he was quiet and extremely self-conscious.
No one could get close to Johnny even at that early stage in his career, least of all me—mainly because CBS gossip had it that, married or not, offstage Johnny had a taste for curvy blondes. As a result, whenever I was around Johnny, I wore armor, metaphorically speaking, and he probably sensed my reserve.
Perhaps I overreacted, because in fact Johnny always behaved like a perfect gentleman. As it happens, he lost his cool in my presence only once. A hapless secretary, unaware that Johnny was allergic to cats, brought hers to the studio, and Johnny visibly bristled when he saw it. The secretary was ordered off the set, and the show went on without any further incident, but I could tell that Johnny was upset.
Offstage Johnny was acutely sensitive, but onstage, like most comedians, he protected himself with a hard shell that might as well have been made of stainless steel and Teflon. That shell was impervious to any hurts, any slights, any rejections, and Johnny, like countless other comedians, wore it like a second skin and always would.
Decades later, I made six guest appearances on The Tonight Show. Johnny was nice to me, if impersonal. One time, at the end of the show, he threw in a brief mention that we’d worked together early in his career. I could tell that the memory of the days when he wasn’t a big star deeply embarrassed him, and he didn’t mention it again, either in public or in private.
However, when we both had Las Vegas acts but were appearing in different hotels, Johnny called out of the blue and invited me to spend the afternoon with him in his suite at Caesar’s, complete with his own private rooftop swimming pool. I considered Johnny’s invitation to be a friendly one, not romantic, and because I felt isolated and lonely in Las Vegas, I might have accepted. But my experience with the arid Las Vegas air was that if I went out in it for longer than a few minutes, I’d lose my voice entirely. I had two shows to do that night, so I couldn’t afford to risk it. I sent word to Johnny, couched in the most courteous of terms, that I couldn’t make it to his hotel. He was miffed, and from that moment on, whenever we met at parties or at other Hollywood events, his behavior toward me was cold, distant, and forbidding.
My early appearances on Johnny’s show didn’t exactly catapult me to stardom, but they did help advance my career slightly. A short while later, I was chosen by a group of Los Angeles press agents to be one of fifteen “Baby Wampus Stars”—supposedly up-and-coming starlets.
I enjoyed meeting the other girls, who included Jill St. John, Angie Dickinson, and Barbara Marx, who later married Frank Sinatra. A group of us were photographed for Life magazine at Harold Lloyd’s glamorous estate, which boasted a beautifully decorated and gigantic Christmas tree that he left up year-round.
When I still failed to get any acting jobs, I posed for some pinup shots. There was never any question of my posing for anything salacious, although I did don a bathing suit for a photo session with the notorious Russ Meyer.
Around that time, I was photographed in a bikini for the cover of Parade, the Sunday newspaper magazine. I considered that I looked fairly demure in the photographs. Unfortunately, my great-aunts Nora and Nell vehemently disagreed, and they called to issue a sharp reprimand. How could I display my body to the world in such a wanton way?
As gently and kindly as possible, I explained that it was really a very modest swimsuit.
However, they refused to be pacified until my grandmother stepped in and calmed them down a bit. But the fact remained that until they died, Great-Aunt Nell and Great-Aunt Nora never approved of my modeling.
In many ways, though, they were on target. Modeling wasn’t really for me, and I basically disliked doing it. So I was thrilled when Wilt called with the good news that I’d been cast in a small part on The Ann Sothern Show, a popular TV series.
My first on-screen appearance! I pored over the script excitedly and discovered that I was to play a fur-clad agent and deliver just three or four lines. I flashed back to Emma’s prediction and smiled to myself. Make my mark on TV? Not with just three or four lines, I wouldn’t.
If I had indeed harbored any delusions of grandeur regarding my appearance on the show, they would have quickly evaporated when—just as I had finished in makeup—Miss Sothern (given what happened next, I can’t conceive of referring to her as Ann) stalked onto the set, a maid dressed in a classic black-and-white uniform in attendance. Then Miss Sothern swept right over to me, looked me up and down, turned around, and stalked away again. No response to my tentative hello. No smile, nothing.
I stood frozen to the spot, not knowing what to do next. Then the makeup man beckoned me to come back to makeup again because, he said, he needed to fix my face.
I sat quietly, bewildered and not quite understanding what was going on, while he redid my makeup.
The truth became agonizingly obvious when I heard him whisper into the phone, “I’m sorry, Miss Sothern; there’s nothing I can do to make her look bad.”
Before I could get over my shock at the implications of what he’d said, I was called back on the set again.
There Miss Sothern fixed me with a look so glacial that it could have frozen Vesuvius.
“We don’t need a rehearsal. Let’s just shoot this and get it over with,” she snarled in my direction.
For my first job in front of the camera, I said my lines as best as I could, then left, shaken to the core by my encounter with Miss Ann Sothern.
A witch on wheels, if ever there was one.
Fortunately, my next TV job, on a pilot, The Jan Sterling Show, proved to be a far pleasanter experience. Jan, an award-winning film actress, couldn’t have been nicer (and off camera she had a great line about her husband and son: “Mummy works for toys, Daddy works for bread and butter”), so my faith in Hollywood divas was restored. Not that I was just working in Hollywood. I did a play, Voice of the Turtle, at the Laguna Playhouse with James Drury, which was notable in that I was spotted in it by a Twentieth Century Fox director, Mark Robson, who was soon to play a big role in my career.
Meanwhile, Wilt managed to get me a bit part in my first movie, as a college girl in Back from Eternity. I was grateful to get a job acting in a movie at last, and relieved that my Studio Club roommate, Barbara Wilson, was cast in the movie as well.
On the first day at the studio, I found it extremely weird to be working with producer-director John Farrow (Mia’s father), who carried a cane everywhere with him. Perplexed, Barbara and I managed to waylay another extra and in a whisper asked her about it.
She gave a wry smile and said, “Just stay away from him if you can, because he loves to goose us girls with it!”
We took her advice.
Next, I got an even smaller part in an episode of the TV show The West Point Story, and then played a secretary in the movie Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?
One of the highlights for me during that time was meeting Orson Welles, who interviewed me for a part in an unspecified movie. The interview turned out to be one of the most powerful and electric experiences of my life.
When I arrived at Orson’s Melrose Avenue office, his secretary ushered me into a small room. Behind a rather small desk sat an enormously fat man exuding an energy I’d never before encountered. This was before he spoke a word. When that glorious voice rolled out, I became a dishrag. The interview went well (when I was able to speak), but the project never materialized.
Orson had sex appeal galore. And, flashing forward, so did another star I met, only socially this time, at a charity golf tournament: Burt Lancaster. He had an extremely seductive personality. The way he stood, the way he talked to you, the way he looked right into your soul with those black-lashed eyes of his—he was one of the sexiest men I’ve ever met, and a lovely, nice human being.
Let me do a Jeannie blink back to the past again. After I’d done a series of small parts in a series of not particularly distinguished movies, Wilt Melnick called and told me that, thanks to Mark Robson, Twentieth Century Fox was considering putting me under contract.
I was over the moon. I was living in the Studio Club just like Marilyn Monroe once had, and now I had been offered a contract by her very own studio, Twentieth Century Fox. But, as they say, it never rains but it pours, because in his next breath he told me that I Love Lucy wanted me for a cameo as Diana Jordan in the episode “Country Club Dance.”
The episode centered around a country club dinner dance at which Ricky, Fred, and a number of other husbands are too bored and complacent to dance with their middle-aged wives. A visiting cousin, the much younger Diana, sashays onto the scene and the husbands all vie for her attention and compete to see who will dance with her first. Diana picks Ricky and dances with him while the other husbands jostle to be next. Meanwhile, the wives watch, incensed.
While the script has them restore the balance the following day, when the wives turn on their own glamour and beguile their husbands at last, the plotline was a little too close to real life for my comfort.
Everyone loved Lucille Ball, but there was no doubt whatsoever that Desi Arnaz was a world-class philanderer. It was common knowledge in Hollywood that he had a taste for young, curvaceous blondes and that Lucy was deeply unhappy about Desi’s infidelity. Worse still, he was blatant about his activities, and once even publicly boasted, “A real man should have as many girls as he has hairs on his head.”
Now, I’m not a prude, but as far as I’ve always been concerned, married men are completely out of bounds to me. I made up my mind then and there that no matter how handsome Desi might be (and he was extremely handsome), no matter how persuasive (and with that Latin-lover charm, I had no doubt at all that he would be), I wouldn’t succumb to his romantic blandishments. I wouldn’t cause any trouble or hurt Lucy in any way.
Besides—and this has always been true throughout my career—when I work, I don’t play. I focus single-mindedly on my role and won’t allow anything or anyone to distract me from it. Usually that’s very easy, but not on I Love Lucy, where Desi seemed to pop up wherever I was during rehearsal.
My solution? To hide from him whenever I saw him coming. Not a particularly subtle ploy, I know, but I was unable to come up with anything more effective.
During rehearsal, Lucy took me aside and said, “You’re good, Barbara. You don’t usually find a pretty girl who can project and be funny at the same time. But make sure to put that pretty little face of yours out there. Let the camera love your face. Don’t look away from it.”
That was Lucy. So different from Ann Sothern, and generous almost to a fault to a younger actress.