Read Online Jeannie Out Of The Bottle by Barbara Eden - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Barbara Eden
Tags: Biography, Non-Fiction
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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
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
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