by Barbara Eden
After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, I also had an innate sense that we were living in dangerous times and that my parents were struggling to survive; I feared I could lose them at any minute in a bombing raid. After the United States entered World War II, San Francisco was on high alert. There were air raid alerts practically every night, blackouts were mandatory, and even the lampposts were partly painted black. I remember having to go to school with a little dog tag around my neck, which bore my name and address and the name of the person to contact if I were lost or wounded during an air raid.
Meanwhile, my parents were doing their utmost to scratch out a living. My father worked very, very hard doing PBX wiring on ships, which kept him out of the army. Other than that, he worked at Pacific Bell Telephone his entire adult life, until he became seriously ill and couldn’t work anymore.
His illness first manifested itself when he was traveling home from work on a streetcar and started vomiting blood. The doctors were puzzled to find cuts in his stomach; they speculated that ground glass somehow might have gotten into his food and that he unknowingly ate it, but none of the doctors ever knew for sure. Eventually he healed and went back to work, but he was never the same again. He became very angry and started to drink heavily. In the end, my parents had to sell their house on Forty-fifth Avenue so they could pay his medical bills. But although Mom and Dad were upbeat about the house sale, nothing was ever the same between them again.
In 1969 I was living in Sherman Oaks and married to my first husband, Michael Ansara, when I got a call from my mother telling me that my father had passed away from a cerebral hemorrhage, caused by a surge of high blood pressure. Afterward, paramedics found a great many blood pressure pills in his pocket. Though they had been prescribed for him, he had opted not to take them, for reasons I’ll never know. I felt guilty that I hadn’t been around to convince him to take the medication and that I hadn’t gone to visit him more often. I still feel I haven’t thanked him sufficiently for the man that he was. He worked so hard to support us.
My mother worked right through the war and after, as the credit manager for a Granat Brothers jewelry store. She didn’t own much good jewelry herself except for a watch and her wedding ring, but even if she wore costume pieces, people routinely stopped her in the street and asked her where she’d gotten them. She had a wonderful, inborn sense of style that never left her, not even at the end of her life when she was frail.
My parents’ financial existence was so perilous that we moved around a great deal. I attended five different schools in San Francisco, and we lived in five different homes, including one we shared with my aunt Margie and her husband.
We also spent a great deal of time with my great-aunts, Aunt Nora, Aunt May, and Aunt Nell, and with my great-uncles, Uncle Will and Uncle Tom, who lived in San Leandro and Vallejo, across the Bay. We’d go to visit them via the ferry, and when we’d come home very late at night, the foghorns would blare and I’d feel extremely sleepy and happy. I look back on those nights with warmth and affection.
Once I became a teenager, though, those happy times were punctuated by the occasional tussle with my mother over clothes, makeup, and of course boys. In high school I wasn’t really attractive; I was thin, underdeveloped, and geeky-looking. Even if I had wanted to improve my appearance, my mother would have stood in my way. She was very strict: she frowned on lipstick, and even if she had allowed me to wear more fashionable clothes, we simply couldn’t have afforded them. Later on, she drilled into me that I shouldn’t go steady too soon, and that I definitely shouldn’t marry early in life. In retrospect, I believe she wanted me to remain a little girl for as long as possible.
I don’t know whether it was due to the era in which I grew up or the way I was raised, but I was really sheltered, not in the least bit like teenagers today. I was so very square. I was banned from ever swearing; once, when I was long since an adult, my mother and I saw a swear word written on the sidewalk, and she went white and said, “Barbara Jean Huffman! That is not a good word.”
Such was my mother’s power over me that even when I appeared as the madam in a production of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and the script called for me to repeatedly utter a four-letter word (one beginning with the letter f and ending in k), I initially couldn’t bring myself to say it.
I didn’t know anything about the facts of life until I was thirteen or fourteen, when my mother, who secretly believed that she was extremely progressive, read me a few excerpts from a book, Being Born. I must have given her a blank look, because she proceeded to have a whispered conversation with my father.
“Harrison, you’re her father. You have to tell her about it. She has to know,” she said.
My father gave a weary sigh.
“You’ve got a part in this, Harrison, whether you like it or not.”
“All right, Alice, all right,” my father said. “At breakfast, I’ll have my robe open and she’ll see the hair on my chest.”
So the very next morning, that’s exactly what he did: left his robe open so the hair on his chest was visible to me.
I blushed and looked away.
He saw my reaction and stuttered, “Barbara Jean, I—I just want you to know that as you get older, there will be body changes, so don’t be surprised or shocked by them.”
He didn’t say a word about the hair on his chest, and I remained none the wiser until a couple of girls at school set me straight and I finally learned what sex was all about.
EVEN WELL INTO my teens, dating wasn’t much of a priority for me, and I wasn’t at all bent on having any romantic entanglements, simply because my whole life revolved around my love of singing. From the time that I could first talk, I was determined to grow up and become a singer. Luckily for me, my mother—always my biggest cheerleader—supported me every step of the way.
Apart from singing with her while we did the dishes together (she washed, I dried), whenever we had company I used to entertain them with a song or two. One day when I was fifteen, my mother’s best friend, Elinor Hoffman, slipped me a hundred-dollar bill (which was probably equivalent to a thousand dollars in today’s money) and said, “Barbara Jean, you’re genuinely talented. You should study singing and this ought to help you.”
I was thrilled and, with my mother’s approval, immediately enrolled in the San Francisco Conservatory, where Isaac Stern and Itzhak Perlman also studied (though not at the same time as me). There I had a fateful chance encounter.
One morning, Lorraine Hinton, a beautiful blond singing student who always wore extremely high heels (and later changed her name to Lori Hart) became ill and had to leave class early. Before she did, she begged me to cover for her in a gig that night.
Well, in those days, I didn’t even know what a gig was, but Lorraine swiftly enlightened me. She explained that I’d have to put on my prettiest dress and sing a couple of songs with a dance band at the Garden Room in the Claremont Hotel, high atop a hill overlooking Berkeley, and afterward I’d be paid twelve dollars.
Whoopee! Twelve whole dollars for doing what I’d always dreamed of doing! So I rushed home and put on my pink taffeta gown (the one my parents had bought me for my first formal school dance), which had puffed sleeves and a sweetheart neckline. My mother lent me a tiny gold heart on a chain, and before I knew it, I was on my way to the Claremont Hotel.
A glamorous resort built on thirteen thousand acres by a rich Kansas farmer as a tribute to his wife and daughter, the Claremont Hotel was built in the style of an imposing English castle. It was the ideal setting to launch my cherished dream of becoming a singer.
My first song was “Blue Moon,” and as I sang to an audience of tourists and businesspeople sipping cocktails, I made sure to lower my soprano voice in the hope that I would sound more grown-up, maybe even sexy.
From the stage, I could just make out my mother in the front row, because then—and always—my astigmatism meant that most of the faces in the audience were blurred. It was both a b
lessing and a curse, particularly when I was playing Las Vegas in later years and could never be entirely sure whether the crowd was focused on me or on their dinner, whether they were chatting or enjoying my act.
The flip side of my astigmatism, by the way, is that sometimes when I’m walking through a hotel lobby or boarding a plane and smile in the direction of a group of people, when I get closer to them I find out that they are total strangers. Consequently, more men than I’d care to remember have jumped to the conclusion that I’m trying to pick them up when I am not!
Anyway, that first night at the Claremont glided by like a beautiful dream, and I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I wanted to perform again as often as possible. Fortunately, in a community like San Francisco, word traveled fast, and soon I was receiving offers to sing at other venues. Next thing I knew, I was entertaining at the officers’ club at Fort Ord and performing in USO shows, mostly at Camp Roberts, not far from San Francisco.
One memorable night, dressed to kill in an elegant peach satin gown, I walked out in front of an audience of fifteen thousand GIs, all hooting, wolf-whistling, and stamping their feet. Then the band struck up the first notes of the song I was supposed to sing: “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.”
All of a sudden, my mind went blank and I just couldn’t remember the first line of the song. Even though I hadn’t sung a word yet, the audience started throwing coins at me (I never figured out why). Through it all, I just kept smiling into what looked like a vast black pit. I felt like passing out, but no such luck.
So I leaned over to the bandleader and told him to start again and play “Blue Moon” instead. He did and rescued me, although that evening will always remain in my memory as one of the most embarrassing of my entire life.
But I’m jumping ahead. During my time at the Conservatory and then at City College, although I was living at home, I still wanted to earn a living, so I worked four hours a day in a local department store, selling and wrapping gifts. Later I got another job operating an IBM machine at the Wells Fargo bank, and in between I did my fair share of babysitting for friends and neighbors. Consequently, during my teens, I was mostly all work and very little play because my primary focus in life was on performing and on my singing career.
My mother changed all that when one night after watching me rehearsing for the band, she looked at me thoughtfully and said, “Barbara Jean, you are hitting every note perfectly. The trouble is that the lyrics don’t mean a thing to you. You aren’t feeling a single word that you’re singing.”
After I recovered from my hurt feelings, I took a deep breath, conceded that she was right, and agreed to start acting lessons right away. By some quirk of fate, my mother had just finished listening to Carol Channing being interviewed on the radio and had heard Carol mention that she’d studied acting at Elizabeth Holloway’s drama school, right there in San Francisco. When my mother told me about the interview, I enrolled for night classes there as well.
After a few weeks, Miss Holloway, a tiny woman who always had a colorful chiffon scarf draped around her neck, sent for me and, to my delight, offered me a scholarship to study acting full-time at her school.
I jumped at the opportunity, quit college, and started at Miss Holloway’s immediately, studying not just acting but also fencing, tap dancing, and everything else I could about every aspect of show business.
One of Miss Holloway’s most-repeated and invaluable pieces of advice was that all her students should attend as many auditions as possible, just for the experience. I followed her instructions to the letter but didn’t get very far, until the day came when she called me into her office and told me that I ought to audition for the upcoming Miss San Francisco pageant.
Now, I’m not and never have been shy. Reserved, yes. Cautious, definitely. But shy, no. Still, the idea of parading up and down in front of a crowd of people who had assembled there for the sole purpose of judging not my acting or my intelligence but my face and my body filled me with dread.
But Miss Holloway brushed all my objections aside with a flick of one of her ubiquitous chiffon scarves.
“Whether you win the contest or not, you have to try, Barbara Jean,” she said. “Go down and audition, and if they reject you, it doesn’t really matter. At least you will have tried.”
I nodded glumly.
But instead of being pleased and grateful that I was taking her advice, Miss Holloway had a parting shot for me.
“And Barbara Jean, you really do need to toughen up,” she said.
My mother presumably agreed, because instead of recoiling in horror at the thought of me entering a beauty contest, she got to work and made me a sparkling royal blue strapless gown with a low waist and a hoop skirt, so that I’d look my best at the pageant.
I realize that nowadays thousands of young girls enter beauty pageants without batting a single false eyelash, but for me it was torture to parade up and down in my bathing suit while a panel of judges appraised me from head to toe. I felt as if I might as well have been naked. And I was unutterably shocked when I won the title of Miss San Francisco, along with a blue satin ball gown and a teeny-tiny diamond ring.
But my beauty pageant ordeal wasn’t over yet. As Miss San Francisco, I was now obliged to enter the Miss California pageant. I didn’t expect to win, and I didn’t, but I liked the other girls, and we had a good time together. When the contest was over, I was flattered to be voted the friendliest and most cheerful girl in the pageant, the one with the best personality—a good egg. Other than that, I was relieved that my beauty pageant career was now well and truly over.
I guess, though, that Miss Holloway was right about one thing: taking the plunge and appearing in the beauty pageant did give me confidence, although it didn’t serve to toughen me up in the least. That would come later, if at all.
Again following Miss Holloway’s advice to audition for everything, I auditioned for and got a part in Spring Crazy, a musical written by former Ziegfeld Follies dancer Mary Hay Barthelmess and her daughter. And although the show closed after just three performances, having appeared in it meant that I was able to get my Actors’ Equity card, a necessity for a working performer.
As time went on, I realized that winning the Miss San Francisco title had also been a bit of luck for me because, as a result, I was interviewed on a couple of local talk shows, and on one of them I met a portly gentleman with a walrus mustache, the comedian Solly Hoffman. His stock in trade (or should I say shtick?) was record pantomime, which is miming to a record.
After the show, he came up with the idea that we should do an act together. Never one to turn down the chance of a job (except, as I’ll tell you much later, under the most stringent of circumstances), I immediately agreed, and the act Hoffman and Huffman was born.
From then on, Solly and I entertained for Hadassah, the Shriners—you name it. The act always started with Solly miming to a song. He would introduce me as the shaineh shiksa (the beautiful gentile girl), and I’d do three songs. The act invariably ended with us doing a record pantomime to “Aba Daba Honeymoon,” the song made so famous by Debbie Reynolds, another shaineh shiksa.
So that was my life during my late teens: singing with bands, clowning with Solly Hoffman, working in the bank, and studying acting. It was hardly surprising that I didn’t have a minute in which to date anyone.
Well, all right, I’ll ’fess up; I did manage a second or two. His name was Al Ansara, and when I said his last name, it lingered in my mouth like the taste of rich milk chocolate. Naturally, I had no idea how much the name Ansara would come to mean to me a few years down the line. Al was a student at San Francisco University, a workaholic like me who was putting himself through school by driving a truck part-time.
Each afternoon when I left Miss Holloway’s, Al would be outside in the street, waiting for me, and he’d drive me to my job at the bank downtown. At the end of the day, we’d grab a soda together, then he’d drive me home to my parents’ house, always keeping a
polite distance from me during the ride.
Then the great day came when Al invited me to a dance, and I floated up onto cloud nine and stayed there. But it quickly became radiantly clear to me that I wasn’t his kind of girl. Quite simply, I just wasn’t fast enough for him. He offered me a rum and Coke, and all I wanted was the Coke. He kissed me on the mouth, but anything else was out of the question, and he knew it. It was hardly surprising that we parted company soon afterward.
I guess I ought to have been heartbroken, but I wasn’t, because my heart was now firmly fixed on something else. Or rather, somewhere else. And not just anywhere, but a place only four hundred miles from San Francisco, though it might as well have been in another world, on another planet: Hollywood, California.
I wish I could say that I was so passionate about following my dream that I simply packed my bags without any hesitation and went off whistling a happy tune, without giving the future a second thought, but that really isn’t the truth. In fact, it took the inspiring Miss Holloway to shake me out of my San Francisco complacency, to tear me away from my safe little world of dance bands, banking, and drama school.
“It’s time, Barbara,” she announced (by this time I’d lost the Jean). “It’s time for you to jump out of the nest.”
Seeing my alarm, she went on, “You’re much too comfortable at home. You’ve got too much talent. Don’t stay in San Francisco. New York or LA is the place for you.”
My head was spinning, but I knew she was right. Nonetheless, my options hung in the air, tantalizing me with their rich promise. Broadway or Hollywood? New York or LA? I flashed back to my pioneering ancestors, escaping from the East Coast and risking untold dangers in the West.
Should I take a stab at conquering Broadway, which Miss Holloway seemed to think was as important as conquering Hollywood?
Or should I play it safer and stay closer to home by opting for Los Angeles, and try my luck in movies instead?
I spent many a night tossing and turning, but still couldn’t make up my mind. After I told of my dilemma to my singing teacher, Edna Fischer, she came up with a unique solution. She confided in me that she had once consulted a famous psychic named Emma Nelson Sims. According to Edna, Emma’s predictions and her subsequent advice based on them had been uncannily accurate. Edna believed in Emma’s powers completely.
