by Barbara Eden
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 f
ace. Don’t look away from it.”
That was Lucy. So different from Ann Sothern, and generous almost to a fault to a younger actress.
The day of the final shoot, I locked my dressing room door, put on my dress for the show (a nice if not particularly flattering number), and then tiptoed out, hoping against hope that Desi wasn’t around and waiting to pounce on me.
Instead, I bumped straight into Lucy’s assistant, who informed me that Lucy wanted to see me in her trailer dressing room at once.
Oh boy! I thought. Have I done something to make her mad?
I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong, but I was still petrified. I followed the assistant into the trailer, where Lucy ordered, “Take that dress off.”
Literally trembling from head to foot in fear, I did what she told me.
Then she handed me another dress.
Remembering Ann Sothern, I looked at it and thought, Probably a sack dress.
Then I put it on. It was the tightest, sexiest dress I’d ever seen, one that showed off all of my curves.
“Take it off again,” Lucy said.
I did, and she and one of her friends spent more than an hour adding sparkles all over the dress so that it would look even more shiny and glamorous.
Now that’s the kind of woman Lucille Ball was. She was really smart and really dedicated to her show, and even though she realized that Desi was actively pursuing me, she still put me in that dress because she knew it was right for the character and right for the show. The show meant everything to her, more, even, than her hurt pride over her cheating husband.
Even to this day in Hollywood, you still hear stories about how Desi broke Lucy’s heart, but she still put her show first because she was smart and she was a professional.
Funnily enough, when I finally filmed the scene in which Desi and I dance together, he turned out to be a complete gentleman on camera and kept his distance from me. I was vastly relieved.
Afterward, the director took me aside and said, “You know, every time we have a young girl in the show and Desi goes after her, Lucy suffers so much. You were the first one who handled things professionally. Thank you.”
Lucy also obliquely thanked me for evading her husband’s advances: she offered to put me under contract for her new production company, Desilu. By then, though, it was too late. Twentieth Century Fox had finalized their offer for me to become one of their contract players, and it was far too good for me to turn down: seven years at $200 a week. I was on my way to making it in Hollywood at last!
WHEN I FIRST arrived at the Twentieth Century Fox studios, I instinctively gravitated toward the warehouse in which the wardrobe department resided, where the costumes worn by Betty Grable and Alice Faye, actresses now long gone from the studio, still hung with their names stitched inside them.
I spent hours wandering through the wardrobe department, asking questions about the clothes and the stars who once wore them, and, in the process, became increasingly aware of the fleeting quality of Hollywood and of stardom, and of the ever-present potential for tragedy inherent in both.
Jayne Mansfield, who starred in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, was a classic example (although I had no contact with her when I worked on the movie). Young, beautiful, sweet-natured, and far more intelligent than she was given credit for by the public and the press, she was to meet her death in a gruesome car accident. It seemed to me that her life story epitomized the quintessential Hollywood tragedy.
Then there was Debbie Reynolds, to whose “Aba Daba Honeymoon” Solly Hoffman and I had mimed. At the studio she was often on the telephone, issuing orders to the staff at her home. Very grand, I thought, secretly envying her and her happy marriage to Eddie Fisher. I could not know that Debbie’s idyllic-seeming marriage would soon be shattered when Eddie left her because he had fallen head over heels in love with Elizabeth Taylor.
Elizabeth was signed to MGM (although she did make Cleopatra at Twentieth Century Fox, and there would be a ripple effect with consequences for me and my nascent career), and when I met her years later, I could hardly talk because I was so stunned by her beauty. Joan Collins was another great MGM beauty. Many years later, when composer Leslie Bricusse and his wife, Evie, invited my current husband, Jon, and me to their home in Acapulco, there was Joan by the pool, swathed in a white caftan, wearing a white turban, reclining on a chaise longue. Jon took one look at her and went, “Oh my God, she’s so beautiful!” I wasn’t amused by my husband’s unadulterated enthusiasm for Joan Collins and snapped, “That’s quite enough of that, Jon.”
A Jeannie blink back to the past again: During my first few months at Fox, I experienced my fair share of disappointments. The first involved Mark Robson, my mentor and the man who had discovered me and brought me to Fox in the first place. Mark wanted me to read for the part of Betty in Peyton Place, which was projected to be a mammoth box office hit. I was elated at the prospect.
I was sent for wardrobe tests, a sure indication that the part was in the bag for me. Then Terry Moore, who had been in Mighty Joe Young and Come Back Little Sheba and had been involved with Howard Hughes, and who had initially turned the role down, changed her mind and accepted it after all.
I was bitterly disappointed, but fortunately, I didn’t have too long to wallow in my disappointment. Just weeks later, I finally got my first big chance at Twentieth Century Fox after all: I was cast in the TV version of How to Marry a Millionaire, the movie that had starred Marilyn Monroe and Lauren Bacall.
TV again!
However, when I learned that I would be playing the part of Loco, one of the three husband-hunting Manhattan bachelorettes, which Marilyn Monroe had played in the movie version, I mentally tipped my hat to Emma Nelson Sims and her hitherto wacky-sounding predictions. It was a star-making role if ever there was one.
At first I was a little intimidated by the thought of following in Marilyn’s footsteps, but then I gave the part more consideration and played Loco as being shortsighted. So that while I didn’t want to banish the image of Marilyn’s Loco completely from my mind while I was playing the part, I felt as if I’d stumbled on my own personal take on the character and was glad.
In the future, Marilyn would play a more significant role in my life than I had originally anticipated. And during How to Marry a Millionaire, our lives would intersect in a rather uncanny way, the significance of which I wasn’t aware of until long after Marilyn’s death, when her personal life became public knowledge.
I very much enjoyed playing Loco, and the series was a success. In November 1957, the producers of How to Marry a Millionaire sent me, Merry Anders, and Lori Nelson, the two other bachelorettes, to Manhattan to promote the series. As it was winter and the temperatures had plunged, they thoughtfully rented a full-length mink coat for each of us.
At the end of the tour, I was at Idlewild (as John F. Kennedy International Airport was then known), waiting for my flight to be called and about to buy some candy, when a dark, heavyset man sidled up to me and abruptly asked me whom I was with.
Startled, I said, “Booker McClay.” Booker was Twentieth Century Fox’s head of public relations.
The man strode off without another word. A few years later, I saw his picture in a magazine. The caption read, “Pierre Salinger.”
Back at the airport, just as I was paying for my candy, Booker came over to me and asked, “Barbara, would you like to meet Senator John Kennedy?”
I wasn’t in the least bit interested in politics, and the name Kennedy meant nothing to me at that time. But I didn’t want to insult Booker, Senator Kennedy, or the man who’d approached me in the first place, so I shrugged and said, “Fine.”
The heavyset man ushered me into an anteroom. Only a drum-roll was missing, or a battery of klieg lights, as he declared in a loud ringmaster’s voice, “I want you to meet the next president of the United States!”
Senator Kennedy was handsome enough to rival any Hollywood star. When he clasped my hand firmly, I looked up into
the clearest, most hypnotic eyes in the universe. I blushed and looked away.
At that moment, fate intervened and my flight was called. I shook hands with the senator again. Then Pierre Salinger escorted me to the foot of the gangway.
As I boarded the plane in the ice-cold air, I tucked my hands into my pockets, and felt something in the left one. I pulled out a small piece of gray notepaper. Written on it were the initials “JFK” and a phone number.
Without any hesitation, I tore it up on the spot and handed the pieces to the stewardess to put in the trash.
I never once regretted it. The truth is that I wasn’t even momentarily tempted by one of the most glamorous, charismatic, sexually alluring men who ever lived.
For I’d already met the man of my dreams. And nothing and no one, not even John F. Kennedy in his glittering prime, ever would have succeeded in leading me astray, because I was wildly, utterly, and completely enthralled by my very own Mr. Right, Michael Ansara.
As far as I—and thousands of fans and love-struck female fans throughout the world—was concerned, Michael Ansara was a magnificent specimen of alpha-male masculinity. Six foot four and darkly handsome, with blazing brown eyes, a deep, resonant voice, and a powerful aura of strength and dependability, Michael was a Hollywood heartthrob with sex appeal to burn.
He was born in Lebanon but came to America with his parents when he was two years old. He grew up in New England, where he lived until he was twelve. Initially he had wanted to become a doctor, but the theater beckoned, and he joined the Pasadena Playhouse, where his fellow students included Charles Bronson (who was to become a close friend), Aaron Spelling of Dynasty and Beverly Hills 90210 fame, and sultry brunette actress Carolyn Jones. Down the line, with his dark, strong good looks, Michael would frequently be typecast in biblical epics, and he appeared in The Ten Commandments, The Greatest Story Ever Told, and The Robe. Ironically, the first time I saw him on the screen, in Julius Caesar, he aroused my interest only because he had the same last name as my first boyfriend, Al Ansara.
