by Barbara Eden
I was so in awe of him that at the last minute I almost changed my mind about appearing with him in From the Terrace, even briefly. I’d already signed the contract, though, so I had no option but to go ahead, scared stiff or not.
When I walked onto the set and, as my part called for, looked deep into Paul’s eyes (they outdazzled even Jack Kennedy’s), I was in Hollywood heaven. Paul must have been accustomed to evoking that reaction in besotted women, as he knew exactly how to put them at ease. He flashed me his hundred-watt smile and said, “Well, Barbara, you’re the first actress I’ve ever been able to look down on.”
He was trying to put me at ease, but he was also poking fun at himself. At the same time, his remark had a serious subtext to it—it wasn’t just a gag designed to relax me. Although I didn’t know it at the time, if the divine Paul Newman was insecure about anything about himself, it was his height.
How his height might have impacted Paul’s star quality and his vast acting talent, I had no idea, but Paul obviously considered the negative rumors about his height to be destructive to his image. His height became such a big issue for him that when a New York newspaper described him as being just five foot eight, he erupted in fury and bet the newspaper that he’d write them a check for $500,000 if he was really five foot eight—and that they’d donate to a charity $100,000 for every inch of height over five foot eight that he could lay claim to. He was so intent on winning the bet that he even contemplated consulting an orthopedic man regarding how he could make himself taller when the newspaper measured him. Luckily for him, they never followed up on the challenge, but Paul’s height, or lack of it, would always be his overriding insecurity.
That aside, he was a very down-to-earth guy and a great actor, who loved his wife, Joanne Woodward, passionately.
I’d resisted being tempted by Elvis and ignored John F. Kennedy’s invitation to call him, but the truth is that had I not been married to Michael and madly in love with him, I might have been seriously tempted by Paul Newman. But, clever woman that she is, Joanne Woodward starred in From the Terrace with him, was on set that day, and would be on most of his future movies.
Which reminds me of Elvis and his misgivings that Priscilla wouldn’t be able to cope with his pull over other women, and Booker McClay’s warnings to me when I wanted to marry Michael.
I’ve always steadfastly avoided worrying about the man in my life cheating on me with other women, because I’ve always firmly believed that worrying about my husband being tempted by other women simply takes too much time and uses too much of my energy. I’d rather devote that time and energy to loving him instead.
The truth is that no matter how happy a marriage between actors might be, there are always tremendous strains. For Michael and me, the primary strain lay in the frequency of our separations caused by our divergent careers. In fact, our separations were so frequent that in 1967 we spent just four months together, as one of us was always away on location.
Michael, who was always more self-contained than I was, may not have suffered so much during our protracted separations, but I certainly did. Recently I found a 1962 newspaper in which I talked about the sadness I felt whenever Michael had to go away for work.
“He says goodbye—and all of a sudden half of you is gone. You come home and the house seems so awfully big and empty. You find yourself looking around corners, listening for his voice and his footsteps. It’s dreadful! I miss him mostly at night. I miss him dreadfully then,” I said.
Even after we’d been married for over seven years, I still hated being parted from Michael when he went away on location. So whenever I had a break from filming whatever movie I was working on, I would jump on the next plane and join him wherever he was. Once I traveled to see him on location where he was taking part in a rodeo. Michael was a brilliant rider and gave the impression that he was at one with the horse. At this particular rodeo, like at all the others, he rode bareback, marvelously. Afterward, I had to leave, and I remember standing by the fence crying, I was so sad to be parted from him.
While we were apart, I often had to work with extremely attractive men, but Michael was never jealous, even though some of them flirted shamelessly with me. My experience with Harry Belafonte was typical.
We met during the seventies, when I was rehearsing for an NBC special and he was working on an adjacent set. He would spend hours watching me onstage, and when I came off, he flirted with me in the most enchanting way. But, handsome and charming as he was, I was never tempted by him. I was too in love with Michael. Moreover, I was never flattered when a man flirted with me, and still am not, because I don’t see it as a compliment, or even take it personally; it is just the nature of men to flirt.
My first major separation from Michael occurred because he had to go to New York to do a play and I couldn’t go with him because I had just started making Five Weeks in a Balloon, with Red Buttons.
During the shoot, Red developed a little bit of a crush on me. He must have been in his forties, but he still looked like a kid, and I think he felt like one as well. When it came to me, he certainly behaved like a kid, but I made it clear that I was married and intended to stay that way.
Later on, after I’d convinced Red that romance between us was completely out of the question, he invited me to go to the premiere of Hatari with him. I missed Michael, and I felt that my relationship with Red was on an even enough keel for me to accept an invitation from him without worrying about any consequences.
Stupidly, I’d forgotten that Red had just filed for divorce, and that the press would have a field day if we were at the premiere together, which they did.
When Michael saw the pictures of me with Red in the newspapers, he acted as if he could hardly believe his eyes. There was nothing for him to be upset about, so I told him that of course I had been to the premiere with Red, but if I had planned to step out on him, I certainly wouldn’t have done so in front of a barrage of press photographers. Michael laughed and said that he knew I wouldn’t.
Five years into our marriage, we bought a large four-bedroom house in the San Fernando Valley, complete with a play area and a swimming pool with a fence around it. The fence was there for one reason and one reason only: so that our future child could play safely in the yard without fear of him falling into the pool and drowning.
That yet-to-be-born child was constantly at the forefront of our minds, yet all our friends felt that we were crazy to buy such a big house just for the two of us, simply because we were dreaming of a family we might never have. For although we had been married for so long, it seemed that our chances of ever conceiving a child together were getting slimmer than ever.
Five Weeks in a Balloon marked the first time I worked with a lion (an experience I would reprise with Larry on I Dream of Jeannie). For some strange reason, this particular lion was permitted to roam free around the set, with his trainer standing by. Red and I were startled, but the trainer explained, “If you see him near you when he’s out of the cage, don’t move, don’t run. He just wants to play with you, like a kitten plays with a ball of string, but no matter how playful he is, just remember that he is five hundred pounds of muscle and can really hurt you. And if he rolls over, don’t move, because if you do, he’ll break your legs.”
Point taken—by me, at least. A few days later, during a break in shooting, Red and I, still dressed in our bright plaid pants from the movie, were having lunch on the grass at Lake Sherwood. Suddenly I looked over his shoulder, and there, a hundred feet behind Red, was the lion, prowling around, his tail switching.
“Don’t move an inch, Red,” I warned. “The lion’s out.”
Red almost jumped out of his skin.
“Where is it? Where is it?” he yelled at the top of his voice.
I glanced over his shoulder. The lion was now forty feet away, contemplating the two of us as if we might make a good lunchtime snack.
“Just stand still, Red. You know we’re not supposed to move!” I said.
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Whereupon Red flung himself between me and the lion, as if to protect me, and started leaping up and down and screaming, “To hell with that! To hell with that!”
At that moment, thank heavens, the trainer raced up to the lion and yanked him away from us.
So the poor lion missed snacking on two actors in bright costumes, and Red and I narrowly escaped certain death.
About the same time as I made Five Weeks in a Balloon, Fox loaned me out to MGM for The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, co-starring Claire Bloom and Laurence Harvey. Laurence, who later would be much acclaimed for his tour de force in The Manchurian Candidate, exuded style and sex appeal and was a classic bon vivant. When we were on location in a little medieval village in Germany, he actually had his magnificent white Bentley shipped over there because he missed it so much.
The villagers, who’d never seen a movie star before, never mind a dashing one driving a great big Bentley, watched with their eyes popping out of their heads as Laurence roared over the quaint cobbled streets in his car, bound for some gourmet restaurant he’d somehow managed to discover in the area.
Usually I tagged along with our makeup artist in tow. One time Laurence insisted on taking us to his favorite restaurant, which he loved because, as he put it, “They make the best steak tartare in the world, Barbara, darling. You haven’t lived till you’ve tried it.”
I gulped, then came clean and admitted that I didn’t eat anything raw, let alone raw meat.
Laurence blithely brushed my objections aside and commanded the maitre d’ to prepare the steak tartare at our table. As he did, I fought back my desire to puke. Laurence, breezily unaware of my battle, gushed away at me happily—“Here you go, Barbara, darling. Sheer nectar”—and shoved a forkload of what I considered to be raw hamburger straight into my mouth.
I made a credible show of enjoying the steak tartare, but it was a miracle that I made it back to the hotel without throwing up every single bit of it all over Laurence’s precious white Bentley!
I had much more fun when I worked on Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, which I made at Fox with Joan Fontaine, Walter Pidgeon, and Peter Lorre of Casablanca fame.
Both Peter Lorre and Walter Pidgeon were already way into their sixties when we started shooting, but each of them was still flirtatious and entertaining. I had lunch with them in the commissary every day, and they were so cute with each other and with me that I really relished being in their company. Walter was a real Casanova and would wink at me and say, “Barbara, my dear, if you’d been around when I was younger, you wouldn’t have stood a chance.” Peter had a little bit of the devil in him, along with great kindness, and every inch of him laughed when he laughed. But when he wasn’t laughing, he gave me excellent career advice, including one particular gem: “Barbara, no matter how successful you become, always sign your own checks. I didn’t—I let my business manager sign them on my behalf—and that’s why I’m still working today.”
Later, I discovered that Peter had hired a close friend to be his business manager, primarily because he wanted to concentrate on acting and not be bothered by mundane tasks like paying the window cleaner. He had implicitly trusted that friend with his wife, his child, his life, and his money. But the friend had robbed him blind, and Peter was now practically penniless.
That didn’t stop him from fighting over the check with Walter every day and insisting on paying for my lunch. When I protested, Peter said, “Not only are you a young, pretty girl, but you’re a contract player as well, so you can’t pay for lunch.” Before one lunch with Peter and Walter, I took the waiter aside and tried to slip him some cash for our lunch, but he categorically refused to take it. Mr. Lorre and Mr. Pidgeon had made a deal with him, he said; Miss Eden must never be allowed to pick up the check.
When I had one last try and challenged Peter and Walter to let me pay the check, they had a fit. Peter was practically down to his last penny, but he still paid for my lunch, that day and every other day during the shoot.
They don’t make ’em like that anymore.
After the fiasco of Cleopatra, Fox’s extravaganza starring Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and Rex Harrison, which failed to ignite the box office sufficiently to justify the (then) stratospheric $44 million it cost to make, the studio underwent a dramatic change in fortunes and closed down. My last movie there was The Yellow Canary, with Pat Boone.
I was now free to make movies for whichever studio I wanted, and I was delighted. One of the positive consequences of leaving Fox was that in the future I would work at MGM, the cream of all the studios, where the hairdressers, makeup artists, and wardrobe staff were the best in the business, the costumes were hand-stitched, and endless care was taken in lighting actresses so they would look more beautiful on the screen than they did in real life.
Working at MGM was like going to an exclusive charm school, where actresses were taught every trick in the business to enhance and exploit their natural assets. An example: we were taught that, unlike brunette hair, blond hair always has to be smooth and blow-dried, otherwise it will look frizzy, as if it has been accidentally singed in a fire.
At MGM, we were taught to wear the same color hose as our shoes, to create the illusion of longer legs, and to wear pale nail polish to make short fingers look longer and more graceful. At MGM, I also learned to apply false eyelashes, and wore them there for the very first time, to great effect.
I worked at MGM with Tony Randall on Seven Faces of Dr. Lao, and canny Tony divined one of my weaknesses (other than ice cream and chocolate): gin rummy. As the movie included a lot of night shooting, between takes we would sit in my dressing room and play the game together.
Tony never lost a single game, and after a while I realized that he was winning a small fortune from me. So I started to watch him more closely. Then it dawned on me: he was sitting opposite a mirror that was reflecting my cards back to him. In other words, he’d been cheating, and how!
Tony and I never played gin rummy together again. Meanwhile, it swiftly transpired that he had other games on his mind, and seemed determined that I play them with him. I kept reminding him of Michael and my marriage, but Tony, a devil with women, was oblivious to all of that. He was a funny man, though, and all his approaches to me were couched in humor. So although they came to nothing, he made me laugh uproariously in the process, and I will always cherish his memory for that.
Married or not, I performed my fair share of love scenes during my Hollywood years, and in most of my movies invariably played girls who ended up being either kissed or rescued, and sometimes both.
One screen kiss I’ll never forget was with Pat Boone, when we made All Hands on Deck. As the plot had it, our kiss was designed to be relatively chaste. But Pat had never before played a role that called for him to kiss his co-star. Consequently, while kissing Pat Boone on camera was just part of a day’s work for me, to Pat, his first on-screen kiss was a major event.
It turned out that his wife and three daughters felt exactly the same, because just as the director was about to shout, “Action,” they all trooped onto the set. A second before Pat and I first locked lips, I heard one of the little daughters whisper, “Watch out! Daddy’s going to kiss someone who isn’t Mommy!”
But All Hands on Deck wasn’t always a barrel of laughs, primarily because the director, Norman Taurog, was a really, really mean man. He was child star Jackie Cooper’s uncle, and when Jackie was a little boy acting in the movies, Norman was notorious for sticking a pin into him so that he’d cry real tears in a scene. During All Hands on Deck, Norman hollered at everybody, with the exception of Pat. On the rare occasions when Pat was late to the set, Norman would take it out on the crew, and on everybody else in the bargain. So we all hated him. And he continued to be so much of a bully that even Pat, who was a really nice, easygoing guy, grew to hate him in the end.
One morning Pat and I were doing a scene on the bow of a U.S. Navy ship. Norman was in an inflatable raft next to the ship
, along with the cameraman filming the scene. All of a sudden, Pat and I heard a splash next to the ship. We looked down and saw that the raft with Norman on it was sinking. All of us just watched the raft slowly go down, and I’m afraid I couldn’t stop myself from laughing. We were only just off Long Beach, so the water wasn’t that deep.
I wasn’t laughing much, though, on my next movie, Brass Bottle, with Burl Ives, in which Burl played a djinn, a genie. Working on Brass Bottle is probably my least favorite Hollywood memory. On the other hand, the movie would prove to be a good-luck charm for me: Sidney Sheldon saw it, it sparked the germ of I Dream of Jeannie, and he remembered my performance in it.
On the surface, Burl Ives was genial and kind. He was wonderful on the set, when other people were around, but at the end of the day, when it was dark, I didn’t dare risk walking by his dressing room.
He’d stand by the door like a big bad bear and beckon: “Come here, little girl. Come here.” Then he’d lunge straight at me. Luckily, I was quick enough on my feet to sidestep him, then I’d run like hell.
The first time it happened, I couldn’t believe my eyes. This darling, warm Santa Claus of a man, who was in his mid-sixties (which, as far as I was concerned, seemed like a hundred and ten) was actually making a pass at me. Incredible!
Less incredible, but still intimidating, was Warren Beatty, who was filming The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis on the sound stage next to where I was shooting How to Marry a Millionaire. Whenever I was on my way to makeup, he’d loom out of the shadows and scare the living daylights out of me by whispering, “Barbara Eden! Barbara Eden! I’m gonna come and get you right now!”
I understand that this may sound very sappy, but I genuinely was still wet behind the ears, and so I really did find Warren to be dreadfully scary. I think that he sensed my naiveté and enjoyed the effect he had on me. Every time I’d see him about to spring out at me, I’d run a mile to avoid him.
I suppose that in some ways Warren was darling, but I always think that darling is as darling does. And, to be honest, I wasn’t altogether sure what I’d do if he did eventually catch me, because I was so attracted to his physicality. My salvation, however, was that he didn’t have the kind of qualities I generally look for in a man.
