by Barbara Eden
Gene Nelson’s wife, Marilyn, threw a baby shower for me, and I received so many lovely gifts that we had to send for Michael to transport them home for me.
On August 29, 1965, less than a month before the premiere of I Dream of Jeannie, I woke up at two in the morning, wracked by excruciating pains. I didn’t want to wake Michael, so I suffered in silence for as long as I could. Then at three-thirty, when the pain became unbearable, I woke him up. Within seconds, he had shot out of bed and called the doctor, and we were on our way to Good Samaritan Hospital.
Six hours later, we were still in the hospital’s waiting room. Michael tried to stay calm, while in the vain hope that I might distract myself from the pain stabbing through me, I read a book, the title of which has long since escaped me.
When I finally went into the delivery room, Michael waited outside, pacing back and forth. Twelve hours after we arrived at the hospital, Matthew Michael Ansara, a big baby with dark eyes, long dark eyelashes, enviably thick dark hair, and a sweet smile, was born.
We called him our lucky-charm baby. We had a child at last, and we loved him more than words could say. Our joy was boundless, and our hopes that he would live a healthy and happy life were unlimited. Matthew meant everything to both of us, and always would.
He was just three weeks old when I Dream of Jeannie first saw the light of day. For a show that was destined to endure for 132 episodes over five seasons (and countless more times in reruns), when I Dream of Jeannie was first released, it didn’t meet with much fanfare from the press.
In fact, no less an industry powerhouse than Variety carped, “Miss Eden plays a genie who materializes out of an Egyptian jug to badger an astronaut, making his commanding officers believe he’s off his rocker, driving his fiancée up the wall, and teasing viewers with dirty minds with innuendo (like the climax of the initialer, what was happening behind the camera in astro boy’s bedroom?).”
Down the line, when the feminist movement swept America, the critics also lambasted the show for depicting a master-slave relationship that they claimed was an insult to liberated women everywhere. I always considered that to be nonsense. I Dream of Jeannie is a fantasy, a modern-day fairy tale that has nothing to do with women’s liberation. The show’s purpose was not to make a political statement but simply to entertain audiences, which is what it indisputably succeeded in doing.
I Dream of Jeannie genuinely delved into the battle of the sexes, but in a cute way. Jeannie truly believed that Captain Nelson was her master, that she was there to serve him. But she also loved him and believed that he didn’t know what was good for him, she did. For despite the surface elements (“Yes, Master,” and so on), it was Jeannie who dominated Major Nelson, not the reverse. She invariably got her way and liked it. And besides, what all the critics seemed to forget was that Jeannie wasn’t a flesh-and-blood person but a fantasy. She simply didn’t exist.
By the end of the first season, we all recognized that I Dream of Jeannie was a hit. Surprisingly enough, while the show was an unqualified success throughout the five seasons it aired, it was never an industry sweetheart. Yet audiences loved it and still do. And after all, I Dream of Jeannie has lasted far longer than many shows that won cartloads of Emmys and reams of accolades from the critics; over the long haul, that longevity is what counts.
When we began filming the second season of I Dream of Jeannie, Matthew was five months old. Consequently, while I was working, I spent most of my downtime dreaming not of Jeannie but of Matthew, wondering what he was doing, what he was eating, and how he was sleeping. I missed him from the bottom of my heart whenever I had to be parted from him.
When the show was on hiatus, I worked in summer stock all over the country, guested on other people’s TV shows, and appeared in my nightclub act in Las Vegas and throughout the country. I worked so hard partly because I wanted to, but partly because after Broken Arrow was canceled, Michael wasn’t working as much as he used to, and although we were both frugal and had a cushion of savings, my income was more important to us than ever.
But it broke my heart when Matthew looked at me with those big brown eyes and said, “Mommy, why do you have to leave again?”
I tried to explain to him that everyone in the world had to work and that I was extremely lucky to be able to do work I loved, that I missed him very much when I was away, and that I’d always come back to him as quickly as I could. But while he understood on a rational level that I had to work, with hindsight I am afraid I have to admit that our separations probably hurt him on an emotional level.
One time I was in a play in Ohio when he came down with a terrible case of flu. The poor little boy was racked with fever, and Michael was out of his mind with worry. He did the best he could to take care of Matthew, but I knew that my son also desperately needed a mother’s touch. I couldn’t walk out of my job in mid-season, so I sent a frantic SOS to my mother up in San Francisco. Mother, bless her, rose to the occasion: she threw some clothes into a suitcase and boarded the next plane to LA. Under her gentle and loving care, Matthew’s health improved by leaps and bounds.
But I was so traumatized by not having been there when he was sick, then having to miss his second birthday because of a commitment in Las Vegas, that when Bob Hope invited me to entertain the troops at Christmas that same year, I reluctantly declined. My refusal may have seemed selfish to other people, but having missed Matthew’s birthday, I was determined that I should not miss the first Christmas of his life when he was old enough to be aware of the holiday. I wanted to see him opening his gifts, and I’ll always be grateful that I did.
In a way, Matthew grew up with Jeannie, in much the same way Candice Bergen grew up with Charlie McCarthy, her ventriloquist father Edgar Bergen’s celebrated dummy.
As soon as Matthew was able to talk, one of his first sentences was “Momma Jeannie!” enunciated when we perched him in front of the show. After a while, I realized that he was talking not about me at all but about the show. Other times, when he would watch the show (and he seemed to want to watch it all the time), he would point at the set and ask, “Where is Jeannie?”
I’d tell him, “I’ll be on in a minute, honey.”
His reaction? “Where is she?” Then, a little while later, while he watched a scene featuring only Larry and Hayden Rorke, he’d say, “Where are you, Mommy?” as if he expected me to be on the show every single second.
Soon I learned that other little children also believed implicitly that I Dream of Jeannie represented a slice of real life, and that Jeannie herself was a flesh-and-blood woman capable of making magic whenever and however she liked.
When Matthew was a little baby, I took him to the market, where he rode in a seat in my cart, and a little girl and her even smaller brother came up to us. The little girl was wearing her school uniform and seemed as meek and mild as an angel. All of a sudden she looked at me, pointed at her brother, and declared, “Turn him into a frog!” Her brother promptly burst into tears—and you could hardly have blamed him!
It wasn’t too surprising, then, that as a child, Matthew always had such a difficult time distinguishing between illusion and reality, between what was happening on camera and what was happening off. When he was a year old, I took him to watch me guest on The Mike Douglas Show. In a gag that took place at the end of the show, Leonard Nimoy carried me off the set while I kicked, screamed, and protested vociferously. Watching on the greenroom monitor, little Matthew burst into floods of tears, and no amount of explaining that Mommy was fine and was only playacting would comfort him.
It would probably take a psychoanalyst to understand Matthew’s inner thoughts, but it was understandable that seeing his mother on TV practically every night was more than a bit confusing for a little boy.
I had to prevent myself from advising him to “rise above it” when, as a very small boy, he went to nursery school and afterward complained, “The other children keep bugging me and asking me if I’m magic.”
“So what
do you say to them?” I said.
“I tell them, ‘No, I’m not. She is,’ ” he said, somewhat proudly.
Such was the international appeal of the series that when I traveled to Hong Kong on a promotional tour for I Dream of Jeannie and was walking through the packed streets with some of the crew, I turned around to find a throng of Chinese people dogging our footsteps. I started to get frightened when I realized that every single one of them was staring at me. But the faster I walked, the faster they walked, and the more people who joined them. I was so unnerved that I whispered to one of the Chinese crew with me to try and find out what was going on, why they were following us.
Then a bold English-speaking Chinese lady pointed at me and came straight out with it. “Are you the magic lady?” she said.
“Sometimes,” I replied.
In America, too, crowds followed me wherever I went. Flattering, but difficult if I wanted to spend a private day concentrating on Matthew and my family. My solution? To wear a red wig and hope no one would recognize me.
One time I was taking Matthew, then eight, to Disneyland, and invited my sister, Alison, and her four-year-old daughter, Michelle, to come with us. Beforehand, I put on my red wig and a pair of big dark-lensed glasses, and when we stood in line for tickets, I felt confident that no one in the park would recognize me.
No such luck. A perceptive young girl came running up to me, waving her autograph book, and eagerly asked, “Aren’t you Barbara Eden?”
Shocked that my disguise had failed and my attempt at privacy had been foiled, I didn’t think before blurting out, “No, I’m not.”
Hearing me, little Michelle reacted with a horrified “Auntie Barbara lied! Auntie Barbara lied!” No matter how carefully we explained the situation to her, she never really understood it.
That day at Disneyland, the girl obviously didn’t believe me, and alerted all her friends that Jeannie was standing in line. Subsequently, pandemonium broke out, and to Matthew’s disgust, I had no alternative but to sign autographs, which I did with as much courtesy as I could muster. At which point the man running the ride spirited all of us—Alison, Michelle, Matthew, and me—to the front of the line.
“Sometimes it helps to be a genie,” I said to Matthew with a wink.
As Matthew grew older, it was clear that he didn’t much like being Jeannie’s son. Moreover, by the time he was six or seven and the show was in reruns, he actively resented the show and my part in it.
He really didn’t want to share me with anyone, and I didn’t blame him. I did everything I could so that he would know he was the most important person in the world for me, that he was number one. That wasn’t difficult, because he was a darling little boy, and everyone who met him immediately warmed to him. I took him on tour to the Persian Gulf when I was appearing there with Bob Hope, and when I did my show in Las Vegas, he would be there in the wings watching me rehearse.
I was proud and happy to have him there, and always basked in his love and admiration, the memory of which still sustains me today. One of my funniest memories of Matthew as a child goes back to the times when I was all dressed up and ready to go onstage in Las Vegas. Matthew, then about eleven, always clapped his hands and cried, “Oh, Mommy, you’re so pretty!” which naturally warmed my heart. And whenever he saw a glamorous singer or actress on TV, he’d always comment, “Oh, Mommy, she’s so pretty.” He’d pause for a second, then without fail he’d add, “But not as pretty as you, Mommy.”
Then one day we were watching TV together and Raquel Welch came on. Matthew exclaimed, “Oh, Mommy, she’s so pretty.”
I waited and waited, but that was it.
So I asked, “Prettier than me?”
And Matthew said, “Well …”
I fell down laughing.
On a more serious note, I never once doubted his deep and abiding love for me. When he reached his late teens and early twenties, Matthew became my greatest defender, a chivalrous knight in shining armor, loving and protective in the extreme.
During the late sixties, Tony Curtis and one of his daughters used to come up to the house and play Ping-Pong with me and Michael. After one or two desultory games during which Tony’s mind, not to mention his body, seemed to be miles away, I realized that playing Ping-Pong wasn’t the primary motive for his visit. He came to our house to smoke pot without his wife knowing about it, and that’s what he’d done.
Along the way, Tony said something extremely inappropriate to me. Matthew happened to overhear every single word, and he went ballistic and threatened to deck Tony. I tried reasoning with him (“rise above it” and so on), but that didn’t work with Matthew, and it was all I could do to stop him from avenging my wounded virtue and socking Tony Curtis in the jaw.
An international tabloid scandal concerning Matt and another household name was narrowly averted when, in 1992, I made an appearance on shock jock Howard Stern’s radio show. It goes without saying that I wasn’t keen to be on the show, but my manager asked me to do it, and I guess we had a movie to promote. So I gritted my teeth and sailed through the show, turning a deaf ear to some of the more salacious comments made during my brief stint.
Two minutes after we went off the air, I was in the midst of making my escape from the studio as quickly as was polite when I received a heated call from Matthew.
I hadn’t warned him in advance that I was guesting on the show, because I hoped fervently that he’d never find out, but as chance would have it, he was driving his truck through the streets of Los Angeles at the exact moment when my interview went out over the air, and he heard every word of the segment.
I concentrated my energy on preventing Matthew from instantly heading to the studio, where Howard Stern was still on the air, and giving him hell for the way he’d treated me. Matthew was fit to be tied, and it was all I could do to convince him that it takes all sorts to make the world of entertainment go round.
When that failed, I resorted to taking the blame myself. “Howard Stern didn’t force me to go on his show, Matt,” I reasoned with him. “I went on it by choice. And I knew exactly what I was doing and what I was in for.”
He still was far from happy. And it was only a couple of hours later, after I had recovered from my shock that he’d heard the show, that it finally occurred to me I should have had the presence of mind to quiz Matthew on what exactly he was doing listening to The Howard Stern Show in the first place!
However, I caught myself wishing that Matthew had been around the time when I was asked by a sports magazine to present an award to O. J. Simpson. The ceremony took place at Jack Lemmon’s office on Beverly Drive. It was just another job to me, but out of respect to the magazine and to the event, I wanted to look my best, so I wore a peach chamois leather pantsuit to the ceremony.
From the moment I walked into the room, O.J. was all over me like a bad case of measles, flirting outrageously and making a series of suggestive remarks. I’m not unaccustomed to men speaking to me that way, but when they do, I somehow manage to tune them out. I did just that with O.J.
I posed for pictures with him, smiling as sunnily as I was able. Meanwhile, O.J. was ignoring everyone else in the room and just talking to me; he acted as if I were the award he’d been given. And although I tried to evade his advances as politely as possible, as luck would have it (or is it that old Murphy’s law again?), a journalist on hand to report on the ceremony must have picked up on the underlying tension between us. In the article on the award ceremony, the journalist quipped acidly, “O.J. didn’t seem to care much about the award. All he could see was Barbara.”
It’s true that O. J. Simpson did come on to me in an extremely blatant and aggressive way, but I did nothing to encourage him. Nevertheless, the journalist went so far as to unfairly blame me for having invited O.J.’s advances, simply because I was wearing tight pants. I was hurt and angry.
Sometime afterward, I was invited to Nicole Brown Simpson’s birthday party and O.J. came up to me, all wide-eyed and i
nnocent, and said, “Oh, Barbara, I hope I didn’t upset you at that award ceremony. I hope I wasn’t rude to you.” Of course he did upset me, and of course he was rude. I merely shook my head and moved away from him. My mother would have been proud.
A few years later, I saw Nicole and the children at an airport and said hello to her. She looked very tired and was in the midst of telling the children, “We have to go and see Daddy now.” I could tell that she was deeply unhappy.
Time for a Jeannie blink back to my I Dream of Jeannie years. Although I worked extremely hard, I was content, both in my own career and in my marriage to Michael. When we were shooting the show, I would get up at five every day, arrive at the studio for makeup at six, and work until seven in the evening. In those days, none of the cast went to dinner together afterward, or to a bar or a club. We just rushed straight home and studied our scripts in preparation for the next day’s filming.
Now and again, however, Michael and I did make time to get together with friends like Steve and Neile McQueen, who lived in a small house in Bel Air, where we’d sometimes go to dinner. Later on, I was so shocked when Steve and Neile announced they were getting divorced, because when we were together it was so clear that they adored each other. After their divorce, we lost touch. Then some years later I was at Columbia Studios, heard someone calling my name, and turned around—and there was Steve!
He hadn’t changed a bit. It was as if time had stood still. We had coffee together and laughed, joked, and reminisced about the past. Steve was a genuinely good human being, a kind friend, and I remember him with great affection.
Which brings me back to I Dream of Jeannie, the show with which I will always be associated, the show that consumed five years of my life. Even with the wild roller-coaster ride I had with my talented, iconoclastic drama king of a co-star, Larry Hagman, I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
THIS MAY BE one of the biggest understatements ever made, but for Larry Hagman, the I Dream of Jeannie years were not happy ones. To this day, I believe he much prefers to be remembered for his role as J. R. Ewing in Dallas rather than for his role as Major Tony Nelson in I Dream of Jeannie.
