Barbara Eden’s Son Matthew Was a ‘Super Human Being’: Learn About the Star’s Late Child

Motherhood Meant More Responsibility for Barbara

From the very first moment Barbara held Matthew in her arms, she was over-the-moon proud to be a mom. However, parenthood came with struggles, and one of the initial challenges she faced was the fact that, for fiscal reasons, she had to find work in addition to Jeannie.

Every time the show would go on hiatus, she would guest star on episodic television, perform in summer stock around the country and appear in a nightclub act in Las Vegas and elsewhere. The downside is that all of this kept pulling her away from Matthew, who began to notice that mommy was always leaving, which was not a feeling she wanted to instill in him.

Problem was that Michael, whose series Broken Arrow had been canceled, was finding it tough to get work, so the responsibility for their finances and more fell largely on her. For instance, when Matthew fell ill and the situation became more than Michael could handle she had her mother fly in to help. And when Matthew’s second birthday came around, she had to miss it because of a Las Vegas commitment.

However, wanting to change things, that same year she reluctantly turned down Bob Hope’s offer to entertain the troops at Christmas so she could be at home with Michael and Matthew on Christmas morning.

Growing Resentment For ‘Jeannie’

Jeannie was such an integral part of their lives that, as Barbara observed in her book, Matthew grew up with the character similarly to “the way Candice Bergen grew up with Charlie McCarthy, her ventriloquist father Edgar Bergen’s celebrated dummy.” As such, there were kids he encountered in public or at school who insisted he perform magic, and, as a result, as a child he started finding it difficult to separate illusion from reality.

On top of that, part of his reality — which serves as a microcosm of the way life was for them at the time — became evident when they went to Disneyland and Barbara, despite the disguise she was wearing, was recognized on the line they were on and got stuck signing autographs — “to Matthew’s disgust.” That disgust would, when he was 6 or 7, turn to resentment of the show and the fact his mother was a part of it.

Barbara’s Defender

Things would change as Matthew got a little older, Barbara bringing him with her to the Persian Gulf to entertain with Bob Hope or the Las Vegas stage (where he stood on the sidelines) when she was performing. “When he reached his late teens and early twenties,” Barbara said, “Matthew became my greatest defender; a chivalrous knight in shining armor, loving and protective in the extreme.” Sometimes to the point where, when he felt his mother was being disrespected, he threatened to physically take on the likes of actor Tony Curtis and disc jockey Howard Stern.

Tensions and Tragedy

During and after I Dream of Jeannie, there were tensions mounting in the marriage between Barbara and Michael, due largely to the fact that she was appearing on specials, TV movies, in her Vegas act and more, while he was still struggling to find employment. Nonetheless, joy came into their lives in 1971 when Barbara discovered that she was pregnant with their second child.

Due to financial need, she fought back the impulse to turn down the musicals The Unsinkable Molly Brown and The Sound of Music, both of which took her around the country. With her doctor’s OK, though he did tell her to be cautious, she embarked on both. By the time it was all over, Barbara was seven months pregnant and when she returned home, her regular doctor informed her that there was a problem. Sadly, the child was stillborn.

Divorce and Personal Regret

As a result of their unborn baby’s gut-wrenching death, the marriage imploded shortly thereafter. Notes Barbara, in the aftermath of the news regarding their unborn son, “[Michael] put his arms around me and hugged me. I could tell that he was stifling his sobs. So was I. But not only that, I was stifling something far worse: the thought that if I’d stayed home during my pregnancy, perhaps the baby could have survived … I’ve heard a tragedy can bring a couple together, but the death of our second son hurt our relationship beyond repair.”

Barbara fell into a classic case of postpartum depression, which she tried to ignore by throwing herself into live performing. She also ignored the absolute need to seek counseling for her grief and her marriage to Michael. Barbara, seeking a new beginning for herself, is the one who filed for divorce, and to this day wonders if it was the right decision to make, particularly because of the “repercussions it would one day have on Matthew that would turn out to be cataclysmic.”

More Family Changes

By 1977, Barbara was getting married to her second husband, Charles Donald Fegert, and the two were going to live in Chicago with his kids and Matthew. Only Matthew, at the age of 12, decided that he wanted to live with his father (not uncommon for teenage boys, as she was told).

When she went to talk to her son about it, she could see his internal torment and decided at that moment that, despite how difficult it might be for her, she would put Matthew’s interest above all others. As to that marriage, it ended (and Barbara says there’s no doubt it was the right decision) in 1982.

Matthew Ansara Tries Acting

Matthew at some point decided that he wanted to become an actor, though he never could get his career off the ground. In 1981 he appeared on Barbara’s TV series version of her film, Harper Valley P.T.A. in the episode “To Dunk or Not to Dunk.” Recognizing that his son was extremely nervous, Michael actually came to the set to coach him and settle those nerves.

Flash forward to 1989 and he was working with his mom again, appearing in a small part in the TV movie Your Mother Wears Combat Boots. After that, it was a 2000 episode of the show One World. On the big screen, he appeared in 2001’s To Protect and Serve and the made-for-video film Con Games.

How the Troubles Began

In between, Barbara had met, fallen in love with and married Jon Eicholtz. Sadly, Matthew did not attend their wedding. Wrote Barbara, his absence was “neither a surprise nor a snub. He was in residence at the Hazelden Clinic in Minnesota, one of the eight times the clinic would make another attempt to cure him of his drug addiction; an addiction that dated back to when he was just 10 years old.”

As it turns out, back in 1974, a neighbor of Barbara and her family’s in the San Fernando Valley grew pot, which — unbeknownst to the parents — he shared with kids from the neighborhood. Matthew, coming from a bloodline with addiction issues (there were alcoholics in both Michael and Barbara’s families) didn’t take long before he was hooked on pot, which would, unfortunately, lead to harder drugs later on — a fact Barbara takes some of the blame for, feeling that the divorce of his parents began Matthew down a path of seeking happiness elsewhere.

Missing the Clues

The important thing to note is that Barbara was far from a hands-off parent, doing her best to keep Matthew on a bit of tight leash. Problem was that neither she nor Michael even knew what to look for in terms of signs of drug addiction, so they were missing a variety of clues, among them Matthew’s shorter fuse in terms of his temper, over sleeping, weight loss, etc. She began to realize what was wrong in 1984 when she discovered that he was not a student at San Fernando Valley’s City College, despite the fact he said he was going there each day.

When she confronted him about this, Matthew went into a rage and left the house. Both parents desperately searched for their son, but to no avail until a month later when Barbara received a call from the police, who said that Matthew — having been pulled over — was a danger to himself and others, and should not be driving.

Holding Out Hope

Matthew agreed to go to rehab, with both Barbara and Michael believing that things would get better from there. Then they were told about the sheer quantity and variety of drugs that their son had been taking. Distraught over the fact they knew the truth about him, Matthew swore he’d get better. Unfortunately, over the next 14 years he was in and out of one drug rehab center after another, with nothing working. At one of them, a counselor told his parents that when a child is abusing drugs the way that Matthew was, he has more or less become those drugs. “He is no longer your child,” Barbara was told, “and he no longer has a home with you.”

Matthew Reaches Out When It’s Almost Too Late

When Matthew had reached his twenties, Barbara came to the hard realization that she simply couldn’t trust him or anything he said; a point driven home when, following his visits, she would find silverware and money missing so that he could fund his drug habit. But then, at the age of 27, he seemed to have cleaned up his act, fell in love with and married a woman, found a job and began studying writing at UCLA.

But, then, as heroin returned to his life, everything, including his marriage, collapsed. Then Barbara received a phone call from him desperately asking for help. She and a few others went to the Venice, California apartment she was renting for him in the hopes it would help him get his life together. It didn’t. He was brought to the hospital suffering from a heroin overdose that nearly killed him.

As Barbara explained to Entertainment Tonight, “Unfortunately, we didn’t find out that he was addicted until he was 19. And when your child is 19, you have no control. They are suddenly considered adults, which I think is just the worst thing in the world. So he did go into rehab, but he didn’t stay. And then we were just scrambling. We didn’t know what to do. It was shocking to us that this happened and happened without us knowing it. It’s just a sneaky illness and it is an illness. What I would say to people with children now is you start watching a child when they’re 11 or 12, or even younger, because there are predators out there. There are predators around our schools that are selling drugs and you don’t always know if your child is on drugs.”

A Sign of Hope

In 2000, Matthew somehow managed to get clean yet again and became engaged to a woman named Leanna Green, the two of them moving in together. He had also begun working on himself physically, getting into bodybuilding and bringing his weight up to 280 pounds, which, for a six-foot four-inch guy, made for a fairly imposing image. He really seemed to have turned things around, though Barbara was afraid to believe him.

Still, she ultimately couldn’t help herself and excitedly got involved in wedding preparations. “He would be straight for about a year and a half and had some success with it,” Barbara said in her ET interview. “In fact, I was shocked when I got the call, because he had been clean and sober for almost two years and was going to get married. We had the parties for the marriage arranged and everything.”

A Tragic End

Sadly, it all ended on June 26, 2001 when Barbara received the news that Matthew had died. He had been found in his truck at a Chevron gas station, slumped over the steering wheel. Next to his body, police found a syringe and vials of anabolic steroids, which he had been taking in preparation for a bodybuilding competition he had entered.

Additionally, a subsequent blood test revealed that he had shot up with heroin that proved too much for his heart to take. Says Barbara, “The policeman told me that he was on heroin and that heroin can be cut or not cut in certain ways. And they said, ‘We know that this is very lethal on the street.’ Apparently that’s what happened: he got a lethal dose.”

Pushing Forward

As she’s had to do a number of times in her life, Barbara needed to pick up the pieces of all that had happened and find the strength to move forward — which she has.  “In the days, weeks, months and years since the funeral,” she wrote, “I have put one foot in front of the other and carried on as best as I could. In the intervening years, I’ve often been asked how anyone can cope with losing a child, and the answer is that you don’t. You can’t. There’s no way. You don’t know how you will get through it, how you can survive. But you just do. There’s no other choice.”