Barbara Eden and ‘I Dream of Jeannie’ — The Inside Story You Didn’t Know

An Early Language Barrier

In the premiere episode of the series when Jeannie initially comes out of her bottle and speaks to Tony for the first time, it’s in Farsi. This makes for a funny bit in the show, but not quite so humorous is the fact that Barbara had no idea how to speak the language. “I had to learn for the first few lines out of the bottle,” she explained to journalist David Levin. “The most difficult thing I’ve ever learned how to do. I knew nothing about that language. I speak Spanish and that’s it.”

Thankfully, the problem was short-lived as all Tony had to inadvertently do was wish that she could speak English … and suddenly she could.

Tony Had a Dilemma With Jeannie

In looking back at the premise of the show, Larry observed, “It was a kind of strange thing. Here’s this guy that finds this bottle and out of this bottle comes this absolutely gorgeous, beautiful girl that’s 2000 years old, and she’s always on the make for him. I mean, always trying to get him in the sack. And my motivation is, you know, I can’t do that, because I’m an astronaut and my career is at stake. How can you live in my home and … well, this just isn’t done. And it was like, here’s this guy with this beautiful girl who can give him anything he wants and he can’t accept it. And then Roger (Bill Daly), my sidekick, is the guy that wants everything. He says, ‘Give it to me, give it to me. I’ll do it.’ The chemistry was wonderful between all of us.”

One would imagine that if the show was produced today, Tony wouldn’t have had such a difficult time accepting Jeannie’s…generosity.

It’s a Bouncing Baby Show … and a Baby Too!

Barbara Eden was cast as Jeannie about six weeks after she auditioned for the role, and about halfway through the show’s first season, she found out she was pregnant. What could have been a disaster insofar as the series was concerned, ended up working out fine in that executive producer Sidney Sheldon and NBC pushed things along quickly so that the last 10 shows or so could be shot on an accelerated schedule. As Larry explained it, “Because Barbara was pregnant now, we did 10 shows back to back just as fast as we could, because she was getting bigger and bigger, and adding more veils and stuff like that.” Other tricks were utilized as well to hide her pregnancy from the cameras.

The Set Was Not the Place for Fun and Games

As Barbara relates in A Conversation With Barbara Eden, Larry was extremely serious on the set of the show. “We had a lot of fun,” she says, “but it wasn’t usually on the set. It was I’d go to his house and he’d come to mine and then he was a stitch, but he was all business when we were doing Jeannie. I must say it was wonderful, because I’ve never worked with anyone that I felt so comfortable with once that camera started rolling … Our timing seemed to mesh, so I guess that made it comfortable for both of us.”

As she revealed in her biography, Jeannie in a Bottle, there was also a certain level of frustration on Larry’s part. She writes, “This is what Sidney Sheldon said many years later about Larry’s unbridled ambition: ‘Suddenly, Larry found himself in a show with a beautiful half-naked girl and there was no way that it would be his show. I tried everything, but it was always only Jeannie the public was interested in, and through five seasons he became frustrated and very angry.'”

No Navel Gazing, Please

Apparently, network censors were so gung-ho about protecting the morals of young viewers (maybe some of the older ones as well), they had a number of rules in place when it came to I Dream of Jeannie. For instance, even though in the early years Jeannie slept in her bottle and Tony in his bed, that bottle could not be placed in the bedroom — so no nighttime visits to Tony for her! Additionally, there was apparently something really sexual about Barbara Eden’s navel, because they were never allowed to show it. As she herself would occasionally explain, it would peek through once in a while, but there came a point where censors were really watching for it. It just seems hard to believe that that could be part of someone’s job description.

Barbara Eden Crawled Into a Bottle

No, we’re not saying she had a drinking problem, but we are, of course, talking about Jeannie’s bottle. This huge prop, she explains, was a lot of fun. “The bottle itself was a large set,” Barbara explains. “They also had little bits and pieces of bottles; bottle tops, you know, that I could climb out of and look around, and it was fun. I loved it. It was like being a little girl again and playing house. And then there were the big pencils and pens, and the cup that held them. And climbing around the large telephone. Or the big pocket! They had a big pocket, because I was often in his pocket and it was just like playing pretend when you’re a child. It was great.”

Larry the Lion-Hearted? Not Exactly.

In one episode, Jeannie convinces Tony to let her pet visit, not realizing that her “pet” is actually an African lion. As Barbara notes in her biography, she’d worked with lions a couple of times on films she’d made. As a result, prior to shooting starting on the Jeannie episode, she took Larry aside and offered him advice on how he and the feline could become friends. “Here’s what you do, Larry,” she writes. “You have to stand very still and let the lion smell you. Then, when he’s finished doing that, you should lean forward very, very gingerly and stroke him as gently as you can. That way, he’ll get to know you and everything will be fine.” His response? “Dream on, Barbara. I’m not making friend with any f–king lion!” And with that, he went back to his dressing room. Later, finally coaxed out, he and Barbara took their seats on the couch, a piece of raw meat placed between them. The lion was brought up to the couch, took a look at Larry and let out a mighty roar.

“Whereupon,” Barbara writes, “Larry bolts off the set, out of the studio and into the street, while the crew runs out after him, terrified. Meanwhile, I am left alone on the set with a 900-pound lion in my lap, purring contentedly.”

‘Bewitched’ vs. ‘I Dream of Jeannie’ … It Was No Coincidence

So who comes out on top, Bewitched or I Dream of Jeannie? That’s the eternal question in the history of television. In fact, it’s one we’ve discussed before. Sometimes there are two shows that arrive at the same time that have certain similarities (such as The Munsters and The Addams Family, both premiering in 1964), but Bewitched beat I Dream of Jeannie’s 1965 debut by one year and series creator Sidney Sheldon never made any secret over the fact that it was the success of that show that inspired his idea for Jeannie. The other inspiration was the 1964 feature film The Brass Bottle, which starred Burle Ives as the djinn Fakrash, Tony Randall and a lovely blonde named Barbara Eden.

Probably the best perspective on the whole thing is the one offered by author Steve Cox in Dreaming of Jeannie: TV’s Prime Time in a Bottle: “The notion that anyone chooses — for the sake of taking sides — to admire only Bewitched or I Dream of Jeannie is a grotesque one … Sure there are similarities and shared traits between [them], but the latter can hardly be labeled a ripoff of the former. Undoubtedly during production there was a mild competition between the Bewitched camp and the Jeannie group. But they learned to work the same neighborhood and ended up playing host to many of the same guest stars, utilizing the same sets, writers and designers …. Who cares if one show inspires another? If it weren’t for The Honeymooners, we wouldn’t have The Flintstones.”

Truer words have never been spoken.

The Reason Season 1 Is Black and White

As fans of I Dream of Jeannie know, Season 1 is in black and white (which today means unwatchable to anyone under the age of 25) while the rest of the series is in color. There were a couple of reasons for this. The first is that due to the show’s use of special effects (remember, there were no computers in those B&W days), it was easier to get away with imperfections that way than you could in color. On top of that, NBC didn’t want to spend the money on color, convinced that I Dream of Jeannie wouldn’t get past the first season anyway. Ha!

Barbara Loves Lucy

Prior to I Dream of Jeannie, Barbara appeared on an episode of I Love Lucy, and quickly realized that everything she’d heard about Desi Arnaz‘ philandering ways was absolutely true. Refusing to fall for his charms, she basically avoided him during rehearsals as much as he could. Lucille Ball definitely noticed and even got word back to her that it was something she genuinely appreciated (even offering Barbara a Desilu contract, which she had to decline as she had just signed with 20th Century Fox). But what blew Barbara away even more was a particular instance that took place before she went in front of the cameras. As recounted in her biography, she was summoned to Lucy’s dressing room and was ordered by Lucy to take her dress off. She did so and was handed another dress. “I thought, ‘Probably a sack dress,'” writes Barbara. “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.”

Barbara Likes to Remind People Jeannie Wasn’t Human

Over the years, Barbara has actually heard complaints from people over the fact that, back in the day, Jeannie and Tony were living together, but they weren’t married, and that Jeannie was running around in her “nightie.” Says Barbara, “It wasn’t. It’s what she wore during the day. That was her dress, that was her uniform. I used to say he wasn’t living with a woman. This was a wisp of smoke. She was from another world, another time, another plane even. She wasn’t a human being, so why would anyone object to this freak living with him? It had nothing to do with being a woman, you know? But the funny thing was she thought she was. And as long as she thought she was, that was hysterical, because she wasn’t.

“It had nothing to do with a man/woman relationship,” she adds. “She called him master, but, honey, who was the real master there? She was. She was on top of the world. It was so silly. So many people have done that to me in interviews and said, well, ‘She was subjective to him,’ but she wasn’t his subject. She was his equal. She was an equal as a genie. And she did her job as a genie and she did it very well.”

So there!

Larry Had a Tough Time Dealing With the Attention Barbara Received

Larry is the son of Broadway legend Mary Martin, and spent a great deal of his life trying to prove his worth as an actor to her. Which would probably explain why he so embraced the stardom that J.R. Ewing brought him on Dallas. In his biography, The Other Side of Me, Jeannie creator Sidney Sheldon related that during the show’s first season, ratings were high but all was not well on the set. “The problem,” he writes, “was Larry Hagman. I planned to use more guest stars, but Larry was always antagonistic toward them. He would be sullen and ignore them, and spend time sulking in his dressing room. He wanted to be the star and he wanted it now. It was Barbara who was getting all the magazine covers and interviews. Larry wanted to show the world that he could be as successful as his mother. The result was that he put himself and everyone else under tremendous pressure … I began to write scripts to build up Larry’s character and make him more prominent. But when an actor is in a show with a scantily dressed actress as beautiful and enticing as Barbara Eden, it is very difficult for him to become the star.”

‘Twas Marriage That Killed the ‘Jeannie’

When things were winding down on the show’s fourth season, cast and crew were awaiting word on a pick-up for the fifth. Then Sidney Sheldon was contacted by NBC’s Mort Werner who decided that Jeannie and Tony should get married. Sidney’s response was, “That would destroy the show, Mort. The fun of Jeannie is the sexual tension between Jeannie and her master. Once you marry them, that’s gone. You have nothing to work with.” But ultimately with no choice, Sidney said they’d get married and the show was picked up for a fifth year. Complaints from the cast fell on deaf ears. “[Mort] thought he was smarter than any of them. He knew what was good for the show. For the fifth year of Jeannie, I wrote a wedding scene … With their marriage, the relationship had changed and much of the fun went out of the show. At the end of the fifth year, I Dream of Jeannie was canceled. Mort Werner had taken a hit show and destroyed it.”

‘I Dream of Jeannie: 15 Years Later’

In 1985, NBC produced a reunion film that brought together most of the cast of the original I Dream of Jeannie, with the notable exception of Larry, who was in the midst of playing J.R. Ewing on CBS’ Dallas. Stepping into the uniform of Major Nelson was Wayne Rogers, late of M*A*S*H. Recalls Barbara, “I don’t know how it came about. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get Larry, because by then he was doing Dallas and he was working very hard and didn’t want to do a movie plus his Dallas schedule. We were lucky to have Wayne Rogers as the master. The film was very good, but not the same, because he’s different. I mean, we’re all so unique and individual, so it was different. And Wayne brought a different texture and had a little more of an edge than Larry. For me, it was intimidating, because it had been so long and I was older. But overall it was well received.”

It’s Never Really Goodbye

I Dream of Jeannie ran from 1965-’70, filming a total of 139 episodes along the way. In what would have been the show’s sixth year — 1971 — it went into syndication (AKA reruns) and has never been off the air for over half a century. While things may not have always been easy behind the scenes, there’s no denying the power of what was created. Observes Sidney Sheldon, “It’s playing all over the world still bringing laughter to millions of viewers.”

Which was the point in the first place.