I Dream of Harassing Jeannie

Barbara Eden had her first brush with Hollywood casting in the mid-1950s, when she was 20. It was a meeting with the “head talent scout at the Warner Brothers studios,” a meeting that did not go well: “to my everlasting shock, he pulled out a picture of his daughter, Lonnie, and said, ‘See, honey, that’s what you need. Big tits!’” Soon she was crying in her uncle’s car as he drove her home. But events reversed themselves. A few months later she was on the lot to see an acting teacher. A “male voice behind me” hailed her in peremptory terms. She stopped and there was the same man, now with no memory of her but with a firm impression of how she looked from the rear. This time he said she had to take a screen test—maybe she was a star after all.