At one time there was a lot of speculation going on in Hollywood about Barbara Eden being forbidden to show her navel. There were half a dozen different theories, but what really happened was the following:
I wrote a script called “The Biggest Star in Hollywood.” Judy Carne, Arte Johnson, Gary Owens, and George Schlatter (Laugh-In’s executive producer) appeared in my script interacting with the Jeannie characters.
Then George Schlatter showed me the script that the Laugh-In show writers had prepared for our cast. The opening scene had Barbara Eden in her Jeannie costume slowly coming down the stairs with a spotlight shining on her navel. I told George that I thought that was in bad taste and I refused to let the cast of Jeannie go on Laugh-In.
So, what we finally ended up with was the Laugh-In group in our show, but none of our cast in their show.
I Dream of Jeannie was completing its fourth year, ready to go into its fifth. We had not received our official pickup for the fifth year. I received a call from Mort Werner.
“I think Jeannie and Tony should be married.”
I was taken aback. “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.”
“I want them to get married.”
“Mort, that doesn’t make sense. If they—”
“Do you want the show picked up for a fifth year?”
There was a long silence. I was being blackmailed, but it was his network. “Can we discuss this?”
“No.”
“I’ll get them married.”
“Good. You’ll be on the air next year.”
When the cast heard the news, they were horrified.
“Businesspeople shouldn’t be allowed to make creative decisions,” Larry said.
The entire cast called Mort Werner, but it was no use. He 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.
We filmed the wedding at Cape Kennedy and a lot of the Air Force brass attended. I tried to make the script as interesting as possible, but 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.
We had produced a hundred thirty-nine episodes. In its sixth year, Jeannie went into syndication. That was in 1971. And it played in syndication for five years.
Today, forty years after Jeannie first aired, it has been revived and is playing all over the world, still bringing laughter to millions of viewers. In color. Columbia is planning to make a movie of it.
During the time I was producing Jeannie, I got an idea that I thought was exciting. It was about a psychiatrist whom someone was trying to murder. What intrigued me was that as far as he knew, he had no enemies. But if he was a good psychiatrist, he would have to figure out who was trying to kill him and why.
The problem with the idea was that I felt it was too introspective. You had to get into the psychiatrist’s head to see how he solved what was happening. I decided it would be impossible to do in the dramatic form. It would have to be a novel where his inner thoughts could be explained to the reader. But I knew I was not capable of writing a novel, so I dropped the idea.
Groucho called me to tell me that a play about the Marx Brothers and their mother, called Minnie’s Boys, was opening on Broadway, at the Imperial Theatre. He asked if Jorja and I would fly back east with him to see the show. Though I was busy producing at the time, I said yes. We flew to New York, saw the show—which was well done—and attended the cast party afterward.
The next morning, we went to the airport to catch a plane home. There was an air traffic controllers’ strike. Our plane started to taxi and the pilot’s voice came on the loudspeaker to announce that there would be a one-hour delay because of the strike. We taxied back to the gate, and two hours later, the pilot came on the loudspeaker again, to announce that there would be a three-hour delay.