Jeannie Out Of The Bottle Read Online Free PDF Page A
Author: Barbara Eden
Tags: Biography, Non-Fiction
me to remain a little girl for as long as possible.
I don’t know whether it was due to the era in which I grew up or the way I was raised, but I was really sheltered, not in the least bit like teenagers today. I was so very square. I was banned from ever swearing; once, when I was long since an adult, my mother and I saw a swear word written on the sidewalk, and she went white and said, “Barbara Jean Huffman! That is not a good word.”
Such was my mother’s power over me that even when I appeared as the madam in a production of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and the script called for me to repeatedly utter a four-letter word (one beginning with the letter f and ending in k), I initially couldn’t bring myself to say it.
I didn’t know anything about the facts of life until I was thirteen or fourteen, when my mother, who secretly believed that she was extremely progressive, read me a few excerpts from a book, Being Born. I must have given her a blank look, because she proceeded to have a whispered conversation with my father.
“Harrison, you’re her father. You have to tell her about it. She has to know,” she said.
My father gave a weary sigh.
“You’ve got a part in this, Harrison, whether you like it or not.”
“All right, Alice, all right,” my father said. “At breakfast, I’ll have my robe open and she’ll see the hair on my chest.”
So the very next morning, that’s exactly what he did: left his robe open so the hair on his chest was visible to me.
I blushed and looked away.
He saw my reaction and stuttered, “Barbara Jean, I—I just want you to know that as you get older, there will be body changes, so don’t be surprised or shocked by them.”
He didn’t say a word about the hair on his chest, and I remained none the wiser until a couple of girls at school set me straight and I finally learned what sex was all about.
Chapter 2
EVEN WELL INTO my teens, dating wasn’t much of a priority for me, and I wasn’t at all bent on having any romantic entanglements, simply because my whole life revolved around my love of singing. From the time that I could first talk, I was determined to grow up and become a singer. Luckily for me, my mother—always my biggest cheerleader—supported me every step of the way.
Apart from singing with her while we did the dishes together (she washed, I dried), whenever we had company I used to entertain them with a song or two. One day when I was fifteen, my mother’s best friend, Elinor Hoffman, slipped me a hundred-dollar bill (which was probably equivalent to a thousand dollars in today’s money) and said, “Barbara Jean, you’re genuinely talented. You should study singing and this ought to help you.”
I was thrilled and, with my mother’s approval, immediately enrolled in the San Francisco Conservatory, where Isaac Stern and Itzhak Perlman also studied (though not at the same time as me). There I had a fateful chance encounter.
One morning, Lorraine Hinton, a beautiful blond singing student who always wore extremely high heels (and later changed her name to Lori Hart) became ill and had to leave class early. Before she did, she begged me to cover for her in a gig that night.
Well, in those days, I didn’t even know what a gig was, but Lorraine swiftly enlightened me. She explained that I’d have to put on my prettiest dress and sing a couple of songs with a dance band at the Garden Room in the Claremont Hotel, high atop a hill overlooking Berkeley, and afterward I’d be paid twelve dollars.
Whoopee! Twelve whole dollars for doing what I’d always dreamed of doing! So I rushed home and put on my pink taffeta gown (the one my parents had bought me for my first formal school dance), which had puffed sleeves and a sweetheart neckline. My mother lent me a tiny gold heart on a chain, and before I knew it, I was on my way to the Claremont Hotel.
A glamorous resort built on thirteen thousand acres by a rich Kansas farmer as a tribute to his
I don’t know whether it was due to the era in which I grew up or the way I was raised, but I was really sheltered, not in the least bit like teenagers today. I was so very square. I was banned from ever swearing; once, when I was long since an adult, my mother and I saw a swear word written on the sidewalk, and she went white and said, “Barbara Jean Huffman! That is not a good word.”
Such was my mother’s power over me that even when I appeared as the madam in a production of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and the script called for me to repeatedly utter a four-letter word (one beginning with the letter f and ending in k), I initially couldn’t bring myself to say it.
I didn’t know anything about the facts of life until I was thirteen or fourteen, when my mother, who secretly believed that she was extremely progressive, read me a few excerpts from a book, Being Born. I must have given her a blank look, because she proceeded to have a whispered conversation with my father.
“Harrison, you’re her father. You have to tell her about it. She has to know,” she said.
My father gave a weary sigh.
“You’ve got a part in this, Harrison, whether you like it or not.”
“All right, Alice, all right,” my father said. “At breakfast, I’ll have my robe open and she’ll see the hair on my chest.”
So the very next morning, that’s exactly what he did: left his robe open so the hair on his chest was visible to me.
I blushed and looked away.
He saw my reaction and stuttered, “Barbara Jean, I—I just want you to know that as you get older, there will be body changes, so don’t be surprised or shocked by them.”
He didn’t say a word about the hair on his chest, and I remained none the wiser until a couple of girls at school set me straight and I finally learned what sex was all about.
Chapter 2
EVEN WELL INTO my teens, dating wasn’t much of a priority for me, and I wasn’t at all bent on having any romantic entanglements, simply because my whole life revolved around my love of singing. From the time that I could first talk, I was determined to grow up and become a singer. Luckily for me, my mother—always my biggest cheerleader—supported me every step of the way.
Apart from singing with her while we did the dishes together (she washed, I dried), whenever we had company I used to entertain them with a song or two. One day when I was fifteen, my mother’s best friend, Elinor Hoffman, slipped me a hundred-dollar bill (which was probably equivalent to a thousand dollars in today’s money) and said, “Barbara Jean, you’re genuinely talented. You should study singing and this ought to help you.”
I was thrilled and, with my mother’s approval, immediately enrolled in the San Francisco Conservatory, where Isaac Stern and Itzhak Perlman also studied (though not at the same time as me). There I had a fateful chance encounter.
One morning, Lorraine Hinton, a beautiful blond singing student who always wore extremely high heels (and later changed her name to Lori Hart) became ill and had to leave class early. Before she did, she begged me to cover for her in a gig that night.
Well, in those days, I didn’t even know what a gig was, but Lorraine swiftly enlightened me. She explained that I’d have to put on my prettiest dress and sing a couple of songs with a dance band at the Garden Room in the Claremont Hotel, high atop a hill overlooking Berkeley, and afterward I’d be paid twelve dollars.
Whoopee! Twelve whole dollars for doing what I’d always dreamed of doing! So I rushed home and put on my pink taffeta gown (the one my parents had bought me for my first formal school dance), which had puffed sleeves and a sweetheart neckline. My mother lent me a tiny gold heart on a chain, and before I knew it, I was on my way to the Claremont Hotel.
A glamorous resort built on thirteen thousand acres by a rich Kansas farmer as a tribute to his