When actress Barbara Eden comes on the line from her home in Beverly Hills, she says she’s expecting her friend and fellow actor Hal Linden to come over to rehearse later.
The stars of the classic sitcoms “I Dream of Jeannie” and “Barney Miller” have a stage play to rehearse before the curtain rises on their performance of playwright A.R. Gurney’s “Love Letters” at the El Portal Theatre in North Hollywood.
“He’s coming over in about half an hour to go over the script,” Eden explains. “We’ll run it all week probably.”
“I’ve done ‘Love Letters’ with a few other people through time,” Linden says the following morning. “It’s a wonderful property and everybody’s different. It’s fascinating.
“I started doing it with Barbara, I don’t know, 20 years ago, and we just kind of hit it off,” he says. “It was a good team, and so this is kind of a re-imagining as we get older.”
How much older? Well, both Eden and Linden are 94 now, which Linden says might give them a record of sorts.
“We may be the most senior ‘Love Letters’ in history,” he says, a statement that’s almost certainly true. “I’ve seen it with young people, because I still remember when it came out [in 1989]. Everybody did it. And it always appeared to me it worked better if the couple were at their closing age [of the characters] rather than pretending to be old.
“It’s easier to pretend to be young,” Linden says. “It works better this way.”
“Love Letters” has long been a favorite of name actors such as Eden and Linden. Its two characters, Melissa Gardner and Andrew Makepeace Ladd III, are lifelong friends who sit at tables on stage as the play unfolds, reading the letters, cards and notes they’ve exchanged over five decades, considering all the what-ifs and roads not taken that might have changed their lives.
Linden has played Alex alongside actresses such as Loni Anderson, Dorothy Loudon, Julie Harris, and his late wife, actress Frances Linden. Eden, in addition to Linden, has played Melissa with actor Larry Hagman, her former costar on “I Dream of Jeannie.”
“It was wonderful working with both of them,” Eden says. “The script is really just fabulous, and for an actor, it’s really good because you start as children and go up until … you know, I’m not supposed to say death, but yeah, it does.”
Linden and Eden had only worked together once before they struck up their “Love Letters” partnership. In the 1976 TV movie “How to Break Up a Happy Divorce,” Eden played a woman who gets upset when her ex-husband enters a new relationship, so to make him jealous, she takes up with a handsome man-about-town played by Linden. [If you have never seen a ’70s TV movie, the title and plot of this one tells you everything you need to know.]
“Every Melissa is different,” Linden says of Alex’s counterpart in the play. “Because everybody catches different parts of that character.
“You think of Barbara, you think of perky,” he says. “That’s the word for Barbara. And there is a perkiness to her character [of Melissa]. But that makes the kind of tragic – she makes it even more tragic. It’s fascinating to watch.”
Linden and Eden have been compelling to watch on stage or screen for decades.
Eden, who was raised in San Francisco, got her start in television in 1956 when she was a regular on “The Johnny Carson Show,” a short-lived pre-“Tonight Show” sketch comedy series.
Linden, who was born and raised in the Bronx, started his stage career as a musician and singer in big band jazz groups. Later, he switched to acting and landed his first role on Broadway in 1958 when he took over the lead male role in “Bells Are Ringing” opposite Judy Holliday.
But their signature roles came in the popular TV sitcoms “I Dream of Jeannie,” which ran from 1965 to 1970, and “Barney Miller,” which ran from 1975 to 1982.
In separate conversations, they talked about their shows, as well as some of the more offbeat moments in their colorful careers and more.
Belly button blues
In “I Dream of Jeannie,” Eden played a literal genie in a bottle who was found by Captain Tony Nelson, an astronaut played by Hagman, who lands on a desert island and frees Jeannie from 2,000 years of captivity.
She falls madly in love with him; he loves her back while trying to keep her presence in his life a secret from the brass.
Jeannie’s usual costume was a pink chiffon genie outfit with flowing harem pants, a bolero jacket and a bare midriff, the latter of which eventually led to controversy.
Mike Connolly, an influential gossip columnist at the Hollywood Reporter at the time “Jeannie” debuted, stopped by the set one day and started to tease Eden about the way her costume was cut high on her waist. She seemed not to have a navel, he teased.
“He joked a lot, and he said, “I don’t believe you have one,’” Eden says. “I said, ‘Oh, I have one.’
“He said, ‘Well, let me see.’ I said, ‘Uh-uh, nickel a peek,” Eden recalls, before adding, “I didn’t have much respect for my belly button there.”
“Connolly wrote about it, which gossip stringers around the country picked up, and then suddenly, the group that monitors whatever is going on on the show [the network’s standards and practices department] said, “‘Oh no! She cannot show her belly button,’” Eden says.
“Well, it wasn’t really ever there unless I put my arms up in the air,” she continues. “Then it would be there. But they took this lovely costume, which was chiffon, pretty, and said I had to have a lining in it.
“Now I was already wearing dancer’s tights and panties, and then two layers of chiffon, I mean, it was ridiculous,” Eden says. “They had a full list of don’ts. Like, Larry couldn’t have the [genie’s] bottle in the bedroom. Ridiculous!”
An X-rated sitcom
Linden had mostly worked on Broadway until the early ’70s when he found himself in high demand in Hollywood.
“I was on Broadway in the revival of ‘Pajama Game’ and I had three offers for TV pilots,” he says. “But the only one that was a sitcom that was going to be filmed in front of a live audience was ‘Barney Miller.”
He picked the right show – neither of the other pilots got picked up – but because the writing staff was always reworking the pages as the show was shot, the plan for live audiences was quickly dropped.
The series, created by Danny Arnold, was set in a New York Police Department detective squad room. Linden played the captain overseeing the work of a motley crew of detectives, including the sad-faced Fish (Abe Vigoda), the blue-collared Wojo (Max Gail), dapper detective Harris (Ron Glass), and deadpan Nick (Jack Soo).
After four episodes as a mid-season replacement, the ratings weren’t good, Linden remembers. Then came episode five, “The Courtesans,” and fate intervened.
“Wojo had fallen for a hooker, and his way of dealing with it was to arrest the entire house [of prostitution],” he says. “So we would have hookers all over the place, sitting at desks making statements, which is a real waste of time because they never show up for court.
“So I tell him, ‘You can’t do this, Wojo, you can’t just waste the resources, we’ve got important things to do,’” Linden continues. “So he asks her for a date. She says, ‘Sure, like everybody else, 50 bucks.’”
Wojo, a Polish Catholic, is devastated, and so Barney has a kind of father-son talk with him before heading home for the night.
“And as he turns to leave, he turns back and says, ‘Barney, can you lend me 50 bucks ’til payday?’” Linden says. “Now you don’t have to be a writer to figure out that the entire episode was written to get to that line.”
But not everyone was pleased. Outside the set, showrunner Arnold and the network suits were having a furious argument about that ending. Aware of the discord, the show’s director called Arnold, asking how to shoot the ending.
“Danny says, ‘Shoot it the way it’s written,’” Linden says. “Hangs up the phone, turns to the network guy and says, ‘We’re going to do this show the way it’s written. If you don’t put it on, I’m not going to do any more.
“And you talk about [courage]?” Linden laughs. “We’re in 55th place, and this guy is threatening not to make any more. The network caved.
“I think it was the only time in history that a sitcom had an X rating in front,” he adds.
Wait, what?
“They ran an X rating in front of,” Linden repeats. “Two stations, I think one in Alabama, one in Louisiana, said we’re not going to run it. But the word got out that there was such a thing as an X-rated sitcom, and we went from 55th place to 23rd place.”
Elvis is a gentleman
Five years before Eden landed on “I Dream of Jeannie,” she played Roslyn Pierce, the love interest of Elvis Presley’s character Pacer Burton in “Flaming Star.”
Was it burnin’ love? Well, the trailer for the 1960 movie described Roslyn as “the beauty who fired the conflict in Pacer’s soul,” so apparently.
“He was just a gentleman,” Eden says of Presley. “I’d come on the set and he’d run and get me a chair. You know, actors don’t do that. [She laughs]. They’re very concerned with what they’re doing.”
Between scenes, they’d talk together, she remembers.
“We talked a lot on location while they were setting the cameras,” Eden says. “His father was with him and a friend, and they’d play their guitar and sing.
“I don’t know if you remember Cochise,” she asks of the Apache chief character played by Michael Ansara, then Eden’s husband, in the TV series “Broken Arrow.” “Elvis was a fan of Mike’s. He would ask me, ‘How do you work in this business and stay married? It’s just crazy.’
“I said, ‘Well, no, it’s not crazy; it’s our job,’” Eden says. “Sometimes he goes one way and I go another way, but it’s a family and it’s a job.
“And he said, ‘Well, you know, I met this girl and I don’t know. I really like her a lot, but I don’t know about bringing her over here.’ I didn’t know what to tell him. I just said, ‘Well, you have to work that out.’ And he did. He brought Priscilla over.”
Many years later, Eden says she met Priscilla Presley at an event.
“I said, ‘I knew about you before anyone did.’ She was so pleased to hear that.”
Trouble in the theater
Linden has always been a song-and-dance man. He won a Tony Award in 1971 for best performance by a leading actor in a musical for “The Rothschilds,” and later in life, he toured with a cabaret act.
Eden was a regular stage actress too, performing in musicals such as “South Pacific” with Robert Goulet, and “The Pajama Game” with John Raitt, as well as singing in her own act in Las Vegas for many years.
Both are aware of the unpredictability of live performance.
After discussing the glamorous Bob Mackie gowns and mix of soft rock and country western songs she performed in Vegas, Eden paused, and then asked, “I’ll tell you a funny story if you want another.”
Of course!
“I came off the stage and my conductor was standing there and he said, ‘Well, you really killed ’em tonight, Barbara,’” she says. “I said, ‘Oh, thank you, and I went upstairs to my dressing room, changed into my clothes.
“My mother was there with me and went down to watch Shecky Greene, who was very popular at the time,” Eden continues. “We’d always watch him because we never knew what he was going to do.
“Then Shecky came off and wiped the sweat off his face and said, ‘How can I make people laugh with a dead guy out there?” I said, ‘A dead guy? What are you talking about, a dead guy?’
“He said, ‘He’s right there, can’t you tell? He’s right next to the stage,’” Eden says. “Oh my God. With the lights and everything, I didn’t pay attention to what was going on down below me. But apparently, he had a heart attack and they covered him and let the show go on.”
Thankfully, no one dies in Linden’s theatrical mishap story, but when asked if it’s OK to tell him to break a leg when he gets on stage with Eden, you can feel him flinch through the telephone.
“I’ve done that. Broke a leg,” he says. “In rehearsal for a concert I was giving, I think down in Orange County. They were working under the stage in the wings and I didn’t see it.
“Walked into the wings and stepped in and broke my leg,” Linden says. “Anyway, don’t say break a leg, say ‘merde,’ French for [bleep]. That’s an old theater line.”
‘Love Letters’
What: Actors Barbara Eden and Hal Linden perform A.R. Gurney’s play.
Where: El Portal Theatre, 5269 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood
When: 7 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 22
How much: $53-$130. A VIP meet-and-greet ticket for photo and autographs is available for an additional $150.
For more: See elportaltheatre.com/loveletters.html