Barbara Eden’s Life Was No Paradise
Starring as the titular genie in I Dream of Jeannie, Barbara Eden became a beloved icon nearly overnight, and her fame continues to this day. But Eden’s sweet blonde looks and bubbly disposition hid a multitude of nightmares. Behind the fantasy, she went through hell.
1. She Has A Hidden Talent
Born Barbara Jean Morehead in August of 1931, Eden grew up in a musical, performance-minded family, with her mother getting them through the Great Depression by singing to them. Eden followed suit: She began studying voice work and acting, and by 1955 she had changed her name to “Eden” and was making regular sketch appearances on The Johnny Carson Show.
But it wasn’t an easy road to Jeannie.
2. She Worked With The Best
Over the next decade, Eden worked with practically every star in 1950s Hollywood, including Lucille Ball and Andy Griffth, grinding away in supporting and guest roles first in television and then in films. There was some payoff: In 1959, she starred in A Private’s Affair, and the next year was co-lead with Elvis Presley in Flaming Star.
But even then, Eden didn’t have complete control of her life.
3. The Studio Set Her Up
In 1957, Eden was starring in the television version of How to Marry a Millionaire and had been dating a non-actor—much to the dismay of her studio, Twentieth Century Fox, who wanted her to promote the show with a celebrity boyfriend in tow. The studio pulled the oldest trick in the book. They organized to have Eden go on a date with Broken Arrow heartthrob Michael Ansara.
The executives thought it would be good publicity for both of them. It turned into a lot more.
4. She Accidentally Fell In Love
Neither Eden nor Ansara likely had high hopes for the studio date—Eden, after all, was seeing someone else, and Ansara had something of a high opinion of himself, knowing he was beloved by women around the world as Broken Arrow’s Cochise. It would have been a huge surprise to both of them, then, that they hit it off, and just a year later they were married.
Yet as both actors kept working, one heartbreaking issue emerged.
5. She Had Difficulty Getting Pregnant
Eden and Ansara would spend the next years working on films together, including Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Seven Different Ways. One thing was still missing. They tried to have a child, but even after six years nothing seemed to be taking.
By the 1960s, Eden was exhausted in both work and life. But the most momentous coincidence was just around the corner.
6. She Was In A Familiar Film
In 1964, Eden was back in a supporting role in The Brass Bottle, and its plot probably sounds eerily familiar: Harold Ventimore happens upon an old brass bottle and unwittingly releases a genie. As it happened, however, Eden didn’t play either of the genies (one male and one female) in the film, but rather took on the part of Harold’s fiancee.
One critic called The Brass Bottle “about as funny as your own funeral"—but it would end up giving Eden everything she needed.
7. Her Show Was A Copycat
In the mid 1960s, producer Sidney Sheldon was trying to come up with an answer to ABC’s popular suburban fantasy Bewitched, starring Elizabeth Montgomery, for NBC. When he saw The Brass Bottle, he had just the idea: Why not have a man unleash a female genie, and watch the hijinks ensue? So, I Dream of Jeannie was born.
You’d think it would be a straight line from this to Barbara Eden, only that’s not what happened.
8. The Producer Didn’t Want Her
Because Bewitched’s Elizabeth Montgomery was so obviously blonde, Sheldon was determined to make his genie a brunette and thus set his new show apart from the ABC juggernaut. Since Barbara Eden was blonder than blonde, she was out from the get-go.
Except, audition after audition, all the hopeful brunettes just didn’t seem to understand the Jeannie character, and Sheldon was left empty-handed. Almost, anyway.
9. He Finally Called Her
Throughout Sheldon’s quest to cast the lead of I Dream of Jeannie, people kept recommending one name to him: Barbara Eden. After all, she’d just acted in The Brass Bottle, and more than that, she had a decade of experience on a multitude of television shows. Finally, Sheldon caved, called Eden up, and soon realized she was perfect for the part, blonde hair and all.
Then he heard her news, and his jaw dropped.
10. She Had Big News
Soon after Sheldon told Eden she had gotten the role, the actress made a confession. The very day he had told her she was in, she’d also found out she was pregnant (at last), and her son Matthew was born in 1965.
It was immensely happy personal news for both Eden and her husband Ansara, but neither she nor Sheldon knew what they were going to do when it came to shooting the first season of I Dream of Jeannie. Their solution was ingenious.
11. She Acted Fast
In the end, Sidney Sheldon was so certain that Barbara Eden was his Jeannie, he set up the show at lightning speed, and they filmed 13 episodes before she was even showing. Once she was, clever tricks of art direction, like draping her in fabrics or having her stand behind counters, took care of the rest.
In any case, there were worse problems on set than Eden’s pregnancy.
12. Her Co-Star Was A Diva
In I Dream of Jeannie, Eden’s Jeannie is released from her bottle by astronaut Captain Tony Nelson, played by television legend Larry Hagman, and quickly falls in love despite Tony’s reservations. Hagman went on to star as JR Ewing in the soap opera Dallas—but he was something of a soap opera all his own.
While Eden was happy with the show, Hagman was dissatisfied with the scripts and often moody on set. He took it way too far.
13. He Acted Out On Set
According to one report, Hagman’s snits turned disturbing. At one point, frustrated at the writing of the latest episode and sick of playing second fiddle to Eden’s effervescent Jeannie, Hagman apparently threw a script down…and peed on it.
Eden, ever the consummate professional, only lightly recalled that Hagman’s dramas grew “wearying”. But she hadn’t seen anything yet.
14. Therapy Only Made It Worse
Throughout Jeannie’s run, Hagman didn’t calm down one bit. Eventually, producer Sidney Sheldon pushed him to get a therapist—and when Hagman complied, it only turned into a new kind of nightmare. According to Eden, Hagman came back saying that the therapist was encouraging him to relieve his stress by smoking joints and drinking bubbly…on set.
As if this wasn’t enough, the studio kept making its own drama.
15. The Studio Didn’t Believe In Her
I Dream of Jeannie debuted right before the color age of television, and even though Sheldon wanted its first season in color, NBC insisted it be in black and white. There was a cynical reason for this. Color would cost more—and NBC didn’t think the show would get renewed and so didn’t want to pony up the money. Then, when Sheldon offered to pay the difference personally, an executive told him, “Sidney, don’t throw your money away”.
Well, they were in for a surprise.
16. She Proved Them Wrong
Against the studio’s own predictions, I Dream of Jeannie was a solid performer. It would eventually run for five seasons and 139 episodes, spawn spinoffs ranging from comics to board games to an animated series, and have a second life in syndication. After all these years, Barbara Eden was now one of the screen darlings of the 1960s…but this attention wasn’t always good.
17. She Had An Infamous Body Part
Eden was merely trying to raise her son and do her job on I Dream of Jeannie, but other people kept getting in the way. Enter: the infamous belly button incident. See, in the early episodes of Jeannie, Eden’s high-waist costume pants would occasionally slip down and show her belly button, to no one’s concern at all.
Until, that is, a reporter wrote a piece about her so-called hidden navel. Cue a massive studio overreaction.
18. The Show Banned Her Belly Button
After this first belly button article came out, a deluge of others followed, until NBC decided to make a formal and iron-clad rule that there was to be absolutely no genie belly button on their show. They stuck to it: In one episode, Tony and Jeannie are in Hawaii, and while everyone else on set is in bikinis and crop tops, poor Eden had to sport a one piece.
It wasn’t the last way the studio did her dirty, but Eden knew how to take care of herself.
19. She Could Tame Lions
In the first season of I Dream of Jeannie, one of the episodes features a real lion. Funnily enough, Eden—as she relates in her memoir Jeannie Out of the Bottle—considered herself “somewhat of a lion expert,” and had previously had experience with big cats. As such, she set out to get to know the animal by letting it sniff her and slowly stroking it, and advised Larry Hagman to do the same.
Well, to the whole set’s horror, he didn’t take her advice.
20. Her Co-Star Fled
When it came time to shoot the scene with the lion, Eden and the beast got along famously—but the moment the lion spotted Hagman, he let out “an almighty roar”. Terrified, Hagman and several crew members fled the set, all while Eden presumably hung out with her new friend. But these antics couldn’t last forever.
21. The Show Worked For One Reason
For four seasons, I Dream of Jeannie walked a thin line when it came to Tony and Jeannie, with Jeannie all too willing to show her devotion to Tony and Tony desperately trying to make her see reason. In this way, the pair managed to live together without being together, a feat that was essential to the generative tension of the show.
But in the fifth season, one disastrous plot point changed all this.
22. A Crucial Detailed Changed
By 1969, the free love mentality of the 60s was well underway—almost over, in fact—and the studio decided that Tony and Jeannie needed to get with the times and come together…albeit through the institution of marriage. In the 69-70 season of I Dream of Jeannie, they had the pair wed, capping off the will-they-won’t-they of the past four years.
When the cast heard the news, their reaction wasn’t what you might expect.
23. One Episode Destroyed Everything
After finding out about the marriage plot, Barbara Eden’s stomach dropped. For all the “happy” plot twist, this wasn’t happy news. She knew her character and she knew her show, and this went against everything that worked about it. “It ruined the show,” she later said. “Because [Jeannie] wasn’t human…She thought she was, and [Tony] knew she wasn’t”.
Before long, Eden’s worst fears were confirmed.
24. The Studio Canceled Her Without Warning
If the studio was hoping the marriage plot in the fifth season would boost ratings, they were sorely mistaken. The show, already floundering with audiences, didn’t pick up after the wedding. It led to a snap decision: NBC decided to cancel the show not too long after the fifth season was filmed, while the show was on hiatus. Eden and her cast had no idea what hit them.
25. A Studio Guard Broke The News
Although Eden and Hagman hadn’t been happy with the marriage story and were well aware of the show’s anemic ratings, Jeannie ended painfully. The studio apparently didn’t get the news out fast enough, because Hagman actually found out about its cancelation from a studio lot guard.
As Hagman related in a later interview, he’d been returning from vacation to get something from his dressing room when a “guy at the gate” told him the news. Though Hagman could laugh a little at it as a “real Hollywood” moment, the effect on Eden was bitter.
26. She Lost Her Chosen Family
In the wake of the cancelation in 1970, Eden later admitted that “I felt just as if I had lost my family”. Then, adding wryly of her partying co-star Larry Hagman, “albeit one with a wild, delinquent terror of a brother!” The trouble was, it wasn’t just Eden’s TV family who was in danger. She was about to lose her real family, too.
27. Her Marriage Was In Trouble
Since the beginning of I Dream of Jeannie, Eden had been raising her son Matthew, trying to have another baby, and also trying to keep the equilibrium in her marriage to Michael Ansara. All of this proved difficult, especially the latter. While Eden became a star on the show, Ansara was working less and less—indeed, one of the jobs he got was because of Eden, as he took up a guest star role on Jeannie.
It began causing tension in the marriage, but it was a tragedy that would break them.
28. She Went Through A Nightmare Pregnancy
Around the time of Jeannie’s cancelation, Eden and her husband were pregnant again. It ended in horror. She carried the baby, another son, for eight months in her womb before the doctors told her had died in utero. Then, unimaginably, she had to carry him to term before giving birth to the stillborn baby.
No one could respond well to a tragedy of this magnitude, but Eden did herself no favors.
29. She Buried Herself In Work
Up until now, all Eden had known was working herself to the bone and building her family. In the face of this shattering blow to her personal life as well as her uncertain career prospects after the end of Jeannie, she threw herself into work, starring in no fewer than three television movies in the coming year.
She hoped it would make everything right again, but it just made things worse.
30. She Fell Into A Deep Depression
During this time, Eden later described how she “became numb” and—although she didn’t know it at the time—fell into a deep depression. As she later related her confused feelings: “‘I’m so lucky. I have this sweet child. I have a husband who loves me. What’s wrong with me?’” Eventually, the trauma caught up to her.
31. Her Marriage Couldn’t Take It
In 1974, Eden went through another heartbreak. After years of difficulty in their careers and their private lives, she and Michael Ansara filed for divorce. To make matters worse, the split badly hurt her son Matthew; as Eden remembered, he “took it horribly. He wanted his mommy and daddy to stay together”.
Eden’s choices after this were questionable at best.
32. She Fell In Love Again
The next era of Eden’s life isn’t well publicized, and for good reason: It was one of her darkest periods. Eden was still dealing with the depression that had helped tank her marriage when she began dating again, which may be why she chose to link up with the high-spirited Charles “Chuck” Fegert.
As she would describe him, “He was handsome, intelligent, and initially loads of fun”. Initially being the operative word.
33. She Chose The Wrong Man
In 1977, Eden and Fegert married—a rash decision she connects to her extreme loneliness at the time. Once they did, Fegert seemed to change: No longer was he just “loads of fun,” he also went out partying at all hours of the day, a lifestyle Eden had never regularly enjoyed even on I Dream of Jeannie.
Still, she might have been able to handle a difference of opinion. She couldn’t handle what Fegert did to her.
34. She Was A Victim
Thanks in part to his partying, Eden’s marriage with Ferget began to break down much faster than her union with Ansara had. It hit a terrifying climax. As Eden revealed, Fegert began getting physical with her, at which point she woke up and finally left the marriage, divorcing him in 1982 after just five years together.
It would take Eden a long time to truly pull herself out of this hole.
35. She Kept On Going
Eden always found a way to work in Hollywood, and she continued her steady stream of appearances through her second marriage, including starring in the movie Harper Valley PTA as well as its television version in 1981, right before her second divorce. While playing main character Stella Johnson, Eden was happy to wink at her most famous role: in one episode, she dresses in a blue and gold genie costume.
The show was a hit—and her next endeavor would reunite her with an old friend.
36. She Had A Long-Awaited Reunion
The 1980s were kind to Eden’s Jeannie co-star Larry Hagman, as he took up the role of villain JR Ewing in the massively successful soap opera Dallas. For all his dissatisfaction on Jeannie, Hagman never forgot about Eden, and he paid her back in the end. In 1990, Eden got a recurring role as one of Ewing’s nemeses, leading to five fun Dallas episodes where Eden and Hagman could play off each other once more.
Things were looking up elsewhere, too.
37. She Met A Good Man
In 1991, Eden married her current husband, real estate executive Jon Eicholtz, and the relationship brought her back to her best days with Ansara. “Jon is bright, funny, nonjudgmental,” Eden once said. “He’s my oak”. But by this time, Eden very much needed the support—because yet another part of her family life was going down the drain.
38. Her Son Struggled
As Eden’s son Matthew grew up post-divorce, it became increasingly clear that he wasn’t coping well with life in general. Although Matthew had chosen to live with Ansara after the split, he’d come back to live with Eden after her divorce from Fegert—and while there must have been some hope that the mother and son would help heal each other, by then Matthew was too far gone.
39. She Watched Him Fade
As Eden spent day in and day out with her son in the 1980s, she noticed disturbing details. For one, he had failed out of the University of California at Santa Barbara, though he had taken up new studies at Valley College. Yet aside from this, Eden also noted that her son was sleeping a lot, and in general had low energy.
It took a small slip for her to start learning the whole, dark truth.
40. He Lied To Her
Around this time, Eden realized that Matthew had forgotten one of his school books after heading out for the day. Eager for him to succeed, she ran to the Valley College campus to give the textbook back to him…which was when she found out through the registrar’s office that Matthew wasn’t even enrolled in the school.
The most harrowing revelations were yet to come.
41. He Ran Away From Home
When Eden confronted Matthew about his enrolment, it triggered a chain of cataclysmic events. Angry that his mother had discovered the truth, Matthew stormed out and was in the wind for months, living mostly on the streets before a friend took him in. Slowly, Eden and Ansara—who was now also alerted to Matthews’s issues—began putting together the puzzle pieces. The picture wasn’t pretty.
42. Her Son Was An Addict
Although Matthew never admitted as much to his parents, Eden finally figured out her son’s destructive secret. He was addicted to hard substances, which now seemed obvious in light of Matthew’s steadily decreasing weight and constant nodding off. In fact, Eden would soon find out that Matthew had been using some form of substance since he was 10 years old—just after her divorce from Ansara.
Desperate to help her son, Eden turned to gut-wrenching methods.
43. She Practiced Tough Love
Eden and Ansara now jumped headlong into Al-Anon meetings, doctor’s appointments, and counseling. As a result of her conversations with these professionals, Eden began to believe that “tough love” was the best approach, and around the time that Matthew began stealing from his parents to score, she kicked him out of the house.
It was, as she put it, “the hardest thing I ever had to do”. Yet it was just the beginning.
44. She Went Through Emotional Turmoil
For the next 14 years, Matthew was in and out of rehab and up and down emotionally. At times, he’d tell his parents he loved them “more than anyone in the world”; at others, he’d walk into Eden’s house and, laughing, tell her she “better lock up everything”.
Still, by his late 20s, Matthew’s life was together enough for him to be studying at UCLA, and he even married an accountant. Yet this too didn’t last.
45. She Saved Her Son
In the late 1990s, Eden’s son hit near his rock bottom. He began using again, prompting his wife to leave him. One day soon after, Eden received a terrifying call. It was Matthew, who said “Mom, I’m sick”. A frantic drive to his apartment found Matthew half-dead from an overdose, and Eden and two friends had to bring him to the hospital to save his life.
In the end, it would make little difference.
46. Her Son Met A Lonely End
In the early 2000s, Matthew had scraped himself clean again, and was once more engaged to be married and even managing to pick up acting jobs and was getting into bodybuilding. It all came crashing down, one last time: One late June evening in 2001, Matthew’s body was found in his parked truck at a gas station near Los Angeles.
When the police report came out, its revelations shook Eden.
47. Her Son Kept One Last Secret
Eden had spent years waiting for the nightmare call she received after Matthew died, and she was heartbroken but unsurprised to find he had perished from an overdose. But there was another shocking detail. Along with a syringe, officers found steroids in Matthew’s truck, which he had evidently been using to help him bulk up for bodybuilding.
As Eden put it regretfully, “Even when he was getting in shape, he did it like an addict—obsessively. He was unable to do anything in moderation”.
48. She’s Never Forgotten Him
Eden spent long years processing her guilt and anger surrounding her son's addiction and passing, and has spoken openly about her grief to the press in the hopes of helping other families like hers. Even so, the pain never lessens: As she recalled, “Even though he was 35, he was still my baby”.
49. Her Genie Bottle Had Humble Beginnings
Believe it or not, Jeannie’s iconic genie bottle wasn’t custom made. It came from a surprising source. It’s actually a special 1964 Christmas edition of a Jim Beam liquor decanter, and originally contained “Beam’s Choice” bourbon. There are a few tales about where exactly it came from, but the most likely is also the most simple: episode director Gene Nelson saw one at a store, liked it, and brought it to Sidney Sheldon. The rest was history.
50. She’s Still Got It
Eden has never been afraid to look back on her life, and has reprised or nodded to her role as Jeannie countless times over her long career—at 93 years old, she even continues to attend conventions. But she’s also the last of her kind: Larry Hagman passed in 2012 of throat cancer, and when Bill Daily (who played Tony’s best friend Roger Healey) passed in 2018, Eden was the last survivor of I Dream of Jeannie.
Still, despite all the pain in her life, Eden doesn’t just survive, she thrives. In a 2023 interview, she related, “I’m really lucky. I have dear friends. I have a wonderful family and a very supportive husband”.
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