The Costume That Turned a Struggling Actress Into a Hollywood Icon

For more than a decade, she was almost famous.

Not a star. Not a name on a marquee. Just a familiar face you couldn’t quite place — the pretty blonde in the guest spot, the supporting player who worked constantly and disappeared just as quickly.

Then one costume, one network controversy over a few inches of skin, and one extraordinary piece of timing turned Barbara Eden into one of the most recognizable women in America.

She was born Barbara Jean Morehead on August 23, 1931, in Tucson, Arizona. Her parents divorced when she was young, and she and her mother moved to San Francisco, the city where she grew up, went to school, and discovered she could sing. By fourteen, she was performing with local bands in San Francisco nightclubs for ten dollars a night — a teenager with a voice big enough to fill a room. She graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School in 1949, trained at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and studied acting as well. She was beautiful, disciplined, gifted, and completely unknown.

So she did what thousands of hopeful performers do. She moved to Los Angeles in the early 1950s and started the slow climb from nothing.

Small television roles. A line here, a scene there. Father Knows Best. Gunsmoke. The Andy Griffith Show. In 1960, she landed a named role opposite Elvis Presley in the Western Flaming Star. She kept working, kept showing up, and remained, by Hollywood’s unforgiving standards, a supporting player. Years passed. The kind of career that could quietly convince someone the big break might never come.

Then, in 1965, the phone rang.

Sidney Sheldon, a television writer and producer, was developing a fantasy sitcom for NBC — a two-thousand-year-old genie who falls for the astronaut who discovers her bottle. He had auditioned numerous actresses for the lead, but none had quite fit the role. Then he saw Barbara Eden, and the search was over.

There was just one complication, and it arrived at the worst possible moment.

On the same day the show was sold to NBC, Barbara’s doctor told her she was pregnant. She feared the opportunity was over before it had even begun. She assumed the network might look for someone else.

Sheldon refused. He believed no one else could play Jeannie.

Here is what most people miss: the show that made her a household name was filmed while she was concealing a pregnancy in plain sight. The costume was redesigned, extra veils were added, and she filmed the first episodes with a growing baby bump carefully hidden beneath what she later jokingly called a walking tent. On August 29, 1965, during a break in filming, she gave birth to her son, Matthew. She later called him her lucky-charm baby. The series premiered on NBC weeks later, and the woman who had spent a decade almost making it became, almost overnight, unmistakable.

And then there was the belly button.

The genie costume left her midriff exposed, and NBC’s television standards at the time required that her navel remain covered. Eden later recalled executives seriously discussing how much of her costume could be shown on screen. The situation became even more amusing when other programs could feature bikini-clad performers with their midriffs fully visible, while Jeannie’s costume had to follow different rules. Decades later, Eden could laugh about the whole thing. Other performers became famous for glamorous features. She joked that she became famous partly because television executives were so concerned about her belly button.

I Dream of Jeannie ran for five seasons, from 1965 until 1970, with Larry Hagman playing astronaut Tony Nelson. The series turned Eden into a television icon and eventually earned her a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

But behind the fame, her life carried a weight no camera ever captured.

Her son Matthew grew up under the attention that came with having two famous parents — Barbara and actor Michael Ansara, whom she had married in 1958. When Matthew was nineteen, she discovered that he was struggling with drug addiction. She helped him enter treatment. He went. He returned home. He went back again. For roughly fourteen years, he moved through repeated periods of treatment and recovery, and she experienced the helplessness that fame and money cannot solve — the helplessness of a mother who cannot simply fix the problem hurting her child.

There were also periods of genuine hope. Matthew became sober, took up bodybuilding, became engaged, and seemed to be building a more stable life.

On June 25, 2001, Barbara Eden’s only child was found dead in his car at a gas station in Monrovia, California. He was thirty-five. His death was caused by a heroin overdose. The child she had once called her lucky charm was gone. Years later, she spoke about him with affection, remembering the person he was when he was sober and acknowledging how painful his struggle had been. She devoted parts of her 2011 memoir, Jeannie Out of the Bottle — a New York Times bestseller — to his memory and continued speaking about his life in the hope that her experience might help other families facing similar struggles.

Her own life eventually found a lasting sense of stability. After her marriage to Ansara ended in 1974 and a second marriage ended in the early 1980s, she married Jon Eicholtz in 1991. Their partnership has lasted more than three decades, and Eden has described it as an important source of happiness and stability in her later life.

She is now ninety-four. Still appearing at events. Still crossing her arms and tilting her head to give audiences the familiar wink they came to see. Still, after everything, Jeannie.

The magic people remember was never really in the bottle. It was in the woman who kept standing back up, on camera and off, long after the cameras stopped rolling.