Barbara Eden unknowingly performed Vegas act in front of a dead man: ‘They covered him up with a tablecloth’
What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas… forever.
When they say the show must go on, they mean it.
Barbara Eden, the legendary television and cabaret star who just celebrated her 94th birthday, was a recent guest on Bill Maher’s Club Random podcast. The comic led Eden through the highlights of her career, including one macabre moment during a live performance in Las Vegas. As Eden told it, the expression “you really killed tonight” wasn’t just a figure of speech.
It was back in the early 1970s when Eden was opening for comedian Shecky Greene at the original MGM Grand in Las Vegas (later Bally’s, now the Horseshoe Las Vegas.) Eden said she and her mother would always stick around after her performance to watch Greene because he was so unpredictable onstage. But one night he came off and was cursing up a storm.
“We said, ‘What’s wrong? What’s wrong?’ He said, ‘How can I make people laugh with the dead guy in front?’ ”
When Maher pressed, “An actual dead guy?” Eden replied, “Ohhhh, yeah.”
Turns out, that when she was doing her act, someone had died in the crowd.
“They covered him up with a tablecloth,” she said. Clarifying, she added, “But I didn’t know it.”
When Maher asked if the rest of the audience was aware, she said she didn’t know but “they got the wife out of there.”
Maher, chuckling, added, “The Desert Inn has heart!,” a reference to the Albert Brooks film Lost in America, which includes a cautionary chapter about visiting Las Vegas. Eden simply repeated, “I found out about it afterward,” and explained that the lights onstage made it difficult to see even the front of the audience. (The dead man covered in the tablecloth was right up front, apparently.)
Some poking around on the internet shows that Eden and Greene were at the MGM Grand’s Celebrity Room in December 1973. At the time of this publication, an old program and menu from the event, in good shape, was selling on eBay for $157.50. Now that the world knows this story, the price should only go up.
Speaking of prices, the meals during the show were pretty darn expensive for 1973. The breast of chicken saute alfredo with egg noodles and sour cream went for $15. Online inflation calculators price that at somewhere between $90 and $105 today. Would you spend so much on dinner theater food in Vegas? Maybe the sticker shock is what killed that guy.
If the name Shecky Greene sounds like a pretend comedian to you, know that he was a pretty huge draw back in the day, and a regular on the talk show circuit. He also had a few dramatic roles. He was a regular on the influential 1960s Army drama Combat! and appeared in the Frank Sinatra-led private eye picture Tony Rome. He was also in Mel Brooks’ History of the World, Part I (as the baddie Marcus Vindictus), a film with a surfeit of like-minded performers including Henny Youngman, Jackie Mason, and Sid Caesar.
Eden, of course, is best known for her timeless performance as Jeannie on I Dream of Jeannie opposite Larry Hagman. That series ran from 1965 to 1970. Eden reprised the role in the television film I Dream of Jeannie… Fifteen Years Later in 1985 and I Still Dream of Jeannie in 1991.
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To watch more of Eden’s chat with Bill Maher, you can hit play on the video below.
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