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television scripts.
    He arrived in Hollywood in 1939, when he was 22. By 1947, he’d won an Oscar for best original screenplay, for The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer , starring Cary Grant and Shirley Temple. In 1962, he gave up film work to write and create The Patty Duke Show for Screen Gems. The one-joke sitcom about identical cousins was an immediate hit—the #18 show for the 1963–64 season. So Screen Gems asked him for another sitcom and all but guaranteed they’d air anything he created.
    Sheldon worked fast. It took him two days to come up with a whole new show. As he told Richard Barnes in Diary of a Genie , it was a Saturday, and he was planning to fly from New York to L.A. the next day to meet with studio execs. “I decided to bring them an outline of [the] show that I wanted to do....On Saturday I started dictating the outline of I Dream of Jeannie .” It started out as a few ideas, but “as I started dictating, it began to get fuller and fuller....[So] I decided to turn it into an entire script.”
    He handwrote most of the script the next day on the plane heading west and presented it at the meeting. Screen Gems bought it as the pilot for Jeannie. “The moral of the story,” Sheldon says, “is that when you get an idea, write it down immediately.” The show aired for five years, from 1965 to 1970.
    INSIDE FACTS
    The inspiration for Jeannie was the 1964 Universal motion picture, The Brass Bottle. The familiar plot: A portly ancient genie (Burl Ives) appears from a lamp to serve his master (Tony Randall). Though he’sfilled with good intentions, the genie keeps getting Randall into trouble. Sheldon said: “I thought that it would be fun to make the genie a beautiful young girl who says, ‘What can I do for you, Master?’”
     
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    In 1941, a gallon of regular gas cost 19.2¢.
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    Sheldon got one other thing from the film—his star. Barbara Eden played Randall’s girlfriend. Sheldon thought she’d be perfect for what he described as “the all-American fantasy,” and never even considered anyone else for the part.
    THE GREAT NAVEL WAR
    Although Sheldon and the network censors had no objection to Barbara Eden’s sexy costume or the fact that the unmarried Jeannie was living with a man for whom she would do anything , they refused to let her show her navel on network TV.
    The solution: She put a flesh-colored cloth plug in it during filming. The joke on the set was that genies weren’t born with navels.
    When George Schlatter, producer of TV’s Laugh-In wanted to debut Eden’s navel on his program, Sheldon and NBC censors stopped him. It wasn’t until the reunion movies that Jeannie ever appeared on TV with a belly button.
    THE NASA CONNECTION
    The astronauts in Jeannie were often bumbling idiots, but NASA was happy to cooperate fully with the show. All they really cared about was eliminating anything that smacked of militarism. They wanted to guarantee that the show would “project the image of the space program as a peaceful, scientific exploration of space.”
    BOTTLED UP
    The recognizable “Jeannie bottle” used in the series was originally made from a 1964 Jim Beam liquor decanter that had been given to producer Sidney Sheldon for Christmas. It was painted by the show’s prop department. In October, 1995, a bottle used on the series was auctioned off for $10,000.
    FLOP TREATMENT
    Screen Gems didn’t think Jeannie was going to be a hit, so they decided to save money and shoot the first season in black and white. It was one of NBC’s last black-and-white shows ever.
     
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    So far, every U.S. president with a beard has been a Republican.
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BATHROOM ORIGINS
    We’ve all heard of these products before. Here’s where they come from.
    E X-LAX
    In 1906 Max Kiss (that’s his real name), a Hungarian-born pharmacist living in the U.S., came up with an over-the-counter version of a new prescription laxative called phenolphthalein. Kiss called his new chocolate tablets Bo-Bos, but