I, Toto

The Phoenix Art Museum has been running a Hollywood Costumes exhibit, which I visited a couple weeks ago. There is quite a range there: Indiana Jones, Sweeney Todd, Queen Elizabeth I, Darth Vader, various Hitchcock heroines, a motion capture outfit (surely I wasn't the only one who noticed that Andy Serkis's quote was mislabeled as coming from Randy Serkis? That was terrible), and Dorothy's dress and slippers, among many more. 

So there were many movie books and such available for purchase, including many Wizard of Oz items. I wished I were 15 or so years younger so that I could get the toy basket with a Toto doll inside. Instead I ended up with the autobiography of the dog who played Toto; that's almost as good, anyway, isn't it? 

Willard Carroll put together this book; he describes in his introduction how he found the text in an old metal box on the site where Toto lived, trained, and was buried. Toto was originally known as Terry, and yes, she was a girl. Her owners were frustrated by her because she had accidents in the house, so they left her with Carl Spitz the dog trainer. Many of his dogs worked in movies, and he had no trouble training Terry until she, too, was ready for the acting business. She worked first with Shirley Temple, later on The Wizard of Oz, and on various other films over a course of years. 

This book, at just under a hundred pages, is short. It's also sweet. To accompany the text, there are also old photographs of Terry with the other dogs she lived with and the actors she worked with. A few newspaper clippings, illustrations, and reviews accompany the pictures. From a learning standpoint, this book offers a look into an area that is much-less explored, though it is within another area (The Wizard of Oz in general) that receives much attention. This book answers the question of who Toto was and also of what it was like for a dog to enter the acting business. The old-fashioned voice and style are quaint and simple, making you quite adore the dog who became Toto. 

Barbara Eden's Jeannie Out of the Bottle

Question. Am I reading more non-fiction these days? I hardly used to read any before. My theory on this observation is that most people tend to read non-fiction (versus fiction) because it is about something that interests them, and when you're younger, you're still figuring out what you like. In my teens, I read movie companions for movies I liked, but most of the non-fiction books I bought I never finished, if I even started them. Now when I buy one, I actually do read it, saying that it's because it's by such-and-such or it's about such-and-such. Because, that is, I am genuinely interested.


This spring, Barbara Eden published her autobiography, Jeannie Out of the Bottle, which I just finished reading tonight. What perfect timing for this book to come out, not so long after my "discovery" of I Dream of Jeannie. (This is the second Jeannie book I have read--the other was Dreaming of Jeannie: TV's Prime Time in a Bottle, which I don't believe I ever commented on here.) I was glad to get this book (which I seem to be saying often lately--am I that emotionally involved?), though it's worth noting that as an autobiography, I Dream of Jeannie is not its only subject matter. But I liked everything else, too, from learning about Barbara Eden's youth, her entrance into show-business, and her encounters with various big names. The Lucille Ball bit was interesting (one does love to hear about intersections between people from two shows one loves), if also sad. If you're wondering, Barbara Eden appears in the I Love Lucy episode "Country Club Dance," which I just watched this summer knowing for the first time that it was she in the role.

A couple of sentences caught my particular attention. Now, I knew that most everybody involved in the show (I Dream of Jeannie, that is) had been against the wedding in the fifth season. But I didn't realize this: "After all, I Dream of Jeannie's abiding theme was Jeannie's unrequited love for Major Nelson, his belief that she was just a figment of his imagination, and her stubborn insistence that she was real" (Barbara Eden, Jeannie Out of the Bottle, 2011). The first time I read that, I probably took it a little further than it actually is, but still. I don't know if I interpreted the show quite in that way. I always took delight in the fact that Jeannie and Tony adore each other, but often don't show it in the usual, obvious ways. Because, honestly, I don't see it as such a bad thing that they got married in the end. Although I don't think Barbara made any mention of this in her book, I've heard elsewhere (from more than one place) that the show was already under threat of cancellation; if that's the case, the wedding didn't change anything from that perspective. But it does allow for a kind of "happy ending" sense to the show; to me, it makes it so that it didn't really just end, it concluded.

Anyway, I must go and stow away another good book on my shelves. And, yes, that will be a feat in itself: there is hardly any spare space left, I have so many books.