Television Barnes' initial appearance on television was in the episode "The Man Who Beat Lupo" on
Ford Theatre. In 1959, she portrayed Lola in the NBC detective series
21 Beacon Street. In the 1960s, Barnes worked for producer
Martin Ransohoff and appeared in episodes of his
The Beverly Hillbillies ("Elly Goes to School" and "The Clampett Look") and was billed as special guest-star. Barnes played
Peter Falk's former wife on the 1965–1966 CBS series ''
The Trials of O'Brien and was host of the ABC daytime talk show Dateline: Hollywood'' in 1967. She appeared as Barbara Soames, a beautiful heiress turned hit woman involved in the murder of a Chicago mobster in season 4, episode 22 of
Hawaii Five-O, titled "Didn’t We Meet at a Murder?". She was also a frequent panellist in the early years of the syndicated version of ''
What's My Line?. Barnes became the 13th actress to play Jane when she appeared in Tarzan, the Ape Man'' (1959), with
Denny Miller as
Tarzan. She played the younger of the two Roman women who visited Peter Ustinov's gladiator school and thoughtlessly provoked a slave rebellion 1960's
Spartacus. In Disney's original 1961 version of
The Parent Trap starring
Hayley Mills, Barnes played gold-digger Vicki Robinson, who temporarily comes between
Maureen O'Hara and
Brian Keith. In the
1998 remake starring
Lindsay Lohan, she played Vicki Blake, the mother of the child-hating gold-digger and fiancée Meredith Blake (
Elaine Hendrix). In 1967, she appeared in
The War Wagon, a Western movie starring
John Wayne and
Kirk Douglas.
Writing Barnes was also a writer and columnist. In 1973, she told newspaper columnist
Dick Kleiner that she liked writing because "it is something you do yourself. With acting, if you win an Oscar or an Emmy, you have to thank everybody. If you write a book, it is completely your own." She wrote a book,
Starting from Scratch, about home decorating and several novels, including
The Deceivers (1970),
Who Is Carla Hart? (1973),
Pastora (1980), and
Silverwood (1985). She wrote a weekly book review for the
Los Angeles Times, and her column "Touching Home" was carried by the
Chicago Tribune and the New York News Syndicate. ==Personal life==