by LARRY HAGMAN
We also took over a neglected patch of dirt and weeds in the back. Maj turned it into a palette of bright flowers.
The rest was up to me. I knew to make it as an actor I needed a combination of talent, thick skin, luck, and connections. I believed I possessed talent and thick skin. Luckily, it turned out, I also had a connection. Ted Flicker. Teddy, my roommate from London, was directing William Saroyan’s play Once Around the Block at the Cherry Lane Theatre, and he gave me a job playing a cop. Every night I would run around the block two times before making my entrance in the first act so I’d really seem out of breath from having chased a burglar, as my character was supposed to have done.
The first part that allowed me to show what I was capable of was in an off-Broadway production of Career, James Lee’s play about an actor determined to succeed on Broadway. It was at the Seventh Avenue Playhouse. I had a small part as a serviceman returning home from the European theater. At the top of the third act, I had a four-minute scene that stopped the show. The audience howled. That part enabled me to get a great agent, Jane Dacy, who also represented George C. Scott, who was also starting out.
Career ran for about a year, and during that time Maj became pregnant again. We were ecstatic. We were also broke. At one point, we were paying for groceries with money that Maj’s sister Bebe—who was living with us while she got her New York nursing license—got for selling her blood to the Red Cross. I could’ve asked my mother for money, but pride wouldn’t let me. We were also estranged since my fight with Richard in Brazil. At the time, she was rehearsing for a new show, and some days the two of us were blocks from each other, yet we didn’t communicate.
One day Maj finally picked up the phone and called her. My mother was a little tentative at first, wondering why Maj was calling.
“Mary,” she said, “I come from a family where, if you have a difference, you work it out.”
My mother was silent.
“It’s a shame that you and Larry are gonna be this way,” Maj continued. “We’re going to have a baby. You’re going to be a grandma.”
More silence.
“You should talk to him,” Maj said.
“It’s up to him,” my mother finally said.
That was the opening Maj needed. The two of them talked for about forty-five more minutes. I think my mother was impressed that Maj had the guts to phone her and mediate a problem that the two of us were too stubborn to confront.
“Look, if I can make Larry go over to where you’re rehearsing, will you talk to him?”
“Yes.”
That was the beginning of a better relationship. The next day I saw her backstage. The hard part had been taken care of by Maj. All my mom and I had to do was talk about the future … how Maj was feeling, the baby, the excitement, and work. We built from there.
* * *
Maj built too, but her due date arrived without any hint the baby might be ready to come out. She hadn’t felt a single labor pain. We went from wondering where her water was going to break to what it would take to break it. We were invited to a party at a friend’s apartment across the city. Given her condition, I didn’t think it was a good idea to go, but Maj insisted. She was tired of being cooped up, fat, and uncomfortable.
We had two vehicles, our Austin-Healey and a Vespa motor scooter. Maj made me get out the Vespa so, as she said, she could feel the wind against her face.
It was against my better judgment. Nonetheless, I loaded her onto the back.
“Larry, it’s like when we were in London,” she beamed. “Let’s go.”
She held on tight and we scooted into the night. Less than a mile later, I drove over a pothole and Maj’s water broke. It was probably the first time a pothole proved useful. Instead of the party, we ended up at Lenox Hill Hospital, where doctors told us the ride had induced Maj into labor.
Unfortunately it wasn’t an easy one. After several false alarms, the doctors sent me home and promised to call when the action started. I went outside and saw the ground was covered with snow, two feet of it. There was no traffic in the streets. New York was at a standstill. Rather than go all the way downtown to the Village, I stayed at Val D’Auvray’s apartment, which was just three blocks away from the hospital. A lot of years had passed since Mom had cracked open my piggy bank to flee from him. He’d contacted me when we moved to New York City and he and his wife, Jane, had become fast friends.
When the doctor finally called, about 3 A.M., it wasn’t with good news. He said Maj was having trouble. The baby was stuck in her pelvic area and he needed permission to take the baby out with a C-section. That was major surgery. I worried about Maj and the baby and felt helpless and scared.
“Jesus, do you have to?” I asked.
“Do you want your kid to be able to count to ten?” he said.
“Take the child.”
* * *
I saw Heidi Kristina Mary in the nursery while Maj was still under anesthesia. She was adorable. As Maj woke up, I was able to tell her our baby was perfect. After spending a week in the hospital, Maj and the baby were ready to come home. My mother, not wanting to think of me cramming Maj and the baby on the back of the Vespa, made sure her granddaughter traveled in style. She sent her Rolls-Royce and chauffeur to the hospital to take all of us home.
A week later, I received the bill for Maj’s surgery and hospital stay. It was about $1,000. We didn’t have a cent. We couldn’t pay the bill. No way.
I met with the hospital’s head accountant, a nice woman who glanced through my paperwork while I told her that I felt terribly embarrassed about being unable to meet my obligation.
“Larry Hagman?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Do you remember a guy named John Salmon?”
John Salmon. I hadn’t thought of him for years. But sure, I remembered him.
“He was one of my best friends at Trinity.”
She smiled warmly. “Well, I’m his mother.”
The news immediately put me at ease. She worked out a payment plan, and I went home just as broke as before but feeling relieved. A few weeks later, I sold the Austin-Healey for $1,200, used the bulk of that to pay off the bill, and still had $200 left over. Suddenly we were rich.
* * *
Things got even better. My agent, Jane, came through with a job, getting me a role in the Ziv production of The West Point Story, an important show at the time. I got my part, learned my lines, and was supposed to report at 8 A.M. Monday morning at West Point, where the series was filmed. Embarrassingly, I miscalculated how long it would take to get there and arrived two hours late for my first TV job. I was appalled but not to the point where I gave up.
Off in the distance, on the drill field, I saw what looked like a film crew, not that I’d ever seen one, and to make up for lost time I drove right up to it. As I jumped the curb, I pulled off the car’s muffler and roared across the drill field. I was greeted by the first assistant director, who threw his hat down and said, “Who the hell are you? Don’t you understand we’re shooting out here and cant have that noise! We’ve got six hundred cadets out here marching behind our actors, and you ruined the shot!”
I told him who I was and he said, “Go to costume and makeup and get back here as soon as you can.” I started the car up again and drove across the vast expanse of the field again, noticing everyone behind me covering their ears and shaking their heads. I somehow got through the two days I was shooting and was never asked to reappear on The West Point Story again.
However, Ziv had another series shooting in Florida, with Lloyd Bridges. It was called Sea Hunt, and a couple weeks later I went down there to do one show. Either they liked me or there weren’t many actors who could scuba dive, because they kept me there for two more shows. Lloyd was a wonderful man who had the patience to help a neophyte like me learn the ins and outs of working in front of a camera. I also remember his two little boys were down there, Jeff and Beau, and both would become terrific actors just like their dad.
I returned home to Connecticut, to the Peter Pan House, where Maj, Heidi, and Bebe were staying while I was away. Mom was on the road at the time too. Anyway, I came back with a fistful of per diem, which Maj was happy to see since she was so broke she’d had to borrow five bucks from my mother’s butler in order to buy groceries. I looked into the doll’s carriage outside on the porch and there was my daughter, Heidi, pink and rosy, covered with a light dusting of snow. I was furious.
“She’s going to freeze,” I said.
“No, it’s healthy,” Maj said. “She’s getting fresh air. It’s good for her.”
When Richard found out that Maj had borrowed five bucks from the butler he blew up at Maj. Big mistake. It was one thing to get angry at me, but an altogether different thing when he targeted Maj. She handed him his head, and we moved back to the Village apartment, which was suddenly way too small for the four of us. We had to move. Maj opened up the newspaper and searched the ads.
* * *
Though we hated to leave our beloved two-room, Aaron-Burr-slept-here place in the Village, our new apartment, located at 159 West Forty-ninth Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, was smack in the middle of the Times Square district. It was exactly what Maj and I had wished for the day we arrived in New York. It was also one of the greatest bargains ever. For $269.60 a month, we got four bedrooms, three bathrooms, two living rooms, a kitchen, a rooftop terrace, and the aroma of being right above the Sun Luck Chinese Restaurant.
We never ate there because they kept shutting off our heat and hot water. We had a running feud with them.
However, we did eat right next door, at the Canton Village, which was run by Pearl, a very sophisticated Chinese lady who’d come to the States with a Chinese dance act. She danced on huge wooden balls three or four feet in diameter and played some of the best vaudeville theaters in America. When the act moved on, Pearl stayed in New York City. She was a kind and wonderful person who let us run up huge bills. Years later, when I got I Dream of Jeannie, I was in New York on a press junket and paid her $2,500, plus a 15 percent tip for her staff, for all that I owed, and we stayed friends forever.
Our new apartment also came with a history. Prior to us, it had been a bookie joint, and before that it had been a whorehouse run by the famous madam Polly Adler. We took advantage of having so much space by constantly offering friends a place to stay. But there were so many other people knocking on the door from its previous incarnations that we had to be extremely vigilant about locking the door.
Not that it always worked. One night I was awakened by a noise. It was around three or four in the morning. We didn’t have any guests at the time, so I got out of bed and cautiously searched the apartment. I went room by room until I found an old drunken sailor pissing in the back bathroom. He was irritated. He didn’t even wait for me to ask what he was doing in my house.
“Where’s Polly?” he asked.
“Huh?” I said.
“Polly Adler.”
“She’s gone.”
“Well, goddamnit, she had the best whorehouse in Manhattan.”
“I can’t help you. Sorry.”
The apartment couldn’t have been more convenient when I was cast in the play Comes a Day, a new drama by Speed Lamkin. It took one minute and twenty seconds to walk from my front door to the theater in which I made my Broadway debut. The production also starred Judith Anderson, George C. Scott—in his first Broadway play too—and Brandon De Wilde, the child actor from the movie Shane.
My proximity to the theater didn’t matter much, as I learned that working with George created many unexpected detours. He was brilliant in the play. He was nominated for, and should’ve won, the Tony Award. But his life offstage was far more dramatic than anything he did on it. I’d worked with George before, on The Alcoa Hour, a television show. One day George came to rehearsal limping. He was clearly in pain. I asked if he had a problem. George lifted up his shirt and I saw the side of his body, from shoulder to waist, was black-and-blue.
George explained that he’d beaten up a cop. Actually, he’d started with one and then taken on three or four—he couldn’t remember the exact count—who then beat the crap out of him with sand-filled socks, bruising his kidneys. As a result, he came to the studio pissing blood. But the point is, he came to the studio and he turned in a great performance.
He was no more together when we previewed the play in Philadelphia. He asked me to do him a little favor by picking up his pregnant wife at the airport between shows. Then he wanted me to take her to a room on the fourteenth floor of his hotel. Not his room, mind you, but a room I was to say was his.
No problem.
I didn’t have a problem because he’d already cornered the market on problems. George couldn’t pick up his wife because he had to meet an old mistress in the coffee shop … and the child he had with her … and her new husband.
Later, after I’d settled his wife into her/his room, he tracked me down. He had another problem.
“Larry, can you go downstairs and ward off Colleen Dewhurst? She just showed up. They called me. She’s in the lobby.”
“Anything else I should know?”
“She’s pregnant too. So please go down there and spend some time with her until I can get out of the coffee shop. I’ll meet you in the lobby.”
That was just a warm-up for New York. On opening night, George roared into our dressing room ready to explode. He’d spent the day with Colleen, who was due to give birth at any moment. Moments earlier, at the stage door, he had been served with divorce papers by his wife. As he finished delivering a brilliant soliloquy about his day, he whipped around and punched his fist through the window. The glass was reinforced with chicken wire. It opened up every vein in his arm. He bled like a stuck pig.
We had less than an hour before the curtain went up.
For some reason, everyone looked at me to do something. I sprinted downstairs to the Turf, a famous restaurant on the corner, and asked for a bucket of ice. The guy behind the counter wanted to know why before he handed me a bucket. I told him an actor in the theater down the block had cut himself pretty severely and the show was about to start. We had to stanch the bleeding.
“Who’s going to pay for it?” he asked.
“I am,” I said.
Then I realized I was in my costume. My money was upstairs.
“Just give me the bucket,” I said. “I’ll bring it back.”
After arguing for a few minutes, the manager got me the bucket and I ran back to the theater. Someone had wrapped George’s whole arm in bandages. He plunged it directly into the bucket of ice. Right before the curtain went up, we rebandaged his hand and then shoved him onstage. Though drunk, pissed off, and bleeding, he still gave one of the greatest performances I’ve ever seen on a stage.
He expected the same from us—and hadn’t lost his sense of humor in the way he let us know that. Moments before my entrance, he came up behind me and as I heard my cue, he put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Larry … about your performance … oh shit, never mind, I’ll tell you after the show.”
I stepped on the stage of my first Broadway show slightly stunned but I somehow managed to get through the night.
* * *
I learned that George was a little unpredictable too. One night we went out to a bar and the guy on the other side of him struck up a conversation. They talked, laughed, and suddenly in midconversation George picked up a plate of canapés and smashed the guy on the side of the head. The blow nearly severed his ear. There was blood all over the place. I couldn’t figure out what had triggered George. Probably nothing. From then on, I made it a rule always to sit real close to him, so he couldn’t wind up and punch me. Not that he ever would’ve … maybe.
You never knew with George. One day George and Brandon came to my apartment between shows to unwind. I was barbecuing on the roof. After some drinks, I went downstairs to get the salad, and when I returned a few minutes later, George was dangling
Brandon by his heels over the parapet, a five-floor drop to the pavement. George was screaming at the top of his voice.
“You little son of a bitch! If you ever step on my line like that again, one of my best lines, I’ll drop you on your fucking head!”
I stayed calm. Showing how cool I was, I turned the steaks on the grill. Poor Brandon was crying buckets, justifiably terrified, while promising never to do it again. I didn’t know what George was going to do. I don’t think George knew. But if he let go, Brandon was dead.
I pretended there was nothing wrong and announced that dinner was ready.
George glanced over his shoulder and nodded. “Oh, okay.” He reeled in Brandon, sat down, and cut into his steak, while Brandon disappeared.
“Helluva good idea, steak, Larry,” said George as if nothing had happened.
I just marveled at the man. You don’t meet many people like him. George had charisma and power onstage as well as in film, a rare talent that he proved in everything he did. I was always in awe of him.
Chapter Eleven
I’ve always said there were no down periods in my life—just out-of-work periods. That attitude has carried me through thick and thin, the only difference being the availability of cash. Mostly we didn’t have much, and most of the young people we knew were in the same boat.
Take Carroll O’Connor. We formed a lifelong friendship when Burgess Meredith cast me in the play God and Kate Murphy, a depressing Irish story about faith and love starring Fay Compton and Lois Nettleton. Carroll was the assistant stage manager. While we were doing the show in Boston, he would chase my little daughter, Heidi, up and down the hotel hallway, the two of them laughing when he scooped her up in his arms. Except for being thinner and having darker hair, he was the same then as he was after his work as Archie Bunker in the landmark series All in the Family made him the TV equivalent of the Beatles. He was bellicose and funny, 100 percent Irish.
