by LARRY HAGMAN
There was only one difference over the years. At the time we met, Carroll was so broke he couldn’t afford more than a cold-water flat on Forty-sixth Street. Once the play reached Broadway, he and his beautiful wife, Nancy, made it a habit to come to our apartment several times each week to take a hot bath, which is when I first said, “Friends who bathe together stay together.”
While we stayed friends for forty years, the play closed mercifully after two weeks. Aside from Carroll, I remember it largely because I won the Clarence Derwent Award as the most promising new actor of the year, one of the very few awards I’ve ever won.
Work was so much more important than money, which I remember as more of an annoying necessity than a goal. One day I came home with two bags packed with groceries and Maj, pregnant with our second child, asked if I’d knocked off a store. No, the truth was, I’d found a five-dollar bill in the gutter.
We lived off the kindness and trust of the owners of our neighborhood stores. The Italian grocers let us run a tab, otherwise we wouldn’t have eaten. The owner of Maj’s favorite fabric store—an opera lover named Louie—also let her pick out whatever she needed. “It’s no problem,” he always said. “Pay when you can.” The guy at the hardware store was just as understanding when Maj went through a nesting compulsion during her eighth month of pregnancy with our second child.
It seemed like every day she was recarpeting, repainting … something. I came in one day and found her standing on top of a ladder, painting the ceiling. Later that week we bumped into several of her doctors at a party, and the following day our pediatrician, Dr. Andy, called both of us into his office. He looked at Maj and said, “I heard about the ladder. You’re grounded.” Then he turned to me. “Make sure she stays on the ground till she has that child.”
A few weeks later Maj went into labor. She needed another cesarean. It was a little easier this time since we knew she was going to need the C-section. When the doctors came out and told me the baby was a boy, I was overjoyed. We named him Preston Benjamin Axel, after my grandfather, my father, and Maj’s father. He weighed ten and a half pounds, so big that Maj couldn’t get over the fact that something that large had been inside her. I was so thrilled about our new arrival that, according to Maj, I went into Texas mode: when we left the hospital I carried my son and she carried her two suitcases by herself.
Shortly after we brought Preston home, Maj had a dress delivery going to Tallulah Bankhead. The costumes she designed and sewed kept us afloat. Singer Jane Morgan and Tallulah were two of her best customers. Obviously unable to deliver the dress herself, I went in her place. Maj warned me that Tallulah was extremely particular about who she’d let touch her, and she preferred Maj. But as I found out, Tallulah wasn’t as particular about who she let see her. Or maybe she was simply expecting Maj. In any event, she answered the door stark naked, holding a glass of gin. It wasn’t a pretty sight, at least from my perspective. But I don’t think she cared. With a naughty purr, she told me to step inside, and in a reverse strip, she slipped the dress on right in front of me. She looked a lot better with it on.
* * *
Then I got the play The Warm Peninsula. Julie Harris starred with Farley Granger and June Havoc, Gypsy Rose Lee’s little sister. I played opposite June, who was in the role of a beautiful actress on the slide. I was her young lover. The play made tons of money on an extended pre-Broadway tour, but probably lost it all during the three weeks it was on Broadway. The cast was wonderful. I learned a lot and made enough to keep my family afloat until my next venture, which came soon after.
It was a musical called The Nervous Set, based on a book by Jay Landesman. My buddy Ted Flicker was directing it. The lyrics were by Fran Landesman and the music by Tom Wolf. Ted had presented it very successfully in Saint Louis and then cast me in it when he brought the play to Broadway. It was another great stage experience for me, but the run lasted just two weeks, again. This time, though, I’d learned not to pay for my friends’ tickets on opening night, which kept me from going in the red.
Then I got what was in those years the greatest chance ever invented for an actor. I was cast on the daytime soap opera The Edge of Night. For more than two years, I played Ed Gibson, a young cop studying at night for his law degree. Done in a studio on upper Broadway, the soap was extremely hard work. It was trial by fire. I started out working three days a week, then four, and eventually I was on the set five days a week. By the end of the first two months, they were handing me twenty-six pages of dialogue every day.
The shows were broadcast live. There were no second takes. You had to know your stuff, and as soon as you finished one show, they gave you a script for another. It required intense discipline, so I developed a routine. After the show, I’d go straight home, make a martini, then sit down with my tape recorder and read my script into the microphone. After memorizing as much as I could, I ate dinner, and then went to bed. At 3 A.M. the recorder automatically clicked on and replayed my lines on a loop tape, over and over again, till I woke up.
About a month or two into it, I started to hallucinate. A doctor told me it was due to a lack of sleep and advised me to quit playing the tape at night, which I did. I didn’t have time to listen anyway. I started driving to the Bucks County Playhouse in Pennsylvania every night to act with Bert Lahr in S. J. Perelman’s comedy The Beauty Part I’d finish The Edge of Night at 4 P.M. and drive eighty miles to the theater. The play was a smash hit, and it was a great role for me. I was on the stage for all but four minutes of the entire production. But Bert, a wily veteran, made sure that he had the lion’s share of attention. I started out with six really boffo laughs, but gradually, after a show, Bert would say, “You know, that line is not really your character, kid. It’s really my character.”
By the end, I had two laughs.
But between the play and the soap I was getting invaluable training. You can’t underestimate the value of working every day. Nothing compares to it, especially the soap opera. That really kept me on my toes. Besides all the lines, there were twenty or thirty characters involved in complex relationships, and you had to keep track of every one of them. Because the shows were live, if someone forgot their lines, you had to know what was going on in the story in order to ad-lib without blowing the whole premise. Every day I seemed to learn something new about cameras, blocking, how not to upstage people, or how not to be upstaged, and also diplomacy.
I had a terrible time with the leading man, John Larkin. He made fun of me at every opportunity. He was full of little put-downs and slights that were probably his way of keeping a younger guy like me in check. Finally I faced him down and we became good friends. When he left the show to try his luck in Hollywood, they offered me the leading role and said they’d increase my salary just $500 a week. John was making considerably more than that, so I thanked them and got it in my head that I should start making plans to leave for Hollywood too.
* * *
I resigned from The Edge of Night when I rejoined The Beauty Part for its Broadway production. There was no way I could’ve done both. On opening night, Alice Ghostley decided she’d been in the business a lot longer than I and she wanted a dressing room closer to the stage, namely mine, which was two flights up from the stage. The new room they gave me was on the sixth floor. That didn’t leave me any time to get offstage, go back to my dressing room, change clothes, have a cup of tea, and whatever during the brief break. That meant I’d have to spend the whole time in my changing tent on stage right.
I was pissed. Alice had a nice part, but nothing like mine. I was onstage all but two minutes of the play. Charlotte Rae heard what happened and asked if I wanted to share her dressing room. She was just one flight down, in the basement. I said, “Wonderful.”
For the whole run of the play, Charlotte and I shared a dressing room, and I was very happy with that. She was a wonderful lady. But the way Alice pulled rank showed me that the business could be callous and uncaring, and also that I should not expect any spe
cial treatment. Talent didn’t mean anything. It was all about how much clout you got.
Bert had plenty. The star of the play, he was still as difficult as ever, maybe more so, and this time working with him was downright painful. Bert had a lot of lines and at his age he was having a difficult time remembering all of them. He didn’t go through a single performance without going up somewhere. Each time that happened, he’d grab the back of my arm in a panic and squeeze until my eyes teared.
“Kid, what’s my line?” he’d mutter.
Worse, he somehow made it seem as if I’d gone up and he was saving me.
This happened every night.
Then one night while I was taking a bath Maj saw the green-and-purple bruises on my arm.
“What the hell, did you get rolled or something?” she asked. “Look at the marks on you.”
I looked over my arms and gently rubbed them.
“That’s Bert,” I winced.
“What do you mean?”
“That’s where he grabs me and pinches me and gets the lines out of me.”
“How are you putting up with that?” Maj wondered.
A good question.
“I’m thinking of getting out of the business after this show,” I said. “This is too hard.”
Bert had no clue what he was doing to me. As with most people who are brilliant, funny, and demanding, he was in his own world, operating from his own agenda. In this case, he had a piece of the box office. Before the first act of each show he stood backstage, peering at the audience through a hole in the curtain. Unwrapping a hard candy, he would count the house—always coming within ten people—while providing an equally accurate critique: “A bunch of losers tonight.” Or, “Okay, we’ve got a bunch of jewels in the front row. A first-class audience. There’s money out there.”
I learned a lot from Bert. He was driven and had a toughness that was acquired from years of playing the Borscht Belt. In The Beauty Part, he had a great advantage—after all, he had been the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz. The audience adored him before he stepped onstage. He was also a great comic and it was hard not to break up onstage every night.
He’d work a laugh till the audience was crying. Some nights the curtain would ring down twenty minutes later than normal because Bert was on a run. Nobody left the theater wanting their money back. He might approach the curtain before it went up like a man walking the last mile without energy, worried and glum; however, when the curtain did go up he turned into a dynamo with the energy of a nine-teen-year-old boy. When the performance was over, he was wired.
He taught me what it was to be a straight man, which is essentially what I was on I Dream of Jeannie. He also taught me to hang tough when I felt like my career was collapsing. If you wanted to succeed, you had to be strong. I owe a lot to Bert, and after a while, like in most of life, the bruises disappeared.
The show had bad luck, though. We got great reviews, but there was a newspaper strike so nobody could read them. Then we moved theaters. Because of the newspaper strike, nobody knew where we’d moved to. The show should’ve run a couple of years, but we closed after about ten weeks, and as they say, that’s showbiz.
Before it closed, though, director Sidney Lumet saw a performance. Afterward, he offered me a part in Fail-Safe, a movie he was about to film that was adapted from the best-selling novel about a runaway U.S. bomber with orders to drop an A-bomb on Moscow. He had lined up, among others, Henry Fonda, Walter Matthau, and Fritz Weaver, and he said there was a part for me if I wanted it. I signed on then.
He asked if I had read the book. I said no, but got it, read it, and knew I’d lucked out.
For my first movie, I could not have wished for a better experience. We rehearsed for a month, a length of time practically unheard of on movies. I played Buck, the Russian-speaking translator for the U.S. president, who was portrayed by Henry Fonda, and the two of us were locked in a bomb shelter. I was the go-between, listening to the Soviet premier on the phone and then interpreting for the president. I must have done all right since everyone thought I really did speak Russian, though I never spoke a word of it in the film.
Henry gave me a few pointers, the kind that only a veteran would pass on. I thought it would be smart if my character smoked, given the tense situation. But as soon as Sidney cut a scene, the prop man rushed over and snipped my cigarette so it would match when filming resumed. I ended up smoking six or seven packs a day. As Henry pointed out, even for a smoker, that was a lot of nicotine to inhale, enough to make me sick, and I never smoked again in a film. Henry also told me not to act with my hands, if at all possible. If you gestured with them, you had to match the move in all the shots, and that took a lot of remembering. Sure enough, when I watched Henry, he just sat there with his hands crossed. He was a master of simplicity.
Columbia Pictures purchased Fail-Safe in order to protect another film still in production, Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece Dr. Strangelove; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, which they wanted to come out first. They stuck Fail-Safe on a shelf and no one saw it for two years. I felt betrayed. I was just naive. It was sound business on the studio’s part.
Chapter Twelve
Despite the frustration, I liked making movies. If you are around the right people, moviemaking is just the most fun an actor can possibly have. I wanted to do more. I called up director Josh Logan, a longtime family friend, and asked if he had any parts for me. He was about to shoot Ensign Pulver, the sequel to the terrific film Mister Roberts, and said he’d find a part for me when it began shooting in Acapulco.
Before it began, Maj and I took the kids and our Irish nanny, Peggy Ryan, and turned our trip to Acapulco into a vacation. We started by driving across the country to California in a Jeep station wagon. Right at the start, as we crossed into New Jersey, we had trouble. I’d put an emergency can of tire inflator under the front passenger’s seat. It was right above the muffler, which heated up, caused the can to explode, and blew out the bottom of the Jeep.
It was a setback, but not enough to delay us. We kept driving across the United States with one-hundred-degree heat radiating up off the asphalt and into the car. The hottest stretch was between Las Vegas and Los Angeles. But before we got there, we stopped at Yellowstone National Park. I pitched our tent in a crowded campground and Maj started cooking dinner inside it while Peggy watched the kids. At some point Maj felt someone leaning against her from outside the tent. She thought it was me, said, “Cut that out, Larry,” and threw an elbow.
Suddenly she heard an angry growl. It was a bear, not me. Curious, Maj went outside the tent and saw five guys white as a sheet. When she saw me, I was holding a flashlight, trembling, having seen the bear destroy our ice chest and saunter off into the woods with a bag of marshmallows. And Peggy, who’d emigrated from Ireland and never been south of New Jersey, had the kids, one under each arm, as she dashed into the car, locked the door, and said Hail Marys all night.
She wouldn’t let us in.
“No, no, I got the babies,” she said. “They’re all right. You two can sleep in the tent.”
When we got to Los Angeles, we stayed in Carroll and Nancy O’Connor’s house in Studio City. They’d gone to Rome, where he was acting in the film Cleopatra. One day a friend of ours, actor John McGiver, invited us to lunch at a home he was renting on the beach in Malibu Colony. A few days earlier, Maj had said she didn’t think she could ever live among all the brown in L.A., but after a few hours out at the beach, she turned to me and said, “Now if we have to stay in California, we’re going to live in Malibu.”
It turned out to be prophetic.
After a couple weeks, we flew to Acapulco to start Ensign Pulver. The movie starred Burl Ives, whose songs I’d played my entire life, Walter Matthau, Robert Walker, and Tommy Sands. I was fortunate to be given a pretty fair role as one of the ship’s officers. The role was about the same size as the one Josh gave Jack Nicholson, who had already written and directed several mov
ies. Once shooting began, he emerged as an off-screen ringleader among the cast of up-and-comers that included me, James Farentino, James Coco, and Peter Marshall.
It was swelteringly hot in Acapulco, nothing that I would have called paradise. The ship’s deck was like a skillet. If you spilled water, it disappeared instantly with a sizzle. Prior to the first day of shooting, Josh assembled the whole cast and crew on the main deck and then delivered an address that reminded me of James Cagney talking to the crew in Mister Roberts. If we ever saw him sitting alone, he said, we were not to disturb him. If he was by himself, he explained, he was thinking about the film, lining up shots, or as he put it, “creating,” and he did not want to be bothered.
Josh failed to mention he was taking lithium, at the time an experimental drug, which had side effects like drowsiness and lethargy; if you took enough, it caused a comalike stupor. On the first day of actual work, he lined up a shot, did the scene, and then sat down on the deck to ponder the next shot. Josh, who was tanned even during the coldest New York winter, positioned himself facing the sun, all the better to enrich the deep, dark color of his face. He sat there for quite a while without being disturbed. Nor did he move when lunch was called. Neither did he appear to have moved when we returned after the break.
Finally the first assistant director went over and asked if he was all right. Not only was Josh not all right, he was completely zonked, basically unconscious save for some unintelligible mumbles, and so severely overbaked that his eyes were swollen shut and his lips had puffed up to the size of pomegranates. He was loaded onto a boat like a sack of rice, taken back to the hotel, and given a couple of days to recuperate before he was ready to shoot again.
