Larry Hagman - Hello Darlin'

by LARRY HAGMAN

  “All of this is just a natural thing,” she said. “You’re at the gate of all new experiences. The guards at the gate are to keep you from going in. But don’t worry about it. If something tries to pull you, don’t resist. Go with it. If you feel pushed, don’t fight it. Just go with the flow.”

  All of a sudden, I got it. I thought about some of the passages I’d read in The Joyous Cosmology and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and they all said basically the same thing that my grandma had just told me.

  I headed for the cave. As soon as I got to the doorway, BOOM, I was sucked inside and down a tunnel at incredible speed. At the end, I saw a light. As I came out of the tunnel, I was in a place where I was surrounded by bright and diffused light. I saw a person who called out to me. I didn’t know if it was a he or a she. That person didn’t talk, but without speaking somehow let me know, “This is a glimpse of where you’ve been, where you re going, where you are all the time.”

  It was too much for me to comprehend. The person seemed to understand I was having trouble making sense of it all.

  “You don’t have to go any further. Having seen this is enough for now.”

  At that point, I was pulled back out through the tunnel. The guards at the gate were asleep. I looked around for my grandmother. She was gone. I hadn’t thought of her in a long time, yet she had been there when I needed her. I wanted to thank her for taking me through the entrance.

  Then I got an orange from the kitchen. When I broke it open, I saw its cellular structure pulse. It looked to me like the actual cells were alternating between life and death. It all seemed perfectly natural.

  I was studying the orange while standing in front of a mirror. When I looked up and saw my face, it was doing the same thing. The cells were pulsing. Some were dying and some were in the process of being reborn. It was an intricate picture. Every molecule was in constant motion. I don’t know how long I stared at my face, but after a while I realized I was a constant flow of energy.

  Everything was.

  I was part of everything, and everything was part of me. Everything was living, dying, and being reborn.

  * * *

  I started playing with a sixteen-millimeter movie camera Larry had. He drove us into Beverly Hills, where we explored the different streets while staring at all the big old homes. They had beautiful gardens in front. All the colors jumped out at me. I looked at everything through the camera. As we drove along Sunset Boulevard, heading into Hollywood, I looked at people waiting at bus stops, exiting stores, and sitting in coffee shops. I used the camera to zoom in on them until I could look directly into their eyes. I saw their cells changing too.

  The experience was extremely unsettling but just about the best thing that had ever happened to me. It changed my way of looking at people. I saw much deeper into their emotions. In those hours, I learned how to read body and facial language at a much more profound level. More than anything else the experience changed my way of looking at life and death.

  I concluded death was just another stage of our development and that we go on to different levels of existence.

  We don’t disappear when we “die.” We become part of a curtain of energy. In almost every religion I knew about, they say, “As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.” I had an understanding of God consciousness. It was so clear. The LSD experience took the fear of death from me, the fear of manmade heaven and hell. With that out of the way, I quit worrying.

  The amazing thing about this whole experience was that it was so familiar. I’d been there before, done that before, and it was so, so familiar.

  * * *

  As for the rest of my LSD, I gave most of it away. Then about a year later Maj tried it. One of the reasons the two of us are still married is that we’e always shared. LSD was no different. I drove her in the hills above Malibu and we hiked through a pretty little canyon. I kept a film camera on her almost the entire time. Her experience was different from mine, since her issues were different. Her upbringing hadn’t been as tumultuous, but she’d had polio when she was twentyone, and in fact her face was still slightly paralyzed when we started going out.

  She dealt with this as she went through her LSD journey. She became her mother, her daughter, and herself, and finally, toward the end, she turned to me and declared, “But I’m beautiful.”

  “I’ve been trying to tell you that for years,” I said.

  LSD was profound for both of us. Maj came out cleansed, just as I’d come out of my trip full of new insights. I think our relationship was better for it. We’d glimpsed some of the answers. But that didn’t mean we had quit working at learning how to deal with life.

  * * *

  There was a lot to deal with at the time. The Vietnam War was going on and I was unpopularly against it. I’d been asked to tour the bases in Vietnam with Barbara. I turned down the request because I didn’t want to lend any credence to the war, though I sympathized with the kids who went there. But even the most patriotic of them were demoralized by the futility of the war.

  At home, there were daily demonstrations at what was seen by many as a racist war conducted by a country that thought it was superior to the “yellow people.” Then Martin Luther King was assassinated, and that tragic event brought home yet another instance of racial hatred. I was watching television in our little house on West Channel Road, when the bulletin came on saying he’d been assassinated.

  I burst into tears. Maj cried too. I thought we’d been making progress, but looking back, I was naive. After Bobby Kennedy was shot, I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t know if the government was involved. I didn’t know who was involved. I suspected the government was involved in all of it. Rather than distrust everyone, I felt like I had to do something myself.

  For two years, I volunteered at the Watts Workshop, a storefront writing-and-acting school in the heart of L.A.’s black community. I taught acting and directing and hired several of the students to be in I Dream of Jeannie. One of my students, Artist Thornton, went on to start a similar workshop in South Dallas, the Artist and Elaine Thornton Foundation for the Arts, and I support him to this day.

  In the late 1960s, most people I knew were trying to find answers, or at least bring up the right questions. I remember Peter Fonda asking me to a screening of Easy Rider. I didn’t know if I could make it because I’d taken another hit of acid a few hours earlier. According to him, that made it more imperative I see his movie. He was right. I saw Easy Rider in a little private screening room, and afterward I glanced at the friends Peter had invited, maybe a half dozen people, and all of us had the same wild, dazed, breathless, awed look of having watched something genuinely incredible.

  I left itching to get on the highway myself. Since we traveled with the family, I sent away to the U.S. Department of the Interior for a guide to thermal springs around the world. I figured the family that bathes together stays together. We went to Canada and toured the northern United States. Along the way we came to Boulder, Montana, site of geothermal hot springs, the turn-of-the-century training camp for boxer Gentleman Jim Corbett, and the historic Diamond S Ranch, a sprawling hotel that was originally built by a group of San Francisco millionaires so they could frolic with their mistresses.

  We checked into the Diamond S, the grand old hotel with onion-domed towers and a ballroom at the foothills of the Elkhorn Mountains. We were given a tour of the Western-style building from Jim Sandal, the hotels manager, who’d previously headed the local school and hospital for the developmentally disabled, which was nearby.

  As he showed us around, our conversation was drowned out by a thunderous noise outside the hotel that was so loud everything shook. We ran to the front porch and saw six army helicopters land on the front lawn. Then about thirty uniformed soldiers walked through the lobby and into the restaurant. They were from a National Guard unit celebrating the end of their yearly training.

  Lunch was exceptional, especially the service. Every time I took a sip of
water, the busboy literally ran over to refill my glass. It was like that at every table. The waiters and busboys took orders, brought food, refilled drinks, and cleared dishes with unusual dispatch. They fixed their eyes on each table, intensely studying every single movement waiting to do their job. There were about fifteen waiters and busboys, and something about them was different.

  “What’s with the waiters?” I asked Jim.

  “They’re from the school,” he explained. “I get the ones I’ve known for a long time, train ’em, and they’re real good workers. They stay here for five days, then go back for two days.”

  “They get the weekend off?”

  “No, it might be the middle of the week. Might be the weekend. It doesn’t matter to them.”

  Jim was proud of his staff. They did their jobs well and he gave them the best life possible. They were mostly in their thirties and forties, and Jim was like a father to them.

  We enjoyed the baths. We soaked several times a day for the five days we were there. The indoor and outdoor pools were filled with natural mineral water coming out of the ground at a constant 104 degrees. A hundred years earlier, Indian tribes that were often at one another’s throats observed a truce on these sacred grounds, which they called Peace Valley. The pools were therapeutic, and so was the conversation with the people we met in the pools.

  Every afternoon I wandered into The Owl Bar for a toddy and a poker game with some of the locals. We also visited nearby radon mines, deep, dark caverns known as “healthy mines.” Years later it was discovered that radon is a deadly gas; in fact, now we test our home for it. But then people with terrible arthritis and rheumatism would sit in those mines for hours, swearing the cool radioactive air gave them relief.

  Getting to see the country on trips like this gave my family a broader and open-minded view of America and the different ways people live. And Boulder, which couldn’t have been friendlier, would play an oddly significant role in my life years later.

  Chapter Seventeen

  There was always a fascination with how we managed the special effects on Jeannie. Television was very low-tech in those days. Whenever Jeannie used her special powers to pop something new into the scene, we would shoot up to a certain point, the director would yell, “Freeze,” and we would literally hold that position until the camera was cut a few moments later. Then they’d make whatever change was necessary and we’d resume shooting.

  One time Barbara and I were doing a scene in which Jeannie popped in on an elephant. After the director told us to freeze, they brought in a live elephant, except they brought him in backward, so his ass was to the camera. We couldn’t turn him around. He wouldn’t budge. The director said, “We’ll just have to live with it, let’s resume.” After he rolled camera, I first showed my astonishment and then resumed my conversation with Jeannie. As I protested the elephant being there—he was right next to me—he lifted his tail and broke wind, literally all over me. Perhaps that’s what the elephant thought of my acting.

  Somehow we managed to hold ourselves together and continue on till the end of the scene. Once the director called “Cut,” I burst into laughter and quickly rushed offstage to shower and change my clothes. It was probably the most mortifying moment of my career. But there were plenty of great moments, too, especially working with guest stars like Sammy Davis Jr., Don Rickles, and Chuck Yeager, who’d broken the sound barrier. We had fun.

  In the midst of all this, Maj and I managed to save up the incredible sum of $15,000. We lived frugally. Hell, we didn’t have time to do anything lavish, I worked so often. One day my accountant suggested I should think about buying a house. He also suggested we look in Beverly Hills. But Maj’s dream had been to live in Malibu, so we looked there and found a big, pink, asbestos-sided house we liked on the beach in the Colony. It cost $115,000, and we put down $15,000—the largest expenditure we’d ever made.

  Maj was thrilled.

  I didn’t know what to think.

  “Woman, you’re going to ruin me,” I said before going to bed for the next three days, feeling like I’d never get out from underneath the $100,000 mortgage.

  Maj oversaw the move to Malibu. After I managed to get out of bed, I joined Maj and the kids in our new home. We had our first candlelight dinner, on the floor—a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken on paper plates. We rebuilt that home twice over thirty years, but Malibu felt like home from that first day we moved in.

  A few weeks later, Carroll and Nancy O’Connor came to visit with their little son, Hugh. Carroll and I were sitting on the bulkhead, watching our two boys play on the sand. Hugh and Preston were about six years old, separated in age by three days. They played with their Tonka trucks. I’d just remarked how we were so fortunate to live in such a safe community when Carroll and I stared in horror as a single-engine, open-cockpit, pre-World War II plane made an emergency landing on the beach, missing our children by not more than five feet. It came so close the boys were sprayed with wet sand from the wheels.

  The two of us ran down the beach and saw the plane buried nose-first in the sand. The pilot was climbing out of the open cockpit, uninjured. As soon as he saw us, he began yelling that he could’ve made a perfect landing if he hadn’t had to pull up and bounce over “the two little bastards playing in the sand.” I had to physically restrain Carroll from attacking the guy and beating him into a bloody pulp.

  Malibu was the perfect place for us. By now we’d enjoyed thermal springs all over the world and Maj had promised to copy that soothing environment when we settled down. For Christmas, Maj designed and supervised the building of a large hot tub. It was one of the only, maybe even the first, of its kind. In researching it, she spoke with one of the Jacuzzi brothers, manufacturers of the original water pump, and discovered that he’d invented a head that mixed water and air to help alleviate the suffering of his own paraplegic son. She used those special heads in our tub, putting them at varying heights so they’d massage different parts of the body—neck, elbow, back, leg. She also made it deep in parts, so we could stand and get a full-body massage. We could also lie down in it. We became the most popular house on the beach because of it, and within a few years she’d built six for friends who lived in Malibu. They marveled at her creativity and would ask how she came up with her ideas. They came naturally. Her father had been an inventor. And just as naturally those hot tubs helped to define life in Malibu.

  Our house was located at the end of the street. For a few years, Maj held sway over the Colony’s egg-dyeing event the day before Easter. All the children in the Colony brought their eggs to our house. One year Jennifer Grant came walking in with her father, Cary, in tow. He was carrying a carton of eggs, ready to be dyed. He looked at Maj, offered his eggs, and asked, “Should I have boiled them?”

  My wife, a lifelong fan of Cary Grant, said, “For you, Cary, I’ll boil them.” She would’ve boiled a hundred dozen if he’d asked.

  We took our civic duties seriously. I judged the annual chili cook-off, led impromptu flag-waving parades up and down the beach while dressed in a flowing caftan, and shopped at the grocery store in a yellow chicken suit. My behavior earned me the nickname the Mad Monk of Malibu.

  Living up to it came naturally. I remember when President Nixon froze workers’ wages but not income from investments in the stock market. I was outraged by what struck me as a fine on the working class. I thought labor should’ve protested. They didn’t, but I couldn’t ignore it. On Labor Day, my family and friends and I built a giant ten-foot-tall chicken out of chicken wire and yellow tissue paper and then paraded it up and down the beach in protest of Nixon’s policy, but mostly because of the chickenheartedness of the labor unions. As it happened, a New York Times reporter was in one of the homes on the beach and reported the story, which got national play but not a word from labor.

  Then I also had my silent Sundays when I didn’t utter a single word. These silent Sundays actually started on a Friday after I’d spent two straight days taping r
odeo scenes for an episode of Jeannie titled “Ride ’Em Astronaut.” When I woke up Saturday morning I couldn’t utter a sound. My doctor said I’d strained my voice and advised me not to talk until Monday.

  Since I didn’t have to work until Wednesday, I spent four whole days without speaking and I rather enjoyed it. On the next Sunday, I decided not to speak again. By Monday, I felt rested and refreshed. Not everyone liked it, though. My daughter, Heidi, then twelve, left me a note that I found when I went to work.

  “Daddy, as you know, I love you very much. But yesterday you were a big shit.”

  Maybe so, but I continued not talking on Sundays for twenty-five years, and all of us learned to adapt. A mystique developed around my silence. People thought it was a religious or mystical thing. I never explained because the truth was not as interesting as the myth. It allowed me to have some fun, too. At one fund-raiser for the summer lifeguards, I posted a sign on the outside of my van that said “Hagmananda Listens.” For five cents a minute people could come inside and talk to me about anything for exactly five minutes.

  They found me dressed in colorful robes and surrounded by flowers, candles, and incense. Before anyone said a word, I handed them a card, warning that I would not speak, or give them absolution or advice. All I promised to do was listen. I also promised not to divulge anything they told me. And boy, did they tell me. Often I got more than I bargained for.

  One man came in with his son and asked if he really could tell me anything. I nodded. He introduced his boy, who was twelve, then explained that he was married and that he loved his wife very much. But one day he and his son returned a day early from a camping trip and found his wife in bed with his best friend.

  As soon as he got those words out, he burst into tears. His son sobbed just as hard. It was very emotional and difficult for me not to comfort them. Then my little egg timer went off, signifying their five minutes were up. When he asked if he could buy another five minutes, I vigorously shook my head no and they left.