by LARRY HAGMAN
I was wondering how I was going to recover from that ordeal when the guy stuck his head back in and thanked me. He said he’d never told anyone about that and just talking about it made him feel better. He said he still loved his wife and was going to make it work. It turned out to be one of the nicest moments.
* * *
By Jeannie’s fourth season, the show’s ratings had dropped and there was talk about cancellation. I didn’t want to see it end. I liked the show. But either way it didn’t seem like I’d be out of work. The studio wanted to sign me to a deal that would keep me in their future projects. While Jeannie might have been struggling, they still saw me as a draw. Jackie Cooper, the production chief at Screen Gems, called me in for a meeting. As a child, Jackie had been in the Little Rascals and starred with Wallace Beery in The Champ, one of the most moving films I’d ever seen. He’d also starred in his own successful series, called Hennesey. I liked him very much, but most important, I trusted him.
He wanted to make a deal that would keep me with the studio. He said it could be lucrative.
“Just give me better scripts for Jeannie,” I said.
Jackie took a deep breath.
“Larry, I can’t give you better scripts. It’s the nature of the game that if you find the right formula you stick with it.”
“Its not working, though. Better writers could help.”
“Look, kid, I’ve been there. I know what you’re talking about and I sympathize with you. I can’t give you any better scripts. I would if I could. The show will likely be dropped from next season. All I can give you right now is more money.”
I finally saw the light.
“Okay, Jackie, that’s a good idea,” I said resignedly.
Jackie said for me to talk with Chuck Fries, the studio’s chief financial officer, and ask for $5,000 a week. It was a large sum for those days, but he assured me I’d get it. Before I left his office, he had me write two words on the palm of my left hand: SHUT UP. Whatever happened, he implored, I was to let Chuck do the talking, and if I felt like saying anything, especially something that would piss off the man who controlled the studio’s purse strings, I was to look down at my hand and do what it said.
So I went in and talked to Chuck, who initially offered me a five-hundred-dollar-a-week raise, not anywhere close to what Jackie had told me to ask for, and I wanted to tell him that he was full of shit. But I opened my hand, looked at those two words, SHUT UP, and I did just that. As much as it killed me, I didn’t say a word. A few weeks later, though, I got the raise just as Jackie had promised, plus a $100,000 bonus, which at that time was a serious bit of dough. Best of all, Jeannie was unexpectedly picked up for a fifth season.
Chapter Eighteen
At the start of the fifth season, the network forced Sidney to finally have Jeannie and Tony get married. Everyone associated with the series knew such a made-for-TV event would counter the show’s poor ratings, at least in the short term. But as for Jeannie’s future, it spelled the end. I knew that if Jeannie and Tony wed, the sexual tension that kept the show interesting would be gone. All of us waged a bitter fight against the decision, particularly Sidney and me.
But the wedding episode aired December 2, 1969, amid much publicity and the highest ratings the show had enjoyed for years. I felt like the groom who walked down the aisle with a shotgun at his back. When we wrapped the final episode at the end of January 1970 (the last original show aired May 26) and said good-bye, none of us knew the show’s fate.
I went straight into a movie-of-the-week for Screen Gems called Three’s a Crowd. It costarred Jessica Walter, whom I’d worked with in The Group, and E. J. Peaker. It was quick and fun but no earthshaker. Then I took Maj and the kids on vacation. We spent a week visiting a friend who owned an island in the Caribbean, and then we surprised Mother and Richard on the Copacabana in Brazil. Seeming genuinely delighted to see us, they invited us to the ranch in Anápolis. We went thinking we’d all matured, but Richard was as miserable as ever.
Upon returning to L.A. at the end of the summer, I drove to Screen Gems to visit Claudio Guzmán, who was still editing some of Jeannie’s last episodes. At the gate, which I’d driven through for five years, the guard told me that I needed a pass. When I asked why, he informed me that I wasn’t working at the studio anymore. I made it inside, and then Claudio told me that Jeannie had been canceled while I was in Brazil. We didn’t get the trade papers in Brazil and my agent hadn’t bothered to call me.
I was more relieved than upset. Jeannie might’ve run its course creatively, but I’d achieved my goal. From the beginning I’d wanted to make a memorable comedy, a show that children could watch with their grandparents, and time has proven I Dream of Jeannie one of the best and most enduring sitcoms ever. It’s still on the air every day around the world.
Meanwhile I had a deal with Screen Gems. I focused on finding a quality script. I was amazed, disappointed, and ultimately frustrated by how many bad scripts were out there. I turned down three, but eventually time ran out on my deal and I simply said to myself, Do the best of the lot and try to make it work.
That turned out to be The Good Life, a half-hour sitcom about a husband and wife who abandon their boring middle-class lives and go to work as a cook and a butler for a wealthy couple without revealing their lack of experience. Like Jeannie, the premise rested on keeping a secret. It also paired me with another gorgeous blond leading lady, Donna Mills. She’d done a lot of soap operas in New York City but was a newcomer to Hollywood. I rounded out the cast with my old buddy David Wayne and Hermione Baddeley, whom I’d known in London. It was a very talented group.
Claudio was the producer and one of the directors. We made sure the actors had fun, felt creatively involved, and stayed loose with a supply of champagne that one writer noted was compulsory The set was like an extended family, and on the weekend my cast mates dropped by the house to add their input to the stories. Sadly, The Good Life didn’t last long. NBC put us on opposite All in the Family, and we were trounced in the ratings by my good friend Carroll O’Connor. The Good Life disappeared after thirteen episodes, and All in the Family went on to make history. If you’re going to be shot down, it might as well be by the best.
* * *
Knowing I had free time, Peter Fonda asked me to play a sheriff in The Hired Hand, a Western that he was starring in and directing. Peter had assembled a first-rate cast that included Warren Oates and my friend Severn Darden. There wasn’t a bad card in the deck. We shot the movie in Santa Fe, and I fell in love with the countryside. When I got a few days off between scenes, I rented a Plymouth convertible and drove to Taos to visit Dennis Hopper, who’d been a friend of mine in New York City. We’d often gone up for the same parts.
He was living in a beautiful old home once owned by Mabel Dodge Luhan. Without exact directions, I stopped in the main square of Taos and asked around until I found someone who knew where Dennis lived. An old Indian perched on a wooden rail outside a restaurant offered to show me if, as he said, I’d “buy an old Indian a glass of wine.”
I needed lunch, so I went in and had a delicious Southwestern-style meal with this old chap, whose name was Telles Goodmorning. After a couple glasses of wine, he was absolutely shit-faced, but he still remembered the way to Dennis’s place. I left Telles Goodmorning asleep in the backseat and went inside.
We drank some wine and tequila, and Dennis showed a cut of a film he’d done in Peru called The Last Movie. I remember he had an extended scene of himself screwing a beautiful Indian girl underneath a waterfall. As it went on and on, I got kind of bored and started to say good night, but Dennis persuaded me to stay at his place instead of driving back to Santa Fe at night.
Then I remembered Telles Goodmorning was still in my car. I went out to take him back to his pueblo and saw there’d been a passing cloudburst that had dropped a whole lot of rain in my open car. I found Telles in the backseat with his blanket around him, sopping wet.
He asked, “Wh
y you leave an old Indian in back of car?”
“I’m really sorry, Telles. I forgot you were out here.”
When I opened the car door about two feet of water gushed out. The Plymouth was trashed inside. It was only a five-mile drive to Telles Goodmorning’s pueblo. After dropping him off, I somehow found my way back to Dennis’s and had dinner.
The next thing I remember is waking up at five in the morning with a dreadful hangover and seeing Telles Goodmorning sitting at the foot of my bed holding a pair of moccasins. He said his wife had made them. I could tell they were special. The beadwork was spectacular.
“This is for my brother who drove an old Indian home last night,” he said.
In exchange I gave him a whale’s tooth I had on a leather string around my neck. I’d bought a keg of about three hundred of them for twenty bucks in a New York surplus store and gave them away as talismans. Telles Goodmorning solemnly touched it to his forehead, heart, liver, and kidneys, explaining that these were the body’s sacred points. (Later I’d find out just how sacred the liver was.) Then he solemnly hung the tooth around his neck, looked up, and smiled.
“We are brothers,” he said. “Maybe you’d buy an old Indian a glass of wine?”
We went into the kitchen and I found him some vodka and orange juice. I had one myself, of course. A couple of those and he was out of it again. By midmorning, I deposited him back home in the same condition as I did the night before. His wife was not too happy with him or me, but she was thankful I’d brought Telles back home again. Her expression darkened when she looked down at my feet and saw I was wearing those beautiful moccasins. I feebly gestured my apologies to her. I knew I was in deep shit and made a speedy exit.
Over the next few days, I shot a couple of scenes and had a few days off. I was thinking about going back home until I was needed on the set again when Telles Goodmorning showed up at my hotel. I invited him in. He asked if I knew anything about peyote. No, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t curious, and I wound up invited to a ceremony later that night.
I don’t know how I found my way to the designated spot, a small Quonset hut in the middle of the desert, but somehow I managed. Inside, I met Telles and eight teenage Indian boys who looked like alkies chasing a new high besides sniffing gasoline. But I gave them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they were going through their own rite of passage. I just had to worry about myself.
Telles gave a brief but solemn talk about peyote. Then he gave us each three coffee cans. One was empty, one was full of water, and one contained peyote buttons. I soon found out what the empty coffee can was for. It wasn’t long after we chewed the peyote buttons that we started vomiting into our empty cans and drinking water from the third can.
After a while, I had no perception of time. The unpleasantness passed and I started having my dreams. I felt myself sprout wings. Then I saw featherlike hair covering my legs. And I watched in amazement as my feet turned into hawk’s claws.
Strangely, I wasn’t anxious or frightened by the transformation. In fact, when it was complete, I took off and flew around the hut. Once I grew accustomed to my wings, I somehow broke through the walls and flew above the Quonset hut and up into the mountains. It was spectacular, and during my flight I was given my song, which I use to calm myself when I’m anxious.
Meanwhile, the Indian boys had a rough go of it. They cried and screamed. The mind is full of phantasmagoria and demons, and peyote unlocks everything up there. If you aren’t feeling good about yourself, I can imagine it’d be pretty scary. My head was in a good space and I enjoyed myself. Maybe I wouldn’t have been so carefree if I’d known Peter was going to cut me out of the movie. But when it played on television years later, after Dallas had made me famous, the network put me back in.
Chapter Nineteen
Every time I went in front of the camera, I had the same thought: What the heck, it’s only my career. At forty, I had no illusions about myself. I was an actor, plain and simple. I wanted to earn a living, get exposure, find good parts. That meant for the next few years I played a variety of characters, traveled far and wide, and tried to save a couple bucks from what I got paid. I enjoyed every minute of it.
The 1971 TV movie-of-the-week A Howling in the Woods reteamed me with Barbara Eden, and we had a great time working together again. Next came Getting Away from It All, another made-for-TV movie, in Morro Bay, a beautiful spot along the coast south of San Francisco. Then an opportunity came along to do more than show up and collect a paycheck. Jack Harris, my next-door neighbor, had produced The Blob, the 1950s horror movie that gave Steve McQueen his first starring role. We were taking a soak together in my Jacuzzi when he said his son and a friend had written a sequel called Beware! The Blob.
“You aren’t doing anything,” he said. “You want to direct it?”
I jumped at the chance. I also agreed to act and to help rewrite the script. I liked the idea of working in a genre where nothing is too farfetched or too silly to put on the screen. My biggest challenge became finding recognizable names who’d agree to be in the movie for scale. I auditioned all kinds of people, but I ended up just stopping people I knew on the beach. Like Carol Lynley. She was walking along and I got her attention by yelling, “Hey, you want to be in The Blob?”
“The what?” she asked.
“It’s the movie I’m directing.”
“What do I have to do?”
“Get eaten by the Blob.”
This seemed to pique her interest, and she signed on. I promised to do the same if she ever did a movie. Godfrey Cambridge, who’d been in Ted Flicker’s Compass Theater, an extemporaneous theater, in New York, came on board when I snared him walking down the beach too. I also cast Richard Webb, radio’s original Captain Midnight, Shelley Berman, Dick Van Patten, Cindy Williams, my assistant John Houser, my ten-year-old son, and even my other next-door neighbor, Margie Adleman, who later sold her home, with some finagling from Maj, to Burgess Meredith, another of the Blob’s victims. To get the job, all you had to do was agree to be eaten by the Blob.
This turned into one of the most fun projects of my career. The picture started with a shot of a cute little pussycat playing on the lawn outside a house. Then it cut inside, where Godfrey puts down a canister he’d brought back from the tundra in the Arctic, planning to examine it in his lab. But the can warms in his kitchen as he watches TV in the next room, the contents thaw, the top pops off, and the fun begins.
First a fly sets down on the can’s rim, and slup, it’s eaten. Then the darling kitty comes into the kitchen and paws the red goop in the can. Gulp! Finally, the Blob eats Godfrey, who was a mouthful since he weighed about three hundred pounds. I wrote myself in as an addled deaf-mute, and like everybody in the film, I too was ingested.
Beware! The Blob wasn’t everyone’s taste. Though the original film had been a cult classic that made lots of money, Beware! The Blob disappeared from theaters almost as quickly as that cute kitty. Reviewers didn’t think too highly of it either, but I had the last laugh when it was rereleased in 1982 as “the movie J.R. shot.” But it’s really good, clean, silly fun for the whole family.
* * *
The projects I did in the 1970s taught me that actors don’t care whether they’re on TV or the big screen, they just like to work. I got a chance to work with so many great actors. When I made The Alpha Caper in 1973, I got a second chance to work with Hank Fonda, who made acting look so easy. Leonard Nimoy, James McEachin, and Elena Verdugo were also in that picture about ex-cons who rob an armored car.
Then I was in Blood Sport, a father-son sports drama with Ben Johnson and Gary Busey, who displayed an abundance of raw energy and ability as a high school quarterback. I played his coach and drew from the guys I remembered from my brief stint on the football team in high school. I remember thinking Gary was someone who had the chance to make it big, and he’s done very well.
In What Are Best Friends For?—my third movie of the year—I worked with Lee Grant and Barb
ara Feldon as well as other talented actors like Nita Talbot, Ted Bessell, and George Furth.
I worked my ass off to capitalize on my name after Jeannie, but the juice didn’t last more than a couple years, and neither did the money. My career was a constant hustle for parts. An actor’s life is not always mansions and hot tubs. Despite three TV movies, I was broke. At one point, we rented our house out for a month and slept on mattresses in Peter Fonda’s office. Awhile later I took the family skiing in Big Bear and had just $60 on me. I figured on staying in our van for a week or so, but on the way up I stopped for gas and I checked with my answering service and picked up a message from my agent.
When I called him back, he asked if I wanted to do a show with Lauren Bacall.
“When?” I asked.
“In three days,” he said.
“What’s the money?”
“How much do you have now?”
“Sixty bucks.”
“It’s a lot more than that.”
I turned the camper around, and three days later we were in London to make a TV movie of the musical Applause. Lauren was in the midst of a triumphant production of Applause onstage there. I heard that she’d been sent pictures of a number of leading-men types to star opposite her in the TV adaptation and that her nine-year-old son had picked mine from the pile and said, “Look, there’s the guy in I Dream of Jeannie.” When Lauren asked how I was, her son had said something like, “Gee whiz, he’s great,” and then I got the part. She’s denied the story, but I believe it—mainly because it makes a good tale.
I was thrilled to get a chance to work with her. My God, when she was nineteen and going with Bogie, she was gorgeous, and years later she still had the looks, voice, and presence of a great star. Her aura was intimidating. Applause was one of the most daunting roles I’d undertaken, and the greatest task was Betty Bacall herself.
I rehearsed for over a week with her understudy before I even met her. I was warned by producers that she didn’t like to be touched. I have no idea if that was true or i f she even knew this was said about her. But when it was finally time for our proper introduction, I was extremely nervous. I was led into a room where she was seated in the center like royalty. I understood why everyone was in such awe of her. She was an imposing figure. “Larry,” she said, gracefully extending her hand. “How nice to meet you.”
