by LARRY HAGMAN
Back in L.A., Maj was vaguely amused as I marched into the terminal wearing my new headdress.
“I figured you’d come back in a hat like that,” she said.
* * *
It wasn’t much after that, just before Christmas 1977, that Maj and I went to see Mother and Ethel Merman costar in a once-in-a-lifetime musical benefit for the New York Public Library. We settled into a friends apartment on Central Park West. Lorimar had sent over two scripts for me to look at. One was a sitcom, the other was a drama. Before we got dressed for the theater, I started reading The Waverly Wonders, a half-hour comedy, which at that time I figured was my forte.
Maj went into another room with the second script. It was titled Dallas, and it laid out the story of two warring oil families in Texas, the Ewings and the Barneses. After reading just two scenes, Maj let out a loud whoop and cried, “Larry, this is it! We found it.”
She had me take a look, and after reading the first nine pages I knew she was right.
Dallas was Romeo and Juliet set among the oil fields, except there wasn’t one likable character in the entire episode. Not one nice person. For television at the time, that was a real breakthrough. Mama was an old bitch. Daddy was an alcoholic asshole. My little brother was a womanizer. And my character, J. R. Ewing, was a combination of all of them.
“Mine’s not the main part, but I think I can go someplace with it,” I said.
“I think the show’s different enough to do well,” Maj said. “Everyone’s an antagonist. It’s fun.”
Right then I called my agent and asked who else was involved. He let it slip that Barbara Bel Geddes had been signed to play the mother. When I found that out I knew the show was going to be a class act. She’d been one of my favorite actresses for what seemed like all my life. I instructed my agent to make a deal.
“The money’s not very good,” he warned.
“It’s more than I’m making doing nothing,” I said, and then more seriously added, “I’m not worried. If the show goes, the money will take care of itself.”
* * *
The whole cast gathered for the first time in producer Leonard Katzman’s office, where we read through the script. The first person I met was Linda Gray, who gave me a big hug. That hug was the start of a lifelong friendship. When we let go, which I did reluctantly, I was totally tongue-tied. All I could say was, “Hello darlin’.”
“Nice to meet ya, husband.” She grinned.
At that moment I knew that Leonard had cast the perfect partner for me.
Patrick Duffy was a big, good-looking kid who felt like an old friend as soon as we shook hands. Both of us had worked on the 1974 TV disaster movie Hurricane, but in different scenes, so we never met. Ironically, I knew his father from the bar he owned in Boulder, Montana. While we were making Hurricane, Patrick’s dad had urged him to call me.
“Larry Hagman’s a big star,” he’d said. “He can get you started in the business.”
As it turned out, Patrick did all right on his own, starring on ABC’s popular series Man from Atlantis. From his perspective, Dallas was already better.
“There’s no chlorine burning my eyes,” he said. “And I don’t have to act with webbed fingers.”
I loved the whole group. Barbara Bel Geddes, a former Life magazine cover girl who’d starred as the original Maggie in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, impressed me as a kindred spirit. When asked what about the role of Miss Ellie interested her, she said, “I needed the job.” Jim Davis was a rugged, handsome, taciturn, perfect Daddy. Victoria Principal struck me as absolutely gorgeous. And talk about fate: it turned out that years earlier, when I enlisted in the air force at Bushy Park, her father was stationed on that base and she went to the American School there. Charlene Tilton was the most adorable teenager I’d ever met. She had all the qualities of a ripe Texas tomato—and sweet beyond belief. Steve Kanaly, who’d eventually play my bastard brother, was a real cowboy. He looked it, talked it—and was. Ken Kercheval was the perfect choice to play my nemesis. He was a powder keg of unpredictability that made his work so charged, and it always came out riveting.
Then there was Leonard Katzman, the true genius behind the show. The man wrote, directed, produced, and served as the real head of the family. Without Leonard, Dallas wouldn’t have been an eighth as successful. When I first met him in his office that day, I thought he was a real Hollywood producer, a kind of stereotype, and he turned out to be anything but that. He was a real human being, psychiatrist, rabbi, priest, ally, friend … and conniver.
When it came to making a TV show work, he knew every trick in the book, including the politics of dealing with the network. He was the man.
God knows what they all thought of me.
I arrived for that meeting in a fringed buckskin jacket and a big old cowboy hat. I also carried a leather saddlebag crammed with bottles of perfectly chilled champagne, which I set on the table with an authoritative clank. The folks seated around the table traded looks that said, “What’ve we got here?”
I made a toast.
“I just hope we all have a real good time,” I said, flashing the first of J.R.’s memorable shit-eating grins.
And boy howdy, did we!
* * *
Back home, Maj asked how everything had gone at the reading. I told her that I loved the cast and thought the script would work, although the writers didn’t know shit about Texas. The plan, as Leonard had outlined it, was to shoot the initial five episodes in Dallas and go on the air in April as a midseason replacement. Everything sounded good, though I’d heard talk that Lorimar’s top executives, Merv Adelson and Lee Rich, didn’t believe Dallas would go beyond the original order.
“So I don’t know,” I said. “At least I’ll get paid through those five. And while we re shooting, I’ll take a trip to Weatherford and see Juanie.”
“Not to worry. It’s going to be a hit,” Maj said confidently. “I feel it.”
Chapter Twenty-two
In the beginning Southfork was quiet. The mansion was virgin territory. The halls were silent and still, not yet haunted by years of scandal, family fighting, and backstabbing. Daddy hadn’t died, Mama hadn’t departed, Bobby hadn’t stepped out of the shower, and J.R. hadn’t been shot. We had no idea we were destined to spend the next thirteen years together. As Patrick said to me a few weeks after we began taping, “I hope they let us know what’s going on with the series early enough. I just rented a house and if this isn’t picked up, I’ve got to get another job.”
My concerns were more immediate. When we began taping in late January 1978, Dallas was gripped by one of the coldest winters on record. It snowed like crazy. My old bread van, which I’d driven out from L.A., provided the only warmth at the different locations where we worked. In the absence of fancy dressing trailers, it was the cast’s unofficial headquarters. I stocked it with champagne and whatever else people wanted. We jelled as a group from all the time we spent in there.
We made nightly trips in my van to Western dancing bars such as Whiskey River, where I discovered great acts like Vince Vance and the Valiants, an outrageous group that plays forties, fifties, and sixties music. I’m their unofficial mascot and stand in on keyboard or bass guitar whenever I hear they’re playing nearby. My instrument is always unplugged, but I’ve learned to make it look legit.
At each bar, I went straight to the hostess and said, “Hello darlin’, ’member me, Major Nelson from I Dream of Jeannie? I wonder if you have a table for all of us?”
Patrick and I hit it off from the get-go. On one of the first shows we taped, we had a dramatic confrontation after I exposed his betrothed’s relationship with the ranch hand Ray Krebbs. Pissed off, Bobby grabbed my shoulders, spun me around, and was about to hit me. But as I turned, he saw I had drool running down my chin. He cracked up.
“Here I am acting my life out and you’re drooling,” he said.
I glanced toward Victoria, who was by the fire, wearing as little
as we could get away with on network television.
“If you were looking at her, wouldn’t you drool too?” I asked.
I think we were destined to be best buddies. One night as I drove a bunch of us to a restaurant, Patrick was drinking champagne and watching the world pass through the plastic bubble on the roof of my van when he suddenly exclaimed, “Hey, that’s my hometown.”
I had a photo from my family trip to Boulder, Montana, taped on the wall, and it had caught Patrick’s attention. In it, Maj and I were standing in front of Gamble’s Hardware.
“That’s my hometown,” Patrick said.
Talk about being blown away. I told him about our trips to the nearby hot springs and the many afternoons I’d spent in the bar there.
“Holy shit, Larry!” he said. “My dad owned that bar!”
I told him that was one of my favorite pictures, and Boulder was one of my favorite little towns.
Since I’d been to his hometown, I decided I had to show Patrick Weatherford, my little hometown. I promised to take him quail hunting. Early one Sunday morning we loaded my van with a couple cases of wine and a case of Tom Moore whiskey—Juanita’s favorite—and we took off to introduce Patrick to my stepmother. We didn’t sober up all weekend. Patrick kept up pretty good for not being a big drinker. But when I poured bourbon over my cornflakes for breakfast, he drew the line.
“I know I’m in training,” he said, “but I’m not quite up to your speed.”
Patrick was pale and suffering when we pulled up to the set early on Monday morning. Jim Davis took one look at him and said, “Where the hell have you been, boy?”
“I went over to Weatherford to meet Larry’s stepmother,” he groaned.
He also met some of my high school buddies. As a matter of fact, later that day I got a call from the husband of a friend of mine, looking for Patrick. He was irate.
“Where is that son of a bitch Duffy?” he asked.
“Why?”
“He was drinking champagne out of my wife’s shoe.”
“Yeah, and he wasted a good bottle of champagne. Your wife was wearing open-toed shoes.”
For these first five episodes, the cast was put up at the North Park Inn, a crumbling motel amid barren fields on the north edge of Dallas. It wasn’t the classiest joint. Patrick’s bedroom floor had a crack in it so large that if he dropped his watch he’d have to go downstairs to get it back. I personalized my surroundings by hanging Indian batik bedspreads on the walls, setting up a toy railroad set around the perimeter, and lighting dozens of candles. There wasn’t a mini bar, so I filled the tub with ice and champagne bottles.
One night Patrick, Jim, and I got together and listened to Jim tell us about all the cowboy films he’d made. God, he must’ve made a thousand of them. We also had a few drinks while he talked. After a few hours, Patrick and I took Jim back to his room and when we returned to mine, there were three fire trucks parked outside. My room was filled with smoke. Apparently, while we were gone, a candle had melted the phone and the smoke had set off the fire alarm.
I apologized and offered to pay for the smoke damage. Fortunately it wasn’t as bad as it looked. After we’d washed the bedspreads, you couldn’t tell there’d been a fire except that the ceiling didn’t match the other rooms. It didn’t matter, though. Soon after we left, they tore the place down and built a huge shopping mall that is now in the center of Dallas, which shows how much the city has spread out since then.
* * *
Meanwhile, we were working long, hard days on the show. Veteran TV writer David Jacobs created Dallas as a classic drama about a poor girl who marries into a wealthy family that could as easily have been set against the steel business in Pennsylvania or the textile mills in New England. But putting it in Dallas exposed a whole new part of the country that nobody had exploited, at the exact moment in time the city itself was expanding as a center of prosperity and power.
The Dallas Cowboys were the hottest team in America—and make no mistake, in Texas football rules.
Leonard Katzman insisted on shooting the first five shows on location in Dallas, not the backlots of Hollywood. He wanted the authenticity of the real thing, but more important, he knew how important it was to work where the suits couldn’t constantly look over his shoulder and second-guess him.
A lot of elements contributed to the show’s success. Many a master’s degree has been earned with a scholarly dissertation about Dallas. The country needed a diversion from a terrible recession. People couldn’t spend money for movies, dinner, and a baby-sitter, so they stayed home, turned on the TV, and watched guess what? A television show that revolved around greed, power, and sex and gave them something to talk about all week.
The world of corporate finance in Dallas is much more complex and devious than any of the story lines we ever devised for the show. In truth, Dallas was a simplistic view of what people imagined Texas oil families were like. We simply indulged that stereotype and made greed, treachery, and blackmail seem like good, sexy, all-American fun. As J.R. said, “Once you get rid of integrity, the rest is a piece of cake.”
I couldn’t have been more ready to step into J.R.’s boots. I’d been working on his character for years, particularly in Stardust. I grew up in Texas and knew all those good old boys. I knew the vernacular. I knew people who really were like J.R.—one in particular. I always said J.R. was a composite of people, and in a way he was. But I have to admit when it came to creating J.R., I reached back into my past and called on the memory of Jess Hall Jr., the man I’d worked for as a teenager at Antelope Tool Company. He was a respected pillar of the community. But he also once drove his Jeep up the front steps of my dad’s house at 2 A.M. and left it on the porch for a week.
I’d known him for thirty years. I never told Jess I’d used him as the model for J.R. I worried he’d be offended. After he retired from business, Jess made a special seasoned salt for cooking in his garage as a hobby. The salt was tasty, but I warned him it wasn’t healthy in heavy doses.
“It can lead to a heart attack,” I said.
“Bullshit, Larry,” he replied. “The body needs salt. It’s the best thing in the world.”
Well, he had a massive heart attack and his doctors took him completely off salt. True to form, he kept making the seasoning product, without the salt, using just the herbs. He still did well with it and it tasted great.
* * *
The first Dallas episode, titled “Digger’s Daughter,” premiered on Sunday, April 2, 1978, in the 10 P.M. slot that had been home to the Carol Burnett Show. Not since Peyton Place had TV viewers been treated to a family as dysfunctional as the Ewings. When Bobby delivered the shocking announcement that he’d married Pamela Barnes, daughter of Jock Ewing’s bitter enemy Digger Barnes, played by my old friend David Wayne, prime time was forever changed.
But that was just the tip. It was also revealed that Pamela had played around with the ranch hand Ray Krebbs, who was involved with J.R.’s niece Lucy. J.R. offered Pamela a fistful of cash to leave his brother and tried to ensure his own control of the family’s millions by having a child with his wife, Sue Ellen. Worst of all for J.R., Bobby was finished with being a roving ambassador and wanted to play a bigger part in the family business. There wasn’t anything mellow in this melodrama.
As Cecil Smith wrote in the L.A. Times review, “The scene is set for some very steamy drama to come on the arid Texas plain.”
Ratings for the first episode didn’t seem to indicate a hit, but the numbers grew steadily, and by the fifth episode, “The Bar-B-Que,” Dallas was red hot. The episode—in which Pamela tragically miscarried after a fall during a struggle with J.R. in the hayloft—finished twelfth. CBS ordered thirteen more episodes for the next season, and we were on our way.
All of us stopped looking for new jobs and returned to Dallas that summer to start the new season. We got a chilly reception from the locals. The city was still reeling from being the site of President Kennedy’s assassinatio
n and was sensitive about its portrayal on the show. Dallas was rebuilding civic pride through the Dallas Cowboys football team and their cheerleaders, so at the start our depiction of Dallas as the home of greed and villainy didn’t make us a lot of friends.
I remember being asked by an acquaintance to watch a football game at the Dallas Country Club, which was a bastion of old Dallas money. My friend introduced me to the men at the bar, budding real-life J.R.’s in their thirties and forties. It was a nice afternoon, and when the game ended, I bid them so long.
“Glad to meet you boys,” I said.
But as I reached for the door, one of them said, “Good to meet you, too … boy.”
A chill went up my spine.
That sentiment stayed with me and gave me food for thought.
My concern was just how bad could I make this bad boy and still keep him lovable.
But remember that when Dallas began, J.R. was not the main character. Bobby and Pamela were the centerpieces. J.R. gradually grew through conversations Linda and I had in the background. While Patrick and Victoria played out the main focus of a scene, we made up our own show. I’d ad-lib something like, “Honey, I put this shit on this morning and a button’s missing. Now what the hell is this all about?” And she’d say, “Well, J.R., I tried finding a button, but I just couldn’t.” Then I’d go, “Here’s a hundred dollars. You better buy yourself a bunch of buttons and fix all my shirts.”
Eventually Katzman started paying closer attention to us when he watched the dailies and finally he asked, “What are you two doing back there?”
“Having fun,” I said. “We were deepening our characters.”
“Well, that stuff’s good.”
We became the Bickersons about the time the network ordered another ten episodes. That was a full season. It gave Katzman and the writers time to more fully develop the characters, especially J.R., who hadn’t been allowed to blossom into his full nastiness. It allowed me to really shape J.R. to match the picture I had of him in my head. I added phrases and nuances that made J.R. my own, which is my modus operandi as an actor. I just do it. If they pick up on it, I know they’re paying attention.
