Larry Hagman - Hello Darlin'

by LARRY HAGMAN

  * * *

  They had to pay attention as we shot the seventeenth episode. Irving Moore, a good friend of Katzman’s, was directing that show, which featured a terrific guest-starring appearance by Brian Dennehy as a bad guy who, along with his partner, holds the whole family hostage during a hurricane—as if a hurricane would ever get as far as Dallas. That showed how much the writers knew about Texas.

  Anyway, he had us in the living room and made Sue Ellen sing the song “People.”

  People, people who need people …

  Tears streamed down her face as she sang.

  She was a knockout.

  Finally Charlene, playing my niece Lucy, got up and said, “I’ve had enough of this. I’m going upstairs to bed.” Dennehy kindheartedly let her go, though only because he knew his partner planned on following her and raping her. As this sexually ripe seventeen-year-old walked across the room, there was a close-up on me, and I followed her with my eyes, revealing lascivious thoughts.

  Irving yelled, “Cut.”

  “Larry, that’s your niece!” he said. “You can’t look at her like that.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “She’s a woman. She’s good looking. This is Texas.”

  “But Larry—”

  “Okay, Irving. Fine. Let’s do it again.”

  The next take I gave Charlene an even more lecherous look and Irving printed it.

  From then on, they knew J.R. was capable of anything, and it gave them an idea of the direction they could take him.

  I did my part offscreen, too. When the cast guested on Dinah’s Place with Dinah Shore, our first big national talk show, I ensured it would be a memorable appearance. Before our entrance, I opened some champagne backstage and Jim got shit-faced. Then I gave the whole cast hats to wear and flags to carry, and led them in a parade through the audience and onto the stage.

  While being introduced to Dinah, Jim accidentally knocked off his London bobby’s hat. It struck Dinah’s bad knee, causing her to gasp in pain. Jim immediately bent down and apologetically began kissing her knee. As he did, his hand accidentally moved up her legs and everything got wonderfully chaotic.

  The lesson became more and more clear. As J.R. went, so did Dallas. The correlation was indisputable. By the end of the season, Dallas was firmly situated among the twenty top-rated shows and J.R. had emerged from the background, having driven Sue Ellen to drink and infidelity, so that finally, while eight months pregnant, she was sent away into a sanatorium. What fun!

  For the end of the first full season, Katzman came up with the idea of keeping viewers hooked over the summer by cooking up a season-ending cliffhanger. In the finale, which epitomized L.A. Times TV critic Howard Rosenberg’s description of Dallas as “terrific trash,” Sue Ellen escaped from the loony bin, narrowly survived a car wreck that left her in a coma, and gave birth to her baby prematurely. Bobby and J.R. bonded in the hospital over the tragedy. Ratings soared.

  This was good television, but what went on behind the scenes was even better. None of us could ever forget shooting that scene in Sue Ellen’s hospital room. As Bobby and I gazed down at my comatose wife, who was connected to numerous life-supporting tubes, I talked about how beautiful she was, even in the dark light of tragedy. Bobby put his arm around me. It was a rare and touching moment of brotherly affection. The crew was enthralled, the set perfectly still. Everybody knew it was one of those special moments.

  “Shall we sing the old song we sang when we were boys?” Patrick asked.

  “Yeah, that’d be nice,” I said.

  Then we started:

  “Do your balls hang low? Do they swing to and fro? Do they itch like a bitch when you drag ’em in a ditch? Can you throw them over your shoulder like a Continental soldier? Do your balls hang low?”

  By the time we finished, there wasn’t a dry eye on the set. Of course, the tears were from laughter.

  I thought Linda was going to kill us.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  As the second full season began, I didn’t have to worry about success going to my head, but my stomach was another matter. Over the past year, I’d gained close to thirty pounds by indulging in the good life, and when we went back to work none of my clothes fit. On New Year’s, Maj and I went on the Optifast diet. We also jogged two miles daily. Within two months, I’d dropped thirty-five pounds. Maj took off twenty-seven. I felt and looked the best I had since Jeannie.

  My timing couldn’t have been better, as my life was about to take on a whole new shape. Though we’d almost finished shooting for the year, CBS made a last-minute request for four additional episodes, something practically unheard of so late in the year. But Dallas was the sixth-highest-rated show. The network wanted to keep up the momentum and take advantage of more advertising income.

  Mr. Katzman and his writing staff plotted out the new shows, and as the story goes, when they began discussing the cliffhanger, now a part of the Dallas formula, someone said, “Why don’t we just shoot the bastard?”

  The buildup was vintage J.R. Besides nearly losing the Ewing fortune and cheating family and friends with bogus Asian oil leases, he’d driven Bobby from Southfork, humiliated Pamela, planned to send Sue Ellen back to the nuthouse (upon discovering this she quietly slipped a pearl-handled pistol into her purse), and accused his ex-mistress and sister-in-law, Kristin, of prostitution (after which she hissed, “I’ll kill him”). In other words, J.R. had been very busy.

  Yet in the final episode, J.R. ended up very much alone, collapsed on the floor of his office after being shot by an unseen assailant.

  That show aired on March 21, 1980. I watched at home as I did every episode. By morning, though, it was clear this one wasn’t like any of the others. Dallas had been seen by nearly fifty million people in the U.S., more than any show except the Super Bowl. Dallas finished number one in the ratings for the first time. Total viewership was estimated at 300 million in fifty-seven countries around the world. It was a phenomenon, bigger than anyone ever imagined. Ronald Reagan was campaigning against Jimmy Carter, American hostages were being held in Iran, Polish shipyard workers were on strike, and all anyone wanted to know was, who shot J.R.?

  My mother quipped, “How could I have raised such a rotten kid?”

  * * *

  I also realized it was the opportunity of a lifetime. As the world asked who shot J.R., I posed my own question—was the network willing to pay me more money to come back for the next season? Overnight, it seemed, J.R. was everywhere. There were J.R. T-shirts, coffee mugs, bumper stickers, and buttons. J.R. hats were for sale. An English rock group scored a hit with the single “I Love J.R.” and the flip side “I Hate J.R.” I knew CBS and Lorimar were making a mint. Everyone was making a windfall from J.R. except me.

  As I saw it, it was also my turn to cash in. I had my agents tell Lorimar that I wanted to renegotiate my contract or else I was walking away from the show.

  This was a gamble—the gamble of my life.

  Friends called asking if I’d lost my mind. They warned that if I didn’t pull it off, I’d never work in Hollywood again. My mother was incensed. To her a contract was sacred. “You don’t go back on a contract,” she scolded. But because of that ethic, which I’d observed, she’d made hundreds of dollars on the stage while the producers of hits like South Pacific and The Sound of Music had made millions.

  “I know the risks I’m taking,” I said.

  And they were big. I was almost fifty, and I wanted to make the move from hired hand to participant. If I blew it, I figured I could survive for a couple years. In reality, they easily could’ve written me out of the show. J.R. could’e been killed. The show would’ve survived. It was hot. But I knew Katzman’s sensibility. He was too intelligent to let J.R. die. Even as the studio played hardball by floating rumors about possible new J.R.’s, I believed everything would work out.

  In a way, it already had. I had a house, a wife I loved, great children. Everything I’d ever wanted.

&nbs
p; What was I really asking for? CBS and Lorimar were making more money than they’d ever ever expected. Many many millions more. I just wanted what was fair.

  Which was the instructions I gave to my agents. I let them handle the negotiations and then turned to my publicist, Richard Grant, for a strategy on how to handle myself and use public opinion to my advantage. Good PR would make me more important, and Richard knew how to execute that.

  He knew a lot more than that. He understood what was important to build a career and put himself between me and the stuff that wasn’t necessary, the thousands who phoned daily with interview requests ranging from what J.R. would do if he were president to would Larry/J.R. endorse a new line of cat food. He knew how to capitalize on the J.R. mystique. He was brilliant.

  “First you need to leave the country,” he said. “This is bigger than anyone at CBS or Lorimar can comprehend. We’re talking the world. Then, wherever you go, you must be highly visible. We want them to see the whole world is obsessed with J.R. Finally, I will be the only person who will know how to get in touch with you. Not your agents or lawyers. It all goes through me.”

  I made only one addition to the plan. Before Maj and I left, I sent Richard, my agents, and my lawyer white Stetson cowboy hats. I stipulated that they wear them anytime they went in to CBS. As I reminded them, the good guys always wore white hats.

  * * *

  When negotiations began, in June, Maj and I flew to London and rented an apartment near our friend Henri Kleiman’s place. Nobody other than Henri and Richard knew where we had holed up. But except for that bit of privacy, I attempted to make my whereabouts as public as possible by partying at Annabel’s, the exclusive nightclub, creating photo ops with female police officers, and shopping at Harrods. I didn’t have any problem attracting attention.

  Great Britain—no, the entire U.K.—was obsessed by Dallas. The BBC figured one out of three Britons watched the show, and when reruns began after the cliffhanger, the Daily Express ran a humorous editorial warning, “Withdrawal symptoms are bound to set in to such an extent that Britain could clearly be facing its darkest hour.” The same was true in Greece, France, Germany, Italy, Turkey, countries as unlikely as Zambia and Zimbabwe, and even the Eastern bloc countries, like Poland and Hungary. Only the Soviet Union kept the show out, yet tapes were still smuggled in.

  “Keep going out,” Richard advised when I checked in with him, as I did my agents, every day. “Every photo and bit of TV footage shows up over here, and the more they see, the sooner they’ll start to see this is an international phenomenon.”

  Visibility wasn’t a problem. Old friend Kevin McClory took us to the Royal Ascot, one of the grandest of horse racing’s spectacles. Dress was festive and formal—top hats and morning suits for the men, and summer frocks and outrageous hats for the ladies. Drink was the same—champagne and Pimm’s cups. The proper decorum also mattered. As Kevin and I walked across the paddock to inspect a horse that was being run by a good friend of his, people started chanting, “J.R.! J.R.! J.R.!”

  Not an unpleasant situation for one looking for attention.

  But Kevin was worried my enthusiasm for being center stage might run afoul of protocol.

  The queen was inspecting a horse that she was running that day. She was right across the paddock from us.

  “Whatever you do, don’t respond,” he warned. “It’ll seem as if you’re trying to upstage the queen, and that would put us in a bad light.”

  I was on my best behavior.

  Still, the queen sent her equerry to inquire about the commotion. He was a pleasant man in his fifties, perfect for the job, and he asked Kevin to identify the person responsible for causing the disturbance. Kevin said it was J.R. The man didn’t believe him and stepped sideways to obtain a better look at me.

  “Oh my God, it is J.R.!” he exclaimed and rushed back to report to H.R.H.

  The queen never sent for us, but soon there were thousands of people surrounding the paddock, chanting, “J.R.” I was always flattered by that kind of reaction. Just as I was reaching the gate to exit the paddock, I turned and tipped my hat to the people, and they went bonkers, cheering like I’d single-handedly won the European football cup for them. That angered Kevin.

  “Now you’ve done it,” he said. “We’re on the queen’s shit list.”

  “As if you give a damn,” I said. “You’re Irish!”

  * * *

  When Dallas went back into production, in July, we were still at the negotiating table. There wasn’t a deal, but we were close. CBS and Lorimar had agreed to let me direct at least four episodes per season, develop made-for-TV movies through my own company, and take a piece of the merchandising that continued expanding to include games, Stetsons, dartboards, books, cologne, and even a beer called J. R. Ewing’s Private Stock. (More than five hundred thousand cases were preordered.) But they thought I was being unrealistic by asking for $100,000 per episode. I argued that was fair market value for an international star.

  “We’ve come in under budget every season,” I told my agents. “There’s plenty of money.”

  Even when Lorimar leaked word that they might let J.R. die or replace me with another actor, I didn’t get nervous. Nor did I feel a twinge of panic when they started shooting with a double, his head swathed in bandages. I couldn’t understand that, as I’d been shot in the stomach. If negotiations fell through, they were supposedly going to hire another actor and explain that J.R. had undergone plastic surgery after the shooting. I never believed a word. Never felt the first drop of sweat. Once negotiations were focused solely on salary, I knew I was in. The mood was different. In preparation, Kevin took Maj and me to his place in the Bahamas so I’d be close enough to Dallas to get to the set within hours of consummating a deal. We were getting excited about going back to Dallas. I was on the verge of winning!

  The phone rang every few hours. Between calls, we swam, ate, drank, and wondered when we were going to get on a plane. We spent one afternoon with actor Richard Harris, who lived nearby, and then made plans to party at the casino that night. As I dressed for the evening—Maj didnt go—sipping champagne, we got the phone call. We had an agreement.

  All I had to do was show up for work in Dallas the next day and my holdout would be officially over.

  I kissed Maj and we toasted each other’s success. It truly was as much her success as mine.

  “Don’t stay out late,” she said. “We have a ten o’clock plane tomorrow morning.”

  But an early night with Richard Harris? Impossible. We celebrated my good fortune by singing songs and drinking vintage champagne all night. I stumbled into bed around 4 A.M. and had been asleep for about three hours when Maj got me up and moving. I’d hardly say I moved very fast. I was blown out. We had an even tougher time rousing Kevin, who was essential to our departure because we’d locked $10,000 in cash and our passports in his private safe and we needed him to open it.

  Kevin’s first ten attempts failed. Pained, embarrassed, and deeply hungover, he swore he couldn’t remember the right combination.

  We suspected our host didn’t want to remember.

  Time was running out before our plane was scheduled to take off. Maj’s patience was running out too. I saw her irritation build as she checked the clock. Then like a bomb she exploded: “Kevin, open the f-ing safe or I’ll have Larry beat the shit out of you!”

  I was astounded. I’d never seen Maj so angry. Also, I hadn’t been in a fight since the Golden Gloves. Nor did I want to fight my old friend. But like a good husband I pretended to be in synch with the plan. I didn’t want to harm Kevin, and besides, he was in pretty good shape.

  But apparently the look on Maj’s face persuaded him to cooperate. With his forehead covered in sweat, he managed to get the safe open.

  We grabbed our cash and passports and jumped in Kevin’s vintage Cadillac, a boat of a car with shark fins on the back. There was a palpable sense of escape, relief, and excitement as Kevin gunned the engine,
but while speeding out of the gates he ran over the curb and tore off the muffler, so there was a horrendous noise and a sheet of sparks behind us all the way to the airport. Shades of West Point. I always seem to be arriving at important occasions with great cacophony.

  Luckily this was the Bahamas, and the plane was an hour late taking off, which allowed us to make the connecting flight in Miami. Once in Dallas, we were whisked by a waiting helicopter directly to Southfork. After circling, the chopper made a spectacular touchdown by the pool. The cast and crew were glad to see me arrive. None of us had spoken throughout my renegotiations, but they told me that they always expected me to return. They were also well aware that my victory opened the door to raises for all of them as well.

  Nowadays I look at the salaries that are being paid to top TV actors, people like Kelsey Grammer, Drew Carey, and the cast of Friends, and I think, Good for them. I also think they should give me a little nod for blazing the trail for episodic television.

  * * *

  Once I was back at work, the big question still remained to be answered. Who shot J.R.?

  A newspaper syndicate with papers in London, South Africa, and Holland offered a quarter-million dollars if I’d reveal it to them exclusively. For a moment I considered telling them the wrong information and then saying I was tricked by the producers, but I decided not to be so like J.R. in real life. Everyone asked me. In truth, I didn’t know who shot J.R. None of us did until we finally filmed the episode.

  Actually, I didn’t even know then. Katzman kept everyone in the dark by handing out scripts with key pages missing and filming J.R. being shot by practically everyone on the set, including several guys on the crew. He jokingly suggested that after editing the show he’d lock everyone in a motel until it aired.

  There was a time when the network feared that viewers might lose interest in the mystery over the summer, but they solved that concern with clever programming that kept the “who done it” episode from airing until the fourth week of the new season. The delay, which included Cliff Barnes, Sue Ellen, and Alan Beam getting arrested as suspects, rekindled the buildup around the world.