Larry Hagman - Hello Darlin'

by LARRY HAGMAN

  Just three days before the secret was unveiled, I performed with my mother in London at a gala eightieth-birthday celebration for the Queen Mother, who I learned was addicted to Dallas. A while earlier, I’d set out to capitalize on my fame by putting out a record, which was not very successful. Nonetheless, I was requested to sing it at the royal command performance. Henry Mancini conducted a huge orchestra, which included a choir. I walked onstage as they played the theme from Dallas and received a wonderful ovation. I started the song with great confidence, but halfway through I went totally blank. I turned to Mr. Mancini and motioned for him to stop. He asked, “Do you want to begin again?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  There was deathly silence in the audience. Two thousand five hundred sphincters were puckered. Henry started the orchestra again, and I proceeded until I got to the same place. I motioned Henry to stop again, turned to the royal box, and said, “Sorry, ma’am. If you’re going to blow it, blow it big.”

  I got a huge laugh among some hoots and whistles. I wasn’t mortified. I simply introduced my mother. She sang a medley of songs she’d made famous onstage in London, and we ended in a duet of “Honey Bun” from South Pacific, which I’d done with her at the Drury Lane so many years earlier. It actually turned into quite an affectionate moment.

  Afterward, I sheepishly walked through the receiving line to meet the Queen Mother and Prince Charles.

  “You really were a bomb out there tonight, weren’t you?” Prince Charles said truthfully but jokingly.

  “A stinker,” I said.

  Then I got to the Queen Mother, who said, “Now I want you to tell me, young man, who shot J.R.?”

  “Not even for you, ma’am,” I said.

  By then I’d seen the final cut and knew the shooter’s identity. It was Sue Ellen’s sister, Kristin, played by Mary Crosby. Mary was a sweet little girl when she came on the show, hardly past eighteen, and gorgeous. Her father, Bing Crosby, had given my mother one of her earliest breaks by having her sing on his radio show as a regular. But I didn’t let family connections interfere with business. When Mary started on the show, one of our first scenes involved J.R. seducing her. Irving Moore was directing and was a stickler for realism. He was particularly hard on ingenues. For some reason, we couldn’t get the scene right for him. In the scene, Mary wore a sexy dress with spaghetti straps, which I was supposed to remove one strap at a time while kissing her. After a couple tries, she whispered, “Larry, don’t push me away because there’s nothing holding my top up.”

  I respected that. After each take I held her close while the director said, “Cut, let’s do another one.” I don’t even remember what kept going wrong. Finally, after the eighteenth take, which we knew had been right on, I thrust her at arm’s length and her whole top fell off as the director yelled, “That’s perfect.” Then I quickly pulled her close and we waltzed off the set. Neither of us has ever forgotten that scene.

  Fans of the show say the same thing about the show that aired on November 21, 1980. They say they’ll always remember where they were the night they found out who shot J.R. That Friday’s show drew more viewers than any show in television history, a 53.3 rating, or an estimated 83 million people—more than had voted in the presidential election three weeks earlier and a record that stood until the final episode M*A*S*H in 1983. The final tally worldwide was 380 million!

  People have asked how that made me feel, being at the center of all that, but the numbers are so huge I never completely comprehended them—and never will.

  I simply enjoyed it. I’d sign autographs for anyone who asked, provided they told me a poem, a prayer, or a song in return. A lot of people balked at this, but I always thought that if I gave my signature away people didn’t place any value on it. But if they had to work for it, and essentially pay for it, they got an experience they never would’ve gotten if I’d signed and we’d never interacted. Both of us walked away with something memorable.

  I got some marvelous poems and songs. If people said they didn’t know any songs, as many did, I asked them to sing me “Happy Birthday.” If they said they didn’t know any prayers, I asked them to repeat with me, “Now I lay me down to sleep …” Then I’d ask them to bless their loved ones and me. Often that led to further discussions, and autograph sessions could last for hours. But I got to know a lot of people. It was wonderful, and then I’d give them my “money.”

  There were only so many autographs I could sign when crowds swelled into the hundreds or more. It took so much time. So I came up with the idea of handing out funny money I had printed up—thousand-dollar bills with my picture and the slogan “In Hagman We Trust.” On the first batch of ten thousand, I put my Malibu P.O. box on the back and told people to send a stamped self-addressed envelope and I’d return it with a personally autographed picture. But after a few months, the post office complained that I was jamming them up and suggested I find another method of responding to the public. I eventually discontinued giving out my address because there just wasn’t enough time in the day to sign all the requests. Now the back says, “This is printed on recycled paper. Why not recycle yourself? To receive an organ donor card, please call (800) 622-9010.” The response has been very satisfying. I can amuse people and maybe save lives.

  At the peak of J.R. craziness, my mother also helped keep it all in perspective. I remember one weekend in particular when we met her in Las Vegas to see my friend Joel Grey perform. After cocktails, we waited for a couple of taxis, but there was just one in front of the hotel, and once the driver spotted me, he yelled, “Hey, J.R., get in!”

  I tried convincing Mother and her companion/secretary, Ben Washer, to take the cab, but she insisted I get in. While we stood there debating, the driver settled it by saying, “I don’t want the lady. I want J.R.” Mother insisted that I go first. Just then another cab arrived. Before we pulled away, I rolled down the window and grinned, “That’s show business, Mom!”

  Cut to the theater. Midway through the show, Joel announced that he had some special guests in the audience. First, he introduced me, “my dear friend Larry Hagman, who plays J.R. Ewing on the number-one-rated show, Dallas.” The crowd gave me an enthusiastic ovation. Then Joel introduced my mother, or, as he said, “a woman who’s better known as Peter Pan!”

  As she rose and waved, people went nuts. They stood, with some climbing on their chairs for a better look, and clapped so long the house lights went up. Despite Mother’s efforts to quiet the house, the applause wouldn’t quit. It was literally a showstopper.

  Finally, after blowing kisses to all sides, she sat down. Then I felt a tap on my knee. There was Mother, leaning toward me. With a twinkle in her eye, she said, “And that’s show business too, baby!”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  The more successful Dallas became, the more fun I had, and there was no end to the enticements that came my way. There were opportunities for commercials, endorsements, travel, and every other imaginable opportunity. I frequently said no. Specifically, I’m thinking of a night when Patrick and I were having a beer at a cowboy bar and I was approached by a twenty-something knockout who asked if I wanted a Texas sandwich. I asked her what she meant by a Texas sandwich.

  “Me, you, and my sister,” she said.

  When I still said no thanks, she said, “Well, okay, you want a Bud Lite?”

  J.R. wouldn’t have hesitated, but that was him. I knew in general it was best to say no and avoid potential trouble. Like the time I opened a Western store in Oklahoma City. I flew there, signed autographs, and stumbled back into my hotel about 1 A.M. My buddy, stand-in, and bodyguard, Tim O’Connor, and I had a two-story apartment in the motel. After saying good night to Tim, I went upstairs and there was a drop-dead gorgeous thirty-something blonde in my bed. She’d turned the lights low and a bottle of Dom Pérignon was open on the side table.

  “Hi, J.R.,” she purred. “My husband’s away for the weekend and I thought we could get to know each other.”

>   What a waste, I thought. What bad timing. I sat down and told her how much I appreciated her offer, but she’d missed my window of availability by thirty years. Besides, I had to get up early in the morning to go to church. Still, we had a glass of champagne before Tim made sure that she left without a story to tell … or sell.

  Sex wasn’t the only thing I said no to. Tobacco was also high on my list of forbiddens. For much of the 1980s, as America was accepting the deadly truth about cigarettes, I was the most famous antismoker. Instead of trying to work with the dozens of charities that asked for some of my time, my publicist, Richard, suggested I focus on one thing, so I chose the American Cancer Society. Nationally, I helped launch their Great American Smokeout Campaign. So did Mother and my daughter. Closer to home, I waged a protest when a billboard for Marlboro cigarettes went up behind my house along Pacific Coast Highway. For ten years, I took the work seriously and I think I made a difference.

  But my passion for getting people to quit killing themselves didn’t always make me popular on the Dallas set, especially with Barbara Bel Geddes, who smoked in the makeup room every morning. It was stinking up the place and was just plain unhealthy for everybody in the room.

  “So,” she said.

  “So cut it out, please,” I said.

  She kept on smoking.

  After she had a heart attack, her heart surgeon told her that she had to quit or die. She quit.

  About a third of the show’s cast and crew also smoked, including Mr. Katzman. If they lit up around me, I’d pull out my pocket-sized portable fan and blow the smoke back toward them. All that second-hand cigarette smoke took a toll on my voice. Finally one afternoon, my throat hurt so much I was forced to deliver an ultimatum. If we allowed smoking on the set, then I wanted to stop production for ten minutes every hour to air out the soundstage by opening the giant doors.

  “No way,” one of the producers said. “You’re talking about stopping work for at least eighty minutes a day. That’ll cost us between ten and twenty thousand dollars a day. Times five days a week. That’s a hundred grand a week. Every week. Larry, you’re out of your mind!”

  “Then why don’t we just ban smoking on the set?” I suggested.

  “We can’t ask people to stop smoking.”

  “Then we’ll take a ten-minute break and ask them to go outside.”

  “That’s still a hundred thousand a week downtime!” they raged.

  No one took me seriously. Then one day I stopped production because my throat was so dry and irritated. I insisted on taking a break while the soundstage was aired out. The doors were opened, blowers brought in, and the air was cleared. Then I returned to work. After several days of doing that, smoking on the set was banned. Yet my victory resulted in complaints. A few guys from the crew said I was discriminating against smokers and a couple guys on the crew threatened to quit. My response? “Good, let ’em.”

  Jim Davis was my toughest case. I got him to temporarily quit his five-pack-a-day habit after I grew tired of hearing him clear his throat before every take. The disgusting noise he made sounded like goomba, which is how we fondly referred to him. Goomba. But he started up again after being diagnosed with inoperable cancer. None of us including Jim himself knew he was sick until the summer of 1980.

  We were shooting a scene in the woods. Fittingly, it was me, Bobby, and Daddy. The three of us were on a hunting trip, a passion all of us shared in real life. As written, we were supposed to be roughing it in sleeping bags by the campfire. But the day we shot the scene, I brought a cot, an ice chest, a comfy chair, and mosquito netting—but only for me.

  “Larry, this is supposed to be roughing it,” the director said.

  “This is the way J.R. roughs it,” I replied.

  He acquiesced.

  All of us had fun. But as the day wore on, the temperature rose and took a toll on Jim. At first, he had difficulty remembering his lines. Then his memory left him altogether. He didn’t know where he was. Neither was he too sure about me or Patrick. “Where the hell are we?” he asked. Texas, I said. “What the hell are we doing here?” The second time it happened Patrick and I took him aside and asked questions to test his memory. Do you know your name? “Jim.” Do you know where you are? “No.” Do you know you’re making a television series right now? “A television series? I’m working?”

  The moment Mr. Katzman realized the problem he stopped shooting and sent us back in a car. Initially we thought he had heatstroke, but soon Jim broke the sad news that doctors had found cancer. When I saw him with a cigarette, he said he’d started smoking again, explaining, “Why the hell not?” Despite aggressive chemotherapy, which made him so weak he couldn’t get up from a chair without assistance and which caused his hair to fall out, Jim worked until a month before he died, in 1981.

  I directed his final episode, which was terribly sad because all of us knew he was in his last days. We left on hiatus, wondering if we’d see him again. Maj and I were touring the Scottish countryside when Jim passed away. I heard the news from a Scottish reporter from a local paper who was waiting for me to walk downstairs at the quaint inn where we were staying.

  “Jock died this morning,” he said. “How do you feel about it?”

  I felt sad, I said, but I’d been expecting the inevitable.

  “But aren’t you upset?” he asked.

  “Yes, definitely,” I said—“but only because of the way you broke the news to me.”

  I sent a wreath to the funeral that said, “Good-bye, Goomba.” Of course, I still see him every day. The first thing you see when you enter my home is the oil painting of Jim that hung in the living room at Southfork.

  * * *

  In 1981, Dallas hit number one. So much energy went into the show, but real life didn’t stop for any of us. Whether it was Linda’s divorce, Victoria’s breakup with Andy Gibb, or Charlene giving birth, we all went through something. Including me. I was hit hard when I got word that my mother had been in a horrific car accident that left one friend dead and another critically injured.

  It was the Sunday of Labor Day weekend in San Francisco. She was with Ben Washer, her dear friend Janet Gaynor, and Janet’s husband, producer Paul Gregory. The four of them were on their way to dinner in Chinatown when their cab was struck by a van that ran a red light. The van’s driver was drunk. Ben died instantly. Janet was critically injured. Paul escaped with broken ribs and minor kidney damage. Mother, unable to remember anything about the crash, suffered two broken ribs, a broken pelvis, and severe heartache over Ben.

  Maj and I flew to be with her immediately. I was distraught and more upset than I realized. I had no patience for the reporters and paparazzi who were camped outside San Francisco General Hospital, waiting for me. We decided to go through the emergency door in the back. There was no way I wanted to give an interview or pose for pictures. But in the hallway we ran into one guy who’d anticipated our move. He was after the big bucks the tabloids would pay for a photo of me looking upset, and I was in the frame of mind that gets celebrities in trouble. The more film he snapped, the closer I got to snapping myself.

  I demanded he turn over his film. When he refused, I grabbed his camera, stripped the film out of it, and dropped the camera on the floor. He threatened to sue, but I never heard from him again.

  Mother was able to leave the hospital after nine days. As we helped her out of the hospital, she was complaining about having to use a “dadburn walker.” Then we heard a noise from up above. We looked up and saw doctors and nurses hanging out the window, crowing, mimicking Peter Pans famous cry: “Er-er-er-errrrrrrh! Good-bye, Peter!” they called. Mother lost it. All of us did. The tears gushed out as much for the sentiment as for knowing what could’ve been except for fate and modern medicine.

  A year later Mother sang at my daughter’s wedding, and in October 1984, she did a benefit for San Francisco General Hospitals Trauma Center, where she’d been treated. At age seventy, she fit into the same Peter Pan costume she’d w
orn nearly thirty years earlier on Broadway and soared over the audience singing, “I’ve Got to Crow.” She also dedicated “The Way You Look Tonight” to Janet, who’d died several weeks earlier of complications stemming from the accident.

  It was a great way to say thank you.

  By then, Mother and I had learned to appreciate each other in ways that had been impossible when we were younger. In fact, her name was brought up once, maybe twice, in connection to joining Dallas, but the closest she got was a press party for the show that was held at our home in Malibu. It was a sensational party, too. CBS had brought in all the TV critics from around the country, maybe two hundred people. Sushi, just coming into fashion, was served by beautiful girls in kimonos. Everyone from Dallas was there and being interviewed in different parts of the house.

  After everyone had been spoken to, the reporters converged on my mother. One young girl gushed to Mother, “Miss Martin, what’s it like to have an icon for a son?”

  My mother gazed benignly down upon her and quietly said, “My dear, my son is a star. I am an icon.”

  That’s what I loved about Mother—her truthfulness.

  I was upset when Barbara Bel Geddes left the show in 1983. We had a relationship like the one I had with Jim. No one including Barbara ever told me that she had complaints. Afterward, I learned she felt like she was being worked too hard and wanted more money. None of those problems was unsolvable. I could’ve helped to work out a compromise. But Barbara was following the advice of a business manager, one of those guys who helped her out of a job, and her departure was a done deal by the time I heard about it.

  Donna Reed was brought in to replace Barbara. I’d admired her in From Here to Eternity and dozens of other films, as well as The Donna Reed Show. If we had to replace Mama, I thought, she was an excellent choice. She definitely brought a different take to the character. I first noticed it in her very first scene. She’d gotten off a plane and was running up the ramp toward Bobby and me. I remember thinking running was something Mama would never do. By this time, viewers knew the character as well as we did, and as much as I adored Donna, she didn’t have the strength or edge that Barbara had given Mama.