by LARRY HAGMAN
“But we have parts coming from Czechoslovakia,” he said. “They will be here in two years.”
I had five bags, containing all my costumes. An older man who looked to be in his eighties spent about an hour and a half carrying them up to our room. By his third trip, he was panting, sweating, and looking like he might have a heart attack before he finished. But I was so pissed off about our accommodations that I let him suffer the first round because I was sure my turn was next. Sheree’s fiancé, Paul Rubio, walked around the lobby waving his American Express card while asking, “Where can we find a hotel that works?”
“There isn’t one,” the concierge said.
“What about one where we can get a drink?”
“I can help you out there,” I said.
I’d stayed at the National Hotel and knew they had a bar that served alcohol, the choice being Heineken or straight shots of vodka. Without hesitating, the whole group piled into our bus and I treated drinks at the bar. Then everybody spread out to look for better places to stay. Despite the effort, our conditions didn’t improve.
One of the producers we hired locally to grease the palms of Soviet officials invited us to his home, a dacha outside the city. One look at it confirmed my suspicion—he had to be Russian mafia. In Moscow, the poor people, meaning just about everyone, lived in run-down apartment buildings, and the few rich people had apartments only slightly less run-down. When a neurosurgeon earns only slightly more than a street cleaner, there’s no incentive to do anything.
But our local producer was proof that crime paid. He owned a two-story modern home that looked straight out of California. It was furnished with new appliances, televisions, VCRs, and enough champagne and caviar to make us feel we were back at the Mansion in Dallas.
Because the only way anyone in the country could’ve seen Dallas was on black-market videotapes, I walked around the city unrecognized. It felt great to be anonymous again. I walked leisurely through museums and churches without being stopped once for an autograph. All of us actors remarked on a similar experience. But then we ran into a group of East German tourists who picked up television signals from West Germany, and they were fanatical Dallas fans. Our guide, a pretty little girl, had no idea why four hundred people suddenly went nuts seeing us. She asked them to stop, but they ignored her.
“That’s J.R.!” they screamed. “J.R., we love you!”
Our guide didn’t understand and called for security.
“But you’re just an actor,” she kept saying.
I couldn’t begin to explain the reach of television to someone who’d never seen it the way we knew it in America, and as for a phenomenon like Dallas, forget it. She couldn’t have understood.
Nine months later, I watched CNN’s coverage of the Berlin Wall being torn down and realized that Dallas had impacted that side of the world. Pop music also had an effect, but ideas combined with pictures were even more powerful. Every time people in Hungary, Poland, and East Germany watched Dallas, they saw what they didn’t have—the beautiful clothes, the big homes, the abundant food, and the lifestyle. Eventually, enough people began to say, “Wait a minute, I want that stuff too! And why don’t we have it?”
I honestly believe that as Dallas crossed the borders into Soviet-controlled countries, it played a big part in the downfall of the Soviet empire. When the people from the Eastern bloc countries saw what they were missing, they realized what a farce communism was.
* * *
My mother, happily retired for years in Palm Springs, never complained about her aches and pains, even after her car accident. But in 1989 she suffered from back pain so severe she didn’t have to complain. It was obvious. We took her to a renowned sports doctor in L.A. After a series of tests, including X rays, he asked if she had an internist. Maj and I exchanged looks. Clearly his question meant her problem was more serious than a backache, and it was.
Upon further examination, Mother was diagnosed with colon cancer. She checked into Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where Dr. Leonard Makowka performed a three-hour surgery. It was his first operation at the renowned hospital. Five years later, purely by fate, I’d be his last operation there.
Meanwhile, despite the surgery, Mother’s prognosis wasn’t good. Dr. Makowka found the cancer had metastasized. I visited daily, until she returned home to Palm Springs. Then we did what we could for as long as we could. She spent her final days at Eisenhower Memorial in Rancho Mirage.
The last time I saw Mother was on a Sunday, the day of the week when I didn’t utter a sound. Mother was used to that habit of mine. Fortunately, the important stuff between us had already been said years before. She’d let us know she was grateful that her children had given her a second chance to be close to them, and she knew that we felt the same way about her.
When I walked into her hospital room a prominent television pastor was sitting on her bed, holding her hand and praying for her. His regular visits had started to concern me. Call me cynical. I’m from the South, and every pastor I’d ever met while growing up made deathbed visits in an effort to get their church “remembered.” I made sure Mother didn’t remember his church at all.
After he left, we had a wonderful visit. She’d never liked Bach, yet she knew I enjoyed whistling Bach inventions. So she started whistling one of my favorites. I did counterpoint. We whistled while holding hands until she grew too tired. I sat for a while longer, then kissed her good-bye.
She passed away the next day. That was on a Monday. I arranged to have her cremated, told Maj that I would pick up the ashes at the Palm Springs mortuary, and we planned a burial on Saturday in the family plot in Weatherford.
Meanwhile, that week I was directing an episode of Dallas on the Irvine ranch a couple hours south of L.A. It was a complicated week. I had a herd of a thousand head of cattle to move around as we shot. There were also horses, wranglers, a chuck wagon, and all the paraphernalia of a roundup. Plus I was acting in every scene. Then on Thursday night, at the last minute, the shooting schedule was changed and I was handed ten pages of additional dialogue I had to learn by the next morning.
Exhausted, I stripped naked and walked around my hotel room with all the windows open to keep myself awake while studying the script. I made it until sunrise. The telephone rang. It was Maj, who was in a panic because she hadn’t received the ashes. I was supposed to have had them sent to Malibu. But I’d forgotten. I’d also left the note with the mortuary’s address and phone number on my desk in Malibu, and I was afraid to ask Maj to get them. We were leaving the next day for Weatherford.
“Where are the ashes, Larry?”
I calmly said I’d call the mortuary and have them delivered to me on location and bring them to Malibu myself.
There was a knock on the door just in time.
It was Patrick, telling me it was time to go to work. I turned to him and he saw the fear in my eyes.
“Hey, you’ve got to help me on this thing,” I said.
Both of us phoned mortuaries in Palm Springs until I found the right one. I’ll never forget saying, “Hello … Larry Hagman here. Do you have my mother’s ashes there?” Neither will I forget the man’s response. “Yes, as a matter of fact Mr. Weasel is just walking out the door with them. He’s going to mail them to you.”
I suddenly recalled a plan to mail them, which I obviously screwed up. But something else got my attention.
“Who’s going to mail them?” I asked.
“Mr. Weasel.”
I started to laugh. Punch-drunk from sleep deprivation and anxiety, I thought that was the funniest thing in the world. I turned to Patrick and told him that Mr. Weasel had my mother’s ashes. He cracked up too. Then Mr. Weasel got on the phone. I said, “Mr. Weasel, do you have my mother’s ashes?” That put both of us on the floor. “Yes, I do,” he said, unaware there were two men on the other end writhing in hysterical laughter.
“I was waiting for instructions on what to do with them and decided I better mail them to you.”<
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I was laughing so hard I couldn’t speak. He thought I was crying.
“I’m sorry you’re taking this so hard,” he said.
“I’ll be all right,” I said.
We arranged for a Dallas company car to pick them up and they reached the set about 4 P.M. I took them to Malibu without telling Maj about my lapse in memory or revealing the different scenarios that had run through my head if I hadn’t been able to get them, including using the ashes from the chuck wagon fire on the set and then sneaking back to Weatherford to bury Mother properly without anyone knowing the truth. Fortunately none of that had to happen.
Early the next morning we flew to Weatherford. The whole family, including Heller and her husband, Bromley, and all her kids, met there and we had a tearful good-bye. Many of Mother’s old friends spoke. We put pictures of the family in her ashes. I included a photo of Linda Gray, who Mother adored. And Heller added a miniature bottle of Kahlúa, her favorite drink. It was a fitting memorial to a life well lived.
That experience started me thinking about my own burial. I want to be ground up in one of those chippers, the kind they used in the movie Fargo, and spread across a field and plowed under. Then I want the field planted with wheat that would be made into flour and used to bake a huge cake. A year after my passing, my friends would be invited to a big party and they’d get a piece of me. And every year I’d come back again.
* * *
Early in 1991 I took Patrick up to a fishing camp a friend of mine owned outside of Medford, Oregon. It was a classic old lodge on 162 wooded acres along the Rogue River. Maj and I had been going there two or three times a year for ten years, fishing for salmon and steel-head.
The first time I’d taken Patrick there we’d limited out. It was unbelievable fishing. Just as we were about to take the boat out of the river, he’d reeled in a fourteen-and-a-half-pounder. None of the fish we caught had been under eight pounds.
This was another special trip. While we were there, my friend who owned the camp called and mentioned that he was interested in selling the place. He wanted slightly more than a million dollars. I knewDallas was likely to be canceled at the end of the season and didn’t want to spend that kind of money when I had other expenses. It took me about two seconds to convince Patrick to buy it. I figured I’d sponge off him anyway.
After Patrick and his family moved in, I asked him to send me the rod and tackle I kept there. I needed it for a trip. I told him exactly where I kept it.
“The one in the closet?” he asked.
“Yeah, that’s it.”
“Oh, it came with the house,” he said.
Actually, it came from starring on a series that ran on prime time longer than any other except for Gunsmoke (and most of them were half-hour shows). If not for Dallas, Patrick wouldn’t have purchased a spectacular fishing camp and I wouldn’t have been building a magnificent mountaintop villa in Ojai, seventy miles outside of L.A. Neither of us would’ve been wealthy beyond our dreams. Neither of us would’ve had the roles of a lifetime. Neither of us would’ve had the fun or the friendships. But after thirteen years and 356 episodes, Dallas came to an end. Only three of us were left from the original cast: Patrick, Ken Kercheval, and me.
Poor old J.R. had proven his mettle when it came to scandal, bribery, blackmail, philandering, and family infighting, but poor ratings were beyond even his skill for manipulating a situation to his advantage. But it was time. There wasn’t much left that the show or J.R. hadn’t done. By the time Katzman put the finishing touches to the last script, I betcha J.R.—who everyone thought was so smart—had lost Ewing Oil and about a billion dollars.
The final episode, a two-hour special, provided a fitting send-off. J.R. had lost everything important to him—Ewing Oil, Southfork, his family and friends. Drunk and angry, he went upstairs and pulled out an old Colt Peacemaker that had once belonged to his daddy. He was about to contemplate blowing himself to smithereens when a guardian angel, played by my friend Joel Grey, showed him what life at Southfork would’ve been like if he’d never existed. We filmed the last scene February 8, 1991, and it was a bittersweet farewell.
At the end-of-season wrap party at the Marina Yacht Club in Marina del Rey, all of us sensed the show probably wouldn’t be back. There hadn’t been an official announcement by the network. But everyone talked about it. Patrick and I didn’t expect to be back. Others, not understanding the economics behind such decisions, hoped for the best, pointing out that our ratings were still better than at least half the shows on the air. Only Katzman, in a reserved mood all night, knew the reality but he didn’t want to tell anyone the news and ruin the party.
Three days later Leonard called and filled me in. He said it almost like it was an afterthought. By the way, Larry, we’ve been canceled.
“Well, there you go,” I said.
It was neither a whimper nor a bang. Just the end of a natural life span. Reagan left office, so did J.R. He had a good run. But there was a bright side. A few days after Katzman had given me the official word, Maj and I attended the screening of a movie and then went to a party afterward. Normally I would’ve turned in early because I had to wake up at 5 A.M. But no more. As I told Maj, I was unemployed. I could party till the sun came up if I felt like it.
Chapter Twenty-seven
One day long after the last episode of Dallas had been filmed, I was showing a friend around Malibu. The beach community’s signature was still its surfers, but it had otherwise gone through dramatic changes over the twenty-five years we’d lived there. Property prices had increased sixtyfold. Shacks that had once lined the beach had been replaced by multimillion-dollar architectural masterpieces. All the old people had either died out or sold out.
Maj and I weren’t planning to sell out, but we were building our dream house on top of a twenty-five-hundred-foot-high mountain overlooking the ocean and Oxnard plain. I had no complaints. At sixty, I was having too much fun traveling between our other homes, in New York and Santa Fe, fishing, hunting, or just tooling around behind the wheel of my Rolls-Royce or on my Harley-Davidson.
One day I got a call from Linda Gray, who said she’d been approached to do the play Love Letters at the Cannon Theater in Beverly Hills. She asked if I’d like to do it with her. I said, “Go back onstage! There’s no way in the world you’re going to get me to go back onstage. It’s too much work.”
“Oh come, Larry,” she said. “You’ll love being in front of an audience again.”
“As you know, Linda, I adore you,” I said, “but you can just forget it.”
Three days later we started rehearsals, and a week after that we opened to a sellout crowd. Every night for the next two weeks also sold out, with standing ovations. Linda was right as usual. I loved it.
Then we accepted an offer to do the play at the English-speaking theater in Vienna, Austria. Opening night was a resounding success. The audience stood and cheered through five-minute curtain calls. The line of people waiting outside for us to sign their programs was literally a block long. Tables were set up in the stage door alley and police had to be brought in to keep the queue in order. It took two hours to take pictures and sign autographs.
At a party afterward, we were eating dinner with the company, friends, and everyone involved, and the theater manager gave Linda and me a toast, declaring, “I’m so thrilled by the quality and success of the show, if my life ended tonight I’d die happy.”
The next morning his wife called to say that he’d passed away in his sleep. Thinking back to his toast, Maj and I and Linda were dumbstruck. It was very strange. The mood for the second performance was somber at the beginning of the show, but at the end we still got our standing ovation. From this, we got offers to tour Switzerland and Germany. A few months later, we returned to Switzerland, where we continued to be a success. But as soon as we crossed into Germany, it turned into a disaster.
The promoter’s idea of publicity was a small, half-inch squib in the general entertainme
nt paper. If you blinked, you missed the notice. There were very few press interviews and practically no radio or TV interviews. We played Stuttgart in a twenty-five-hundred-seat auditorium with eighteen people present—two in the balcony, four in the mezzanine, and the rest scattered throughout the orchestra. One of them was Maj, who laughed alone at all the right places and stood and clapped at the end.
That turned out to be the model for the rest of the tour.
At first it was funny, and then less amusing, and then totally demoralizing. Then it became funny again when we realized there was nothing we could do to change the situation. We were playing in English to a German audience in working-class communities where most of the playgoers were Turkish. The language barrier itself was probably insurmountable. The people who did buy tickets were very enthusiastic, but it was hard to tell because their laughter took a while to travel from the cheap seats to the stage.
There was an upside—we didn’t have to spend two hours afterward signing autographs. To say the least, it was a humbling experience that brought home the vagaries of an actor’s life, from the pinnacle of international stardom to the tortured obscurity of a provincial actor. Miss Gray and I had carved a close friendship in our thirteen years on Dallas, but there’s nothing like sharing a disaster to deepen those bonds.
We performed Love Letters one more time, for a week at the Rubicon Theatre in Ventura, California, and got back our full houses and standing ovations, so I know we didn’t cause the debacle. However, let me say this: if Linda ever wanted me to play Hamburg with her again, I’d be right there with her.
Carroll O’Connor had seen us do Love Letters at the Cannon Theater and absolutely loved it. He came backstage with tears in his eyes. He understood every nuance of the play. As we talked, he asked if I wanted to direct In the Heat of the Night, his successful CBS series. He had made the transition from Archie Bunker to a Southern sheriff, an almost impossible feat given the indelible impression he’d made on audiences as Archie. But that he did it was a tribute to his enormous talent as an actor.
