The Eternal Party

by Kristina Hagman

  Though we often had to deal with the logistics of Mom’s care, my relationship with Dad was much as it had been when I was younger. We talked about books and movies and current events. We had deep philosophical conversations. Dad and I were at ease with each other and spoke about things that would be uncomfortable for most fathers and daughters; we even talked about death. My parents’ advanced ages and medical conditions were not the only reasons we discussed this difficult subject. We had talked about death over the span of many years in the context of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, news articles about Jack Kevorkian, and the sad fact that his dear friend Bill Hayward had killed himself, as had Hayward’s sister and mother. Even when I was back in high school we had talked about death: Carlos Castaneda’s book Journey to Ixtlan had been required reading; Dad had read it with me, and we talked about the medicine man’s role of taking drugs to understand death and help those who were alive prepare for it. Over the years, Dad had repeatedly said that hallucinogens had taken away any fear he ever had about dying, but that was not the sense I had back in that hospital room in Dallas.

  After his death, I remained confused and unnerved by the way he had begged for forgiveness. What was he thinking of during that last long day? The easy answer was that he wanted to be forgiven for affairs he’d had while married to my mother. We only talked about these other women a few times as a family, taking our cue from Mom, who usually passed over the subject quickly. My brother probably knew more than the rest of us, but he just said, “Dad does his own thing,” and he never went into detail.

  * * *

  Dad’s lovers turned out in force to celebrate him at his memorials in Dallas and Los Angeles, according to new information I was getting from various sources just before and after he died. I began to wonder which women really were his lovers and which were just friends of the family. Did it matter? Mom always said Dad loved women. While we publicly said good-bye to our father, I tried to focus on all the wonderful things about my dad, but I couldn’t help but be confronted with facts of his hidden life. Dad liked secrets. Secrets made him feel powerful and in control. Dad admired men who knew how to keep secrets and was especially enamored with a Texan who had a lot of them, oil tycoon H. L. Hunt. Dad was very impressed that after Hunt died, the public learned that he had more than one secret family and fourteen children.

  Dad made a game of keeping his mistresses’ identities unknown. It was like a game we played with him when we were kids. It was a treasure-hunt game he called Hide in Plain Sight. He would show us an object and make us leave the room. Then he would hide the object, not under something, not hidden from view, but somewhere that you might not notice, as though it were in plain sight. We would come back in the room and hunt for the object, and it sometimes took quite a while. Dad was good at camouflaging things; he understood what people noticed and what they didn’t. I think Dad had lovers like this—people we all knew, people who were a part of our lives who regularly had dinner with the family but were also his special intimate friends. Memorials are often the place where secrets come out. The woman who had crawled into his bed at the hospital on his last day did not call attention to herself, though she was present at two of the three public memorials. She was very respectful, but another woman at the memorial in LA grabbed both my arms and demanded my full attention. She made a point of telling me that being with my father for years in Santa Fe had been the greatest experience of her life. I blinked for a moment trying to get my bearings. Who was she? What did she mean to my father? Was she his mistress?

  Looking into her eyes, I immediately remembered that she was a journalist I’d met years ago when I was on her talk show. Her show had featured my paintings when they were on display at an art opening in LA in the mid-1980s. As I recalled, she had been an unusually astute interviewer who asked well-informed questions about my grandmother, Dad, and me. What I did not know at the time was that she had gotten all her information from Dad because she had been an intimate friend of his; how intimate I will never know.

  I recalled the only other time I had encountered her. It happened one morning long after my art show, when she had emerged from one of the many bedrooms at Dad’s giant home in Ojai. No one bothered to introduce us, and it took me a while to figure out who she was because she looked so different from the formal interviewer I had met years ago. She was wearing one of the Jacuzzi robes my mom designed and created. She sat at the breakfast table with all of us, including Mom and the grandkids, as if she were a part of the family, and we talked about the Internet. I remember that she spoke fast and confidently, seemingly eager to display her knowledge.

  I suppose I always sensed that my father had many women in his life besides my mother, but I never asked about them. So it was disconcerting, at best, to have the blinders lifted from my eyes right after he died as I was forced to recognize what these women might have been to him. It was a shock to learn that the journalist was likely not the only one of them who had been guests in our home. Yet I had managed to remain naïvely unaware of their intimacy with my dad. All I had known was that they had been nice to me. There were all these women who helped me with my acting career or promoting my artwork. When he was alive, I really had not wanted to know which women were his lovers and which were just family friends. But then on the night of the memorial in LA, I had to confront this woman’s intensity of the emotion and her relationship with my father, whatever that relationship might have been, and do so at a time when my grief was new and profound. Thankfully, I was surrounded by family and friends, with the conspicuous and regrettable exception of my mother, who was too far gone to attend.

  With Mom conveniently out of the way, this former journalist and talk show host was not the only woman in attendance at the memorial who would go to some lengths to tell me that Dad was the most important man in her life. I was amazed that none of them were sympathetic enough to realize that these were not words I wanted or needed to hear right at that moment. In any case, I simply told each of them, as quietly and dismissively as possible, that many people loved my dad and felt that spending time with him was the best thing that had ever happened to them. This was the truth; these women were not the only ones who felt his loss deeply.

  The memorials were populated by scores of people whose lives my father had touched. There was a woman a few years younger than I who had had a troubled childhood and had called regularly to talk with Dad since the early 1970s. He had long, long talks with her on and off for more than forty years. He had even put me on the phone with her sometimes to talk to her and comfort her, thinking a teen would understand another teen best.

  There were people Dad had given money to when they’d been in tough spots and artists whose work he’d championed and single mothers, with their now-grown children by their side, standing before the microphone telling the crowd about how he had supported them and had been the person whom they had been able to confide in when they felt all alone. Dad had been the man in their lives. Dad’s whole motorcycling gang came in full regalia. His professional friends came, all sorts of people who had worked with him over the years. As testament to the deep friendships my father maintained, his two best friends, whom he had been close to for over sixty years, came and spoke. Roger had been his high school roommate, and Henri was the man who had introduced my parents to each other and had been the best man at their wedding.

  All the stories I have heard since Dad died helped me understand what a rich and complicated life he led. The thing I could not understand was why he was asking for forgiveness.

  If I were to decide he was asking forgiveness for fooling around, I’d be giving myself a neat and tidy way of wrapping things up and walking away. But I didn’t want to walk away. Throughout my life, I had looked the other way when it came to anything that might take my dad off his pedestal. But now I didn’t want a godlike dad; I just wanted to understand him. And so I embarked on a search to discover who my dad had been.

  * * *

  Memory can be slipper
y. How you remember something can be far more important than what actually happened when it comes to the formation of your emotional structure and the way you think. As I embarked on my search to understand what had tormented my father in his last hours, I was interested in finding out as much as I possibly could and getting the other people’s memories to corroborate my own. I unearthed and read twenty diaries I had kept over the years; I was surprised to find that I had started writing them as early as the age of ten. I found boxes of VHS tapes of all sorts of family events, including my first wedding and holiday dinners and the opening of an art exhibition that Dad had attended wearing a brown cowboy hat that matched his favorite hunting/fishing jacket that I had custom painted for him (it was covered with images of jumping trout with a bird of prey on the back). I wondered how I would be able to view this obsolete form of recorded personal history until a dear friend lent me an old VHS player she had in her garage. My family came alive for me again as I watched hours of home movies and dozens of talk shows that my father had taped whenever anyone in our family was interviewed. Viewing them, I experienced the embarrassment that anyone feels when seeing his or her awkward younger self, especially because many of the videos were of interview shows, The Merv Griffin Show, Oprah, and Good Morning America. Loads of people had seen me making a fool of myself when I was a nervous twentysomething trying hard to please everyone. The way I had looked and behaved made me cringe. The most embarrassing of all these shows was the episode of Oprah in which I was interviewed along with several other children of Hollywood stars. That particular interview had taken place at a terrible point in my life. I was a wreck; my goals and self-image were in flux. A series of events had recently lead me to quit acting, starting with being told by a casting director, at an audition, that he had seen a nude picture of me in Vogue, and ending with a well-meaning director pushing me past my emotional comfort zone in order to get a good performance out of me. It was a point in my life when I wanted to leave Hollywood far behind: I’d gotten married, and in so doing, I changed my name. I was trying to reinvent myself by moving away from my family and settling in New Mexico, and yet there I was, back on TV because my father encouraged me to do it. On this particular show, I sported an unflattering mullet hairstyle and wore an oversized suit with giant ’80s shoulder pads that was designed to completely hide my body. Oprah was kind and used all her skill to put this group of nervous celebrity offspring at ease, but of all the young people on stage, I was especially awkward, and by the time the show ended, my accent had changed from British to California girl to Texan. This accent switching was a trait I found my grandma and Dad were also prone to in many of their interviews, but on them, it sounded good.

  I also watched a video of a show that had taken place a few years later and made up for those first clumsy attempts to present myself to the public. This time, I was not being interviewed as J. R.’s daughter; instead, my whole family was in attendance at one of my first big art exhibits. Their love for me flowed out of the television. Now in my fifties, I saw the young woman I once was with new eyes: there I was interacting with my parents and grandmother in a place where I was truly comfortable. I could see that I was very happy that day, but my happiness was even more profound all these years later as I heard my family praising my early work as an artist. Clearly, a shift in my perspective has taken place. I understand family better now and know what it feels like to be a proud parent. The look of love and pride that I saw on my father’s face is a look I know very well now that I’ve experienced the feelings that occasion it. My dad must have been feeling the same pride I feel for my daughters as I witness them growing into their wonderful adult selves.

  My dad and my grandma were good at telling stories that people loved to hear because they were pros. My grandma, the musical comedy actress Mary Martin, was a Broadway legend, and as the cameras rolled, she said, in her perfect theatrical diction, “I am proud to be in my granddaughter’s show.”

  You could see that she loved being interviewed, and she happily went on to explain what she meant. She told a funny story about taking me shopping when I was about six years old. Apparently, I stopped her in the street and said, “Someday, if you are very good, I will let you be in one of my shows.”

  Back then, we both thought that being in a show meant being in the theater, but I had left the family business and was no longer an actress. My show was in an art gallery, and it had sold out and been well reviewed in the Los Angeles Times. I had worked hard to make the best paintings I could, but I was never under any illusion that the television crews were there to shine a spotlight on me as an emerging painter. I knew that I was in the limelight by association, but it was the light in my parents’ eyes that made the evening one of the happiest in my memory.

  The videos made me miss my family very much. I missed my grandmother, who always let everyone know that she was the most important person in the room while at the same time making me feel like the most important person in the world to her. I missed my father’s hugs and the playful way his laughter bubbled out of him. I missed my mother’s smile, and watching her when she was young had left me with the longing to be with the strong, vibrant person she had once been.

  As I watched these many tapes, the picture of my family’s life together became richer and sharper. I often felt I had been transported back in time in order to make sense of events and of people who, in real time, I had simply experienced. Dad, as he appeared in the videos, had no relation at all to the person he was in his final hours. And so, after watching these glimpses of life as it had been, I sought out many people whose lives Dad had touched in the hope of understanding why a seemingly happy, contented man who never apologized for anything during his life had begged for forgiveness when he was dying.

  I Googled him repeatedly, and each time I did, I’d discover new things had been posted that weren’t there the day before. I found: Larry Hagman memorial … Larry Hagman and marijuana … and LSD … and Dallas … Larry Hagman and organ donors, Larry Hagman as Tony Nelson, kissing Jeannie on I Dream of Jeannie … registering with the Peace and Freedom Party … supporting renewable energy …

  At one point, my search revealed 1,270,000 results about Dad. Many of the things I learned about him were familiar to me, but his interview in The Guardian on September 8, 2012, titled “My Family Values,” gave me a perspective on his thinking that I had not known. He spoke about the pain of coming from a broken home. When the interviewer asked what he wanted to teach his children, he said, “I have taught my own children to be as truthful as possible and to be kind. I am glad I have had such a long marriage—I wanted to give my children a stable start in life, but it hasn’t made much difference to them. My son has been married three times; my daughter twice.” This statement stung and surprised me as well: he had never said that he was disappointed in us because we had both been divorced. Yet his response to this interviewer made it clear that he thought we had failed. Though I did not like to be criticized, upon reflection I realized he had taught me to be truthful and kind. All this information, old and new, and the emotions it elicited would, at times, become overwhelming, but it also helped me make sense of my life in ways that had always eluded me.

  I reread Dad’s official autobiography and some unofficial ones; I sent away for The Larry Hagman Handbook thinking it might contain some things I didn’t already know. But it had no surprises, and anyway, it was just a collection of facts, and as Norman Mailer once said, “Facts are nothing without their nuance.”

  Still, seeing dates of shows Dad had done did bring back memories, like the time we were all at a resort dinner theater in Michigan while Dad was in a play called The Golden Fleecing. We had lived there all summer, and my brother and I had made the hotel lobby our playground.

  Looking at Dad’s TV history, I remembered being on the set of the short-lived series Here We Go Again on a day when Mom brought a camp stove with her and made vegetarian stir-fry for Dad on the back lot. Dad was on a health kick, and foo
d services were not interested in accommodating a vegetarian diet back in those days, so Mom stepped in and made him exactly what he wanted; it was just one of the countless things she did to encourage him and keep him well and happy.

  There were so many things that I remembered. These memories were like images on a kaleidoscope, one shifting into the next with no apparent pattern or meaning. Dad was not an easy man to understand; he was so full of contradictions. He’d polish off a bottle or two of wine and then go to skid row in downtown Los Angeles, pull drunks off the street, and take them to sober up at the Midnight Mission. He didn’t mind being called a pothead, but he refused to think of himself as a drunk. “I only drink wine and beer,” he’d say. “That’s not really drinking.”

  He never likened the way he drank to the way his much-despised stepfather did, which was to drink huge tumblers of gin, pretending it was water. Dad prided himself on not being at all like his stepfather, Richard, whose addictions had colored all his attitudes, including—and maybe especially—the totally negative way in which he interacted with Dad. Still, the amount of wine drank in our house was astounding—at least several bottles a day. While I was growing up, the store I shopped in most often with Dad was the liquor store. He had many drinking buddies; the era of the two-martini lunch was not yet gone. All Dad’s friends drank a lot. An example of their ethos was displayed in his good friend Carroll O’Connor’s kitchen where a sign read, “Wine kills slowly, and I am not in a hurry.”