The Eternal Party

by Kristina Hagman

  As soon as she landed at the airport and saw the frightened faces of the people on the ground, my grandma admitted to herself that she did not have a clear idea about the degree of danger into which she was leading her own troops. In Saigon, she could see how difficult and out of control the situation was while being so close to the fighting, but she also saw how eager the soldiers were to have them there.

  Ganny was a tiny little person, but she was determined to do all she could to bring the soldiers’ spirits up and be a role model for the cast and crew. They could hear bombings very close by as they were setting up the makeshift stage at Nha Trang Air Base. Between shows, she toured the hospitals with General Westmoreland and saw firsthand the devastation of war. The tragedy of the violence she witnessed changed her life; after Vietnam, there was a serious side to her that had never been there before.

  * * *

  A Life magazine photographer had accompanied her to Vietnam. He took a great picture for the cover of the magazine; he shot Ganny from behind as she greeted the troops at the end of the show. She had come back onstage as herself, wearing a very feminine, flowing gown, having shed the corseted and plumed Victorian costume of her character. The real Mary was warm and genuine and there to give them everything she could from the depth of her heart. In the pictures, you see her back and, in front of her, the faces of hundreds of soldiers who’d come to see her. What comes across to me as I look at that picture are these hundreds of men (and one or two women) beaming at her, and I knew she had touched their lives with that special gift she had. At the end of one of the final performances, an officer came onstage to read a telegram from President Johnson, a fellow Texan, thanking Mary publicly for her service to her country.

  On another occasion, while the Vietnam War raged on, she attended a huge antiwar rally at the New York Public Library. Gathered there were the casts of every single show on Broadway, but when my grandmother, Mary Martin, entered, her fellow performers fell silent and instinctively parted to clear a space for her as she made her way through the crowd. It was a gesture of the utmost respect. There could be no doubt that she deserved the moniker The New York Times gave her: “The First Lady of American Musical Theater.”

  * * *

  After Dad became the most-watched character on television, he and Ganny often teased one another about who was more famous, a rivalry that went way back and was probably inadvertently fostered by the woman who raised them both, Mary’s mother, Juanita. Parenting two generations of children was not without consequences and, in this tricky domestic setup, Mary and Larry had—perhaps inevitably—been rivals for Juanita’s love and affection. The flaw in Juanita’s caring and parenting was that she had so effectively protected them from each other that they had become less like mother and child than like siblings, and, as such, there was always a degree of competition between them even though they were also mutually supportive. This playful rivalry was illustrated by an incident I witnessed many years later. The two of them were on the street headed to the theater to see Joel Grey perform in San Francisco, and it was hard to get a taxi but when a taxi driver finally did pull up to them he said to my dad, “I’m off duty, but my wife would kill me if I did not pick up J. R.” Dad offered the cab to his mother, but the driver said, “No, I want you, J. R.”

  So Dad got in the cab, and as it pulled away he called out to his mother, saying, “That’s showbiz, Mom.”

  When Joel opened his show, he told the audience that he had two special friends in the audience, Larry Hagman, which was followed by polite applause, and then he said, “And his mother, Peter Pan.”

  Ganny got a standing ovation that went on for a few minutes, and while smiling all the while, she tilted her head toward Dad and whispered, “And that’s showbiz too, baby boy!”

  It was around that time that someone said to Ganny that playing J. R. Ewing had made her son an icon. She drew herself up to her full height of five foot two and said, “My son is a star. I’m an icon.”

  * * *

  When I was in my early twenties, I had a special night with Ganny during which I came to understand how much she missed her mother even decades after Juanita died. Ganny had invited me to stay with her as a guest in her dear friend Dorothy Hammerstein’s apartment after we had gone to see Sandy Duncan in Peter Pan.

  Ganny was delighted to see the show and loved Sandy in her favorite role. And she had been deeply moved when she paid a surprise visit to Sandy’s dressing room, and upon seeing her, Sandy had burst into tears. She told my grandma, “You’re the only Peter Pan I’ll ever know,” to which Ganny had graciously replied, “But you see, you are my Peter Pan.”

  My grandma was quite emotional and full of reminiscences that night as she and I tucked under the covers of the big four-poster bed in Dorothy’s very elegant apartment. We talked late into the night, and at some point, I began complaining to her about my mother, who I felt was interfering in my life. Usually cuddly, Ganny put a stop to my outpouring when she looked me straight in the eye and said, “Look at you, in your slinky leopard-print nightgown; you look all grown up. Now stop and listen to your whining little girl’s voice complaining about your mother. It is time you match your voice with your body and grow up. You can’t have it both ways.”

  Here was my Peter Pan grandma telling me to grow up! Her expression was angry, and because she was so seldom angry with me, I sat up and paid attention. Next, Ganny said, “You will never know what loneliness is until your mother dies.”

  It was then that I saw a kind of sadness on her face I had never seen before. I had known how deeply my father loved his grandmother, but it was at that moment that I got a sense of what an amazing mother Juanita had been to both of them.

  * * *

  Juanita’s death was incredibly hard on my father too. When she became ill and could no longer care for her twelve-year-old grandson, she did not tell him that she was dying from cancer. She said only that she was sending him off to stay with his mother for a while. As he traveled alone on his first solo trip by train from Los Angeles to New York, he did not know that he would never see his beloved grandmother again. But he may have sensed that something was wrong, and I can imagine that this was very frightening to him. Soon after he arrived at the home Richard had created for his mother’s new family, he had to face the worst thing that can happen to a child; the one person who had always been there for him was dead. Dad had many mixed feelings about his mother, but he had adored his grandmother without reservation. He must have felt like a lost boy.

  * * *

  Life with his mother certainly did not revolve around a young boy. Ganny was working eight shows a week, and she and Richard had a baby daughter, Heller. In the Martin/Halliday home, children were not the focus; it was each day’s performance that formed the center of life.

  There was no time for her to grieve with her son; at this point in their lives, they barely knew each other, and though they were both in pain, they didn’t speak about their mutual loss.

  Whenever Dad spoke about his grandmother Juanita, he got a special tone in his voice; his memories of her were so loving. One of the few times I ever saw tears in his eyes was during a Christmas dinner our family had at Casa del Mar, a grand building in Santa Monica that had just been converted into an elegant seaside hotel. He had just turned eighty years old and, for the first time since he was a child, was back in the same place where his grandmother used to bring him for swimming lessons. As we walked through the lobby to the dining area with the concierge, he asked if the swimming pool was still in the basement. The look on his face told me that he was transported back in the time to the days when his grandmother was caring for him.

  5

  Real Texas Roots

  AFTER HIS BELOVED GRANDMOTHER passed away, the lonely teenaged boy that was my father often behaved in strange and difficult ways. I think this happened because there was no safe place where he could express his sadness, confusion, and sense of abandonment. As he struggled with all these r
epressed emotions, Richard was downright cruel toward him, and this made Dad’s life with his mother and Richard unbearable for him and for them. Richard was a stickler for perfect manners, perfect dress, and perfect adherence to his schedules and plans. All these plans centered on keeping Mary Martin in perfect form for her public, and Dad was barely allowed to see his mom at all. The more Dad acted out, the more it became clear that his stepfather did not like the prospect of living with what he called “a recalcitrant adolescent boy.”

  So Dad was shipped off to boarding school. Though that sounds harsh, the fact is that his mother was actually trying hard to become the best mother she could be to him. She could see that everyone was uncomfortable with the living situation as it was and the school to which he was sent, the Woodstock Country School in Vermont, was a fantastic place. It was a progressive, coed school that fostered a family-like, egalitarian learning community. She took him there herself, and on the very first day, Dad found Roger Phillips, who became his roommate and one of his very best friends for life. Roger and his loving family have been with us through thick and thin. I have always thought of him as my Jewish uncle in New York, and he is the one I turn to when I miss my dad so much it hurts.

  I am sure Dad would have loved to have stayed at Woodstock for his entire high school experience, but after the meticulously supervised life he lived with his grandmother, who had sent him to boys-only military schools, Dad did not handle his newfound freedom well. At Dad’s memorial, Roger recounted the incident that—unfairly—got Dad in terminal trouble.

  Not smoking in the dorms was one of the school’s only rules. It was definitely forbidden, but that’s what about six of us were doing. We heard someone coming up the stairs and threw our cigarettes out the window. Quickly, smoke filled the air because a fire started when one of the butts lit a dry mop that was on the roof. The dorm master asked, “Who did this?” No one spoke. It was impossible to tell which of the six cigarettes rolling down the tin roof actually hit the mop. After a long silence, Larry said, “I did.” And the amazing thing, of which I’m ashamed to this day, is that no one said anything after this. We could have come to his rescue by saying that we all did … and we let him take the rap. Larry was suspended.

  Roger never forgot that Dad made it possible for him to stay in school, and his loyal friendship gave my father a stability that was a great comfort to him. As Roger recounted, so many years later, what happened that night in the high school dorm to all Dad’s friends and family, tears came to his eyes.

  * * *

  Dad did not last long back in the house with Richard. It was obvious to them all that he was going to have to move again. While he had been at Woodstock, Dad had learned to ride horses, and when his mother and Richard said they did not know what to do with him, Dad said, “Send me to my father in Texas. I want to be a cowboy.”

  Though he hardly knew his father, he was sure that he would not be like Richard. The stories he heard about his father conjured a picture for the teenaged Larry of a Hemingway-like figure who hunted and fished. So off he went to Texas, where he had not lived since he was a toddler. He was more than ready to go. Texas would be both strange and yet somehow familiar.

  My Papa Ben was quite a character who looked very different from my father with his fireplug body and a flattop, but he and my father shared the full, expressive lips that made them both attractive in their own ways. After he and Mary divorced, Ben went to fight in World War II and became a lieutenant colonel, winning a Bronze Star for exceptional and meritorious service on the battlefield. During the war, he married Juanita Saul, who had been his law secretary, and they had a son, Gary. By the time Larry was sent by train to his father, Ben had become a very well-respected lawyer in Weatherford.

  From the start, my dad wanted to be just Papa Ben. He felt accepted by his stepmother, who was named Juanita like his beloved grandma. Juanita did not fuss at him about manners like Richard had and Dad developed a real affection for her. Papa Ben lived up to and surpassed any notion my father had of being a manly man. He made up for the years they had been apart and spent a great deal of time with him, and together they did all the “manly” things, like hunting and smoking and drinking. Weatherford was in a dry county, which meant you could not buy alcohol locally, but that did not stop anyone from driving across the county line to fill up their car trunks with bottles of booze; in fact, these pilgrimages added to the ritual of drinking.

  As a little girl, I got to know Papa Ben during our many trips to Weatherford. On hot summer nights, I would sit curled up out of the way listening to jokes and stories told under the cigarette haze that swirled around the bare lightbulb while the men played poker and knocked back bourbons on the screened-in back porch. They recounted heroic deeds of the wild things they did while “shitfaced,” like when Papa Ben drove a tank through the wall of a German bank toward the end of his service in World War II. He decided it was his right to take bags of cash, and he felt really rich until he learned the currency wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on.

  After he passed away, one of these drinking stories was the legend of how Papa Ben died. Dad told the story with a big dose of gallows humor, emphasizing his own father’s fun-loving spontaneous nature; “Papa Ben had been drinking at a party held at the country club. It was his custom to jump into the pool when he had a few too many, but on this last jump, he was so drunk he didn’t notice the pool had no water in it.” The abrupt ending to the story lets the listener come to their own conclusions about the consequences of drinking. The real ending to the story was not so sudden, making it even more tragic. Papa Ben lingered in the hospital. He had a series of strokes over the next months, which were probably caused by the injury he sustained when hitting his head on the pool’s concrete bottom. He passed away just before the first episode of I Dream of Jeannie went on the air. He was only fifty-seven.

  After his father died, Dad still spent time in Weatherford, and it was always an occasion for hard drinking. I remember being in the backseat of our station wagon during one of these visits. Dad was driving us back to his stepmother’s house in town after dinner at the home of one of his high school friends who lived out in the country. He was so blind drunk that he could not see the road ahead of him. Even drunk Dad was safety conscious so to make sure he would not drive off into a ditch, he cracked the driver’s-side door open so he could see the yellow center dividing line up close. Dad took precautions for the fact that he was always drinking; he became a stickler for making sure everyone had their seatbelts securely fastened as soon as the device was invented, but he never stopped driving with a beer in his hand.

  He had put us in danger when driving drunk, but he would not have been asking for forgiveness for that. Hell, he probably didn’t even remember doing it. It was dumb luck that he was never in a bad car accident, but then, in many ways, he was very lucky.

  6

  Dad Goes into the Family Business

  MARY AND RICHARD WORKED TOGETHER on all her shows, and as part of the team their daughter, Heller, was given small roles in many of them. Dad was in his late teens when he realized he wanted to be in showbiz too. He learned how to get the audience to laugh while doing plays for the Weatherford High School Drama Club, and he was hooked. He tried taking drama at Bard College where his good friend Roger was enrolled, but he dropped out after only one year. Dad told his mother about his newfound love of theater hoping she might find some acting work for him, but the tension that existed between my father and Richard made it impossible for him to be cast in a show with his mother. The fact is, Ganny would really have liked to have had him play a role in one of her shows, but at this juncture in their lives, she knew it would have caused too much family tension. Instead, she helped him get his first few jobs with theater companies like the Margot Jones Theatre in Dallas and St. John Terrell’s theater in Saint Petersburg, Florida.

  Dad worked hard and barely earned enough to get by doing these jobs. Living their lavish lifestyle, his mother a
nd Richard could have afforded to help him out with a bit of extra cash, but they were united in their decision not to give him any spending money, because along with his infatuation with the theater, Dad had developed another love; while in high school, he had become a very heavy drinker. This fact was brought home to them when he had stayed with them in Connecticut for a few weeks. While he holed up in his room to stay out of Richard’s way, he had gotten very sick. They became very frightened for him when he couldn’t get out of bed, so they called in a doctor. After examining him, the doctor told them Dad had drunk so much that he had alcohol poisoning. They did not know how to get him to cut down on his drinking, so their strategy was that they would not give him any spending money, figuring that if he didn’t have an extra dime, he wouldn’t be able to buy liquor. Instead of drinking less, Dad figured out a way to stop paying rent; he took advantage of the warm nights in Florida and slept outside. He strung up a hammock between the latrines and the dressing rooms and slept there so he could keep partying.

  * * *

  Dad loved telling stories of his early years as an actor. He dramatically claimed he had to steal food to survive. But the truth is he never knew real poverty; he just wasn’t any good at holding on to cash. Even after he had started a family and we were living in Malibu, he was always saying he was broke, particularly during the years between Jeannie and Dallas. Dad worked quite a lot but seemed to spend anything he made as fast as he made it. It was only when he got into his fifties that he finally amassed enough money to stop talking about not having “a pot to piss in.”