Larry Hagman - Hello Darlin'

by LARRY HAGMAN

  When America dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, my mother burst into tears, crying over what I can still hear her calling “the slaughter of those poor people.” Days later a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. She continued to cry. I couldn’t comprehend what had happened or what it meant until I was much older and knew that being remorseful and compassionate had been the correct way to react.

  It wasn’t the popular view. At the time, most Americans were brainwashed into having contempt for the yellow race, seeing them as inhuman, even subhuman, and I’m convinced that sort of conditioning directly contributed to our involvement in the Korean and Vietnamese Wars. Until many of us woke up during the sixties, we were led to believe we were correct in exterminating those people.

  In the fall, my mother sent me to Woodstock Country School, a boarding school in Woodstock, Vermont. Though I’d been away twelve of my thirteen years, Mom was concerned about how I’d react to being sent away, but I was delighted to escape Richard. She drove me there in the Cadillac, the backseat filled with my trunk. I was assigned a roommate, Roger Phillips. Mother and I met him and his family as we unpacked. We had a good afternoon, laughing as we kept bumping into each other. The Phillipses seemed like a great family.

  But just when I was nearly settled my mother took me outside in the hall.

  “Larry,” she said in a hushed voice, “I want to tell you something.”

  Since I’d never been to boarding school, I expected some sort of lecture.

  “Yes, Mother?”

  “You know that Roger and his family are Jewish?”

  I had no idea what a Jew was. I’d never thought about such things. Mother didn’t know me. How could she? We’d never spent any time together. With great bravado and fake worldliness, I said, “I know he’s a Jew.”

  “I wanted to make sure.”

  “Don’t worry. It’s okay.”

  Not once in my life had I ever judged a person by race or religion, and I didn’t start then. Nor have I since.

  From the moment Roger and I moved in together, we’ve been best friends. We had something in common right away. He brought a beautiful white gelding named Stormy. He got me interested in riding, taught me how to ride bareback and vault a horse. I loved it so much I ended up working every weekend for two years at Fergie’s stables, near school. I mucked out stalls for fifty cents a day, plus a great meal at quitting time and the owners’ trust to exercise their horses.

  At school, I also made another lifelong friend, Severn Darden. He grew up to be a well-known character actor, and we worked together many times. But Sev was already a character in school. I remember him visiting me in Connecticut over spring break. Though fifteen, he drove from New Orleans to Connecticut by himself. Not only that, he showed up in a 1937 Rolls convertible and he brought a bottle of Courvoisier for my mother.

  Mother was somewhat taken aback. But she learned to love him, as we all did, for being an original till the day he died.

  Compared to those two worldly guys, I had so much to learn. Woodstock was the first coed school I’d ever attended. It was a progressive institution, a bastion of liberal educational theory and thought where students created the rules. Yet, as they explained on the first day’s indoctrination, there was no smoking, no drinking, and no sex. The three biggies, they called them.

  I broke them all.

  * * *

  I didn’t actually have to try. The school year was only a few months old when Klaus Heinmann, one of the boys in the dorm, taught us how to make applejack. We bought a barrel of cider for $16, added sugar and yeast, then let it set for a while in the cellar next to the coal furnace. After it fermented, we took it outside and let it freeze. The part that didn’t freeze was pure alcohol. We got drunker than shit a few times. Then Klaus went blind for about three days after one batch, and that ended that experiment.

  The other two rules toppled when I started going with “an older woman.” She was a junior, and gorgeous. At sixteen, she was already a woman, light-years ahead of me in worldliness, relationships, everything. I wasn’t even aware of it myself until I saw her smoke. That said a lot. She must’ve thought I had potential, because one day she offered me a cigarette. I said no. I wasn’t going to smoke cigarettes.

  “If you take a puff,” she said, “I’ll let you put your hand on my breast.”

  Well, I smoked for twenty years after that. I didn’t stop until I was thirty-four years old.

  The next year she took up with another guy, leaving me with a broken heart and a nasty smoking habit that nearly led to me burning down the boys’ dorm. It was late one cold winter night, and Roger and I were smoking, flicking butts onto the roof of the porch outside our window. We didn’t know there was an oil mop out there. One of the butts landed on it and within minutes the mop began to smolder. We didn’t even notice.

  A movie was just letting out directly across the street. A bunch of sailors were among the crowd bundling up as they hit the cold air. One of the sailors noticed the smoke and yelled, “Fire!” Soon the group was running toward the dorm as if they had been called to battle stations.

  Hearing the commotion, I stuck my head out the window and saw the sailors staring at me. Then I noticed the smoking mop.

  The dorm was a little wooden house, a 150-year-old tinderbox, and our room was on the second floor. Thinking I’d save the situation, I reached out the window, managed to grab the mop, brought it inside, and tried to shake the fire out. Sparks flew in all directions. In an instant, the curtains caught on fire, followed by the bedding, and soon we were engulfed in flame. I was so stupid.

  Roger responded much better. He ran downstairs, grabbed the fire extinguisher, put the fire out just as the headmaster stepped through the smoke, and received the hero’s congratulations he was due. I was suspended for two weeks. I accepted the punishment but not the blame. I’ve always known the real culprit was my girlfriend, who let me touch her breast if I tried her cigarette.

  * * *

  Later that year my mother came to see me. She hired a horse and carriage to take us around the lovely Vermont town. I sensed she had something important to tell me because of the way she was acting. She told the driver to stop, collected her thoughts, and looked deep into my eyes. She told me that during the summer she was going on the road in Annie Get Your Gun and wanted me to come with her.

  “There’re a couple of small parts,” she said. “Hellers going to have one. I’d love to have you in it too.”

  I went numb. I had no aspiration to be onstage. Worse, the thought of being with Richard for a year on the road made me dumbstruck.

  Mother anxiously awaited an answer.

  My mind was blank.

  I remember staring straight at the horse’s ass in front of me, and suddenly I got an idea.

  “Mom, I really want to be a cowboy.”

  The thought had never entered my mind before. I was inspired by the horse’s ass.

  “I want to go live with Dad in Texas and be a cowboy.”

  My mother was disappointed but took it well. She said she understood.

  “I know you want to be with your father. That’s okay.”

  * * *

  So that summer, after school ended, I took the train to Texas from New York all by myself. The trip was uneventful until I stepped onto the platform in Weatherford. Then it was like entering a new world. I didn’t look anything like a fifteen-year-old from Texas. I wore a Brooks Brothers suit and tie, had thick glasses, and my hair was done up as was stylish in New York, in a big wavy pompadour.

  “First thing we’ll do is take a trip to the barbershop,” said my dad, who kept his hair in the same buzz cut he’d been given upon joining the National Guard.

  A buzz cut was unimaginable. I begged Dad to let me keep my hair a little longer. Eventually he said okay, but he made me agree to a deal.

  “You have to play football,” he said.

  “Why do I have to play football?”

  “Because in Texas, men pl
ay football.”

  I made the team as a second-string defensive end, but my gridiron glory was short-lived. In the first game I tripped over my own foot and broke my ankle. For the next few months I hobbled around on crutches, but that turned out to be a boon to my social life, attracting lots of sympathy from the girls on campus.

  Then I met Joey Byers, who became my first love. She was beautiful and kind and a year older and much smarter than me. We were hot and heavy when my ankle healed and my dad told me that I had to go back to the football team. I didn’t want to. I’d endured enough pain and suffering and asked if there wasn’t something else I could do.

  “The Golden Gloves,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Boxing. You can box in the Golden Gloves tournament.”

  I saw what was going on, but there was no way I could be as tough as my dad. Ben Hagman was a two-fisted, drinking, good old Texas boy. He’d spent seven or eight days behind the German lines during the battle of the Bulge. He’d seen one of his closest buddies get shot in the head and blown out of their jeep. He’d come back a changed man.

  From the day he returned home, he slept with a .45 under his pillow. One night the neighbor’s cat climbed up on the screen of his bedroom window. Hearing the noise, my dad grabbed his gun and blew the cat to pieces. A couple shells went through the bathroom wall of the neighbor’s house too. No one was hurt, but it scared the hell out of everyone.

  Given the choice between football and boxing, I decided it was better to fight one guy than eleven. I chose the gloves. My coach was Jim Wright, the future Speaker of the House. I’ve always said I’m sure glad he was my boxing coach and not my acting coach. But he was a good boxing coach, big on strategy, always advising me to jab, jab, jab, “and when you see an opening, go for it!” I won a few fights as a light welterweight, which boosted my ego. Even better, I thought Joey, who liked me for my long hair, liked me even better for being tough in the ring. Later she told me it was barbarous. Go figure women.

  So I kept at it. In the big boxing tournament, my first-round opponent was the toughest kid in the draw, the bootlegger’s son. He was the toughest kid at school too. That kid liked to fight in and out of the ring.

  I knew I was going to lose. A victory for me would be survival. But I did more than make it through the fight alive. At the end of three rounds, I was still on my feet, throwing punches, bouncing off the ropes, bruised but breathing. As expected, the bootlegger’s son won the bout, taking the fight on points, but I’d broken his ribs with a flurry of punches and he had to forfeit his next fight. My so-called moral victory was the talk of school. After that fight, nobody made fun of my hair anymore.

  * * *

  When Dad ran for state senator, I helped “manage” his campaign, which was the epitome of a grassroots effort. My dad let me drive the two of us across the state while we sipped bourbon from the bottle and he told stories. Before we’d pull into a little town, he’d gargle some Listerine, and then heel give his speech in the town square, his voice blasting out of the loudspeaker we stuck on top of his maroon Oldsmobile. After, I’d find a shady spot outside of town, pull over, and we’d take a nap.

  I love to remember how much I learned from him. One afternoon we stopped in the countryside to stretch our legs and I spotted a buzzard. Impulsively, I grabbed the .22 we kept in the back of the car, and said, “Dad, watch this.” I snapped a shot off. I didn’t look or anything. But I killed the large bird midflight. It was a brain shot, right through his head. Probably the luckiest shot of my life. My dad, not happy, said, “Goddamn, boy, now we have to eat that son of a bitch.”

  “Huh?”

  “Son, in Texas, we eat what we shoot.”

  He wasn’t kidding. That night I ate buzzard for dinner. I learned my lesson. I never again shot anything I didn’t want to eat.

  * * *

  My first big hunting trip was November 16, a day that many men regarded as sacred as Christmas, maybe more. It marked the start of deer season. I went with my dad and seven of his friends. Dad and his buddies leased twenty thousand acres that became theirs to hunt for ten days. Their annual ritual began with a drive to Fredericksburg. We started out with three cases of hard liquor, thirty cases of beer, and something like forty packs of cigarettes. These were the most important ingredients of a good hunt.

  We had our own camp cook, a black man named Tom Simmons. The man was a genius with a Dutch oven, which we affectionately called Simmons’ Pot. The first night in camp someone always went out and got a doe for camp meat. Once I shot six squirrels from a tree in ten seconds, and they went into the pot. So did an armadillo I shot. And a rattlesnake. Simmons threw everything we brought him in the pot, let it simmer, seasoned with jalapeño peppers, onion, sage, garlic, and whatever else was handy, and he’d serve it over corn bread for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

  You couldn’t breathe in that delicious aroma without getting hungry.

  “Just lettin’ the juices stew,” he’d say and smile.

  We slept in an old tin-sided fishing camp that had seven bunks. I didn’t get one of those, thank you. Instead my dad handed me a sleeping bag and I made myself comfortable on the floor. It was fine for the first few nights, but then a norther blew in and the temperature dropped from seventy degrees to below freezing. Even with the tin sides tied shut and the stove cranked up, it was still so cold our big old hunting dog, Nora, curled up next to me, whimpering and shivering. I opened up my sleeping bag and let her get in. As soon as she got comfy, she pissed all over me.

  I got up to get some dry clothes and when I returned, the bag was frozen solid. I woke my dad and asked if I could get in with him.

  “Lukey, there’s barely room in here for me,” he said. “You can get some canvas out of the back of the truck and curl up with the dog.”

  I’d already tried that. From then on, Nora slept alone.

  Such discomforts were forgotten as soon as I set out in pursuit of deer. I can still recall every detail of my first one. It’s an event you never forget. I was seated in an outcropping of rocks when I heard a thump-thump-thump. Looking around, I saw about thirty deer on my right, running toward me. In those days, there were hundreds of deer. I once counted more than eight hundred in a single field at night with a spotlight. These particular deer had been spooked by something. I could tell from the way they ran. Then they stopped right in front of me and the biggest buck I’d ever seen was looking straight at me. I dropped him on my first shot.

  Deer hunting is a rite of passage in Texas. I felt like I was now a man.

  * * *

  That trip also saw me go through another rite of passage. By the sixth day, we were out of booze and beer. My dad and his friends were unable to imagine continuing their trip without more firewater. They organized a liquor run to Piedras Negras, a little town across the border in Mexico. Dad turned to me and said something about the fact that I had a girlfriend who I’d been seeing for a long time. He was speaking about Joey. I said, “No, sir, we don’t get that far.” And I wasn’t lying.

  “Well, son,” he said, “we’re going to get you laid.”

  I was thunderstruck. We drove straight into the red light district, which actually had red lights in front of the different bars, and we entered a dance hall. Nobody was dancing, but there were about thirty girls sitting around the bar. After drinking about four or five Carta Blancas, my dad told me to pick one out. I still couldn’t believe this was about to happen.

  “What?”

  “We’re going to get you bred down here.”

  It was a real situation. To save face, I wasn’t able to say no. I glanced around at the girls and picked out one that looked nice—kind and pretty. Dad motioned to her, worked out a price (five bucks), and watched as she took me into a little cabin that was barely large enough for her bed, which I sat on with great trepidation. The cabin was lit by a string of Christmas lights and the walls were papered with magazine photos of saints and priests and nuns. The religious motif
of her crib snuffed whatever ardor I had brought in, which wasn’t much.

  She took off her dress, letting it fall so that the multicolored lights reflected off her white corset, which was all she wore. Without making eye contact, she unsnapped the crotch and lay down on the bed. Until that moment I’d never laid eyes on what I was looking at. While I was amazed, I wasn’t excited, and the perfunctory way this girl presented herself to me put even more of a damper on my nonexistent ardor.

  She nevertheless tried a few things, embarrassing me until I finally let her know that I wasn’t interested. Instead, in my broken Spanish, we struck a deal. For an extra five bucks, she went back into the dance hall and told my dad and his friends what a powerful, virile young man I was. She was pleased. I was pleased. More important, Dad was pleased. Everyone congratulated me. My dad praised me on a job well done. Needless to say, I felt pretty good about the whole thing.

  I’d passed the ultimate Texas test—I’d gotten my deer and got laid … kind of.

  Chapter Four

  The combination of having a girlfriend and getting my first car, a 1943 Jeep, made me grow up quickly. I don t think any two things have a more profound effect on a young man. I was in love and mobile. When Joey went off to college, I was devastated but I still had my freedom. As a senior, I also branched out socially, writing for the school newspaper and acting in the school play, a production of a comedy called This Girl Business.

  On opening night, I got my first laugh. By the final performance, I had eight or ten laughs. I’d learned that once the audience decides you’re funny, they’ll laugh at almost anything, a look, a gesture … it almost doesn’t matter as long as they buy into what you’re doing.