Larry Hagman - Hello Darlin'

by LARRY HAGMAN

  After graduation, I began working at the Antelope Tool Company. An opening had been created for me as a favor to my father, who in his law practice represented the company as well as its very wealthy owner, Jess Hall Sr. A former pro wrestler, Big Jess, as he was known, made his fortune by inventing scratchers and centralizers, essential components in oil drilling. Scratchers kept paraffin from building up on the sides of the concrete pipes that brought oil up from the depths of the earth, and centralizers kept the miles-long steel drilling pipes from binding onto the walls of the hole.

  First Play

  Big Jess had four sons. For Christmas one year, he gave each one a Beechcraft Bonanza, a fast little airplane. Awhile later, one of the sons crashed his plane in Canada and was killed. Because the old man was ailing at the time, a battle ensued over who would assume control of the family’s business. Jess Hall Jr.—known as Little Jess—a tough as nails good old boy who laughed and had a good time, emerged victorious in a drama that would sound familiar to me many years later.

  But enough history I began by making scratchers, alongside my friend Larry Hall, one of Big Jess’s grandsons. The two of us worked inside an old metal Quonset hut, where afternoon temperatures inside surged well above the 110-degree mark. We turned out three or four springs for the scratcher a minute. If we had worked any faster, we would’ve keeled over from heatstroke. I spent nearly every cent I made in the Coke machine—and the Cokes were only a nickel apiece.

  Scratcher

  Shows you how much money I made.

  The hut was filled with machines—which Big Jess had also invented—that spit scratchers out at three hundred a minute. They did a hundred times the work we did without breaking a sweat. Demoralized after a few weeks I begged for another job.

  “Sure thing,” said Little Jess, who put me to work unloading one-hundred-pound sacks of cement from railroad boxcars that stopped outside Antelope Tool Company. Every bag had to be lifted by hand. Every fiftieth bag was broken, spilling its contents, making the conditions horrendous. I worked in cement dust up to my ankles, breathed the dirty air, and wiped it from my glasses. Whatever dust didn’t make it into my lungs or eyes stuck to my sweaty skin and hardened. I’d never worked as hard or gone home as achy and sick.

  After my first day, I worked up the nerve to get Mr. Hall to transfer me again. It was either that or die. He stuck me on the crew of laborers digging sewer lines and the swimming pool for his new home. The ground was cleechie, a hard sediment rock resembling cement. It was impossible to dig this stuff. You had to blast it. I would make a few holes by pounding a stake into the ground, then another guy would load it with dynamite and blow it up.

  Gradually the hole got bigger. Once we got below ground, the lack of air, the heat, and the lingering dynamite fumes made working in it almost lethal. I got terrible headaches. Big strong men passed out every few hours. As the bodies piled up, I feared my turn was coming. Too soon for my taste. I didn’t want to go having dug my own grave.

  My dad understood when I quit, but he wouldn’t let me hang around the rest of the summer, and so he found me a job bucking hay. That was basically more hard manual labor. I cut alfalfa, tied it in bales, loaded it on trucks, and then unloaded it in barns. The thick dust in the air and the heat made this job miserable too. But one guy told me not to worry about the heat. As he explained, Texas got the first harvest, then everyone migrated north to states with cooler climates. He was actually excited at the prospect.

  “Larry,” he said, “think about all the money we can make following the harvest all the way up to Montana.”

  I’d never seen a man as enthusiastic. He couldn’t have been getting any more money than I was, and I got only fifty cents an hour.

  And for what? Hay for some damn cow to eat.

  I had another serious talk with my dad.

  “I’m just not cut out for this kind of cowboying,” I said. “I haven’t seen a horse for two summers, except in a rodeo.”

  My dad was sympathetic. Taking pity on me, he suggested a hiatus until the fall, when I’d start college. But that itself was a subject we hadn’t discussed. College. My dad laid out his vision. He wanted me to attend college, then law school, and then join his firm, eventually taking it over.

  I wasn’t a bad student but I wasn’t what you’d call a disciplined student either.

  “I don’t think I have that studious quality that’s required to be a good lawyer,” I said.

  “What are you talking about, Larry?” my dad said. “You do great in history. You remembered your lines in the school play. You’ll be a great lawyer.”

  I don’t remember the extent of our discussion. Nor do I remember exactly at what point I arrived at this next insight. But I realized I didn’t have the facility most people had to plan for the future. I was more into living the moment. My dad worried that what I really meant was I didn’t want to work hard. I don’t think so. I was willing to break my neck for something I liked, something that I was passionate about doing, something I thought was fun …

  “I think I want to act,” I said.

  He was silent, but his response was in his eyes. “Act?”

  “I really like it. I want to give it a try.”

  Thank God my dad was an understanding man—or pretended to be.

  Chapter Five

  Dad took me to the Greyhound station. With what was left of my summer salary, I bought a one-way ticket to New York City.

  When I arrived, Mom offered me a choice between a new car or a trip to Sweden. Knowing I could always get a car, I opted for a trip with a group called Experiment in International Living.

  Carrying a backpack and a small suitcase, I took an old steamship to Rotterdam and a train to Stockholm, where I was placed with a Swedish family. The Roones had never met an American until I walked through the door. I burst into their sedate family like ice cream over pickles. It was pure culture clash. We looked at each other with total bewilderment.

  For my welcoming meal, they served me a bowl of curdled milk, a traditional dish called filmjölk. It smelled like old socks. When I spooned it to my mouth, a long, elasticlike string of icky goop remained in the bowl. My stomach turned. It pleaded with me not to eat it. The whole family watched as I put my spoon back down in the bowl. As reluctant and uncomfortable as I was in rejecting their culture and hospitality, I couldn’t bring myself to eat this dish. I feared what might happen if I did.

  Soon they feared me. That afternoon the Roones’ son Nels tried teaching me to fence. He took it in school and was quite proficient. He taught me the old thrust-and-parry routine. After proving myself less than spectacular, I showed him my throw-the-sword routine, which I’d learned from the Zorro movies. We spent the rest of the day in the emergency room, getting his eyebrow stitched. Later that night, as penance, I dutifully ate my filmjölk. That the Rooneses put up with me the whole summer attested to their good Lutheran compassion.

  And their patience. I didn’t get out of bed in the morning till around ten, hours after the Rooneses were up and busy. The pot of coffee their eldest daughter left outside my door would always be cold by the time I arose. After a few weeks, I almost looked forward to my bowl of filmjölk, which was tolerable if I added enough lingonberries. Each morning they commented on how late I slept and wondered why I was so tired.

  I had a good explanation. I’d met an American sailor who’d jumped ship after the war and had made Sweden his home. He loved Swedish women and aquavit, a liquor known as “the elixir of life.” He took me to a party, where I met my own Swedish beauty and got to know her better over several glasses of aquavit. She was the daughter of a taxi driver. Her hair was the color of golden straw and her skin tanned to a honeyed brown.

  Her family had a canoe and we took it for outings on Lake Mälaren. In the summer, days lasted for twenty-three hours there. We had a great summer together.

  Toward the end of my stay, my group took a ten-day trip into the mountains of Lapland, in northern Sweden. Th
e scenery was spectacular. We drank from clear, icy streams that originated in glaciers high above the Arctic Circle and breathed fresh, crisp air. At night, I entertained by playing Burl Ives songs on my guitar. I had only one complaint—the giant mosquitoes that feasted on my American flesh.

  The saddest day of my life was when the trip ended and I had to say good-bye to my girlfriend. She accompanied me to the train station. At seventeen, I didn’t know if I’d ever feel as deeply about another woman in my life. Even though we promised to write, we never did, and all the fears I had that I’d never see her again were well founded.

  As it turned out, I eventually fell in love with another Swedish beauty. She lived three blocks from the Rooneses. We took the same tram into the city, though our paths never crossed until I met her in London four years later. This time I wouldn’t let her go.

  * * *

  In the fall, I entered Bard, a small college in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, and it turned out I knew people there. Both Roger Phillips and Severn Darden, my roommates from Woodstock, were also freshmen. In fact, Roger had recommended Bard to my mother and Richard. I liked Bard from the start. Founded in 1860 as an Episcopalian school, it was a progressive liberal arts college that (I quickly realized) would allow me to continue my studies in drinking, smoking, and pursuing the opposite sex.

  While everyone scrambled to pick their majors, hoping they were making the right choice, I chose drama and dance. The pretty girls were there and the few guys who signed up didn’t seem interested in them. I sensed there’d be much greater opportunity for me in that major than in math, science, or English, and I was absolutely right. After a few months I’d had the best sex in my life, with young women who were kind, instructive, and eager to pass along their knowledge. Actually, they were eager to pass me along, which they did.

  I was in several plays, often alongside Ted Flicker, who became a fast friend. My first real production was Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, in which I played Valentine. These plays were a big leap for me, and I remember feeling outclassed by the other student actors, sometimes like I had absolutely no business being onstage. Every night backstage, I noticed the girl on the book always seemed to be laughing, looking up, or talking to someone whenever I was around. Maybe I was paranoid, but I always thought she was about to expose me as a fraud.

  However, I discovered that I enjoyed being onstage. The best thing I did, at least in my opinion, was a dance project created by one of the senior girls as her thesis. It was a modern ballet. I never had the kind of talent that would make anyone suggest I try out for George Balanchine, but my exuberance added a spark to the program. At least it did according to my very first review, which appeared in the New York Times and said something to the effect that Larry Hagman is outstanding.

  That crumb of encouragement was enough for me.

  We had January and February off from class in order to get real-world experience, and with my mother’s help I got an apprenticeship with Margot Jones’s prestigious theater group in Dallas. A lot of people criticize nepotism, but hell, it worked for me. Besides, after the door is opened, it doesn’t matter. You’re on your own.

  Margot, known for giving playwright Tennessee Williams his start, had created a theater in the round, which at the time was a brand-new, almost radical idea and had attracted a diverse group of actors, including TV soap star Peggy McKay and actor Jack Warden, who was just starting out. We put on Romeo and Juliet (I carried a spear) and Sean O’Casey’s latest work, Cock-a-Doodle Dandy. Despite long, hard hours, I realized I had an affinity and an appetite for the stage.

  I also acquired experience outside of the theater. I lived at the YMCA, a pretty rough place in those days. I’d been warned that only gays lived at the Y and they attacked innocents like me. But I had no choice; I couldn’t afford to stay anyplace else, and what the hell, I figured nothing would happen. Just to be safe, though, before going to bed I bolted my door, braced it shut with a chair, and then worried all night. I didn’t sleep much.

  After four weeks, I was exhausted, and though untouched, I was still uneasy. I moved to a boardinghouse recommended by one of the guys at the theater. It seemed nice and safe. Your basic boarding-house. In other words, it was teeming with weirdos. On my first night, someone told me to watch out for “the bear.”

  “The bear? What’s the bear?”

  “Just watch out,” he said.

  For what? My room, the Ritz of boardinghouse rooms, was on the top floor. I jokingly referred to it as a second-floor penthouse. On my second night, I returned from a grueling day of rehearsals. Exhausted, I flopped onto the bed and went to sleep. Around one, I felt a thud against my bed. Then this something climbed into bed with me. It scared the crap out of me. I wasn’t able to move, that’s how frightened I was. Then this thing took my hand and placed it on its enormous breast—actually, a mound of hair.

  That’s when I remembered: the bear!

  “How do you like that, honey?”

  I recognized the voice. It was my landlady. She wanted me to massage her hairy chest. Maybe she wanted me to do more than that, but I didn’t want to go that far even in my imagination. After I got her out of there, I got out myself and bunked with a friend from the theater. One night he took me out for White Castle hamburgers, and we were hanging out at the stand when a song came on the jukebox. He told me to listen.

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “Just listen,” he said.

  I looked around. The girls were going wild.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Rock and roll,” he said.

  It was “Blue Suede Shoes.” I didn’t get it. I was into Stan Kenton and Glenn Miller. I obviously had a lot to learn.

  * * *

  I finished out the year at Bard, doing more of the same: building sets, learning about lights, sewing costumes, and a lot of acting. In June, when my mother asked how I’d enjoyed college, I told her that there’d been some good moments onstage but I’d imagined doing something else. When I’d left Texas, it had been for Broadway and the excitement of New York City, not small-town college life along the Hudson. My instinct told me to move on and I worked up the nerve to tell my mother I wasn’t going back.

  “It’s just not what I want to do,” I said.

  “You don’t want to be an actor?” she asked.

  “No, I still want to. I’m just not cut out for school.”

  She looked at me and must’ve seen that bit of herself at seventeen and eighteen years old, that girl who, despite a husband and a child, knew her future was in Hollywood.

  She smiled. No matter her age, her smile remained mischievous and youthful. She never really grew up.

  “Let me see what I can do,” she said.

  Chapter Six

  I spent the summer with Margaret Webster’s acclaimed Shakespeare workshop in Woodstock, New York, where I worked in about six or seven plays with many excellent teachers, like Lucia Victor, and actors like Nancy Marchand, who went on to memorable roles on TV in Lou Grant and The Sopranos. I remember being in an Irish play, in which I was playing a dead man, and I forced the guys who were carrying me to take me onstage. I kept saying, “Goddamn it, get me out there.” I was so anxious to get out there. Except I was four pages too early.

  I was always jumping my cue. That was my biggest problem. I couldn’t wait to get on.

  But I also remember receiving some decent reviews for a small part in The Taming of the Shrew. Though my notices were more about being the son of Mary Martin, who was getting raves in Annie Get Your Gun, I finally started having the kind of acting experience I’d wanted.

  It was a great eight weeks, except for one nagging concern. The Korean War started that summer and I felt the threat of being drafted for a real war. The threat was real and it consumed everybody over eighteen. It filled young men in the 1950s with a paranoia that was hard to shake.

  Then I moved back in with Mother and Richard in Connecticut. That lasted a very short time, and for
good reason. I was drinking pretty heavily at the time. It was a skill I had picked up at Bard and honed in Dallas. One night I got a tape recorder and read all of James Thurber while consuming a bottle of gin. At that time I drank salty dogs—grapefruit juice, gin, and salt around the rim.

  For the next few days, I was extremely sick. It was not a pretty sight.

  Mother thought I had walking pneumonia and called the doctor.

  “Mrs. Halliday,” he said, “I have to tell you that your son does not have walking pneumonia. He is going through alcohol poisoning.”

  Mother faced me down.

  “If you drink like that, you can drink on your own,” she said none too happily.

  I did not know what to say. I had been drinking on my own—and doing a hell of a good job.

  “Larry, I’m going to give you fifty dollars a week, and you can go find a place of your own,” she said. “Visit me backstage when you can.”

  Getting kicked out of the house was the best thing that ever happened. I had just finished reading The Catcher in the Rye. I felt I was a misunderstood teenager, which of course I was, so I packed my one suitcase and I left without any hard feelings. However, I suspected Mother was a little disappointed in me, to say the least. Dragging my suitcase, an old leather satchel that weighed fifty pounds empty and about triple that full of clothes, I took the train into New York City.

  As soon as I got off the train, it started to rain. I walked into one hotel after another, looking for a place with a room for $50 a week. Eventually I arrived at the Knickerbocker Hotel, which was so old it still had DC current in the rooms, a fact I discovered when I plugged in my tape recorder and fried it. The room was affordable, just $34 a week, leaving me $16 to eat and drink.

  I was allowed to observe classes at the Actors Studio and watched people destroy one another’s performances with stinging critiques. Knowing that was not for me, I flopped around a few other acting classes, but nothing stuck. When Mother saw I was at least making an effort, she put me in touch with Lawrence Schwab, the producer who gave her her start on Broadway, and he put me in touch with his partner George Eckles, who went by the name St. John Terrell.