Larry Hagman - Hello Darlin'

by LARRY HAGMAN

  His name was pronounced Sinjin. He was a wonderful teacher and mentor. I sat in his office while he looked me over, like a man looking at hieroglyphs for the first time, and he seemed absolutely perplexed.

  “What are we going to do with you, kid?” he muttered.

  “I’m a helluva dancer,” I said.

  “Dancers are a dime a dozen, kid.”

  But Sinjin knew much more than he let on. He produced a slew of musicals that changed weekly, and he signed up a revolving cast of stars for the lead parts. They would do a week, then leave; the show would change, and a new star would perform. It was a tidy little formula, but Sinjin profited, and occasionally he shared bits of wisdom.

  “I’m going to tell you something, Larry, and remember this,” he said. “You don’t have to pay actors and dancers that much.”

  “You don’t?”

  “No, because no matter how much you pay them, when the rag goes up”—the rag was the curtain—“they’re going to do the best they can. They can’t help it.”

  Sinjin didn’t have anything for me at that moment, but before Christmas he came up with my first job. He was producing musicals for the annual winter musical circus in Saint Petersburg, Florida. He wanted me to drive the show’s choreographer, Ken MacKenzie, his wife, the lead dancer, their three Pekingese, two chorus girls, a newly hired assistant—let’s call her Frances—and her Great Dane down there in a 1941 Navy surplus Woody station wagon that looked ready for the scrap heap.

  I told him fine.

  Fine was probably not the right word, but on the day after Christmas we loaded up the wagon and took off. With all of us crammed into the car, plus our luggage and assorted dog food bowls, which were half in the car and half tied to the roof, it was crowded, to say the least.

  A short ways into the trip—and mind you, it was snowing and sleeting the whole way; it was just a damn shit storm is what it was—I realized those tiny Pekingese could not stand the Great Dane and he could not stand them. There were problems right away.

  The trip was supposed to take three days. Sinjin had given me $150 to ensure we slept comfortably at night. I started down the New Jersey Turnpike, wishing either the Great Dane would eat the two Pekingese or they would annoy him into jumping out the window and hitchhiking to Florida on his own. I had never heard noise like that in a car. And that was the pleasant part of the trip!

  About three hundred miles later, somewhere in Delaware, I got my first blowout.

  Boom!

  “What was that?”

  Yap-yap-yap-yap!

  Grrrrrrrr!

  “Is everything okay?”

  No, it wasn’t. It was about two in the morning. It was colder than hell, it was snowing, and I did not have a spare tire. I walked about three miles in the dark to a filling station and bought a new tire and a used spare. Changing tires in that weather was a real learning experience.

  Ready to go, I drove a couple hundred more miles down the highway before finally stopping at a motel for the night. When he gave me money, Sinjin had not figured the cost of a flat that would require me buying two tires. Nor had he figured the cost of motel rooms for so many people. And never mind the dogs. None of the motels we stopped at would take them.

  “But, Larry, they can’t sleep in the car,” Millie MacKenzie, the choreographer’s wife, said. “They’ll freeze to death.”

  So, after everyone settled into their rooms, I had the two chorus girls come on to the motel manager while I smuggled the dogs into the rooms.

  The next day, following a short night’s sleep, I told everyone that I wanted to make up for the time we lost the previous day. I drove as fast as possible in the terrible weather. Spirits in the tightly packed car were not quite as high as they were the day before, when they had been extremely low. People did not get along as well. Neither did the dogs. Somehow, though, all of us managed to tolerate one another until we crossed the line into Georgia. That’s when we suffered another blowout. Unlike the last time, no one asked what that noise was. The dogs did not growl. We knew. There was a collective groan.

  Oh no.

  Again, it was nighttime, cold, and miserable. I saw a light from a filling station far ahead, and as I tried rolling toward it another tire slowly lost air.

  Oh shit.

  Luckily a guy came along in a pickup. He stopped to see what was up with us. He saw the chorus girls, who were bundled up but had beautiful faces. I saw they triggered his interest. I stepped up and introduced Willard to the girls, who by this time knew the procedure. They whimpered helplessly, and I said they needed help.

  “Yup, I’ll give you a ride down there to the fillin’ station,” he said.

  I walked in and the man running the place, one of those Southern mountain men who had no teeth and wore overalls that barely covered him, was sublimely drunk.

  “Whatchay need, boy?” he asked.

  “Tires.”

  “Well, we got tires here,” he said. “What kind you want?”

  “The kind that won’t blow out,” I said.

  “Well, what kind of car you got, boy?”

  “One with pretty women in it,” said the guy who picked me up, smiling hopefully.

  * * *

  About an hour later we had been driven back to the station, the car had been towed, and I was back in the office talking to Jethro.

  “Where y’all stayin’?” he asked.

  “We need to find a motel. Know of any nearby?”

  “We’ve got a motel right here,” he said, eyeballing the chorus girls. “In fact, we got two rooms open.”

  Just two, I thought. But what were my options?

  “Okay,” I said. “How much?”

  Whatever amount he told me was more than I had when I added in the tires and the money I would need for food. Ignoring the surge of panic I felt, which might have convinced me that I really was an actor, I struck a deal with the guy, promising to be out of the rooms by noon the next day. Then he gave everyone a taste of the local moonshine he said he made and we settled into the rooms.

  They were adjoining rooms with a dank smell. I put the MacKenzies, their Pekingese, and the chorus girls in the larger room, which had two beds, and then the secretary, Frances, and I took the other, smaller one, which had only one bed. Frances promptly claimed it, and her Great Dane hopped on just to make sure I knew my place was on the floor—the cold floor again.

  A few hours later I heard a noise that sounded like moaning. My first thought was terror. I thought maybe Jethro or Willard or both had sneaked into the room and were molesting Frances. I turned on my little flashlight and raised my head just slightly enough to see that Frances and her Great Dane were in the midst of a—uh—well, they were having a moment together. In truth, it was more than a moment. Frances had her eyes shut tight, was having a wonderful time, and it made my jaw drop lower than that Great Dane’s.

  I put my head down, covered my ears, and thought, Oh God, what am I going to tell Mother when she asks how work is going?

  “How was your night?” Jethro asked the next morning.

  We were in the bar for breakfast. He had clearly been up all night. I could see our car in the garage. It looked almost refitted with tires. After scrambling up some eggs and frying bacon, he went back outside, leaving us to eat in relative peace and quiet. Everyone looked tired, except the Great Dane, who, I swore, had a smile and looked like he might want a cigarette.

  But apparently his mood wasn’t that good. When one of the Pekingese went after a piece of bacon that dropped on the floor, the Great Dane thought it belonged to him and started chomping on the little dog. The other Peke attacked the Great Dane. And all hell broke loose. Chairs and dishes toppled and broke.

  Jethro heard the ruckus and came in.

  “You aren’t getting ready to leave, are you?” he asked.

  At some point he had fallen in love with Frances. Now he sidled up to her, real close, and gave her a goofy look that showed he was truly dangerous.

/>   “How’s it going with the car?” I asked, knowing we had to get out of there.

  “Coming along,” he replied.

  “We just needed two tires.” I was being bold. “It should be ready by now.”

  Somehow I convinced him to tighten up the final lugs on the tires and we took off faster than Napoleon fleeing Moscow. I ended up borrowing gas money from the MacKenzies and cash for food from the chorus girls. But we finally arrived in Saint Petersburg. I phoned Sinjin to say we’d made it and to ask for more money to pay everyone back. But he beat me to the punch by asking how much cash I had left over.

  “Left over?” I replied. “I had to borrow like a hundred bucks from these people to feed them.”

  Sinjin was incredulous.

  “I didn’t tell you to feed them,” he said. “They’re on a per diem. They feed themselves.”

  Whatever. I was pleased with myself. This was my first professional job in the theater, and I’d been successful. Though it would take me six weeks to pay back the money I’d borrowed, Sinjin was a great teacher. I got everyone where they were supposed to go in one piece—except for one of the Peeks, who was missing a small chunk of his right ear.

  Chapter Seven

  In Saint Petersburg, I had one of the best theatrical experiences of my life. Sinjin staged good solid musicals like Desert Song; No, No, Nanette; Die Fledermaus; Showboat; Up in Central Park; and Carousel under a tent large enough to hold fifteen hundred people. Based on my successful jaunt cross-country, he made me the assistant prop man—at no increase in salary, I might add. I still made only twenty-eight bucks a week. He also put me in the chorus, letting me sing, dance, and play bit parts. Sinjin knew how to get his money’s worth.

  Sinjin also thought I should know how to put up the tent and maintain it, so in addition to everything else, he assigned me to work under the tutelage of the tent master, Joe Pelican. He’d learned all there was to know about big tents from years with the Ringling Brothers Circus. I learned how to drive nine-foot stakes into the ground while swinging a fourteen-pound sledgehammer from the top of a ladder. That was another learning experience. You miss the stake, you go flying off the ladder. After a couple of misses, I had perfect aim. I’m not kidding.

  Between setup, daytime rehearsals, and nighttime performances, plus two matinees a week, tent maintenance, and numerous other assignments, I crammed thirty-five hours of work into twenty-four—and somehow I still managed to get in some playtime with one of the chorus girls.

  She was a bona fide nymphomaniac. I remember telling Sinjin I liked her a lot! Smiling, he said that he did too. So did the general manager, the carpenter, the head parking attendant, and several of his assistants.

  “I like working the winter down here,” I told her.

  “I like the work you do down there too,” she replied. “Now hush up, cutie, till I tell you it’s time to take a break.”

  This was not an easy gig, though. The show was closed when a hurricane hit and ripped the tent apart. The enormous tent poles, weighing over a thousand pounds, were blown down and one of them landed on the wardrobe mistress. That tragedy, combined with dreadful box office sales, convinced Sinjin to move the show to Miami, where he had another tent on the Seventy-ninth Street Causeway.

  After what little remained of the lighting equipment was packed up and shipped off, I found myself with a two-week break before I would be needed again. I also found myself without a salary, as the always frugal Sinjin stopped paying me those weeks.

  So on the way to Miami a few of us stopped in Sarasota, the winter home and headquarters of the Ringling Brothers Circus, which I’d always loved. With a few days to kill, and broke, I found one of the managers and asked if I could work for a couple of weeks.

  “We need a ticket taker for one of the sideshows,” he replied.

  “Done.”

  On my second day of work, the circus staged their annual winter parade through town, advertising the start of the winter season. It was about a hundred degrees, one of those Chamber of Commerce days when Floridians put on their Bermuda shorts while the rest of the country is snowed in. A guy told me they needed some help with the animals.

  “Animals? I’m pretty good with animals,” I lied.

  “Good, try this on.” He gave me a lion’s suit.

  At 10 A.M. I got into my suit, practiced a few growls. The parade started. It was hot and humid. By ten-thirty, I swear, the temperature had passed 140 degrees inside my lion’s suit. I do not recall how long I managed to keep growling and marching. I remember sweat poured off me. I was wetter than when I had showered that morning. Next I remember about halfway through the parade being on my back and looking up into a clown’s face. They had taken my head off and thrown a bucket of water on me.

  “What’s going on?” I mumbled.

  “You got heatstroke,” the clown said.

  A lot of people had crowded around, apparently thinking it was exciting to see one of the lions passed out on the asphalt. As I staggered up, pausing on all fours, some kid sprinted out from the crowd and ripped off my tail. It was no easy task. The tail was so long that it had a wire that ran from my neck to my ass to keep it in the air. But he snatched it right off, almost strangling me, and I was too groggy to give chase.

  “Where’s your tail, lad?” the costume guy asked later on when I returned my suit.

  “Some kid ran off with it,” I said.

  “Well, that’ll cost you thirty-five dollars.”

  “I’m not even making thirty-five dollars a week. Not even close.”

  “I know,” he said with a smirk. “I’ll give you a break. You’ll have to work here another week for nothing.”

  I was quickly learning that theater and circus management have something in common—they’re all heart.

  * * *

  Once I got to Miami, the intensity of everything, from the work to my life, ratcheted up. You could not live in that city for my salary, $28 a week, so I bunked in the men’s latrine. I threw up a cot between the urinals and put up a tent of mosquito netting. The latrine was a major breeding ground of Miami’s mosquito population. I dated a member of the corps de ballet whose father was a U.S. Customs officer, and every two weeks he confiscated a stalk of bananas for me. She kept me alive. All I did in my time off (ho-ho) was drink rum, eat bananas, an occasional hamburger, and that pretty little dancer.

  My day started at 6 A.M. when I checked the tent to see if the wind had come up at night and caused any damage. Then I sat in on rehearsals in my various capacities as chorus member, actor, assistant prop man. It was a lot to do, and yet I felt lucky to have the job. These musicals often boasted a talented cast headed by Elaine Stritch and solid characters like Iggy Wolfington and George Britton. My night didn’t finish until very late, and I somehow had the energy to party all night, drinking and dancing and so on.

  I’d never been as poor, tired, or happy. I had a lot of stamina. After all—I was nineteen.

  Toward the end of summer, the area suffered a freak cold wave. There was even a sleet storm. Not surprisingly, between sleeping in the latrine and the crazy hours I kept, I came down with pneumonia. I felt like I was going to die. Iggy and George took me into the little house they rented and got me to a doctor, who gave me a shot of penicillin, which was still a relatively new drug. That got me through it.

  By the time I recovered, though, the season was over.

  I headed north, where Sinjin had me work in his productions in Lambertville, New Jersey. It was “the original musical circus in the round,” where he had started out. By now I’d won my spurs and he made me the assistant stage manager, a position whose salary was regulated by the Actors’ Equity Association. I don’t remember the amount, but it was a helluva lot more than $28 a week. Best of all, it allowed me to get my Equity card, a big step for me in those days.

  I was also playing very slightly bigger parts and feeling more confident about myself onstage when Mom called to ask me about an actor named Wilbur Evan
s. She was about to reprise her starring role in South Pacific, and Wilbur was set to be her leading man. I’d worked with him in Florida. She said she was concerned that he wasn’t as tall as Ezio Pinza, her costar on Broadway. I assured her that he was a fine actor who would do well in the part. But it turned out she actually had something else on her mind. My mother could be crafty like that. She said there was a small speaking part open in South Pacific and I could also be in the chorus if I was interested.

  I didn’t have to think about it. I jumped at the offer.

  The hard part was telling Sinjin, but he magnanimously let me go, saying mine would be hard shoes to fill. Indeed, he was going to have to pay at least three additional people to do the work I did. But knowing Sinjin, I felt confident he’d find another sucker.

  Chapter Eight

  Mother, Richard, Heller, and I sailed to Southampton from New York on the Media, a small passenger liner belonging to the White Star Lines. During the voyage, I met an air force Catholic chaplain, Captain O’Rourke, who was on his way to his post at the U.S. base at Bushy Park, England. We drank and joked all the way across the ocean and that connection would prove to be a great help to me a short time later.

  The sailing was not as smooth during the brief family vacation we took before starting rehearsals. At one point we were at Castle Combe, a fine countryside hotel, and once again Richard was on my case. He saw me vault onto a horse in the stable area and ride bareback. This sort of riding was apparently too wild for the proper form around the stable and caused quite a stir. At dinner, Richard informed my mother that I’d been misbehaving as usual, and it became an issue between us.

  “The woman at the stables says you are harming the horses,” he said.

  “I didn’t know that,” I said. “I learned to do that back in Vermont and I’ve seen it in every Western movie ever made.”