by LARRY HAGMAN
At least he recovered. I cannot say as much for the birds. We had a scene in which one of the sailors, played by Tommy Sands, is on his way back home, and as his C-47 transport plane circles the boat, we were supposed to release dozens of white doves. It was to be a loving gesture as well as a striking cinematic moment. After five days in cages in the sun, those birds might as well have been on lithium too. When the C-47 was overhead, their cages were opened but the birds would not fly. Some actually got up in the rigging, but most would not budge. They had sunstroke, dehydration, or both.
We tried again in the afternoon, but still none of them would fly. So when the plane made a second pass, Josh had some of the crew get rifles and start shooting in the air in the hope the noise would scare them into flight. It made sense. By this time, though, the poor birds were so sick and weak they flew all right, but fell into the ocean like planes running out of gas. They littered the ocean, scores of sick white birds, fluttering and sputtering, too pooped to pop. It was the saddest, most frustrating thing I’d ever witnessed.
No, wrong. The saddest thing was when the sharks came. They arrived in threes and fours and started eating the birds as if they were Kentucky Fried Chicken. There was nothing any of us could do to help. We could not dive in. We did not have nets to scoop them out of harm’s way. Taking a boat out would not help. As we watched this pathetic scene, the water churning with bloodstained feathers, some of the guys sobbed while others screamed, “Save the fucking birds!”
A few days later we nearly lost Josh the same way. During lunch, he decided to go for a swim. A ladder was let down and he dove into the ocean. He began a leisurely freestyle alongside the boat. Then someone noticed a dark shadow tailing him. Soon a bunch of us were watching, our mouths agape. It was a shark, at least an eight-footer, trailing Josh like a tailgater on the freeway, taking his sweet time while riding his bumper. All of us started to yell: “Josh, get your ass in here.”
“What? I cant hear you.”
“Get your ass on the boat.” We pointed behind him. “Shark!”
Then the shark surfaced. Josh saw it about twelve feet behind him and swam for the boat as if trying to break an Olympic record. Once he got close enough, some guys pulled him in, otherwise it could have easily been the last of Josh Logan.
For his birthday, Maj and I gave him a half dozen baby chickens, which he raised in his hotel penthouse till nearly the end of filming, when the hotel’s manager pressured him to put them on a farm. Another afternoon, while in a lithium-induced daze, he stood on the roof and tossed plate after plate into the swimming area, ten floors below. The day before, we had showed him how to play Frisbee, which he could not throw to save his life. But he was murderous with those plates. The hotel manager, having noted we were friends, asked me to go to the roof and calm him down before he caused some serious damage.
* * *
If anyone actually came close to dying, it was the first assistant director, when he tried to chintz us out of a decent dinner. About eighty of us were being ferried back from the ship after a long, hot day when this AD declared that by the rules of the Screen Actors Guild he could serve us leftover box lunches for dinner. The lunches consisted of inedible bean paste sandwiches. Maybe he saw the homicidal looks the crew gave him, or heard somebody mutter something about shark bait, but he reluctantly added that any of us who did not want to eat the box lunch could stay on the dock until they brought us a proper supper.
Well, along with Jack and Peter Marshall, I had been bringing my own lunch, so we weren’t particularly hungry. The three of us glanced at one another. This was a no-brainer.
“We’re staying on the dock,” Jack said.
It was as close to a mutiny as you could get on a movie set. The other guys opted to go back to the hotel, leaving just the three of us on the dock. We ordered lobster from the food stands and got shit-faced on beer and tequila. Finally, about three hours later, the first assistant director returned in a car and found the three of us holding one another up at one of the food stands. Because of us, he was having to pay meal penalties to about a hundred actors, at a cost of several thousand dollars. He was pissed.
“I want you idiots to get in the car and go to the hotel,” he said. “You’ve cost us a shitload of money.”
Back at the hotel, he continued to rant, promising none of us would ever work for Warner Bros, again.
“And if I can help it,” he added, “you’ll all be out of the business.”
“Fat fucking chance,” Jack said as we turned back to the bar and toasted the end of our careers.
* * *
I did not need much of an excuse to toast anything. On that movie, I was seduced by the carefree, party-time atmosphere of being in the tropics. I had never been anywhere like Acapulco, where holding a piña colada, mai tai, daiquiri, or some other alcoholic fruity concoction with a spear of pineapple and a cute umbrella on top just felt natural. I had found paradise. Everyone down there had their pleasure. For me, it was booze. My pal Bobby Walker did tai chi. I remember asking him about the weird movements he was doing on his balcony, something I’d never seen before, and soon I was hooked on that too. Josh had his own thing. Others had their vices. I didn’t pay much attention to any of it until Jack made a comment to me.
“Hag, you drink too much,” he said.
“I don’t think it’s a problem.”
“Neither do I. I just think you ought to try something else.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“A little grass. I’ll go out and get some.”
“Marijuana?” I said. “I can’t do that.”
Jack, who could tell I was ignorant and frightened of pot, accepted my answer and went his own way. A few days later, he came up to my room with a newspaper folded under his arm. When I told him Maj was down at the pool, he flashed a devilish grin and set the paper down on the coffee table. I asked what was in it. He said, “Acapulco gold.” Whoa, not in my room, I said, then suggested we go up to his room. A few other guys joined us, and then Jack got to work, sounding like a Vegas dealer as he said, “Well, let’s roll it up.”
At first I did not feel anything. About an hour later, after smoking more, I asked when the stuff started to take effect.
“Hag, you just asked me that,” Jack said.
“Huh?”
“You just asked me that for about the twelfth time.”
“I did?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, when does it start taking effect?”
“Now.”
“No shit.”
“What do you think?”
“I think I’d rather have a martini.”
Then the fun started. I went downstairs to see Maj, who was swimming laps in the hotel pool, which was extremely large and deep, something like fifteen feet. I had absolutely no idea that I was extremely high as I jumped in the pool, grabbed Maj, and told her to swim with me to the bottom. Once down there, I started to take off her bikini top, something she resisted while at the same time trying to get me to understand she was running out of air and needed to surface quickly. But when you are as high as I was, time does not mean anything.
Finally Maj dragged me back to the surface, gasping for air and pissed off.
“What the hell have you been doing?” she asked.
“Well, Jack turned me on,” I said.
“Larry, we had a deal,” she said. “You always said you wouldn’t do anything like that unless you did it with me.”
“I’m sorry. But don’t worry, there’s more.”
We went up to Jack’s room, where everyone was still in their same seats, puffing away, except for one guy, who vanished without anyone having seen him leave. Instead of searching for him, we ordered food and beer from room service. After the guy delivered it, we became paranoid that he’d turn us in to security for smoking pot. Then there was a knock on the door, and it freaked us out. It turned out to be the missing guy, a stuntman, who had climbed down ten floors to the ground on
the outside of the hotel without being spotted. It’s what he liked to do when he was high.
For me, the real fun came when Maj turned on. We went back to our room with some grass and had a great time. We ate, put on some music, and then started to make passionate love. We had such a good time I started to levitate. I rose up off the bed, high enough that I could look down and see the two of us on the king-size mattress. Then the wall next to my head opened up and I saw about three inches of blue sky.
“Jesus Christ, this stuff is fantastic,” I said. “I’ve never had anything like it in my entire life!”
“Wow!” Maj exclaimed, laughing.
Eventually we wanted dinner and headed down to the restaurant. We had to take the stairs because the elevator was out. When we got to the lobby, it was jammed. Someone from the movie company hurried over to me and asked if we were okay. I got paranoid. Did they know I had smoked pot all day? Could they tell? It was best to act as if everything was normal. I said we were fine and asked why.
“Didn’t you feel it? We just had a huge earthquake.”
It was news to me. The quake had knocked out all the power and damaged the hotel, including the roof over our room, hence the crack of blue sky I’d seen. And I thought it had been the grass. It’s probably lucky that episode came toward the end of shooting there, but then we went back to L.A. to finish up the film at the Warner Bros, studio. One day the prop master mixed up a batch of jungle juice that we as the ship’s crew were supposed to have made. But he added too much purple coloring and after a couple takes, everyone’s tongue turned deep purple and they had to suspend shooting for a few days.
Chapter Thirteen
We’d sublet John McGiver’s rented house in Malibu for a couple of weeks while I finished up work. Maj had really fallen in love with the beach, and the kids were old enough to enjoy it. We were next door to Jascha Heifetz, which might sound exciting, but hearing him practice one sequence over and over and over for hours was enough to drive you nuts. But I admired him as the first guy I ever met who owned an electric car.
As we celebrated my birthday on the beach, I received word that I had gotten another movie, The Cavern, a World War II movie that was going to shoot in London and Italy. Maj’s sister Bebe was going to take the kids to Sweden, so we had to be back in New York within four days. Despite having paid for a few more weeks at the beach, we packed up the Jeep, the floor now repaired, and took off for New York.
After driving all night, we were near Midland, Texas, around 3 A.M., needing gas and food. I pulled into a truck stop, and while I filled the Jeep with gas, Maj went for hamburgers. She came back in a lather, complaining they wouldn’t sell her hamburgers. I asked where she went. She said to the hamburger stand. I looked over and saw she had been at the “colored” window. I told her to go around the front and get them.
“I’ll be damned if I will,” she said.
She’d never run up against segregation, and she was infuriated that there would be separate windows for whites and blacks. She was going to stand at the colored window and demand to be served. I said, “Look, Maj, you’re in segregated territory. It’s not right, but you will be arrested and that means Dad will have to be woken up, drive five hours to bail us out of jail. It’s going to be a lot of money, a lot of trouble, and we’ve got the kids. It’s just not worth it.”
Finally I quieted her down, went around to the white section for hamburgers, and we were on our way. Before leaving, though, Maj threw her burger out the window. A few hours later, we stopped in Weatherford to see Dad, slept a bit, and took off again.
We got to New York just in time to load Bebe and the kids on the plane to Sweden so she could show them off to their Swedish relatives. A few days later, Maj and I flew to Europe, stopping first in London to see Henri Kleiman and some other friends. One night I got bombed and jumped into the Serpentine for a moonlight swim, and the next day I had a cold that turned into a deep hack by the time we made it to Trieste for the start of The Cavern.
The film, directed by Edgar Ulmer, was about a group of soldiers—two U.S., one Italian, one British, one German—and a beautiful Italian woman, who take refuge from the bombing in a cavern the Nazis have stocked with booze, cigarettes, and enough food for a regiment. But eventually they go nuts and kill one another.
Edgar began shooting in the caverns at Postumia, Yugoslavia, and then moved to Trieste. We had a large, talented, multinational cast and crew, including John Saxon, Brian Aherne, Italian actress Rosanna Schiaffino, and Nino Castelnuovo, who had won an award for his work in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.
Edgar got very concerned about my health. My cough was a sickening hack. Every time I drew a breath I felt stabbing pains in my chest. Finally Edgar told me that he thought the cough was pretty serious. He said I better get an X ray. He was right, but his concern went beyond friendly. I had a momentary suspicion that the producer of the movie might be more interested in finding something that would stop production, like an accident or serious illness, which would allow him to collect insurance money rather than finish the picture. After Fail-Safe, I knew movies were business endeavors, and all of us knew this wasn’t going to be a blockbuster.
Edgar sent me to get an X ray. Maj and I went to a place in downtown Trieste, a beautiful old city but a backwater village when it came to medical facilities. The doctor’s office was on an upstairs floor of an old, decrepit building. We stepped into the elevator, an old cage that did not inspire confidence as it very slowly creaked upward.
Once at our destination, we were met by a little woman about four feet tall who had a thicker mustache than mine. The doctor did not speak a word of English, but he motioned us into place. Maj had her chest done, since the company was paying, and then I had mine. I coughed my head off for an hour in the freezing cold office till the results came back.
The doctor had a very serious, grave look as he put the plates up against the lights. Maj’s X rays were clear, but mine were filled with arrows pointing to spots. There was also a two-page, single-spaced report written in Italian, which I could not decipher. But I figured it was my death sentence when the doctor handed it to me and went off on an intensely serious explanation in Italian. I kept asking what it meant, what he was saying, until finally he drew his finger across his throat and said, “Signor Hagman, niente fumari … Morte! Morte!”
I interpreted only the throat-slashing gesture, and fainted.
After coming to and getting my head bandaged, I was made to understand that I would have to stop my two-pack-a-day cigarette habit. In the meantime, the doctor gave me antibiotics for my infection. Maj said the doctor felt I would be better in a week. On the set, everyone expressed relief at my diagnosis, except for the producer, who tried to cover up his disappointment.
Then disaster did strike. While shooting the bombing sequence that forced us into the cavern, a scene that had all of us running through a path between explosions, Joachim Hansen, the actor playing the German officer, accidentally stepped inside one and it blew him sky high. The blast did not kill him, but it knocked him flat out. The producer looked like a kid watching Fourth of July fireworks, his face the picture of hope, like someone who thinks he might have the winning lottery ticket—at least until he heard the crew guy who had rushed over scream, “He’s okay! He’s alive!”
I always contended that since I did not have double cancer of the lung, they had to figure out a way to stop production. And poor old Joachim literally walked into it.
* * *
They were not spending a whole lot of money on this movie. There was not much in the way of creature comforts. They packed three of us—me, John, and Peter Marshall—into one trailer. It was so small the three of us could not change in there at the same time. Two of us could, but not three.
So one day, after we had spent hours shooting by the side of a mountain, we were driven back to base camp. It was cold as hell outside. I was waiting for my turn in the trailer when Brian Aherne came by. The veteran actor had t
aken a liking to me and said he wanted to talk to me confidentially. I said fine.
“My darling wife has procured the trailer that Elizabeth Taylor used in Cleopatra,” he continued, “and I was wondering if you would share it with me.”
“What?”
“Yes, I feel rather bad about it because I really don’t have room for all the other actors.”
I was flattered. I knew there had to be a catch, and there was.
“If you share my trailer, you would take the job of my batman.”
“What the hell is a batman?” I asked.
Brian seemed a bit surprised I had not heard the term.
“Well, all British army officers have an enlisted man who is their batman,” he explained. “He draws their baths, pitches the tent, makes the cot up, strings up the mosquito netting. All the things that a batman does.”
I spent a moment thinking about the position he described. He wanted me to be his goddamn butler. Brian went on:
“Dear boy, this profession we’re in requires a great deal of facility. There are feast years and then there are famine years, and it’s always good to have the knowledge of an additional job. If you are my batman, I can teach you how to be a proper man’s man.”
At that point, I saw John and Peter exit our trailer and wave it was my turn to change clothes. I imagined the cold wind whipping through our trailer.
“Say, Brian, does your trailer happen to have heat?” I asked.
“Yes, it does.”
“Then I’ll be your batman. It sounds right up my alley!”
For the next six weeks, I worked as Brian’s batman. If I was not in front of the camera, I was doing chores in our trailer. I learned how to serve tea to a field officer, turn down his bed, and press pants without an iron, which is a nifty trick. You carefully set the pants between the mattress and box spring, go to sleep, and by morning they are perfectly pressed. I was never a batman again, but Brian was right, I learned a lot of practical skills and put them to good use ten years later when I played a butler in the TV series The Good Life.