Larry Hagman - Hello Darlin'

by LARRY HAGMAN

  I knew that Burgess hated playing the Penguin. Even though it was one of his most famous roles, he was offended that someone with such memorable radio, stage, and screen credits should be reduced to waddling around in a tux and quacking like a penguin on what he considered a lowly TV show.

  Knowing this, I had Michael Woolbrech make fifty silk flags with penguins on them, and then on the day of the party I flew them up on the top of the offending roof. I also made a loop tape of Burgess quacking like the Penguin and blasted it on my stereo all day long. Maj made me take the flags down and turn off the stereo when she looked over and saw that Burgess was on the verge of apoplexy. It was one of the meanest—and funniest—pranks I ever played.

  * * *

  That summer Peter Sellers rented our house for six weeks. It was right after a big storm. We’d lost part of our beach and were having it and our house repaired. I warned Peter that we had to have some work done. Burgess was also replacing his seawall. I emphasized it wasn’t going to be idyllic.

  “I don’t care,” he said. “I love the house.”

  “It’s twenty thousand a month.”

  “Money’s no object.”

  Good, because I was broke and needed the money. So Maj, the kids, our three cats, two dogs, and turtle moved into a spare room in Peter Fonda’s office on Melrose and Seward. The next day the pile driver set out right outside Peter Sellers’s bedroom and started hammering. Peter thought it was going to last for a few days, but the work spanned six weeks. He was livid.

  “I’d like my money back,” he said.

  “I can’t do that,” I said. “I spent it. I paid off bills.”

  Though his lawyers threatened to sue, he stayed the entire time. In the midst of that, Peter Fonda celebrated his thirty-fifth birthday with a giant party at his office. He had about a hundred people, including his dad and sister. I put on my magenta gorilla suit and stood by the door, making sure that only invited guests came inside. I had a great time, and around 2 A.M. I went to sleep on the lawn. In the morning, I woke up with a terrible hangover and got on a rickety old bike I saw and started pedaling toward a nearby stand that made the world’s greatest milk shakes.

  It was one of those still mornings. There wasn’t a car on the road. But on the way, I crashed my bike—the front tire slipped into a drainage grating. I injured my knee and was lying dazed in the road. The next thing I knew, two cops were staring down at me.

  “Are you all right?” one of the cops asked.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Good. I don’t know what I could book you for—impersonating a gorilla on a Sunday morning—but just do whatever you have to do and get the hell off the street.”

  * * *

  My next offer was much better. Paul Mazursky asked me to be in Harry and Tonto, his memorable film starring Art Carney as an old man who, after losing his New York City apartment, sets off on a cross-country journey, visiting his children and friends, and living life as he’s never done before. Art was brilliant. I played his son, a real loser who begged his dad to move in with him and share the rent. Every one of my scenes was with Art and I had a delicious time working with him.

  But for every film like Harry and Tonto, I did five on par with The Big Rip-Off, a TV movie that was forgettable—with three exceptions. One was Tony Curtis, the star, who was so much fun. He was the best cribber I’ve ever worked with. You’d never know he had tiny slips of paper with his lines written down pasted everywhere. He’s a master. We did one scene in a car where I held a flashlight so he could see his lines.

  The second exception was meeting Brenda Vaccaro, a fabulous babe.

  And the third exception? My hair. Before shooting began, Maj had said, “Let’s try perming your hair.” I’ll just say two words: big mistake.

  In 1975,1 played Linda Blair’s father in the made-for-TV movie Sarah T—Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic, but otherwise I barely worked the whole year. I started off the next year by making The Return of the World’s Greatest Detective, a TV movie about an L.A. cop whose motorcycle falls on him while he’s lying down reading a Sherlock Holmes novel during his lunch break. He wakes up believing he’s Sherlock Holmes. The movie was intended as a pilot for a weekly series, but it didn’t go.

  I’d put a lot of creativity and energy into that project, and it took a while before the disappointment faded.

  Fortunately, I stayed busy. I made The Big Bus, a parody of disaster films directed by James Frawley, another friend from New York days. He put together an unusually strong cast, including Joseph Bologna, Stockard Channing, Ned Beatty, Ruth Gordon, Lynn Redgrave, and about twenty-five other terrific actors. Next, I took a part in The Eagle Has Landed, a World War II epic about Nazi soldiers who plot to kidnap Winston Churchill. It shot in London during the hottest summer they’d had in fifty years, and I took the family with me so they could have a vacation.

  The movie featured another stellar group of actors: Michael Caine, Donald Sutherland, Robert Duvall, and Anthony Quayle, the very beautiful and talented actress Jenny Agutter, and Treat Williams, who was beginning his movie career. The film’s director, John Sturges, had made classic movies like Gunfight at the OK Corral, The Magnificent Seven, and The Great Escape.

  He was brusque. He barked orders like an old-fashioned movie director. A few times I fell into his crosshairs. Like the scene when I had the muzzle of my carbine pointed down. He wanted it up. But it was raining.

  “I don t want water going down the barrel,” I said. “When it rains, you sling it down.”

  I could almost hear him thinking: Youngsters today. But he said, “That makes sense. If that’s what you want, go ahead.”

  I shot my final scene with Jean Marsh, who’d been a friend of mine in London when I did South Pacific. In the movie, she played a German spy and I barged into her cottage, prepared to throw a hand grenade into her room. Suddenly she opened the door and shot me in the forehead. Blood was supposed to splatter everywhere as I tumbled backward down the stairs.

  It was a great scene.

  We did it without a hitch and shooting was over for me.

  I took Maj and the kids to Ireland, where we stayed at a historic castle with Kevin McClory, who had produced a James Bond picture. The castle looked like something out of an Irish fairy tale. We played croquet on the expansive lawn and servants brought out champagne. I felt very civilized. I also went to the horse races at the Curragh, Ireland’s oldest and most beautiful racetrack. My friend Bob Sangster owned horses that ran there every day. Through him, I got in tight with the trainers and made a few bucks at the window. I also lost some too.

  One day while I was playing croquet I got a call from The Eagle Has Landed’s production manager. Almost two weeks had passed since my last scene. He explained that when they viewed the dailies, they discovered the summer’s heat had dried out the blood in the capsule that was supposed to have burst on my forehead and they needed to reshoot that little portion showing the bullet going between my eyes.

  “This time, hopefully, you’ll bleed,” he said.

  I returned for a few days, shot the scene, and got paid an extra week’s salary, which I really needed after the horse races in Ireland.

  * * *

  Not long after I landed a part in Mother, Jugs and Speed, a big-budget comedy about rival ambulance companies that starred Raquel Welch. Raquel had a reputation for being difficult, but I found her perfectly wonderful. She was also perfectly wonderful to look at. The movie, which also starred Bill Cosby and Harvey Keitel, started out funny, but the second half was loaded with stupid killings that confused moviegoers, who didn’t know if it was a comedy or an action picture.

  Next I worked on The Rhinemann Exchange, a 1977 miniseries that shot in Mexico City, which wasn’t a great experience, but then I had a wonderful time making Checkered Flag, a racing movie that shot on location in the Philippines, with Joe Don Baker and Susan Sarandon. Susan was a sensational person, as she’s repeatedly proved over the years. I also beca
me friendly with racing great Parnelli Jones, who had a small part as himself and served as the technical adviser.

  Retired from driving, he owned a car that was running in the Indianapolis 500 just a few weeks later. When he finished his work on the film, he asked if I wanted to be his guest at the race and serve as the grand marshal. Yeah, I jumped at the chance. I loved parades, and this would be the biggest one I’d ever been in. But it meant finishing the movie, flying to L.A. just long enough to pack, then catching a flight to Indianapolis. Immediately after the race, I’d have to fly to London, where I was supposed to start a movie. Maj planned to meet me in London with the kids. It was a lot of travel, but it was worth it.

  Needless to say, I landed in Indianapolis jet-lagged out of my mind. It was the day before the race. I rode in the parade, waving to thousands of people from my perch on the back of a convertible. Afterward I rode around on a Kawasaki minibike in the pit area, meeting hundreds of people associated with the different cars and their sponsors. I was having a great time. But according to Parnelli, the best part was what happened in the infield, the grassy area inside the raceway.

  “It starts at six o’clock in the morning,” he said. “They open the gates, shoot off a cannon, and everybody races to stake out a spot on the infield. What they do is get a coupla guys with motorcycles and they race ahead to claim territory for their RVs, the place they’re going to spend the next eighteen hours. Its like the Oklahoma Breaks, where everyone is racing to stake out land. Only instead of building a home and planting a farm, they’re setting up an RV and getting shit-faced.”

  “I’d like to see that,” I said, “but it’s past midnight and I’m so tired I just don’t think I can make it.”

  “You really have to see it,” another guy chimed in.

  “Then I have to stay up all night, otherwise I’ll never wake up that early.”

  Some guy overhearing the conversation offered me one of Keith Moons favorite pills. But it was a first for me.

  Pretty soon sleep was a nonissue.

  At 6 A.M. I was standing in the infield, surveying a long green straightaway covered by a low-lying fog, and I was absolutely wired. Suddenly there was a boom and through the mist I saw a line of RVs and motorcycles racing toward me. Realizing I would get creamed if I stayed in that spot, I kick-started my minibike and took off in front of them.

  I’d never seen anything as wild, but it got wilder once people began to drink—or whatever. I spent the rest of the morning riding around, saying hi to people, accepting beers, and having a blast. There was no slowing down. At one point, I encountered a circle of RVs that was set up like a wagon train. They were end to end and you couldn’t get in unless you went through one of them. Naturally, that made me curious.

  Nosing around, I spotted a gorgeous young woman and said hello to her. When she realized I was Larry Hagman from I Dream of Jeannie, she invited me inside.

  Well, right in the middle of this grand American spectacle, I walked into a major orgy. There must’ve been thirty to forty people fornicating in every conceivable position known. I felt out of my depth and returned to the pits for the race. Parnelli had been right, though. The 500 was exciting, but the real thrill was what happens in the infield.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  I was fortunate I had enough of a name to get TV movies like Intimate Strangers and Cry for Justice, which allowed us to maintain our lifestyle, but just barely.

  In fact, I was broke again when I bumped into Richard Donner, a friend from my earliest days in Los Angeles who was about to establish himself as one of Hollywood’s top filmmakers. When we saw each other, he’d just cast Christopher Reeve and Marlon Brando in Superman, his latest movie, and was about to leave for location.

  “Hag, you want a job?” he asked.

  “Does a bear shit in the woods?” I replied.

  “I just saw you in The Eagle Has Landed, and it’ll be a snap for you. You’ll pick up some good dough. We’re going to be on location in Banff for about a month or two, and I suspect I’ll need you up there for probably three or four days.”

  Those three or four days turned into about two weeks because of bad weather. But if I was going to be rained in, I picked an entertaining group of people to be marooned with. I wasn’t around Christopher Reeve or Marlon Brando, which was too bad, though I can still boast of having been in a film with both of them. And also Glenn Ford, Trevor Howard, and my old Screen Gems boss Jackie Cooper; they were all part of the action. So was Margot Kidder. After the movie, she moved out to Malibu and I got a call from her, asking if I knew a good doctor.

  “What’s the matter, honey?” I asked.

  “I was riding a horse with a Western saddle,” she said. “It bucked me up and I landed on the saddle horn. I think I broke my clitoris.”

  “Oh, honey, I know just what to do,” I said and made a few calls before finding a doctor who fixed her up.

  I was a hero to her and advised her to ride English saddle from then on.

  * * *

  It was a Saturday night, and on most weekend nights there was a party for the cast and crew on the hotel’s expansive balcony overlooking the grand Banff scenery. I filled some plastic bags with powdered sugar and taped them up so they looked like another powdery substance. They had the heft of a pound each. When I arrived at the party, I waved them around like tins of caviar and said, “Hey, everyone, look what I just got in the mail!”

  People froze and stared, completely rapt and amazed. I specifically offered them to Dick Donner, who ran in the opposite direction, and all I heard was him saying, “Uh, no, no, no thanks.”

  I gave chase, but then, in front of the whole company, I did one of those phony I Dream of Jeannie trips and let go of the bags. They flew over the parapet and exploded at the bottom, about twenty feet below. The hundred or so people there rushed to the railing and saw the ground blanketed with white powder. There were gasps and groans and cries of “Oh my God!”

  * * *

  This first Superman was the classic story of the alien orphan sent to Earth from his dying planet. He grows up and uses his superpowers to destroy evil. I played an army colonel in charge of soldiers who were escorting an atomic-tipped missile. My scene revolved around gorgeous Valerie Perrine faking a car accident in order to distract the military guards, thereby creating a diversion that would allow her people to steal the missile.

  One of my men spotted her lying in the road, unconscious but nonetheless provocative.

  “There’s been an accident, sir,” he told me.

  I assessed the situation myself and said, “I think she needs mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and vigorous chest massage.”

  With that, all the soldiers started to jump on her.

  I called the men to attention, ordered them to do an about-face, and pompously said, “I’m not going to have my men do anything I’m not prepared to do myself.”

  Then I jumped on her.

  We printed the first take, did the coverage except for my close-up, and then it started to rain. It kept raining for five straight days. A week went by before Dick was able to shoot outside again, which provided me with a desperately needed additional week’s pay.

  Finally I did my close-up and finished my part of the movie. I was ready to go home. But a Canadian air controllers’ strike made it impossible to fly out of Canada. Valerie and two of her girlfriends were in the same situation. I persuaded the production company to furnish us with an RV and a driver to take the four of us to the airport in Great Falls, Montana, where we could get a plane to L.A.

  We set out at eight in the morning, driving through Banff National Park and drinking champagne and enjoying the spectacular scenery. At one stop for food, I went searching through my wallet for a credit card that wasn’t maxed out and a tiny little dot of blue paper fell out. All of a sudden I remembered that years earlier I’d squirreled away a tab of acid in case of an emergency. I told myself this long drive qualified as one and swallowed it.

  Aw
hile later, as we were driving by a beautiful mountain stream that emptied into a large blue pool, I decided I had to go swimming. The driver stopped and I stripped down to my Skivvies and dove in. The glacial water must’ve been thirty-five degrees, but it didn’t make any difference to me because I was generating my own heat. I swam around as if I were in a heated pool. I saw the girls and a bunch of other people watching me from the bank and asking, “What the hell is that guy doing in there?”

  I was talking to the trout.

  Eventually I got back in the van and I continued having a great time on the road. Mileage markers flew by, but when it got dark the driver said he needed to sleep before we got in an accident. After he stopped, the wind started whistling through the RV. It was freezing cold. The driver worried about carbon monoxide buildup and wouldn’t leave the motor on to provide heat. We didn’t have any blankets. The girls pulled their sweaters on, wrapped up in the curtains, and were fine. I was traveling light and didn’t have much other than what I had on. In addition, I was coming down off my acid trip.

  Nobody offered to let me curl up with them and I decided to lie down on the floor. A few hours later, with the nighttime temperature near freezing, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I woke Valerie and asked if I could share her curtain with her. She turned me down. Desperate, my teeth chattering, I turned to one of her girlfriends and asked, “C-c-c-c-can I-I-I g-g-g-get in with you?”

  She moved over and I curled up. Sex didn’t enter my mind. I just wanted to get warm.

  The next morning the ground was covered with snow. Forgetting the fact that I’d nearly frozen to death the night before, I was the first one to jump out and make snow angels. Valerie laughed at my impulsiveness, then joined me, as did the other girls, in making snow angels.

  Finally, we made it to Great Falls. As we boarded the plane, I spotted a large Indian chief headdress in a store. It cost $100.1 was down to my last $125 travel per diem. I had them hold the plane while I debated whether or not to spend money I couldn’t afford to spend. I looked at that headdress and couldn’t resist.