The Eternal Party

by Kristina Hagman

  In her early adolescence, Peggy had been sent to work on a large estate away from her family, where she would be fed, as they had too many mouths to feed back home. She later told me that her job was polishing the boots of the master of the estate, and though she was not starving, she wanted to get away from that life and come to America to find work. Peggy’s life on the estate had instilled in her a clear understanding of workplace hierarchy. Whatever she thought of our bohemian lifestyle, she kept it to herself and always maintained a strong understanding of who was the boss; in fact, that was what she called my father—“the Boss”—and he liked it.

  Never saying a word to my parents about how to raise children, she did what she thought was best for me when my parents were out in the evening. She created rituals for me, like learning songs and nursery rhymes, feeding me comfort food, and saying prayers before bed. She insisted on good manners and scolded bad behavior. I always knew where I stood with her. I loved her very much and became very attached to her. She gave me stability in a home where life was very unpredictable.

  For example, Peggy would try to convince me to go to sleep before my folks came home, but I always resisted. I knew they were sure to bring a party back home with them, and I wanted to be up so I could join in the fun. Actors get revved up after a show and are not ready to call it a night; everyone was on a tight budget, so Mom and Dad would invite the cast over for a nightcap. Knowing the drill, Peggy sometimes took me to stay at her apartment way up on the East Side, where lots of Irish families had lived for generations. But on most nights, we stayed at our apartment, and when Peggy had successfully gotten me to sleep early, I would still wake up after she was sent home in a cab. As I slept in one of the back bedrooms of our big, rambling apartment, the sounds of music and laughter would drift down the hall; friendly, enticing sounds that would wake me, and I would stir and rub my eyes till I knew where I was, and then I would get up and race down the hall in my nightgown. I was never met with a “hush, hush, get back to bed” attitude from my parents; instead, I was invited to dance on the coffee table to my favorite music, which at the time was the lively staccato rhythms of the composer Khachaturian. I loved being the center of attention. The candlelight flickering on the faces of my parents and their friends as they sat in the living room watching me, I twirled around till I was dizzy and light-headed but nothing would make me stop dancing because I was compelled by the magic of the Slavic music to continue stomping my feet ferociously. This delighted the grown-ups, who would clap and urge me on until at last, completely exhausted, I would tumble into someone’s arms and finally curl up in the crook of my dad’s arm or make myself a little nest on the pile of overcoats covering the big bed. I would happily drift off to sleep at last with the sounds of music, laughter, the clinking of ice against glass as the drinkers made toasts followed by animated conversation. Those sounds mingled with the scents of perfume and cigarettes filled the air and imbued the soft, warm coats that cradled me.

  People often slept over. When I got up in the morning, some of them would still be there, nursing hangovers or eating breakfast or sleeping off the festivities of the night before. One of our most frequent guests was Donny Loomis, a gifted photographer who photographed me from the moment I was brought home, as a newborn, from the hospital. He took many, many pictures: me being held by my proud grandma, who looked glamorous as always, or by my dad as he turned me upside down for fun, absentmindedly holding me as he smoked, or my mom changing me or pushing me in the stroller, or the three of us sleeping together. He also took my father’s head shots and documented everything we did. He photographed Dad while he was taking singing lessons and during rehearsals. He took trips with us when Dad was in a show on the road, and he documented my first birthday, which we spent in Washington, D.C. While Dad and Donny went to rehearsal, Mom and I were in line to take a tour of the White House. As the story goes, word got out, all the way to President Eisenhower, that Mary Martin’s granddaughter was in the building. He insisted that we be brought into his office. My mother was very nervous and also tongue-tied; she couldn’t say a word. She later told me that the president was very kind to us and asked why we had come for a visit. Mom blurted out that we were in the White House to celebrate my first birthday, and he said he was amazed to see us because he did not believe that Peter Pan could be a grandma!

  Sadly, that was one of the very rare occasions that Donny missed. He seemed to be with us night and day and the photographs he constantly took recorded many aspects of my early childhood. These photos were not random snapshots, they were all shot with his professional eye. Though he did take some obviously posed pictures of our family, the most interesting of these images are of us doing the most basic things, like walking down the street and playing at the zoo. He took one of me standing on the toilet seat cover while watching my father brush his teeth; in one of the photos taken that morning, my dad leans over to kiss me with his foamy mouth and his toothbrush still in one hand.

  * * *

  Donny also took some great photos of us on our roof. That roof was an urban kid’s version of a backyard. It was where Mom set up a blow-up splash pool for me. Donny took lots of pictures of me playing in the pool, skipping nude in the sprinklers and spraying my mom with the hose. Donny was there with his camera during late-night picnics on the roof when everyone would be wrapped up in beaver coats and blankets and Mom would set up candles and a hibachi grill. Dad played the guitar, and his friends would sing while looking up at the stars from our tar beach right in the middle of midtown Manhattan.

  Donny frequently photographed me when we were the only ones up in the morning; one time, when I was three years old, he found me walking around drunk. He was scared for me and woke my aunt BB, who was a nurse. He told her that I had finished off the dregs of wine our guests had left in their glasses the night before, so the two of them walked me around until I was sober. It became one of the standard household jokes that, in the Hagman home, even little kids got drunk.

  One of Donny’s photoshoots is full of photos of me lying nude on the end of my parents’ empty bed, staring inquiringly at the photographer. One of them was framed and hung in our house for most of my life. In the other photos from that session, I am twisting and turning, flirting with the man behind the camera. We have stacks of contact sheets of other photos Donny took, strips of tiny fading images, each revealing our lives unfolding as fast as Donny could click the shutter of his camera, but for some reason the only pictures we have any negatives for are the pictures of me, naked and flirting with Donny. Over the years since my early childhood, I have looked at the huge box of photos Donny left us so many times. They have kept my very early memories alive.

  Stories of child abuse are so omnipresent in our culture these days that there have been times when I felt uncomfortable about the nude photos of me, but Donny died when I was four years old, so I will never really know what he intended or why we only have these negatives and not all the others. Donny was a kind and gentle man, and I cannot imagine that he ever meant to use these photos for anything unseemly, nor do I remember anything inappropriate or malicious in his attitude or his behavior toward me. I prefer to think that these pictures are his gift to me, the enduring, tangible memory of my baby self, and they were tools that helped me remember my early childhood.

  * * *

  I recall so many other things that were not photographed too. For instance, the pictures on the roof reminded me that it was where my folks took my German shepherd puppy, named Fraja, to relieve herself when they didn’t want to venture out to walk her late at night. Dad would race her up the stairs so she would not pee in the house. Dad often had a quick temper in those days, and he took it out on my dog. He was a real disciplinarian with her. If she barked or chewed something up, as puppies will do sometimes, he hit her aggressively, and as he hit her, he looked at me intensely, saying, “You have to catch dogs in the act and punish them right away, or they will never learn.” His gaze was frightening, and I would
come to know it later in life when I did anything he disapproved of. Many years later, the whole world would know that same gaze, because Dad, in the role of J. R. on the TV show Dallas, looked straight into the camera in just the same way he had looked at me when he was letting me know that he had to hurt my dog for her own good. When he got that look on his face, the TV audience knew J. R. meant business and that he was about to destroy one of his rivals.

  It scared me to watch him discipline my beloved dog. His behavior toward Fraja made her a bit touchy. She was very protective of me and sensitive to my moods. She followed me everywhere. I think German shepherds tend to get especially attached to one person, because when I was four and my brother was born, she growled at the new baby. My father immediately sent my dog away, which broke my heart and didn’t make me particularly happy about this new addition to our family.

  * * *

  Before Preston was born, my folks did everything they could to convince me to stay in my own bedroom at night so they could be alone. Very often, even after I had ceased to fear the dark, I would have bad dreams and wake up in the middle of the night and tiptoe into my parents’ room, which was on the other side of our large L-shaped apartment. To get there, I’d pass the kitchen, dining room, and the bedroom suite with its own sitting room, where Aunt BB lived. I’d race past that scary hallway that led to our front door, and at last, I would get to the biggest room in the apartment, where Mom and Dad slept. The room filled the whole width of the building and had tall leaded-glass windows. People might be sacked out at one end of the room on the couch, but I knew I’d find Mom and Dad in the king-sized bed with the elegant bedding Mom had sewn for it. I would creep in next to them, and they would adjust to my presence without waking. Once there within the sound of their breathing, I would feel safe, surrounded with love and the scents of their familiar bodies. In this blissful state, I would fall asleep watching the brightly colored neon lights from the restaurant and cinema on the street below as they flashed on and off, like glowing rainbows, across their bedroom ceiling.

  8

  Set Free in the Wide-Open Country

  DAD LIKED TO BE on the move and, in his determination to give us the family closeness he never had, he brought us all with him wherever he went, be it for work or pleasure. We often drove from New York to LA so Dad could work on both coasts; to make it more fun, they found different routes, often stopping in my dad’s home of Weatherford, Texas. These were wonderful times during which we would hunt and fish and swim nude in clear mountain streams. Even outdoors, Mom made sure we had a cozy place to rest for the night. She prepared great food on the camp stove while Dad got a big, roaring fire going. Once the fire was big enough, the bugs wouldn’t bother us, and we ate around the campfire beneath the sparkling dome of stars. After dinner, Dad would tell wonderful stories or play his guitar and sing to us.

  Camping was cheap, which made it a perfect pastime when Dad was out of work. Out in the wilderness, my dad was really relaxed. Even when he wasn’t working, Dad was always on, entertaining everyone around him; I think actors who have a calling to the craft are naturally this way. But on camping trips, we were our own tribe, there was no one to impress and no need to dress or behave in any certain way. Dad believed that being in nature was good for the soul. During his teenage years, his happiest times were on horseback in the Vermont countryside and out hunting with his papa. He shared his love of the outdoors with us and taught us to respect nature.

  My parents longed for as much time outdoors as they could get. Some New Yorkers are happy living indoors all the time, but one of the things that kept Mom and Dad together was their love of nature. So we got out of the city as often as possible.

  Sometimes we stayed with David Wayne, an older actor who had had a huge success as the leprechaun in the hit musical Finian’s Rainbow. Dad and David had worked together and became good friends; we were always welcome at David’s beautiful, big home in Connecticut. But when my ingenious proto-hippie folks wanted to really let loose, they found all sorts of ways to stay out in the country for free. One of the best of these destinations was Sterling Forest, just an hour from the George Washington Bridge. Through Ganny, Mom and Dad made friends with John Houser, who was a Hilton Hotel executive.

  The Housers let our family use a little run-down cabin from the time I was a baby until I was seven and we moved away from the East Coast. The cabin was across the road from a waterfall, just a ten-minute walk from the Housers’ grand Japanese-style home that overlooked a lake. John was a bit older than Dad, but the two men became best friends who swam in the lake at all hours and drank and sang and played cards together. The cabin he lent us was a wreck; the paint was peeling, and there was no glass in some of the windows, but the fresh scents and the sounds of birds and the brook flowing by were so welcome after the noise and gritty air of the city that no one cared about how the place looked. We could never seem to get enough of it. In Sterling Forest, I was free to roam around all day, accompanied only by my dog.

  For another change of scenery, we would go camping in the sand dunes of the Hamptons, out on the end of Long Island, a few hours from New York City. This was a very beautiful beach community where the real estate was wildly expensive even in those days, but camping was nearly free. To get there, we would go with a group of friends in a caravan of cars driving though potato fields and lush farm country, where my folks would stop to buy enough fresh corn and tomatoes to last the long weekend. On one of these trips, they saw an abandoned refrigerator on the side of the road and somehow got it towed to our regular camping spot. They dug a really deep hole and put the fridge in it; that way the fruits and vegetables stayed fresh in a giant insulated cooler. When they left they covered it over with sand and put some rocks and driftwood across it so that they could dig it up the next time we were there.

  At the campsite, Dad and all his buddies, like Jimmy Hammerstein (Oscar’s son), wore sarongs, a wrapped skirt-like piece of clothing that Dad’s friend John Houser had introduced him to. Houser had learned how to live the good life while working for Hilton in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands; he called this form of skirt a “Lava-lava.” Away from the city and 1950s dress codes, the men dispensed with pants. Dad always loved to show off his shapely legs. He never like to wear pants when he did not have to. The guys would dive in the ocean wearing these loose flowing wraps. All things Hawaiian were popular then, and they also used what was called a Hawaiian sling—a harpoon with a giant rubber band on the end—to catch fish for our dinner. The guys got a great kick out of going native, walking around the dunes dressed like Pacific Islanders in an ocean paradise just hours from the big city.

  We did not always stay close to New York. We took many cross-country trips, during which we saw much of the United States. As I grew older, though I still could not help with the driving, I did learn how to read maps and enjoyed being the copilot, helping Mom or Dad navigate the countryside. Back then, you could camp almost anywhere, and in the late afternoon, we would leave the main highways and travel narrow country roads. When we saw a promising dirt road, we would follow it until we came to open land. In order to make sure we were not camping in someone’s driveway, we would search around a bit, and if the coast was clear, we would park and set up our tents.

  The first thing Dad would do when we got to a campsite was clean it up. Environmental consciousness had not yet become popular with the general public, and many of the off-road places we camped in were covered in garbage. Dad took us kids all around the area where we were going to stay, picking up debris and collecting wood for our campfire. This was our way of making the place our home; it gave me and my brother a chore to do and a chance to stretch our legs. Dad made you feel like you were contributing to our family’s happiness and well-being, praising us for collecting as much wood as we could carry and telling us which type of wood burned the longest and which was good for kindling to start the fire with. While we were busy doing this, Mom set up camp. She had designed and sewed a
canopy out of mosquito netting, rip-stop nylon that had zippered doorways. The whole contraption was hung on poles attached to the roof of our Jeep. This created a bug-free room connected to where all our stuff was stored in the car; it also marked the area that served as our kitchen. Before the fire was started, she would have pulled out the camp stove and cutting board, and as we foraged for wood, we knew where our camp was by the delicious scents of her cooking, which drew us back from the surrounding forest.

  We often stayed on the shores of lakes or streams, and since we always tried to camp far from any other people, we did not bother with bathing suits; we just took our clothes off and dove right in. Or if we were in one place for a while, we never bothered putting anything on until evening when it became cool. Camping in the wilderness with no one around for miles, we played in and out of the water all day long. It was perfectly natural for our family to be naked. As a child, I was always comfortable with my clothes off. Maybe this was a Scandinavian thing. Being next to water meant we always had something to do, swimming or fishing or just playing in the water’s flow. As sunset approached, we would get quiet and keep a lookout for the animals that would come to drink at the water’s edge. But water can be dangerous too: one time in the middle of the night, we discovered we were on a tidal flat as water rushed into our tent, covering us in our suddenly sodden sleeping bags.

  As we passed through different temperate zones, my folks made sure we learned about the plants and animals native to the places we stayed in. In Canada, we saw moose; in the Southwest, we were introduced to coyotes and jackrabbits. We learned how to spot holes that might have snakes in them and knew which types of trees were the lookout posts for birds of prey. Dad taught us which birds were good for eating and how to hunt for them. He never hunted big game like deer or bear, but we had more than one run-in with bears, who love to steal food from campers, and we knew never to keep our food in the tent with us. Nowadays, there is a whole industry around camping and outdoor adventure, but the way we went camping looked very different and far more basic than all the advertisements you see for fancy camping equipment. We did not hike or climb mountains; we would just establish a camp and live there hunting, fishing, or just hanging out for a few days in nature.