The Eternal Party

by Kristina Hagman

  One outfit I remember vividly was an empire-style dress that was white with a delicate French toile pattern in black and a small black velvet bow, coupled with a black coat that had three-quarter-length sleeves and came with a broad black velvet headband. The next year, probably because I had voiced more than one complaint about being forced to wear black and white, my beloved Ganny bought me a more modern bright-green A-line dress with a big yellow flower on it.

  All decked out in my new finery, ready for the parade the next day, we were dropped off at the 21 Club for lunch. The club had been a speakeasy during Prohibition. When I got older, I was told how the bar could tilt on a fulcrum if the feds raided the place so all the glasses and booze could slide through a trapdoor into the basement on a moment’s notice. The bartenders would then place tea and coffee cups where the drinks had been.

  The 21 Club had been founded around 1930, but forty-five years later, it still felt like you had to be someone special to get into the place. It was never a “members-only” club, but they fussed over you as if you were a “member,” especially if you were famous or happened to be a friend of the Kriendler and Berns families, who were the owners.

  * * *

  To enter 21, you walked through iron gates and past ornamental iron jockeys whose attire was painted in the bright primary colors of the best-known racing stables. The ceiling in the bar–dining room seemed low because there was an amazing assortment of sporting and corporate memorabilia hanging there, everything from toy planes and trains to football helmets to stuffed animals that had belonged to patrons or represented their companies. This increased the feeling that 21 was a clubhouse. The maître d’ presented all the ladies with red carnations. Special little girls like me were given gifts like a little silver pin in the shape of a bow with a tiny replica of the signature gates of 21.

  Celebrity patrons had their own favorite tables. We were always seated at a big, round table in the front corner, where we could see and be seen by all who came in. Easter was one of our favorite times for lunch at 21. Everyone entering the room would come over to greet Ganny and comment on our Easter outfits. One year, I was invited by the cook to come dye Easter eggs in the 21 kitchen, a special treat.

  I always knew the 21 Club was one of the best restaurants in New York, but while the service from waiters in white jackets was impeccable and there was fancy food like steak and oysters, they also featured plain, down-home cooking. Granny’s favorite was their famous chicken hash. She knew without asking what I wanted. She would look at me with her chin tilted and say, “Heidi will have a burger and french fries!”

  After lunch, Dad liked to see each outfit Ganny had bought me with all their accessories. He would insist that I parade up and down in front of him and twirl around, as if I were a model on a runway. Mom and Dad always liked the experience of buying clothes, and they loved getting dressed up for special occasions. When Dad died, there was evidence of their love for shopping in several giant walk-in closets full of their clothes, many of which they hadn’t worn in decades and others with the tags still on them.

  On Easter weekend, some member of my family always took me to see the Rockettes’ holiday show, just up the street at Rockefeller Center. And then came the best part: walking hand in hand with Dad in the Easter parade on Fifth Avenue going right past good old Saint Patrick’s Cathedral where we would poke our heads in to hear the music. Dad and I loved looking at all the women wearing fantastic pastel-colored hats and matching outfits; the men dressed up too, whole families walked together, and everyone was dressed to the nines. Dad really enjoyed parades; he loved the hubbub and colors and crowds and the sounds. A parade was one of his favorite places in the world to be, and later in Malibu, he became known for creating parades that had no other purpose than to celebrate life.

  Only much later did I realize that my pre-Easter shopping excursion with Ganny was her way of readying me to be seen with Dad when he would have his time in the limelight. During the Dallas years, photographers often came around when we were on our way out for a meal or after the theater, trying to catch a photo of us and when she saw them, Ganny would tilt her head to highlight her best features and as she did so she would whisper in my ear, “Find the light, so you can look your best.”

  Both my dad and Ganny knew how to find that light, just as they knew how to grab the attention of people when they were out in public. From holding court at the 21 Club to Dad’s hippie parades on Malibu Beach, they set the tableau, created the scene; they wrote the script. For them, the lines between life and the theater were always blurred. The week leading up to Easter was an especially memorable show they created, and I was an important supporting actor for my proud, loving father strolling down Fifth Avenue in the Easter Parade, showing off his little daughter.

  The shopping trip with Ganny was also a vivid illustration of the strange dual reality I would live in for most of my life, straddling two sides of a cultural divide simultaneously. After our luxurious day excursions, I would be chauffeured home and dropped off at a building where prostitutes were soliciting in the doorway, and Ganny would go back to her apartment building where the doorman rushed to help her out of her car.

  * * *

  This disparity in living standards and lifestyles was played out again when I moved away to go to college. Dad had never thought to put any money aside for higher education, so when it was time for me to go to university, he told me there was not much money to spare. The truth was that neither of my parents really understood how much money they had and they did not plan for things like education or retirement, especially before they had a consistent income with the success of Dallas. Once we moved to LA, they always had a business manager of some kind, someone who paid the bills and took care of the finances. But for several years, these money managers changed often, and there was not much continuity to any financial plan; consequently, if things went bad, there was someone to fire and blame for bad management, but it also meant that neither of my parents understood the big picture about what things really cost.

  * * *

  When it came time for me to apply for college, I was completely on my own. There was no discussion of where or how or if I should go to college. The teachers at my private high school assumed everyone would go to college, and so I began to look into how to do this myself. I had a learning disability, school had been difficult for me, but I had worked with a dance therapist who had helped me overcome the self-esteem issues I had around being dyslexic, and I had begun to really enjoy school. I was inspired to pursue a degree in this branch of therapy. It was a relatively new discipline, having just been recognized ten years earlier, in 1966, with the founding of the American Dance Therapy Association. The organization’s Web site describes this therapy in the following way:

  The psychotherapeutic use of movement is a process which furthers the emotional, social, cognitive, and physical integration of the individual … Children who don’t have the patience or attention span for other forms of therapy can benefit from the openness that comes with expressive dance. Adults whose emotions have been buried or who are not in touch with their feelings, as well as victims of abuse who are otherwise unable to articulate their problem, may find insight and release through dance.

  Doing dance therapy and feeling better about myself gave me a new confidence that resulted in my ability to get better grades as my concentration on academics improved. I wanted to help others as I had been helped. Mom and Dad did not understand it and did nothing to help me navigate this path toward my adult life—nor did they stand in my way. This field of therapy was so new that I could not find a college that offered a dance therapy degree. The therapist I had been seeing in Malibu suggested I meet with Allegra Fuller Snyder, who was the head of dance and dance ethnology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She wrote a course of study for me and suggested that I apply to Lone Mountain College in San Francisco. They accepted me and agreed to follow the plan that had been written for me. I was so enthus
ed about beginning my studies that I headed straight to college that first summer after high school instead of joining my family on location in Ireland, where Dad was making a film. Getting into a college and having a course of study tailored especially for me felt like a triumph, but after only one quarter at Lone Mountain College, which had been established in 1898, the school closed down without any warning. It is now a part of the University of San Francisco. My plan had failed and I felt lost and defeated. Mom and Dad did not give me any guidance because they did not know anything about going to college.

  Since I had already made the move to San Francisco, I decided that the most sensible thing to do would be to go to SF State University. It was a much bigger, more impersonal institution than picturesque, intimate Lone Mountain College that I had hoped would be my anchor for the next four years. That September, I began working toward a very challenging double major in both psychology and dance. SF State was a much bigger school, and I could not really follow the education plan that had been set up to be achieved at a much smaller college with a dance department. At SF State, dance was in the PE department, and it was not clear which courses I needed to take.

  * * *

  When my family came back from Europe, I tried to explain all the changes I had gone through since they had left to go on location. I had to ask my parents for financial help. I never even considered applying for any kind of scholarship. I figured without ever looking into it that, with a father who was a famed TV star, I would never qualify for assistance anyway. I felt embarrassed about giving Mom and Dad the details of what college would cost. I was just learning day by day how much I would have to pay for rent, books, and tuition. I had no idea of how to make a budget. We had never talked about these things. Instead, my parents often reminded me that Mary and Richard had been tough on Dad when he was starting out as an actor and that their toughness had forced him to make it on his own.

  Dad was often very generous with me. He paid for the private high school I really wanted to attend and had bought me a secondhand car. He also paid for dance class and dance therapy. But he did not seem to be very pleased that I would be living so far from home. Whenever I came back for a visit, he did all he could to convince me to stay. Dad had his priorities, and paying for college was not high on his personal list. I lived on a couple of hundred dollars a month. I rented a cheap ground-floor studio in Haight-Ashbury, a neighborhood our family had visited during the 1967 Summer of Love. I had fond memories of the place, but by 1976, the bright colors had faded, and there were a lot of junkies and drunks hanging around. Ever optimistic, I tried to bring my little place back to its former glory by painting murals on my walls and putting pots of flowers in the windows. I was careful with whatever money Dad sent me, but I also worked a few jobs to support myself. On weekends, I had a job as a life model for drawing classes at the Academy of Art University; on weekday afternoons I worked in the student union. Fortunately for me, most students did not like the lentil soup the management insisted we serve at the cafeteria, so I always had leftover food to take home for the weekend. Just like Dad had done, I was stuffing dinner rolls into my pockets, scrounging free food wherever I could find it.

  When I came home to visit, I was transported to a different world: Dad would pull up at the airport to meet me in his custom-built dark-brown delivery van with its dome skylight and king-size bed. I’d be completely worn out from the long hours at work while trying to keep up with my studies. The Rolling Stones would be blaring out of sliding doors as he threw them open for me, and the pungent smell of marijuana would engulf me as I entered. Dad would give me a big hug and pop the champagne as we pulled away from the curb. To remind me that our beach house was less than an hour away, he would already be dressed in one of the many robes my mother made for everyone in Malibu. The robe he most often chose was made of a soft brown fabric, which flowed down to his ankles and had a hood, making it look like something from a hippie monastery. He would have that expectant, giant, it’s-time-to-have-fun grin on his face that assured me that home was where I should forget all my troubles; and instead everybody must get stoned.

  I know that when I was at college, he missed me a lot. I still have some of the letters my folks wrote me. Mom gave me advice on how to make friends and avoid guys trying to pick me up on the street, but Dad would send me articles about attempts to legalize marijuana and little notes in which he’d quote the Desiderata’s dictum “Strive to be happy” or just write “I miss you, Pooh.” (My name has changed many times. My given name is Heidi Christina Mary Hagman; I changed it legally to Kristina, ridding myself of Heidi and changing the spelling of Kristina to reflect my mother’s Swedish heritage, but when I was a kid, Dad often called me Pooh.)

  He told me more than once that he wanted me to come back home, and that may be why the financial support he gave me was so minimal. Having heard in my letters that money was tight, Ganny had gotten me work in a summer stock production of The Sound of Music, and working as an actress seemed a lot easier than studying for all the science prerequisites I needed for the physiology part of my degree.

  My whole life changed when I stopped fighting for a college degree and dropped out of school to return to Los Angeles to go into the family business of acting. My return coincided with the beginning of Dallas, and my parents now had enough money to make sure I had a safe place to live close to family members while I auditioned and took acting lessons. Dad and Mom bought my aunt BB and my grandmother Helga a cottage in West Hollywood big enough to be remodeled in a way that created a studio apartment in the back with its own entrance and kitchenette for me. Dad encouraged me to seriously pursue an acting career, and he and Mom made sure I stayed on a diet and had my hair and nails done regularly. He arranged meetings for me with agents, and he got me into the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. Dad’s generosity was nothing new, Bridget Fonda’s mom, Susan, remembered that on my tenth birthday I impulsively said that all I wanted for my birthday was to take the piano he’d gotten me, and on which I was taking lessons, to the edge of the Grand Canyon so I could hear what it sounded like when the songs I played echoed through the canyon’s massive walls. Dad said, “What a great idea! We can put it in the back of the van!” He was wildly enthusiastic about the idea of the special acoustic adventure trip and told all his friends about it, but this idea was so impractical that it didn’t happen. I’ve never doubted that he would have done it if he could have figured out the logistics of it. Now that his little girl was at home again, he was prepared to give me whatever I needed or wanted—singing lessons, dance lessons, and acting classes.

  Dad was happy: I was back in the fold.

  * * *

  I often wished my parents had encouraged me to stay in college, as it is one of the biggest regrets of my life that I did not continue with it. I was always aware that they did all they could to make sure I got a very unusual—and very eccentric—education. In Dad’s eyes, the adventures we all had together were the best education money could buy and definitely not something for which he would ask to be forgiven. Knowing Dad, I think he would have felt a heartfelt thanks was more in order!

  10

  Taking Art in a New Direction

  DURING THE BRIEF TIME in my life that I poured myself into the pursuit of an acting career, I was very close to Ganny and Dad. They gave me advice on how to study my lines and renewed their earlier lessons on how to pose for photographs to my best advantage. Dad saw to it that I got lots of exposure that could lead to work as an actress, like being by his side when he got his star on Hollywood Boulevard and doing talk shows on which the children of famous performers were interviewed. I had a good feel for the work and acted in the live theater without any pay but also got a few acting roles on TV and did some commercials, which paid very well.

  Our dear family friend Carroll O’Connor created a character for me on his show, Archie Bunker’s Place. I played Linda from the laundry for one season. Working on th
e show with Carroll gave me the opportunity to be mentored by some of the best comedic actors in the business, like Martin Balsam and Anne Meara. Carroll treated me like a member of his own family and was very patient and loving toward me. I should have paced myself and stay focused on Archie Bunker’s Place, but I was trying so hard to fill the footsteps of my famous grandma and Dad that, after getting up early in the morning to be on the set all day, I worked late into the night at the Comedy Store in order to get some much-needed experience in front of a live audience.

  I had heard about the Comedy Store at the classes I took once a week at the Harvey Lembeck Comedy Workshop. The Comedy Store was an important and popular venue where comedic actors were given the chance to showcase their talents in front of an audience that was often packed with people from the movie and television industry. Ironically, the club was in the exact building that had once housed a nightclub called Ciro’s, where my grandmother had performed in showcases as a singer in her early career. The owner of the Comedy Store, Mitzi Shore, put together groups of actors who would be on stage doing improvisations before the stand-up comedians came on. Backstage one night, I met Robin Williams, who was constantly in the news at the time because of his first big break on a show called Mork & Mindy. I was almost too nervous to shake hands with him, but he saw the copy of The Catcher in the Rye that I held under my arm and to put me at ease by making me laugh he did a hilarious five-minute riff on the book on stage later that night. Mitzi put me on as the lone woman in a group with six guys! Somehow I held my own, and I discovered the art of being the straight man (or in this case straight woman) was a lot of fun and brought some sense of reality to the improvisational sketches we did. We rehearsed at my place on the weekends and became very close both as a working team and as friends. The group included John Larroquette, Andy Garcia, Daniel McVicar, Ray Fitzpatrick, Joe Hardin, and Fred Asparagus; most of these talented men went on to have amazing careers in television, movies, and the theater, and many of them are still my very best friends today.