The Eternal Party

by Kristina Hagman

  It would seem like I had everything a girl could wish for, but just as I saw my career laid out for me, I started developing some very self-destructive behaviors. I wasn’t sleeping much, and I started to go out drinking with the guys after the show. My will to continue as a comedian came to a full and sudden stop when I became emotionally involved with one of my fellow actors. We had a very fiery affair, and at the end of an especially bad argument, I dropped him off at a rehab facility to dry out. He stayed there for a time, and when he was finished with his treatment, we separated. I had fallen so deeply for this man that when we split up, I began to drown my sorrows with more and more booze and started dating lots of different people. This was a very bad combination, and I had to do something drastic to break the cycle.

  So, only eighteen months after I had come home from college, I moved away from the family again, hoping that by moving to New York I would have a chance for yet another new beginning. I went there to study the craft of acting. I wanted to work in all kinds of theater productions and not just play to get a laugh. I did not know where I was going to live, and I was sad to leave the lovely studio my mom had built for me to live in behind my aunt and Swedish grandmother. With some nostalgia, I looked back on all aspects of the crazy year and a half that I had spent in LA. I focused on any of the positive things that I had done, and the one that came most vividly to mind was the look of admiration and approval on my grandma Helga’s face when I had finished a good painting. With everything else that was going on in my life then, I still painted weekly, just as I had done all through college earlier in the year. I had amassed a large enough body of good work to mount a one-person exhibition of my Georgia O’Keeffe–inspired floral paintings. My other grandmother, Ganny, helped me find a gallery in Palm Springs, and I sold almost every canvas on display. Maybe, it occurred to me, I should give up acting and paint full-time. I knew several professional artists in New York, so I intended to work with them and explore whether acting or painting was my true calling. I was just a little more than twenty years old, and I needed to find out what I was meant to do with my life.

  In New York, a friend of the family helped me find a tiny, relatively cheap apartment to rent, with one window that looked out at a brick wall. I decorated my place as best I could, filling it with furniture I’d found on the streets. I painted all the street treasures periwinkle blue so the odd pieces had some kind of harmony.

  I worked diligently studying acting at the HB Studio, one of the most renowned acting schools in New York, founded by Herbert Berghof. Herbert was one of the profession’s most gifted and perceptive teachers, and soon after I began studying with him, he gave me a small part in a play he was directing. I was determined not to fall into my former bad habit of drinking after the performance with the cast. Instead, I went right home on the bus, and most nights I painted until my post-performance energy had dissipated and I was finally ready for sleep. After several months of painting alone in my room, I had enough work for a one-person exhibition at a gallery on Long Island, and my self-discipline paid off in acting too; Herbert gave me a starring role in a new play at HB Playwrights Foundation and Theatre.

  Before rehearsals started, I went back to LA for a family party. While I was back home, I went on a few dates. One of these blind dates was with a guy who must have slipped something into my drink, because I passed out, and when I awoke many hours later, I knew I had been raped. I felt dirty and defiled, and it happened in my own bedroom, right behind where my Swedish grandmother slept. Despite my loving family, I felt that LA was a dangerous place for me to live.

  On the airplane back to New York, I renewed my determination to focus on work. I had started rehearsals on the play when I found out that I was pregnant. Life and art became all jumbled up for me: the play was about a girl who had run away from home and gotten pregnant. It was an emotionally demanding role that was much too close to my real life. My famous director believed Method acting, and asked me to use difficult experiences I had lived through to bring some real emotion to my character, but it was taking all the strength I had to keep my real-life tragedy separate from my acting life. While we were still in rehearsals, I decided to have an abortion. Working on the play helped me come to that conclusion because it dealt with the emotional, financial, and physical problems that a young, single woman must cope with after discovering she has an unplanned pregnancy. The theater was teaching me things that my loving father and grandmother never intended for me to learn. It was amazing that I would be doing that particular play at that juncture in my life. I was crying in the wings between acts, and though I finished the run of the play, I ultimately found that I was not cut out to live the emotionally raw life of a Method actor. My life had become a hell as I grappled with the sadness I still felt about the volatile romantic relationship I had lost back in LA and my struggles with the multitude of conflicting emotions I felt in the wake of my abortion. This was the lowest point in my life.

  I had had so many bad starts in such a short frame of time that I decided I needed help to work through the intense feelings I had about ending a pregnancy and figuring out what to do next. I went to a highly recommended psychiatrist. He suggested that I was confused because there was too much going on in my life. He said, “Imagine you are in a desert with empty land around you so that you can make decisions clearly.” I left his office after paying $300 for my fifty minutes and moved to the desert for a few months so that the money I had made as an actress would go further. I was not in any state to make any big decisions; I needed some time to myself. I figured in Georgia O’Keeffe country, I could paint and recover.

  All during my time in New York, I had been visiting our family’s dear friend Barton Benes a few times each week. We painted together in his studio. With all the other stuff I had going on, I found real solace and happiness sitting by Barton’s side painting and talking. I put together a show of the watercolors I did while painting with him for a gallery on Long Island. Barton thought getting out of the city would be a good idea. He persuaded me to focus on making art. He was a very successful artist who had been fostering my talent as a painter since my early childhood. When I had accepted that demanding role in the play, he had confronted me, saying, “You can’t seriously pursue art and acting. You have to choose.”

  At the time, I did not listen to him, but a few months later, the choice became obvious to me. Life as an artist, away from the glare of the public, was what suited me best.

  The few months I had planned on spending in New Mexico turned into years. I married an artist, and though our marriage did not last, he taught me good work habits that I still make use of in my painting studio practice, and he introduced me to the supportive and thriving art community in Santa Fe. My loving parents rolled with it. They watched as I became happier and healthier surrounded by other artists under the beautiful blue skies of New Mexico. They came to visit often and eventually bought a house of their own right next door to me. They enjoyed the Santa Fe aesthetic so much that later, when they remodeled their house in Malibu, they built it in the adobe style; they even got all the rustic beams for the beach house from New Mexico.

  We had great times together, hanging out with artists at the Pink Adobe restaurant and going out to Cerrillos, where I rode horses with my good friend Annie Whitney. Annie was the first person any of us knew who lived the environmentalist’s dream of being completely off the grid, thanks to solar power.

  I was very happy in those years. I felt at home at last, and I was making art that came from deep inside of me. Though my mother had painted when she was young, I was not trying to be like her or anyone else in my family. The comparisons of my work, with the work of the very famous people in my life, stopped. I was slowly finding my own creative spirit. I loved to be in the studio for hours on end and even got chilblains on my toes one winter as I kept painting standing in one one place long after the fire went out in the wood-burning stove. I found a deep calm inside myself that was fueled by making art. />
  Having struggled with the dyslexia that had always made spelling and reading so difficult for me, I had known since my early childhood that drawing and painting were my way of getting what was inside of me out onto paper. Being an optimist, Dad figured that dyslexia gave me the gift of seeing the world in a unique way and that I could translate my special vision of the world into art. Dad liked the idea of being self-taught; even before I could read, he had bought me art books with lots of illustrations by many schools of artists. His own taste in art was very eclectic: everything from the Renaissance masters to primitive artists like Ralph Fasanella, who painted New York street life; he also admired Simon Rodia, who built colorful, soaring towers out of junk in Watts, California.

  Between 1983 and 1988, I had one-person exhibitions of my paintings and prints in Los Angeles, Florida, New York, and Germany, and my work was included in group shows all over the United States. In 1988, Mom and Dad bought an apartment in New York. It was in Trump Parc, a high-end apartment building on Central Park South, where their apartment had wraparound terraces and a view of Central Park. Interestingly, it was almost exactly ten blocks from my childhood apartment. Mom was having a hard time with the contractor she had hired to remodel the interior, so she asked me if I would supervise the work while she traveled with Dad. As much as I loved Santa Fe, I was a bit restless, and I thought I might try to see if I could find a gallery in New York City that would carry my work.

  When I got to Trump Parc, its marble-and-brass lobby was very impressive, but the elevator did not go up to the twenty-third floor yet where my folks had their apartment. I had to walk up several flights, and the only other creatures living up that high in the building were rats that fed off the construction workers’ leftover lunches. One week, I caught twenty of them. It was something of an adventure working on the remodel with the subcontractors who were installing lights and molding; when the painting crew quit, I hired some currently unemployed dancers to work with me to finish the painting. Dancers are hard workers, and they take direction well. From the beginning of this project, I knew I could not paint in the apartment, so I rented a very funky, work-only painting studio on Great Jones Street just off the Bowery for a few months. The day before I started painting there, the famous artist Jean-Michel Basquiat died of a drug overdose across the street. This was during the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s. Addicts would linger on the street below my studio and scream out loud in their drug-addled state. When I told Dad about this, he worried about me walking around there alone. He came to visit and went all around the neighborhood with me looking for ways to keep me safe. He pointed out alleyways I should avoid and doorways where someone might be hiding. There was a fire station on the block, so he walked in and introduced himself to all the firemen, who recognized him immediately and stopped what they were doing to give us a tour of us the firehouse. Dad promptly pulled out his specially printed “In Larry Hagman We Trust” fake hundred-dollar bills and passed them around and, in return, asked if they would watch out for me on my way to and from the studio, which they did. Dad was happy to have found a way to keep me safe. He was exploring ways to deal with all the homeless who panhandled even in his posh neighborhood, so when he walked down Central Park South he would talk to a beggar at one end of the street and show him a ten-dollar bill, then tear the bill in half and give one half to the guy. He’d say, “If you get all the other panhandlers out of my way, I will give you the other half of that bill when we get to my destination.”

  When Mom and Dad came to town, they would take me out shopping and buy me designer clothes. As I did when I was child, I would try them all on for Dad, and he would help me choose what to wear when I was out in public with them. The paparazzi would be omnipresent; Ron Galella took some great photos of us. Dad was determined that we were all going to look fabulous on our way into the Algonquin or the Waldorf Astoria, and he would remind us that Ganny always wanted us to find our light. Once, when they were in town for Thanksgiving, we got decked out to take a hansom cab from the Plaza Hotel to have Thanksgiving dinner with friends. We were all wrapped in the finest, most luscious furs as we were conveyed through Central Park in an open, horse-drawn carriage. It seemed to me that this was decadence personified, that nothing the fictitious Ewings did on Dallas would ever top what we were doing in real life. As soon as my folks left, I returned to my normal life as an artist who loved to work but who was clearly not yet famous in her own right.

  My life continued to be like my childhood, with great abundance and flashes of elegance but with no stability or consistency. I found myself looking forward to the fun times with family and to working hard on my own art at all other times. It was an exciting life of extremes, but sometimes I wondered if Dad ever noticed how I lived when I was not by his side. I talked to a film writer at a party once who gave me some very good advice. He said, “Your dad’s fame is not your fame, your dad’s money is not your money, but your story is your story, to tell in whatever way you wish to tell it with images or words.”

  Looking back, I know that painting has been my primary way to tell my story. When I was growing up, my parents let me have free rein to paint on our walls. I painted huge murals, one covering our two-car garage door with images inspired by The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis. I also painted a beautiful lady who was half-bird, half-woman on Dad’s bathroom door. Neighbors admired these murals and hired me to paint murals for them. When I was in my teens, my work was colorful and primitive, like Peter Max, or like illustrations for the Beatles movie The Yellow Submarine. Childlike work of adults was popular at that time, but because my paintings were actually made by a child, their naïveté delighted the high-fashion hippie set. I painted a mural for the Malibu youth center and a few more for Bob Hope’s grandchildren. My work has changed over the years, but bright, saturated color continues to play an important part of my visual identity. While he was alive, Dad’s continued enthusiastic support of me as an artist was one of the few constants in my peripatetic life.

  * * *

  In the month before he died, I was preparing to paint a mural on his living room ceiling. We had been talking about it during the last year and planning what it should include. He wanted me to paint the midsummer sky as it looks just before sunset over the water. He was trying to bring the outside in by creating a trompe l’oeil (French for “fool the eye”) experience that would make a person looking at it inside his condo feel that he or she were floating over the ocean. I had dreamed of it for months and wanted to realize his vision for him, but in the end, it became a mural I will never paint.

  11

  Dreaming of Jeannie

  IN 1951, DAD TRAVELED with his mother, Richard, and their daughter, Heller, to London, where Mary was set to star in a West End production of South Pacific. Larry was turning twenty, and Mary convinced Richard that the once-difficult boy was now a reliable young man who had been working diligently in the theater since dropping out of college. There was a spot in the chorus that included a small speaking role that was, she said, just right for him. She reasoned that it was time for her only son to understand how hard she worked. She hoped he would see for himself what discipline it took to be the star of a show giving a major performance eight times a week. While working in the chorus every day, he witnessed his mother up close for the very first time in his life.

  He watched how she diplomatically dealt with all the personalities in the new London-based cast. He saw the way she worked with them to become an ensemble that would make the show as fabulous as it had been on Broadway. Rehearsals were grueling, and yet he saw that she was relaxed and poised, looking fabulous during the many interviews and photo shoots she did for the press before the show opened. Dad still could not stand Richard, but his respect for his mother skyrocketed. Working together, they recognized something in each other: the overwhelming need to be in front of an audience. They were both actors to their cores. Richard did not have that; Mary and Richard’s daughter, Heller, did not have that; no
one who was ever very close to them had that. In the deepest, truest sense, they had a need to act, and it was a bond that was especially theirs. This was the only full-stage production they ever did together, and Dad often remembered it fondly. In every home we lived in, he kept an etching of the place where they’d performed, Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. It was a precious memento of their time together on that stage.

  Dad’s stint in South Pacific ended after a year, because, before he left for London, he had registered for the draft in Texas. He knew, however, that if he went back to the United States, there was a very good chance that he would see action in the Korean War. When Mary became aware of this, she did all she could to keep her son out of harm’s way. South Pacific was the hottest ticket in London, and she made sure that Dad’s military superiors and their wives came to see her in it, and though I don’t know for sure, I think this might have helped Dad secure his posting in London, far from the front. Because of his theater experience, he was given the opportunity to produce, direct, and tour shows for the U.S. military stationed in Europe.

  It was a job that came with a lot of responsibility, and Dad stepped up to the challenge. He had to make sure the troops got what they wanted. He was always on the hunt for good acts. His energetic, fun-loving personality was well suited to the task of going out on the town to find talent.