The Eternal Party

by Kristina Hagman

  The culture out west was really different. In Manhattan, disparities in class structure were totally visible and literally walking distance apart: certain neighborhoods had doormen out front of elegant buildings, and then you could walk a few blocks and get to a neighborhood like ours, where prostitutes hung out in the doorways. On the Upper East Side, all the kids wore uniforms, while on my street, they wore mismatched hand-me-downs. In California, the class disparity was hidden from view because the poor areas of town were miles away from the middle- and upper-class enclaves. As a child living in a nice neighborhood I seldom noticed anyone in need.

  Behavior was very different too, out by the beach where we lived in a wooden house in the shade of Santa Monica Canyon. The people around us seemed naturally fit; they even walked differently from New Yorkers. No one seemed to be in a rush to get anywhere, and they all dressed so casually as if comfort were much more important than conformity. It was like all the rules about style and comportment were discarded. Mom, who was always so aware of fashion, was taking note of the body consciousness that did not include girdles or bras. Everything was so different from New York, much freer, warmer, much more colorful, less bound in tradition.

  The LA fixation on healthy living and hard bodies was contagious. Dad stopped smoking cigarettes and began working out. When I look at the old Jeannie episodes I’m always struck by how slim and great looking he was then. During our first year in LA, my parents continued to take the pep pills that had made them so energetic in New York, but finally their prescriptions ran out. Mom was really angry when she went to refill it and the pharmacist refused to give her any more pills. A law had been passed prohibiting the sale of the drug Bontril, because it was habit forming. At first Dad was pissed off too—“What a lot of bullshit!”—but it engendered one of those aha! moments because it forced them to face the fact that they had been addicted to amphetamines. But getting off the drug wasn’t easy. Dad had a hard time keeping his temper on the set, and Mom was grumpy and constantly dieting, which for her meant eating practically nothing. Dieting was an obsession for both of them.

  I was a chubby kid, and Mom had always tried to restrict what I ate, but back in New York, Peggy was the one who had fed me. Mom used to get mad at her when she found out that she was taking me to the cafeteria at the zoo to have french fries and burgers. Now Mom was in control of mealtime, and I was always hungry and sneaking food when she wasn’t looking. Sometimes Mom just wouldn’t cook, and when Dad came home there would be nothing to eat, so we’d walk to the Golden Bull restaurant just down the street and right across the Pacific Coast Highway from the beach. Mom was virtually starving herself and one night she passed out at the table. I remember being worried about her, but Dad distracted us by getting Preston to imagine what kind of wife he was going to have when he grew up. Preston said his wife would have twenty children and eat whole bottles of ketchup every day. It was such an odd, fanciful story that I never forgot it or the evening that my brother told it to us.

  * * *

  I loved to sit and watch TV as soon as I got home from school. Dad was serious about limiting the amount of TV we kids could watch, and he became even more aware of the powerful effects of TV viewing after reading Marshall McLuhan’s new book Understanding Media, which came out in 1964 when I was six. In New York, the issue of how much time I could spend watching TV was pretty much taken care of because Ganny had made sure I was sent to one of the best schools in the city, and she also gave us memberships to all the museums. The school, the École Française, had strict guidelines about the cultural things children should be exposed to. My routine consisted of being picked up at school, where we wore cute little gingham uniforms, and being taken by Peggy to a museum, which also kept me out of the apartment, where Mom had to work.

  But in Los Angeles, I was much more on my own, and I would walk home alone and then plop down on the floor and turn on the TV. Dad was at work all day, and Mom was often grumpy, so she didn’t want to be bothered and didn’t stop me. I had trouble making friends, and watching TV was a lot easier than trying to fit in with new kids in this strange town. I loved shows like Gilligan’s Island and Bewitched. They were silly, make-believe shows perfect for a kid to veg out with, and they had begun the year before I Dream of Jeannie, so they could be seen in reruns in the afternoon after school.

  Like those shows, I Dream of Jeannie was fanciful and magical. It was the story of a young man, an astronaut named Tony Nelson, played by Dad, who discovered a beautiful young woman who happened to be a genie who constantly surprised him with her unabashed passion and the ability to grant him his every wish.

  Dad’s show came on once a week in the evening, and he made us watch it in silence. We could not say a word until the commercials came on. Watching the show was very serious business for Dad, but he loved it when we giggled.

  He was always thinking about how to make it better. He often had friends over to watch with us, and they would have intense discussions about how the show could be improved. Still, in the early years of I Dream of Jeannie, Dad was ecstatic. His mother had always been such a big star; her pictures were often on the covers of magazines, but now he was on the cover of TV Guide, and he was thrilled about it.

  His mother’s work had set a daunting challenge for him. He had so much admiration for her talent, dedication, and hard work. He was determined to be as good in television as she had been in the theater. To achieve this, he would have to equal her skill and perfectionism.

  Mary had worked with Broadway’s most gifted writers and composers: Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein, Adolph Green, Betty Comden, and Jule Styne. They were all dedicated to their craft and would rehearse for countless hours until every number in the show was brilliant.

  Dad wanted to do everything in his power to make his show the best show on TV. But unlike the musicals my grandmother worked in, where, after an opening on Broadway, she had the exact same script for every performance, Dad had to work with a new script each week, for every one of the 139 episodes of I Dream of Jeannie. This meant he had very little time to make things as fantastic as he needed them to be. On top of that, he was always in the shadow of the enchanting woman who played Jeannie, the beautiful Barbara Eden. Dad seldom talked about his costar to us; he was respectful of her but rarely consulted her about the show to my knowledge.

  I tried to understand something about their relationship by binge watching I Dream of Jeannie episodes one day, while I was writing this book. The premise of the show was that Jeannie was Tony’s fantasy, but it looked like there was true affection between Tony and Jeannie, and I noted that their kisses were very warm and that she was genuinely affectionate as was his response. Barbara’s character never fought with Dad’s character: she just threw her arms around him and covered him with kisses till he shut up.

  Dad was always asking the writers and producers for better scripts, but when he got the same story line over and over again, he began meeting with two of the other actors—Bill Daily and Hayden Rorke—to come up with new lines and sight gags.

  At times, Dad even went so far as to completely change all aspects of a scene. For example, if Jeannie blinked her master, Tony Nelson, back into the spaceship after he insisted he really did want to go to the moon, he would land back in the capsule upside down. He was always doing pratfalls: tumbling downstairs or over the back of the couch; he never wanted to just walk and talk—there had to be lots of movement. He took his cue from silent Buster Keaton films. He brought a lot of physical comedy to Jeannie; maybe that’s why the show has been so successful in so many foreign countries.

  No matter what he was working on, Dad left nothing to chance. I remember crawling all over a set with him one day, feeling the floor with our hands to make sure no nails or stray pieces of glass would be in the path of his stunt. All these pratfalls took a lot more time than playing it straight. But he loved making people laugh. He thought about the show night and day and always felt the pressure to be funnier
and sharper than he’d been before. Like his mom, he came alive when people were watching him, but at home, we could see that he had moments of deep insecurity and doubt; for such a fun guy, he worried a lot.

  In the past, he had smoked to calm his nerves, smoking as many as three packs of cigarettes a day. Now he calmed himself by smoking a lot of pot instead. His wide, glazed-eyed grin did not always jibe with what was going on around him. With his flowered peasant shirts and rose-colored glasses, my costume-loving father felt right at home in an era when colorful and shockingly unexpected clothes were the fashion. He put his outfits together with the same care that his mother or Richard would for a public appearance, but unlike them—whose mutual goal was to be glamorous—his goal was to flout convention.

  He tried to get his mother to smoke pot with him. He had a thing for getting older people to try it, and he would watch how they reacted to the drug. He always wanted to turn people on, but Mary thought it was bad for him. His insistence that she try pot upset her, and she made that very clear in a letter she wrote him. “I don’t approve of your life,” it read. “The world is full of revolt and you are at the head of the class. Are you so insecure in your work? You become a better actor through performing. Not with the help of pot.”

  * * *

  Watching Jeannie every week with Dad and being on the set to see how the show was made was something like being backstage when we lived in New York. I came to know the show very well. I was really proud of my dad in his role as the astronaut Captain Tony Nelson. Even as a kid, I knew the country was caught up in a fascination with going beyond our planet and landing on the moon. What could be better than having your dad play a space hero? But the country was at war in Vietnam, and astronauts are also members of the air force. When Jeannie debuted in 1965, it was a time when U.S. airmen were being shot down and killed in Vietnam. Though he had been in the air force himself during the Korean War, Dad was vehemently against the Vietnam War, so playing Captain Nelson was sometimes uncomfortable for him.

  He had been taking me to peace marches, and he wore a peace symbol around his neck and talked a lot about conscientious objectors who were fleeing to Canada or going to jail because they opposed the war and refused to fight. Though Ganny went to Vietnam performing Hello, Dolly! for the troops, Dad didn’t do shows for servicemen; he admired men who fought for their country, but he silently protested the war by trying not to be identified with the military during what he believed to be an unjust war.

  But one day, the whole family stopped in at an air force base where Dad was going to do an informal autograph signing. It was right on our way to the foothills of Yosemite where Dad’s fellow actor on Jeannie, Barton MacLane, who played the general, had a ranch where we often stayed. At the base, a picnic was in progress in the midst of a housing facility where servicemen’s families lived. The crowd was made up of wives, mothers, and children. There were very few men; nearly all of them were away in combat.

  A boy just about my age came up to me. He told me that my dad was his dad too. This was confusing to me and made me grumpy. I complained to Dad, saying, “I’m your little girl. I know this boy can’t be your son.”

  Dad patiently sat me down and explained that the boy had not seen his father for months because he was far away in the war. He told me, “When I am Tony Nelson wearing my uniform, I look just like his dad. The TV brings me into his living room every week, so while his own dad cannot get home, he needs me to be his dad. You have to share today.”

  With me by his side, Dad went to hug this little boy, and we all walked around the compound together. The boy was so happy, and the way his sad face brightened had a huge effect on Dad. I think he may have had an epiphany that day about his ability to make a difference in people’s lives, and he helped me understand his responsibility to everyone who supported our family by watching him on television. From that day on, I understood that my father would never be mine alone; he belonged to his public.

  12

  LSD Trips of Another Kind

  WITH DALLAS DAD EVENTUALLY PROVED he had what it took to mold a show into something everyone would be riveted by. But his determination to perfect I Dream of Jeannie and make it the best show on television almost ruined him. Between his constant complaints to the producers about bad scripts and his erratic behavior due to amphetamine withdrawal and pot smoking, things eventually, and perhaps inevitably, spun out of control. I didn’t understand what really happened at the end of Jeannie until years later when I read, in Dad’s own words, about how he had gone berserk on the set. It happened when the show was in its fifth year. One of those endless rehearsals that Dad insisted on was taking place on a particularly hot day. The air conditioner on the set was so loud the actors couldn’t hear each other’s lines. Dad asked the technicians to turn it off. When they didn’t, he repeated his request and then repeated it again. When they still did nothing, he stormed over to where the fire retardant and an axe hung on the wall, then picked up the axe and pounded it into a giant cord. Everything went dark. He’d meant to shut off the air conditioners; instead he’d cut the cord that supplied electricity to the entire soundstage. When the lights went out, he knew he had blown it. Working on Jeannie was never the same after that day. He was afraid he would never work again; he knew he had gone way too far.

  His then best friend, Ted Flicker, who directed some episodes of Jeannie, insisted that Dad see a psychiatrist who could help him get things into perspective. Dad agreed even though he was never interested in talking about his problems. As Dad always told it, after a few sessions, the psychiatrist told him he needed to see that he had an amazing life and then suggested he take LSD. It’s another one of Dad’s stories that may or may not be true. I’ve often thought he was curious about LSD and more comfortable with the idea of experimenting with it if the green light for doing so came from his therapist.

  Right about this time, Dad’s friend Peter Fonda took him to a Crosby, Stills, and Nash concert and afterward took him backstage where he met David Crosby, who gave him some very high-quality LSD.

  Having read The Joyous Cosmology, Dad hoped that LSD would open the door to enlightenment. Talk therapy was not going to take him where he wanted to go. And so he turned to LSD to help him allay his anxieties and find that always-elusive balance between work and life.

  Over the next few weeks, Dad proceeded to get ready to take his first trip. Unlike many people at the time who were dropping acid casually, my father planned this trip as carefully as he prepared to do a pratfall on the set. He talked to a lot of people who had taken LSD and one of them was a friend of his from their high school days back in Weatherford, Texas, who was now living in LA and had gone on many hallucinogenic trips. Larry Hall was the quintessential hippie; he had long dark hair and dressed in fringed buckskins and looked sort of like a Native American. He offered to be my father’s Virgil and lead him to the unknown world of LSD and safely bring him out again. They planned a quiet, safe environment for Dad’s first trip. Mom was part of the plan too and arranged to take me and my brother out for the whole day so the men would be free from the distractions of the family.

  It turned out to be an amazing experience in which Dad explored what happens to us when we die. During the trip he felt connected to his beloved grandmother, whose death had been one of the most frightening experiences of his life. After the trip he continued to feel her presence in his life.

  My dad would never refer to an afterlife as heaven. We had no religion. Mom’s family had been very strict Lutherans back in Sweden, and she had hated church. Dad’s peripatetic life had never included going to church, and I was brought up being told by my parents that religion was invented to control the masses. Their attitude was: if you believed in heaven and hell, you were a fool.

  I developed my own beliefs, and after Dad died, I read a lot of books that described people’s deathbed or near-death experiences. There was a common theme among them that begins with the feeling of being afraid at an entrance of some
kind, a gate or the opening to a tunnel or a cave; beyond the entrance, a bright light can be seen in the distance. People who have religion call this place heaven, but people like my dad, who want to eschew the notion of a heaven that is beyond this world, struggle to describe it. This is how my dad wrote in his book about his LSD vision of what I would call heaven:

  “Suddenly I saw the entrance to a cave across the room. It was guarded by octopuslike creatures with long writhing tentacles. There were also two other creatures that looked like lions with feathers. Then I turned and saw my grandmother, who’d died when I was twelve. She was to my left, hovering about eight feet above me. She sat in the same position I was in, and wore the same robe. She didn’t speak or motion. She simply looked at me with a wonderful, comforting smile and told me not to worry about it.” As his trip continued, he was sucked into a tunnel at incredible speed. A voice told him to go with it. At the end of this tunnel he saw a bright light.

  Over the course of our lives together, he repeatedly told me that this LSD vision of his grandmother welcoming him at the entrance of, whatever you want to call it, had taken his fear of death away. If there was another plane of existence after this life, she was surely there, and if she were there, death would be like going home.

  He was so excited about what he had learned on his trip that he wanted to share it with my mother so that she too could experience it. He wanted her to have the same spiritual awakening he felt he had had.

  It was not until a year later that Mom and Dad took acid together. She was not into pot in the way that he was, but he liked getting stoned with her. They had always been partners and playmates, and though she hadn’t embraced the hippie culture as much as Dad had, he really wanted her to experience the revelations that LSD had given him.