The Eternal Party

by Kristina Hagman

  Later that month, Dad told me over dinner with friends that he’d contacted “some people” he knew and had a contract put out on Dennis Hopper to have him kneecapped. He was excited by his Mafia-like solution to the problem and—as was typical of Dad—the story suddenly became a story that was all about him. It wasn’t about my frightening experience anymore; now it had become the story of a noble father doing the right thing by his daughter. Beyond that, it was about Dad being a tough guy who knew how to seek out the kind of people who could be hired to permanently damage someone. This, Dad told me, was better than having someone killed; this would be measured revenge. Hopper would be alive, and everyone would know that Larry Hagman’s daughter was not to be messed with. He had taken a page right out of our neighbor Mario Puzo’s book The Godfather.

  I have no idea if he actually did get in touch with some leg breakers or if he was telling a totally made-up story to make me feel safe.

  Years went by and the story was told again and again, but nothing ever happened to Dennis Hopper. As far as I know, Dad never saw him again, and at some point, Dad began to say that Mom had made him cancel the contract. I suspect he made the whole thing up.

  13

  A Trip with Dad to Nowhere Land

  TEN YEARS AFTER dad took his first acid trip, he asked me to take one with him.

  I had just finished my freshman year at San Francisco State. When I came home for the summer, Dad seemed really glad to have me home. Though we were living in Malibu then, it had become our custom to rent our house during the summer to richer celebrities, which gave Dad the money he needed to pay the property taxes and the mortgage. All our personal stuff had to be put away or thrown out so the renters could live in our rooms, and we went off to live somewhere else for a few months.

  Sometimes we went camping. One summer, when Dad had some work in the Los Angeles area, we camped out on the Fondas’ tennis court; the following summer, I took a trip to Europe on my own. But while Peter Sellers rented our house, Dad, Mom, and my brother, Preston, plus our three cats, two dogs, and one turtle moved into a spare room in the Pando Company offices that Peter Fonda shared with his Easy Rider producer Billy Hayward (who in the small world of showbiz was the son of Leland Hayward, who often produced Ganny’s shows!). Their office was in a funky bungalow in West Hollywood, where all sorts of people were hanging out and getting high night and day. Dad loved it.

  The next summer when I returned from the university, my family was living at Ganny’s house in Palm Springs. Like most of her neighbors, Ganny left Palm Springs during the blasting summer heat, so we had the whole neighborhood to ourselves. Because the heat was so stifling, people in the desert tended to stay indoors until it cooled down a bit after 5:00 P.M. Dad and I were stuck in the house and bored when he casually suggested we do LSD together.

  The invitation didn’t surprise me. It was ten years since he’d taken his first acid trip; I knew that he was all about sharing the tripping experience.

  By then, he had stopped trying to get his mother to smoke pot with him and had become very careful not to talk about taking drugs when she was around. But she had no illusions about what he was actually doing or about his attempts to get others to join him. And she didn’t mince words when telling him how she felt about it.

  “I loathe your going in for this,” she’d recently said, “and I have no respect for your desire to have all those you care about share it with you.”

  If we stayed at her house when she was home, Dad would go out in the orchard to smoke alone and avoid taking hallucinogens. But when Ganny wasn’t in the vicinity, he was free to be out in the open with his drug use and to do whatever he wanted.

  Though I’d never done hallucinogens with Dad, many of my high school friends had been very casual about dropping acid. I seldom did it. It took too much out of me. It was so intense; I felt I needed days to recover and weeks to feel like myself again. Once I got to college, I avoided pot and did not take LSD at all. I did not know it at the time, but I had a learning disability; school was difficult for me, and taking drugs made schoolwork that much harder to do, so I instinctively avoided it.

  I knew firsthand that taking drugs was serious business. Since I was about nine years old, I’d been around people who were tripping. As a kid in Malibu, I was frequently taking care of adults who were too high to take care of themselves. There is something about my character that lends itself to caring for other people, maybe because I was so tuned in to my parents’ moods. Dad said many times that he was never hungover after a night of drinking, but I have drawings of him that I did as a teen that show him lying around in a robe looking out of it and the caption “Hungover” scrawled in my handwriting at the bottom of the page. Mom was often in a terrible mood when she woke up. I learned to make her coffee and bring her cigarettes before I went to school, hoping that by doing so she would be in a good mood for the rest of the day. I knew that LSD made people extremely vulnerable. If I took acid with Dad, who would be watching out for me? It was a scary prospect, but I wanted my dad’s approval. Though he had always been loving, he’d also been critical; he could be hard on me at times in the belief that he was just trying to help me. For example, during this first year of college, I had missed both my parents a lot but had seldom called home because the first thing I would hear from him was, “Have you lost any weight yet?”

  I was not sure I wanted to let my guard down around him. Mom assured me that she would stay straight while we were tripping, and as long as she was with us, I was confident enough that everything would be okay.

  Dad kept talking about what great, enlightening experiences he had had on acid. Maybe, I thought, if I tripped with Dad, it would be a way to know him better. Because Dad never liked to talk about his feelings, the way to be close to him was to do things with him—watch the sunset, relax in the Jacuzzi, or sit on the couch and watch TV snuggled up next to him. I did all those things, yet despite these cozy times we spent together, he remained an enigma to me.

  Could acid give me that aha! moment of understanding that Dad always talked about? Maybe, by doing acid together, the aha! moment would be about our relationship, and I would at last understand who he was.

  * * *

  So as the desert heat cooled down, we dropped acid holding hands while we watched the sunset. We sat by the pool overlooking the orchard that was filled with lemon, lime, orange, and grapefruit trees. There was a beautiful red-and-purple glow radiating off the mountains that edge Palm Springs. As the sun disappeared behind those mountains and the color faded from the sky, I felt attracted to the blue light in the pool. I took off my dress and slipped into the water that was the same temperature as my skin and gazed down at my pale, naked body, feeling it expand as if my body and the water were one. It was as if I was the water filling the pool’s entire width and breadth. I felt powerful in that pool; I was completely unafraid. The experience was glorious. I have no idea how long I was in there. At some point, Mom coaxed me out of the water and dried me off and helped me put on one of the robes she made from warm, soft terry cloth that felt so comforting. I was barefoot, and so was Dad, and we tiptoed around the gravel-covered orchard picking grapefruits from the trees. As we peeled them open, each piece of fruit was a marvel, a jewel. We pulled oranges apart too, and each section of pulp was like the fleshy part of my hand just below the thumb, and I wondered if my hand would come apart as easily as the orange did. Dad and I did not talk much. We listened to Handel’s Water Music, and at some point, we each wandered off in different directions.

  I ended up inside the house, moving from room to room, picking things up, and smelling things. The house was filled with the familiar scent that was especially Ganny’s, and for a while, I was lost in my memories of playing in her bedroom back in the old days in New York. Those thoughts led me to Ganny’s dressing room, which was not at all like the spacious bedroom and open dressing area with its freestanding cheval mirror that had been in her Sutton Place apartment in New York. Th
is was a small, cramped room made to look bigger by the use of mirrors on all four sides. As I entered, I saw images of myself multiplied indefinitely. There were hundreds of me reflecting back at me on the shining surfaces of that small room. It was very disconcerting. I felt a violent urge to bang my fists into the glass over and over, but I managed to get myself out of the room and find my mother.

  I told her, “Don’t let me go in there again alone.” For the rest of the night, she stayed close to me.

  I don’t think Mom ever felt comfortable tripping, and she understood that I was scared. Dad also seemed to sense my discomfort, and being his jovial self, he found Kleenex boxes and put them on his feet and then shuffled around the house repeating, “I’m Puss in Boots, I’m Puss in Boots,” which made all of us laugh uncontrollably. Dad was at his best when he was clowning and making other people happy.

  I felt very close to Mom. We were a physical family. We always held each other as we walked down the beach or sat cuddled together when we watched TV. We gave each other butterfly kisses (getting close to the other person’s cheek and wiggling your eyelashes to tickle him or her) or Eskimo kisses (rubbing noses), so when I was high, it was natural to hold on to her, and it was comforting to be in her presence. While I sat with her, Dad became absorbed with picking the seeds out of a watermelon, and after a while, having taken stock of how many hours we had been high, Mom made some spaghetti for us, thinking that we might be able to eat and that food would help me come down. We all were familiar with the different stages of trips. Even though each trip was different, there were some similarities to the effects, like a time when it was too overwhelming to eat and a time when your body got hungry and hunger would take you to negative places because of the need for sustenance. By then, it was the middle of the night, and we’d been tripping a long time. Mom got busy making us spaghetti. When the meal was ready, Dad and I sat at the table, fascinated by the intricate lines of pasta, which we played with as much as we ate them.

  Being high is a lot of work! Everything you come in contact with becomes an intense exploration that completely takes you over and ultimately becomes exhausting.

  Taking LSD with Dad did not, as I hoped it would, occasion any meaningful father-daughter talks. As I’ve said, Dad was never inclined to have talks of that sort anyway, and the truth is, I was so stoned that I probably would not have remembered any talks if we’d had them. I had to be content with the fact that we were more like playmates than soul mates. For the rest of our lives, we often referred to the trip we took together and spoke of how our outlooks on life had been changed by LSD and of how our experience of real things in our everyday lives, like colors and scents, became more vivid than they had been before taking it.

  Even without any kind of interpersonal revelation, that experience in the desert was a milestone that reminded me how intense the drug is and how much time and energy it takes to go on a trip, and it made me understand that Dad, the happy traveler, was comfortable going places where I would never follow him again.

  * * *

  When I tripped with Dad, I still had not told him or my mother about what had happened to me when they left me with Larry Hall. The truth is, I didn’t fully understand that awful event until I was twenty-seven and went to a rally held by Take Back the Night, an international group that protests rape and other forms of sexual violence.

  At the rally, I learned that a rape can occur even when there isn’t vaginal penetration; I learned that being forced to lick a penis under threat of violence is a form of rape. I heard people at the rally say again and again that it was not the fault of the child who was forced to perform such acts. I felt such a sense of unity with the people around me. I felt they would understand me and be a comfort for me, and in turn, I would comfort them. We were not bad; the child in each of us was reaching out to be recognized and made whole. The leaders of the group said it was important to talk about what had happened, to not keep it to yourself. The sharing of the experience made it less powerful. They allowed that the pain will never go away, but what can be changed is the way the pain causes you to function. Clearly, if more children felt they were safe to talk about what people did to them, they could be cared for, and perpetrators might be confronted or stopped from hurting others.

  So one day when we were alone together, I sat my parents down and told them what had happened to me. I tried to present it simply as a story of something that happened a long time ago, something I had put behind me and grown out of. But I started crying as I described what happened in my bedroom while they were away more than two decades earlier. They just looked away and didn’t say anything. Nothing. Not a word. The silence seemed to last forever. It was obvious that Dad had no idea about how to respond and did not know what to say. I wanted them to comfort me as the kindly strangers did at the rally. I wanted them to say they were so sorry such a terrible thing had happened to me, as Larry Hall had done. I wanted them to hug me. I wanted them to tell me what I had learned at the rally: I wanted them to say, “It was not your fault.”

  But Dad mumbled something that I could not hear between my sobs, and he went into the other room. What I’d told them was just too tough for him. There was no way he could turn what I’d told him into a funny story and make us laugh the way he usually would when anything was said that was uncomfortable for him. Mom just shook her head. She did not say a word, and she did not reach out to me. I felt as alone as I had when the incident occurred. I was weak from crying.

  After Dad died, it struck me that the fact that he’d failed to comfort me at a time when I so sorely needed comforting might be something for which, in his final moments, he might have asked me to forgive him for. But I’m pretty sure he had put the whole matter out of his thoughts long before, not because he was uncaring but because he had been so saddened by what I had told him that he could never bear to think of it again.

  In those last precious hours before he lost consciousness, the connection we shared was a time of healing for us both. So I hope he wasn’t thinking of it. I wouldn’t want him to be feeling that he’d failed me in any way—big or small—as he slipped away from this world.

  14

  Malibu

  IN 1966, DAD HAD BOUGHT us a shabby beach house in Malibu Colony. Back in 1927, carpenters from one of the movie studios had built the house that became our new home as a temporary weekend rental for movie stars. The house evolved over the years and had been expanded in a kind of do-it-yourself way and without plans. But the fairly dismal quality of the construction did not matter to my parents; this house was right on the beach, and Mom was overjoyed that she was finally the owner of her own home. Buying this house was an amazing feat because of Dad’s habit of spending any cash he earned right away. It was the physical manifestation of the fact that he’d really had some financial success as an actor. He very rightly kept saying that he really couldn’t afford it, but Mom found ways of making money so that we could hold on to our beautiful ocean view.

  After my experience with the kids in my neighborhood in Santa Monica, I became a bit of a loner when we moved to Malibu. I played with Peter Fonda’s kids when they stayed with us, but they were quite a bit younger than I was. I also made friends with the girls next door, who were a bit older, but many of the kids in the Colony teased me. They said we were weird because everyone who came to our house wore robes and bathed nude. My dad was different, and these kids couldn’t understand the flag parades down the beach and all the strange outfits Dad wore to the grocery store. I spent a lot of my time at home, cooking with my mom and painting, and I took long walks. In those days, dogs roamed free. I love animals and made friends with all the dogs on the beach. I brought treats with me, and sometimes I walked the length of the Colony and kept going way up into the Malibu hills where Pepperdine University now stands, with a pack of ten or twelve dogs around me. I felt safe and free.

  We were all friends with the Hormel family, famed for their sausage and lunch meats. Dad had played Prince Charmin
g to their widowed matriarch. The Hormels had a whole bunch of kids. We always had fun together when they came to their own little cottage on the north end of the beach. We played with a giant silk army/navy surplus parachute that the tall men would make billow above all the children, and their big family made a great team for playing Frisbee.

  There were very few girls in our neighborhood of my age, so I was very excited when a new girl came to live down the beach from me one summer. She was from back east and had a very sweet and gentle manner. Before Kate arrived, everyone on the beach was so excited that her family had rented a house for the summer because she was Richard Burton’s daughter, and she was summering with her father and his then wife, Elizabeth Taylor. Even as a kid, I knew these were especially famous people, having stared up at their faces painted ten feet tall on the billboard advertising their film Cleopatra when I was a was living in New York. For months, this glamorous couple had graced our neighborhood. I remembered them as the most beautiful people ever imaginable.