The Eternal Party

by Kristina Hagman

  I’ve never known why he said that or why my presence would make him more nervous than usual. Maybe he just needed someone to blame for his nerves, or since it was a show to celebrate a grandmother’s eightieth birthday, maybe he was appealing to everyone in the audience who had ever gotten embarrassed in front of their kids. Finally, laughing because there was nothing else to do, he said, “I knew I would blow it! And what a place to blow it too!”

  At last, on the third try, he got the song going, and when Ganny came out, she gave him a playful hip bump and stole the show. She took command, moving him around, and loosening him up. By the end of the piece, they were having a grand time, and the love and warmth between them was very real. It turned out to be a great night, and they made all the headlines the next day. One paper carried a cartoon of the Queen Mum standing up in her box with a rifle pointed at J. R. onstage, and he had his hands up, saying,”Don’t shoot, Mum.”

  Dad was most happy and comfortable when he got the attention of strangers. Being famous fit him well, but eventually and inevitably, even J. R. faded from the spotlight. He still has very devoted fans, but when Dallas was off the air for several years, the crowds were not gathering around him as he went out in public. He really missed getting lots of attention as he made plain during one particular trip he made to Seattle, where I was living with my husband and two daughters.

  He had come to visit us and do a Q and A with the theater class at my daughter Kaya’s high school. Dad was not a teacher, and he did not know how to engage a high school class; he was accustomed to crowds that were eager to see him, crowds that knew all his work and laughed at all his jokes. These kids were too young to have a clue about Dallas and much too young to have seen I Dream of Jeannie.

  It was a tough afternoon. The students didn’t ask him many questions. The drama teacher and I prompted the kids into some kind of interaction with Dad, but the class wrapped up rather quickly, and there was polite applause at the end. Dad was accustomed to a big send-off. As we walked away from the school, I could sense his deflated ego with each step we took toward Pike Place Market, one of the biggest tourist draws in Seattle. No one was recognizing him there either. He was going up to vendors making small talk and joking around, but no one said, “Hey, aren’t you that guy…” This brought him down even more. I saw the smile he had put on as he entered the market fading. I thought he might be hungry and tried to get him into a café for lunch, but he was determined to get a reaction out of the folks around him. Attention was the food he needed, and he figured out a way to get it. He bought a three-foot-long, bright-red, sequined beanbag lizard that he draped on his shoulder as if it were a live pet. This attracted the eyes of passersby, and when they took a moment to look at him, they would stop and say, “Aren’t you J. R.?”

  Then he would turn to them, his eyes twinkling, and say, with a devilish grin, “Why, yes, darlin’, I am.”

  After that, he felt a lot better.

  16

  Real Life

  MY FIRST MARRIAGE ONLY LASTED two years. The wedding took place during the height of the Dallas craze. Everything was done on a grand scale; we announced our engagement at the Rockefellers’ estate. Our public life and private life had become a blur; my wedding got a lot of publicity and fed the image that Dad was proud to perpetuate. His dalliances notwithstanding, he was a very loving family man, and he wanted the world to know this about him. It was an image that was always very important to him.

  My wedding had the same down-home family touch that all our parties had. Mom and my aunts did the decorations and flowers and supervised the food. A few hundred people attended, all crammed into the newly built house in Malibu. The guest list included a lot of people I did not know very well, like everyone who worked on Dallas, from the stars to the script supervisor and costume people.

  Mom had sewn my beautiful satin-and-lace dress. Ganny sang; Aunt Heller’s youngest children were the flower girl and ring bearers. My godsister, Bridget Fonda, and one of my dearest girlfriends, Phillipa McNabb, were my bridesmaids, but even with all this love around me, it felt like we were putting on a show and the real stars were Dad and Ganny. I was so uncomfortable as I was getting dressed that, like many a bride before me, I almost called it off. Uncle Henri, who had been Dad’s best man back in London, told me to pull myself together and gave me a Valium. I was looped and pale when I said my vows; Valium was another drug that was too strong for me. I will never know what I might have done that day without it.

  The event was a great success from Dad’s perspective: there were dozens of paparazzi to take pictures of our smiling family; they even came in helicopters to film the wedding from overhead, and there was Dad, in his element, the center of everything. For me, looking back on it, the dearest things are the family pictures in which Dad is just beaming, holding me close, and looking so happy, the proud patriarch at his daughter’s wedding.

  When I married again ten years later, it was no accident that I chose a man who had lived in Japan for the previous eight years. Daniel didn’t know anything about what was happening in American popular culture, and that meant that he not only didn’t care about J. R., he had never even heard of him!

  Daniel’s first window into what life is like for the family of a celebrity came during a trip we all took together to Turkey, where we were hounded by photographers and Dad encouraged him to shield us from them. Even after we were married, no matter how much distance we put between our new family and my father’s fame, we could not really feel free from it. For example, we lived in Italy for six months so I could paint the landscape and Daniel could write and all of us, including our one-year-old daughter, could learn some Italian. Daniel had gotten in the habit of picking up old Italian magazines so he could practice reading in the language. He found one at an inn where we were staying in Rome. The magazine was filled with photos of my first wedding taken from the helicopter. There was even a picture of it on the cover; it was surreal. I had thought I had distanced myself from that tabloid reality and had built my own life far away from Dad’s fame. But this incident made me realize that no matter how far away I go and no matter how much time passes, my family’s fame is a part of my legacy whether I want it or not.

  Another constant element of life for anyone connected to my family was joining the party and drinking. Daniel had seen my family getting drunk a lot. The first thing anyone did after entering my parents’ house was to get a drink, and every meal was consumed with many bottles of wine. When we’d been dating for a while, Daniel told me he wanted me to stop drinking for three months because he did not want to get seriously involved with an alcoholic. After not drinking for a while, I had a different perspective on my family’s rituals. Though I went back to drinking wine with dinner, I became much more aware of how insidious it could be. I’ve been more careful about my drinking ever since.

  A little over a year after we met, Daniel and I decided to have a child. When I became pregnant, we were not yet married, and Dad was uneasy about the direction my life was taking. Hippie life and Swedish mores were not enough to make him comfortable with my having a child out of wedlock, but nothing he said was changing my mind about having this baby. When I was five months pregnant, I came by myself to Los Angeles for a visit with my parents. The first night, during dinner, Dad and Mom and other family members were all drinking heavily. I was sober, of course. Dad and my uncle began joking about attending the birth of my child. This was at a time when families had just begun filming births. They were going on and on about how they would video the birth. They were all laughing about where the camera would be placed and making innuendos about porn films and teasingly referring to the noises I would make while giving birth. As I sat there I started envisioning my delivery room filled with my drunken, rowdy family all making fun of me instead of the intimate, important moment I longed for, during which I would bring a new life into the world. I knew they had no understanding of what this meant to me, and this was not the time to tell them about how
I wanted my birthing experience to be, so I excused myself from the table, saying I was tired, and went upstairs to my room.

  I had just crept into bed and taken my contact lenses out when my mother came through the door, which was three steps up from the sunken bedroom. She was very drunk by then, and she was yelling, reminding me of all the things she and Dad had given me. Who did I think I was anyhow? Did I think Daniel’s family was better than my own because they all had college degrees? She was so out of control, she was not really making any sense, so I stayed in bed and asked her to leave, but she wouldn’t go. I could not make out her facial expression without my contacts, so in order to see her better, I finally got out of bed and went up the three steps and stood close to her. I said, “Mom, you have to let me go to sleep.”

  She pushed me. I fell backward. It was only three steps, but I hit my back hard. Finally, she left the room. That night, I started bleeding.

  The next morning, I told my aunt BB about the blood, and she immediately arranged for me to see a doctor. Dad insisted on taking me. It was about ten in the morning, and he drove me to the hospital on a beautiful sunny day in the Mustang convertible with the top down. He was trying to lighten the mood with music, and the wind whipped my hair around, which on any other occasion might have been fun, but I was hurting and very worried about the possibility of losing the baby. Looking over at Dad, I could see that he was shaking. I had seen him with the DTs before, and I knew he hadn’t had a drink yet that morning the way he usually did. He calmed himself by sucking on some hard candy, which helped control his need for sugar, which the booze ordinarily supplied. He never mentioned anything that had been said the night before or how Mom had behaved.

  He was visibly relieved when the doctor said all I needed was to be on bed rest for the next few weeks. She reassured us the baby and I would be okay.

  Dad had watched as the doctor did the ultrasound. He saw the baby open her fingers as if she were waving. He was enchanted … his grandchild had waved at him. Now he could rewrite the story of what had brought us to the hospital that day. It was no longer the story of a frightening episode in which Mom, in a drunken rage, had put her grandchild in jeopardy. All that faded away as Dad put a positive spin on the event and made himself the focus of a story that was now about how he had taken care of his daughter, who was having trouble with her pregnancy, and how he had been the first person in the family to see his new grandchild. “I saw my baby grandchild,” Dad proudly told everyone, “and she waved at me.”

  * * *

  When it came time for me to give birth, Daniel and I agreed that my family should not attend. We had talked a lot about what had happened in LA and all the drinking. We had gone to birthing classes and read books about creating a peaceful, healthy birth, and we did not want that birth influenced in any way by their hard-drinking party energy. However, we did want the support of some family members, so we asked Daniel’s father, who was a psychiatrist, to be with us throughout the birth. In retrospect, I think my parents felt I had chosen Daniel’s family over them at this important moment in our lives, and the message they got was that I was taking some distance from them.

  A week after my daughter was born, Mom came to visit without Dad, who was working and couldn’t get away. She brought presents for the baby. She was warm toward me, cordial to Daniel, and thrilled to see baby Kaya. But it was clear that my insistence on taking control of the way my daughter was born had strained the very strong connection my parents and I had always had. But thinking back on it, difficult and unpleasant as the events surrounding my pregnancy were, my father would not have seen them as anything for which he needed to be forgiven.

  17

  Parents

  DAD NEVER DID anything around the house. He never changed lightbulbs or cleaned dishes or paid bills. One day, long after Dallas had ended, we were getting ready for a big luncheon at his immense and gorgeous estate in Ojai. The wind had picked up the night before, and the gardener did not have time to come back to the house to clear away the leaves and debris that were scattered all over the terrace. Before setting the table, I got out a broom and began sweeping, Dad picked up another broom that was leaning against the wall and started sweeping too. He was awkward with the broom and said to me, “I don’t think I’ve ever done this before.”

  I paused and looked at him, not sure if he was being sarcastic or not; then I thought to myself, he must have swept a floor before, but the truth is, it may have been decades since he had picked up a broom because, as he would say, “I have people to do that for me.”

  He was good at getting help. If he could not figure out how to use the remote control on his TV, he would hire someone to do it; other people washed the cars, grew the vegetables, typed and sent the letters he dictated, and on and on, and they all loved doing it for him. Often, he paid for these services, but he was known for getting people to do things for him for free. He would talk to them and genuinely admire their ability. Dad was flattering me by telling me he did not know how to sweep a floor; he was acknowledging that I regularly did something he did not do.

  Mom, on the other hand, as I’ve noted, did not hesitate to get right in there and do all sorts of things herself. That’s not to say she didn’t have household help: she always had as much help as we could afford, but she never ceased to enjoy cooking and cleaning and fixing things. The longer they were married, the more Dad came to depend on her to manage their day-to-day lives, and she was his helpmate in all decisions. He would hate this comparison, but their arrangement was very much like the one Ganny had had with Richard: there was an unspoken agreement in both relationships that enabled both Larry and Mary the freedom to be artists while their partners helped craft their image and manage things behind the scenes. Mom, in addition to doing many of the household repairs herself or, if not, finding the right person for the job, also mended and altered Dad’s clothes for him; until she became completely confused, she could sew anything. For years, if Dad bought a shirt he really liked, Mom would take it apart and make a pattern; she would then improve on the garment and make a dozen of them for him in every color. Even after their ship came in with the success of Dallas, she and her sisters continued to do a lot of the daily cooking. Mom managed all the details of running their Santa Monica and Ojai households, the latter of which was twenty thousand square feet, had three pools, and had six permanent employees. She packed for their trips abroad and took everything they needed; Dad was good at putting his toiletries bag together and delighted in planning the outfits he wanted to wear, including special hats for each one, but it was Mom who made sure all the practical stuff was there. She packed in such a way that the clothes would not wrinkle. They traveled a great deal, and experience had taught her how to arrange things so it would be easy to find the coats they would need at the end of a long trip that would start with a warm week in Florida and end with a visit to Moscow during the winter. She knew just where to go to buy anything they needed, from plumbing fixtures to Georgian silver tea sets.

  Because she had taken care of him in every possible way, when she became too ill to do that, Dad was miserable and adrift. I began to understand just how lost he was when his appliances started breaking down. Short of hiring experts, he did not have a clue about what to do when something broke. It seemed foolish to find an “expert” to fix his toaster, so he asked me, “Where do you go to buy a toaster?”

  This was a simple question, but it told me that he never had to think about these sorts of practical everyday things before.

  Another aspect of their lives that Mom had handled was their real estate and financial concerns. She and Dad would meet with the investment advisors and accountants, and when they got home, she would talk everything over with Dad; invariably, she would need to calm him down because talking about money engendered so much anxiety in him and often caused him to feel that they did not have enough cash to cover their costs. Mom was confident and practical. She knew they were well off, while Dad, to the end of his
days, and even when there was loads of evidence to the contrary, could not help but worry that something terrible would happen by the end of the year that would leave him totally broke again.

  Mom’s amazing array of talents included the ability to read the architectural plans for the homes they built and buildings they bought. Aging did not modify her innate restlessness, and throughout her life, she would always need something to do. Dad said he liked paying for construction workers because then Mom would have other men to order around.

  After Mom had rebuilt their home in Malibu several times and needed more space to create, they moved to Upper Ojai, a picturesque town that looks like a mini Santa Fe and is a two-hour drive north of Malibu. The move to Ojai presented Mom with the ideal situation: a place where she could design and build to her heart’s content on a forty-acre site on the top of a mountain overlooking the ocean.

  The Mediterranean home she envisioned and built was an amazing place with beautiful foliage and trees. It had several pools that flowed all through the house and ended as a moat around Dad’s den. The den was beneath the book-filled Victorian-style library, and you got to it by going behind voluminous silk curtains that revealed an elegant spiral staircase from which you could look onto Dad’s moat. At the base of the stairway, there was a retractable metal door that turned his inner sanctum into a hidden fortress. Inside, Mom had decorated his hideout like a fantasy creation from an Arab fairy tale that Jeannie would have felt at home in: there were Persian carpets and Oriental antiques and, amid all this finery, a walk-in safe full of guns and ammo. That was the only really private space in the house; the rest of it was designed as a party palace with nine bedrooms in four separate towers.

  Between the towers was the huge eat-in kitchen and, next to it, the dining room with an enormous round table (no one was below the salt here). The walls were covered with hand-painted murals of the desert. Down a long hallway that looked like it came from a medieval monastery, you got to the billiards room where there was a huge bed and big couches and high-backed chairs and a big-screen TV. Above this playroom there were two more sleeping towers with many bathrooms.