Hello Darlin' (10 page)

In the summer of 1956, as my hitch came to an end, the WAF captain quite rightly still
had it in for me for getting away with murder and she refused my promotion to staff
sergeant. She felt if I wasn’t going to stay in the air force, which I wasn’t, there
was no sense in promoting me, and she was quite right. However, that meant Maj and
I would have to take a troop ship home rather than fly, which seemed like she would
get the last revenge.

Once we boarded the ship in Southampton, we were separated. Maj was put in a room
upstairs with two women and a baby; she was miserable. I was down belowdecks, with
six hundred enlisted servicemen, and just as miserable. We were permitted to see each
other once a day; military rules. There wasn’t any alcohol allowed on board either;
also military rules. But on the second day out at sea, there was an announcement on
the ship’s PA asking if Mrs. Hagman could take tea with the ship’s captain. Everyone
was curious.

Maj was escorted to the captain’s private cabin, and it turned out he was Swedish
and wanted some Swedish company. He poured her aquavit, not tea. Soon he had me up
too, and appointed me the ship’s official entertainment director. I staged a show
the night before we docked. Getting that ready was a welcome diversion, as was the
fact that every day at teatime the three of us got shit-faced, which made the eight-day
voyage almost tolerable.

We arrived in New York with mixed emotions. The U.S. dock-workers were on strike,
delaying everything from being taken off the ship a full day. Then we discovered the
battery of our Austin-Healey had run down. When I came back from looking for a new
battery, I found Maj sitting in the driver’s seat of the disabled car, crying that
she wanted to go back to England. I reached in my jacket pocket, pulled out a pint
of gin the captain had slipped me, and I handed it to Maj, saying, “Here, honey, drink
this. You’ll feel better.”

We drove from Brooklyn to Times Square. By the time we were in the center of the lights,
Maj was feeling no pain. In fact, she was pretty enthusiastic about the city, the
taxis, the people, the excitement of the night, and she said, “Now this is more like
it. One day I want to live here. Right here. In the middle of the hustle and bustle
of New York.”

*   *   *

That would happen, but first I took Maj to Mom’s in Connecticut. Mom and Richard weren’t
there. We were greeted by Richard’s sister, Didi, who was the opposite of him, warm
and loving. She was a friend to us until the day she died. She helped us settle into
the guest house, a darling place that Mother referred to as the Peter Pan House because
it had been constructed as a present from producers after she spent a year in the
role on Broadway and then starred in the classic 1955 TV special. According to Mother,
Peter Pan is the most important thing she ever did in the theater. Never mind it was
a hit or audiences smiled through the whole thing. For her it was a role that allowed
her to play herself. Mother was someone who had dared to follow her dreams from Weatherford
to stardom; she followed her heart; she refused to see any limitations. I figured
that’s as close to flying as humans get. In spirit, she really was Peter Pan.

Maj was also curious about my father. The opposite was also true. From the time he
heard I came back to the States, he wanted to know when he was going to meet “the
foreign bride.” His tone implied that he was not ready to accept her into the family
the way he would have if she’d been a gal from Texas. No, first he had to check her
out.

Finally we arranged a visit. We flew down on one of those four-engine prop planes
that took forever. It was 2
A.M.
when we finally arrived at Amon Carter Field. My stepmother, Juanita, greeted us,
explaining that my dad was in Jacksboro defending her cousin on a murder charge. About
two hours later, my dad came through the front door talking about how he had driven
all night to meet the foreign bride.

“Where the hell is she?” he bellowed.

First Juanita asked about the trial. Dad was happy to tell her, since he had saved
her cousin’s skin from a death sentence.

“I convinced the jury it was an accidental shooting,” he said. “They gave him seven
years.”

“Seven years!”

“For godsakes, he shot a woman to death!”

Dad was already at the liquor cabinet, reaching for a bottle of bourbon.

“Where’s Larry’s foreign bride? I’d like to have a drink with her.”

It was 4
A.M.
—a perfect time to drink in Texas. Maj was all smiles as Dad poured shots with the
look of a Roman emperor who had just ordered the games to begin. After half the bottle
was gone, and before breakfast, Dad took her outside to throw bayonets into a wall.
She had to make them stick; she did. Then they graduated to hatchets. And then my
dad got out his shotgun, handed Maj a .22, and announced they were going out to shoot
doves.

“Dad,” I said.

Maj gave me a dirty look.

“Larry,” she said, grinning. “I’m going dove hunting!”

We were in the middle of town when my dad spotted a dove. He pointed it out to Maj,
then ordered her to “shoot that son of a bitch.”

Maj turned out to be a crack shot, impressing my dad and surprising the hell out of
me because I knew she’d never shot a gun before. She made it a bad morning for several
doves. We had them for breakfast, finished the bourbon, and went to bed. After a nap,
Dad wanted to show Maj what a real oil well was like. There was one outside of town
ready to come in. Dad was on retainer to the company that was drilling and had a small
piece of the action. It was one of the few oil wells he ever invested in. We had to
drive about twenty miles to get to it. The temperature was well above one hundred,
almost unbearable. Only my dad’s description of the excitement of watching a gusher
come in and seeing people go bonkers over their newfound fortune
distracted us from the discomfort of the heat. I listened with anticipation; Dad’s
description was exciting. I remember him telling Maj that there was nothing like that
taste of oil fresh out of the ground.

Soon we were on the oil field. My dad watched as Maj put her tongue to a handful of
dirt.

“You taste the oil?” he asked.

“No, it tastes like salt water,” she said.

Dad was not happy with this news.

We waited out there nearly all afternoon as the investors saw their hope of a gusher
dry up faster than a speck of water on that hot plain. We could have spent six months
there waiting for oil and never seen it. Like so many oil wells, the only thing in
there was all the money that people poured in it. The hole was dry.

There was a wonderful lake next to the well and we all jumped in. After a nice warm
bath, we drove home and barbecued dinner. Dad toasted Maj’s official welcome to the
family with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He said he did not know what they put in the
water back in Sweden but she had strength and spirit. She could also hold her liquor.
He liked her. Hell, he loved her.

We had terrible hangovers the next morning, but they were mild in comparison to what
might have been if we had swum any longer the day before in the lake where we had
decided to cool off. According to a story in the morning paper, just a few hours after
we left the lake, a man who went swimming was bit by more than 150 poisonous cotton-mouth
water moccasin snakes. His was an agonizing death.

“Jesus Christ, it was exactly the same place we were,” I gasped.

“That’s a sign, Larry,” Maj said. “I think it’s time to get out of Texas.”

*   *   *

We headed for Brazil, where Mother and Richard owned a ranch. A few years earlier,
their dear friends Janet Gaynor and her husband, Adrian, had invited them to visit
the Moorish-style home they had
built on ranchlands in Anápolis, and they had been immediately hooked. After being
swindled in their first attempt to purchase property, they finally bought about a
thousand hectares with a pretty but rustic adobe house, and turned it into a first-rate
ranch, where they could unwind, ride horses, and enjoy the solitude of rolling green
valleys and hills in every direction.

On a clear day, Mother would look out from the highest point on the property, a view
that stretched for a hundred miles, and swear she could see where the earth began
to curve.

You had to be hearty to enjoy it there, as luxuries weren’t scarce, they were nonexistent.
Life in Anápolis was the equivalent of America in the latter part of the nineteenth
century—with dirt roads that were sometimes impassable in the rainy season, no telephone,
and no electricity other than the power, about two hours’worth, from a crude little
hydroelectric dam. We picked our coffee beans and roasted them in the morning. There
was one little refrigerator, which ran on kerosene. Our food was cooked on a wood
fire in the kitchen.

Yet it was exactly what I’d been looking for. They had horses and ran some cattle
on the land. They also had ten thousand chickens and were the biggest supplier for
Brasília, the soon-to-be new capital of Brazil. I had a feel for the ranch; the unbelievable
beauty really touched me. The dirt was red the way it was in Weatherford, Texas. Mother
noticed the effect it had on me and said that if I liked it that much, I could take
it over and run the place.

The offer sounded good until my first blowout with Richard. Early on he and I got
into one of our fights, and suddenly I was the guy in the old Hollywood Western who
snarls, “This town ain’t big enough for both of us.” Only I did not have to say it.
As much as the ranch touched my soul, I knew it was no use. There was no changing
Richard. No talking to him. He was just a pain in the ass—and that was when he was
at his best. He was worse once the booze and the speed kicked in.

After eleven o’clock in the morning, he was impossible. Later I
found out one of the reasons Richard liked Brazil so much was that he could buy almost
any medication over the counter, including amphetamines. After he died, Mother would
find bags of speed stashed amongst his belongings; she never knew how bad his habit
was; it explained a lot.

*   *   *

Maj and I took off for Rio, where we spent a month living a carefree bohemian life,
drawing money occasionally from a few thousand dollars Nanny had left me and that
Richard’s accountant had invested wisely. In those days, you could survive nicely
on very little money. For $12, you got a first-rate hotel room on the Copacabana in
Rio. For four bucks, you ate steak and lobster and drank wine. Behind the Copacabana,
in a backstreet alley, we found a bookstore that had novels in English, and we got
hooked on Gore Vidal. We read everything he had written. Later, he became a good friend.

For a while, we considered staying in Brazil. The country was wide open and things
were happening down there that made life look exciting. But I was eventually scared
off by the wild fluctuations of the currency. One day you had $10, and the next day
it was worth ten cents, without any apparent reason for the change. There was another
factor that made me decide to leave: Maj got pregnant. I didn’t see us as pioneer
types raising a family on the frontier. Unfortunately she miscarried on our way back
to the States.

Still, the few weeks she carried the baby had an effect on me. If it was time to start
a family, it was also time to get serious about my career.

B
ack in New York, we rented a basement apartment in Greenwich Village. We fell in love
with the place. The building, owned by Irving Marantz, an artist who had a wife and
two great kids, overflowed with character. Supposedly it had been constructed by Aaron
Burr, the former vice president of the United States and famous duelist who shot Alexander
Hamilton. We had two rooms. One was the bedroom/living room/dining room, and the other
was turned into Maj’s sewing room. She brought in good money designing costumes for
entertainers.

We also took over a neglected patch of dirt and weeds in the back. Maj turned it into
a palette of bright flowers.

The rest was up to me. I knew to make it as an actor I needed a combination of talent,
thick skin, luck, and connections. I believed I possessed talent and thick skin. Luckily,
it turned out, I also had a connection. Ted Flicker. Teddy, my roommate from London,
was directing William Saroyan’s play
Once Around the Block
at the Cherry Lane Theatre, and he gave me a job playing a cop. Every night I would
run around the block two times before making my entrance in
the first act so I’d really seem out of breath from having chased a burglar, as my
character was supposed to have done.

The first part that allowed me to show what I was capable of was in an off-Broadway
production of
Career,
James Lee’s play about an actor determined to succeed on Broadway. It was at the
Seventh Avenue Playhouse. I had a small part as a serviceman returning home from the
European theater. At the top of the third act, I had a four-minute scene that stopped
the show. The audience howled. That part enabled me to get a great agent, Jane Dacy,
who also represented George C. Scott, who was also starting out.

Career
ran for about a year, and during that time Maj became pregnant again. We were ecstatic.
We were also broke. At one point, we were paying for groceries with money that Maj’s
sister Bebe—who was living with us while she got her New York nursing license—got
for selling her blood to the Red Cross. I could’ve asked my mother for money, but
pride wouldn’t let me. We were also estranged since my fight with Richard in Brazil.
At the time, she was rehearsing for a new show, and some days the two of us were blocks
from each other, yet we didn’t communicate.

One day Maj finally picked up the phone and called her. My mother was a little tentative
at first, wondering why Maj was calling.