Hello Darlin' (2 page)

Within moments they knew that each helicopter carried one of the stars from
Dallas
and that I was in the lead chopper, the guy in the white Stetson who was tossing
out handfuls of the one-hundred-dollar
bills with my picture on them and the saying “In Hagman We Trust.” As all of us stepped
onto the lawn, people cheered and waved. Some shouted, “We love you, J.R.,” and I
could feel the atmosphere turn electric. Out of the corner of my eye I caught Bob
Wynn grinning.

But his good mood didn’t last long. As I knew from having lost money in one of his
oil deals, Bob’s ventures often had another side, and this grand evening did too—rain.
Not long after I arrived, the nighttime sky unleashed a storm of biblical force. It
just poured. I was supposed to introduce the night’s entertainment, country music
legend Johnny Cash. By the time I arrived backstage, I had mud up to the crotch of
my white Western-style tux, the power had gone off, and Johnny was telling Bob why
he couldn’t play.

“There’s a damn good chance me and my band could get electrocuted out there.”

Bob stepped forward until there wasn’t any space between him and Mr. Cash.

“Look, you son of a bitch,” he growled, “if you don’t go out there and play, I’m going
to blow your head off.”

I have no doubt he might have done it too. Neither did Cash, who followed my introduction
onto the stage, which, in the absence of electrical power, was illuminated by headlights
from a bunch of Cadillacs and Rolls-Royces that were hastily moved into a semicircle.
The introduction over, I hurried out to the audience, where my chair sunk into the
mud. The woman next to me chuckled; hers was even deeper. We spoke briefly. She was
from out of state, Cleveland or somewhere.

When the power was restored, and after a couple of songs, the man seated behind the
woman asked the guy in front of her to remove his ten-gallon cowboy hat. It was blocking
his view. It was blocking everybody’s view. When his request was ignored, he waited
about fifteen seconds, reached over the lady, and knocked the guy’s hat off. She and
I exchanged nervous glances as the man slowly turned
around, asked for his hat, and put it back on. A few moments later the scene was
repeated. But this time, before the hat hit the ground, the guy wheeled around and
threw a vicious punch. It missed its target, who ducked, and instead hit the woman
square on her forehead.

She tumbled backward in the mud. I saw a huge goose egg form just above her nose.
I thought she was dead.

Meanwhile, the two men went at each other, fists flying and all that. As security
intervened, I noticed Bob Wynn had taken over the microphone. He was asking everyone
if they were having a good time. Despite the rain, it seemed like they were—except
for the woman lying at my feet. An emergency medical team had rushed over and were
working on her. A few minutes passed before she opened her eyes. She looked right
at me without any recognition and asked where the hell she was.

“Dallas,” I said. “Welcome to Dallas, honey.”

*   *   *

My arrival in Texas, though much less violent, would over time lead to moments of
real drama.

I was born in Fort Worth, Texas, on September 21, 1931. My mother was seventeen. She
had married and become pregnant almost the moment her marriage was consummated. She
had no idea about sex. Nor did she have much of a clue about motherhood. It just happened
as if it was supposed to, like so many events in life seem when you look back on them.

But Mom did things her way, and her way was rarely traditional.

Her father, Preston Martin, was a prominent lawyer in town. Her mother, Juanita Presley,
had taught violin at the community college. Mother was born in the family’s modest
home. According to her, my grandfather signaled her birth to the neighbors by raising
the bedroom curtain, and she liked to say, “Curtains have been going up for me ever
since.”

My mother was a good-looking child. She sang the words to every
song the town band played on Saturday nights outside the courthouse. At twelve, she
took voice lessons. She would describe herself as the best customer at the Palace,
the town’s only movie theater. She began to dream about becoming a performer after
seeing Al Jolson sing “Mammy,” and soon she was able to mimic Ruby Keeler, ZaSu Pitts,
and other stars of the day.

“Give me four people and I’m on,” she said. “Give me four hundred and I’m a hundred
times more on.”

*   *   *

My father, Ben Hagman, had his own flair. He was a criminal attorney who, at six feet
and 240 pounds, commanded a courtroom the way Mother did a stage. He once defended
a man who’d gone into a sleazy bar on Jacksboro Highway and taken a shot at the bartender.
While he missed the bartender, the bullet went through the bar’s thin metal siding
and killed a lady seated in a pickup parked outside.

Dad got a hurry-up call from the shooter, who’d been arrested on murder charges. Before
the cops launched an investigation, my dad went into the bar and pulled two slugs
out of the wood in the back bar. Then in court he argued that two or more shots would’ve
been murder, but one shot was an accident—at least in Texas it was. As he didn’t inform
the court about the two extra slugs, Dad got his client a lesser sentence.

His family, originally from Sweden, owned lumber mills in Wisconsin before moving
to Texas, shortly after the turn of the century. Dad’s mother, Hannah, a Christian
Scientist, died of cancer. His father passed away soon after. He had two brothers.
One, my uncle Carl, was a retired army officer. The other, my uncle Bill, married
a woman named Ruth, and both were so fat they needed special heavy-duty springs in
their car.

My father was nineteen when he met my mother, then fourteen. They didn’t start dating
until she was a high school senior. After a hot summer romance, my mother’s parents
attempted to lower the flame
by sending her to Ward-Belmont, a finishing school in Nashville, Tennessee. Miserable
there, she convinced her mother to come get her. For some reason, my grandmother brought
Ben along, and then the three of them went to Hopkinsville, Kentucky, where my mother,
sixteen, and Ben, twenty-one, got married.

“How hillbilly can you get?” my mother would say later.

*   *   *

She had a baby at seventeen, but after a couple of months of playing mother, she was
miserable. Maybe not miserable, but frustrated.

Not a big surprise. She was a kid herself—too young to be a wife, too young to be
a mother, and too full of ambition to settle down.

My father joined my grandfather’s law firm, and soon after, my mother opened Mary
Hagman’s School of Dance in an old grain loft, and I was handed over to my grandma.
I called her Nanny. All of us lived under the same roof, in my grandparents’ new home,
a large, rambling, two-story house. My grandmother took care of all of us.

Weatherford still had the flavor of an old Western town. Horses outnumbered cars,
electric lights were new (not all the homes outside of town had them), and the big
thing was watermelon. In front of the courthouse, there was a tin watermelon about
fourteen feet long, and outside of town there was another sign that said, “Welcome
to Weatherford, Watermelon Capital of the World.” That sign was regularly used for
target practice. Every year they had to replace it, and one year they simply changed
it to say, “Welcome to Weatherford, Home of Watermelons and Mary Martin.”

Mother was very proud of that, but she’d joke, “Even in my hometown I can’t get top
billing!”

But that wasn’t true. Everyone in town knew my mother as the talented, energetic dance
instructor. I was two when she took the train to California, where she studied at
Fanchon and Marco School of the Theater, a school for dancing teachers, in Hollywood.
More trips followed. After she brought back new dance moves and the mystique of
having seen the movie capital with her own eyes, her classes became more popular
than ever.

Soon she opened a second school and began staging shows that made her name even bigger
locally.

She was able to work so hard because my grandma assumed all the responsibility of
raising me. It was as if I were her own child. My mother once took me for a walk and
I was attacked by a swarm of bees. Another time I fell off a Shetland pony and broke
my collarbone, and when my grandmother found out—three days later—she balled out her
daughter, asking, “What’d you do to
my
Larry?”

I was always described as a good boy with a sweet disposition. I probably was. I’m
still pretty easygoing. I can remember only one serious impropriety as a kid. While
playing in the sandbox, I stuck my tongue out at my grandma. She told my grandpa—whom
I called Papu—and he locked me in the cellar, a dank room that reeked of homemade
wine and provided shelter to rats the size of Pekingese. “Larry, you stuck your tongue
out at Grandma. That’s no good.”

First I heard the lock click. Then the lights went off. Then I started to think about
the rats down there. I’d seen my grandpa trap some that were bigger than me—at least
they seemed it. I naturally assumed the first sound I heard in the dark was a rat,
and it scared the crap out of me. I ran to the door, terrified.

“I’m sorry. I’ll never do it again,” I cried.

The door flung open and I fell into my grandma’s arms. She’d clearly had words with
my grandpa.

As tough as my grandpa was, he never spanked me. Never once raised his hand. His punishment
was much worse. He bored me to death with lectures. I used to say to myself, Why can’t
he just spank me and get it over with? His lectures were summations meant for a jury,
not a five-year-old child. They also had an effect. I never did anything stupid a
second time.

*   *   *

I was also raised by Billy Jones, a wonderful, very round, extremely loving black
woman who’d worked for us so long she became part of the family. She’d raised my mother
and her older sister, Geraldine, and then she got me too. She took me to the black
church, which I liked better than ours. She also took me to the movie theater, where
I remember the manager would let me and other white kids go upstairs with our nannies
but the nannies couldn’t go downstairs with us.

It didn’t seem right.

“That’s just the way it is,” she said.

Still, I didn’t understand why it had to be.

Even as a little kid I could talk all night, but Billy didn’t always want to listen.
At bedtime, she had a secret method of putting me to sleep. She’d blow out the pilot
light in the gas heater and let the gas fill the room. Just enough to make me drowsy.
That practice ended when my grandparents returned from a church barbecue and found
us both passed out and the gas still flowing. Billy resorted to another trick. She
filled a little cloth sack with sugar, dipped it in bourbon, and let me suck on it.

Was this the start of my alcoholism? Who knows?

*   *   *

As my mother grew up, she and my father grew apart. He wanted to have his own home
and law practice, which he did. My mother quickly discovered she wanted her own career
too. She zipped off to Hollywood every time she wanted to learn a new dance routine,
but after a while it was pretty apparent she had aspirations other than becoming the
best dance instructor in Weatherford and Fort Worth.

Finally she decided to give stardom a shot. She moved to L. A. with her devoted friend
Mildred Woods. Between 1935 and 1937, she auditioned so frequently at Paramount, MGM,
and the other studios that she earned the nickname “Audition Mary.” Her first big
job was singing at the Cinegrill, a bar at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.
Word quickly got back to Weatherford. Broadway was one thing. The movies were another.
But working in a bar?

Concerned, my grandma packed me in the car and sped to L.A. She wanted to see what
was going on for herself.

What she saw was my mother pursuing the life she’d dreamed about. She was doing it
without my father, whom she divorced amicably, the distance and diverging careers
being too much of a strain on their relationship. My grandma and I moved in with Mother
and Mildred. They had an apartment in the Highland Towers near the Hollywood Bowl.
Mother was doing fairly well, making $400 a week singing at Gordon’s nightclub, where
she met the composers Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern. She’d also grown friendly
enough with gossip columnist Hedda Hopper to have her baby-sit for me in a pinch.

One night I was awakened by a noise in my bedroom. Without stirring, I quietly opened
my eyes and saw my mother and Mildred looking around my room. Mother picked up my
piggy bank and handed it to Mildred, who broke it open and handed the meager amount
to my mother. That night we dashed off to Palm Springs. As I recall, mother was fleeing
from Val D’Auvray, a European businessman who was pressuring her to marry him.

Val was an interesting character, a strong, masculine, erudite man who made and lost
fortunes and had influential friends all over the world. He loved mother and, I think,
saw himself as her Svengali. She didn’t give him the opportunity. However, for a time
he did fill the space in my life that was denied to my father, taking me to the doctor,
to amusement parks, and one time to Errol Flynn’s yacht, which he said he’d once owned.
And years later he would play an important role in my life.

Speaking of roles, the only one that ever gave my mother trouble was the one that
concerned me, motherhood. But she tried her best. That Easter in Hollywood she and
Mildred woke me up and said they had a surprise for me. Mother was holding the end
of a yellow ribbon.

“Take the ribbon, Lukey,” she said, using her pet name for me. “Get up and follow
it and you’ll find a special treat.”

I followed instructions and excitedly traced the ribbon through the house—from the
bathroom into the living room, around the dining room table, and out through the kitchen.
Mother and Mildred kept saying, “You’re getting warmer. You’re getting warmer.” Finally,
I opened the screen door in the kitchen and found the end of the ribbon tied to a
little white bunny—splattered in bright red blood!