Hello Darlin' (23 page)

“The money’s not very good,” he warned.

“It’s more than I’m making doing nothing,” I said, and then more seriously added,
“I’m not worried. If the show goes, the money will take care of itself.”

*   *   *

The whole cast gathered for the first time in producer Leonard Katzman’s office, where
we read through the script. The first person I met was Linda Gray, who gave me a big
hug. That hug was the start of a lifelong friendship. When we let go, which I did
reluctantly, I was totally tongue-tied. All I could say was, “Hello darlin’.”

“Nice to meet ya, husband.” She grinned.

At that moment I knew that Leonard had cast the perfect partner for me.

Patrick Duffy was a big, good-looking kid who felt like an old friend as soon as we
shook hands. Both of us had worked on the 1974 TV disaster movie
Hurricane,
but in different scenes, so we never met. Ironically, I knew his father from the
bar he owned in Boulder, Montana. While we were making
Hurricane,
Patrick’s dad had urged him to call me.

“Larry Hagman’s a big star,” he’d said. “He can get you started in the business.”

As it turned out, Patrick did all right on his own, starring on ABC’s popular series
Man from Atlantis.
From his perspective,
Dallas
was already better.

“There’s no chlorine burning my eyes,” he said. “And I don’t have to act with webbed
fingers.”

I loved the whole group. Barbara Bel Geddes, a former
Life
magazine cover girl who’d starred as the original Maggie in Tennessee
Williams’s
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,
impressed me as a kindred spirit. When asked what about the role of Miss Ellie interested
her, she said, “I needed the job.” Jim Davis was a rugged, handsome, taciturn, perfect
Daddy. Victoria Principal struck me as absolutely gorgeous. And talk about fate: it
turned out that years earlier, when I enlisted in the air force at Bushy Park, her
father was stationed on that base and she went to the American School there. Charlene
Tilton was the most adorable teenager I’d ever met. She had all the qualities of a
ripe Texas tomato—and sweet beyond belief. Steve Kanaly, who’d eventually play my
bastard brother, was a real cowboy. He looked it, talked it—and was. Ken Kercheval
was the perfect choice to play my nemesis. He was a powder keg of unpredictability
that made his work so charged, and it always came out riveting.

Then there was Leonard Katzman, the true genius behind the show. The man wrote, directed,
produced, and served as the real head of the family. Without Leonard,
Dallas
wouldn’t have been an eighth as successful. When I first met him in his office that
day, I thought he was a real Hollywood producer, a kind of stereotype, and he turned
out to be anything but that. He was a real human being, psychiatrist, rabbi, priest,
ally, friend … and conniver.

When it came to making a TV show work, he knew every trick in the book, including
the politics of dealing with the network. He was the man.

God knows what they all thought of me.

I arrived for that meeting in a fringed buckskin jacket and a big old cowboy hat.
I also carried a leather saddlebag crammed with bottles of perfectly chilled champagne,
which I set on the table with an authoritative
clank.
The folks seated around the table traded looks that said, “What’ve we got here?”

I made a toast.

“I just hope we all have a real good time,” I said, flashing the first of J.R.’s memorable
shit-eating grins.

And boy howdy, did we!

*   *   *

Back home, Maj asked how everything had gone at the reading. I told her that I loved
the cast and thought the script would work, although the writers didn’t know shit
about Texas. The plan, as Leonard had outlined it, was to shoot the initial five episodes
in Dallas and go on the air in April as a midseason replacement. Everything sounded
good, though I’d heard talk that Lorimar’s top executives, Merv Adelson and Lee Rich,
didn’t believe
Dallas
would go beyond the original order.

“So I don’t know,” I said. “At least I’ll get paid through those five. And while we
re shooting, I’ll take a trip to Weatherford and see Juanie.”

“Not to worry. It’s going to be a hit,” Maj said confidently. “I feel it.”

I
n the beginning Southfork was quiet. The mansion was virgin territory. The halls were
silent and still, not yet haunted by years of scandal, family fighting, and backstabbing.
Daddy hadn’t died, Mama hadn’t departed, Bobby hadn’t stepped out of the shower, and
J.R. hadn’t been shot. We had no idea we were destined to spend the next thirteen
years together. As Patrick said to me a few weeks after we began taping, “I hope they
let us know what’s going on with the series early enough. I just rented a house and
if this isn’t picked up, I’ve got to get another job.”

My concerns were more immediate. When we began taping in late January 1978, Dallas
was gripped by one of the coldest winters on record. It snowed like crazy. My old
bread van, which I’d driven out from L.A., provided the only warmth at the different
locations where we worked. In the absence of fancy dressing trailers, it was the cast’s
unofficial headquarters. I stocked it with champagne and whatever else people wanted.
We jelled as a group from all the time we spent in there.

We made nightly trips in my van to Western dancing bars such as
Whiskey River, where I discovered great acts like Vince Vance and the Valiants, an
outrageous group that plays forties, fifties, and sixties music. I’m their unofficial
mascot and stand in on keyboard or bass guitar whenever I hear they’re playing nearby.
My instrument is always unplugged, but I’ve learned to make it look legit.

At each bar, I went straight to the hostess and said, “Hello darlin’, ’member me,
Major Nelson from
I Dream of Jeannie?
I wonder if you have a table for all of us?”

Patrick and I hit it off from the get-go. On one of the first shows we taped, we had
a dramatic confrontation after I exposed his betrothed’s relationship with the ranch
hand Ray Krebbs. Pissed off, Bobby grabbed my shoulders, spun me around, and was about
to hit me. But as I turned, he saw I had drool running down my chin. He cracked up.

“Here I am acting my life out and you’re drooling,” he said.

I glanced toward Victoria, who was by the fire, wearing as little as we could get
away with on network television.

“If you were looking at her, wouldn’t you drool too?” I asked.

I think we were destined to be best buddies. One night as I drove a bunch of us to
a restaurant, Patrick was drinking champagne and watching the world pass through the
plastic bubble on the roof of my van when he suddenly exclaimed, “Hey, that’s my hometown.”

I had a photo from my family trip to Boulder, Montana, taped on the wall, and it had
caught Patrick’s attention. In it, Maj and I were standing in front of Gamble’s Hardware.

“That’s my hometown,” Patrick said.

Talk about being blown away. I told him about our trips to the nearby hot springs
and the many afternoons I’d spent in the bar there.

“Holy shit, Larry!” he said. “My dad owned that bar!”

I told him that was one of my favorite pictures, and Boulder was one of my favorite
little towns.

Since I’d been to his hometown, I decided I had to show Patrick Weatherford, my little
hometown. I promised to take him quail hunting.
Early one Sunday morning we loaded my van with a couple cases of wine and a case
of Tom Moore whiskey—Juanita’s favorite—and we took off to introduce Patrick to my
stepmother. We didn’t sober up all weekend. Patrick kept up pretty good for not being
a big drinker. But when I poured bourbon over my cornflakes for breakfast, he drew
the line.

“I know I’m in training,” he said, “but I’m not quite up to your speed.”

Patrick was pale and suffering when we pulled up to the set early on Monday morning.
Jim Davis took one look at him and said, “Where the hell have you been, boy?”

“I went over to Weatherford to meet Larry’s stepmother,” he groaned.

He also met some of my high school buddies. As a matter of fact, later that day I
got a call from the husband of a friend of mine, looking for Patrick. He was irate.

“Where is that son of a bitch Duffy?” he asked.

“Why?”

“He was drinking champagne out of my wife’s shoe.”

“Yeah, and he wasted a good bottle of champagne. Your wife was wearing open-toed shoes.”

For these first five episodes, the cast was put up at the North Park Inn, a crumbling
motel amid barren fields on the north edge of Dallas. It wasn’t the classiest joint.
Patrick’s bedroom floor had a crack in it so large that if he dropped his watch he’d
have to go downstairs to get it back. I personalized my surroundings by hanging Indian
batik bedspreads on the walls, setting up a toy railroad set around the perimeter,
and lighting dozens of candles. There wasn’t a mini bar, so I filled the tub with
ice and champagne bottles.

One night Patrick, Jim, and I got together and listened to Jim tell us about all the
cowboy films he’d made. God, he must’ve made a thousand of them. We also had a few
drinks while he talked. After a few hours, Patrick and I took Jim back to his room
and when we returned
to mine, there were three fire trucks parked outside. My room was filled with smoke.
Apparently, while we were gone, a candle had melted the phone and the smoke had set
off the fire alarm.

I apologized and offered to pay for the smoke damage. Fortunately it wasn’t as bad
as it looked. After we’d washed the bedspreads, you couldn’t tell there’d been a fire
except that the ceiling didn’t match the other rooms. It didn’t matter, though. Soon
after we left, they tore the place down and built a huge shopping mall that is now
in the center of Dallas, which shows how much the city has spread out since then.

*   *   *

Meanwhile, we were working long, hard days on the show. Veteran TV writer David Jacobs
created
Dallas
as a classic drama about a poor girl who marries into a wealthy family that could
as easily have been set against the steel business in Pennsylvania or the textile
mills in New England. But putting it in Dallas exposed a whole new part of the country
that nobody had exploited, at the exact moment in time the city itself was expanding
as a center of prosperity and power.

The Dallas Cowboys were the hottest team in America—and make no mistake, in Texas
football rules.

Leonard Katzman insisted on shooting the first five shows on location in Dallas, not
the backlots of Hollywood. He wanted the authenticity of the real thing, but more
important, he knew how important it was to work where the suits couldn’t constantly
look over his shoulder and second-guess him.

A lot of elements contributed to the show’s success. Many a master’s degree has been
earned with a scholarly dissertation about
Dallas.
The country needed a diversion from a terrible recession. People couldn’t spend money
for movies, dinner, and a baby-sitter, so they stayed home, turned on the TV, and
watched guess what? A television show that revolved around greed, power, and sex and
gave them something to talk about all week.

The world of corporate finance in Dallas is much more complex
and devious than any of the story lines we ever devised for the show. In truth,
Dallas
was a simplistic view of what people imagined Texas oil families were like. We simply
indulged that stereotype and made greed, treachery, and blackmail seem like good,
sexy, all-American fun. As J.R. said, “Once you get rid of integrity, the rest is
a piece of cake.”

I couldn’t have been more ready to step into J.R.’s boots. I’d been working on his
character for years, particularly in
Stardust.
I grew up in Texas and knew all those good old boys. I knew the vernacular. I knew
people who really were like J.R.—one in particular. I always said J.R. was a composite
of people, and in a way he was. But I have to admit when it came to creating J.R.,
I reached back into my past and called on the memory of Jess Hall Jr., the man I’d
worked for as a teenager at Antelope Tool Company. He was a respected pillar of the
community. But he also once drove his Jeep up the front steps of my dad’s house at
2
A.M.
and left it on the porch for a week.

I’d known him for thirty years. I never told Jess I’d used him as the model for J.R.
I worried he’d be offended. After he retired from business, Jess made a special seasoned
salt for cooking in his garage as a hobby. The salt was tasty, but I warned him it
wasn’t healthy in heavy doses.

“It can lead to a heart attack,” I said.

“Bullshit, Larry,” he replied. “The body needs salt. It’s the best thing in the world.”

Well, he had a massive heart attack and his doctors took him completely off salt.
True to form, he kept making the seasoning product, without the salt, using just the
herbs. He still did well with it and it tasted great.

*   *   *

The first
Dallas
episode, titled “Digger’s Daughter,” premiered on Sunday, April 2, 1978, in the 10
P.M.
slot that had been home to the
Carol Burnett Show.
Not since
Peyton Place
had TV viewers been
treated to a family as dysfunctional as the Ewings. When Bobby delivered the shocking
announcement that he’d married Pamela Barnes, daughter of Jock Ewing’s bitter enemy
Digger Barnes, played by my old friend David Wayne, prime time was forever changed.

But that was just the tip. It was also revealed that Pamela had played around with
the ranch hand Ray Krebbs, who was involved with J.R.’s niece Lucy. J.R. offered Pamela
a fistful of cash to leave his brother and tried to ensure his own control of the
family’s millions by having a child with his wife, Sue Ellen. Worst of all for J.R.,
Bobby was finished with being a roving ambassador and wanted to play a bigger part
in the family business. There wasn’t anything mellow in this melodrama.