Hello Darlin' (24 page)

As Cecil Smith wrote in the
L.A. Times
review, “The scene is set for some very steamy drama to come on the arid Texas plain.”

Ratings for the first episode didn’t seem to indicate a hit, but the numbers grew
steadily, and by the fifth episode, “The Bar-B-Que,”
Dallas
was red hot. The episode—in which Pamela tragically miscarried after a fall during
a struggle with J.R. in the hayloft—finished twelfth. CBS ordered thirteen more episodes
for the next season, and we were on our way.

All of us stopped looking for new jobs and returned to Dallas that summer to start
the new season. We got a chilly reception from the locals. The city was still reeling
from being the site of President Kennedy’s assassination and was sensitive about its
portrayal on the show. Dallas was rebuilding civic pride through the Dallas Cowboys
football team and their cheerleaders, so at the start our depiction of Dallas as the
home of greed and villainy didn’t make us a lot of friends.

I remember being asked by an acquaintance to watch a football game at the Dallas Country
Club, which was a bastion of old Dallas money. My friend introduced me to the men
at the bar, budding real-life J.R.’s in their thirties and forties. It was a nice
afternoon, and when the game ended, I bid them so long.

“Glad to meet you boys,” I said.

But as I reached for the door, one of them said, “Good to meet you, too …
boy.”

A chill went up my spine.

That sentiment stayed with me and gave me food for thought.

My concern was just how bad could I make this bad boy and still keep him lovable.

But remember that when
Dallas
began, J.R. was not the main character. Bobby and Pamela were the centerpieces. J.R.
gradually grew through conversations Linda and I had in the background. While Patrick
and Victoria played out the main focus of a scene, we made up our own show. I’d ad-lib
something like, “Honey, I put this shit on this morning and a button’s missing. Now
what the hell is this all about?” And she’d say, “Well, J.R., I tried finding a button,
but I just couldn’t.” Then I’d go, “Here’s a hundred dollars. You better buy yourself
a bunch of buttons and fix all my shirts.”

Eventually Katzman started paying closer attention to us when he watched the dailies
and finally he asked, “What are you two doing back there?”

“Having fun,” I said. “We were deepening our characters.”

“Well, that stuff’s good.”

We became the Bickersons about the time the network ordered another ten episodes.
That was a full season. It gave Katzman and the writers time to more fully develop
the characters, especially J.R., who hadn’t been allowed to blossom into his full
nastiness. It allowed me to really shape J.R. to match the picture I had of him in
my head. I added phrases and nuances that made J.R. my own, which is my modus operandi
as an actor. I just do it. If they pick up on it, I know they’re paying attention.

*   *   *

They had to pay attention as we shot the seventeenth episode. Irving Moore, a good
friend of Katzman’s, was directing that show, which featured a terrific guest-starring
appearance by Brian Dennehy as a
bad guy who, along with his partner, holds the whole family hostage during a hurricane—as
if a hurricane would ever get as far as Dallas. That showed how much the writers knew
about Texas.

Anyway, he had us in the living room and made Sue Ellen sing the song “People.”

People, people who need people …

Tears streamed down her face as she sang.

She was a knockout.

Finally Charlene, playing my niece Lucy, got up and said, “I’ve had enough of this.
I’m going upstairs to bed.” Dennehy kindheartedly let her go, though only because
he knew his partner planned on following her and raping her. As this sexually ripe
seventeen-year-old walked across the room, there was a close-up on me, and I followed
her with my eyes, revealing lascivious thoughts.

Irving yelled, “Cut.”

“Larry, that’s your niece!” he said. “You can’t look at her like that.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “She’s a woman. She’s good looking. This is Texas.”

“But Larry—”

“Okay, Irving. Fine. Let’s do it again.”

The next take I gave Charlene an even more lecherous look and Irving printed it.

From then on, they knew J.R. was capable of anything, and it gave them an idea of
the direction they could take him.

I did my part offscreen, too. When the cast guested on
Dinah’s Place
with Dinah Shore, our first big national talk show, I ensured it would be a memorable
appearance. Before our entrance, I opened some champagne backstage and Jim got shit-faced.
Then I gave the whole cast hats to wear and flags to carry, and led them in a parade
through the audience and onto the stage.

While being introduced to Dinah, Jim accidentally knocked off his London bobby’s hat.
It struck Dinah’s bad knee, causing her to gasp in pain. Jim immediately bent down
and apologetically began kissing
her knee. As he did, his hand accidentally moved up her legs and everything got wonderfully
chaotic.

The lesson became more and more clear. As J.R. went, so did
Dallas.
The correlation was indisputable. By the end of the season,
Dallas
was firmly situated among the twenty top-rated shows and J.R. had emerged from the
background, having driven Sue Ellen to drink and infidelity, so that finally, while
eight months pregnant, she was sent away into a sanatorium. What fun!

For the end of the first full season, Katzman came up with the idea of keeping viewers
hooked over the summer by cooking up a season-ending cliffhanger. In the finale, which
epitomized
L.A. Times
TV critic Howard Rosenberg’s description of
Dallas
as “terrific trash,” Sue Ellen escaped from the loony bin, narrowly survived a car
wreck that left her in a coma, and gave birth to her baby prematurely. Bobby and J.R.
bonded in the hospital over the tragedy. Ratings soared.

This was good television, but what went on behind the scenes was even better. None
of us could ever forget shooting that scene in Sue Ellen’s hospital room. As Bobby
and I gazed down at my comatose wife, who was connected to numerous life-supporting
tubes, I talked about how beautiful she was, even in the dark light of tragedy. Bobby
put his arm around me. It was a rare and touching moment of brotherly affection. The
crew was enthralled, the set perfectly still. Everybody knew it was one of those special
moments.

“Shall we sing the old song we sang when we were boys?” Patrick asked.

“Yeah, that’d be nice,” I said.

Then we started:

“Do your balls hang low? Do they swing to and fro? Do they itch like a bitch when
you drag ’em in a ditch? Can you throw them over your shoulder like a Continental
soldier? Do your balls hang low?”

By the time we finished, there wasn’t a dry eye on the set. Of course, the tears were
from laughter.

I thought Linda was going to kill us.

A
s the second full season began, I didn’t have to worry about success going to my head,
but my stomach was another matter. Over the past year, I’d gained close to thirty
pounds by indulging in the good life, and when we went back to work none of my clothes
fit. On New Year’s, Maj and I went on the Optifast diet. We also jogged two miles
daily. Within two months, I’d dropped thirty-five pounds. Maj took off twenty-seven.
I felt and looked the best I had since
Jeannie.

My timing couldn’t have been better, as my life was about to take on a whole new shape.
Though we’d almost finished shooting for the year, CBS made a last-minute request
for four additional episodes, something practically unheard of so late in the year.
But
Dallas
was the sixth-highest-rated show. The network wanted to keep up the momentum and
take advantage of more advertising income.

Mr. Katzman and his writing staff plotted out the new shows, and as the story goes,
when they began discussing the cliffhanger, now a part of the
Dallas
formula, someone said, “Why don’t we just shoot the bastard?”

The buildup was vintage J.R. Besides nearly losing the Ewing fortune and cheating
family and friends with bogus Asian oil leases, he’d driven Bobby from Southfork,
humiliated Pamela, planned to send Sue Ellen back to the nuthouse (upon discovering
this she quietly slipped a pearl-handled pistol into her purse), and accused his ex-mistress
and sister-in-law, Kristin, of prostitution (after which she hissed, “I’ll kill him”).
In other words, J.R. had been very busy.

Yet in the final episode, J.R. ended up very much alone, collapsed on the floor of
his office after being shot by an unseen assailant.

That show aired on March 21, 1980. I watched at home as I did every episode. By morning,
though, it was clear this one wasn’t like any of the others.
Dallas
had been seen by nearly fifty million people in the U.S., more than any show except
the Super Bowl.
Dallas
finished number one in the ratings for the first time. Total viewership was estimated
at 300 million in fifty-seven countries around the world. It was a phenomenon, bigger
than anyone ever imagined. Ronald Reagan was campaigning against Jimmy Carter, American
hostages were being held in Iran, Polish shipyard workers were on strike, and all
anyone wanted to know was, who shot J.R.?

My mother quipped, “How could I have raised such a rotten kid?”

*   *   *

I also realized it was the opportunity of a lifetime. As the world asked who shot
J.R., I posed my own question—was the network willing to pay me more money to come
back for the next season? Overnight, it seemed, J.R. was everywhere. There were J.R.
T-shirts, coffee mugs, bumper stickers, and buttons. J.R. hats were for sale. An English
rock group scored a hit with the single “I Love J.R.” and the flip side “I Hate J.R.”
I knew CBS and Lorimar were making a mint. Everyone was making a windfall from J.R.
except me.

As I saw it, it was also my turn to cash in. I had my agents tell Lorimar that I wanted
to renegotiate my contract or else I was walking away from the show.

This was a gamble—the gamble of my life.

Friends called asking if I’d lost my mind. They warned that if I didn’t pull it off,
I’d never work in Hollywood again. My mother was incensed. To her a contract was sacred.
“You don’t go back on a contract,” she scolded. But because of that ethic, which I’d
observed, she’d made hundreds of dollars on the stage while the producers of hits
like
South Pacific
and
The Sound of Music
had made millions.

“I know the risks I’m taking,” I said.

And they were big. I was almost fifty, and I wanted to make the move from hired hand
to participant. If I blew it, I figured I could survive for a couple years. In reality,
they easily could’ve written me out of the show. J.R. could’e been killed. The show
would’ve survived. It was hot. But I knew Katzman’s sensibility. He was too intelligent
to let J.R. die. Even as the studio played hardball by floating rumors about possible
new J.R.’s, I believed everything would work out.

In a way, it already had. I had a house, a wife I loved, great children. Everything
I’d ever wanted.

What was I really asking for? CBS and Lorimar were making more money than they’d ever
ever expected. Many many millions more. I just wanted what was fair.

Which was the instructions I gave to my agents. I let them handle the negotiations
and then turned to my publicist, Richard Grant, for a strategy on how to handle myself
and use public opinion to my advantage. Good PR would make me more important, and
Richard knew how to execute that.

He knew a lot more than that. He understood what was important to build a career and
put himself between me and the stuff that wasn’t necessary, the thousands who phoned
daily with interview requests ranging from what J.R. would do if he were president
to would Larry/J.R. endorse a new line of cat food. He knew how to capitalize on the
J.R. mystique. He was brilliant.

“First you need to leave the country,” he said. “This is bigger than anyone at CBS
or Lorimar can comprehend. We’re talking the world.
Then, wherever you go, you must be highly visible. We want them to see the whole
world is obsessed with J.R. Finally, I will be the only person who will know how to
get in touch with you. Not your agents or lawyers. It all goes through me.”

I made only one addition to the plan. Before Maj and I left, I sent Richard, my agents,
and my lawyer white Stetson cowboy hats. I stipulated that they wear them anytime
they went in to CBS. As I reminded them, the good guys always wore white hats.

*   *   *

When negotiations began, in June, Maj and I flew to London and rented an apartment
near our friend Henri Kleiman’s place. Nobody other than Henri and Richard knew where
we had holed up. But except for that bit of privacy, I attempted to make my whereabouts
as public as possible by partying at Annabel’s, the exclusive nightclub, creating
photo ops with female police officers, and shopping at Harrods. I didn’t have any
problem attracting attention.

Great Britain—no, the entire U.K.—was obsessed by
Dallas.
The BBC figured one out of three Britons watched the show, and when reruns began
after the cliffhanger, the
Daily Express
ran a humorous editorial warning, “Withdrawal symptoms are bound to set in to such
an extent that Britain could clearly be facing its darkest hour.” The same was true
in Greece, France, Germany, Italy, Turkey, countries as unlikely as Zambia and Zimbabwe,
and even the Eastern bloc countries, like Poland and Hungary. Only the Soviet Union
kept the show out, yet tapes were still smuggled in.

“Keep going out,” Richard advised when I checked in with him, as I did my agents,
every day. “Every photo and bit of TV footage shows up over here, and the more they
see, the sooner they’ll start to see this is an international phenomenon.”