Hello Darlin' (26 page)

Cut to the theater. Midway through the show, Joel announced that he had some special
guests in the audience. First, he introduced me, “my dear friend Larry Hagman, who
plays J.R. Ewing on the number-one-rated show,
Dallas
.” The crowd gave me an enthusiastic ovation. Then Joel introduced my mother, or,
as he said, “a woman who’s better known as Peter Pan!”

As she rose and waved, people went nuts. They stood, with some climbing on their chairs
for a better look, and clapped so long the house lights went up. Despite Mother’s
efforts to quiet the house, the applause wouldn’t quit. It was literally a showstopper.

Finally, after blowing kisses to all sides, she sat down. Then I felt a tap on my
knee. There was Mother, leaning toward me. With a twinkle in her eye, she said, “And
that’s show business too, baby!”

T
he more successful
Dallas
became, the more fun I had, and there was no end to the enticements that came my
way. There were opportunities for commercials, endorsements, travel, and every other
imaginable opportunity. I frequently said no. Specifically, I’m thinking of a night
when Patrick and I were having a beer at a cowboy bar and I was approached by a twenty-something
knockout who asked if I wanted a Texas sandwich. I asked her what she meant by a Texas
sandwich.

“Me, you, and my sister,” she said.

When I still said no thanks, she said, “Well, okay, you want a Bud Lite?”

J.R. wouldn’t have hesitated, but that was him. I knew in general it was best to say
no and avoid potential trouble. Like the time I opened a Western store in Oklahoma
City. I flew there, signed autographs, and stumbled back into my hotel about 1
A.M.
My buddy, stand-in, and bodyguard, Tim O’Connor, and I had a two-story apartment
in the motel. After saying good night to Tim, I went upstairs and there was a drop-dead
gorgeous thirty-something blonde in my bed. She’d
turned the lights low and a bottle of Dom Pérignon was open on the side table.

“Hi, J.R.,” she purred. “My husband’s away for the weekend and I thought we could
get to know each other.”

What a waste, I thought. What bad timing. I sat down and told her how much I appreciated
her offer, but she’d missed my window of availability by thirty years. Besides, I
had to get up early in the morning to go to church. Still, we had a glass of champagne
before Tim made sure that she left without a story to tell … or sell.

Sex wasn’t the only thing I said no to. Tobacco was also high on my list of forbiddens.
For much of the 1980s, as America was accepting the deadly truth about cigarettes,
I was the most famous antismoker. Instead of trying to work with the dozens of charities
that asked for some of my time, my publicist, Richard, suggested I focus on one thing,
so I chose the American Cancer Society. Nationally, I helped launch their Great American
Smokeout Campaign. So did Mother and my daughter. Closer to home, I waged a protest
when a billboard for Marlboro cigarettes went up behind my house along Pacific Coast
Highway. For ten years, I took the work seriously and I think I made a difference.

But my passion for getting people to quit killing themselves didn’t always make me
popular on the
Dallas
set, especially with Barbara Bel Geddes, who smoked in the makeup room every morning.
It was stinking up the place and was just plain unhealthy for everybody in the room.

“So,” she said.

“So cut it out, please,” I said.

She kept on smoking.

After she had a heart attack, her heart surgeon told her that she had to quit or die.
She quit.

About a third of the show’s cast and crew also smoked, including Mr. Katzman. If they
lit up around me, I’d pull out my pocket-sized portable fan and blow the smoke back
toward them. All that second-hand
cigarette smoke took a toll on my voice. Finally one afternoon, my throat hurt so
much I was forced to deliver an ultimatum. If we allowed smoking on the set, then
I wanted to stop production for ten minutes every hour to air out the soundstage by
opening the giant doors.

“No way,” one of the producers said. “You’re talking about stopping work for at least
eighty minutes a day. That’ll cost us between ten and twenty thousand dollars a day.
Times five days a week. That’s a hundred grand a week. Every week. Larry, you’re out
of your mind!”

“Then why don’t we just ban smoking on the set?” I suggested.

“We can’t ask people to stop smoking.”

“Then we’ll take a ten-minute break and ask them to go outside.”

“That’s still a hundred thousand a week downtime!” they raged.

No one took me seriously. Then one day I stopped production because my throat was
so dry and irritated. I insisted on taking a break while the soundstage was aired
out. The doors were opened, blowers brought in, and the air was cleared. Then I returned
to work. After several days of doing that, smoking on the set was banned. Yet my victory
resulted in complaints. A few guys from the crew said I was discriminating against
smokers and a couple guys on the crew threatened to quit. My response? “Good, let
’em.”

Jim Davis was my toughest case. I got him to temporarily quit his five-pack-a-day
habit after I grew tired of hearing him clear his throat before every take. The disgusting
noise he made sounded like
goomba,
which is how we fondly referred to him. Goomba. But he started up again after being
diagnosed with inoperable cancer. None of us including Jim himself knew he was sick
until the summer of 1980.

We were shooting a scene in the woods. Fittingly, it was me, Bobby, and Daddy. The
three of us were on a hunting trip, a passion all of us shared in real life. As written,
we were supposed to be roughing it in sleeping bags by the campfire. But the day we
shot the scene, I brought a cot, an ice chest, a comfy chair, and mosquito netting—but
only for me.

“Larry, this is supposed to be roughing it,” the director said.

“This is the way J.R. roughs it,” I replied.

He acquiesced.

All of us had fun. But as the day wore on, the temperature rose and took a toll on
Jim. At first, he had difficulty remembering his lines. Then his memory left him altogether.
He didn’t know where he was. Neither was he too sure about me or Patrick. “Where the
hell are we?” he asked. Texas, I said. “What the hell are we doing here?” The second
time it happened Patrick and I took him aside and asked questions to test his memory.
Do you know your name? “Jim.” Do you know where you are? “No.” Do you know you’re
making a television series right now? “A television series? I’m working?”

The moment Mr. Katzman realized the problem he stopped shooting and sent us back in
a car. Initially we thought he had heatstroke, but soon Jim broke the sad news that
doctors had found cancer. When I saw him with a cigarette, he said he’d started smoking
again, explaining, “Why the hell not?” Despite aggressive chemotherapy, which made
him so weak he couldn’t get up from a chair without assistance and which caused his
hair to fall out, Jim worked until a month before he died, in 1981.

I directed his final episode, which was terribly sad because all of us knew he was
in his last days. We left on hiatus, wondering if we’d see him again. Maj and I were
touring the Scottish countryside when Jim passed away. I heard the news from a Scottish
reporter from a local paper who was waiting for me to walk downstairs at the quaint
inn where we were staying.

“Jock died this morning,” he said. “How do you feel about it?”

I felt sad, I said, but I’d been expecting the inevitable.

“But aren’t you upset?” he asked.

“Yes, definitely,” I said—“but only because of the way you broke the news to me.”

I sent a wreath to the funeral that said, “Good-bye, Goomba.” Of course, I still see
him every day. The first thing you see when you enter
my home is the oil painting of Jim that hung in the living room at Southfork.

*   *   *

In 1981,
Dallas
hit number one. So much energy went into the show, but real life didn’t stop for
any of us. Whether it was Linda’s divorce, Victoria’s breakup with Andy Gibb, or Charlene
giving birth, we all went through something. Including me. I was hit hard when I got
word that my mother had been in a horrific car accident that left one friend dead
and another critically injured.

It was the Sunday of Labor Day weekend in San Francisco. She was with Ben Washer,
her dear friend Janet Gaynor, and Janet’s husband, producer Paul Gregory. The four
of them were on their way to dinner in Chinatown when their cab was struck by a van
that ran a red light. The van’s driver was drunk. Ben died instantly. Janet was critically
injured. Paul escaped with broken ribs and minor kidney damage. Mother, unable to
remember anything about the crash, suffered two broken ribs, a broken pelvis, and
severe heartache over Ben.

Maj and I flew to be with her immediately. I was distraught and more upset than I
realized. I had no patience for the reporters and paparazzi who were camped outside
San Francisco General Hospital, waiting for me. We decided to go through the emergency
door in the back. There was no way I wanted to give an interview or pose for pictures.
But in the hallway we ran into one guy who’d anticipated our move. He was after the
big bucks the tabloids would pay for a photo of me looking upset, and I was in the
frame of mind that gets celebrities in trouble. The more film he snapped, the closer
I got to snapping myself.

I demanded he turn over his film. When he refused, I grabbed his camera, stripped
the film out of it, and dropped the camera on the floor. He threatened to sue, but
I never heard from him again.

Mother was able to leave the hospital after nine days. As we helped
her out of the hospital, she was complaining about having to use a “dadburn walker.”
Then we heard a noise from up above. We looked up and saw doctors and nurses hanging
out the window, crowing, mimicking Peter Pans famous cry: “Er-er-er-errrrrrrh! Good-bye,
Peter!” they called. Mother lost it. All of us did. The tears gushed out as much for
the sentiment as for knowing what could’ve been except for fate and modern medicine.

A year later Mother sang at my daughter’s wedding, and in October 1984, she did a
benefit for San Francisco General Hospitals Trauma Center, where she’d been treated.
At age seventy, she fit into the same Peter Pan costume she’d worn nearly thirty years
earlier on Broadway and soared over the audience singing, “I’ve Got to Crow.” She
also dedicated “The Way You Look Tonight” to Janet, who’d died several weeks earlier
of complications stemming from the accident.

It was a great way to say thank you.

By then, Mother and I had learned to appreciate each other in ways that had been impossible
when we were younger. In fact, her name was brought up once, maybe twice, in connection
to joining
Dallas,
but the closest she got was a press party for the show that was held at our home
in Malibu. It was a sensational party, too. CBS had brought in all the TV critics
from around the country, maybe two hundred people. Sushi, just coming into fashion,
was served by beautiful girls in kimonos. Everyone from
Dallas
was there and being interviewed in different parts of the house.

After everyone had been spoken to, the reporters converged on my mother. One young
girl gushed to Mother, “Miss Martin, what’s it like to have an icon for a son?”

My mother gazed benignly down upon her and quietly said, “My dear, my son is a star.
I am an icon.”

That’s what I loved about Mother—her truthfulness.

I was upset when Barbara Bel Geddes left the show in 1983. We had a relationship like
the one I had with Jim. No one including Barbara
ever told me that she had complaints. Afterward, I learned she felt like she was
being worked too hard and wanted more money. None of those problems was unsolvable.
I could’ve helped to work out a compromise. But Barbara was following the advice of
a business manager, one of those guys who helped her out of a job, and her departure
was a done deal by the time I heard about it.

Donna Reed was brought in to replace Barbara. I’d admired her in
From Here to Eternity
and dozens of other films, as well as
The Donna Reed Show.
If we had to replace Mama, I thought, she was an excellent choice. She definitely
brought a different take to the character. I first noticed it in her very first scene.
She’d gotten off a plane and was running up the ramp toward Bobby and me. I remember
thinking running was something Mama would never do. By this time, viewers knew the
character as well as we did, and as much as I adored Donna, she didn’t have the strength
or edge that Barbara had given Mama.

Barbara decided to return the next season. Several weeks before she made the decision,
I had lunch with her in New York and said that I wanted her back. I was unaware that
talks were already going on. Obviously, her return made me happy, but I was quite
upset at how the news reached Donna.

Donna found out she wasn’t being asked back from a French reporter as she got off
a plane in Paris. I was stunned when I heard how she’d been informed. I had no idea.
Her agent, the producers, Lorimar, CBS—no one had told her. That was cold, callous,
unthinking, and unforgivable. Nothing we said could ever have made amends to Donna,
who died of cancer two years later with her trust in the business shattered, and rightfully
so. I wish we could’ve dumped the way that was handled into what we called the Black
Hole of Calcutta.

The Black Hole of Calcutta was a passageway on the studio lot that ran from one street
to another. It was lined with tiny portable dressing rooms on wheels that had been
made in the 1930s. Despite all the hundreds of millions of dollars
Dallas
generated, we used them the entire time we shot the series. They were universally
loathed by
the cast. During the summer there was no air, and in the winter months the wind whistled
through like the North Pole.