Hello Darlin' (27 page)

One year I got so fed up I asked the Lorimar honchos for my own motor home on the
set, one of those luxury palaces on wheels outfitted with a bedroom, kitchen, phone,
radio, TV, and various items that would make it a comfortable retreat. They said no,
arguing if they gave one to me, they’d have to give one to all the principals at a
cost they estimated at $5 million. They also said paying the Teamsters would be about
another $1 million a year. Seeing their point, I made a point of my own.

“I’ll tell you what,” I said. “Give me fifty thousand dollars a year and I won’t ask
for an RV.”

Done deal. They thought they’d gotten away with a big savings, but the series lasted
another ten years, making me half a million dollars for just keeping my mouth closed.
I laughed about it every year.

But that didn’t solve another problem we had. The bathrooms. I don’t know about the
women’s, but the men’s room was an absolute pit. For the first five years, we didn’t
even have hot water. Then L.A. health officials forced that issue as well as a reconfiguration
of the toilets to make room for a handicapped stall.

That made the stalls so narrow it was impossible to shut the door without banging
your knees. A situation that called for comfort was untenable, so we used the handicapped
stall. No one who needed it was ever there. Then one day I was sitting on the toilet
when I was interrupted by a sharp bang on the door, followed by a contemptuous voice
demanding to know, “Who’s in there?”

I replied that I was.

“Who are you?”

Not recognizing the questioner’s voice, I said it was none of his business.

“Well, what are you doing?”

I was doing what people do when they sit on the toilet, I explained.

“Don’t you know this is for handicapped people?” he asked.

“Yes, I do.”

“I’m handicapped. I’m in a wheelchair, and I need to get in there right away.”

“I’m really sorry,” I said. “But I’m right in the middle of what I’m doing, so you’re
going to have to wait.”

He didn’t care.

“I’m going to call security,” he said.

“Fine,” I said.

It wasn’t like I tried to take a long time, and when I finished, I opened the door
and saw an incredibly frustrated, pissed-off guy in a wheelchair was parked directly
outside. He was plainly handicapped. He was also incredibly angry. Somehow he had
no idea who I was and told me that security was on their way.

I started to walk out.

“Hey, asshole,” he said, “what’s your name?”

“Patrick Duffy,” I replied. “And go fuck yourself.”

O
n set and off, Patrick Duffy was the perfect companion for me. He was almost as good
looking as me, almost as talented, almost as funny, and almost as smart. We were kindred
spirits who liked to hunt, fish, and play practical jokes. Early in the show, David
Wayne and I took him salmon fishing in Vancouver. On the plane we sat in first class
telling fishing stories while being served drinks and hors d’oeuvres. By Patrick’s
eighth vodka, I looked at David and said, “I didn’t know this guy was such a drinker.”

“Yeah, he’s really tossing ’em back,” David agreed.

Indeed, Patrick got drunker and drunker. Before landing, he made a pass at the flight
attendant. At that point, I thought his joking had crossed the line from funny to
obnoxious. Even after I said something to him, Patrick kept slugging back the drinks.
David and I worried how we were going to get him through customs. Once the plane landed,
though, Patrick changed. All of a sudden he was perfectly sober. Grinning, he confessed
that he’d enlisted the flight attendant’s aid and had her fill his vodka bottles with
water.

Patrick was also very spiritual. Introduced to Buddhism by his
wife, Carlyn, he would rise at 4
A.M.
to chant for an hour and chanted for another hour at night with Carlyn and their
children. One day I asked what he chanted for. Patrick cocked his head to the side
and smiled. “Money.”

“No shit?” I said.

“It’s working, ain’t it?”

At the end of the 1984 season, Patrick left the show. At thirty-seven, he wanted to
see if he could make it even bigger in movies. He also had a sense of being underappreciated.
After talking it over with his wife, he broke the news to me. I told him that he was
making a mistake and gave him the same lecture Hayden Rorke had given me almost twenty
years earlier when I wanted to leave
I Dream of Jeannie.
I said if you leave a show when it’s number one, people will think you’re nuts.

Patrick left anyway. In the finale of the 1984 season, Bobby saved his wife, Pamela,
from being run down by her crazy half sister, but was struck himself. He died in the
hospital a few hours later. Though the series was nudged out of first place in the
overall ratings by
Dynasty,
we continued our roll.

But the next year was dismal for both the show and me. Not only did Patrick leave,
Leonard Katzman resigned too, a result of his constant clashes with the other executive
producer, who took over. Under his guidance, our happy family fell apart. The new
guy in charge was the antithesis of Leonard. He wasn’t a creative person. All he created
was anxiety. He berated line people, pinched pennies, and undermined eight years of
success by trying to inject the show with glitz. It wasn’t
Dallas.

One day I received an audiotape from Patrick that reminded me just how grim the situation
had become. I popped it into my tape player. On it, Bobby was being buried, and Patrick
was saying, “Larry, help! I’m six feet under. Let me out! Let me come back. Please!
Let me come back. I’m sorry. I made a mistake.”

It was a joke. When Patrick left, he had no intention of ever coming
back. He said he was making more money than he had on the show. I was on my own,
and it forced me into a confrontation, something I hate. But I told Lorimar chief
Lee Rich that he had to replace the producer. His reply was an impossibly frustrating
look that said, “You’re an actor. What do you know about this stuff?”

I said he could take $1 million out of my salary and give it to him if he’d leave.
Lee didn’t pay attention. So I said, okay, make it $2 million, just get rid of him.
He still refused. I had one more meeting, and there I made my final proposal. The
producer had to go or I wasn’t coming back the next season.

“You’re going to walk away from that kind of money?” he asked.

“If he stays there won’t be any money, because there won’t be any show,” I said.

Television executives aren’t stupid. At the end of the day, they make decisions based
solely on numbers. They look at ratings and profits. When they studied
Dallas
’s slumping ratings and considered the fate of the series without Patrick
and
me, they saw the producer might be more costly than imagined, and soon he resigned
for reasons he said were personal.

Katzman signed back on. Both of us knew that if
Dallas
was going to come back, we needed Patrick. We immediately started plotting to bring
him back. First, I called Patrick and had a long talk, basically explaining that no
matter the circumstances of his departure, we could write him back into the show.
Forget being rational. We’d find a way. Money was no problem either. If he wanted
a raise, which he did, we’d make sure he got it.

“How’d it go?” Katzman asked.

“I think he realizes it’s cold out there,” I said.

Before the season ended, Patrick worked out terms that brought him back. Then I had
him out to the house for a celebratory afternoon. After a long, relaxing Jacuzzi,
we went to our local watering hole for lunch, the Baja Cantina. On the way, Patrick
reminded me, as Katzman regularly did too, that his return was top secret. Katzman
hadn’t even worked out the story line introducing his return in the season’s finale.
Fine, I understood. But when the waitress came to take our lunch order, she said,
“Hi, Patrick. I hear you’re back on
Dallas.”
Our jaws hit the table. We were shocked.

“Where’d you hear that?” Patrick asked.

“On the radio as I came into work,” the girl chirped.

It shows you how tough it is to keep a secret in Hollywood.

*   *   *

A good attitude is vital to a healthy, happy life, and my attitude improved simply
by watching the 1985 season’s cliffhanger when Pamela woke from a dream and saw her
dead husband, Bobby, step from the shower and say, “Good morning.” Ratings rose. Viewers
were confused, amazed, and thrilled. The buzz returned. And most important, my best
friend was back on the show.

When the next season premiered, Patrick’s resurrection was explained by casting the
entire previous year as a nightmare, which it had been for us. When the three of us
reunited in Dallas to start shooting, the old zest returned as if on cue. As did the
jokes and partying. While on location, Maj and I, Linda, Barbara, and Priscilla Presley
stayed at Caroline Hunt’s luxurious Mansion on Turtle Creek Hotel, which is one of
the three best hotels I’ve ever been in in my life (the other two are the Lanesborough
in London, which Caroline’s company also manages, and the Oriental in Bangkok). The
rooms are gorgeous, the service is unparalleled, and the food superb. My suite alone
set the production company back $21,000 a month.

I kept my room stocked with champagne. I usually had a five-pound tin of caviar, which
I acquired in bulk from a Russian film director friend in exchange for VCRs and videotapes
of
Dallas
that he dispersed in the Soviet Union. If people in the Soviet Union enjoyed watching
our show as much as Linda, Sheree Wilson, Priscilla, Barbara, and Maj and I enjoyed
eating beluga, then the commies were in trouble.

We were still in Texas, though. That was its own reality. One day I was having lunch
at the Mansion when I was spotted by an old lady. I felt like a deer caught in headlights
the moment I saw the spark of recognition in her eyes. She struggled up from her chair,
grabbed her walker, and started across the room. It must’ve taken her three minutes
to inch across the dining room. “Here comes an old lady wanting my autograph,” I said
to Maj.

As soon as she got next to me, she said, “Take this, you rascal,” and then hit me
upside the head with her handbag and knocked me right out of my chair. I literally
saw stars. Then she chuckled a tad remorsefully. “Oh my goodness, Mr. Hagman, I’m
so sorry My husband is dead, and before he died, he gave me a thirty-eight revolver.
I always carry it with me and I forgot it was in my handbag.”

“That’s all right, ma’am,” I said, rubbing the bump that had risen on the side of
my head.

“I’m really sorry. But you are such a rascal.”

Speaking of pistols, Nancy Hammond, a wonderful woman we became friendly with in Dallas,
owned the penthouse in the towers at the Mansion. She and her husband Jake were wealthier
than some countries, but nothing thrilled Nancy like a good bargain. One day she told
us about how she drove her Rolls-Royce to Costco to pick up some tires that were on
sale. She bought the tires and ten cases of Dom Pérignon, arranged for them to be
delivered to her apartment, and walked back to her car.

“And then you know what happened, Larry?” she said. “I got there and there were two
men sitting in my car.”

“Really?”

“Yes,” she said. “I walked over and pulled out my pearl-handled revolver—the one Jake
gave me—and I said, ‘You bastards, get out of my car or I’ll blow your heads off!’
They ran across the parking lot. Then I put the key in the ignition and do you know
what? It wasn’t my car.”

Another time Maj and I were having lunch with Nancy at the
Ritz-Carlton in Washington, D.C. She walked in and, after we kissed and hugged, asked
if I wanted to see her new diamond ring. It was beautiful and enormous. But I couldn’t
help notice something was wrong with one of her fingers. I asked what had happened.

“I was making some cheese dip in the Cuisinart and I stuck my finger in too far,”
she explained. “It took the finger right off. Zip. Right like that. But Jake said,
‘Don’t worry about it, honey. I’ll buy you a knuckle-to-knuckle diamond and we’ll
call it the ‘Cuisinart Diamond.’”

And he did. Boy did he.

Then she held her hand up to show me her prosthetic finger.

“I have to keep having to send it back because the older I get, the more wrinkled
I get, and the damn finger doesn’t wrinkle at all.”

Then she removed her finger and handed it to me.

“Take a look, Larry.”

I couldn’t think of anything to do with her finger. But just then the waiter served
my Bloody Mary, so I stirred it with Nancy’s finger.

“That’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen anybody do,” she said, bursting out
in laughter. “That’s why I love you.”

*   *   *

Only one dark cloud marred the 1985-86 season. The week before Thanksgiving, Patrick’s
parents were shot to death at their bar in Boulder. Two nineteen-year-old guys, who’d
been looking for money, were arrested later the same day, the murder weapon, a shotgun,
still on them. Patrick’s belief in the continuum of life helped him handle the tragic
news better than the rest of us on the set that day. He got to Montana aboard Lorimar
chairman Merv Adelson’s private jet and buried his mom and dad in a Buddhist cemetery
in Japan.

In 1987, I knew the series had begun a slow curve downward. Victoria left, with Pamela
dying in a fiery car crash. She was at an age where the move made sense, and I knew
better than to try talking her out of it. Dack Rambo, who spent two seasons playing
J.R.’s cousin,
was also written out of the show. Openly bisexual and outspoken about having AIDS,
Dack accused me of getting rid of him because I was homophobic. Until then, I liked
Dack, but his charge was so farfetched it wasn’t worth arguing in the press.

My philosophy about people on the show was made clear years earlier when we had problems
with one of the actresses showing up chronically late. It screwed up everyone’s schedule,
from hair to makeup, which created tension, delayed production, cost money, and so
on. None of which did anyone any good. So I asked Leonard to change her call time
to 4
A.M.
from 6. She quickly got the point. In show business you can be a drunk, a drug addict,
or psychologically screwed up, but you cannot be late. It’s the only thing you can’t
be.