Hello Darlin' (29 page)

“Yeah, that’s it.”

“Oh, it came with the house,” he said.

Actually, it came from starring on a series that ran on prime time longer than any
other except for
Gunsmoke
(and most of them were half-hour shows). If not for
Dallas,
Patrick wouldn’t have purchased a spectacular fishing camp and I wouldn’t have been
building a magnificent mountaintop villa in Ojai, seventy miles outside of L.A. Neither
of us would’ve been wealthy beyond our dreams. Neither of us would’ve had the roles
of a lifetime. Neither of us would’ve had the fun or the friendships. But after thirteen
years and 356 episodes,
Dallas
came to an end. Only three of us were left from the original cast: Patrick, Ken Kercheval,
and me.

Poor old J.R. had proven his mettle when it came to scandal, bribery, blackmail, philandering,
and family infighting, but poor ratings were beyond even his skill for manipulating
a situation to his advantage. But it was time. There wasn’t much left that the show
or J.R. hadn’t done. By the time Katzman put the finishing touches to the last script,
I betcha J.R.—who everyone thought was so smart—had lost Ewing Oil and about a billion
dollars.

The final episode, a two-hour special, provided a fitting send-off. J.R. had lost
everything important to him—Ewing Oil, Southfork, his family and friends. Drunk and
angry, he went upstairs and pulled out an old Colt Peacemaker that had once belonged
to his daddy. He was about to contemplate blowing himself to smithereens when a guardian
angel, played by my friend Joel Grey, showed him what life
at Southfork would’ve been like if he’d never existed. We filmed the last scene February
8, 1991, and it was a bittersweet farewell.

At the end-of-season wrap party at the Marina Yacht Club in Marina del Rey, all of
us sensed the show probably wouldn’t be back. There hadn’t been an official announcement
by the network. But everyone talked about it. Patrick and I didn’t expect to be back.
Others, not understanding the economics behind such decisions, hoped for the best,
pointing out that our ratings were still better than at least half the shows on the
air. Only Katzman, in a reserved mood all night, knew the reality but he didn’t want
to tell anyone the news and ruin the party.

Three days later Leonard called and filled me in. He said it almost like it was an
afterthought. By the way, Larry, we’ve been canceled.

“Well, there you go,” I said.

It was neither a whimper nor a bang. Just the end of a natural life span. Reagan left
office, so did J.R. He had a good run. But there was a bright side. A few days after
Katzman had given me the official word, Maj and I attended the screening of a movie
and then went to a party afterward. Normally I would’ve turned in early because I
had to wake up at 5
A.M.
But no more. As I told Maj, I was unemployed. I could party till the sun came up
if I felt like it.

O
ne day long after the last episode of
Dallas
had been filmed, I was showing a friend around Malibu. The beach community’s signature
was still its surfers, but it had otherwise gone through dramatic changes over the
twenty-five years we’d lived there. Property prices had increased sixtyfold. Shacks
that had once lined the beach had been replaced by multimillion-dollar architectural
masterpieces. All the old people had either died out or sold out.

Maj and I weren’t planning to sell out, but we were building our dream house on top
of a twenty-five-hundred-foot-high mountain overlooking the ocean and Oxnard plain.
I had no complaints. At sixty, I was having too much fun traveling between our other
homes, in New York and Santa Fe, fishing, hunting, or just tooling around behind the
wheel of my Rolls-Royce or on my Harley-Davidson.

One day I got a call from Linda Gray, who said she’d been approached to do the play
Love Letters
at the Cannon Theater in Beverly Hills. She asked if I’d like to do it with her.
I said, “Go back onstage! There’s no way in the world you’re going to get me to go
back onstage. It’s too much work.”

“Oh come, Larry,” she said. “You’ll love being in front of an audience again.”

“As you know, Linda, I adore you,” I said, “but you can just forget it.”

Three days later we started rehearsals, and a week after that we opened to a sellout
crowd. Every night for the next two weeks also sold out, with standing ovations. Linda
was right as usual. I loved it.

Then we accepted an offer to do the play at the English-speaking theater in Vienna,
Austria. Opening night was a resounding success. The audience stood and cheered through
five-minute curtain calls. The line of people waiting outside for us to sign their
programs was literally a block long. Tables were set up in the stage door alley and
police had to be brought in to keep the queue in order. It took two hours to take
pictures and sign autographs.

At a party afterward, we were eating dinner with the company, friends, and everyone
involved, and the theater manager gave Linda and me a toast, declaring, “I’m so thrilled
by the quality and success of the show, if my life ended tonight I’d die happy.”

The next morning his wife called to say that he’d passed away in his sleep. Thinking
back to his toast, Maj and I and Linda were dumbstruck. It was very strange. The mood
for the second performance was somber at the beginning of the show, but at the end
we still got our standing ovation. From this, we got offers to tour Switzerland and
Germany. A few months later, we returned to Switzerland, where we continued to be
a success. But as soon as we crossed into Germany, it turned into a disaster.

The promoter’s idea of publicity was a small, half-inch squib in the general entertainment
paper. If you blinked, you missed the notice. There were very few press interviews
and practically no radio or TV interviews. We played Stuttgart in a twenty-five-hundred-seat
auditorium with eighteen people present—two in the balcony, four in the mezzanine,
and the rest scattered throughout the orchestra. One of them was Maj, who laughed
alone at all the right places and stood and clapped at the end.

That turned out to be the model for the rest of the tour.

At first it was funny, and then less amusing, and then totally demoralizing. Then
it became funny again when we realized there was nothing we could do to change the
situation. We were playing in English to a German audience in working-class communities
where most of the playgoers were Turkish. The language barrier itself was probably
insurmountable. The people who did buy tickets were very enthusiastic, but it was
hard to tell because their laughter took a while to travel from the cheap seats to
the stage.

There was an upside—we didn’t have to spend two hours afterward signing autographs.
To say the least, it was a humbling experience that brought home the vagaries of an
actor’s life, from the pinnacle of international stardom to the tortured obscurity
of a provincial actor. Miss Gray and I had carved a close friendship in our thirteen
years on
Dallas,
but there’s nothing like sharing a disaster to deepen those bonds.

We performed
Love Letters
one more time, for a week at the Rubicon Theatre in Ventura, California, and got
back our full houses and standing ovations, so I know we didn’t cause the debacle.
However, let me say this: if Linda ever wanted me to play Hamburg with her again,
I’d be right there with her.

Carroll O’Connor had seen us do
Love Letters
at the Cannon Theater and absolutely loved it. He came backstage with tears in his
eyes. He understood every nuance of the play. As we talked, he asked if I wanted to
direct
In the Heat of the Night,
his successful CBS series. He had made the transition from Archie Bunker to a Southern
sheriff, an almost impossible feat given the indelible impression he’d made on audiences
as Archie. But that he did it was a tribute to his enormous talent as an actor.

I directed several of the one-hour shows, plus one of
Heat
’s two-hour movies-of-the-week at the end of its run. In fact, as it would turn out,
I was in Georgia in early 1992 directing Carroll when I first noticed my energy was
kind of low. I didn’t think much of it until
months later. Nor did Maj, who attributed my sluggishness to having put on a few
extra pounds. So I instructed my personal trainer, Taylor Obre, my Princess of Pain,
to work me out a little harder. By May I’d dropped a few pounds and felt better.

But one day during my workout, Taylor and I got into a conversation about medicine
and health-related topics.

“Have you had a checkup recently?” she asked.

“No, not for at least a year, and maybe longer.”

Taylor shook her head disapprovingly and wrote down the name of her internist. Several
days later I watched Dr. Paul Rudnick draw what looked like two gallons of blood from
my arm. He also took a chest X ray, gave me an EKG, and prodded the middle regions
of my body. It was the most thorough medical exam I’d had in my life. You would’ve
thought he was looking for a loophole that would get me out of the draft all over
again.

On June 3, shortly before Maj and I sat down for dinner, Dr. Rudnick called. He said
results from my blood workup were back and they showed a life-threatening situation.
I had no idea what he was talking about. I’d worked out early that day. I felt great.
But here he was, telling me I was sick. The test results indicated I had cirrhosis
of the liver. He said, “If you keep drinking, I don’t think you’ll be around in six
months. If you quit, you have a chance of living a normal life.”

At the time of the call, I was holding a glass filled with vodka and orange juice.
I usually had a few before dinner, then switched to wine.

I immediately put the drink down the drain and checked my watch. It was 6:15
P.M.,
June 3, 1992.

That was when I quit drinking.

Despite a report in one of the tabloids that I was sick, I never felt ill. I wouldn’t
even have gone to the doctor if it hadn’t been for Taylor. Though I’d averaged about
four bottles of champagne a day for the past fifteen years, I never got drunk. I drank
just enough to keep that click going, that soft, comforting high that playwright Tennessee
Williams wrote about in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

But I gave it up that moment without any problem. It was the same way I’d quit smoking
thirty years earlier. I’m lucky. I seem to have the kind of self-control that allows
me to stop without suffering withdrawals, DT shakes, falling-down episodes, headaches,
or any of the other side effects of such a drastic change in lifestyle.

A second, more thorough exam by Dr. John Vierling, medical director of the Liver Transplant
Program at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, confirmed my liver’s tissue was scarred and
deteriorating. He described it as a textbook case of advanced cirrhosis, the eighth-leading
cause of death from disease in the United States. According to Dr. Vierling, I fortunately
wasn’t in need of a transplant, not yet anyway, but my blood required testing every
three months to check for tumors, which commonly grew in diseased livers. Otherwise,
I could do as I pleased.

And I did. I went with Peter Fonda and Willie G. Davidson, the grandson of Harley
Davidson, on our long-planned ride to Sturgis, South Dakota, the biggest motorcycle
rally in the world. It meant missing a wedding in New York, which Maj and Linda Gray
went to without me. Our Malibu neighbor Burgess Meredith was also invited. We happened
to be on speaking terms at that time. Actually, he typically called Maj three times
a day for advice. He called so often that he referred to her as his “rent-a-wife.”

Anyway, Burgess was staying at the Ritz-Carlton, next door to our New York apartment.
On the night before the wedding, they were all at a party at “21,” where Burgess gave
the bride and groom his private stash of Petrus wine, which he conveniently stored
at “21,” The next morning the bride and groom called up Maj and asked her to check
in on Burgess, who they said had had an accident after the party. When Maj got there
Burgess was sitting on his bed in his Skivvies, being checked out by paramedics who
had been called by the hotel’s doctor. An ambulance was on its way. Burgess didn’t
seem too upset. When he saw Maj, he nonchalantly said, “Oh hi, what are you doing
here?”

“Going to the hospital with you,” Maj said calmly.

“Would you grab my address book and medicines?” he asked as he was being loaded on
the gurney.

The ambulance took them to the hospital. Several hours later, the doctor found Maj
and asked how well she knew Mr. Meredith.

“Thirty-five or forty years,” Maj said.

The doctor was puzzled by the bruises he’d found on Burgess.

“What do you think is wrong with him?” he asked Maj.

There was a rumor going around that Sharon Stone had taken Burgess back to the hotel
after the party and he’d made a pass at her and fallen down the stairs. But Maj didn’t
tell that to the doctor. She simply said, “I think he suffered an attack of Petrus,”
and let the doctor figure that out by himself.

A few weeks later, Burgess came back to Malibu and thanked Maj for saving his life.
He sent over a tree stump that had been painted with beautiful tulips by our mutual
friend Margie Adleman. And Burgess regarded us as the best of friends again—at least
for a while.

*   *   *

Over the next two years, I didn’t have any major complications or complaints. I kept
up my workouts with Taylor and stayed in pretty good condition, except I noticed a
steady loss of energy. I also had persistent nosebleeds, which I ignored, even though
later on I’d learn they were signs of liver malfunction.

The really big event in our lives was moving into our home in Ojai. It had taken five
years to build. Maj had designed it and supervised every facet of construction. She
made daily trips from Malibu to Ojai, 170 miles round trip, five days a week. Her
attention to detail and decorating, which included importing hundred-year-old roof
tiles from Provence, France, ensured that the home that materialized lived up to her
vision, which it has and beyond.