Hello Darlin' (33 page)

I talked it over with the Uglies and they said they could make other plans and to
go for it. After I served as the grand marshal for the Swiss Love Ride on Sunday,
Maj and I flew back to L.A. on Monday. On Tuesday I met with Mike and John Travolta,
both of whom seemed happy with me. I was fitted for costumes, and the next day I began
shooting my part.

I shot for a few days and then had a week off. During that time I nearly ruined my
chance to be in the picture when I wiped out on my Harley. I was headed from my house
to the music festival in downtown Ojai. I wasn’t going more than fifteen miles per
hour down a winding mountain road. Suddenly a car came around the corner and
I thought drifted into my lane. For some idiotic reason, I hit the front brake, which
caused my Harley to go down. The eight-hundred-pound bike landed on top of me, pinning
me to the pavement.

I felt fluid dripping onto my eyes. It was a mixture of blood and gasoline leaking
from the bike. I somehow found the valve and turned off the gas. If I hadn’t been
wearing my helmet, which I always do, I would’ve been a goner. The girl driving the
car tried to lift my Harley, but it wouldn’t budge. I told her to quickly drive up
the road and get a friend of mine, John Long, who I’d just seen parking some cars
for a friend’s party. She brought him not more than five minutes later. They both
somehow got the bike off of me and Lola, John’s wife, drove me to the Ojai hospital,
where there were about six people in line at the emergency room. I waited over an
hour in terrible pain before anyone had time to look at me. If I’d had internal injuries,
I easily could have bled to death.

It turned out I had three broken ribs, which were more painful than my transplant
operation. I was afraid to cough, sneeze, and especially laugh—the pain was so intense.
When I showed up on the set of
Primary Colors
a few days later, my arm was in a sling. No one knew about the accident. Everything
had been kept out of the news. That day was one of my biggest scenes, the one when
I announced my intention to run for president in opposition to John Travolta’s character.
It was being shot at UCLA in an outdoor arena filled with three thousand extras, balloons
and streamers, cameras, and crew. My God, it couldn’t have been more crowded, and
I could barely move.

Mike was in front of a monitor, watching a replay from another scene as I hobbled
by on my way to makeup. He looked up, probably wondering who the cripple was. Then
he did one of those double takes.

“Hi. What happened to you?” he calmly asked.

“Oh, I had a little motorcycle accident,” I said blithely.

“Do you think you can do the scene today?”

“Oh yeah, absolutely,” I said cheerfully.

He paused and gave me a more careful examination.

“Are you going to wear your arm in a sling?”

“No, I can move it.”

Truthfully, I couldn’t move it worth shit. But it didn’t matter as I began to feel
the euphoria that I get right before going in front of a crowd. I asked Mike if we
could forgo rehearsal. I also asked if he’d mind not telling the audience that I was
the actor about to come out. I wanted to ride that wave of excitement they would have
when they recognized me. Mike, always ready for an idea that helped a performance,
said, “Fine by me. Let’s do it.”

With cameras rolling, I walked onstage. The audience had been told to cheer with enthusiastic
abandon, but when they recognized me they went nuts. It was my first appearance in
front of a group of people since my operation nearly a year earlier. I felt such warmth
and love. It was a sublime moment. I went through the scene, gesturing and moving
as if my banged and bruised body were thirty years younger. Of course I didn’t even
feel my broken ribs. Nothing hurts when you re in front of an audience.

S
hakespeare was right when he said all the world is a stage. He should’ve added that
all the people are playing parts. This is true wherever you go, whether it’s Hollywood,
New York, London, Paris … everywhere. But nowhere was it more evident to me than in
Romania.

We’d been asked to come to Romania to help Prince Paul, grandson of King Carol II,
raise money for children with AIDS. It doesn’t matter how busy you are, you can’t
turn down a cause like that. We went to London, then to Bucharest, where, as a video
crew documented our visit, we toured army bases and university campuses, helped the
prince announce a shipment of more than $200,000 worth of medicine, and posed for
pictures with all the local politicians. I knew there were tens of thousands of kids
with AIDS, but I never saw one.

On my first day there a man approached me on the street with tears in his eyes. With
wonderment in his voice, he said, “J.R., you have saved my country. You have saved
Romania.” He went on to explain that Nicolae Ceauşescu, the country’s terrible dictator,
had allowed
only three hours of television a day—two hours of political propaganda and one hour
of
Dallas,
to show the corruption and decadent morality of the United States.

Big
mistake! People watched
Dallas
and liked what they saw, and when they overthrew Ceauşescu, they shot him and his
wife five hundred times.

The man’s story confirmed what I’d experienced in Russia a few years before.

Over the next few days, we toured the old city of Sibiu in Transylvania, where I listened
to stories about Tepes the Impaler, who’d turned back Ottoman invaders in the mid-1400s
and filled a forest with twenty thousand Turkish and Bulgarian prisoners he’d impaled
on stakes. The history was fascinating, but we never saw his castle.

Then we went back to Bucharest. The day before we were scheduled to leave, the producer
of the video told us it was time to get his most important shot. Maj and I were eating
breakfast in our hotel room when he revealed his plan.

“Now, Mr. Hagman,” he said, “this is the scene where you come out of a doorway, tip
your hat, and say, ‘Welcome to Southfork.’”

“Southfork?” I said incredulously.

“Southfork … Romania.” He said it as if this was common knowledge. “And then we pull
back to show the Southfork ranch. Just like in
Dallas.”

It turned out there was an amusement park near Slobozia, a city in southeastern Romania
about an hour from Bucharest. The park was owned by Alexandru Ilie, a wealthy entrepreneur
who built a fortune on cheddar cheese, then built himself a colossal tourist attraction
featuring a replica of the Eiffel Tower, a zoo, monster waterfalls, and a reproduction
of Southfork smack in the center of his three-hundred-acre luxury ranch. Why Southfork?
He said that
Dallas
had become a part of people’s lives in Eastern Europe. Why not give them what they
want?

After hearing the whole story, I looked at the producer and then
turned to Maj. Suddenly I felt as if the trip might’ve been a setup. I didn’t know
what to say. Fortunately Maj did.

“No f-ing way,” she told the producer.

He looked stunned.

“What?”

“That’s an endorsement,” she said. “If Larry does the shot, we’re endorsing an amusement
park, and we’re not doing it. Larry gets paid for that.”

“But you are here—”

Maj interrupted.

“We’re here for kids with AIDS. If you’re going to do an endorsement, do it for kids
with AIDS.”

The situation got pretty tense. It turned out we hadn’t been told how much of the
trip hinged on this particular shot. Apparently there was a whole web of business
dealings and intrigue based on it. The producer looked like he was going to have a
heart attack. I urged calm and suggested that if he wanted me to endorse the amusement
park he should find a way to compensate me. It was simple.

“How much do you get for endorsements, Mr. Hagman?” he asked.

I explained that I received from $100,000 to $500,000 for endorsements in the United
States. Those figures disturbed him. Disregarding the fact that Mr. Ilie, the owner
of the amusement park, was said to be worth over $100 million, the producer said there
wasn’t that kind of money in Romania. There was no way he could raise that kind of
money in such a short time. In that case, Maj advised him to forget the shot.

He asked us to give him three hours to come up with something. Meanwhile, Maj and
I went on a tour of former Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu’s gigantic marble palace.
It was the second-largest building in the world next to the Pentagon, in Washington,
D.C. We walked around with our mouths open. The palace contained meeting halls the
size of football fields. It was impossible to reconcile
the enormity and the wealth on display there with the poverty of the people whose
blood had been spilled constructing the monstrous palace.

Halfway through the tour my cell phone rang. It was the producer. He’d found an oil
company that he said “would be positively delighted if you would make a commercial
for them.” They were also willing to pay $100,000. I said, “When?” He said, “How about
in fifteen minutes?” I said, “Done deal.”

Our limousine whisked us to a location, a very modern-looking gas station on the outskirts
of Bucharest, and I taped a commercial for Luke Oil. The whole thing took maybe an
hour. They also took stills for magazine ads. I signed the contracts, and then asked
for the money in cash. They said it was impossible to get that kind of cash in Bucharest,
which made me say to myself, There goes a hundred grand. But a week later we were
back in L.A. and my bank informed me that the funds had arrived.

Three months later, a director of the Romanian film crew who’d done the commercial
visited us in Santa Monica and showed us pictures of me in my Stetson, holding a bottle
of Luke Oil, that was displayed on a ten-story building in Bucharest. Apparently my
picture was plastered all over the country. He explained that Luke Oil was the leading
Russian oil company in Europe. It was a good omen, because my mothers nickname for
me was Luke.

*   *   *

My life has been full of good omens. I’ve been blessed with a knack for finding the
right person or getting a lucky break. Take my diabetes. Two of my neighbors in Ojai,
Rick and Virginia Loy, have two boys who are juvenile diabetics. She’s investigated
probably every treatment known to medicine to try to help her children. One of the
doctors who’s been of significant help to them is Diana Schwartzbien. I went to her,
and through her method of a low carbohydrate diet and exercise I went from taking
twenty-six units of insulin in the morning
and sixteen at night to being totally insulin free. Like with everything else, including
AA, it works only if you work at it.

Some of my endeavors haven’t been as successful. My campaign to remove the radar tower
from Sulphur Mountain is still ongoing. The tower still stands, emitting what I believe
is harmful radiation, and I’m continuing to battle the bureaucracy. I’m convinced
that one day it will be moved to a proper site. People continue to smoke, but to a
much lesser degree than twenty years ago. The government still subsidizes tobacco
while condemning it at the same time. Eventually a balance will be struck and tobacco
addiction will be added to alcohol and drug addiction and perhaps a successful treatment
will be found.

I don’t want to sound like I’m on a soapbox, but I think I’ve entered a more spiritual
stage of my life. As I grow older, I see myself in a period of giving back. The way
the world seems headed, I feel like I have to be involved with many organizations.
I am at present the National Kidney Foundation’s spokesperson for organ transplants
and also involved with Habitat for Humanity and the Solar Electric Light Fund, a nonprofit
group that brings electricity to areas of the world where people have never seen a
lightbulb. I also have been appointed to the Advisory Committee on Organ Transplantation
under the Department of Health and Human Services.

I never thought I’d live this long or this far into the twenty-first century, but
here I am, and I’m concerned about the world my grandchildren are inheriting.

Sure, there are advances every day. Computers go faster and drugs work miracles. But
they also come with two pages of legal warnings that they might do more harm than
good. The brilliant surgeon who performed my liver transplant had to quit practicing
because the insurance companies and accountants were telling him how to treat his
patients. Politicians legislate the destruction of the environment so we can drive
SUVs, and they do it without considering the effect they are having on the whole chain
of life of which we’re a part.

Rome fell when the lead went from their pencils into their wine and the lawyers took
over society. Everything was crooked. Nothing got done and problems piled up. Finally,
the barbarians came through and solved all the problems for them. They killed everyone.

But poets are still writing about love, musicians are still making music, and kids
are still thinking they know how to do things better than their parents. As long as
that continues, we’ve got a chance.

While I was writing this book, something my mother said when I was young came back
to me. She didn’t tell me to be a great or successful actor. Nor did she tell me to
be a good human being. She said that over the passage of time, my goal should be to
acquire my own wisdom. To do that, she said, I needed to gather my own experiences.
She told me not to fear making mistakes. To take chances. Have fun. Live.

I’ve done all of that to the best of my ability. I wouldn’t have been able to tell
the same story without Maj by my side for nearly fifty years. Over those years, Maj
has been asked many times if she’s ever been jealous of my leading ladies, and she
always replies, “Well, it does take at least two of us to take care of him.” She’s
not joking. Because our marriage has lasted so long, particularly in a town where
nothing lasts, there is a curiosity about it—and us. People constantly ask for our
secret, and here it is—two bathrooms. Again, I’m not joking. But we’ve gone through
everything together, and our partnership has been the most fortunate part of my life.
We’ve had a lot of fun. That’s the real secret.