Hello Darlin' (6 page)

Soon they feared me. That afternoon the Roones’ son Nels tried teaching me to fence.
He took it in school and was quite proficient. He taught me the old thrust-and-parry
routine. After proving myself less than spectacular, I showed him my throw-the-sword
routine, which I’d learned from the Zorro movies. We spent the rest of the day in
the emergency room, getting his eyebrow stitched. Later that night, as penance, I
dutifully ate my
filmjölk.
That the Rooneses put up with me the whole summer attested to their good Lutheran
compassion.

And their patience. I didn’t get out of bed in the morning till around ten, hours
after the Rooneses were up and busy. The pot of coffee their eldest daughter left
outside my door would always be cold by the time I arose. After a few weeks, I almost
looked forward to my bowl of
filmjölk,
which was tolerable if I added enough lingonberries. Each morning they commented
on how late I slept and wondered why I was so tired.

I had a good explanation. I’d met an American sailor who’d jumped ship after the war
and had made Sweden his home. He loved Swedish women and aquavit, a liquor known as
“the elixir of life.” He took me to a party, where I met my own Swedish beauty and
got to know her better over several glasses of aquavit. She was the daughter of a
taxi driver. Her hair was the color of golden straw and her skin tanned to a honeyed
brown.

Her family had a canoe and we took it for outings on Lake Mälaren. In the summer,
days lasted for twenty-three hours there. We had a great summer together.

Toward the end of my stay, my group took a ten-day trip into the mountains of Lapland,
in northern Sweden. The scenery was spectacular. We drank from clear, icy streams
that originated in glaciers high above the Arctic Circle and breathed fresh, crisp
air. At night, I entertained by playing Burl Ives songs on my guitar. I had only one
complaint—the giant mosquitoes that feasted on my American flesh.

The saddest day of my life was when the trip ended and I had to say
good-bye to my girlfriend. She accompanied me to the train station. At seventeen,
I didn’t know if I’d ever feel as deeply about another woman in my life. Even though
we promised to write, we never did, and all the fears I had that I’d never see her
again were well founded.

As it turned out, I eventually fell in love with another Swedish beauty. She lived
three blocks from the Rooneses. We took the same tram into the city, though our paths
never crossed until I met her in London four years later. This time I wouldn’t let
her go.

*   *   *

In the fall, I entered Bard, a small college in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, and
it turned out I knew people there. Both Roger Phillips and Severn Darden, my roommates
from Woodstock, were also freshmen. In fact, Roger had recommended Bard to my mother
and Richard. I liked Bard from the start. Founded in 1860 as an Episcopalian school,
it was a progressive liberal arts college that (I quickly realized) would allow me
to continue my studies in drinking, smoking, and pursuing the opposite sex.

While everyone scrambled to pick their majors, hoping they were making the right choice,
I chose drama and dance. The pretty girls were there and the few guys who signed up
didn’t seem interested in them. I sensed there’d be much greater opportunity for me
in that major than in math, science, or English, and I was absolutely right. After
a few months I’d had the best sex in my life, with young women who were kind, instructive,
and eager to pass along their knowledge. Actually, they were eager to pass
me
along, which they did.

I was in several plays, often alongside Ted Flicker, who became a fast friend. My
first real production was Shakespeare’s
Twelfth Night,
in which I played Valentine. These plays were a big leap for me, and I remember feeling
outclassed by the other student actors, sometimes like I had absolutely no business
being onstage. Every night backstage, I noticed the girl on the book always seemed
to be laughing, looking up, or talking to someone whenever I was around. Maybe I
was paranoid, but I always thought she was about to expose me as a fraud.

However, I discovered that I enjoyed being onstage. The best thing I did, at least
in my opinion, was a dance project created by one of the senior girls as her thesis.
It was a modern ballet. I never had the kind of talent that would make anyone suggest
I try out for George Balanchine, but my exuberance added a spark to the program. At
least it did according to my very first review, which appeared in the
New York Times
and said something to the effect that Larry Hagman is outstanding.

That crumb of encouragement was enough for me.

We had January and February off from class in order to get real-world experience,
and with my mother’s help I got an apprenticeship with Margot Jones’s prestigious
theater group in Dallas. A lot of people criticize nepotism, but hell, it worked for
me. Besides, after the door is opened, it doesn’t matter. You’re on your own.

Margot, known for giving playwright Tennessee Williams his start, had created a theater
in the round, which at the time was a brand-new, almost radical idea and had attracted
a diverse group of actors, including TV soap star Peggy McKay and actor Jack Warden,
who was just starting out. We put on
Romeo and Juliet
(I carried a spear) and Sean O’Casey’s latest work,
Cock-a-Doodle Dandy.
Despite long, hard hours, I realized I had an affinity and an appetite for the stage.

I also acquired experience outside of the theater. I lived at the YMCA, a pretty rough
place in those days. I’d been warned that only gays lived at the Y and they attacked
innocents like me. But I had no choice; I couldn’t afford to stay anyplace else, and
what the hell, I figured nothing would happen. Just to be safe, though, before going
to bed I bolted my door, braced it shut with a chair, and then worried all night.
I didn’t sleep much.

After four weeks, I was exhausted, and though untouched, I was still uneasy. I moved
to a boardinghouse recommended by one of the guys at the theater. It seemed nice and
safe. Your basic boarding-house.
In other words, it was teeming with weirdos. On my first night, someone told me to
watch out for “the bear.”

“The bear? What’s the bear?”

“Just watch out,” he said.

For what? My room, the Ritz of boardinghouse rooms, was on the top floor. I jokingly
referred to it as a second-floor penthouse. On my second night, I returned from a
grueling day of rehearsals. Exhausted, I flopped onto the bed and went to sleep. Around
one, I felt a thud against my bed. Then this something climbed into bed with me. It
scared the crap out of me. I wasn’t able to move, that’s how frightened I was. Then
this thing took my hand and placed it on its enormous breast—actually, a mound of
hair.

That’s when I remembered: the bear!

“How do you like that, honey?”

I recognized the voice. It was my landlady. She wanted me to massage her hairy chest.
Maybe she wanted me to do more than that, but I didn’t want to go that far even in
my imagination. After I got her out of there, I got out myself and bunked with a friend
from the theater. One night he took me out for White Castle hamburgers, and we were
hanging out at the stand when a song came on the jukebox. He told me to listen.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“Just listen,” he said.

I looked around. The girls were going wild.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Rock and roll,” he said.

It was “Blue Suede Shoes.” I didn’t get it. I was into Stan Kenton and Glenn Miller.
I obviously had a lot to learn.

*   *   *

I finished out the year at Bard, doing more of the same: building sets, learning about
lights, sewing costumes, and a lot of acting. In June, when my mother asked how I’d
enjoyed college, I told her that there’d
been some good moments onstage but I’d imagined doing something else. When I’d left
Texas, it had been for Broadway and the excitement of New York City, not small-town
college life along the Hudson. My instinct told me to move on and I worked up the
nerve to tell my mother I wasn’t going back.

“It’s just not what I want to do,” I said.

“You don’t want to be an actor?” she asked.

“No, I still want to. I’m just not cut out for school.”

She looked at me and must’ve seen that bit of herself at seventeen and eighteen years
old, that girl who, despite a husband and a child, knew her future was in Hollywood.

She smiled. No matter her age, her smile remained mischievous and youthful. She never
really grew up.

“Let me see what I can do,” she said.

I
spent the summer with Margaret Webster’s acclaimed Shakespeare workshop in Woodstock,
New York, where I worked in about six or seven plays with many excellent teachers,
like Lucia Victor, and actors like Nancy Marchand, who went on to memorable roles
on TV in
Lou Grant
and
The Sopranos.
I remember being in an Irish play, in which I was playing a dead man, and I forced
the guys who were carrying me to take me onstage. I kept saying, “Goddamn it, get
me out there.” I was so anxious to get out there. Except I was four pages too early.

I was always jumping my cue. That was my biggest problem. I couldn’t wait to get on.

But I also remember receiving some decent reviews for a small part in
The Taming of the Shrew.
Though my notices were more about being the son of Mary Martin, who was getting raves
in
Annie Get Your Gun,
I finally started having the kind of acting experience I’d wanted.

It was a great eight weeks, except for one nagging concern. The Korean War started
that summer and I felt the threat of being drafted
for a real war. The threat was real and it consumed everybody over eighteen. It filled
young men in the 1950s with a paranoia that was hard to shake.

Then I moved back in with Mother and Richard in Connecticut. That lasted a very short
time, and for good reason. I was drinking pretty heavily at the time. It was a skill
I had picked up at Bard and honed in Dallas. One night I got a tape recorder and read
all of James Thurber while consuming a bottle of gin. At that time I drank salty dogs—grapefruit
juice, gin, and salt around the rim.

For the next few days, I was extremely sick. It was not a pretty sight.

Mother thought I had walking pneumonia and called the doctor.

“Mrs. Halliday,” he said, “I have to tell you that your son does not have walking
pneumonia. He is going through alcohol poisoning.”

Mother faced me down.

“If you drink like that, you can drink on your own,” she said none too happily.

I did not know what to say. I had been drinking on my own—and doing a hell of a good
job.

“Larry, I’m going to give you fifty dollars a week, and you can go find a place of
your own,” she said. “Visit me backstage when you can.”

Getting kicked out of the house was the best thing that ever happened. I had just
finished reading
The Catcher in the Rye.
I felt I was a misunderstood teenager, which of course I was, so I packed my one
suitcase and I left without any hard feelings. However, I suspected Mother was a little
disappointed in me, to say the least. Dragging my suitcase, an old leather satchel
that weighed fifty pounds empty and about triple that full of clothes, I took the
train into New York City.

As soon as I got off the train, it started to rain. I walked into one hotel after
another, looking for a place with a room for $50 a week. Eventually I arrived at the
Knickerbocker Hotel, which was so old it still had DC current in the rooms, a fact
I discovered when I plugged
in my tape recorder and fried it. The room was affordable, just $34 a week, leaving
me $16 to eat and drink.

I was allowed to observe classes at the Actors Studio and watched people destroy one
another’s performances with stinging critiques. Knowing that was not for me, I flopped
around a few other acting classes, but nothing stuck. When Mother saw I was at least
making an effort, she put me in touch with Lawrence Schwab, the producer who gave
her her start on Broadway, and he put me in touch with his partner George Eckles,
who went by the name St. John Terrell.

His name was pronounced
Sinjin.
He was a wonderful teacher and mentor. I sat in his office while he looked me over,
like a man looking at hieroglyphs for the first time, and he seemed absolutely perplexed.

“What are we going to do with you, kid?” he muttered.

“I’m a helluva dancer,” I said.

“Dancers are a dime a dozen, kid.”

But Sinjin knew much more than he let on. He produced a slew of musicals that changed
weekly, and he signed up a revolving cast of stars for the lead parts. They would
do a week, then leave; the show would change, and a new star would perform. It was
a tidy little formula, but Sinjin profited, and occasionally he shared bits of wisdom.

“I’m going to tell you something, Larry, and remember this,” he said. “You don’t have
to pay actors and dancers that much.”

“You don’t?”

“No, because no matter how much you pay them, when the rag goes up”—the rag was the
curtain—“they’re going to do the best they can. They can’t help it.”

Sinjin didn’t have anything for me at that moment, but before Christmas he came up
with my first job. He was producing musicals for the annual winter musical circus
in Saint Petersburg, Florida. He wanted me to drive the show’s choreographer, Ken
MacKenzie, his wife, the lead dancer, their three Pekingese, two chorus girls, a newly
hired assistant—let’s call her Frances—and her Great Dane down
there in a 1941 Navy surplus Woody station wagon that looked ready for the scrap
heap.

I told him fine.

Fine was probably not the right word, but on the day after Christmas we loaded up
the wagon and took off. With all of us crammed into the car, plus our luggage and
assorted dog food bowls, which were half in the car and half tied to the roof, it
was crowded, to say the least.