Hello Darlin' (14 page)

Finally Maj dragged me back to the surface, gasping for air and pissed off.

“What the hell have you been doing?” she asked.

“Well, Jack turned me on,” I said.

“Larry, we had a deal,” she said. “You always said you wouldn’t do anything like that
unless you did it with me.”

“I’m sorry. But don’t worry, there’s more.”

We went up to Jack’s room, where everyone was still in their same seats, puffing away,
except for one guy, who vanished without anyone having seen him leave. Instead of
searching for him, we ordered food and beer from room service. After the guy delivered
it, we became
paranoid that he’d turn us in to security for smoking pot. Then there was a knock
on the door, and it freaked us out. It turned out to be the missing guy, a stuntman,
who had climbed down ten floors to the ground on the outside of the hotel without
being spotted. It’s what he liked to do when he was high.

For me, the real fun came when Maj turned on. We went back to our room with some grass
and had a great time. We ate, put on some music, and then started to make passionate
love. We had such a good time I started to levitate. I rose up off the bed, high enough
that I could look down and see the two of us on the king-size mattress. Then the wall
next to my head opened up and I saw about three inches of blue sky.

“Jesus Christ, this stuff is fantastic,” I said. “I’ve never had anything like it
in my entire life!”

“Wow!” Maj exclaimed, laughing.

Eventually we wanted dinner and headed down to the restaurant. We had to take the
stairs because the elevator was out. When we got to the lobby, it was jammed. Someone
from the movie company hurried over to me and asked if we were okay. I got paranoid.
Did they know I had smoked pot all day? Could they tell? It was best to act as if
everything was normal. I said we were fine and asked why.

“Didn’t you feel it? We just had a huge earthquake.”

It was news to me. The quake had knocked out all the power and damaged the hotel,
including the roof over our room, hence the crack of blue sky I’d seen. And I thought
it had been the grass. It’s probably lucky that episode came toward the end of shooting
there, but then we went back to L.A. to finish up the film at the Warner Bros, studio.
One day the prop master mixed up a batch of jungle juice that we as the ship’s crew
were supposed to have made. But he added too much purple coloring and after a couple
takes, everyone’s tongue turned deep purple and they had to suspend shooting for a
few days.

W
e’d sublet John McGiver’s rented house in Malibu for a couple of weeks while I finished
up work. Maj had really fallen in love with the beach, and the kids were old enough
to enjoy it. We were next door to Jascha Heifetz, which might sound exciting, but
hearing him practice one sequence over and over and over for hours was enough to drive
you nuts. But I admired him as the first guy I ever met who owned an electric car.

As we celebrated my birthday on the beach, I received word that I had gotten another
movie,
The Cavern,
a World War II movie that was going to shoot in London and Italy. Maj’s sister Bebe
was going to take the kids to Sweden, so we had to be back in New York within four
days. Despite having paid for a few more weeks at the beach, we packed up the Jeep,
the floor now repaired, and took off for New York.

After driving all night, we were near Midland, Texas, around 3
A.M.,
needing gas and food. I pulled into a truck stop, and while I filled the Jeep with
gas, Maj went for hamburgers. She came back in a lather, complaining they wouldn’t
sell her hamburgers. I asked where
she went. She said to the hamburger stand. I looked over and saw she had been at
the “colored” window. I told her to go around the front and get them.

“I’ll be damned if I will,” she said.

She’d never run up against segregation, and she was infuriated that there would be
separate windows for whites and blacks. She was going to stand at the colored window
and demand to be served. I said, “Look, Maj, you’re in segregated territory. It’s
not right, but you will be arrested and that means Dad will have to be woken up, drive
five hours to bail us out of jail. It’s going to be a lot of money, a lot of trouble,
and we’ve got the kids. It’s just not worth it.”

Finally I quieted her down, went around to the white section for hamburgers, and we
were on our way. Before leaving, though, Maj threw her burger out the window. A few
hours later, we stopped in Weatherford to see Dad, slept a bit, and took off again.

We got to New York just in time to load Bebe and the kids on the plane to Sweden so
she could show them off to their Swedish relatives. A few days later, Maj and I flew
to Europe, stopping first in London to see Henri Kleiman and some other friends. One
night I got bombed and jumped into the Serpentine for a moonlight swim, and the next
day I had a cold that turned into a deep hack by the time we made it to Trieste for
the start of
The Cavern.

The film, directed by Edgar Ulmer, was about a group of soldiers—two U.S., one Italian,
one British, one German—and a beautiful Italian woman, who take refuge from the bombing
in a cavern the Nazis have stocked with booze, cigarettes, and enough food for a regiment.
But eventually they go nuts and kill one another.

Edgar began shooting in the caverns at Postumia, Yugoslavia, and then moved to Trieste.
We had a large, talented, multinational cast and crew, including John Saxon, Brian
Aherne, Italian actress Rosanna Schiaffino, and Nino Castelnuovo, who had won an award
for his work in
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

Edgar got very concerned about my health. My cough was a sickening
hack. Every time I drew a breath I felt stabbing pains in my chest. Finally Edgar
told me that he thought the cough was pretty serious. He said I better get an X ray.
He was right, but his concern went beyond friendly. I had a momentary suspicion that
the producer of the movie might be more interested in finding something that would
stop production, like an accident or serious illness, which would allow him to collect
insurance money rather than finish the picture. After
Fail-Safe,
I knew movies were business endeavors, and all of us knew this wasn’t going to be
a blockbuster.

Edgar sent me to get an X ray. Maj and I went to a place in downtown Trieste, a beautiful
old city but a backwater village when it came to medical facilities. The doctor’s
office was on an upstairs floor of an old, decrepit building. We stepped into the
elevator, an old cage that did not inspire confidence as it very slowly creaked upward.

Once at our destination, we were met by a little woman about four feet tall who had
a thicker mustache than mine. The doctor did not speak a word of English, but he motioned
us into place. Maj had her chest done, since the company was paying, and then I had
mine. I coughed my head off for an hour in the freezing cold office till the results
came back.

The doctor had a very serious, grave look as he put the plates up against the lights.
Maj’s X rays were clear, but mine were filled with arrows pointing to spots. There
was also a two-page, single-spaced report written in Italian, which I could not decipher.
But I figured it was my death sentence when the doctor handed it to me and went off
on an intensely serious explanation in Italian. I kept asking what it meant, what
he was saying, until finally he drew his finger across his throat and said,
“Signor Hagman, niente fumari … Morte! Morte!”

I interpreted only the throat-slashing gesture, and fainted.

After coming to and getting my head bandaged, I was made to understand that I would
have to stop my two-pack-a-day cigarette habit. In the meantime, the doctor gave me
antibiotics for my infection. Maj said the doctor felt I would be better in a week.
On the set,
everyone expressed relief at my diagnosis, except for the producer, who tried to
cover up his disappointment.

Then disaster did strike. While shooting the bombing sequence that forced us into
the cavern, a scene that had all of us running through a path between explosions,
Joachim Hansen, the actor playing the German officer, accidentally stepped inside
one and it blew him sky high. The blast did not kill him, but it knocked him flat
out. The producer looked like a kid watching Fourth of July fireworks, his face the
picture of hope, like someone who thinks he might have the winning lottery ticket—at
least until he heard the crew guy who had rushed over scream, “He’s okay! He’s alive!”

I always contended that since I did not have double cancer of the lung, they had to
figure out a way to stop production. And poor old Joachim literally walked into it.

*   *   *

They were not spending a whole lot of money on this movie. There was not much in the
way of creature comforts. They packed three of us—me, John, and Peter Marshall—into
one trailer. It was so small the three of us could not change in there at the same
time. Two of us could, but not three.

So one day, after we had spent hours shooting by the side of a mountain, we were driven
back to base camp. It was cold as hell outside. I was waiting for my turn in the trailer
when Brian Aherne came by. The veteran actor had taken a liking to me and said he
wanted to talk to me confidentially. I said fine.

“My darling wife has procured the trailer that Elizabeth Taylor used in
Cleopatra,”
he continued, “and I was wondering if you would share it with me.”

“What?”

“Yes, I feel rather bad about it because I really don’t have room for all the other
actors.”

I was flattered. I knew there had to be a catch, and there was.

“If you share my trailer, you would take the job of my batman.”

“What the hell is a batman?” I asked.

Brian seemed a bit surprised I had not heard the term.

“Well, all British army officers have an enlisted man who is their batman,” he explained.
“He draws their baths, pitches the tent, makes the cot up, strings up the mosquito
netting. All the things that a batman does.”

I spent a moment thinking about the position he described. He wanted me to be his
goddamn butler. Brian went on:

“Dear boy, this profession we’re in requires a great deal of facility. There are feast
years and then there are famine years, and it’s always good to have the knowledge
of an additional job. If you are my batman, I can teach you how to be a proper man’s
man.”

At that point, I saw John and Peter exit our trailer and wave it was my turn to change
clothes. I imagined the cold wind whipping through our trailer.

“Say, Brian, does your trailer happen to have heat?” I asked.

“Yes, it does.”

“Then I’ll be your batman. It sounds right up my alley!”

For the next six weeks, I worked as Brian’s batman. If I was not in front of the camera,
I was doing chores in our trailer. I learned how to serve tea to a field officer,
turn down his bed, and press pants without an iron, which is a nifty trick. You carefully
set the pants between the mattress and box spring, go to sleep, and by morning they
are perfectly pressed. I was never a batman again, but Brian was right, I learned
a lot of practical skills and put them to good use ten years later when I played a
butler in the TV series
The Good Life.

*   *   *

One night at the end of November, Maj and I had dinner at our favorite restaurant
in Trieste. We’d had a wonderful time. We walked back to the hotel arm in arm, laughing
and talking, not a care in the world. Some of the cast were in the lobby when we walked
in. They
gave us a look that asked how we could be enjoying ourselves so much at the moment.
Then Edgar said, “You killed Kennedy! You killed Kennedy!”

“What?” I said.

“Yes, yes, you Texans. You’ve killed him.”

At that moment we learned that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in
Dallas. Maj and I were devastated. We spent the next few hours in our rooms listening
to the BBC news on the radio. Our grief and sadness was profound. The next morning
Maj and I went to the U.S. consulate in Trieste and paid our respects by signing a
condolence book. When we finally got back to the States, the country was different,
and though we didn’t immediately recognize it, so were we.

Maj picked up the kids from Bebe in Sweden, and then we spent Christmas in Rome, where
I finished
The Cavern
and we visited with our writer friend Gore Vidal, who lived around the corner from
our apartment in Piazza Margana. It was a magical time. I remember our housekeeper,
an old Italian woman, always barged through our bedroom door and asked,
“Amore?”
wondering if we were making love.

Though I worked hard, I liked that the Italians always found time to break for long,
delicious lunches and indulged in equally long dinners. There always seemed to be
a party with fascinating people who would talk till three in the morning. Maj made
sure the kids saw every important museum and ruin. She also had accounts throughout
Rome; shopkeepers sent bills addressed to
la bionda signora Americana con due bambini,
the blond American lady with two children. She also rented a Fiat, and needed three
or four new bumpers on that car by the time we left town two months later.

It didn’t seem as if life could get any better, and I was right.

*   *   *

Back in New York, I met with Otto Preminger, who was about to direct the World War
II epic
In Harm’s Way.
He had the biggest desk I’d ever seen in my life and afterward I learned why. You’d
need to have a
trampoline to vault it and strangle him. That man knew enough to make his throat
inaccessible. But over dinner and in a meeting, he was the epitome of charm. Once
the camera started to roll, though, he turned into a dictatorial ogre.

He gave me several weeks of work on the movie, which shot in Hawaii. It seemed every
male star in Hollywood was in it: Henry Fonda, Duke Wayne, and my friends Burgess
Meredith, Patricia Neal, and Carroll O’Connor. Tom Tryon was the star. Every night
a bunch of us met in one of our rooms for cocktails and we discussed ways we could
murder Otto. We fantasized about putting massive amounts of Ex-Lax in his coffee,
loosening the threads on the back of his director’s chair so when he leaned back he’d
topple overboard, and countless other schemes.