Hello Darlin' (16 page)

Dad dutifully went over there and guided Juanie back to the table. Everything was
fine until we noticed she was missing about half an hour later. Soon a dreadful smell
permeated the room. The bandleader came back over, livid, and literally shaking.

“Mr. Hagman, your wife has just puked in the electric piano. She shorted it out. That’s
the odor you smell.”

Dad again dutifully retrieved Juanita and we all called it a night. But the night
wasn’t quite finished. While Dad loaded her in the car,
he slammed the door and broke four of her fingers. We spent the rest of New Years
at the hospital. But that wasn’t the worst of it. She did all of his legal typing,
so she had to spend the next few weeks learning how to type his torts with one hand.

*   *   *

After we finally arrived at our little brown cottage, Bebe said goodbye and flew back
to New York while we settled into our new home. Three months had to pass before I
heard whether
Jeannie
was going to be on the fall television schedule. In the meantime, I had to earn a
living.

About that time,
Fail-Safe
was finally released into theaters and it was seen by Bob Walker, a casting director
for Four Star Studios. After seeing the movie, Bob swore that I spoke Russian and
he tracked me down for a voice-over part in an episode of
The Rogues,
a popular TV series starring David Niven, Charles Boyer, and Gig Young. The part
called for someone who spoke Russian. I never told Bob that I didn’t know one word,
and he didn’t ask.

But I pulled it off by finding a Russian actor who kindly tape-recorded my dialogue,
and I learned the proper pronunciation by mimicking his accent. It worked. They liked
me. There were a couple shows left in their season, but Gig had a previous commitment
that he couldn’t get out of. Shooting on
The Rogues
had gone weeks over and the producers were in a bind. Bob Walker persuaded the producers
to bring me onto the show as Gigs characters cousin. In essence, I took over for Gig.

My first episode in that role had the famous actor George Sanders as its guest star.
On the first day of shooting, he wasn’t prepared when the director asked if he knew
his lines, and I was amazed that an actor of his stature arrived on the set like that.
But George was unfazed; in fact he had what to him was a perfectly good explanation,
saying, “You didn’t expect me to learn my lines on
my
time, did you?”

I always knew my lines. They liked me, and maybe they would’ve used me more often
on
The Rogues,
but the program was canceled.

We still hadn’t heard about
Jeannie,
so I had to try hustling more work. It wasn’t out there, at least for me, and one
morning I turned to Maj and said, “Honey, I think you have to go back to work.” She
said no. She told me that she was taking
my
children to the beach for the day. Instead, she told me to continue looking for work.
“Stay positive,” she said.

I took her advice. I spent the day trying to find work, talking to my agent, networking
with friends, and trying not to think about Maj and the kids on the beach. As it turned
out, Maj wasn’t on the beach. She’d come home in the afternoon, and soon after, the
phone rang. It was Sidney Sheldon. He asked if we had a bottle of champagne. She said,
“Sidney, we don’t even have a bottle of Gallo.”

Just then I walked in through the door.

“Sit down, Larry,” Maj said. “I have something to tell you.”

“What?”

“Sidney just called and said the pilot sold, the network ordered twenty-two, and it
starts shooting right away.”

We were so happy. I was so relieved.

“That’s called having faith,” Maj said. “Trust your instincts. They’re always right.”

T
he show didn’t need to start off as a battle, but it did.

In the spring of 1965, NBC green-lighted
I Dream of Jeannie,
and it seemed as if forces were conspiring against us. First, Barbara announced she
was pregnant, making it necessary to shoot the initial ten episodes as quickly as
possible. NBC signaled they didn’t have much faith in the series by insisting on shooting
the first season in black-and-white to keep costs to a minimum. Or at least that was
how it was explained to me. The network was also worried the censors would go nuts
every time Jeannie said she wanted to “please” her master. Finally, to my way of thinking,
the director was all wrong.

In short, it was the TV business as usual, and that’s exactly what I wanted to avoid—business
as usual. My goal was to make the best sitcom ever. It was an obsession that I brought
onto the set and into meetings by questioning everything and making suggestions, always
with the same goal—to make it as good as possible. I never criticized anything without
making a suggestion I thought was different or better. I was driven. Gene Nelson misinterpreted
my behavior as that of an ego-driven actor chasing stardom. But the cast knew better.
I
made it very clear that my interest was only in the show. If
Jeannie
did well, all of us would benefit.

I think I had my points. After a while, the scripts contained the same jokes week
after week. I got frustrated. Billy and I would create physical gags so we wouldn’t
be just talking heads. But our efforts at creating something off the page irritated
Gene. As far as I was concerned, he didn’t understand the kind of comedy we were trying
to create. He also blew up one day when I insisted that we couldn’t simply let Jeannie
blink people away without showing where they went. Otherwise viewers might think she
killed them. I suggested we always blink them someplace amusing and get a laugh. Ultimately
Sidney decided, and he went with my idea.

After the first ten shows, Gene wanted me fired. He must’ve given an ultimatum because
Sidney asked me how I felt about Gene returning as director.

“You can bring him back if you want,” I said. “But I won’t be here.”

Apparently Gene had gone to Sidney and suggested writing an episode in which Jeannie’s
bottle was lost and then found by someone else, who would become her new master. As
far as he was concerned, that would solve the Larry Hagman problem. But Sidney told
him that NBC didn’t have a problem with Larry Hagman. In fact, the network loved me.
As a result, one of my problems was solved. Gene didn’t return after we finished those
ten episodes.

*   *   *

But there were other problems, which made me like a volcano set to erupt. One in particular
vied for my attention with the show. My father was very sick in Weatherford. His condition
was brought on partly by age, partly by his own negligence. Toward the end of spring,
he’d gone to the Weatherford Country Club, had some drinks, and as he would often
do, he stripped down to his Skivvies, and dove into the pool. Nobody had told him
they’d drained it.

He survived, but a short time later, while fishing with his friend
James Porter McFarland, he had a stroke and fell out of the boat. Somehow James got
him out of the water and drove him to the hospital.

He recovered. But about three months later he suffered another stroke, this one massive,
and it left him in a coma. His weight dropped from 265 pounds to 120. He was a helpless
skeleton. We were told he had absolutely no hope of recovering. He just lay in bed
and had no awareness of anything as far as anyone could tell. He wouldn’t have wanted
to be in that condition.

I visited him as much as
Jeannie’s
tight schedule allowed. Dad was in a room with four other guys. One of them, a man
named Walter, had tried to blow his brains out thirteen years earlier, but his attempt
had been only partially successful. He’d given himself a perfect lobotomy. Consequently,
he sat in a chair grinding his teeth, sweating, and talking some indecipherable language.
Whenever I visited Dad, I’d always say, “Hello, Walter,” wipe his mouth off, and try
to figure out if the sounds he made had any meaning.

All of us hated seeing Dad in that condition. At the time I knew a guy who had access
to pharmaceuticals, legal or otherwise. He could get anything. So before I went to
visit Dad for what turned out to be the last time, I had him get me the kind of drug
that U-2 pilot Gary Powers was supposed to swallow when the Soviets shot him down.

Dad was the same as always. But we had a nice visit. I gave him a shave, as I always
did, and I told him what was going on in my life. I had no idea if he understood.
Probably not. Then came the moment that I’d thought so hard about. I got up from my
chair, opened up Dad’s IV, and took out the pill I’d brought. I was scared to death.
My hands shook and sweat poured off me the way it did Walter, who I noticed was staring
right at me.

Suddenly I lost my nerve. I knew that if Dad expired, Walter was going to yell his
first intelligible words in thirteen years. He would point at me and yell at the top
of his lungs, “He did it.”

I closed the IV, kissed Dad, and left the hospital, never to see him
again. Mercifully, he passed away on his own about a month later. He never saw the
premiere of
I Dream of Jeannie
on September 18, 1965.

*   *   *

I was in New York promoting the series, walking up Fifth Avenue, when I bumped into
director Sidney Lumet. We were delighted to see each other. He was carrying a script
for his adaptation of Mary McCarthy’s novel
The Group.
He described the story, about the lives of eight girls from Vassar in the 1930s,
suggested there might be a role in the film for me, and told me to read it and pick
one out.

I’d never been given that freedom before, and naturally I picked out a part that ran
through the entire movie. Sidney was surprised at the role I selected. He said it
wasn’t what he’d had in mind. I didn’t explain my reasoning—the longer the role and
the bigger the part, the more I got paid. It was Candice Bergen’s first movie and
she was gorgeous. But of course, all the girls in the film were drop-dead beautiful.
I looked forward to going to work every single day.

After the movie, Maj and I got a camper and drove the children all through Canada
on our way to Seattle, where Mother was performing. One day we were going through
a desolate stretch of highway when I stopped for gas. The station attendant noticed
our California license plates and asked if we were by any chance from Los Angeles.
I said yes. He showed me a Canadian newspaper whose front page was plastered with
pictures of L.A. on fire.

Great columns of black smoke filled the sky. Watts was burning, the result of devastating
riots. I was really shaken. Maj was too. It was very emotional, thinking of how miserable
and enraged black people had to be to burn their own homes, stores, neighborhoods.
We cut our trip short, stopping briefly to see Mother in her show in Seattle, and
then made a beeline to L.A.

In October, work started up again on
Jeannie,
without Gene Nelson. In his place, Sidney brought in Edward Swackhamer, my favorite
director. He also hired Claudio Guzmán, a veteran producer who
knew how to handle me. Ted Flicker even came in to direct. Everything I wanted was
mine, and I was excited and happy to be a part of a successful show. In general, I
was having fun. Still, it didn’t stop me from pushing for better scripts.

I was naive. I didn’t know that once you got a good thing, you didn’t change it. But
I always felt we could make the show even better, and I pushed for it. I didn’t know
how to settle. On two occasions I got so frustrated that I called Maj from the set
and told her to start packing, I was ready to quit. She took it in stride, as did
the others. After the second time, Hayden gently massaged my shoulder and offered
some good advice.

“Anyone who quits a successful show is seen as insane,” he said. “You’d be crazy to
leave. It’s so hard to get a successful show like this. Nobody will ever trust you
again.”

Fortunately, my cast mates were always supportive. Barbara, who was like a rock all
the way through the series, also wanted better scripts but she never complained. It
wasn’t in her nature. Billy was right with me; we had so much fun creating our shtick.
Whatever I wanted, he was for it.

Sidney was the guy responsible for the whole thing, and he patiently accepted the
fact that I could be difficult. I think he put up with me because he understood I
battled for all the right reasons. As he said, “Larry’s problems stem from his being
such a perfectionist. He wants to own the world and own it this afternoon.”

In truth, I was in a hurry, but there was a reason. After our son, Preston, was born
Maj was prescribed a medication called Bontril to help her lose weight. She had no
idea the pills were uppers. Neither did I when I started taking them around the same
time to keep my own weight in check and for energy, which, boy howdy, they gave me.

Throughout
Jeannie’s
first season, I took them twice a day without knowing the psychological effects they
were having on me. After we started the second season, Maj tried to refill the Bontril
prescription. The pharmacist refused, explaining there was a new state law that
prohibited selling that particular drug. Maj said he told her that it was because
it could become habit-forming.

“That’s a lot of bullshit,” I said. “I’ve been taking them every day for years and…”

Suddenly I heard what I was saying and a lightbulb went off. We stopped Bontril and
tobacco at the same time. The effects were devastating. Coming down off nicotine is
hard enough. Add amphetamines and you have serious problems.

I certainly did.

They were so obvious that one day on the set Ted, thinking I was flipping out, strongly
advised me to go see his therapist, Sidney Prince.

I pooh-poohed it until one day on the set I lost it all. I don t know what triggered
it, but I had a breakdown. I was crying, vomiting, and shitting at the same time.
Even the wax from my ears was coming out. I was exploding. I decided right there I’d
better go see Sidney Prince. They put me in the back of a pickup because I was such
a mess nobody wanted to put me in their car. They took me to Sidney s. He talked to
me gently once I’d calmed down.