Larry Hagman: Vita Celebratio Est

In his acting debut, Larry Hagman had only one line. It never got out. Instead, the actor stared dumbly at the audience. If he has been tongue-tied in the 40 years since that grade-school pageant, the occasion has gone unrecorded. Today Hagman likes to talk the way Texans like to spend. Except on Sundays, when there is a rule of silence at his Malibu spread. "You've got to have a day of rest somewhere along the line," he explains. "Every major religion has one."

But then Hagman crowds at least a week into the other six days. He is famous for leading full-dress parades down the beach, with as many as 400 people in tow, and he may decide--today, tomorrow or perhaps ten minutes from now--that it is time to put on his Indian headdress and call the rest of the Malibu tribe to a war dance. He has been known to show up at the supermarket in a gorilla suit. Why? Why not? "I guess I'm a ham," he says. However he costumes himself, he knows that he can always cool off by jumping into the lavish Jacuzzi bath and forget everything but his motto, floating on a banner overhead: Vita Celebratio Est (Life Is a Celebration).

So it has been for most of his 48 years. Larry's father Ben Hagman was a wheeling-dealing Texas lawyer, J.R. Ewing without the meanness. His mother is Mary Martin, who is, along with Ethel Merman, doyenne of Broadway musicals. The Hagmans divorced when Larry was five, and for much of his childhood he shuttled between boarding schools and theater wings. When Martin went on the road with Annie Get Your Gun in 1947, Larry, then 15, decided to go home to Weatherford, Texas, to live with his father. One summer Ben was running for state senator, and his son drove him all over his district. "I met all the dudes down there," he recalls. "Oil, cattle, politics, everything. Let me tell you, my character is milk toast compared with some of those people. Fratricide, patricide, brothers and sisters shooting each other; it was unbelievable!"

After appearing in some tent-show musicals, Larry joined his mother in the London production of South Pacific. A European tour in the Air Force followed. Along the way, Larry met Maj (pronounced My), a Swedish designer then living in England. "She thought I was the crassest jerk she had ever met in her life," he says. But Haggam who had a littie of J.R.'s way with women even then, wisely let a little time pass, then asked her out--on his Vespa scooter. They celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary last December in the company of their two children, Heidi, now 22, and Preston, now 18.

After the Air Force, Hagman tried his luck off-Broadway, then did a two-year stint on The Edge of Night. There were several modest roles in movies, including one memorable semivillain in The Group. But Hagman's most important part before Dallas was in the airhead sitcom I Dream of Jeannie. For Hagman it was the big break. He worked constantly, rewriting scripts, fighting to get the best possible performers. "I was driven, compulsive," he remembers. "I yelled at people. Finally I couldn't take it any more. I started to vomit, and it was as if my body were exploding and everything inside were trying to get out, including my brain." Two and a half years with a shrink put his cerebrum where it belonged, and even when Jeannie folded, he kept busy with TV pilots and movies. In the lean years that followed he still earned more than $150,000, enough, as his mother says, to allow him to be "a grand pasha" around the house.

Hagman was shown the first script of Dallas in early 1978: it was love-hate at first sight. "There wasn't one redeeming person in it. Even the mother was bad. I was tired of shows in which everybody was so nice and warm and cuddly to each other.

I wanted to see some ass kickers." That was incentive enough ; for Hagman to make J.R. into the most unusual bad guy in the history of TV villainy. Like all those dudes he met when he was with his daddy, he speaks softest when he is at his meanest and smiles before he pounces; the more devious he gets, the more sincere he seems to be.

That canny balancing act has made Hagman indispensable to the show. He knows it, of course, and, embittered by the fact that he does not get one penny from the Jeannie reruns, the star refused to return to work unless he got a larger share of the Dallas gusher. It was a tactic J.R. would appreciate, and, naturally, it worked: Hagman now makes an estimated $50,000 to $75,000 a show, or between $1.1 million and $1.65 million a year--not counting residuals yet to come from eventual syndication. "But you're already a rich man," he was advised before negotiations. "Not as rich as I'm gonna be," he countered. J.R. would like that too.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.