J.R. Ewing had it all – power, women, privilege and the biggest TV audience on the planet. Now he’s back and still as mean as ever. We recall the much-loved actor as he was in this RTÉ Guide interview by Donal O’Donoghue from last September to mark the return of Dallas
“It’s like a licence to steal”, says Larry Hagman, flashing that iconic grin as his eyebrows do the Highland fling. The veteran actor is talking about playing TV’s most famous villain, Texas oilman and star of Dallas, J.R. Ewing. He’s also talking about the “greatest” (and most lucrative) job he has ever had.
“I wake up every morning and say ‘thank God I’m going to do some work that I love’”, he says. “I can be with my friends and get paid an enormous amount of money and sleep with some of the most beautiful women in the world on film. It’s kind of early porno stuff . . . I’d better stop there. So, what was the question again?”
At the peak of Dallas’ popularity, Larry Hagman was the highest paid TV actor on the planet, nailing a reported $100,000 per episode in 1980. That was the year his Stetson-wearing bad guy was plugged full of lead and a worldwide audience of over 380 million tuned in to find out whodunit (‘Who Shot J.R.?’). Bigger than the Beatles, nastier than Simon Cowell and more glamorous than Joan Collins’ boudoir, Dallas was the heavyweight champion of the TV world.
In his 2001 biography, Hello Darlin’, Hagman even claimed that it played a major part in the downfall of the Soviet empire. He was joking (we think) but there was no question about the show’s impact. Now Dallas is back, for two seasons at the very least and 80-year-old Hagman is leading the charge.
Today, at a Dallas junket in a swanky London hotel, Hagman is cracking jokes like a man vaccinated with a Groucho Marx serum. “Introduce yourself!” he says, going round the table of journalists and then quipping, “been in it!” whenever a country or city is named. “At some time or other I’ve been everywhere so now I just say ‘been in it’.” He briefly converses in Swedish with one journalist (Hagman’s wife of 58 years, Maj, is Swedish) and then cracks wise about what it’s like to live in a country where the days can be very long. “You’d go on a date and it would last three days until you finally just collapsed”, he says and laughs: a gravelly growl tempered by the throat cancer from which he got the all-clear shortly before the show’s US premiere on June 13.
“It was like coming home”, he says of his first day on set with fellow ‘old-timers’, Patrick Duffy (Bobby Ewing) and Linda Gray (Sue Ellen Ewing). Then he fixes you with that Hagman stare: the eyes with the interrogatory brows drilling into you as if to ask, ‘what’s your line sonny?’ But despite the forbidding appearance, he’s an open interviewee. “They scheduled this without a pitstop”, he says (at least I think he said ‘pitstop’), when he first rumbles into the room, his co-star (and long-time friend), Gray, just a few paces ahead. He’s dressed as you might expect – a sort of J.R. in mufti – sporting the Stetson, a paisley cravat, and a military sharp suit. You wonder how much of the Ewing ego and attitude has seeped into the actor’s soul since he first rode out of the Southfork sunset in 1978. More than a little you reckon.
“I wake up every morning and say ‘thank God I’m going to do some work that I love."
Back then, Hagman, best known for the ’60s TV hit I Dream of Jeannie, was scrabbling to re-establish a toehold on the Hollywood ladder. It was his wife Maj who made the call that changed his life. He had been offered two new shows, The Waverly Wonders (the role was of a high-school gym teacher) and a melodrama called Dallas. His wife, who read both, suggested the latter as it had “not one redeeming character”. Hagman agreed. The Waverly Wonders lasted for just one month. “I credit Maj with everything good I’ve done over the past 58 years”, he says. “She just tells me what to do and I do it and it always turns out to be right. When we got the script for Dallas, I called Maj and she said ‘you’re going to do it and I said OK.’”
Last year, after the pilot episode was green-lit (the season was ultimately ten episodes), Hagman hosted a dinner for the cast at his home in Santa Monica. “So often in television you report for work and you’ve never met a woman that you’re going to be in bed with for 12 hours that day”, he says. “You’re being provocative and half naked and that’s the first time you ever see that person. So this party was to try and break the ice so that when we did those nude scenes we’d really know each other!”
So they all came over – the young and the not so young. “Larry took of us on a tour of his Santa Monica condo which overlooks the beach”, says Jesse Metcalfe, previously the hunky gardener from Desperate Housewives, now Bobby Ewing’s son, Christopher. “He has a crazy collection of memorabilia – suits of armour and electric cars. But the thing that really stuck in my mind was that Larry had these photographs of himself from all over the world – standing beside the pyramids in Egypt, in a gondola in Venice, and in all of them he was dressed as J.R. And I thought, this is the guy I’m going to be working with.”
The younger stars of Dallas admit that they were in awe of Hagman. “When Larry walks into the room he tends to take all the air out of it”, says Metcalfe. But Hagman’s reputation for being a prankster kept the family atmosphere going. Co-star Josh Henderson, who plays John Ross Ewing, calls him ‘Pops’.
The original cast of Dallas
“Larry does not play J.R. as one note where he’s simply evil”, says Linda Gray. “He has that smile that dilutes the evilness. It’s like J.R. puts it, ‘I’m a Texas businessman’ and he does bad things but he does them with a smile. It’s the smile which makes J.R. Ewing J.R. Ewing.” That is Hagman’s cue. “Ready?” he asks, before hitting us with a flash of those trademark teeth. He then talks about J.R.’s legendary womanising which, if he has anything to do with, is unlikely to wane. “I keep telling the director, ‘I may be eighty but I’m not dead’.”
Over his 80 years, Hagman has lived a hard life. He drank whiskey like John Wayne (“my role model”), partied with The Who’s Keith Moon, dropped acid after musician David Crosby gave him some tabs as a gift and took peyote with Native Americans. At the age of 34, he stopped smoking tobacco and at 6.15pm on June 3, 1992 he quit drinking.
“Seventeen years ago I had a liver transplant and that helped a lot right there”, he says now and laughs drily. “So now I have a 42-year-old liver in an 80-year-old man.” Following his diagnosis with cancer, and on the advice of Linda Gray, Hagman adopted a vegan diet. “It has changed my life”, he says. “It’s really boring eating but it’s good for you and you live longer if more frugally and your faeces don’t smell any more. I thought you’d like to know that.” And how is his health now? “I’m here”, he says.
Hagman was born in Fort Worth, Texas but grew up in the small town of Weatherford where the city limits sign proclaimed: ‘Welcome to Weatherford, Home of watermelons and Mary Martin.’ Martin, a Broadway stage star, was Hagman’s mother while his father, Ben, was the town’s criminal attorney. When they separated, the youngster went to live with his grandmother in Los Angeles, but returned at the age of 12 to live with his mother. In his teens he spent two Texan summers doing hard manual labour – digging ditches, breaking down walls, baling hay – which brought him to a fundamental conclusion. “The harder you physically work the less you get paid”, he says. “I know people who work in offices and make tens of millions of dollars a year and they never do a stroke of work other than go to the watercooler and the bathroom.”
So Larry Hagman became an actor, going on to hit that once-in-a-lifetime gusher with Dallas and J.R. Was he nervous about returning to the well? “Nah!” he says. “Why? It was only a career and at 80, how many more jobs will they give me?”
Not that he has any intention of hanging up his spurs now. “Actors can’t retire”, he said recently, reckoning that he has another ten years in the tank. “Did I say only ten?” Hagman asks, eyebrows arching. “Thirty would be good. Retire from what though? Most actors are out of work most of their lives so we’re lucky to get work, blessed and lucky. The secret to living life is so easy, it’s all about having the right attitude.”
Does he think that the series’ makers will shoot J.R. again? “Who the hell knows?” he says. “If they can make money at it, yeah they’ll shoot me again.” But he doesn’t look too worried: after all he’s been there before.
Dallas, Monday TV3 & Wednesday, Five
