Word: hagman
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...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...
...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...
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...
...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...
...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...