Hagmann's Bluff

made him an international celebrity thanks to its 13 year lifespan and worldwide viewing figures that have yet to be matched.

But Hagman is as famous for his vices as for his thespian chops. Listening to his stories about his formative years, you get the distinct impression that his hell-raising would put Richard Harris and Peter O’Toole to shame. In fact, Hagman’s drinking spiralled so out of control he needed a liver transplant. His lifesaving operation was even referenced in an episode of The Simpsons entitled ‘Kidney Trouble’. In it, Homer’s father is waiting for a new kidney, but the doctor informs the family: “Larry Hagman took it. He’s got five of them now! And three hearts. We didn’t want to give them to him, but he overpowered us.”
Hot Press caught up with Hagman at his suite in the K Club in County Kildare during his recent visit to Ireland to appear at the Punchestown Races, along with the actress Linda Grey, who played his wife Sue Ellen in Dallas, as guests of Newbridge Silverware.
Interviewing Hagman is an interesting experience, as he likes to punctuate almost every answer with a question of his own, especially when discussing alcohol and drugs – two subjects he appears genuinely keen to discuss. He is unapologetic about the fact that his attitude to drugs is hugely unconventional.
Hagman says he “got high hundreds of times”. He has tried almost every substance going, save for one.
“I never tried heroin,” he confirms. "I never wanted to. I think marijuana was my favourite, certainly. LSD. And mescaline. Mushrooms. Ever tried a mushroom? It’s very illuminating. All these things are steps in the direction of self-awareness.”
It’s unusually refreshing to meet a celebrity – particularly such a classic American iconic figure like JR Ewing – who speaks his mind about drugs.
“I’m 76-years-old,” he says. “What are they going to do? Throw me in jail? No. You know, fuck ‘em. Now, in retrospect, it seems silly, but moderation in all things is much better (laughs) than excess in all things. But you only get that in hindsight. I have a motto in life – don’t worry, be happy, feel good.”
Hagman was a late bloomer when it came to taking his first toke. It was only when he hooked up with Jack Nicholson in Hollywood that he experienced, as he puts it, the great pleasure of smoking marijuana.
“He’s a great guy. I had a lot of fun with him. He’s wonderful,” he reminisces. “How old were you when you first turned on?”
Probably about 17.
“I was 35! It came as a total surprise to me. It was kind of that sidestep in time. I wasn’t involved in that type of society, And it’s still illegal, which I cannot believe. I tried cocaine several times but it wasn’t my cup of tea, that’s all. In the States, the scourge is methamphetamine. That’s a super high upper, and it’s made cheaply and it’s really terrible. It devastates people. You can live with cocaine, you can live with heroin and all those other things. Cocaine is addictive, but marijuana is not addictive and they keep saying it is but it’s not. You can quit that forever.
“The powers-that-be don’t want people to think for themselves,” he continues. “They can’t be directed and you can’t draft them! I’m not religious at all. I’m not much into formalised religion because that just means control. Control is all very well, but I’m not wild about the people who do control us, you know? I’m also not wild about kids in their teens and so forth using. I mean, it is very powerful stuff. But establishment people denigrate everything, because they lose control when people start thinking for themselves.”
Peter Fonda, who is best known for his role in Easy Rider, turned Hagman on to LSD.
“Oh, my God! It was total transformation of a spiritual consciousness, in my case. I was into my 40s. I was quite late. A lot of kids took it for kicks. But I only did it because it got me to a spiritual place. It allowed me to see the oneness with everything. I mean, we are all just here for a short length of time but actually we’re (pauses)... all the prayers and all the religions I’ve read about have an ending like: ‘Is now, always was, and always will be,’ when speaking of God. And I believe that for humans too. It’s the continuation of the you. Am I making any sense to you?”
Indeed he is, albeit in a way I'd never have predicted. Hagman says he had many visions while experimenting with drugs, and dismisses most of them as being simply “common” experiences.
“I’ve compared the things with many other people,” he says. “But I remember when I had an operation with my liver, I had a similar experience to LSD. I had an out of body experience where I was suspended above the operation table and I was watching myself and I was looking at the guys and they were talking and playing music!”
Hagman started drinking at a very early age, or as he puts it himself, “I had my hangovers as a child! It was because that was the thing to do. Smoking and drinking. John Wayne did it and all my heroes and so forth.”
Would Earnest Hemingway have also been a figure he looked up to?
“I was a big fan of Hemingway. He came from a western type of upbringing too. As a matter of fact, now that you mention it, he did influence me quite a bit about alcohol. It was a manly thing to do.”
Hagman first hit the bottle with a vengeance when filming the very popular I Dream Of Jeanie TV show, which ran for six years. He recalls being frustrated by the poor quality of the scripts. When he complained, the producer would try palming him off with more money. His frustration eventually transmogrified into aggression.
“I went to a psychiatrist and talked about it,” he recalls. “He said, ‘Look, you are in a golden prison and they let you out every Friday. And you have the weekend and you can spend your money or have fun, and then you go back to your golden prison. That’s two days out of the week, so enjoy it’. I finally did.”
His enjoyment, he says, came via the bottle and drugs. Patrick Duffy, one of his acting colleagues from Dallas, once recalled Hagman drinking in the morning, pouring it onto his cornflakes.
“I always drank in the morning,” nods Hagman. “It didn’t get bad. I didn’t get drunk or anything, I’d just keep that little high. You’d get a little high and you’d want to stay there. To get that kick. I was drinking about five bottles of champagne every day, but I’d start at nine o’clock in the morning, until ten o’clock at night. That’s not too much! I was trying to get pleasantly inebriated and stay there. I never liked to get aggressive or lose control. I am an alcoholic. I’m in a programme. The thing with drink, though, is it can make you violent. I’ve talked to a lot of cops about this, and they said, ‘When we reprimand somebody, we’d much rather have him on marijuana than alcohol because alcohol makes them combative’.
“Giving up drinking wasn’t as difficult as tobacco," he continues. “Tobacco was terribly difficult. You are much better off without it. I was the head of the American Cancer Society division on anti-smoking. And I even made an anti-smoking television commercial. Tobacco kills half a million Americans a year. It is not a pleasant death. You get lung cancer and it goes to your brain. And I thought, ‘That’s too much’. I gave up because I read what it does to you. I quit successfully and getting involved in cancer awareness just seemed like the thing to do. You know what? It’s never been proved that marijuana has killed anybody. I’ve never heard of anybody dying from marijuana poisoning. So, tobacco and alcohol are legal and kill millions of people – marijuana is illegal and has never killed anybody. Can you figure it out? Of course cannabis should be legalised.”
Hagman quit booze 13 years ago when he was diagnosed with liver failure.
“I almost died several times from alcohol,” he admits. “It’s not a pleasant death. I have insurance from my union but it costs like almost a million dollars to get a new liver – if you can get it! God! It’s the most expensive operation in the world. I think it costs $600,000 plus $40,000 in medications a year – in a country that doesn’t have social medicine. So, if you don’t have a union or somebody who can take care of that, you are fucked.
“I also had to have a portion of my liver taken out. I came over to Europe and I got an ecoli infection in my liver and they had to take out a piece about as big as my fist. And it grew back. The liver’s the only organ that can replicate itself. Then I had problems with other things. They had to do another colon operation. So it’s an ongoing thing. But without money you are pretty well fucked. I work out three or four times a week. I have a trainer and I exercise every day. So, I’m in better shape now than when I was 40. But I have a Puerto Rican liver too! The guy who gave me his liver was Puerto Rican. So, I like to dance and do the salsa and eat hot spicy food!”
It’s next to impossible to have a conversation with Hagman without discussing the show that turned him into a household name. He even dresses like JR Ewing, with the signature cowboy hat, and proudly shows me a gigantic wristwatch with the initials JR engraved on it. The Dallas phenomenon reached an all-time high when the infamous ‘Who Shot JR?’ cliffhanger episode was aired – and it still has the second highest American viewership figures ever.
Dallas was renowned for its end-of-season cliffhangers, but JR’s ‘murder’ lasted considerably longer than intended because of an ongoing actors’ strike in 1980, as well as Hagman’s tough negotiation stance which saw him threatening to leave the show during the height of its popularity. During the talks, he jetted over to London to get away from all the pressure and hinted during an interview on Wogan that he might call it a day on the show. His threat had the desired effect, prompting the CBS network to make him the highest paid actor working on TV.
“It was my wife’s idea,” Hagman admits. She said, “‘We have a lot of friends in London – let’s go back there'. Then you would have the pressure, like your mother calling you up and saying, ‘Larry, you have a contract. You’ll never work in the business again'. To hold out made sense. It was only two years into the show and nobody thought we were going to run much longer than that. But I knew it would.”
Hagman is adamant that he would have quit the show if CBS hadn’t coughed up.
“Oh, yes, of course. I had to. Dallas was a license to steal! It was wonderful. Lots of fun. Lots of money. Lots of fame. All the things you wanted as a young man.”
There’s a lot of internet buzz at the moment about a possible movie remake of Dallas. And if it happens, Hagman says he’d love to sign on for a cameo.
“John Travolta was rumoured to play JR in the movie and I was very complimented that they would choose somebody like him. I think it’s a mistake – they should get me! But there you go. They’ve missed the boat.”
It's been two years since Hagman last appeared on our screens in Nip/Tuck. He reckons it’s probably the best thing on TV these days.
“I played a great part,” he enthuses. “The main characters are both plastic surgeons, and when they interview people they say, ‘What don’t you like about yourself?’ And people say, ‘I don’t like my breasts’, or ‘I don’t like my ears’, or ‘my nose’. They ask me that and I say, ‘My balls need fixing (laughs),’ or something like that. I had testicular cancer and they cut my balls off and they put these little acorns in there. I want something bigger and they say, ‘Like what?’ and I said, ‘How about kiwis?’ and they do it – and they show the operation. Much more complicated than that. I loved it.”
There’s no doubt about it. Larry Hagman still has balls.