Underneath the familiar 10-gallon hat was a genuine Texan, not just a character from Hollywood groomed for his world-famous role. Larry Hagman was born in Fort Worth, Texas, on September 21, 1931, and though having spent some of his childhood in California living with his grandmother, he returned to the Lone Star State and graduated from Weatherford High School.
Larry maintained ties with his hometown even after his most well-known character was in syndication. Former Parker County Judge Mark Riley recalled the actor returning to Weatherford in the mid-1980s to speak at a benefit for the local library. “Some years earlier, while I was working for a radio station, I received a large picture of Larry Hagman. I really did not know who sent it or why I kept it for so long, but I knew my mother was a huge fan of Hagman. Mom was in the hospital and could not attend the event, and the word we had from Hagman’s advance crew was that he was not going to do interviews nor sign autographs. However, I mentioned having the picture and wanting to get it signed for Mom to one of the organizers of the event. He told me to bring the picture and keep it at my table, and he would see what he could do. To make a long story short, Hagman autographed the picture To Maurine, Love you, Larry Hagman. I was able to put the picture in Mom’s room, and it was the best medicine she ever had. We don’t always see that side of celebrities like Larry Hagman.”
Like most thespians, Larry took many small roles in theater and television before his rise to stardom, but being the son of Mary Martin, aka “Peter Pan,” certainly appears to have assisted his career. They acted together during a long run of South Pacific in London before he joined the United States Air Force, where much of his activity included producing and directing others in live military productions.
There was even a starring role in the popular soap opera The Edge of Night that Larry commanded for two years, before his widely recognized role as the bumbling astronaut Major Anthony Nelson in I Dream of Jeannie, where he starred alongside Barbara Eden. The sitcom drew consistently high ratings for five seasons. In the first episode, the marooned astronaut finds Jeannie in a bottle, and though their relationship is one of master and genie, the sexual tension between the two characters was thick, and many agree that the tension was the glue that held the show together. After the characters Nelson and Jeannie married during the fifth season, the tension was lost, and ratings fell to the demise of the program.
We probably never consider Larry as a vocalist, but many of his stage performances were musicals, and he appeared in the TV version of the musical Applause with the great Lauren Bacall. That was in 1973, but the role that brought Larry his greatest success and fame was to come along five years later, when the hugely popular prime-time drama Dallas debuted.
Each episode began with the popular theme song that everyone can hum along with and a view of Dallas as a helicopter panned the iconic Reunion Tower and the rest of the Dallas skyline. Perhaps the idea of playing a villain like J.R. Ewing appealed to him because it was contrary to his nature. If the rest of the world did not already believe everyone in Dallas, Texas, wore big hats and western boots, lived on a ranch and owned oil wells, they soon did due to the addiction to the highest-rated television show of the era.
Other television shows drew high ratings by ending a season with a cliffhanger — The Fugitive from the 1960s for instance — but none captured the attention of the world like “Who Shot J.R.?” We were left wondering whether J.R. lived or died, and, of course, wondering who pulled the trigger in the final episode of Season 3. Larry was negotiating his contract with the producers of Dallas, and reportedly consideration was given to using the “shot” as a way of writing him out of the script. Negotiations worked out, and J.R. appeared in the final minutes of the first episode of Season 4, but we did not find out who shot J.R. until the fourth episode of the season.
While the J.R. Ewing character may have been the stereotypical Texan to much of the world, Larry Hagman may have been his alter-ego, based on the charitable nature he exhibited later in his career. There are conflicting accounts about where his ashes were spread after his death and cremation in Dallas in November 2012, but at least some of his fans believe they are all over Southfork Ranch.
Sources:
IMDb.com
larryhagman.com
Written by Bill Smith
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