Who shot JR? In the summer of 1980, it was the question that swept the world. It was emblazoned on T-shirts, mugs, billboards and newspapers, made the Ten O’clock News, kept bookies busy for months and was even mentioned in Parliament.
Nearly 400 million people in more than 57 countries tuned in to watch scheming oil baron JR Ewing gunned down in the closing episode of the third series of Dallas.
Even the U.S. election wasn’t immune when Jimmy Carter’s Republican opponents wore badges saying, ‘A Democrat shot JR’. And a session of the Turkish Parliament was suspended so legislators could get home in time to tune in.
Loveable lunatic: Larry Hagman's off-screen life often rivalled that of his alter-ego JR Ewing in terms of excitement and entertainmentThen when, months later, the video tape identifying the culprit finally arrived in London by plane, it was transported to the BBC under armed escort.
Such was the global grip of America’s favourite soap, and the fascination of JR as one of television’s most brilliant baddies. He was the devil in a ten-gallon hat — a Machiavellian schemer who grinned wolfishly as he cheated oil barons, family members, wives and lovers.
More... Tourists flock to pay tribute to dead Dallas star Larry Hagman leaving flowers at Southfork Ranch which was known to millions of viewers as J.R.'s lavish home Supreme Court to rule whether relatives of soldiers killed in battle can sue for human rights breachBut while JR Ewing had people queueing up to kill him, Larry Hagman, the actor who turned JR into such a mesmerising monster (despite desperately corny lines and appalling plot developments), was a deeply loved, if highly eccentric and flawed, man.
Indeed, Larry, who died on Friday, aged 81, had an off-screen life that often rivalled JR’s for excitement and entertainment, and certainly topped him when it came to hedonism — drugs (everything from diet pills to LSD), alcohol (Hagman perked up his morning cornflakes with Bourbon) and women (Larry was an enthusiast).
His endless eccentricities included roaring round Malibu on his Harley-Davidson in a yellow chicken suit, shopping for food dressed as a gorilla, upstaging the Queen at Royal Ascot by distributing fake $100 bills to the crowds with his face on them, claiming he and Dallas were partly to thank for the fall of communism, and staying silent all day every Sunday for ‘therapeutic’ reasons.
He dated both Joan and Jackie Collins (‘They were arm candy!’ he said), loved partying, adored sex — but after 1954, only with his beloved wife Maj — and claimed to be a member of the ‘mile-high club’, with a difference. ‘Let me tell you, making love when you’re flying a plane and there’s no autopilot is pretty tricky,’ he once said. ‘A lot of panic was involved.’
Showbusiness: Hagman got his big break when he was cast in I Dream of Jeannie alongside Barbara Eden, left, which was followed in 1978 by his career-defining role as JR Ewing in Dallas, rightLarry Hagman was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1931, the product of a brief and unhappy marriage between Broadway music star Mary Martin (who appeared in South Pacific) and wealthy lawyer Ben Hagman. His childhood was overshadowed by family rows, his mother’s driving ambition and the awful bullying of her second husband Richard Halliday, whom young Larry fantasised about shooting with a rifle.
As a young man, he dithered about what to do with his life, but finally plumped for showbusiness after a stint in the U.S. Air Force in London organising entertainments for troops across Europe (he dodged a posting to Korea by obtaining tickets to South Pacific in London for the U.S. military top brass).
It was also in London that met Maj Axelsson, a Swedish dress designer who became his wife of 58 years, the love of his life, the mother of his two children, Heidi and Preston, and the reason he didn’t go (completely) off the rails.
They married in 1954 and after years making little impact on Broadway, his first big break on TV came with I Dream Of Jeannie, in which he played an astronaut haunted by a beautiful blonde genie. That was eventually followed in 1978 by the part of JR Ewing in Dallas.
Dallas was never supposed to revolve around JR and his neurotic on/off vodka-swilling wife Sue Ellen, played by Linda Gray. But when filming began, Larry and Linda deliberately camped up their parts — ad-libbing during scenes, fighting, bickering and constantly drawing attention to themselves until the delighted producers demanded more and more scenes for them, all packed with legendary lines.
Who can forget JR’s typically charming put down to Sue Ellen: ‘You’re a drunk, a tramp and an unfit mother.’ Or Hagman’s personal favourite: ‘Once you get rid of integrity, the rest is a piece of cake.’
Must-see TV: JR Ewing became television's most famous villain, and Larry Hagman the highest paid TV star in the worldSoon JR was TV’s most famous villain, and Larry the highest-paid TV star in the world, with the power to change scripts and have producers hired and fired. But he was also a full-blown alcoholic. He had started drinking (Southern Comfort and home-brew cider) when he was 14, and kept hard at it for the next 50 years. At the height of his Dallas fame and fortune he graduated to champagne and bourbon and pretty much anything he could get his hands on.
‘I’d begin with a champagne and orange juice for breakfast,’ he once said. ‘Then continue throughout the day, drinking five bottles.
‘When I got home at night, I’d have a couple of vodkas, then wine with dinner.’
It never dawned on him he had a problem. Even though he was spending £40,000 a year on champagne alone.
‘Nine o’clock in the morning to nine o’clock at night is a long 12 hours,’ he said. ‘You can ingest a lot of alcohol in that time, but it was never too much. I was never a drunk or nasty or violent, and never fluffed my lines on set. No one ever told me I should stop. I just took lots of little slugs throughout the day.’
It wasn’t just booze. He was also an avid cigarette smoker, became addicted to Maj’s diet pills in the Sixties, had his first puff of marijuana with Jack Nicholson (when they were filming Ensign Pulver in Acapulco), got his first LSD tabs from pop star David Crosby of Crosby, Stills & Nash, and dabbled with cocaine.
‘At about 11am I would get a nice high, and I kept it going all day long.’
He never regretted his drug-taking, just the effect the drugs had on his body — ‘they ruined it! ’— and insisted that taking LSD removed his fear of death.
He once said that when he died he wanted his corpse fed through a wood chipper and the remains spread over a field planted with wheat and marijuana that would eventually yield a huge marijuana cake so his friends could munch through ‘a little of Larry’.
Then and now: Hagman, seen left as JR with Linda Gray as Sue Ellen in the original series, reprised his most famous role in the Channel 5 remake of Dallas - the co-stars are seen together in 2012, rightIt can’t have been easy being married to someone who popped his first cork with the morning papers and ‘liked the constant feeling of being mildly loaded’, but Maj stuck it out. She also, very sensibly given his various enthusiasms, went everywhere with him — on location, on fishing trips — and always insisted on a bathroom each, which was her secret to a happy marriage.
Theirs was a solid, proper, hugely loving marriage. He adored and respected her and said: ‘My happiness comes from being a husband, father and grandfather of five, not from stardom, which is a fluke.’
Even so, Dallas was huge. Everyone watched it. We were all left dangling by the endless cliff-hangers.
Even the Queen Mother asked Hagman when she met him: ‘Who shot JR?’ only to be disappointed with a polite: ‘Not even for you, ma’am.’
In northern Africa, a Bedouin tribe delayed its annual migration across the Sahara because its elders couldn’t countenance missing the last ever episode of Dallas.
The Bedouins needn’t have worried. Earlier this year, the series was brought back on Channel 5. It wasn’t a patch on the original, but it did feature the original JR, Sue Ellen and Bobby Ewing, all back from the — nearly — dead.)
And in Romania, the programme was heralded by Dictator Nicolae Ceausescu as the perfect case study in Western capitalist decadence and broadcast to his long-suffering populace alongside two hours of party political broadcasts.
Zest for life: The popular actor famously lived life to the fullAs a piece of propaganda it backfired. Luxury-starved Romania fell in love with the chandeliers, big hair, lavish swimming pools and JR’s extravagance. And when Ceausescu was overthrown in 1989, a Romanian businessman created a Dallas theme park, complete with Southfork and fake oil wells to celebrate the role of JR and the rest of the Ewing clan in toppling Communism.
Meanwhile, Larry’s liver was protesting against his ‘lots of little slugs throughout the day.’ In 1992, he was diagnosed first with cirrhosis and then cancer of the liver, and on August 23, 1995, had a 16-hour liver transplant.
‘As JR I could get away with anything — bribery, blackmail and adultery,’ he said. ‘But cancer caught me.’
The transplant saved his life and touched him enormously. So much so that he kept a photo of the 35-year-old donor by his shaving mirror, thanked him every morning for the gift of life and became a zealous campaigner for organ donation.
So it was a big shock to his friends to read reports in September 2003 that he’d allegedly fallen off the wagon (something he denied) and, three months later, was rushed to hospital for further liver surgery.
Thankfully, it was just a blip and, under Maj’s guidance, he embraced a vegan diet of five ‘disgusting’ vegetable smoothies a day, Zen meditation, mind-reading, paragliding and a keep-fit regime with a woman he nicknamed the ‘Princess of Pain’.
Sadly, it didn’t keep the wolf from the door. Last October, Larry discovered a tumour on his tongue, which turned out to be cancerous. A stint of chemotherapy put it into remission, but recent complications saw him back in hospital last week.
He died surrounded by his family and co-stars, dear friends Linda Gray and Patrick Duffy, who played his brother Bobby. The only person missing was his beloved Maj, who was in a nursing home nearby, suffering from acute Alzheimer’s and unable even to recognise Larry.
Friends claim it wasn’t the cancer, but a broken heart at losing Maj for ever, that killed him.
According to TV executives, art will imitate life and JR’s death will be written into the next series which they are part-way through filming. Which is all very well, but it is hard to imagine Dallas — even a re-make — without JR.
Larry Hagman had an extraordinary and enviable zest for life. Throughout all the ups and downs, the boozing, the drugs, the vegan shakes, the liver failure, the tongue cancer, the bizarre outfits and the brutal exercise regimes, he was always honest and open about his battles and, with Maj by his side, relentlessly upbeat.
His motto was: ‘Don’t worry, be happy, feel good’, his cars were adorned with bumper stickers that read: ‘Hagman Lives!’ and for years a flag emblazoned with Vito celebration est (life is a celebration) fluttered gaily above his Malibu home. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine anyone taking the art of celebration quite as seriously as he did.
■ And finally, who did shoot JR? His on-screen sister-in-law and mistress Kristin, of course, played by Bing Crosby’s daughter, Mary.
