South Florida Sun Sentinel | August 22, 1993
By Deborah Wilker
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Talk about your more pleasant assignments:
Brunch with TV icon Larry Hagman at a fancy oceanfront resort; chat about his new Fort Lauderdale series Staying Afloat; then top it off with a visit to the deck of the show’s multi-million dollar yacht.
A lovely day. A simple mission. Or so it seemed.
“Meet Larry Hagman,” says an effusive press agent.
Hagman bounds into the Ocean View Cafe, dressed as Staying Afloat’s dapper Alexander Turnbull Hollingsworth Ill, all in yachtsman’s blue, with a grin as big as Texas.
He’s in a restaurant packed with stunned tourists — some of whom are spitting up their waffles as they realize it’s old J.R. right here in the flesh.
As they strain for a better look, Hagman nods and waves with attentive charm.
Flashbulbs pop. The room is his.
Extending a firm handshake and instantly making everyone around him feel at home, Hagman takes a seat, grabs a menu, looks straight ahead — and then…
and then…
– there is nothing.
Not a word. Not a syllable. Not a peep.
“Just one minor detail,” says Richard Grant, Hagman’s harried publicist.”Today is one of Larry’s silent days.”
Silent days?
I’d heard something about this — about how Hagman always takes one day each week during which he utters not a single word.
“Honest, I had no idea he was going to pick today,” says Grant, a veteran star-keeper who, in all his 30 years of babysitting Hollywood’s elite, says he has never faced a dilemma quite like this.
In just a few hours, Grant also would have to deliver his mute client to a crew from Entertainment Tonight.
“You know Larry doesn’t talk one day a week. Well, today’s the day.”
Yeah, we know. But why this day?
Wasn’t this no-talking thing something he only did on Sundays?
Didn’t he call them Silent Sundays?
And wasn’t today a Saturday – the day of our long-planned chat? Was he really serious? Did he really expect to be the subject of a lengthy interview without speaking? Dead serious.
“Larry was up all night shooting — he’s exhausted and he’s resting his voice and he picked today instead of Sunday. But don’t worry. Really. You’re gonna love this. Just watch him,” says Grant, his love-ya-baby shtick oozing.
Well, love might be pushing it. But like will do.
Hagman has been not-talking for so long, he’s perfected it.
Employing a charismatic mix of sign language, rubbery facial ticks and an array of moves borrowed from living-room charades, he’ll ‘answer’ just about anything.
His favorite movie? “Wayne’s World,” imparted with an uncanny imitation of Mike Meyers’ bug-eyed grin and “schwing” maneuver.
Favorite TV show? Anything on The Discovery Channel, for which he mimes fish swimming downstream, dogs yelping and birds in flight.
What about a Dallas reunion, I ask of the show that concluded its 14-season run in 1991. ‘You never know,’ he reveals, with a que sera sera shrug. ‘Maybe.’
But didn’t they shoot you at the end? ‘Perhaps,’ he implies, clutching his chest and a make-believe gun.
Whatever this was — this odd conversation with myself over breakfast, Hagman somehow managed to entertain.
On a more telling note, it was intriguing to sit down with a celebrity who did not prattle on about himself, his projects and triumphs. He was content to merely perform.
When we catch up with Larry Hagman on the set two days later, it’s a Talking Day, thank goodness. Particularly since NBC is spending more than $3 million on this two-hour movie, the pilot for a planned series beginning this winter.
The flick bows Nov. 19 as part of NBC’s new Friday Night Mystery Movie, which will rotate familiar TV stars in light-action fare – along the lines of Murder, She Wrote.
On this day, Staying Afloat is shooting at Pompano Air Park, home of the Goodyear Blimp. While the crew sets up and action scene, Hagman has retreated to his trailer for a laugh.
Nothing special going on in there. Just a classic “| Love Lucy” episode playing.
“Lucy. She was something, wasn’t she?”
At last — he speaks!
Here’s Larry Hagman — all smiles and apologies, sipping a bottle of designer apple juice while he watches TV.
“It was kind of selfish of me, I know,” he says about the Silent Day. “Id never done an interview like that before.”
He explains that miming for people demands their concentration.
He says he began the practice about 27 years ago after a long day on the set of I Dream of Jeannie.
“We were filming a rodeo scene and there was a lot of dust and I kept yelling ‘Jeannie, Jeannie,’ ” he recounts, referring to the ‘60s series co-starring Barbara Eden.
“The next day I woke up and I had no voice. So the doctor told me not to talk all weekend and I kind of liked it.”
“It’s restful. I’m there inside my head alone.”
Hagman then vowed to do it once a week. The last day he ever spent with his mother, the actress Mary Martin, was a Silent Day.
“Of course I didn’t know it would be our last day together,” he says of Martin who died in 1990.
Hagman hasn’t seen much of Fort Lauderdale since arriving about two months ago. But what he has seen he has liked.
“My wife and I love to travel. I wanted a show with a location we’d enjoy.”
He explained that Florida is merely a base for his Staying Afloat character, who lives on board a stunning 100-foot yacht moored along the Intracoastal.
The show’s light-escapist nature may take him anywhere. And as executive producer, Hagman picks the cities.
By all accounts, this seems to be a happy set packed with eager crew and content young co-stars.
“I kept waiting for him to turn into a monster,” says producer Gray Frederickson, a friend of Hagman’s since 1988. But he never did.” This guy is so nice it has to be an act, he thought.
“This is the way I prefer it,” Hagman says of his easygoing work style.
“You don’t get your best work from frightened people,” recalling a rancorous episode with a Dallas producer who regularly bullied cast and crew.
“Anger is always a waste of energy, a sign of weakness,” Hagman says. “It’s part of the star’s job to set the tone, to be accessible. It makes people know you care.”
He likes the feeling of being on the set. He’s here all day, though he isn’t needed in a scene until noon. He knows his presence lends a certain aura.
“There’s a time not to be here also,” he says. “You don’t want to be leaning over people. But what’s the alternative — not caring, and not getting the job done?”
He remains quite close with his former co-stars, chiefly Linda Grey, and says that if he could rewrite any moment from that 13 years, it would be that “Linda was not phased out the way they did.”
That — and Bobby’s “dream” season. “We lost a lot of viewers after that.”
In returning to network TV, Hagman has taken quite a salary cut. Of course, even if the networks were paying as they used to, no new show could afford J.R.’s old demands.
“It wouldn’t be fair to anyone to impose that kind of budget,” Hagman says realistically. “All I want to do is have a little fun on a good location. The money follows if it’s successful.”
Originally published August 22, 1993
