JR goes to the Big Oil Well in the Sky

The original cast of Dallas

I was sad to hear veteran actor Larry Hagman has died in Dallas, TX. Ill with throat cancer from his smoking days at the age of 81 he was in Dallas to reprise the TV series which made him famous and though in hospital had spent the Thanksgiving Holiday peacefully with his family. Farewell then Major Tony Nelson who dreamt of Jeannie and JR Ewing who was shot but didn't go to the Great Oil Well in the sky.  He was the son of the wonderful Mary Martin, muse to Rodgers and Hammerstein, and the original Nellie Forbush in South Pacific and Maria von Trapp in The Sound of Music.

Mary Martin

Larry Hagman and Barbara Eden in I Dream of Jeannie

While in England with the US Air Force he met and married his wife of almost 60 years, Swedish designer Maj Axelsson. The couple later had two children. He became a star in 1965 in the TV comedy series I Dream of Jeannie, in which he played an astronaut haunted by the beautiful blonde genie, played by Barbara Eden. But it was in 1977 when he landed the role of merciless oil magnate JR Ewing, the character at the centre of the show Dallas, that his worldwide fame was cemented.

JR back at the Southfork Ranch

The series ran from 1978-1991 and viewers were glued to the weekly primetime soap antics of the Ewing family. Big hair, big money, sordid affairs and over the top portrayals of an oil rich life in Texas were the order of the day and audiences loved it. The series ran for 13 seasons and on November 21, 1980 more than 350 million people tuned in to find out "who shot JR". the season premiere that answered that question was the highest rated television episode in history.

Hagman refused to be defined by his most enduring role, acting in films such as Nixon and Primary Colors. Married to Swedish designer Maj for over 60 years he has long been an anti-smoking campaigner, a climate campaigner and advocate of solar energy. Ironic then, that the actor who played greedy Oil Man JR Ewing should turn his back on Big Oil and advocate a green lifestyle as the way forward. The magical house they built at Ojai in California near Ventura, about 65 miles north of Los Angeles, is powered entirely by solar energy and has its own water supply. It’s called “Heaven.”

Hagman lived for many years on a mountaintop above Ojai, a breathtaking 42-acre ranch called Heaven. The Hagmans first came to Ojai in the 1960s when they took their two children, Heidi Kristina and Preston, there to camp. Hagman really liked Ojai, saying it reminded him of New Canaan, Conn., where he grew up. “Ojai has got a special quality,” Hagman said in an interview in the late 1990s with. “I don’t really know what it is, but it’s a unique little town.” 


http://www.hagmanheaven.com/ojaimain.html

Dallas has some surreal memories for me too. The show was mostly shot in Los Angeles, but the makers of the soap caught the aura of the Ewing clan with breathtaking exteriors shots all around Texas. Whilst most of the family drama was centered on Southfork Ranch outside Dallas the building that really captured the personality of the show best was the “Ewing Oil” Tower. Its menacing presence became an extension of J.R.’s cool and intimidating power and the steel exterior of the Renaissance Tower (located at 1201 Elm Street) was J.R. through and through. Like many office buildings in sunny Dallas it is clad in mirrored glass and the opening sequence showing the clouds reflected on the building was a personal favourite.

"Ewing Oil HQ" Dallas

Back to my surreal day in Dallas. In 1982 I had to go to Dallas for a day on business from Chicago where I was involved in some equally surreal activity with an office on the 69^th floor of Sears Tower, then the world's tallest building, and staying in the wonderful neo-gothic University Club of Chicago on the Lakefront opposite the Art Institute.  I was flying down on American Airlines leaving at seven in the morning coming back that night. The University Club is a rather wonderful 14 storey neo-Gothic skyscraper with a swimming pool and squash courts in the basement, a 3 storey dining room overlooking Lake Michigan called the Cathedral Room for the simple reason it looked like an English Cathedral, a solarium and Gym on the top floor and huge bedrooms. The service was very personal, when I emerged from my bedroom in the morning the staff who you hadn't seen before would greet you by name and there was nothing the front desk could not do for you. So when I asked at the front desk how I would get to O’Hare Airport at 5 the next morning they said, don’t worry we’ll organise transport for you.

http://www.ucco.com/

University Club of Chicago

When I went to the front door in the morning instead of the taxi I was expecting the club had laid on a Cadillac Limousine with (remember this was 1982 so none of this was then common in Europe) a TV on the centre console, a bar, fridge and the Chicago Tribune for my reading pleasure. Overwhelmed as I was the driver suggested he would meet me that night in their newest model, I nodded assent. At O’Hare time was tight and I ran down the air bridge with minutes to spare.  Breathless, I sat back in my seat on a very empty American Airlines (AA) plane. I then looked at the safety card and realised this was a DC10. Now it just so happens that the deadliest airliner crash on US soil was an American Airlines DC10 taking off from O’Hare three years earlier when an engine separated from the wing and destroyed the control mechanisms. On May 25, 1979, AA flight 191, operated by a McDonnell Douglas DC-10-10, crashed moments after take-off from Chicago. The jet had 258 passengers and 13 crew on board, all of whom died in the accident, along with two on the ground. As we started to roll the video monitors flickered into life and we were presented with a camera behind the pilot giving us a cockpit view of the take-off. I thought “not only are we going to crash but we’ll see it happen in real time and hear the Captain scream!”

In my office, 69th Floor, Sears Tower, Chicago, Ill. 1982

Despite my nerves we took off safely and as there were only 30 passengers on board we got the best of treatment and the equivalent of 3 breakfasts as they had stocked up for a lot more. For two hours we followed the mighty Mississippi and Paul Simon was right, on this sunny day with its meanders and oxbow lakes the Mississippi really did shine like a National Guitar. The surreal continued at the new airport DFW – Dallas Fort Worth which had not been open too long and where there were over 70 beautifully coloured planes clustered together surrounded by barbed wire and security guards on the tarmac. Braniff International Airways had just gone bust and all their planes had been flown back to their Dallas base to be repossessed. Each type of plane was painted just the one colour, purple, green, red and their 747’s were orange – their transatlantic slogan was “Fly the big orange.” My business contact was waiting and I strolled out to his Cadillac. This was not accidental as Texans don’t walk and the design premise of DFW and its six terminals connected by a people mover transit system was that you should be able to park within 150 feet of your gate. Hence the huge land grab to build DFW Airport neatly summed by the billboard on the road in “When DFW is finished it will be bigger than Bermuda, Bermuda 66 square miles, DFW 68 square miles.” Yup, everything is bigger in Texas.

The Big Orange -  A Braniff International B747 - 100

In Dallas after my business was finished I had a few hours to kill before flying back so I asked my host to drop me to downtown Dallas, for these were the days of Dallas on TV and Ewing Oils gleaming glass office block so I wanted to see for myself. Now the thing is Dallas is like Burbank, it doesn't really have a downtown, it has about 14 office blocks on a mound beside the flood plain of the Trinity River, the dried out (in summer) bed of the Dallas River and despite owing its existence to the railway the Union Station has only one working platform with the rest of the station being developed into a “themed retail and dining experience.” Another reason why central Dallas is not greatly exciting is a large part of it is in Grenville County which is “dry”, hence no bars.

Downtown Dallas from the flood plain of the Trinity River

Despite the temperature in the hundreds I went to see the JFK memorial, for after all in Ireland we looked upon him as “our” President. I found it strange, for all the world looking like a raised stylised concrete wall with two gaps and at its centre an empty plinth which looked like it was made for a statue which never arrived. Undaunted I headed from there down Elm to Dealey Plaza where John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated on Friday, November 22, 1963. Now today there is a memorial there and on the 6th Floor of the Texas Book Depository from which Lee Harvey Oswald fired the fatal shots (don’t mind the hocus theories Oswald did the deed – the only question is who was behind him) there is now a Kennedy Museum but in 1982 there was nothing, zero, zilch. It was as if Dallas wanted to forget about JFK.

Kennedy Memorial, Dallas

It became obvious talking to people that JFK was not particularly welcome in Dallas in 1963 and he was still not thought much of today. For people in Dallas, TX, were right wing often wrapped up in a large dose of old time religion. It was obvious that many didn't accept the Civil War (or as they term it in Texas “The War of Northern Aggression”) had ended and cars with “Yankee Plates” were honked off the streets. There were still very obvious racial undercurrents here in the “Deep

Dealey Plaza, site of the assassination

South”, you only ever saw blacks queuing for buses and even the bars appeared to be de-facto segregated being either white or black but not mixed. It was obvious that the White Texans didn't much care for their black neighbours and didn't much care for that “Catholic” 35th President of the United States from up north. Whatever else Dallas was, it was no melting pot.

See; Erykah Badu does Dallas

http://daithaic.blogspot.co.uk/2010/08/erykah-badu-does-dallas.html

That particular day the only thing melting in Dallas was me as the temperature was still in the 100’s so I looked for the shade of a bar on the “wet” side of the centre and I happily arrived at one during Happy Hour where it had a free chili bar of Tex-Mex snack food. It also had a Pina Colada machine with two buttons, cold and ice-cold. The machine must have impressed me as I missed my bus to the airport. In fairness there was only one every hour as Texas was not too hot on public transport but 20 miles to DFW was a long taxi ride. Arriving back at Chicago O’Hare Airport I was greeted by the same driver from the morning but this time he brought a brand new silver Cadillac Limo which was so long it had stretch marks. I arrived back in the Windy City JR style, fixing myself a JD and coke and watching the TV in my brand new limo. Strangely, despite the allure of JR and Ewing Oil, I have felt no need to return to Dallas.

Larry Hagman

By all accounts a nice guy Larry Hagman as JR Ewing caught the zeitgeist of the age and left a huge cultural footprint in the 1980’s which conditioned the view of the US in popular culture. Barbara Eden, who starred with Hagman in 1960s' sitcom I Dream of Jeannie, published a statement on her Facebook page which read: "I can honestly say that we've lost not just a great actor, not just a television icon, but an element of pure Americana.

"Goodbye Larry, there was no one like you before and there will never be anyone like you again."

Larry Hagman, 1931 - 2012.