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O J A I M AG A Z I N E | SUMMER 2025
THe dAy I wEnt to HeavEn – To see LArry HAgmaN I went to Heaven to see Larry Hagman. And not surprisingly, it was a real hoot. Any time spent with the larger-than-life, oft-outrageous son of Broadway star Mary Martin is bound to be memorable, to put it mildly. Although “mildly” is not the appropriate adjective you use when Mr. Hagman, once dubbed “The Mad Monk of Malibu,” comes up in conversations. And I quickly discovered why. But before we get to Larry’s Heaven in Upper Ojai, permit me, dear reader, to take you back in time before I recount details of my get-together with the irrepressible Larry (and his wife Maj) at his mountaintop aerie. To an era even before Mr. Hagman evolved into TV’s iconic scheming Texas billionaire who rampaged on our home screens from 1978-1991 as John Ross Ewing (affectionately known as J.R.) in the popular series Dallas. Close Encounter: Part One It was the summer of 1969 and Larry was already the star of the comedy series I Dream of Jeannie (1965-1970) opposite Barbara Eden. He played an astronaut stranded on a desert island who finds a bottle, opens it, and up pops a blond genie who says, “Your wish is my command.” Viewers loved it. Over that long summer of ’69, I and my wife, Sally, found ourselves living with a friend in the exclusive guarded enclave known as the Malibu Colony. How could I, a hardworking, underpaid foreign correspondent for Britain’s London Daily Express (4 million readers a day) get to live in the legendary “Colony?” Here’s how. My journalist pal Bruce
Russell (Reuters’ bureau chief in Los Angeles) was a friend of the British singer/actor/director Michael Sarne, who had been hired at a ridiculously high salary by Fox movie mogul Daryl F. Zanuck to direct the 1969 movie Myra Breckinridge, based on Gore Vidal’s bestselling book. Fox gave Sarne a beach house in the Colony, but Sarne made a quick getaway back to London once the movie was finished, and kindly offered Bruce the use of his pad until the lease ran out. Heady stuff. Two doors down the sand lived The Mamas & the Papas (all in full throttle at the time), Jane Fonda, and her then-beau, the French film director Roger Vadim, who had a habit of cohabitating with his leading ladies like Brigitte Bardot. (Apologies for that diversion. I couldn’t resist name-dropping.) We enjoyed bumping into Cass Elliot or John and Michelle Phillips on the sand. On July Fourth, we spotted a bunch of children marching down the beach. They were part of a raggle-taggle parade led by a scruffy-looking, bare-chested fellow in tatty shorts who was blowing a tin whistle and waving what looked like a Vietnamese flag. This latter-day Pied Piper of Malibu turned out to be Larry himself, who was one of the high-profile celebrities actively protesting the unpopular Vietnam War. And damn the consequences. Close Encounter: Part Two By the ’70s Larry had become a big star. In full J.R. mode, he was king of the TV
hill. And my editors in London wanted me to talk to him about Dallas, which apparently was a favorite of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, when she retired to her Buckingham Palace quarters to watch “telly.” Not everyone, it seems, was as impressed by Dallas as Her Royal Highness: The Los Angeles Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning TV critic Howard Rosenberg noted that Larry’s “performance … is a salute to slime.” But you know what they say: “You can’t please all of the people — all of the time.” So, I hied back to the Colony and showed up at his whiter-than-white, two-anda-half story beachfront house that he described as “adobe, Santa Fe-style.” To me it looked like an impressive reject from a French Foreign Legion movie set: towering over the sand, all dazzling white with lots of stained-glass windows stretched deep, and seemingly impossibly squeezed into the narrow beachfront lot. On the deck of the house, a fluttering white and red flag read, “Celebratio Vitae” (Celebration of Life ). It was, I discovered, truly Larry’s motto for living. Moments after he welcomed me, Larry said with a straight face: “Let’s do the interview in my hot tub — so, take your clothes off and get in.”
by IVOR DAVIS