In his acting debut, Larry Hagman had only one line. It never got out. Instead, the actor stared dumbly at the audience. If he has been tongue-tied in the 40 years since that grade-school pageant, the occasion has gone unrecorded. Today Hagman likes to talk the way Texans like to spend. Except on Sundays, when there is a rule of silence at his Malibu spread. "You've got to have a day of rest somewhere along the line," he explains. "Every major religion has one."
But then Hagman crowds at least a week into the other six days. He is famous for leading full-dress parades down the beach, with as many as 400 people in tow, and he may decide—today, tomorrow or perhaps ten minutes from now—that it is time to put on his Indian headdress and call the rest of the Malibu tribe to a war dance. He has been known to show up at the supermarket in a gorilla suit. Why? Why not? "I guess I'm a ham," he says. However he costumes himself, he knows that he can always cool off by jumping into the lavish Jacuzzi bath and forget everything but his motto, floating on a banner overhead: Vita Celebratio Est (Life Is a Celebration).
So it has been for most of his 48 years. Larry's father Ben Hagman was a wheeling-dealing Texas lawyer, J.R. Ewing without the meanness. His mother is Mary Martin, who is, along with Ethel Merman, doyenne of Broadway musicals. The Hagmans divorced when Larry was five, and for much of his childhood he shuttled between boarding schools and theater wings. When Martin went on the road with Annie Get Your Gun in 1947, Larry, then 15, decided to go home to Weatherford, Texas, to live with his father. One summer Ben was running for state senator, and his son drove him all over his district. "I met all the dudes down there," he recalls. "Oil, cattle, politics, everything. Let me tell you, my character is milk toast compared with some of those people. Fratricide, patricide, brothers and sisters shooting each other; it was unbelievable!"
After appearing in some tent-show musicals, Larry joined his mother in the London production of South Pacific. A European tour in the Air Force followed. Along the way, Larry met Maj (pronounced My), a Swedish designer then living in England. "She thought I was the crassest jerk she had ever met in her life," he says. But Haggam who had a littie of J.R.'s way with women even then, wisely let a little time pass, then asked her out—on his Vespa scooter. They celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary last December in the company of their two children, Heidi, now 22, and Preston, now 18.