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After the Air Force, Hagman tried his luck off-Broadway, then did a two-year stint on The Edge of Night. There were several modest roles in movies, including one memorable semivillain in The Group. But Hagman's most important part before Dallas was in the airhead sitcom I Dream of Jeannie. For Hagman it was the big break. He worked constantly, rewriting scripts, fighting to get the best possible performers. "I was driven, compulsive," he remembers. "I yelled at people. Finally I couldn't take it any more. I started to vomit, and it was as if my body were exploding and everything inside were trying to get out, including my brain." Two and a half years with a shrink put his cerebrum where it belonged, and even when Jeannie folded, he kept busy with TV pilots and movies. In the lean years that followed he still earned more than $150,000, enough, as his mother says, to allow him to be "a grand pasha" around the house.
Hagman was shown the first script of Dallas in early 1978: it was love-hate at first sight. "There wasn't one redeeming person in it. Even the mother was bad. I was tired of shows in which everybody was so nice and warm and cuddly to each other.
I wanted to see some ass kickers." That was incentive enough ; for Hagman to make J.R. into the most unusual bad guy in the history of TV villainy. Like all those dudes he met when he was with his daddy, he speaks softest when he is at his meanest and smiles before he pounces; the more devious he gets, the more sincere he seems to be.
That canny balancing act has made Hagman indispensable to the show. He knows it, of course, and, embittered by the fact that he does not get one penny from the Jeannie reruns, the star refused to return to work unless he got a larger share of the Dallas gusher. It was a tactic J.R. would appreciate, and, naturally, it worked: Hagman now makes an estimated $50,000 to $75,000 a show, or between $1.1 million and $1.65 million a year—not counting residuals yet to come from eventual syndication. "But you're already a rich man," he was advised before negotiations. "Not as rich as I'm gonna be," he countered. J.R. would like that too.