Long life | 6 December 2012

I was sad to read that Larry Hagman had died. As J.R. Ewing, the conniving Texas oilman in Dallas, he may have been ‘an overstuffed Iago in a Stetson hat’, but he was curiously lovable in a way that no Iago ever is. This could be because he was rather lovable in real life and this niceness may have seeped through into the evil television character to temper its hatefulness. Unusually for a Hollywood star, he remained happily married to the same woman for 50 years; and even more unusually, he did so despite being at various times a very heavy drinker, smoker and drug-taker. It was an odd combination for a man who claimed his happiness came entirely ‘from being a husband, father and grandfather of five’ to be at the same time one whose declared purpose in life was ‘to be as outrageous as you possibly can’.

This outrageousness involved drinking five bottles of champagne a day while filming Dallas, and doing so (according to him) without ever getting drunk, it being a common boast among Texan men that they can hold any amount of liquor. ‘Nine in the morning to nine at night is 12 long hours,’ he said. ‘You can ingest a lot of alcohol in that time, but it was never too much.’ Other of his eccentricities involved appearing in public in silly costumes, such as going to the shops dressed as a gorilla, and making fans sing him a song or tell him a joke before agreeing to sign his autograph.

But then, like many Americans, he also had a puritanical side yearning to express itself; and he turned abruptly from chain smoker to anti-smoking fanatic, carrying a battery-powered fan with which to blow smoke back into other people’s faces. Strangest of all was his habit, of which I learnt from his New York Times obituary, of refusing to speak on Sundays. He did this for a number of years while insisting all along that there was no religious impulse behind it. He didn’t explain what the point of it was, or why he had decided to do it in the first place. All he said was: ‘You’ve got to try it to appreciate how nice it is.’

Maybe it was nice for him, but how nice can it have been it for his family as they sat down to Sunday lunch in the presence of their doting but silent patriarch? Rather tense and gloomy, I would have thought. I am drawn to the conclusion that his Swedish wife Maj Axelsson must have been a woman of saintly forbearance. She met and married Hagman in London in the 1950s shortly after he had appeared at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in the musical South Pacific with his mother Mary Martin — he in the chorus and she as the star (in which I must have seen him, though I wouldn’t have realised it at the time) — and stuck with him for the next half-century in spite of great provocation. Not only did she put up with his various addictions, including one to her own diet pills; she had also to sit through Sundays without any conversation at all. It is remarkable that their mutual devotion managed to survive all these challenges intact.

Still, there is something rather appealing about the idea of one day of silence each week. It should be more than that. It should involve abstinence not only from talking and telephoning, but also from emailing, texting, tweeting and all the other forms of communication that now seem to dominate people’s lives. It puzzles me that everybody should be so desperate to stay in touch with each other and know what everyone else is doing. But there is a phenomenon known as FOMO —Fear Of Missing Out — that feeds this compulsion, and it seems to be spreading like wildfire around the globe. We should do our best to combat it.

Up here in Northamptonshire I don’t talk very much to anybody except my next-door neighbour, my elder brother John, and our conversations are mainly about pills and medical appointments. I am 72 with diabetes and what used to be known as Chronic Bronchitis (now, in a typically pointless euphemism, as Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease), and John, who is 85, suffers in addition to these ailments from Parkinson’s Disease. Between us I think we take about 20 pills a day and have at least half a dozen medical appointments a month, so we have plenty to talk about. Since Larry Hagman suffered from cancer and cirrhosis of the liver, I expect that he talked a lot about medical things as well. And maybe it was to allow his mind to dwell occasionally on other matters that he chose to say nothing at all on Sundays. Not a bad idea.