Hello Darlin': Tall (and Absolutely True) Tales About My Life

Larry Hagman's autobiography is as entertaining as an episode of Dallas, and he seems a whole lot nicer than J.R. Ewing, his second star TV role (the first was as Barbara Eden's "master" in I Dream of Jeannie); he's candid about the drugs and drinking that led to a 1994 liver transplant. The emphasis, however, is on good times and friends ranging from Keith Moon to Carroll O'Connor. He was born in Fort Worth in 1931, when his mother was only 17. Mary Martin soon divorced his father and departed to claim the stardom she was destined for. Hagman is frank but nonjudgmental about the fact that he had a cool relationship with his mother until after the death of her second husband and manager, Richard Halliday, who gets the book's only hostile portrait. Generally, the mood is sunny as he relates adventures like shooting deer with Dad ("three cases of hard liquor, thirty cases of beer, and something like forty packs of cigarettes ... were the most important ingredients of a good hunt"); military service in London, where he met Swedish clothing designer Maj Axelsson (his wife of 45 years); and a respectable Broadway career in the '50s and TV fame in the '60s. Hagman is refreshingly unpretentious about his place in the scheme of things. "I help keep [TV audiences] sedated," he remarks, "and at the same time I help sell cars, aspirin, deodorant, and feminine hygiene products. So far I've been pretty good at it." --Wendy Smith