A new liver has given Larry Hagman not just a new life but a new attitude.
“I had a kind of spiritual awakening, a reawakening, really,” Hagman told TV critics last month. “I want to take all my money and spend it. Right up to the time I don’t need Medicare anymore.”
Decades of heavy alcohol consumption destroyed Hagman’s liver and nearly killed him. A transplant a year ago saved him and changed his outlook: “A healthy liver, not drinking, not smoking–hell, I can walk on water, boy!”
Hagman said he plans to sell his homes in Malibu, New York and New Mexico–he’s hanging on to other places in Ojai and Santa Monica–take the cash and dispose of it. “It’s time to go out and spend it,” he said. Traveling the world will gobble up some, and he also hopes to give away a chunk. “I’m trying to think of something of value to do with it,” he said.
Hagman, appearing with “Dallas” co-stars Patrick Duffy and Linda Gray to promote a “Dallas”-reunion TV movie airing this fall on CBS, credited his old show with helping to bring down communism.
Hagman said he used to trade “Dallas” tapes and VCRs for caviar with a friend in Soviet Russia and that the tapes were quickly bootlegged, duplicated and sold on the black market. Seeing the extravagant lifestyle of the Ewing family as depicted in “Dallas,” Hagman maintained, “got people to wondering, `Why don’t we have that over here?’–all the cars and the glitz,” he said.
“I think it contributed a lot. I really do. Just the information on how people really lived here. Well, not exactly how people lived.”
Hagman admitted that he never regretted the lifestyle that almost killed him and said that, astonishingly, he actually had to be talked into having the transplant. His doctor later explained that liver failure had left his blood so polluted with poisons that his ability to reason was compromised. “Everything was muddled,” he said.
Afterward, with the new liver installed and working, Hagman said, “All of a sudden, names and addresses of old girlfriends started to come back to me. And I started calling some of them up! I talked to some irate husbands,” he cracked.
One former love, it turned out, was still living in London with the same phone number, he said, although she had gone through a couple of bad marriages in the intervening years. “I talked to her for a long time. She couldn’t remember me for anything.”