Linda Gray's comments about Larry Hagman's last days
I am starting a new thread on this (sub)topic, because it was getting buried in another thread focusing on a slightly different set of issues. This way it will be easier to find and discuss...
Okay, so this is what Linda Gray said, and after I quote her, I will offer my observations:
Then last week I was with him with Patrick Duffy [who played J.R.'s youngest brother, Bobby Ewing, on the series] when we went to visit him in the hospital. Larry being in the hospital wasn't expected: He'd invited his entire family -- daughter, son and five granddaughters -- to spend Thanksgiving in Dallas, where we've been filming the new show for TNT. He probably felt weak and didn't want to fly.
When we went into his room, he looked good and was sitting up in bed, but then he said, "I have two weeks to live." And we were like: "Are you kidding? We have scenes on Monday!" Then we talked about how he'd ordered the new Tesla electric car and said, "You can't die until you drive the Tesla." And he perked up and said, "Yeah, I've got the Tesla coming and the scenes with you." It was like that -- two hours of laughing, giggling and hanging out. We left just beaming, thinking: "This is cool. He's being Larry; he's going to be OK."
I think we can make a few inferences from this, and they will be true inferences whether the actors or Larry himself realized certain things at the time they occurred. First, she says he looked okay sitting up in bed, but sometimes people have a last-minute rally before they die (animals do that too). I am not saying that happened to him, but with whatever meds were in his system, maybe he was doing fine for a few hours and then things obviously worsened quickly after that. He could have still been in a lot of discomfort, trying to focus on the positive and making his friends happy-- he was an actor after all, so he could have been playing a scene for them in that hospital room.
But that is not the point I wanted to make. What I wanted to say was that she admits he was probably too sick to fly home for the Thanksgiving holiday. Doesn't it stand to reason that if a man cannot take a relatively short flight from Texas to California in first-class luxury that he was probably becoming too ill to work? Cidre and most especially the insurance people would have had to start stepping in, even if he lived a few weeks longer and tried to work. He was literally on his deathbed at this point, so to think he can keep working full-time is just not very realistic. In his mind, and in their minds, it might have seemed like a good idea for him to keep working and hope he would fully recover, but they had to have known that his condition was becoming gravely serious.
Another thing here, and I know it's harder for people to see someone decline physically when you are around them daily or at least on a rather frequent basis (because the changes may be too gradual to notice)-- but if you look at him from the end of season 1 to the beginning of season 2 when there was a long gap in filming, it is obvious that he is sick. Even comparing season 1's appearances to the last Dallas TV movie in the 90s and you can see his health is not what it once was. So for people to be ignorant of that fact is baffling. Of course, he couldn't have been completely terminal when he signed on to do the continuation series in 2012, or he wouldn't have been insured by the production company, but they had to have known he had various medical problems (that all has to be disclosed by a physician before contracts are drawn up) and they had to have known that he could not have as heavy a workload as the younger stars.
I am not blaming Cidre for Larry's death (obviously) and I am not really blaming her for the fact that she had to quickly write in J.R.'s death-- but some of her story choices were questionable, and a smart producer would have had a contingency plan in place in the event this were to happen (which it unfortunately did). Even if the show came back for season 4, she should have a plan in place for Bobby's death and Sue Ellen's death-- stars of hit series die sometimes and you have to be ready for the show to go on.
On a comical note, I think it will be very ironic if Patrick Duffy ends up living the longest of all the original cast-- when his character had been killed off then was magically resurrected in a dream scenario. Can you imagine if he lives to 100 and there's another show about the Ewing grandchildren with old Bobby still around...?