I didn’t shoot J.R., but I was there – wearing a dead man’s suit.
It was hot enough to deep fry a 12-pound turkey under my arm when I got out of the limo in front of J.R. Ewing and walked into the North Dallas restaurant. The film lights and reflectors pushed it even hotter. Cameras followed our every move. Two takes, and the crew changed camera angles to inside. As I walked through the door, J.R. crammed his big hat on my head and pulled it down over my ears, shoved me into the restaurant and started laughing. I stood there facing the crew and a purring camera, feeling like Eb on “Green Acres.” Eb looked better.
“Cut!” yelled director Leonard Katzman, a serious-looking gray-haired man with a frustrated look on his face, as if I was the problem. Larry Hagman (J.R. Ewing) was known to joke around to kill the heat and tension on the set. Everyone took a turn in the barrel.
In the summer of 1980, I was a young man in my early 20s. A brutal heat wave (not uncommon in Texas) parched the Dallas-Ft. Worth Metroplex, making the inside of my tinny, airless 1976 Chevy Vega so hot it warped cassette tapes like wilted lettuce. In the percolating Texas summer scorcher, the Cowboys were just beginning to be “America’s Team,” “Urban Cowboy” was filming at Gilley’s down in Houston and “Dallas” was the hottest show on TV. My wife and I were in five episodes. Not guest stars – scenery schlubs. We were piddly extras.
Susan was a drama major and had an agent, so her being on the show made sense. How I ended up sweating in my suit with Hagman and Jim Davis (Jock Ewing) on Saturdays and later on the national hit is a stranger story.
Quick version: I go to pick up Susan’s paycheck at her agent’s office one day after work, and a guy looks at me waiting in the lobby and asks what I was doing Saturday and did I own a three-piece suit. Next thing I know, I’m suiting up for the next five Saturdays at $50 a day, imitating a businessman or sitting with Susan as a couple in a restaurant. Sometimes, we were in scenes with the major stars. Sometimes our role was being human backdrops, acting like people trying not to sweat like a porker at Sonny Bryan’s Barbecue.
One day, we walked up and down a Dallas street near the School Book Depository for seven hours in 125-degree heat – me in that sauteed three-piece suit, boiling in my own body fluids, while JR and Sue Ellen (Linda Gray) had some kind of fight inside a bank. We were the backdrop. I got a nasty banker’s tan and lost 10 pounds. The suit looked like I’d been swimming in the Great Salt Lake. Susan faired little better as her skin tomatoed and her hair curled like Betty Boop in heat.
The next Saturday, Susan was out of town and I got a call to be in North Dallas at 6 a.m. My role: Businessman. Bring the sweat suit. My foray into acting was beginning to feel like little weekend trips to hell for fifty bucks a pop.
That’s when Hagman pulled the hat down over my ears. We shot several scenes inside and finished the day in a record 130-degree (according to the bank sign next door) parking lot.
I collected my 50-spot and walked back to my car to discover I’d locked the keys in it and left the lights on, killing the battery. I stood in that suit, pooling what was left of my hydration into my shoes next to a big RV. I looked around for a wire to pick the lock.
The door behind me opened and Jim Davis stepped out of the RV with a coat hanger. He seemed to thoroughly enjoy himself jimmying the lock on my door. It was a highlight of my early life watching the famous cowboy star ram his coat hanger into the crack of my Vega’s window. I thanked him but didn’t have the guts to tell him my battery was dead, too. I got the security guy who wandered up to see if I was “bothering Mr. Davis” to jump it. It was my last “Dallas” shoot.
All in all, Susan and I shot scenes with Larry Hagman, Linda Gray, Jim Davis, Steve Kanaly (ranch hand Ray Krebbs), Ken Kercheval (Cliff Barnes) and Charlene Tilton (Lucy Ewing), plus a few guest stars whose faces are familiar but names escape me. To my continued dismay, I never got to shoot with Victoria Principal. And they never told us who shot J.R., either (we saw it when everyone else did on TV).
That fall, our hometown newspaper in Alabama interviewed Susan and me and treated us like celebrities – kind of cool for a couple of low-rent extras who mostly got paid to sweat. But here’s the best part of the story: A relative of ours died not long afterwards and they didn’t have a suit to bury him in. So I donated the hottest suit I have ever worn – feeling generous and a little relieved to be rid of it. I sweated just looking at that suit on his corpse during the funeral. It was December.
I think about that from time to time. I am forever encased in celluloid reruns wearing that suit – and he is forever encased in a metal box wearing the same suit. I never saw him sweating in it, though.
