The silhouette is unmistakable, and so is the smile. It looks - if you don't look too closely - like J.R. Ewing is calmly drinking coffee downstairs in the Morrison Hotel, Dublin. J.R. Ewing: ultimate 1980s bad guy, star of the TV show Dallas, hellraiser, womaniser, tormentor of trembly-lipped Sue Ellen and wimpy Bobby and petulant Cliff Barnes and all the rest - hell, is there anybody on the planet who doesn't know who J.R. is?
Of course, the man who rises to shake hands is not really J.R. It's the actor Larry Hagman, in Dublin to publicise a book whose climax is not the phenomenon that once was Dallas, but the recent liver transplant operation that saved his life. Perched at a table a discreet distance away is a blonde woman wrapped in a tangerine pashmina: Maj, Hagman's wife of almost half a century. Not very J.R. at all, despite the book's title, Hello Darlin'. But when you talk to Hagman, you have to keep pinching yourself because what comes out of his mouth is pure J.R., all quick-fire rhythms and outrageously overdone vowels.
"I'd been asked to do a book many times," he's explaining. Minny tahmes. "And I kept saying: 'I'm too young. I'm not ready for that stuff yet.' Well, I got to be 70 and I thought, there's not that many years left - I might as well do something, and get it right."
He got it right. Hello Darlin' is a model of its kind, a great, gossipy read and - thanks to the input of the US Weekly journalist, Todd Gold - uncommonly well-written. However, I tell him, some of his stories are frankly unbelievable. He looks shocked.
"Really? Like what?" OK, what about the Great Dane? "The Great Dane? Oh, no, that was true," he protests. Desperate to do pretty much anything to get a foothold in the acting game, a young and impressionable Hagman was working for the impresario, St John Terrell, driving a motley crew of chorus girls, choreographers, dancers and assorted dogs from New York to Florida. Forced to overnight in a motel with too many people and not enough rooms, he curled up on the floor while one of the women, and her dog, took the bed. He was woken by - well, consult page 51 for further details. Hagman has assumed the look of wide-eyed innocence J.R. used to adopt when he was about to ruin some sweet-as-pie all-American family business. "That was true," he insists. "Maj was with me."
Maj, who is of Swedish origin and whose name is pronounced "My", shakes her head. "I wasn't with you," she says. "But I knew that whole group. It's for real."
Hagman turns to me in triumph. "What," he asks, "would you think would not be real about it?" I mutter something about having lived a sheltered life. "Oh. Oh, I see. Well, my dear," says Hagman, patting my arm, "I'm sorry about that. No, actually, I'm glad. That sure is a lot better for you than the life I've lived."
Reading Hello Darlin', you'd have to disagree. Hagman's life has been peopled by a cast of characters weirder and more wonderful than anything the Dallas scriptwriters - or those of his other TV smash hit, I Dream of Jeannie - could have dreamed up. For example, his macho lawyer father, who once gave him buzzard for dinner: "Son, in Texas, we eat what we shoot". Or his mother, the actress Mary Martin, a living legend in her own right. Hagman, who was raised by his grandparents, saw little of his mother during his teenage years, which come across in the book as a sort of showbiz hell.
"Not showbiz hell," he says now, "so much as I just didn't have access to her. My stepfather kept me away, pretty much, and so there was no way of getting to know her. Then he died. I don't want to speak ill of the dead, but he's worth speaking ill of. He was a jerk."
A jerk towards whom, according to the book, the 12-year-old Hagman harboured murderous thoughts. "Well, yeah," he says, taking a thoughtful sip of coffee. "I had him in my crosshairs a couple times. But I didn't do it. Thank God."
After his stepfather's death, Hagman and his mother developed what he now calls "a great relationship". The day before she died, he sat holding her hand and they whistled Bach inventions together - a skill he hasn't lost in the meantime, as he happily demonstrates. "I dunno why; mother didn't even like Bach very much."
Like many of the stories in Hello Darlin', it's cheesy but somehow cheering. Both on paper and in the flesh, Hagman comes across as one of life's good guys - easy-going, optimistic, family-orientated, for the environment, against Vietnam. Definitely not J.R. Where, I wonder idly, does he stand on George Bush? The answer is fired back like a bullet into a buzzard: "George Bush is an asshole. He's no more qualified to be president of the United States than you are, or I am."
For years, Hagman has battled the Californian bureaucracy, trying to have a National Weather Service radar tower removed from his neighbourhood, an idyllic town called Ojai, high above Los Angeles. "Well, I hope I win that one - I'm fighting it, anyhow," he says. "They made a mistake, and they won't admit it. I went back east and talked to the second-in-command of that area of the government, black man, really nice guy. And he said: 'Mr Hagman, you will never, ever, ever, ever, never, EVER get that tower moved.' And I said: 'Well, don't mince words - what do you really mean?' He said: 'The bureaucracy up here hates you. You're a celebrity. You've made a lot of problems for them, cost them a lot of money.' "
Warming to his theme, Hagman explains how the station is sited too high up in the mountains, how it emits microwave radiation which, every 15 minutes or so, makes his TV sizzle for a minute at a time. Then he groans. "Oh, now, see how I get wrapped up in this? The steam is starting to come out of my ears."
Let's move to safer territory. Dallas fans may be surprised to learn that the show's constant on-screen in-fighting wasn't even remotely matched in real life. J.R. and Bobby might have been deadly enemies, but Hagman and Patrick Duffy were forever taking hunting and fishing trips together - still do, in fact. Kristin may have shot J.R., but Hagman gave Mary Crosby away at her wedding.
"I was very careful to keep everybody happy on that show," says Hagman. "There's no sense in working with dissension, you know? If anybody started to bitch, I'd just tell them to come into the dressing-room and say, 'what's wrong, and is there anything I can do?' "
The approach seems to have paid off; he's even still friendly with J.R.'s ex-wife, Sue Ellen, aka the actress Linda Gray. "I see a lot of Linda. In fact, I saw all of her in this show she's doing now in London, 'cos she has a nude scene. After 25 years, I finally get to see her nude, for God's sake."
In Dallas, it was Sue Ellen who had the drink problem. In real life, Hagman - who had been, shall we say, fond of a drink since his late teens - had been averaging four bottles of champagne a day for 15 years; eventually, it took its toll on his liver. At the age of 64, he was told he needed a liver transplant. The book goes into plenty of gory detail about the operation and its aftermath, but the tone is light, almost jolly. Surely it wasn't as easy as he paints it? "It was," he says. "I never had a minute of pain." And does he still have to take, what is it he says in the book, 26 pills five times a day? "Oh, no. No, just 26 pills. For the day. Then I take vitamins and all that other stuff - about 50 pills, I guess. I dunno. I live well. I feel good."
Last month, Hagman celebrated his 70th birthday with an enormous party in the house in the Californian hills. In the same month, he and Maj hosted three charity fundraisers in the same house. How, in the roller-coaster romance business that is show-business, have they made it to 50 years of marriage? Maj is adamant: separate bathrooms, she says. To the casual observer, though, the reason appears to be simply that the pair of them are great pals. They chat easily about their grandchildren, about her work as a designer, about Alaska and solar-powered houses and Tallulah Bankhead. In conversation they have the easy familiarity of a long-running comedy double act.
(Quick sample. A somewhat awed Maj is telling me about a recent function in Downing Street: "And it was quietly said, you know, if you could donate five hundred thousand . . ." Hagman cuts in: "I wonder if anybody did." Maj: "Everybody did." Hagman: "Oh, they did? I didn't." Maj: "You did." Hagman: "I did?" Maj: "I did." Hagman: "You didn't? Oh God, I better go to work. Jeez.")
If he does go back to work, says Hagman, it certainly won't be on a TV series like Dallas. Too much like hard work, he explains. Movies, now, they're a different story. "I've done a few movies recently, and I wouldn't mind doing a few more. Where you come in, steal the movie, it's a big success, and that's that. Ten pages. Oh, yes."
And downstairs in the Morrison hotel on a November evening in Dublin, J.R. grins his weasel grin.
Hello Darlin' by Larry Hagman, with Todd Gold, is published by Simon and Schuster at £17.99 in UK