JR's Angels

Sly Lovegren in Dallas Hi my name is Sly, I started work at Ewing Oil back in 1981 as JR's secretary. I got the job after my Uncle Harry recommended me to JR, not that he's my 'real' Uncle, he's just a very close family friend. I admired JR and we had a very professional working relationship, he could trust me, well most of the time, there was a point where I was working for JR's enemy Cliff Barnes and spying on JR.

I felt I had no choice, my brother was in jail and Cliff promised he could help him or make it worse if I didn't co-operate. When JR found out I thought my career was over and my life in Dallas was ruined, but JR being JR turned the whole situation around to his advantage. He used me to give Cliff false information. It worked and JR once again won the day. I was fired by JR after I got into a mess with his oldest son James Beaumont which led to JR being locked away in a sanitarium, I was so shocked and upset, JR had trusted me, I was more of a confidant than secretary, once he even made me head of one of his dummy corporations when Ewing Oil was in trouble with the Justice Department. Luckily he asked me back and I agreed.

I mentioned our relationship was strictly professional.....but I don't know if I should reveal this! Ok....well once we did sleep together.

It was a spur of the moment thing and it was never mentioned again and I guess I regretted it. JR left Dallas in 1991 and then suddenly in 1996 I got a phone call from him, my marriage had ended at this time and JR told me he was coming back to Dallas and to set things up, he knew he could count on me.

I was very upset to read on CNN that J.R. had been murdered, though I was pleased to hear that Cliff Barnes had been convicted. Still, what hurt me most was that not a single member of the Ewing family contacted me to let me know J.R. had died, or to invite me to the funeral. After everything that happened over the years, it felt like they simply didn’t care about the past at all.

Phyllis Wapner from Dallas Hi my name is Phyllis Wapner and I worked at Ewing for 12 years, from 1980 to 1991.

I was fortunate enough to be working for Bobby Ewing, if I had worked for JR I don't think I would have stayed as long as I did. I admired and respected Bobby and I feel he respected me too. I was very loyal to Bobby and went to work for him when he started a new company after Ewing Oil was shut down - which I must add was down to JR and had nothing to do with Bobby. I recall vividly that awful woman Mrs Scotfield who burst into Ewing Oil declaring she was responsible for its downfall and blaming Bobby for her husband's death, little did she know the caring man Bobby is.

I felt so bad for Bobby when his first wife Pam left him, I liked Pam. I was happy he found happiness again with April Stevens, I didn't really know her and at first I didn't particularly like her. It was just terrible that her marriage to Bobby was so short lived with her tragic death in Paris. I can understand why Bobby blamed the Oil business and Ewing Oil for her death. This led him to sell Ewing Oil to Miss Dela Vega, who gave the company over to that awful Michelle Stevens. JR eventually got Ewing Oil back for a short period and that's when I decided enough was enough.

I had waited years to tell JR what I thought of him and it gave me great pleasure to do just that as I quit Ewing Oil back in 1991. I still keep in touch with Sly occasionally, I liked Sly but didn't agree on her ethics and always suspected that she may have been more than just a secretary to JR but I'm not one to gossip so won't guess if she ever slept with JR or not. I guess I'll never know. I'm happy to say that Bobby and myself kept a very professional relationship. I don't keep in contact with Bobby now, what's done is done. But I loved my time at Ewing Oil and remember it fondly.

Hi my name is Kendall, I worked at Ewing Oil as the receptionist for several years. I remember once JR requested a list of all the people who had visited Ewing Oil, I'm not sure what was going on but I think JR felt someone was spying on him, Sly was acting really odd at that time too, and like I told Phyllis I'm sure Sly was up to something. I also went to work for JR when he started JRE Industries, but I preferred Ewing Oil to be honest.

In 1990 I started dating James Beaumont but he was only after information on JR and Ewing Oil then later on towards 1991 Michelle and James took control of Ewing, most of the other secretaries were fired but they kept me on I guess because I wasn't as close to Bobby and JR as Sly and Phyllis were. Ewing Oil eventually ended up in the hands of Cliff Barnes, which was a great shock but I stayed on and I enjoyed working for Cliff he was quite funny but I missed the old days of Ewing Oil, we were all such a great team then.

Julie Grey in Dallas You want to know what happened to me?

Then I’ll tell you myself.

People look at a woman like me and think they know the story. They see the secretary, the mistress, the woman who stayed too long and loved the wrong man. They think I was weak. They think I was foolish. Maybe I was. But I was also loyal, and loving, and lonely — and in Dallas, that can be more dangerous than being cruel.

When I was at Ewing Oil, the whole place felt like it was holding its breath. There was tension in every hallway, secrets in every office, lies dressed up as business and family loyalty. The company was under Senate investigation, and then Bobby Ewing came home with a bride who sent shockwaves through Southfork and Ewing Oil alike — Pamela Barnes, Cliff Barnes’s sister. That alone was enough to make the atmosphere unbearable. Then Bobby announced he was coming into the office as an executive, and suddenly J.R. had his little brother right there, close enough to watch him, question him, maybe even uncover things J.R. had spent years hiding.

And J.R. hated that.

He was the president of Ewing Oil, and he clung to power like it was the only thing keeping him alive. He didn’t share control. He didn’t share weakness. He barely shared the truth. But he shared his secrets with me. Or at least, he trusted me to carry them.

I was the one he told to lock away the Red Files. I was the one who knew what needed hiding. I joked with him sometimes, asked whether he planned on sharing his secrets with little brother Bobby. That was the kind of thing I could say to J.R. I knew how to talk to him. I knew how to soothe him, flatter him, challenge him just enough to keep his attention. I knew him in ways other people never did.

And that was my tragedy.

Because I loved him.

I loved J.R. Ewing long before I should have, long before Sue Ellen, long before I understood what loving a man like that would cost me. I knew he would never marry me. I knew I would never be the woman he stood beside in public, never the woman he gave his name to, never the woman he chose in daylight. I was the woman he came to in private. The woman he leaned on. The woman he trusted when it suited him. The woman he wanted when he needed comfort, or understanding, or a place to put all the feelings he didn’t dare show anyone else.

And I let him.

For years, I let him.

I told myself it was enough to be needed. Enough to be the one person he could talk to, the one person he could count on. But there’s a loneliness in that kind of love that hollows you out. He would come to me at night and leave me in the morning. I’d sit alone over breakfast, staring at a cold room, knowing exactly what I meant to him and exactly what I didn’t.

Then one night, after he’d been with me, he realised he had forgotten my birthday.

My birthday.

And what did he do? He set a hundred-dollar bill on my pillow as he walked out the door.

Do you understand what that does to a woman? Do you understand what it feels like to lie there and realise that after all the years, all the secrets, all the loyalty, all the love, that’s what he thought would make it right?

Something in me broke that night. Not all at once. Quietly. Deeply. The kind of break you don’t recover from because it reaches the part of you that still hoped.

So I called Cliff Barnes.

Now, Cliff was never my great love. He was never anything close. But he paid attention to me. He pursued me. He made me feel seen at a moment when I felt humiliated and disposable. I knew he wanted information. I knew he wanted leverage over the Ewings. I wasn’t stupid. But I was hurt, and hurt people are so easy to use.

I let myself get drawn in. I let myself believe, for just a little while, that maybe this was me taking control. Maybe this was me doing something for myself. Maybe this was me finally hurting J.R. the way he had hurt me.

When the Wild Bill Orloff file passed through my hands, I hesitated — and then I crossed a line I could never uncross. I gave Cliff the information. I betrayed Ewing Oil. I betrayed J.R. I betrayed the life I had built for myself. And the terrible thing is, at the time, part of me wanted to. Not because I loved Cliff, but because I was angry. Angry at being used. Angry at being hidden. Angry at giving everything to a man who would never truly choose me.

But Cliff Barnes was no saviour. He was using me too.

The moment I saw the bitterness in him, the obsession, the way every noble cause somehow came back to his hatred of the Ewings, I knew. He didn’t care about me. He cared about winning. About revenge. About J.R. And I was just another weapon he thought he could pick up and put down.

Pam saw it before I wanted to admit it. When she confronted me, she stripped away every excuse I had left. She saw me clearly — too clearly. She saw a woman who had settled for crumbs and called it love. A woman who had spent years accepting less because she was too afraid to ask for more. A woman who had traded away her pride for moments that meant everything to her and almost nothing to the man she gave them to.

It shamed me because it was true.

So I quit. I walked into J.R.’s office and told him I was done. I admitted what I had done. He asked me why, but how do you answer a question like that? How do you explain to a man like J.R. that the worst thing he ever gave me wasn’t betrayal — it was hope?

I left Dallas after that. I tried to start over in New York. But some women can leave a city behind, and some of us carry it inside us. I was miserable there. I was lonely. I was lost. And in the end, I came back to Dallas because for better or worse, it was the only place that had ever felt like my life.

That’s when I found Jock again.

Jock Ewing was different. Kind. Gentle in a way men like J.R. and Cliff never were. He saw me, not as a convenience, not as a weapon, not as a temptation to be used and managed, but as a person. We spent time together, and there was such comfort in it. We talked. We laughed. We remembered. We kept each other company in a world where the people we loved were often too busy, too distracted, too selfish to notice we were hurting.

People made assumptions, of course. They always do. But what I had with Jock wasn’t sordid. It wasn’t some game. It was companionship, tenderness, respect. He made me feel that my presence mattered. That I mattered.

And maybe that’s why J.R. couldn’t stand it.

He came to me with his suspicions and his jealousy and his usual arrogance, convinced everything I did had to be about him. He thought I wanted revenge. He thought I wanted to use Jock to get back at him. Maybe once that would have been true. But by then I was just tired — tired of being manipulated, tired of being measured by what secrets I held, tired of being treated like a woman whose heart was an inconvenience.

I told him I was done letting him run my life.

I meant it.

But J.R. had a way of coming back into my life like a storm through an unlocked window. Even after everything, even after all the hurt, he still knew exactly how to pull me back toward him. That was the curse of loving him. You can know a man is poison and still crave the taste of him.

He took me away, tried to draw me in again, and for a moment I let him. But even then, I knew something had changed. I looked at him and wondered whether he wanted me at all — or whether what he really wanted were the secrets I carried, the things I knew, the parts of his life I could expose if I chose to.

And I was right to wonder.

Because when we came back, I discovered he had my apartment searched.

That’s what I was to him in the end: a threat to be managed.

Not long after, Cliff resurfaced too, circling once again, asking what I knew, what I might sell, what I might betray. Men like Cliff and J.R. looked at me and saw information. Access. Opportunity. Neither of them really saw the woman standing in front of them, bruised by love and trying, finally, desperately, to survive.

J.R. even suggested I use Cliff — sleep with him, if necessary — for Ewing Oil’s advantage. He said it as casually as if he were asking me to type a memo. In that moment, whatever remained of my illusions died. I saw him clearly. Not as the man I had loved, but as the man who had trained me to accept humiliation as intimacy.

So I made my own move.

I reached out to Cliff. I prepared to sell what I knew. Not because I was greedy. Not because I was faithless. But because I was cornered, and because for once I wanted to act on my own behalf. I wanted control of something — my future, my choices, my life.

I never got the chance.

Jeb Ames came to my apartment. Willie Joe Garr was involved too. They knew I had spoken to Cliff. They knew I knew too much. They knew I had become dangerous.

I asked if J.R. had sent them. Maybe he had, maybe he hadn’t. In Dallas, men like that rarely need to be told what to do when they think a woman knows too much.

They told me to pack. They told me I was leaving town.

But I knew better. Deep down, I knew. Women in my position don’t get sent away neatly. We get erased.

So I ran.

I ran out of my apartment, frantic, terrified, desperate to get away. I ran to the stairwell, up and up, until I reached the roof with those men coming after me. I can still feel that fear if I let myself think about it too long — the cold air, the pounding of my heart, the sound of footsteps getting closer, the certainty that nobody was coming to save me.

I hid. I fought. I tried.

And then Willie Joe caught me. He hit me. I remember the shock of it, the cruelty, the absolute panic. I remember knowing — with terrible clarity — that they meant to kill me.

And they did.

Let’s say it plainly, because that’s the truth nobody softens for women like me:

I was murdered.

Not lost.
Not taken by misadventure.
Not the victim of some tragic accident on a rooftop.

I was chased, terrorised, trapped, and killed.

Murdered because I knew too much.
Murdered because powerful men were afraid of what I might say.
Murdered because in their world, my life was worth less than their secrets.

That’s the part people forget when they tell my story. They remember the affair, the jealousy, the betrayal, the scandal. They remember that I loved J.R. Ewing. They remember that I made mistakes.

But I was more than the mistakes I made.

I was a woman who wanted to be loved honestly and never was. A woman who gave too much, forgave too much, endured too much. A woman who tried, at the very end, to take hold of her own life — and paid for it with that life.

So if you remember me, don’t just remember the whispers. Don’t just remember the secrets. Don’t just remember who I loved.

Remember what they did to me.

Remember that I was murdered.

Full List:

• Roberta Lessing
• Kendall Chapman
• Julie Grey - 1977-79
• Phylliss Wapner - 1980-90
• Louella - 1979-81
• Sly Lovegren - 1981-91, 1996
• Doris
• Darlene
• Jamie Ewing - 1985-86
• Kristin Shepherd - 1981
• Susan
• Jackie Dunggan - 1988-91
• Connie
• Jannie
• Derek - 1991
• Louisa
• Jean