In-place list modification without for loop in R

I'm wondering whether there is a way to do in-place modification of objects in a list without using a for loop. This would be useful, for example, if the individual objects in the list are large and complex, so that we want to avoid making a temporary copy of the entire object. As an example, consider the following code, which creates a list of three data frames, then calculates the vector of maximums across all three data frames for one column of the data, and then assigns that vector to each original data frame. (Code like this is needed when aligning plots in ggplot2.)

data_list <- lapply(1:3, function(x) data.frame(x=rnorm(10), y=rnorm(10), z=rnorm(10)))

max_x <- do.call(pmax, lapply(data_list, function(d){d$x}))

for( i in 1:length(data_list))
{
  data_list[[i]]$x <- max_x
}

Is there any way to write the final part without a for loop?

Answers to some of the questions I'm getting:

1. What makes me think a copy would be made? I don't know for sure whether a copy would or would not be made. The actual scenario I'm working with deals with entire ggplot graphs (see e.g. here). Since they are rather large and complex, it's critical that no copy be made.

2. What's the problem with a for loop? I just would rather iterate directly over a list than have to introduce a counter. I don't like counters.

3. Why not use data.table? Because I'm actually manipulating ggplot graphs, not data frames. The code provided here is just a simplified example.