Irish Above All

by Mary Pat Kelly

  “I use classy music,” Sally said to me as she got in position. “The New York Philharmonic recorded ‘Clair de Lune’ for me. And be sure to write that I was a ballerina. Trained right here in Chicago. Always a lucky town for me.”

  “So you prefer Chicago to Hollywood?”

  “Wouldn’t say preferred. But I don’t have to talk to make a living in Chicago. Sound ended my movie career. You might not have noticed but my voice is a little high and they tell me I have the trace of an accent.”

  “Mmmm,” I said. Sally put the Ozarks into every vowel.

  Now she picked up her fans and did a bit of her routine for me while I snapped away with my Seneca. Something about the way the lights played over her body certainly made her look naked but the fans never really did reveal all. The finale came when she stepped behind the screen and let them fall. But a silhouette is only a silhouette. Here was a woman who’d made her own way since she was thirteen years old. She’d managed to focus the whole Century of Progress onto herself. “Sally Rand, Businesswoman.” I doubt if Quigley would use it for the headline but that was really the story. Sally was happy to praise the scientific exhibits at the Century of Progress, so Margaret would be satisfied.

  “I appreciate you letting me do this interview,” I said.

  “Well,” she said, “Margaret signed her note Margaret Noll, the name I knew her by. But a little bird told me she’s Margaret Kelly now, married to the mayor.” Oops. “I want to ask Margaret to do me a favor,” she said.

  “Listen, Sally, Margaret never interferes with Ed’s decisions. He’s been getting a lot of pressure to have the police raid your show. So far he’s resisted but Margaret can’t prevent it.”

  “But I want him to raid my show. I want you to bring the mayor here. Sit him in the front row. I want him to be shocked and appalled at how indecent I am.”

  “What?”

  “Yes. Yes. The crowds have been thinning out. A rumor’s going round that we’re just another girly show. Nothing special. I want to seem so wicked that Chicago, the Sin City of the United States, will be set back on its heels. I want to be led away in handcuffs in front of newspaper reporters. To stand, or rather dance, in front of a judge with every newspaper in town there, along with wire service reporters and even the New York Times.”

  “You want me to bring Ed here so he’ll have you arrested?”

  “Yes,” she said. “You produce him and I’ll do the rest.”

  There was a knock on her dressing room door. “Come in,” she called, and the best looking young man I’d ever seen walked into the room. About twenty I’d say, with black black hair and very blue eyes. Sally jumped up, ran over to him. She took his hands and brought him over to the couch where I was sitting. “I’m so sorry, Ty, I wish I’d been there when your father passed.”

  “He went very peacefully. Actually in my arms.”

  During my time in Ireland while I was running from the Black and Tans and doing my bit in the Irish fight for independence, in spite of the fear and outrage I felt, I had noticed that many Irishmen were spectacularly handsome. I’d grown up among nice-looking fellows. My own brother Michael and of course Ed himself were considered fine figures of men. But it was when I got to Connemara, Professor Peter Keeley’s home place, that I saw boys and young men with the same black hair and blue eyes that made Sally’s visitor so extraordinary.

  I’d been told that Ireland’s Atlantic shore was home to the descendants of Spanish sailors who’d survived the wreck of the Armada and that’s why men like this fellow had skin that turned a bronze color instead of bright red like most of the Irish. This young man, whose hand Sally Rand was still holding, would win the top prize in any male beauty contest.

  “Hello,” I said to him. Sally looked at me, surprised. She’d forgotten I was even there. This young man had blurred me away immediately.

  “I’m Nora Kelly,” I said.

  “Tyrone Power,” he said, escaped from Sally’s grip, and sat down beside me.

  “It sounds as if you’ve suffered a loss.”

  “My father, Tyrone Power Senior.”

  “A very great actor,” Sally said. “My leading man.” She took a handkerchief from the pocket of her kimono and brought it up to her eyes.

  Sally sat down, wedging herself between Tyrone Power and the arm of the couch. The three of us were crowded together. “You remember, Ty? You were only a little boy when you visited the set of Braveheart but even then I saw the family talent.”

  “Are your people from the west of Ireland, Mr. Power?” I asked. “You have the look of a Galway man.”

  “No, we’re from Wexford.”

  So much for the Armada, I thought. But Wexford. Isn’t that where the Kennedys come from?

  “Not New Ross by any chance?”

  “No, Kilthomas. My great-grandfather was also called Tyrone Power and acted all over Ireland and England. The King O’Neill was his biggest hit.”

  “Oh, I thought you might be related to the Kennedy family of Boston. They’re also Wexford people.”

  “The only cousins I know are called Guthrie. One of them’s named Tyrone also. It’s a family name.”

  “So you must have O’Neill roots. Tyrone is Tír Eoghan. Land of Eoghan, Owen in English. He was the father of Niall of the Nine Hostages and—” I stopped. They were both staring at me. I can go on a bit about Irish history.

  Sally asked, “How old are you now, Ty?”

  “Nineteen.”

  She looked over at me. “Imagine being that young,” she said. “I feel ancient.”

  “You seem to be doing alright,” he said.

  “I’m pulling down two thousand a week,” she said.

  “My God,” he said, “nobody makes that kind of money in the movies.”

  “But my pay depends on customers in the seats and attendance is dropping. But if my friend here”—she pointed at me—“cooperates, I’ll be coining it again.”

  Tyrone Power stood up. “Well I’d better get out front and claim my seat. The man in the box office said you should have a sellout crowd.”

  “That’s what he tells everybody. But after Nora does her part it might actually be true.”

  We watched him walk out. “Now that’s a handsome man,” I said.

  “So I can expect you and your guest at the nine o’clock show on Saturday night, right?”

  “I’ll try,” I said.

  “Don’t try. Do it. Or you won’t be using those pictures you took of me. My lawyers will make sure of that.”

  A businesswoman.

  “But I’ve purposely not seen Sally Rand’s act,” Ed said to me when I proposed he go to her show with me. “If she and those other girls are really nude I’ll have to do something. The Century of Progress can’t be sullied by cheap burlesque.”

  “Nothing cheap about Sally,” I said.

  “I know her, Ed,” Margaret said. “She is from Kansas City. Lived on Mersington. When I came back from France I found out that Helen Beck was now called Sally Rand and was acting in the movies. We went to see King of Kings where she played Mary Magdalene’s slave.”

  I was surprised when she spoke, and grateful. I’d explained Sally’s plan to her but she’d been reluctant to fool Ed. But then so was I. We were back on good terms so why spoil it?

  We were in the library of the apartment. Margaret had paneled the room in oak with built-in shelves full of Ed’s engineering books. She preferred popular novels and kept them in one corner. I’d opened a copy once and saw that she’d written Mrs. E. J. Kelly on the flyleaf. I checked the others and, sure enough, there was the same signature on each one. Mrs. E. J. Kelly was her identity now and I was asking her to reach back to Kansas City where she’d returned a misfit and had been a woman with a past, sitting in the side pew at the cathedral. Margaret had transformed herself and here I was linking her to the notorious Sally Rand. But she seemed ready to help me.

  Keep talking, Nonie, I told myself. “I met the son of one of
her costars today. Tyrone Power. His father was in a movie with her called Braveheart,” I said.

  “A western,” Ed said. “I saw it. Took young…”

  He started and stopped. Took Ed Junior, I thought.

  Ed reached into his pocket, took out the medal, and began to rub his thumb across the face of Our Lady of Sorrows. Ed was first and last an Irish Catholic, holding on to the faith he had as a boy. When he’d said in his radio speech that God must have had reasons for taking his wife, unborn baby, and young son, he meant it. He might not understand but he could accept God’s will. Then God had sent him three more children, “the husky boys and lovely girl.” Even the Ojibwe ceremony on the shores of Medicine Lake had further confirmed his Catholicism. He could turn a blind eye to Sally Rand, just as he looked away from betting parlors and bootleggers. He didn’t impose his morals on other people, but if pushed he would shut her down. Which is what he told us.

  “But that’s what she wants, Ed,” I said, and told him his role in Sally Rand’s publicity stunt. I thought he’d get mad and that would be that. But I couldn’t lie to Ed.

  “Helen Beck is not the devil, Ed,” Margaret said. “She’s just a woman on her own trying to make a living. If I remember correctly she even went to Christian college in Columbia, Missouri, for a year. Probably wanted to be a teacher.”

  Except no teacher would make two thousand a week for three hours’ work a night, I thought. And Sally wasn’t slaving for some fellow who was forcing her to expose herself. She was selling the product she could charge the most for, her body. And hadn’t Margaret and Lucky Davis done the same thing in a way? Would either one have married well if they hadn’t been attractive women? Oh, I knew Margaret loved Ed. And Lucky and the doctor seemed a devoted couple. But I bet both women did what I’d seen Sally do. Look in the mirror and say thank you, God, for this face, this figure. I wish women weren’t judged by their appearances but they were.

  “Margaret,” Ed was saying. “You don’t really think I should get involved in this charade, attending Sally Rand’s show.” Margaret looked at me. Please, please, please, I thought.

  “Why not?” she said. “You can stand up for decency and help a woman trying to make her way the best way she can. I may come along. I’d like to say hello to her.”

  * * *

  In the end Margaret didn’t attend the show with us. Ladies did not patronize burlesque and I was careful to be very professional, a photographer at work.

  Ed was duly appalled. Now he wasn’t a prude exactly. He told the newspapers the Century of Progress was a serious endeavor. Meant to uplift our city and country at a very difficult time, to highlight new technology, medical advances. Okay, he had to build in some fun—the Sky Ride, the German beer halls. Even the Irish Village held dances with jigs and reels for all. But exposing female flesh for money should not be the most publicized element of the Fair. He ordered her arrested the next day.

  The judge set a very low bail, then dismissed all charges after Sally told him that she wore a body stocking and couldn’t be blamed if “lascivious eyes,” her words, saw bare skin.

  Ed had stood up for decency and was willing to let Sally away with her victory in court.

  A week later Margaret and I met Sally Rand for a quiet lunch at the Cape Cod Room. Without her makeup and wearing a tailored suit, she was not recognized. Still Helen Beck after all. She remembered that little Noll girl very well, and they had a good catch up.

  “We’ve missed you, Nonie,” Margaret said to me as we walked back to 209. I found myself telling her about photographing Hannah Sullivan, and she insisted that I show her the prints.

  “But this is art, Nora,” she said to me, then brought the photographs down to their apartment.

  The next day Martin Quigley accepted my Sally Rand photographs and article, as well as the pictures I took of the Mademoiselles, and paid me $100. But he said because of his contract with Miller my name could not appear on the photographs.

  I wanted to fight him. Make him give me credit. Then I realized I wasn’t too chuffed (Granny’s word) about taking pictures of supposedly naked women. I quit.

  Nothing to stop me from going to Ireland now. The family didn’t need me. Neither did Ed, I thought. Dino the doorman said his sister would be glad to take over my apartment “unofficially and ready for you when you come back.”

  But maybe I wouldn’t be coming back. After I visited Peter’s grave I might very well go to Paris and see if I could reenter that other Nora Kelly’s life.

  Full summer now. Margaret and the kids in Eagle River, and Ed was driving up the next day. He’d come up to my apartment to ask if I’d like to ride up with him. An all-is-well gesture.

  “Ed,” I started. “I have my own plans.”

  “To take more photographs like the one Margaret showed me? You really should, Nonie. That woman reminded me so much of Granny Honora. Not her looks but the longing.” He walked over to my window. “What if we came up with a project called ‘Face of the City’? I’ve been concentrating so much on buildings I forgot the real beauty of the city is its citizens. Our own WPA. The feds are paying photographers and why can’t we?”

  “Very poetic, Ed. And can someone like me with a past be trusted with such an exalted—”

  “Come on, Nonie. I panicked.”

  “Doesn’t matter, Ed. It’s time.”

  “Peter Keeley’s grave?” he asked.

  “I didn’t think you even knew his name.”

  “I listen, Nonie, I do,” he said. “Just don’t stay away too long. Slan abhaile, Nora,” he said.

  9

  AUGUST 1933

  I was almost finished packing, with my trouser suit the last to put in. Wonder will I have the nerve to wear it in Ireland, I thought. I remembered that Countess Markievicz had told me she would have preferred to add pants to the uniform she designed for herself to wear as a soldier in the Irish Citizen Army—but appropriating men’s clothes was too revolutionary even for revolutionaries.

  Con was dead now but at least the Civil War that had divided so many of my Irish friends, one from the other, was over.

  Eamon de Valera had won.

  His Fianna Fail party controlled the Irish Parliament. I had written to Maud Gonne MacBride, my closest friend among the rebels that I was coming and had asked for her help in finding Peter’s grave. No response, but Maud’s life was always crowded with politics, a family, and her art. If I appeared at the door of her St. Stephen’s Green house she would take me in. I was sure. And then … well … at least I was on my way, until I wasn’t.

  Nearly midnight when Ed came knocking at my door.

  “Michael’s had a heart attack. He’s at the hospital. The doctors don’t think he will last the night.”

  My big brother, named for our grandfather who had died in Ireland. He’d supported us all after our own father’s death and now he was going too. Dear God.

  Michael was unconscious at Mercy Hospital. There had always been rumors that the nuns kept a few special suites here that had been financed by the Outfit for their members. Michael seemed to be in one of those. There was a living room with a fireplace, which is where Henrietta and Toots were when I arrived. He was on the couch reading the Sun-Times, and Henrietta was talking to a nun in the corner. My granny Honora had told us stories about how the Sisters of Mercy had started the first hospital in Chicago when our city was a frontier town. The order had been founded to teach girls, and the nuns had opened a school first; but when a cholera epidemic broke out, they turned the school into a hospital. The nuns became nurses. And now they had the biggest medical center on the South Side.

  Our uncle Patrick had been a friend to the Sisters of Mercy, sharing with them a portion of the money he’d made fur trapping up north. The nuns had also nursed my own father, Patrick, during the Civil War when he and Aunt Máire’s boy, Johnny Óg, were fighting with Colonel Mulligan’s men in Lexington, Missouri. Uncle Patrick had found the two boys on the riverboat the siste
rs had turned into a first aid center. Johnny Óg had not survived but the nuns saved my father’s life. I’d known the Sisters of Mercy at St. Xavier’s High School. They were no-nonsense women who wouldn’t easily let a patient succumb. I imagined them saying to Michael, “Enough of that foolishness. You’re a father with five children. Live.”

  But when the nun came over to Ed and me, the way she took my hand and patted it told me there was no hope.

  I walked into the bedroom. Michael was completely still. His chest just barely rising. I didn’t pat his hand, I stroked it. No response, and it had been such a skilled hand. When I was young and he was a master plumber, he’d bring me along on his jobs. I’d marvel at how he’d fit pipes together, judging lengths and angles. In those days few people had running water or proper flush toilets, and any fellow who could provide an inside bathroom seemed a kind of miracle worker. I remember when Michael installed our toilet. The relief of not having to go to the outhouse. I mean it can be twenty degrees below zero in Chicago. Awful to rush into the backyard all bundled up, stepping into that smelly shack. The luxury of an inside toilet. And now those hands lay limp.

  Ed stood at the head of the bed staring at Michael’s face as if willing him to open his eyes. “Michael,” he said. “Michael.” First in a whisper but then louder and louder. “Michael. Michael. Wake up. For God’s sake wake up.”

  I thought I felt a slight twitch in the hand I was stroking.

  “Michael. It’s Ed,” he said. “Wake up.” And Michael’s eyelashes did move very slightly. Now Ed started shaking his shoulders and Michael opened his eyes.

  “I’ll get the nurse,” I said. But as I withdrew my hand, Michael gripped it.

  “Nonie,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m here, Michael.”