Walter Macken

by Ultan Macken

  My father and mother were looking forward to seeing him when they visited New York but, by coincidence, we received a letter from him in July of 1950.

  1 Post Road, Wakefield,

  Rhode Island.

  Thursday, July 20

  Dear Walter,

  It has been too long a time since we heard from the Mackens. How are the Mackens doing? The McNultys are okay, but of course that is only one man’s point of view. There’ll be three of us by the end of August if the doctor is correct. Is there any notion of you coming over here? It would be a pleasure indeed to see you all again. How’s the writing? I know the playacting is sailing along but I also know it’s the writing that interests you most.

  We’re in Rhode Island for the summer, it’s near the sea, looks like Kerry but not enough like Kerry to suit me. We often talk about going back to Ireland but even if we had the money, we would not go back this year.

  Take a few minutes off some night and let us know all about yourselves.

  Best regards,

  From Faith and John McNulty

  My father must have already written to him about the proposed visit:

  1 Post Road,

  Wakefield,

  Rhode Island.

  July 21

  Dear Walter,

  That’s a funny thing. Yesterday afternoon I said to Faith, it’s a long time since we heard from the Mackens. And I wrote this letter which you may have now received. Well, sir, this morning your letter came! It had gone to New York, as properly addressed by you and then been forwarded up here. There is such a thing as mental telepathy, all right.

  We are immensely pleased at the prospect of seeing you and Peggy and regret only that the youngsters aren’t coming. You must, from now on, keep us informed of every detail, such as, who your producer is, if there is anything we can do, big or small, by way of preparing for your arrival, you have only to command us. Have you figured where to stay? We’re having the baby the latter part of August and it now bids to be a big month, what with the Mackens and the heir to the McNulty millions, arriving at the same time.

  I am beset with fears that you may be expecting too much of this ‘fabulous America’. It isn’t paradise on earth (I don’t think you rate it as such anyway) and I do hope you are not counting on having too much of your salary left when you get through paying the idiotic cost of living in Manhattan, where hotel rooms for the two of you will surely run to $60 or more a week in a decent place, such as ‘The Alonquin’, an old fashioned hotel that’s right in the theatre district of New York.

  Please, Walter and Peggy, do not build any air-castles on what you will save here, because it is a sorrowful duty to warn you that it won’t be much. Don’t think me as a pessimist, I merely don’t want you to be heart-broken at this fabulous America.

  I’m anxious too, to see ‘Rain on the Wind’. Is there a publication date set? I must write the Macmillan publicity outfit and tell them what a hell of a fine guy they have coming over here. This is a ballyhoo nation, and the more ballyhoo the better, even if some of it is bound to be distasteful. Among the tasteful items, however, I think I can arrange to have you interviewed for our ‘Talk of the Town’ department in the ‘New Yorker’ which reminds me of the perfidious McNulty promise a long, long while ago to enter a subscription for the ‘New Yorker’ for you, and I don’t think I ever did it. By God, I’ll do it next Tuesday when I go back to New York. As I said in my letter of yesterday, we are staying up here at the country home of Faith’s folks, and I am working occasionally, but not to any fanatical excess. As they say, work is the curse of the drinking classes.

  I’ll try and give you all the help I can in making your stay interesting and possibly, if not probably, profitable. Please write us details as they develop, and do not hesitate to call on me to do any chores that you’d like to have done. I’ll find a place for you to stay and things, like that, letting you know how much it will cost and all that, so that you and Peggy can have the matchless fun of jotting down figures and totting up miniature fortunes about to be gained – fortunes that seldom come to pass but which are fun on paper.

  Do write us now,

  John McNulty

  We had planned, if you ever came, to have you in our guest room in New York, but that is to be a nursery, no less!

  The McNulty’s were expecting their first child and their excitement is clear.

  Meanwhile the letters about The King of Friday’s Men kept coming, such as this one concerning financial arrangements:

  The King of Friday’s Men Company.

  July 26th 1950

  Dear Mr Macken,

  Thank you for your prompt wire. I am holding your check for your instructions. Do you want your New York agent to deposit it for you, or shall I send it on to you or hold it in safekeeping until you arrive and can deposit it in an American Bank yourself?

  If your American agent has power of attorney and can deposit a check made out to you, perhaps that would be safest.

  According to our latest plans the August 15 date will be post-poned to somewhere in the neighbourhood of September 1st. Anita Loos is sailing for Ireland next week to meet M.J. Molloy and interview the different casting possibilities he has turned up. She will want to meet you too, but you are not to infer that your position as Bartley is in any jeopardy.

  Sincerely,

  Peter White

  A couple of weeks later there was great news about Rain on the Wind:

  Macmillan & Co. Ltd.

  9th August 1950

  Dear Walter Macken,

  As Lovat Dickson is on holidays, I sent a telegram yesterday to let you know that ‘Rain on the Wind’ has been chosen by the ‘Daily Graphic’ on the recommendation of Edward Shanks as the Book Find For September. They want us to publish it on September 13th to synchronise with the appearance of Mr Shank’s review, and we are of course making effort to keep that date.

  Mr Harold Macmillan is now in Strasbourg, but he asked me to say how pleased he was that the book was chosen, as, of course, we all were. He hoped that you would help the ‘Daily Graphic’ as much as you could with anything they might require for publicity purposes. I imagine that some of it may go against the grain, but this is one of the penalties of your growing fame, as you have already found in the case of the questionnaire from our New York house.

  We had a photograph and a biographical note, and we have sent these to the ‘Daily Graphic’. We have also given them your address, but we did not do this until we felt that the telegram had reached you and given you fair warning. I know that you must be very busy, so if we can help you in any way, please let me know.

  I only take this opportunity of sending my own good wishes, not only for they success of the book, but for your coming conquest of Broadway.

  Yours sincerely,

  Thomas Mark

  John McNulty was also a regular correspondent with my father at this time:

  One Post Road,

  Wakefield,

  Rhode Island.

  Saturday, August 20th

  Dear Walter,

  The occasion for writing this letter is that when we got back I told Brentano’s bookstore to get ‘Mungo’s Mansion’ and it came last night and I read it again. I had read it at Bunnyconnellan and by gosh, I had even more fun reading it the second time.

  How are you and Peggy and Wally Óg and Ultan getting on? We speak of you often.

  My story on the Irish excursion will come out in an early September edition of ‘The New Yorker’. It isn’t really a story, really but a series of small anecdotes, one of which has Ultan as the central figure – I hope you don’t mind. I’m in fear that you will find my little yarns the stereotypical episodes noted by most of us Yanks. Just the same I’m going to risk sending you that story when it comes out.

  Any chance of you coming to the States? If you do there’s always a room (small and dully furnished mostly with Racing Annuals) where you could stay at our house at 325 E 72nd Street.

  Reg
ards to all,

  John and Faith McNulty

  John and Faith were unaware of the postponement to the start date of the play and in consequence, what was happening with the trip to America.

  I think my parents were pleased that there was going to be a story in The New Yorker featuring me. The story was published later in a book called A Man Gets Around, where John writes about his first visit to Ireland, and that his father came from Lisdoonvarna in County Clare and his mother from around Ballyhaunis in County Mayo. He planned to visit both places but only visited his mother’s home place. He also paid visits to Dublin, Waterford and Galway and finally ended up in Bunnyconnellan near Crosshaven where he met up with the Mackens:

  Our last days in Ireland were spent at Crosshaven, which is near Cobh (pronounced ‘Cove’ and still called Queenstown by the crew of the ‘Britannic’, on which we were to sail back to the United States). At odd times during those days I recalled the dreamy notions I had before we left East Seventy-Second Street. My head had been full of all the things I had heard about Ireland from the time I was a kid, at wakes, and in songs about white cottages with thatched roofs and the smell of burning peat (I learned within a week or so to call it turf, not peat). After landing there and riding around the little island, only a couple of hundred miles from north to south and less than that from east to west, I always had a feeling that Ireland wasn’t exactly what I had dreamed it would be. Yet it was – in a sentence or a phrase dropped by a passer-by, or timidly passed to me by a man next to me in a pub. Often I felt these were my people, although they did not know me any more.

  At the hotel we stayed at in Crosshaven, there was a little boy, the son of Walter Macken, the actor and writer. The father was down for a couple of weeks from the Abbey Theatre, in Dublin, to play in Cork, which is about fifteen miles from Crosshaven. The name of the little boy was Ultan. That is a name you never hear in the United States. It is pronounced ‘Oolthawn’ with the accent on the ‘thawn’. It is an old, old name, older than Patrick or Michael in Irish use, and to hear the little boy’s mother, Peggy, say it was to hear a caress.

  The place where we were staying was the Bunnyconnellan Hotel, nestled on the side of a hill from which we could look out at the splendid harbour of Cork. Sitting on a bench in front of the hotel, in one of the bursts of sunshine that space out the rain in Ireland, the little boy and I were looking out at the sea. Ultan, who is only five, was born on the coast of Galway, where they say the sea in a rage can be a most terrifying thing. Before us, there was an empty sea, where tomorrow the ship would be.

  ‘Out there will be the “Britannic”,’ I said to him, ‘and if you look out tomorrow you will see her. There will be no way of seeing us – it’s too far to see – but we will be there, heading back to America.’

  Ultan walked away and plucked idly at a flower in the border of the path. Then he came back to me, the stranger he had known for only seventy hours or so. He, too, was groping [sic], as I had long been, because he put his little hand on my arm and he said, in his beautiful Galway speech, ‘We’ll be terribly froightened for you tomorrow whin the loiner, and you in it, starts out into the big sea.’

  A stranger I was, in a country I felt was my own, and a little bit of a boy, with a single sentence, ended all my groping – ‘We’ll be terribly froightened for you tomorrow …’

  Meanwhile the delays to the production of The King of Friday’s Men continued. The latest letter came from Michael Grace, the producer, rather than Peter White:

  The King of Friday’s Men Company.

  October 13th 1950

  Dear Mr Macken,

  I must apologize to you for not getting a letter off to you sooner but getting the production of ‘The King of Friday’s Men’ in shape takes every second and the days just seem to fly by.

  We are working hard to get the production going within the next six weeks and opening the latter part of December here in New York. The one thing that is holding us up is the final choice of the director.

  Mr Guthrie McClintic, Bretaigne Windust from Hollywood, Sir Cedric Harwicke are all available choices for immediate production and we also believe that Margaret Webster is. Among those who can do it pending a short delay and also want to do it are Peter Glenville, Maurica Evans and very likely John Ford.

  We expect to come to a definite solution within the next ten days and at that time, we will give you a definite date for your departure and your stay over here. The ultimate form of the producing unit may be legally different, such as a partnership etc. as this is necessary for reasons of tax governing the theatre. Naturally, your contract with this office is valid as per our agreement of June 22nd 1950 and this office is looking anxiously forward to its splendid fruits. I was just up to Boston two days ago and happy to hear that Mr McClintic considered your performance one of the best he had ever seen on the stage.

  In this, he coincides with Thornton Wilder as you may possibly know. It is on just such things as these, and the tremendous interest that our project is already creating, that we hinge our concepts and anticipate success. The reason I have not written earlier is because I know that you more than anyone else would like to see a satisfactory director, so that the play may be given its utmost here in New York. As I am very pressed for time, I wish you would show this to Mr Molloy and the chances are before the fortnight is out, you will either see me personally here or in Ireland.

  Sincerely,

  Michael Grace

  John McNulty wrote in October as well. He was beginning to think that my father would not be coming to the States at all:

  1 Port Road,

  Rhode Island.

  October 18th 1950

  Dear Walter,

  Thank you for your letter about the ‘New Yorker’ piece. You spoke so highly of the magazine that I must arrange for you to get it regularly – but of course I’m always putting off things like that – so don’t expect it too soon. The little anecdote you told me about Ultan was very nice indeed [I don’t know what this anecdote was] – and I hope he is well and all of you are.

  I had Brentano’s the booksellers get me Mungo and the friends who have read it are very praiseful of it, especially a fellow named Bill Keefe who is a Broadway fellow.

  Are you going back to Galway to live for a while? I often wonder and so does Faith. Is there any more talk of you coming over here some time? One day when you have nothing else to do, write and let us know of these things. Meanwhile our fondest regards to you and your brood – Mackens abú.

  Sincerely,

  John McNulty

  A very interesting letter arrived from M.J. Molloy in October:

  Milltown,

  Co. Galway.

  Dear Wally,

  I had a cable from Mike Grace today. He says that the rehearsals are opening about the middle of November and the cable continues: ‘Ask Macken for four weeks extension of option on June 26th with me. Cable this office.’ This suggests that he wants you to cable him the option extension, but I don’t get what the hurry is about. An air-mail letter will reach him in three or four days. Send it to the Office Sec-retary, ‘King of Friday’s Men Company’, Room 906, 1619 Broadway.

  Peter White was sacked at the beginning of September, and since then I have had little news. A month ago, Grace alone had raised $50,000 and the most likely directors are Guthrie McClintic, or Bretaigne Windust.

  Best wishes,

  Yours sincerely,

  Michael Molloy

  P.S. Mike was to fly to Hollywood this week end to talk with Bretaigne Windust; that is why I don’t see what the hurry is about. It is just Mike’s little way of wanting everything by telephone, or cable; which is all right for him. There has been trouble between Mike and Mrs Dahlberg [one of the play’s backers], not without reason on both sides, I think.

  Also in October, my father received a letter in Irish from Ernest Blythe, his boss at the Abbey:

  26/10/1950

  A Bhaitéir, a chara,

  Tá sé so
craithe again gan ‘Juno and the Paycock’ a dhéanamh roimh Nollaig. De bhrí sin, caithfimid tosnú Dé Mairt ag cleachtadh Professor Tim. Tá páirt ann duit-se. Mar sin, is dóigh liom go bhfuil sé riachtanach socru láithreach i dtaobh an turas go Meiricea. Do bheadh sé mí-shásúil bheith idir-eatortha nios sia. B’fhéidir go dtiocfá isteach ag caint liom amhaireach.