J.P. Donleavy: An Author and His Image

by J. P. Donleavy

I was considerably taken aback and angered in fact that I would be accused of wiping out corporations when only meaning to advise them to behave fairly and honestly. And my own quite charming lawyer interjected that he thought such a remark at the beginning of an interrogatory was quite uncalled for. But there was no apology except that I was about to look behind me to see if some greatly feared mogul sat there puffing on a voluminous cigar who had been guilty of champerty to do with my litigations. But although not quite believing it, I knew something had irrevocably changed. And now that litigation had come to dominate almost all I did, a powerful lawyer’s accusation in New York, although untrue, became a comforting thought which was never denied deserved till I feebly do so now.

  But further down the line, my nemesis Girodias, too, was implacable. And approaching about twenty years of litigation and having developed a gigantic distaste for legal papers or having it known where my physical presence was, I was even reluctant to admit to my name. But it came to pass that one spring day in New York in front of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian church a meeting happened that changed the course of all one’s litigation and did more unexpected doom to the enemy than my enigmatic messages had. As I innocently stood watching pedestrian life go by from the steps of this church, suddenly this strange little man detoured across the pavement and stopped in front of me. A picture of respectability to whom I apologetically said yes when he asked, was I who I was. I had no idea I was then meeting ‘Deep Throat’, who, beyond his benignly diminutive size and so neatly attired in his blue suit and brown trilby hat, was to be like an atomic bomb and make me look like a real pussycat in litigation.

  ‘Deep Throat’ then said that he’d read my books and that he had written a book for Girodias and that he had been cheated of his royalties, his contract broken and the book disgraced by making it seem blatantly pornographic and that money borrowed by Girodias had been squandered. He asked then would I be interested in what his lawyers had uncovered in spending two years in tracking down and tracing through all the company fronts which Girodias used to obscure his culpability and ownership and that his lawyers had at last followed the trail to the head parent company of all the satellite companies around the world and which at last revealed Girodias as the proprietor. I said I should be very pleased to have the particulars of such discovery.

  Litigations with Girodias at the time in Paris were being conducted behind the fronts of companies, his behind that of a Swiss company Eratom and my identity hidden behind an Irish company, The Little Someone Corporation. Eratom’s lawyers had long been raging to the judge that The Little Someone Corporation disguised a proprietor who was none other than the notorious J. P. Donleavy. The judge at these repeated hearings would always respond, ‘Certainly, gentlemen, just produce the evidence and I shall take the necessary steps to deal with any malfeasance.’ As the many months passed of Eratom’s lawyers jumping up in protest, one day a parcel arrived to me containing a sheaf of papers. I glanced through and saw that ‘Deep Throat’ was true to his word. Here it was, Maurice Girodias owner and proprietor of companies which had indeed been traced around the globe with the search ending up in Belgium down a little side street near the old market in Antwerp. Shoved into an envelope off the papers went to Paris.

  It was upon the very next occasion of Eratom’s lawyers raising a hullaballoo and the judge again asking for evidence that my own lawyers stood up and made their protest of Girodias being behind Eratom and then these quiet gentlemen in grand procession handed their evidence up to the bench which had so painstakingly been collected by ‘Deep Throat’s’ lawyers. And as I sat in the court in sun glassed disguise, to one’s immense delight and relief the judge struck out Eratom’s action. Ah but the story I yet wish to tell is how ‘Deep Throat’ continued, even physically, to pursue Girodias across the world which finally ended up with one of the strangest confrontations in publishing history. And indeed it’s why, with space being inadequate to tell it here, I now contemplate writing the second volume of The History of the Ginger Man.

  Suffice to say such are these many strange incidents still left in their silence and still haunting the soul. Which had then, so many years ago, been made to wither on the brink of disaster that you can only hope will not come. Surprised, as you exist further in your bleakness, to awake alive each dawn holding tight to your courage.

  Wondering where

  In the world

  You can search

  To find one smile

  Of love

  1995

  Shaun Beary – A Portrait of the Playwright as a Man

  I first met Shaun many years ago across a dining room table of gleaming splendour in the elegant east side New York apartment of his aristocratic lady, Ginny Fair Gimbel, legendary as one of the Big Apple’s most beautiful and charming women. I was at the beginning of my second marriage, which would come to grief as had the first, plus I had land and farming problems as well. I listened closely as Shaun told that it was a great old country habit in Ireland that if you didn’t like someone too much, you threw a strychnine laced chunk of meat across the neighbour’s fence to kill his dogs.

  Then this man and his stunning companion, an artist of no mean ability, moved to Ireland where one was totally charmed by this couple who took up residence in one of Dublin’s most revered old hotels, the Hibernian, while their estate, just bought, was groomed for their occupation. Breeding, raising and racing horses was Shaun’s calling as you might say, being that he had grown up in Ireland and, as a fine horseman himself, knew bloodstock ways well. He was, too, descended from the elegant Herberts on his mother’s side and from the famed and esteemed jockey, friend of princes and kings, Michael Beary.

  Shaun’s Elizabethan handsomeness, even seen only in a photograph, often drove women into paroxysms and to desperately pronto make fools of themselves attempting to achieve his rapid acquaintance. He moved imperturbably in the world of the ultra beau monde and the jet set super rich. Singularly stylish in his own eccentric way, his suits subtly cut and his brolly and racing binoculars always so discreet he appeared to be without them, as indeed he mostly was as he readily dealt with a few of life’s tribulations and the low life so easily encountered around horses.

  Splendidly entrepreneurial, he did with some frequency set about in pursuit of spectacular schemes, trading in paintings, tapestries, electronics and always living in stylish circumstances, especially in New York. When there, I would often take cinnamon toast and afternoon tea with him, marvelling at how, in travelling light, he never forgot to pack his toothbrush, bars of chocolate and a change of shirt and socks, and transported these at his side in his trusty brown paper or polythene bag.

  Over the years we would confront by accident in the most unlikely places as once happened in New York when I was busy peering through a crack in an undertaker’s door which happened to be next to a stylish café with tables on the street. Customers with champagne dripping from their lips and the unmistakable silhouettes of the supine dead outlined through a translucent glass behind their laughing heads. As I turned from peering into this home for the disposal of the dead and took my attention back towards laughing talkative life, there was Shaun smilingly observing me. For he himself was New York’s most compassionate man who could pass no vagrant or beggar without giving him a coin or two.

  Also, Shaun had done it all. Produced K2 on Broadway, been a film distributor, become the owner of one of the largest caches of nicely preserved polythene in Europe, traded in sheep, horses, cattle and hay. And possessed of a marvellously practical way of handling money, transporting it in his brown paper bags full of brick hard loaves of cash, he appeared in Chicago one strange year and cornered the wheat market as he bought in the many millions of tons, and calmly waited, as he looked out the windows into the weather from the top of the world’s tallest building, for the Russians to bid. It was then that he came closest to what I had predicted for him of becoming the globe’s richest man.

  I have meanwhile promised to build
Shaun a small chapel should I ever hear of his intention to sanctify a relationship. For this is a man whose words, should they ever be shockingly harsh on stage, still harbour in their meaning the gentle touch of a loving hand. Never in the long time that I have known him, has he ever uttered words of downheartedness or defeat. Nor did I know of his long silent struggle in isolation to write plays that, now having seen one, I know will cram the seats and knock the dull hats off the theatre going public in London, Paris and New York. And why not.

  Shaun is blessed

  With enemies

  Who all have

  Such bad luck

  1995

  PART 2

  People and Places

  My Own Romantic Bronx

  These are words I’ve quoted over the years to the sceptical and disbelieving. And are words used by the early nineteenth century New York poet James Rodman Drake to describe the Bronx of his day. One uses the words frequently and perversely because it always struck me that no one would ever admit coming from that bereft proletarian mainland piece of New York City. Indeed folk from Dayton, Sandusky or Des Moines are quicker to disclose their origins.

  However, once some years ago, in a famous movie star’s New York apartment before dinner, a gentleman sat across from me. We were rather prolonging our mildly suspicious pleasantries with one another while our host, better known as Robert Redford, his wife cooking, put their children to bed. I began to envision one of those painful hostile New York evenings with one of those guys who infers by every question he asks, ‘Hey do you think you’ve shot your bolt.’ Plus I suppose my accent, vaguely tending to east of mid Atlantic, provided an unsurmountable additional barrier between us. But in the process of withdrawing into my tweedy anglicized shell, the most benign and loving smile appeared on this gentleman’s face as I said, ‘I was born in Brooklyn and was raised in the Bronx.’ It was upon mention of the latter place that suddenly one felt one had been admitted to an exclusive club to which my potential adversary happily already belonged.

  Over the years it seems one does tend to romanticize one’s origins, especially if the present locale of your life is distantly removed. And one is somehow conscious that Americans who’ve departed to better climes don’t particularly care to go back or dwell upon their previous lives or view their childhoods or old friends as anything other than something beneficially escaped from. Alas, of course, that’s an important social climbing principle denied most writers, for their pasts are often more precious than their presents or futures and it is my Bronx past that haunts mine.

  My earlier memories are of an area variously called Wakefield and Edenwald. We lived in a two storey brick house in a potholed street on top of a hill not far from the intersection of East 233rd Street and White Plains Road. There was a back garden, a grape arbour, a plant filled vestibule and some Italian neighbours. The vestibule was memorable because I tipped from its pedestal a large Chinese vase which momentously crashed on the tiled floor. Adjoining our modest house was the Crawford estate, with walking paths through grounds under big trees surrounding a large old clapboard mansion with a veranda. Latterly a family, two spinster sisters and a bachelor brother, called Kruger lived there and ran a rest home. At Halloween they held outdoor pumpkin lit dances. It was in the Kruger gardens that I saw my first humming bird hovering over a flower and dug my roads for my tootsie toys and where an older girl cousin, Nancy Martin, taught me to whistle.

  In the winter small world on top of that hill, I played indoor war with my younger brother using the living room furniture and sofa cushions as battlements and the rising dust as the smoke from our guns. Summers my father would make grape and elderberry wine. Mr Kruger would come to visit down our cellar where tastings were had from the massive barrels. As the evening approached following their long afternoons of wine sampling, I would watch my father, who was an immensely strong man, lift Mr Kruger in the palm of his hand and place him over the fence to stagger home. It seemed such a rural scene but it was happening a couple of stone throws from the roar of the elevated train at the foot of the hill.

  Near us were families with children I was not encouraged to play with. But occasionally I would disappear to dine in their shadowy cellar kitchen off exotic Italian dishes cooked by their ancient shawled grandmother. They drove cars far more luxurious than my own father’s Huppomobile, at least that’s the name I remember of that car with its round glass thermometer which stuck up from its radiator. Years later I hopefully imagined that perhaps these seemingly pleasant people were members of that Hollywood publicized underworld who carried submachine guns in their bass viol cases and swore death revenges on those who crossed them. And I learned and can still reel off many of the choicer Italian curse words. But my somewhat lace curtain Irish parents preferred another Italian family, as being more acceptable. They made candles. Indeed they made candles for some of the crowned heads of Europe. My mother and I attended occasionally in their forbiddingly Victorian Baroque dining room for tea. Later it seemed marvellous fun to break these ornately sculpted perfumed cylinders of wax in half when I found boxes of them in the family drawers. I was mystified by my mother’s anger at my playing this pleasant game.

  On this same hill, one of the highest points of the Bronx, I first heard the radio through earphones. Saw one of my first films, The Informer, in a movie house with its marquee fronting on the bleak girders of the elevated train. And went to school. Reluctantly brought there some dusty blocks away in my father’s Huppomobile followed on the road by my panting dog Spot. I also got hit in the head with a stone, nearly smothered in a baby carriage and chased by a formerly well to do uncle presently impoverished by the Depression, at whom my brother and I threw lumps of cheese. We modelled ourselves on the Katsandjammer Kids in the Sunday comics and delighted in the uncle’s enragement storming out of his bedroom trying to catch us running away down the stairs.

  When I was seven years or so of age we moved. Across the Bronx River and to the other side of the New York Central railroad tracks. To an area which seemed altogether more sylvan, a small geographically triangular collection of streets called Woodlawn. Being bordered on the east by the northerly slender ribbon of Bronx River Park and on the west by the thousand or more acres of Van Cortlandt Park and separated to the south from the rest of the Bronx by the garden grandeur of Woodlawn cemetery gave this community characteristics more like those of some small upstate town. With its third of a mile long main street of Katonah Avenue. Along which were an A & P store, post office, couple of beer saloons, bakery, five and dime store, and even a small public library established in the once ground floor living and dining room of an old house.

  Here the unsocially registered neighbours were German, English, Scandinavian and some of Irish origins just like myself. With surnames like Duffy, Borst, Luttinger, Dobbin, McKernan, Monroe, Walsh, Silbernagle, Hennessy, Gerosa, Kuntze, Farrel, Meyer, Briggi, Gallagher, and first names like Phonicious, Red, Ger, Bah, Quince, Jab, Neut, Zeke. A sprinkling of more prosperous families occupied the bigger corner houses. One or two of these folk, with a couple of horses and garages full of cars and assets downtown in the city, were even rumoured to be millionaires. But most were of average means stuck somewhere hopefully upward mobile on the social ladder the Bronx so precariously provides.

  Under an autumn maple tree on East 236th Street between Napier and Onedia Avenues I heard my first joke. I was told to ask Red, a hick visiting his city cousin, a friend of mine, if he ever smoked. ‘Nope ain’t never got that hot.’ I think I may have only laughed politely but this is how one first became aware of the mystifying tricks and improvisations provided by the English language. It was here amid such comic ability that I learned how to throw a lariat, build model aeroplanes, play hockey on roller skates and really grew up.

  Eastwards Bronx River Park lay in its own valley of the Bronx River up which I had always heard battleships could navigate years ago. Latterly I’m told this is untrue but there was a deep part of the river close
by the Woodlawn station of the New York Central tracks where there was a swimming hole. Rumoured haunted by twin brothers who had drowned there when they high dived and got stuck in the bottom mud of this polluted water. Into which large sewers flowed and up these dank tunnels my early grade school friends repaired to look up passing ladies’ skirts through grates, to smoke cigarettes and philosophize in matters mostly of sex and sin. One small chap broodingly remarking that if he were the result of what his father did to his mother he would never speak to either of them again.

  But the place which became one’s real stamping ground was to the west, Van Cortlandt Park. Falling running here one day I cut my knee so badly I was carried home shoulder high covered in blood and was stitched together by a doctor somewhere below in the Bronx. But otherwise one roamed in safety in the relative isolation from the rest of New York City. My friends, before young ladies fatally entered their lives, spent their time in ancient pursuits as had the Mohican Indians who once wandered these same lands hunting with their bows and arrows. Instead we used slingshots made from tyre inner tubes with handles fashioned from the dogwood tree. These perfected were lethal weapons of astonishing accuracy. A friend, Alan Kuntze, set out every dawn each autumn to trudge booted through winter snows to plant his traps in the muskrat runs under the icy water of the Tibbet’s brook swamp. After skinning and curing in his attic he would sell the pelts to the Hudson Bay Company, making the then massive sums of money of two hundred and fifty dollars in a season.

  But all was not death and killing. We kept pet racoons and crows. The former fond of stealing ladies’ jewels and the latter, when they finally flew away, always temporarily returning each year. Wandering the woods with Alan Kuntze, although I was more interested in growing up to be rich and famous, I did learn from him to climb to the tops of beech trees and swing to the ground as the Mohican children did. He also taught me Indian lore. How to follow trails and leave or not leave signs of your own. How to set snares for small game and in these woods we often sat around late afternoon camp fires dining off squirrels and talking of the mysteries of hawks, snakes, owls, fox, opossums, racoons, mink, weasels, skunk and the occasional deer which inhabited these lands.