The Real Mrs. Brown: The Authorised Biography of Brendan O'Carroll

by Beacom, Brian

  A day later, Brendan, who doesn’t believe in organised religion but does believe in a God, prayed. ‘I was in the Shamrock Lodge, went into a cubicle in the toilet and cried. I got on my knees and prayed God would take this child because I couldn’t cope with the baby and the fear that Doreen would never walk again.’

  Doreen had had two epidurals, and still had no feeling in her legs. She was also having dreadful dreams about the Devil trying to pull her out of bed. Brendan feared his wife was going to die.

  On the third day, the doctor announced, ‘Mr O’Carroll, I have bad news for you, your son died at three o’clock.’

  He said it, but can see this may make him look callous. Yes, Brendan replied ‘You frightened the life out of me. I thought it was going to be something really serious.’

  He was joking. It was his only way of coping. Brendan was absolutely devastated. He now shudders at the memory.

  ‘And when God did take him, it was my fault and I thought, “Oh, Jesus. What did I do to deserve that?” But you see I had prepared in my mind the white picket fence, swing in the garden, taking him to the zoo. I had all these things planned and all the plans went out the window. And I couldn’t find peace in myself.’

  The doctor suggested Brendan told his wife the tragic news. But he couldn’t, at first.

  ‘But then I finally told her Brendan was dead. We had a mutual cry. A few days later, Doreen began to walk again.’

  His world in turmoil, Brendan left the magazine. There was now an incredible strain on the marriage. Doreen was struggling with a deep depression that was to last six months.

  ‘We nearly had a major falling out. It was so hard. I was working my guts out and coming home to complete chaos, and I felt I couldn’t take it any more. I had to explain that I was feeling that way because I’d lost a son too, and I, finally, wanted the right to mourn, to focus on my grief.

  ‘One morning, Doreen woke up glowing, a changed woman. She’d had an incredible dream where this nun came around carrying in her arms what seemed like a bunch of flowers, or sometimes a baby. And Doreen said, “Brendan, everything’s going to be okay.” From that moment, she never looked back.’

  The Mammy’s Final Bow

  Brendan had been trying a range of jobs. He’d returned to waiting, had a go at window-cleaning; he did whatever he could to earn money. Nothing lasted long. Then, on 14 September 1979, Doreen O’Carroll gave birth to a gorgeous brown-eyed little girl. The couple named her Fiona, after Brendan’s sister.

  The new arrival stretched the family purse further.

  ‘I was sitting out in the back garden one afternoon, reading a newspaper and wondering what to do. I’d sold my car and bought a van, thinking it might be useful. Just then, Doreen came out and said, “We’ve no money.”

  ‘“But you’ve got the unemployment benefit. I gave it to you on Thursday.”

  ‘“It’s all gone.”

  ‘“Shit.”

  ‘So she went back inside and I had this idea. I picked up the phone and rang the Irish Independent newspaper and asked for the circulation section. A voice came on and I asked who the boss was while I could hear the machines going in the background. I got the answer “Tommy Curran”. So I asked for Tommy and this voice came on the line.

  ‘“Hello Tommy, it’s Brendan O’ Carroll.”

  ‘“Who?”

  ‘“Brendan. Brendan O’ Carroll. You asked me to give you a shout if you needed any labourers.”

  ‘“Oi did?”

  ‘“Sure, you did. But listen, if there’s nothing going don’t worry about it.”

  ‘“Oh well, I don’t want to let you down.”

  ‘“Don’t worry about it . . .”

  ‘“Look, I’m all right for tonight, but ring Bob Naylor in the Sunday World.”

  ‘So I did. And said, “Bob, it’s Brendan O’ Carroll. Tommy said to give you a ring about some work.”

  ‘“Can you operate a saddle-stitcher?”

  ‘Now, I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. “Sure I can.”

  ‘“Well, I’ll see you in here at seven o’clock.”

  ‘I turned up, and Bob explained there was work going on the collating machine already. Would I mind stacking pallets for the time being?

  ‘I said, “No, not at all.” Stacking pallets was easy. So I stacked and I was fast. I worked hard. And all the time I was watching the bloke work the saddle-stitcher, the machine that held the papers together. I realised it was all about how you fed the machine, fanned the paper, and so forth.

  ‘Later that night Bob said to me, “Right we’re puttin’ you on the saddle-stitcher.”

  ‘And I was shittin’ myself. If the machine was fed wrongly, the whole line broke down.

  ‘Well, I don’t know where God is, but that night he was watching over me. That night I got through it. And I got paid.

  ‘My social security at that time, a married man with one kid, was thirty quid. But Bob came down with a cheque for fifty-eight quid. For one night’s work. I was in raptures.

  ‘Bob then asked me if I was available for a Wednesday shift, working on the Farmer’s Journal and the other magazines. Later in the canteen he came up to me and asked if I was the bloke with the van. I said yes, and he asked if I fancied doing a run, near Finglas. He said there would be sixty quid in it for me. I said, “Load the feckin’ thing up.”

  ‘I came home with one hundred and eighteen quid for a night’s work. And I kept on doing the paper work, even when I got a proper job.’

  The mind was never short of an idea.

  ‘In Ireland at this time we had the TV Times, the Radio Times, RTÉ Times, but we had no TV Guide. So I came up with this idea for a magazine that would cover all of the television stories, with all the TV programmes.

  ‘The next stage was to get a meeting with Fergal Quinn.’

  Fergal Quinn Senior has a chain of supermarkets in Ireland. In fact, the Superquinn store in Finglas had been the scene of the Sellotape and bicycle-lock robbery that had landed the young Brendan in the reform school.

  ‘I managed to get a meeting with him – I’d once worked at his house as a waiter – and I walked into his office and he said, “Brendan – you’ve got three minutes.”

  ‘And so I pitched him the idea and he asked how much I was going to charge for the publication. I said nothing. It would be given away free at the supermarket checkouts.

  ‘The idea was he would get exclusivity in his supermarket alone. And at the end of the three minutes he said, “Okay. Let’s do it.” There was only one condition, that if he had an ongoing legal dispute with any of the advertisers, then I couldn’t give them space. But that didn’t represent a problem.’

  Brendan was in. With an incredible idea he was set to become a millionaire. Offices were rented and Brendan went to the bank and secured a loan. He worked hard on designing the magazine, using the grid system of daily reference that all magazines use today.

  ‘We got the first dummy issue produced and it looked amazing. We got it round to the advertisers and they were blown away with it.’

  But when something looks too good to be true, it usually is. The Friday before the magazine launch, a courier arrived at the office door. It was a notice of impending legal proceedings. RTÉ were suing Brendan for breaching the copyright on their programmes. And they sent the same legal notices to Superquinn.

  ‘The problem was that the BBC and ITV owned the rights to publicise their programmes. Now, we could have taken them on in court and perhaps won. And it’s since been shown that every magazine on the planet can show TV listings. But to establish the precedent would have meant using up all our money. And all that would happen is then someone else would put out the same magazine.’

  What else to try? Especially as, on 15 October 1983, Doreen gave birth to a healthy little blue-eyed boy, Danny.

  However, Brendan’s mammy wasn’t enjoying the best of health. Now 71, she certainly wasn’t old, but her general tiredness had increased
and Maureen would take to her bed more often. And not for dramatic purpose. Doctors diagnosed heart problems.

  ‘I could see my mammy was becoming more and more worn out,’ he says, the voice still echoing the sadness of the time.

  One afternoon, Maureen O’Carroll took baby Danny upstairs to lie down with her. She never woke up.

  ‘And nothing could be done. But before she died she made me promise that I’d do two things for her.

  ‘“Ma, like what?”

  ‘“Sure, don’t let me die in hospital. I don’t want to die amongst strangers. I want to die with my family around.”

  ‘“Sure Ma, if I can organise that I will.”

  ‘“And I want to die on a sunny day.”

  ‘“Hell, Ma, I don’t have any control over that.”

  ‘Danny was ten months old at the time and she died cradling him in her arms. And yes, it was on a sunny day.’

  Brendan has never had a day since when he hasn’t thought about his mother. They were bound together with a connection that’s unbreakable. When Agnes Brown talks about loving her kids so much, even if they are 3,000 miles away, she says there is still an umbilical cord attached.

  The inspiration for Brendan’s stage show moment comes from real life. That is Maureen O’Carroll speaking.

  ‘At least there was nothing left unsaid. We knew exactly how we felt about each other. I wasn’t standing over the coffin saying, “If only.” It doesn’t get better than that.’

  Brendan’s thoughts on the death of his mother are contained, conflated, edited. He strives to give the impression he’s at one with her passing, accepting of the belief this was a lady who’d had a good life, was loved by her family and had made a mark – and has moved on.

  But that’s not the reality. It’s rare to spend time with Brendan without Maureen O’Carroll appearing in the room in the form of an anecdote or a reference such as ‘My mother would have feckin’ loved seeing a character like Agnes Brown on stage.’ Whenever he offers up nuggets of wisdom, he will all too often reveal his mammy to be the source. He says he had enough time to share his thoughts with his mother, but it’s hard to believe that now. Brendan shares his thoughts with his mother every day, believing she can hear them, believing they are still connected. Brendan doesn’t grieve for his mother, and that’s perhaps because she still hasn’t departed his life. And she never will. Maureen O’Carroll left her mark outside the family. Her political legacy is recorded in the history books. And there’s no doubt her shoulder was one of the strongest in pushing the boulder of women’s rights up the hill.

  Meanwhile, what was Brendan to do? He’d tried his hand at farming, publishing, window-cleaning, just about anything that would keep him away from the 1980s dole queues. And steady, well-paid work had dried up and life was a struggle.

  One night, he was given a real clue as to where his future might lie. But it was small, and it escaped him.

  ‘I went along with a group of friends to attend one of these murder-mystery nights, but instead of being supplied with a script to act out, I wrote it myself. It was full of colour. I gave all the characters big descriptions. And you wouldn’t believe the threads I included in that story. It got to the stage that there were so many clues and red herrings that not even the murderer knew he was the murderer.

  ‘I’d never felt so satisfied in my life. Of course, I hadn’t worked out why I’d enjoyed this occasion so much. But the idea of holding the interest of a group of people was really satisfying. I knew when I was telling this story I had my pals in the palm of my hands. Honestly, it felt fantastic. Yet, feeling that and knowing what to do with that sort of skill is something else.’

  In 1984, however, Brendan seemed to have exhausted his business ideas and was back waiting on tables at the Department of Foreign Affairs.

  ‘I didn’t feel it was beneath me. Nor was I intimidated. I always had the ability to accept my position in any situation. And I knew I would always do my best. While working in the department, my feeling was that these guys were getting the best waiter they could on that day.’

  However, some people believed he was destined for greater things. ‘Once I waited at a function attended by Dick Spring, the Deputy Prime Minister, and he was on his way to Foreign Affairs where I was serving lunch.

  ‘Now, of course my Mother had been a TD. And as Dick passed the kitchen, he called out, “Brendan!”, gave me his business card and said, “If you ever want to run for your mother’s seat, give me a shout.”

  ‘I was taken aback. I was a waiter. And here was the Deputy Prime Minister telling me he would help me to become an MP if I fancied the idea. This was all too surreal.’

  Brendan would later think seriously about moving into politics.

  Meanwhile, his work at Dublin Castle was to bring him into contact with one of the most challenging customers he had ever served. The Iron Lady. Ireland was offered its third presidency of the EEC in 1984, and Brendan was hired by the Department of Protocol to work on the event in which Ireland played host to heads of state from around the world.

  But he was halted in his tracks when he discovered he’d be serving the UK Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. He hated the woman’s politics. How could a working-class boy from North Dublin brought up in near poverty not hate them? Or even begin to like the woman?

  ‘And it was an odd feeling for me. I didn’t even have a car at the time, so I’d have to hitch a lift to be able to wait tables for the likes of the President of the United States.

  ‘That first morning, I got into this Volkswagen minibus, and I jumped in and said, “Thanks, lads. I’m off to Dublin Castle. Where are you headed?” And one bloke replied, “So are we.”

  ‘“Great. Let’s go.”

  ‘So I closed the door, looked around and realised I was in a van with Sinn Fein. It was full of placards protesting against Reagan and so on. And I thought, “I can’t get out of this van at the castle with this lot.” So I said, “Lads, could you drop me off before the castle?”

  ‘So they dropped me off at Christchurch a couple of miles away and I walked all the way up to the castle.’

  At the castle, Brendan had to go through security training.

  ‘Once we had been cleared by security we were told, “One of you six will be serving the top table.” What this meant was, if President Reagan, for example, wanted something, it would be relayed via the head of security, who would then signal the head waiter who would then signal the waiters. It was all about waiting for signals.

  ‘But this didn’t sit right with me. As we were being addressed I said, “Excuse me, can I bring something up? I’m a waiter and if I hear someone say, ‘Excuse me, can . . .’ my first instinct is to say, ‘Yes, can I help you?’ What if I do that?” And the security man said, “You’ll have one hole there,” pointing to my forehead, “and about six bullets in your body.”

  ‘I’m telling you, some of the waiters rattled with nerves carrying the soup course to the top table.’

  Though Mrs Thatcher managed, surprisingly, to calm Brendan’s nerves.

  ‘I gave her the first-ever drink when she arrived on Irish soil at the President’s Palace. But although I wasn’t predisposed to like her, there was something about her that I thought was class.

  ‘I was introduced to her by the head waiter, George Buckley, who said, “Mrs Thatcher, this is Brendan, who’ll be looking after you.” And I offered her a drink and she said she’d love an Irish whiskey. Now, there was a little interval as she was having a sip and she said to me, “Now, tell me Brendan. Will you be with us for the next four days?”

  ‘She asked if I had a family. And I said, “Yes, two children,” and I told her the kids’ names, Fiona and Danny.

  ‘She smiled and said she would try not to be too much trouble.’

  He remembered two things in particular about Mrs Thatcher. ‘She ordered hot milk and pepper, to be taken in her room, for her indigestion.’ (More than a decade later, when offered an entertainment
show with Irish broadcaster RTÉ, Brendan had to think of an off-the-wall title and said, ‘Just call it “Hot Milk And Pepper”.’)

  ‘And the second was I’ve never seen anyone work so hard.’

  He was also struck by her grace, but reveals he tested it to the limit.

  ‘On the final day, the catering staff were really pressed for time, trying to get lunch finished because Mrs Thatcher had to make a one o’clock speech that would be on the news, filmed during this lunch.

  ‘It was a nightmare, with four hundred people there, and my job was to make up the dessert, which was fresh strawberries.

  ‘And as I served her Mrs Thatcher said; “Excuse me, Brendan, could I have some caster sugar?” I ran into the temporary kitchen, found a dessert dish, and cut open the white bag, stuck a spoon in it and put it in front of Mrs Thatcher just before the cameras came on. Just then the head waiter announced, “Clear up!” and we were moved back into an adjoining room as the Irish Prime Minister began to speak.

  ‘At this point I looked at Mrs Thatcher on the television monitor. She picked up the teaspoon and sprinkled her strawberries. She swallowed a mouthful, and I watched her expression and she held a smile on her face the whole time. But I just knew there was something wrong. I looked back at the bag I’d taken the sugar from. It was salt.

  ‘The blood drained from my face as I watched her pick up a strawberry, dip it into the salt, and swallow it. And she got up, made a speech that brought the house down. And you know, I never heard a word of complaint about that.

  ‘At the end of that trip, Mrs Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe were sitting at reception in one of the rooms at Dublin Castle, waiting for the helicopter. I asked her, “Prime Minister, would you like a drink before you leave?” She ordered a coffee and, as she sipped it, she turned to me and said, “I bet you’re glad it’s all over, Brendan. And I’m sure Fiona and Danny will be delighted to see you.”

  ‘Well, I was taken aback. I had told her the names four days before. Once. And I thought, “That’s class.”’