by Des Bishop
The thing that made us all uncomfortable was the way the musical took over his life. My mother told me later that it became a massive strain on their relationship. All his free time was taken up with it. On one level he really thought he was on to a winner; he really thought he could write a hit Broadway musical. I admire that. But his obsession with it lay even deeper than his hunger for success; when I discovered his childhood past I began to understand why he had become consumed by it. He would often sit in his chair with his headphones on, rewinding the cassette tape over and over again, listening to the songs. He would pump his fist and get very passionate at times. One thing I must say though was that he had a lovely singing voice. That part wasn’t embarrassing. The fist-pumping and the humming to himself while others were around was.
The problem was that the story had its foundations in fantasies that were lying deep in his mind, about both his life and his desires. It is the story of a boy called Michael Ryan who had to emigrate from Cork to England with his mother after their father died. It inspired a song, ‘No Irish Need Apply’, about the horrible treatment of Irish immigrants in London. That horrible treatment motivates them to get a boat to New York to start a new life. Unfortunately for Michael, his mother is turned back at Ellis Island because she has TB. Michael is then raised by Ned, a kind man they had met on the boat. Together they sing ‘With these bare hands I will build my dream’. Michael eventually becomes a very rich man in the building industry. He achieves these riches by dubious means and it becomes a morality tale about how Michael’s greed destroys all his relationships. Eventually one of Michael’s corner-cutting decisions on a building site kills Ned in an accident. This is his rock-bottom as he kills the man who raised him in a desire to make more money. Redemption comes from his daughter reconnecting with her Irish roots and Michael becoming a philanthropist.
I won’t ridicule the story, but within this morality tale were songs about Irish history, quasi-Irish-American republicanism, comedy about cockney slang, the Great Depression, World War II, and even one about the Holocaust. It also has these recurring characters called ‘spriggins’, who are like little fairies reminding people that Michael is haunted by an evil force that motivates his behaviour. It was way too ambitious – like Forrest Gump meets Darby O’Gill and the Little People.
He had some readings, and it was never dismissed outright as people could see something appealing in the epic journey of an Irish-American man. But no one could ever make sense of what motivated Michael Ryan to be the way he was. My dad tried to say he was motivated by how the family had been treated in England, but it was not good enough. The show was just a series of set pieces trying to tell the story of history, Irish America and greed, sprinkled with my dad’s romantic view of Ireland as the place where none of this evil would exist.
Eventually, after many attempts, my dad parked the musical and his obsession eased. He did not really come back to it until the last few years of his life. But these fantasies were ever present. When he went about writing his memoir he concocted an entire childhood in London rather than Bexhill so he could place himself among the bombings there. He wanted to be part of that. My Aunt Joan broke down laughing when I asked her recently if she remembered living in London. He also wanted to tell the story of ‘No Irish Need Apply’ in relation to his own life. He tried to suggest that while his dad was off fighting in the war, himself and his mother were turned away from places with the sign on the door reading ‘No Irish Need Apply’.
That’s the odd thing. The musical was not truth. But then, when he came to writing the truth about his life, he inserted the musical into his story. His narrative was evolving even further. He was moving deeper into fantasy.
25
My dad expressed a lot of his discontent as regret. My mother has reminded me that it was not really regret. It was never so much that he regretted giving up the life in 1977. It was more that he never felt he had achieved enough. Despite having been a very successful model for all those years, he never saw that as good enough. In his mind, being an actor was nobler. He had it in his head that acting success would have somehow made him a better person.
My mother told me that some of the acting crowd, the Chelsea set that my dad hung around with, always belittled him because he was a model. My mother saw that they were just bitter and jealous of my dad because he was charming and good looking. These men never got much work, but in the pub they talked a good show about everything they were doing; the pub was where they spent most of their time. My dad was working all the time as a model and making loads of money. But he ended up focusing on the fact that they saw him as less than them.
My dad never expressed his insecurities through bitterness and belittlement like some of these guys did. He just internalized it and tried to find a way to feel like he had done enough with his life. I can understand that feeling: I know that I have the same thing in me as my dad on this front. I am often drawn to trying to prove myself to people who quite often are toxic to me. I have often been motivated to succeed so I could officially be good enough in the eyes of others. Still, to this day it hasn’t worked, of course, and in the end all my successes and all my dad’s successes brought only temporary respite from that creeping feeling of inadequacy.
My dad spent his early adulthood trying to be accepted by these guys. He would spend his later life watching CNBC all day on his days off and wishing he had earned more money. More worryingly, he would try to play the stock market, based on information coming from the TV. You are always the last to know by the time it gets on TV, and he often lost money doing this. He always told me about missed opportunities when he could have made loads of money. He was fascinated by how his Uncle William had managed to crawl out from under the burden of debt his father – my father’s grandfather – had left his family.
He had petrol pumps installed to replace the forge and he purchased a licence from the post office for ten shillings which gave him the right to haul livestock all over Ireland. He then purchased a lorry and a taxi, and he had a contract to drive the nuns wherever they wanted to go. What with fattening the pigs for sale, he still had a few fields left on the farm to raise cattle and horses.
My uncles were cattle-dealers at heart. They were always looking to beat down the price when they went out into the countryside to buy cattle.
Eamon Doran, the bar-owner, was a well-known and quite wealthy man and one of my dad’s great friends. My father would often tell stories about how he could have got into the bar trade in New York. Again he felt that his nine-to-five life was not as successful as Eamon’s. He saw his friend’s life as more attractive than his own.
My dad with Eamon Doran. Eamon was an amazing godfather and was always really generous at communion, confirmation and the big birthdays. He showed up in Blackrock College on my eighteenth birthday and gave me £100, a dangerous thing to get on the day you can drink legally.
He would always tell the story about how he loaned Eamon money he had saved up from modelling to open his first pub in New York. ‘I loaned Eamon the money and he went on to become a millionaire with pubs all over New York. But you know, he was dead at sixty. I made the right decisions, I suppose.’ Most of these thoughts finished with ‘I suppose’ for my dad. I suppose he was not sure about his decisions at all.
My father would never believe that anything myself and my brothers achieved was any good until someone else told him so. When we played sports when we were younger, it was always about the guy who played better and not about how you played. He would only praise you by telling you what some other father had said about your performance. Early in my career, until he met Richard my agent, he did not believe me when I told him things were going well. It was always that way with my dad. It was never good enough until somebody else acknowledged it. All our conversations would go like this:
‘Hey, man, how did the show go last night?’
‘Good, man.’
‘Was
there anyone there?’
‘I told you that the whole tour is sold out.’
‘Did they enjoy it?’
‘Yeah, Dad, I told you it was good.’
‘What did Richard think of it? Did he say it was good?’
‘Yeah, Dad, he was happy.’
‘Oh well, that’s good that Richard was there.’
Another classic of my dad’s would be:
‘Hey, man, when is your run in Vicar Street finishing up?’
‘I have a few more weekends to go.’
‘How many will that be then when you are done?’
‘It will be forty-three sold-out nights.’
‘And how many did you say Tommy Tiernan did the last time?’
Even then it did not stop him constantly reminding me that it could all be gone tomorrow. He loved telling me about how fickle the entertainment game was. I suppose there was a part of him that wanted to feel like he had something to offer in that department, seeing as (to a certain extent) he had been there. But really, all he had to offer was fear. That is not a total criticism, and I think that is often how parents deal with affairs related to their children. In some ways it is beautifully annoying that they would try to protect you in that way.
But it was deeper than that with my dad. I felt in some way he did not want me to end up like him. He did not want me sitting around watching CNBC and wondering what I had done wrong, and he didn’t want me to have to worry about money at sixty years of age. He did not want me to feel inadequate about what I had achieved when I was in his shoes. He did not want me to have a life of wishes that had expired. He hadn’t completely let go of the fact that he had been in the game. He always used to say, any time Michael Caine came on the TV, that he was lucky. When I came back from Ireland all buzzed up about The Field with Richard Harris, we all sat down to watch it. My father dismissed Richard Harris’s performance straight away. He had been friendly with his brother, so I guess he couldn’t give him the satisfaction. He was thinking, ‘That could have been me.’ I suppose.
To give an example of how this affected me, for years after I had achieved success in Ireland I refused to do work outside of Ireland. I did this because I thought I would be repeating what my dad did when he left London to go to New York. He always felt he would have achieved more if he had not done that. I did not want to look back and think I’d let the whole thing fade away in Ireland, the same way my dad did. I sometimes began to feel that I was fighting a losing battle against my destiny and that it was inevitable that I would repeat the sins of my father. Really, though, it was just plain fear. I take responsibility for that fear; I don’t blame my father. I believe that our fears manifested themselves in similar ways, and what we were and are afraid of is pretty much the same: the final truth that we are not good enough.
He was desperate for acceptance. That’s a feeling I recognize. So much of his early life was filled with rejection that it is no surprise that in the end he would never feel like he fit in. It is hard to find a sense of belonging when you were forced not to belong in your own home. I can only imagine somewhere deep within him was a nagging sense that he had deserved the life that was dealt him. It’s hard to feel worth much when you experience the trauma he did when he was a boy.
26
For years I wanted to tell the story of how my dad’s life was revealed to me. I really wanted to chart my own understanding of my dad, an understanding that had evolved dramatically over the years.
The moment that really prompted me to want to tell his story came years ago after I had become a performer myself. In a sense I had followed in my father’s footsteps. I know that he was always delighted that I did that, but he could not stop himself from pushing all of his fears about his own disappointments on to me. He did not want me to make the same mistakes he had made. This is a very nurturing thing, but I also think that my decision to become a performer sparked off a powerful force within him. It certainly inspired him to express to me strong feelings about his decisions in life.
In 2003 I made a documentary series with director Mike Casey about living on minimum wage. It was called The Des Bishop Work Experience and it aired in February 2004 on what was then RTÉ Network 2. It was hugely successful and it completely changed my life.
It was a very exciting time and it was great to be able to send all the reviews back home to my parents. They were very excited about it all. Of course, my father very quickly began to remind me that I needed to save all the money because the success would not last forever. Then one day we had a conversation I will never forget. We must have been talking about my career as usual and he gave me this bit of advice: ‘The most important thing for you is that you never give up performing on the stage. No matter what happens, you keep doing what you love. You don’t want to be left with the regrets that I have lived with my whole life for giving up on performing.’
By the time my dad told me about his regrets, I had a much better understanding of him, but I resented his regrets intensely, and this resentment was strengthened by the fact that by this stage in our relationship we were very close. We were both sober men who once struggled with alcohol. We were both members of AA. We were both at times employees of Burberrys. We were both men who knew the unstable world of performing for a living. My dad was my friend by now. I had apologized to him for the madness of my youth and we had become adult mates, free from the wreckage of our pasts. When I say ‘our pasts’, I mean the past of our lives together. My father was not free from the fantasies that haunted him.
When he warned me not to end up with the same regrets as he had, I did not think much about it, but over the years it bugged me: all these years later he still felt discontent about what he had achieved in our lifetime together. It bothered me that the life he had lived before we, his children, were born had not satisfied him as a complete experience. I was just sad that towards the end of his life he still felt he had not achieved enough. I knew that it meant he felt he was not good enough as a person. I knew he looked around at his existence and wondered how he had got there.
I think my life of performing may have kicked off a sense in him of what could have been. Perhaps it reminded him of the life that he had and the wishes he had that had never died in him. Perhaps those desires that laid benevolently dormant in him were stirred.
I knew what he had really achieved in life. I felt sorry for him, as well as being angry with him because he still was lost in a drama that suggested that what he wished he had achieved was greater than what he had actually achieved as a dad. It must be remembered that he was unhappy with the only life we knew. Even though I often wondered later on how he lived the Flushing life after the excitement of his life in London, I was still raised in Flushing and that is who I am. It is a strange thing to be raised in a place where the person who provided you with that life is not comfortable with it. You don’t want to feel less than good about your own life. But that is what my dad felt in Flushing. But that is what he felt about himself too.
In August of 2004 I sat in a café in Edinburgh during the fringe festival. It was raining outside and I was having a bad day. So I was trying to cheer myself up by coming up with ideas for shows. I wrote down in my notebook, ‘My dad was nearly James Bond’. I decided I wanted to write a dramatic one-man show about the way my dad’s life was revealed to me. I wanted to include all the humour of our relationship in my younger days and his acting past. I would tell the story of him nearly being James Bond and would show funny clips from Zulu and The Day of the Triffids and how we ended up using them against him. I would then say those lines at the end of the first part: ‘You don’t want to be left with the regrets that I have lived with my whole life.’ He regretted giving up acting to give us the stable life. He regretted not being James Bond the hero.
I was then going to reveal what he had told me in 1996 about the real story of his life. It was not going to be funny. It was going to be horrific. I was goin
g to turn him into being the hero for surviving it. At the end I was going to bring him up onstage to get the applause he had regretted not having had all his life. I wanted him to know that the type of success he was missing was empty compared to the sacrifices he had made as a father and the success of raising his sons in a home that was free of violence.
Once I wrote it down I fell in love with the title, My Dad Was Nearly James Bond. It said it all. My dad was nearly an actor who played a great hero who would always survive the most outlandish situations. Of course, if he had become that actor he might have been famous and received the applause of the masses, and for a time he would have had a reprieve from the reality that he never lived in a place where he did not feel inadequate.
I was motivated then to tell the story of the heroics of fatherhood. I wanted to celebrate the sacrifices he had made in a song of gratitude about a deeper, more stellar performance. I wanted to give an ovation from his audience, the family, so he could realize that his performance had not gone unsung.
But, most important of all for him, I wanted to let the world know how interesting and triumphant my father’s life had been, despite the fact that he was oblivious to so much of what he had achieved. I wanted to tell the story of a real hero that once had an audition to play a heroic character called James Bond. He had a near miss that epitomized his regret. He spent his life feeling he nearly played a legend, and I wanted to tell the world that the real legend was his survival.
When Dad got sick I knew that time was running out to tell the story. It might seem strange that I would want to tell his story while he was still around; many people would opt not to tell such a personal history until after the death of a loved one. For me, though, this was a project to be done with my dad. I always saw my dad’s life as having an element of performance in it. That was not always a positive thing but, as I have the same thing in myself, I could identify with my dad as a performer; I could identify with his desire to have life endorsed by what others thought about things. So I wanted to tell his story in a performance and I wanted him to be part of it. I suppose I wanted him to die ‘validated’. I wanted his passport stamped in the only way that mattered to him. He still believed there would be someone at the other end to check his passport, so for him that idea made sense.