Eamon Kelly

by Eamon Kelly

  Professor Liam Ó Briain, in a letter to the Irish Independent on 6 October 1964, defended Hilton’s direction and said there wasn’t a trace of anything that could be remotely described as rip-roaring in his handling of the play. Naming the principal actors, the professor said that they contributed equally to make it a production which for unity of tone was one of the most noteworthy of Hilton Edwards’s many noteworthy productions in Dublin.

  BROADWAY

  At a street crossing the traffic lights flashed an urgent ‘Don’t Walk’. Hilton Edwards, on seeing this, enquired, ‘What do they expect us to do, run?’ Presently a friendly white ‘Walk’ beckoned to us in a lamp as big as a television screen. We were in New York and going to rehearsal. Philadelphia, Here I Come! had been revived at the Gate Theatre in 1965, and London and New York impresarios, seeing it, arranged for its presentation on Broadway and later in the West End. The two leads, Patrick Bedford and Donal Donnelly, were included in the deal, as were Maureen O’Sullivan, Mavis Villiers and myself. Éamon Morrissey joined us later.

  It was a difficult decision for me leaving Maura and three young children behind. I was every day of fifty-one and a bit long in the tooth for haring off across the Atlantic. But Maura, true thespian that she was, gave me her blessing. We agreed that if the play were successful she and the children would join me in the States. I got my passport and visa and was vaccinated, and in the middle of Christmas 1965, after a fond farewell, more smiles than tears, I got a cab to Dublin airport. Hilton Edwards and Brian Friel accompanied the cast on the flight and to my dying day I’ll never forget the sight at twilight of the New York skyscrapers all lit up like benediction as our plane circled to land at Idlewild. Christmas at home with its candles in the windows paled in comparison to the fairyland that was Manhattan.

  All my relations who emigrated came to New York, and from an early age listening to their letters being read and hearing them talk when they came home, New York placenames like Hell’s Kitchen, the Bowery, Central Park West and Chinatown were familiar to me. I mentioned this to Brian Friel on the plane and he drew a map of Manhattan with its avenues going north and south and the streets running east and west, and indicated roughly the places I had mentioned.

  Our spirits soared that morning as we walked along. The New York air seemed more invigorating than that of Dublin. Everything was livelier. The traffic and even the pedestrians were all hell-bent on getting somewhere fast. Flashing advertising lights competed for our attention and tall buildings, their toenails firmly on the sidewalk, stretched away into the sky.

  There was no dining-room in the hotel we actors could afford. We had to go to the corner café for meals. I ordered a boiled egg for breakfast the first morning and got it broken up in a teacup like my mother used to give the baby of the family when I was young. One of the many little things that make America different.

  New York actors were auditioned by Hilton for the other parts in the play, and after three weeks’ rehearsal we opened our pre-Broadway tour in Philadelphia, which town stays in the memory because the streets were named after trees, and a large statue of William Penn dominated the centre of the city. We played in the Walnut Street Theatre, reputed to be the oldest in America. Sheridan’s comedy The Rivals opened the playhouse in 1812. It was the great impresario David Merrick who put on our play and he, his aides and assessors accompanied us on the tour. Actors who didn’t measure up to a Broadway standard were replaced and we lost two players on the way to New York.

  ‘Where are you going, Biff?’ an aide enquired of another one night in Boston.

  ‘To dressing-room four to fire Louise,’ Biff said, I thought with a little relish.

  In a while’s time a distraught Louise came down the stairs in floods of tears. Without her knowing it, another actress had been understudying the part. Not until we reached New York were some of us free of the fear of hearing that knock on the dressing-room door.

  Television stations in Philadelphia and Boston were wont to place a camera before an audience emerging from theatre productions and ask the punters for their thoughts on the play. Merrick disliked this type of publicity as some nut was quite likely to say that the show was a load of garbage. To counteract it he had his crew members, all dickied up, merge with the audience, hog the microphone and offer comments which were laudatory in the extreme. This could only work a few times as the camera people recognised the crew and ignored them. Then Merrick’s men played a record from Hello Dolly, one of his shows which was running on Broadway at the time, to muffle what was being said. Better still, with a pair of pliers he often cut the leads to the television speaker and left the interviewed playgoers on the screen opening and closing their mouths silently like goldfish in a bowl. He took the pliers out of his back pocket and showed them to us.

  David Merrick was described as the adulte terrible in Time magazine. We were told that once when he got all round very bad notices for a show, he looked up the telephone directory and invited people of the same names as the drama critics to dinner. There were tickets to the panned show, after which he asked the ‘Stanley Kauffmanns’ and the ‘Walter Kerrs’ for their views. Quotes from their lavish praise were writ large on the publicity boards in the theatre marquee.

  After a week in Philadelphia and another in Boston, where we played in the Wilbur Theatre, we opened in the Helen Hayes on Broadway. There were to be two previews on Monday and Tuesday, 15 and 16 February, and the press night was to be on the Wednesday. At this time there was a row going on between Stanley Kauffmann, the new critic of the New York Times, and the Broadway producers. Kauffmann insisted on coming to the second preview because he said the time between curtain down and going to press was too short to write an in-depth review. Merrick’s and the other producers’ argument was that a preview was not the finished article. Even at the last moment changes could be made which would improve the performance. And anyway, a press night opening was at seven-thirty instead of eight o’clock.

  We were in our dressing-rooms getting ready on the second preview night when there was an announcement on the tannoy to get into our street clothes and leave the theatre at once. Outside, a thousand ticket-holders and Mr Kauffmann of the Times approached a darkened marquee and a notice saying that the show had been cancelled. Mr Merrick, when pressed for an explanation, said, ‘A rat got in the generator.’ The cancellation of that night’s showing of Friel’s play made front page news in New York next morning. Anyone interested in the theatre knew that Merrick had a new play called Philadelphia, Here I Come! opening in the Helen Hayes that night.

  Being new to Broadway we were nervous, but the excitement of the events of the evening before tended to put us on an all-time high, and we turned in a great performance which received a tremendous reception at the curtain.

  Later that night I was walking after Brian Friel on our way into Sardi’s Restaurant, a favourite eating place for after-theatre people. When we got inside the door there was a burst of applause. I looked behind to see what famous personality was entering. There was nobody. The applause was for Brian, a warm New York welcome for a new playwright on Broadway.

  We sat up in Moriarty’s pub and diner until the papers hit the streets in the small hours. Douglas Watt wrote in the Daily News: ‘I am happy to report that David Merrick didn’t cancel last night’s performance of Philadelphia, Here I Come! as he did the previous night’s.’ And he went on to say: ‘It is beautifully performed under Hilton Edwards’s sensitive direction … Philadelphia, Here I Come! casts an undeniable spell.’

  Walter Kerr of the New York Herald Tribune wrote: ‘This morning the sun shines brighter. Producer David Merrick has gone window shopping in Dublin and brought us back a fine new play … Author Brian Friel has set all of his cranky, fond and obstinate shy people to searching for the word that is everlastingly on the tip of everyman’s tongue, and everlastingly not spoken. He has written a play about an ache, and he has written it so simply and so honestly that the ache itself becomes a warming
fire.’

  Stanley Kauffmann’s review was not so warm, and didn’t merit quotation among the thirty-one excerpts which appeared in a full page advertisement in the New York Times on 15 February.

  We played on Broadway until November. There were many awards for the play, director and leading actors. Brian Friel received a Tony Award nomination, as did Hilton Edwards for his direction. Donal Donnelly, Patrick Bedford and Maureen O’Sullivan were also named (Maureen had now become Máirín D. O’Sullivan because her name clashed with the famous Maureen in Hollywood), and wonder of wonders, a nomination came to an astonished yours truly. I was pipped at the post for the actual award by Patrick Magee who was playing in Marat-Sade.

  Many notable people took in the show during its run on Broadway, and we often had to stay on stage to meet them after the curtain. One night Bobby Kennedy and a family party came. The actors crowded around the Kennedys, Bobby’s sisters and his wife, and I, not being of a pushy nature, was left in the background. When the party left the stage, still surrounded by the actors, Bobby was last in the line. He stood for a moment and saw me at the far side. I was going to approach him but hesitated. He walked across, shook my hand and said how much he had enjoyed the play. I was very moved by the thoughtfulness of his action.

  But of all the notables who came, I think I enjoyed Paddy Murphy’s visits best of all. Paddy had been my next-door neighbour at home in Ireland, and I was a schoolboy the morning he set out for America. I remember going to his house to wish him farewell. His departure was in many ways not unlike that of Gareth O’Donnell in the play. His father, as well as being a farmer, was a building contractor in a small way, and Paddy had been helping him and learning the trade. It was a severe blow to the father when Paddy got it into his head to go to New York. The old man was brokenhearted and refused to speak to his son. As Paddy paused at the door the morning he was leaving, to wish him goodbye, his father’s only words were, ‘You’ll be sorry yet.’

  Paddy got on fine in the States. He was a motorman on the subway train from the Bronx to Manhattan. Every morning he brought carriageloads of commuters down to the city and carted them home in the evening. He told me he had never seen a Broadway play and was very curious about them when he heard I was going to be in one. I got tickets for him and he rang me up a few times before he came. He had many questions to ask. How long would the play last? Would there be a half-time?

  When he came he was so interested in the activities of the household, the naturalness of the people eating, washing up, playing draughts, saying the rosary, the boys dropping in to say goodbye to Gar, that he had to come again to savour what was being said. He told me that it brought him back to his own last night at home, and that the taciturn father ‘was my own old man out of the soot’. He admitted to being close to tears. Gar’s alter ego puzzled him. He took it that he was a dead brother who came back to advise the young man.

  In the following months Paddy organised parties of Kerry neighbours and friends to visit the play. There were so many that afterwards he drew them up in two lines in the wide corridor outside my dressing-room. Then I was called out and marched up and down the lines like de Valera reviewing a guard of honour. He introduced each person as we went along. ‘This is Jerry Sheehan from Knockanimeris! And here’s a man from Mayo.’ (Paddy’s wife came from that county.) He read up everything he could lay hands on about the theatre. He became an authority on what was appearing on Broadway and he had sheaves of newspaper cuttings when I called to see him in the Bronx.

  I had two aunts and numerous yankee-born first cousins in New York. Sundays were set aside for visiting them. I first called on Aunt Mary at Dittmar’s Boulevard in Astoria. I was treated to the same warm hospitality the settled Irish always lavished on greenhorns on their arrival. There was a sumptuous meal and drink to go with it. Generosity knew no bounds. My jacket was put in the closet because of the central heating. On my way home when I looked in the pockets they were full of dollars. There had been a whip-round, what they used to call a ‘shower’, for the new arrival.

  Nearly all the talk on that first visit was about Ireland. How many of the people my aunts remembered were still alive? Marriages of relations at home were discussed and I was questioned about any contributions to the matrimonial fruit basket. Then I was told how my New York cousins were getting on – where they worked and where they lived. Maria, Aunt Margaret’s daughter, was married to an Italian policeman. I knew from listening to American relations that marrying outside the ethnic group was frowned upon. Women like my aunts would ask their daughters who were that way inclined, ‘What’s wrong with Irish boys?’ A father giving away his daughter to a Pole or an Italian might say to her at the altar-rails, ‘What’s that you said his name was again?’

  The policeman son-in-law wasn’t present on that first visit and I told his wife Maria that as he was on duty in Manhattan he should call into the Helen Hayes Theatre to see me after a Wednesday matinée. Sure enough he turned up with an Irish cop, both of them bedecked with guns, batons, handcuffs, parking tickets, whistles, notebooks and pencils. They were hardly able to walk under all that paraphernalia. Actors exchanged curious glances as they saw them entering my dressing-room. I kept a bottle of Irish in my locker and there was a drop all round. They turned out to be a good-humoured pair, and I said for a lark, why not slip the handcuffs on me and frogmarch me out when the other actors were leaving their dressing-rooms. This they did, to the open-mouthed astonishment of my colleagues. They deposited me in the squad car and drove off with one or two hoots on the siren. They dropped me safely at my hotel, where the phone was hopping off the hook. News had spread to the staff of the theatre that I had been abducted by the police. I reassured the staff, and they took some convincing that it was all a joke and that I was available for duty that night. My biggest difficulty was keeping the incident from the ears of the PRO, who would have used it for publicity that would have got two of New York’s finest into trouble.

  LOST IN THE UNDERGROUND

  It was March, the play had been successful and the people were coming in. It looked like as if we’d be in New York for a while, so I sent to Ireland for Maura and the children. My first cousin Bob Rodden drove me to the airport to meet them. It was three months since I had left home, and Eoin, seven, and Brian, five, had not forgotten me, but Sinéad, a little over a year-and-a-half, didn’t know me at all. She stood by a railing holding an upright bar, and with her head turned away she cried her fill. Any word of consolation I had to say only made her worse. Then I must have had a nudge from the Holy Ghost or something because I began to hum an Irish lullaby with which I used to put her to sleep when she was smaller. Gradually the crying stopped and gradually she turned her head around, looked up at me quizzically and began to smile through her tears, as much as to say, ‘Ah, I have you now!’

  When we got into Manhattan we discovered that we had left Sinéad’s go-car behind at the Aer Lingus terminal. Next morning I set out with Eoin and Brian on the subway to retrieve it. Riding on the underground train was to be a special treat for them. We had to change trains at a place called Union Turnpike in Queens. I took Eoin’s and Brian’s hands firmly when the train stopped. The doors open swiftly and when the people are through they close just as quickly. As we faced the opening door, Eoin, always independent, let go my hand and went towards a door on his right. In a second Brian and I were on the station platform and Eoin, unable to push his way through the entering crowd, was held back by the closing door and left inside. The train sped off and he was gone. The life almost drained from my body with the shock.

  My first primitive instinct was to rush after it and try and catch the departing train. There was a coloured man at the window of the carriage and I waved to him and indicated as best I could that I had left the child inside. A lady who had been on our train from Manhattan and noticed the two youngsters with me, seeing my distress, spoke to me very slowly as if I didn’t understand English. I was dark and a trifle swarthy and maybe sh
e took me to be Spanish. She asked me to remain exactly where I was and said that she would follow in the next train and see if Eoin had been put out at Van Wyck Boulevard station. She went off and after what seemed like an eternity during which time my brain, veering towards madness, visualised all the dire things that could befall Eoin – would I ever see that dear child again? – the down train drew up and there she was with Eoin by her side. She had found him in the safe keeping of the coloured man. God be praised, I was in the seventh heaven with delight. Eoin, afraid I would tell him off, was inclined to hang back, but I rushed forward, swept him off his feet and embraced him, and when I put him down, my benefactor had gone. On our journey to the airport and back home in the train Eoin clung to my side like a barnacle to the black rocks in Ballybunion.

  When news of the incident broke in the theatre the publicity man put me in the hands of a journalist, and a photograph of Eoin and myself appeared with an article in the New York Herald Tribune. Heading the article was a verse which read:

  Has anybody here seen Kelly,

  The kid who was lost and found?

  Blessed be the souls who retrieved him,

  All in the underground.

  Not great. It wouldn’t have rated a mention in Radio Éireann’s The Balladmakers’ Saturday Night. There was an appeal in the paper to the lady who found Eoin to come forward. Eventually she turned up and David Merrick hosted a dinner in her honour in the Rainbow Restaurant nearly a mile up on top of a skyscraper in Manhattan. Her name was Mrs Francis Koschir and she was the wife of a Jewish doctor from Long Island. She and Eoin were photographed and he had a present for her – an Irish linen tablecloth which Maura found in a New York shop.

  I had rented a housekeeping apartment in the Excelsior Hotel at 81st Street and Central Park West. When Donal Donnelly’s wife Patsy and their little daughter came to New York they stayed in the same hotel, as did Brian Friel, his wife Anne and their family. We, the Kellys, had two bedrooms, a sitting-room, dining space and a small kitchen. The apartment was cleaned every day and, as ever in America, a mountain of fresh towels put in. We were fourteen storeys up, and when the window-cleaner came I had to close my eyes. He went through the casement and slipped an S-hook from his tackling into a staple on the outside of the frame. The sight of him leaning back into nothingness, singing as he cleaned the window, sent a nervous tingle through my wrists and ankles.