by Eamon Kelly
He said he knew a back road to the airport and he took us there. We were far from the departure area but we found sheltered accommodation with many other stranded people. All Maura’s cases were in the cab, and in the cold and excitement of being rescued from it we forgot the hand luggage with her tickets and passport. Now panic really set in. How could we trace the cab driver? We asked for the airport police, and when they came they were flabbergasted to learn that Brian, not yet six, and having an obsession with figures, remembered the registration number of the stranded cab. We gave the police all the particulars, how many pieces of luggage and the names on the destination tags. They went off.
In the blizzard there was no hope of my getting back to the city, and now the full horror of the situation dawned on me. I was going to miss the show that night. I tried in vain to ring the theatre. I calmed myself down by saying that it wasn’t a total disaster. We were all alive, and what were understudies there for but to go on in an emergency? Eoin and Brian came to the matinée at the Schubert with me every Saturday. They read their comics in my dressing-room and listened to the show on the tannoy. Now my mind was taken off the concern of the hour listening to Eoin talking to a group of truck drivers sitting nearby. Remembering some dialogue from the play, Eoin asked these disgruntled men, ‘Why does a hen cross the road?’ I had to smile. The incongruity of it. A child of seven engaging the attention of these hardened veterans of the parkways. I thought they’d tell him to scram. But no, they wanted to know why. Eoin told them, ‘To get to the other side. Ha-ha! Why does a hen lay an egg?’ They hadn’t a clue. ‘Because,’ Eoin said, ‘it couldn’t lay a brick. Yo-ho. Why does a sailor wear a round hat?’ They feigned puzzlement, then said, ‘Put us out of our misery, kid.’ And Eoin capped his own question with ‘To cover his head. Ha-ha!’ He had run out of dialogue and returned to us.
After what seemed ages the police came back to say that the cabman had succeeded in being hauled out of the ditch, and when the traffic eased he delivered our luggage to the Aer Lingus terminal. Much relieved by this news, although regretting that I didn’t have the opportunity of paying the cabman in whose debt I would ever be, we went to the pilots’ lounge where there were easy chairs in which we could rest. Later on we were taken by airport car across the runway to the departure area. We checked to find that tickets and passport were safe, but learned at the desk that because of the snow all flights were grounded until tomorrow.
We had a meal in the restaurant and a generous member of the Aer Lingus staff gave us his apartment a distance away. How great is the goodness of human nature! There was one double bed, and worn out from the day’s adventure the entire family got into it. After a while the children complained that there wasn’t enough room and they were being crushed. They pushed and pushed until I fell out on the floor where I spent the rest of the night.
Next morning, with the luggage checked in for the flight and Maura and the children sitting in the lounge by the departure gate, we said our tearful goodbyes. I left them bound for Ireland, while I headed back to Chicago. There is a stiff fine levied on any actor missing a show in the theatre, but when I explained my case to the management, they held that my absence was caused by circumstances outside my control and I was forgiven. They were happy enough; my understudy had gone on and the performance had been a success.
I wish I could report that things had gone so smoothly for Maura and the children. According to her first letter, their plane, after many delays, took off from O’Hare airport. Some trouble developed when they were over Canada and they had to make an emergency landing at Montreal. The passengers were taken in buses with a police escort – they had no landing papers – to hotels in the city, and after an early start the following morning they were only a short time in the air when another fault occurred, something to do with the undercarriage. They circled the city several times and came down so low they could see the ice in the St Lawrence River. Because of the long delays due to bad weather at Chicago airport and the emergency landing at Montreal, many of the passengers were distraught and being comforted by the ever-attentive and kindly flight staff.
Finally the fault was rectified and the plane straightened out on its flight line to Ireland. Later Maura had a letter from Aer Lingus congratulating herself and the children for remaining so calm under the trying circumstances at the outset of the journey. Happily for them they were at home in Ireland and we actors were on our way to St Louis on the banks of the Mississippi.
Our hotel there was close by the river and we watched the big-wheeled paddle boats dock and then sail on. Some of us took the elevator up the inside of the chromium-plated twin arches that have become the trademark of the McDonald’s fast food outlets. The view of the city and up and down the river was breathtaking. Modestly hiding away in a corner not far from the braggart arches was an elegant little Catholic church going back to the time of the French.
I haven’t mentioned the play reviews we got on the road. They were first class. We won all the way. Bob Goddard of the St Louis Globe-Democrat exclaimed, ‘Where have you been all my life, Mr Friel? That is the natural question after viewing a memorable stage experience called Philadelphia, Here I Come!’
And so the word was in Columbus, Ohio, and over the border in Toronto where we played in the Royal Alexander Theatre. We went on to Cincinnati, Cleveland and St Paul, and our prop money was stolen in Milwaukee. The people in the design department were put to the pins of their collars to dream up imitations of three green Irish pounds, a foxy ten-shilling note and two half-crowns. They did it and the secretary of the Department of Finance in Dublin wouldn’t have known the difference from the front row.
Our travels brought us back again to Boston where a critic sporting the name of Kevin Kelly gave us what I can recall as the only bad review of the play. ‘It failed to move me,’ he said, ‘and was little more than blathering bathos.’ In Philadelphia, where we had also played on the run in to Broadway, I read a review of the show on the way to the theatre on opening night. I imagine that the critic, on seeing that there was little or no change in the original cast, dolled up his review of our first visit and gave it to the editor, who put it in the paper a day too early. It was an eerie experience seeing our names down for something that hadn’t yet taken place. In New Haven, Joyce’s Ulysses, shot in Ireland, was showing at a city cinema. I went to see it, and it was like a visit home. The auditorium was crowded and my seat was at the very front, from which vantage point my actor friends from Dublin looked larger than life.
We ended our tour of America in Baltimore on 13 May 1967. It had been nearly a year and a half since I had left home. In that time I had seen most of the States except the far west and the deep south. At first I thought I wouldn’t like America. I had great confidence in socialism then, my face ever turning to the east, and I felt that the screaming ideology of US capitalism would set my teeth on edge. I wasn’t long in New York when I became aware of the wealth of Park Avenue and the poverty of Harlem. As the song says:
Though gems adorn the great and grand
There are faces with hunger paling.
In downtown Manhattan I saw poor black women rummaging for food in garbage cans, and people sleeping on the doorsteps in the night-time, something which was not in evidence in Moscow, where I went many years later. In the States the successful white man is cock-of-the-walk, and at that time you’d see no coloured faces in posh restaurants or striding down the concourses of great American airports – unless they were working in those places. On tour out from New York, I felt from the way some of our American crew members spoke to coloured porters in railway stations that in his heart the white man was master, and he still regarded his black brother as a slave. This feeling of superiority manifested itself in unexpected ways. When I got up to give my bus seat to a coloured woman in Columbus, Ohio, all the white people looked at me as if I had two heads.
I was at many parties in Irish-American homes, but I never saw a coloured face. The Irish in Engl
and have married Asian and African partners, but I never heard of anything like that in the States. The Irish-American attitude to the coloured seemed to me to be much the same as that of the majority of our settled kith and kin to the travelling people at home. But what a welcome our American cousins have for their white brethren from Ireland. Their hospitality is heartwarming and their generosity knows no bounds. I found friendship to be the hallmark of all Americans. Brendan Behan said of them, ‘He who hates you, hates the human race.’
TO BRIGHTON AND LONDON
Before we had set out on tour from New York each member of the cast had bought a tin trunk similar to those returning Yanks brought home in the old days. These stood four feet high and were two feet broad and two deep. When opened out, one side held drawers and the other a wardrobe space complete with coat-hangers. They were transported with the stage scenery and sat in the wings at each venue, and you took what you wanted from them to your hotel.
Now they were being packed for the last time for our journey back to Ireland. My trunk was shipped by sea and I hurried back by air, anxious to see what the home place looked like after seventeen months away. O’Connell Street seemed bare. Nelson’s Pillar had been blown down the year before. I regretted this. During the twelve years I had worked upstairs in the attic of the GPO as a radio actor, I was on the same level as the one-armed one-eyed figure. Every day I promised myself that I would climb to the top. I never did. It wasn’t the cost that kept me away. The sign at the entrance read ‘only 3d’.
The pillar itself was a graceful Doric column reaching into the sky. I can still see the words sculpted on the four sides of the granite base. Trafalgar was there and I remember February and April. These were cut in lower case and the years in Roman capitals. Seamus Murphy, the sculptor, ever marvelled at the classical proportions of the letters in those words. He held that they were the best example of lettering in these islands. Militant Republicanism is short-sighted. The destruction of the pillar and the equestrian statues of King William and Lord Gough were wanton pieces of vandalism. We should learn to live with our past.
I didn’t bring my tin trunk to England. It still sits in the spare room with a large Cunard Line label on it.
We opened our pre-West End tour of Philadelphia, Here I Come! in Brighton. Maura and the children came over for a visit and the youngsters enjoyed riding on the toy railway and the many other amenities for young people in the August sunshine. I had a movie camera I bought in New York and I still have pictures of them on the merry-go-round.
Jack Tinker was writing then in the Brighton Evening Argus and he spoke of the dewdrop freshness of the play. The English were going to like it. Oxford was our next stop and then into London, but at the last minute Manchester and Golder’s Green were added to the schedule because the original date for our play in London clashed with the opening of another show, which meant we wouldn’t get our full share of the press.
I had been engaged to take part in a television series called Never Mind the Quality Feel the Width with Joe Lynch and John Bluthal playing the leading parts in a joint tailoring business. One was Catholic, the other Jewish, and the comedy in the series arose, as it were, from the collision of these two cultures. I was to play the part of a parish priest, and rehearsals were to begin the week we opened in London when I would be free in the daytime.
Now I couldn’t do it because I’d be a couple of hundred miles away. A contract had been signed and there was hell to pay. A proposition was put to me by the Thames Television company. Would I be willing to take a late train out of Manchester each night to London after the show? Without telling my own management of my predicament I decided to chance it. It worked fine for two nights. On the third night I went to the railway station to find that there was a lightning strike. My God! What was I to do? The television show I was rehearsing in London was going out live on Sunday night.
It was difficult enough getting accommodation at that late hour. I found a place, the worst ever in which it was my misfortune to lay my head. The bed was damp and there was a shiny coating of dirt on the bedroom carpet. I had a light overcoat which I wore over my pyjamas between the sheets. I was up at the crack of dawn, got a taxi to the airport and flew to London. I rang the TV people and a courtesy car brought me to rehearsal and back to the airport afterwards for the flight to Manchester.
This is how it was for the rest of the week, and because I was under extreme pressure both the play and the TV rehearsal and broadcast went the best ever. When Oscar Lewenstein and Michael White, the English producers of our show, heard that I was going down to London from Manchester every day, all hell broke loose, because of the risk involved if I couldn’t get back for the show. They got after my director Hilton Edwards. Hilton bore down on me like a great three-masted schooner on a small boat. Was it true that I was taking the train from Manchester down to London every day?
‘No, Hilton,’ I replied. ‘I go by plane.’
That seemed to take the wind out of his sails, because he thought for a moment and said, ‘You’re flying? Well I suppose that’s all right.’ Strange logic, but it got me off the hook.
After a week at the Hippodrome in Golder’s Green we opened at the Lyric Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue on Wednesday 20 September 1967. At the matinées tea was passed along the seats to the patrons at the interval, and we in our dressing-rooms knew when the time was up by the rattle of the empty cups and saucers being collected by the ushers.
The dressing-room was where I lived when not on stage, and I tried to make it as much like home as possible. There was a couch and an easy chair, a cabinet with drinks in case anybody called round, and I had just one picture. It was a reproduction of Picasso’s The Jester which I had bought in New York. A white figure with a sad face on a light green background. I regarded it as a sort of talisman. It went with me on tour through the States and it was here in London now.
Outside, the names of the principal actors loomed large on the theatre marquee, and posters of the show were fixed to the wall at pavement level. I was glad that my name was just high enough on the bill that a passing dog with an inclination to raise a leg couldn’t reach it. Madge Ryan, who replaced Mavis Villiers and who had a better agent than I, had her name placed above mine, but mine was still safe from the designs of contemptuous London canines. A player whose name escapes me was once asked what he thought of drama critics and he replied, ‘You may as well ask a lamp-post what it thinks of dogs.’
But the West End critics were kind to us, though they didn’t write about the show with the same gusto as their American brethren. The theme of the play somehow struck a deeper chord with people of the New World. Everyone there of European descent had an ancestor whose last night in his native place was, in many respects, not unlike that of Gareth O’Donnell.
Dominic Roche and Derry Power from the original Dublin production joined the cast in the West End. Dominic, who played the part of the schoolmaster and was no stranger to the London stage, had a story about the Lyric, where we were now. The theatre faces Shaftesbury Avenue, while Windmill Street passes the stage door. An old actor playing there had a short appearance in Act One and didn’t come on again until late in Act Three. He had all that time (including two intervals) to kill. Sitting in his dressing-room became boring, and to while away the time he walked each night from his dressing-room, down the long corridor, out the stage door, across the street and into the Lyric Tavern, where he sat on a high stool over a drink and did the Evening Standard crossword.
The play had a long run, and with practice he had his return so well timed that, after glancing at his watch, he got off the stool, walked out of the pub, crossed the street, went in the stage door, down the long corridor, into the wings, and without pausing walked on to the stage on cue. The old actor prided himself on his achievement, but one night he was late. Only imperceptibly. It seems when he emerged from the pub a window-cleaner with a long ladder on his bike was going up Windmill Street.
I am in my eleme
nt in big cities. In them you can fade into anonymity, and there’s no Dublin passer-by to say, ‘How’s the man?’ A chap can be as lost with his thoughts in a crowded street as if he were strolling through a woodland glade. There are city parks in which he can sit and run lines to himself, pubs in which to have a pre-lunch drink and art galleries to visit when the spirit needs lifting.
In the long run of a play the actor has the company of his peers at show time. After the curtain, when the goodbyes are said at the stage door, he is on his own until he meets them again the next night. This is when he misses his family, and mine was back in Dublin where the children had started school again.
Living accommodation proved difficult enough to find in London in 1967. Hotels were out of the question on our salaries. I had to be satisfied with a small flat in Cadogan Gardens, a stone’s throw from the King’s Road. I had never lived alone, fending for myself, and for a fairly gregarious type of fellow it proved lonely. When the door of the flat shut behind me on Saturday night, I wouldn’t see a face I knew again until a half-hour before the show on Monday.
Ever heeding my mother’s admonition to ‘keep the faith’, no matter what strange place I was in, I always managed to make Mass on the Sabbath day. On my first Sunday in Cadogan Gardens I had no idea of where there was a Catholic church. From past experience in foreign cities I had learned that the only people afoot early on Sunday morning were Catholics on their way to Mass. That Sunday at 8.45 a.m. I walked to Sloane Square and noticed a sprinkling of people heading in a certain direction. I wondered if they were of my persuasion. Any doubts I had were soon banished on seeing Garret FitzGerald, who was later to be our Taoiseach, striding along. I tagged on behind and, sure enough, we came to a Catholic church in time for nine o’clock Mass.