Singing My Him Song

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Now, for those who don’t know, keening is an ancient Celtic expression of grief or sorrow, usually heard at a time of death. It is expressed by a high-pitched wailing sound with mourners beating breasts and giving vent to the odd shriek in the middle of the wail. While it was not quite the full frontal keen, the mother did a fairly good job moaning about what would happen to the other children, Siobhan and Malachy. If I couldn’t look after them, how was I going to look after the new one?

There is nothing more aggravating than someone giving voice to your own unspoken fears.

We weren’t doing well financially, and we were trying to cope with raising a handicapped child. Plus, I’d made a haimes of my role as father to Siobhan and Malachy, so I had my own doubts. I contributed what I could, but Linda took care of our children largely with money she got from her parents, who had quite a bit of it. Having settled in with Diana, I saw Siobhan and Malachy, now six and five, most weekends, but I was as apt to bring them home and then go out, leaving their care to Diana, as I was to stay and give them any of what they needed from their father. During their earliest years, I had been completely absent a good amount of the time, sometimes just too drunk to show up.

But the mother Angela was never comfortable with the women any of the sons married anyway, and announcements of pregnancies only served to deepen her gloom that liaisons were going to be on the permanent side. Yet when babies shouldered their way into the world, the mother became most maternal and loving, at least until the little ones reached the age of two or thereabouts. At that point, they got a bit of independence and she’d shift her attention onto the next infant.

On the evening of the thirteenth of October 1965, Diana announced that there were certain movements within her body that indicated a desire on the part of someone to take his leave of the womb. So it was off to the New York Hospital with us. We had taken some Lamaze classes with a lady named Elizabeth Bing, the natural childbirth guru, and for the first time, I had the sublime experience of watching the new life make its entry into our orbit. It was a boy, whom we named Conor Turlough. He was a long lithe fellow, and of course the most brilliant baby in the nursery.

Nina, my stepdaughter, wasn’t making much progress, and the experts were now saying she was very retarded. She sat for long periods of time, crinkling cellophane paper from cigarette packs and rocking back and forth. She was for some reason terrified of solid foods, so even when she was six we were still getting her jars of baby food and spooning it into her mouth. It occurred to me that as she had all her teeth and seemed otherwise in good physical health, perhaps some solid grub might be in order.

I apprised Diana of my intention and suggested she absent herself and Conor from the house, as I didn’t think it was going to be quiet or pleasant getting Nina to eat the hamburgers I’d prepared. (Were I doing it today, I’d probably select rice and beans or tofu, as I’m a vegetarian, on health grounds.) I sat Nina on a chair at the kitchen table, tied a large apron round her neck, and spread out some newspapers on the table and on the floor, and so began the battle.

I’d made about eight medium-size burgers, which I broke into bite-size pieces. I popped the first piece into Nina’s mouth, where she allowed it to rest for a brief moment. When she realized what I’d done, her eyes opened up wide with fury and rage at this big person who’d forced foreign matter into her mouth. She let go with a yowl and spat out the offending morsel, which landed on my shirtfront, leaving a stain before descending to the floor. She quieted down, and I tried again, putting another piece of hamburger in her mouth, all the time speaking as softly and as soothingly as I could. Same result: Out came the meaty projectile, which just dropped to the floor. We sat for a while, me doing all the talking, as Nina did not and does not have speech.

Nina made no attempt to get off her chair, nor did she keep her mouth shut tight to prevent me popping in the food. There were times during this hour-long battle that I was sure I was being bamboozled by this child, as she yowled without conviction, and her resistance was confined to spitting out the food. She’d sometimes have a look of disdain and amusement at this hulk of a man trying to feed her. Somewhere I had read that Annie Sullivan, who took on the task of teaching Helen Keller the rudiments of ordinary societal behavior, had had a similar siege and, heartened by that thought, I continued the routine. Pop, spit, talk. Pop, spit, talk. Pop, spit, talk. The kitchen floor and table were littered with hamburger. Splatter after splatter, it appeared soon enough as if it were raining hamburger meat in the kitchen.

I was about to admit defeat and sue for terms of surrender when my doughty and noble opponent decided to have mercy on me. She retained a chunk of burger behind closed lips and smiled her Mona Lisa smile at me, still not swallowing, but after a long, long interval I noticed little movements that indicated something was headed toward the stomach, and that’s how Nina ate solid food for the first time in her six years of life.

But this small step forward with Nina was just that and no more. With the new baby, Diana was overwhelmed, and there wasn’t anywhere we could turn for help. There were no day programs suitable or, indeed, willing to take Nina. When we tried to take her out, she would stage screaming sit-down strikes on the sidewalk. We began to think about permanent residential care.

It is not an easy or simple decision to admit that you cannot raise your own child, but in the end, that is what we did. We found a small home in New Jersey run by a very kindly, bright lady and, soliciting all the financial help we could from family, we arranged for Nina to live there.

It was a bright, sunny day driving out there, but it was hard to appreciate as Diana was teary-eyed and heart-sore at the prospect of parting with Nina. It was hard for me, too, as I’d become very attached to this sweet, trusting child. Nina played quietly in the backseat, not knowing she was heading for a totally new life. When we dropped her off, we saw that a couple of the other kids were similar to Nina in age, condition, and behavior, something we took a bit of comfort from, because we figured Nina would not be an unknown quantity. In a sense we were now free—free to be married, to travel about, to go out, to be parents to Conor—but the price was high. As we drove away, we stopped to look back and saw Nina with her new mentor, standing on a rise outside the house, the sun lighting up her face and turning her blond hair to a light, golden aura. We both wept, because no matter how often we visited her, we knew that child would never live in our home again.

Diana’s sister, Heidi, had married her high school love, Warren Washburn, a Marine, and they had become parents to Kelly, a brilliant little girl. Being married and a parent was no barrier to service in Vietnam, though. Warren, a charming, gregarious, devil-may-care sort of lad, assured Heidi and his family that there was nothing to worry about, a statement which can be depended upon to cause a lot of worry.

I don’t know why I felt so strongly about that war, particularly as I didn’t have to go there and slog it out myself, but I did. The French had treated the people abominably, with the usual colonial torture and murder, and then pulled out, leaving the U.S. to carry on the savagery. Of course, being steeped in Irish history and the brutal centuries-long occupation of Ireland had an influence on me. Colonial powers were always brutal, I knew, from what I’d seen and heard growing up, and what the French, and later the U.S., did to the Vietnamese seemed to me little different from what the English had done in Ireland. Indeed, I could never understand Irish people who supported that barbarous and diabolical attempt to bomb poor people into accepting an alien culture.

Whenever Richard Harris hove into town, I got the inevitable visit at the saloon, and, of course, we went on the inevitable bender. Nearly always there was a brawl. Harris always drew attention wherever he went, and it was astounding to me how many “tough guys” felt the need to challenge the man to a fight. He usually charmed them out of it, but there were some who wouldn’t be charmed.

visit at the saloon, and, of course, we went on the inevitable bender. Nearly always there was a brawl. Harris always drew attention wherever he went, and it was astounding to me how many “tough guys” felt the need to challenge the man to a fight. He usually charmed them out of it, but there were some who wouldn’t be charmed.

One night we were carousing in some club, and perhaps we were too loud, and perhaps our language may not have been of a pristine quality, but it was directed at no other humans but ourselves. So, when a blocky sort of fellow stepped up to our table and ordered us to “shut da fuck up,” it was an astonishing interruption to our fun. I believe we both said, “What?”

“You hoid me,” sez the blocky fellow. “My lady don’t like dat kinda talk so shut da fuck up.”

I ventured the opinion that if she was a lady she wouldn’t be listening, and he glared down at us from across the table. “Fuck you, buddy,” sez he to me.

Without so much as an “After you, Claude,” Harris and myself dived for this belligerent lad, overturning the table. We got ourselves tangled in the tablecloth, swinging, punching, and swearing, only to discover, upon becoming untangled, that our provocateur had departed the premi with his lady, escorted by the owner and barman. Celebrity had once more won out over civility and good manners.

Some years before, when I was visiting Harris in Hollywood, I had gotten arrested for trespassing when I went for a midnight swim in his pool. He’d left me sitting in jail overnight, which he thought was very funny. I had not been quite so amused, and even though years had passed, I thought about revenge from time to time.

One day, during that same sojourn in New York, Mr. Richard Harris rang me and invited me to lunch at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel. When I arrived, I noticed outside a small throng of people carrying notepads and cameras. They were a minor mob of autograph seekers who’d heard Harris was in residence.

I proceeded to the Harris suite and was greeted warmly by the man himself. He got room service to bring up the lunch, and we were chatting leisurely, when the star suddenly bounded to his feet and bellowed that he had just remembered an appointment and must get in the shower, and would I answer the phone if it rang?

Moments later, Harris already showering, the phone rang and the concierge asked to speak to Mr. Harris.

“Speaking,” I said.

“The fans here want to know if they could send a delegation of three up to your room to get signatures and pictures for all of them.”

“Three?” I asked.

“Yes sir,” sez he.

“Send them all up.”

“But there’s more than twenty of them,” he protested.

“That’s okay,” sez I.

“It’s your funeral, Mr. Harris,” sez he.

In the bathroom, the star-turned-singer had launched into the song “How to Handle a Woman,” from Camelot. When the bell rang and I opened the door, Harris warbling in the background, I was faced with about an acre of wide eyes and acne. I invited them all in and told them to make themselves comfortable and to help themselves to anything at the bar. I asked them to tell Mr. Harris that Mr. McCourt was called away on some urgent business and then I left.

When Harris regained his sense of humor and resumed speaking to me, he told me that he’d walked out of the bathroom bollox naked to discover that a considerable number of the citizens of New York were comfortably ensconced in his hotel room. He was not too amused by my prank, but I explained to him ’twas a small price to pay for having left me in jail overnight in California.

’Twas about then that I was temporarily rescued from the suffocating torpor of the saloon. One day, a very well-dressed man approached me at Himself and said he would like to talk to me about hosting a television show. There was a need, he said, for a natural kind of chat show with some humor and bite to it. I admit to having peered about to make sure he was talking to me, and indeed he was. I said I’d be delighted to do it and hands were shook and commitments made.

As it turned out, the first show had to be taped in California, because by the time I was scheduled to go on the air, I had fortuitously become involved in a movie as well. Richard Harris had introduced me to Marty Ritt and Walter Bernstein, a couple of stalwart survivors of the blacklist in the McCarthy years, who were now making a movie called The Molly Maguires.

The Molly Maguires were a group of Irish coal miners in Pennsylvania in the 1860s. They suffered the usual economic terrorism at the hands of the mine owners, and when they attempted to organize, they were brutalized and fired. ’Twas said they had resorted to the bit of sabotage, and knocking off an occasional payroll, and for this some of them were arrested and hanged.

Sean Connery played the leader of the Molly Maguires (the name, by the way, lifted from a secret society in Ireland who were said to dress as women so as to escape detection when they made their forays against the Brit landlords), a man by the name of Black Jack Kehoe. Richard Harris played James McPartlan, an Irishman and an informer, who was paid to infiltrate the group and report on their doings.

Paramount Pictures took over a little village called Eckley in Pennsylvania, where little was required to take it back to looking as it looked in 1860 except to bury some telephone wires and spread some coal dust on the dirt road. On either side of this rough little road were still standing old company houses, little cabins, each with a garden patch complete with the outside lavatory in back. They had small porches out front, and on good days ’twas not unusual to see a retired miner sitting there coughing what was left of his life away, now that the coal dust had done the dirty work of destroying his lungs.

Pneumoconiosis is the doctors’ name for this incurable disease, otherwise known as black lung, or silicosis. I was fascinated by these men, who spoke proudly of being miners, never regretting working in the nether regions, but dying all the while. They couldn’t get comfortable, these old men, either sitting up or lying down, and their breathing was so tortured it caused palpitations in my own chest from my empathetic efforts to help their respiration.

Just as surely as those miners’ lungs had been destroyed by their years in the mines, parts of that beautiful country had been destroyed by strip mining. Thousands of tons of coal dust had been spread over thousands of acres of lovely green land, giving stretches of it an appearance not that different from the surface of the moon. Though it was an abomination to the environment, it gave Marty Ritt a wonderful opportunity to shoot an oddly colorful but dead and deadly landscape.

So, to this forgotten town came a film company with lights, generators, rain-making equipment, cameras, trailers, a hundred or so crew members, and the actors Connery, Harris, Brendan Dillon, the beautiful Samantha Eggar, Bethel Leslie, Frances Heflin, the terrifically talented Anthony Zerbe, the huge Art Lund, and a grand actor named Frank Finlay who came over from Britain to play the part of the evil police chief. I had been cast as—what a surprise!—the local saloon keeper, in whose premises the Molly Maguires plotted their dastardly doings. My part had me attending wakes and going to mass to hear the priest condemn secret societies like the Mollies because, as usual, the Church was in cahoots with the capitalistic savages who were murdering the miners.

I also had to referee a strange football-like game invented for this film, a combination of soccer, rugby, basketball, boxing, wrestling, and mayhem. We played that scene on a blistering hot July day, on a field bereft of grass and rock hard. We were all dressed in the heavy woolens of the period, resulting in people falling down from heat stroke and exhaustion. To end the game, I was instructed by the director to run to a certain spot, look down the field, look at my pocket watch, blow my whistle, and wave my arms. I was so confused with heat and dust that, when I got to the designated spot, I took out the whistle, looked at it, and then attempted to blow the watch, which caused a huge hoot of laughter amongst the hundreds of spectators and players.

It was a most convivial company, with most of the shooting taking place during the day, and dining out and storytelling in the evenings. Marty Ritt had his story of being blacklisted and anecdotes brought back from Hollywood. Walter Bernstein had been in the army during the Second World War, on the staff of The Stars and Stripes, and had slogged his way through German-occupied Yugoslavia to get an interview with one Josip Broz, a.k.a. Marshal Tito. Of course, he had his own blacklist stories, and let us know that his screenplay for The Molly Maguires was a metaphor for informers like Elia Kazan and others who had squealed to the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Sean Connery was quite the reserved type until he decided you were safe enough to talk to, but turned out to be one of the best storytellers of all, especially about his early days in choruses of South Pacific and other musicals. He had a good self-deprecating sense of humor. He was married then to a rather fiery actress named Diane Cilento, and they had a small son named Jason; they arrived to join Sean sometime after the film began.

Although provided with a driver, Connery always chose to drive himself. One morning, he arrived on the set with the windshield of his car smashed to smithereens, and he went on and on about how a body can’t even park a car in a rural area these days without some goddamn vandal doing it damage, and if he caught whoever it was they were going to have their asses kicked good and proper.

We all made the usual murmuring sounds of sympathy and went about our business. Came lunchtime and we were joined by little Jason Connery, who, when we were all gathered around the table, piped up in his English accent, “Daddy, Mummy was so very angry to break the window in your car. Why did she do that?”

Sean whisked the lad away so fast we never heard the rest of the story.

It was altogether a pleasant summer, as Diana and Conor were able to come and live with me in a rented house. Some members of the company had set up a daycare center, so our lively three-year-old boy was kept occupied.

When you are on location with a movie company, there is a womblike quality to life itself. The film becomes the whole of your existence, and when you have a reasonable part you are well taken care of. They drive you back and forth, they feed you, they clothe you, all medical needs are met, with the result that you shut out the world and all its turbulences and troubles because you are too occupied with wondering if your closeup shots are going to be in the final cut.

That year was a strange one, with tragedy—personal, national, and international—hitting everywhere. My sister-in-law’s husband, Warren, had returned from Vietnam safely and had gone to work at NBC. On the surface he was still the same ebullient and cheerful lad who went on that foreign venture, but a series of car crashes while drinking belied that. A researcher at NYU later came up with the statistic that veterans of the assault on Vietnam had proportionately more car accidents than any other group, and Warren had several. The last one occurred when riding with his brother Jimmy, who survived, but Warren suffered injuries that led to swelling of the brain, irreversible coma, and, after a few weeks, a merciful death.

For a while, though, I was seduced by the comforts of the movie actor’s life and abandoned all protest and demonstrations.

When our location shooting wrapped at the Pennsylvania site, the company and all our families were airlifted to Los Angeles. We checked into the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, but that proved to be disastrously expensive, as we’d no kitchen facilities, and the per diem could not quite cover the expense of room service. Diana, we had discovered, was very much pregnant again, and all this gadding about far away from home was a bit too much for her, and getting settled was essential. As small as my part was, I still had a couple of months of shooting to do.

Despite my being in many scenes, I had only one line to speak in this entire epic, and a memorable line it was. When the informer James McPartlan appears in the village, he is understandably viewed with suspicion. The cover story he presents is that he is on the run from the police, for “pushing the queer” in Buffalo. No sir, that is not an assault on a homosexual in upstate New York; it was the jargon of the time for passing counterfeit money. When this sham criminal queried me on getting lodgings, I responded with, “There’s a train leaving in twenty minutes.”

There’s another scene wherein the police raid my saloon and a magnificent brawl breaks out ’twixt the miners and the constabulary. At one point, the chief of police whacks McPartlan on the head to make it clear they considered him part of the mining riffraff and throw off any suspicion that he was their spy.

Harris and Connery, who was also in this scene, went to Marty Ritt and asked him to postpone shooting the fight; they were doing all their own stunts, they explained, and might get hurt, and it would be better to do it last, just in case. Marty said that was good thinking, and added, “By the way, I like Malachy. Let’s keep him, too.”

I stayed on the production until the end, and that’s how I came to be one of the highest paid one-line actors in movie history. As Connery pointed out, “If I were getting paid as much as you for each line, I’d never have to work again.”

So it was that Diana and I were looking at a splendid house in Los Angeles that had once been owned by Will Rogers. The real estate agent told us it had last been rented to one of the Beach Boys. He’d let in a bunch of squatters and then abandoned the place, and it was now up for rent again. It sounded great, as it was furnished and the price was reasonable, and the only problem would be kicking out the squatters and getting some bed linens and a few other assorted items along those lines.

When we arrived for our inspection, we had a bit of difficulty getting in. Inside the house, a dozen or so young people were lounging about, with a good strong smell of pot permeating the whole place. They were not a friendly group; indeed, they were quite hostile in demeanor, which made me a bit uneasy, and made Diana downright fearful. Then we went out back to look at the swimming pool (in the shape of the state of California), which the real estate agent had warned us might need a little work. A little work, indeed. The bloody thing looked as if it had not been cared for in years, and it was half full of scummy water. However, that was not the focus of our attention.

Seated at the edge of the pool, his feet dangling, was a thin, smallish, bearded young man, dressed in a black shirt and jeans. We said an awkward hello, but there was no response from him other than a savage, hate-filled glare. Diana began making frantic signs to me, indicating that she wanted to get the hell out of there. I told her to relax, there was nothing to be concerned about, that I would take care of everything.

When we left, I told the agent we’d take the place.

Diana took me aside and said, “If you do, you will live in that house all by yourself, because I wouldn’t live there if it were rent free.” We continued to argue about it, and I eventually told the agent that I’d changed my mind.

Diana had told me that she had never in her life felt such malevolence before, and that she felt the people in that house were a threat to the baby she was carrying. I, being full of bravado, was going to boot them all out and take over the manse, but was glad I hadn’t tried. The assorted gang in possession of the house were the followers of Charles Manson, the young man with hate-filled eyes seated by the pool.

We eventually found a reasonable house in Brentwood, complete with garden, and I settled in for the remaining two months of the shoot. I began commuting to New York once a week to tape my new television show, Sound Off with Malachy McCourt, but the first show was taped in California, with Sean Connery and Richard Harris as guests. We shared a bottle or two of the whiskey beforehand so the wheels of talk wouldn’t squeak, and though I was a bit nervous with first-show jitters, it all went smoothly, more of a conversation than an interview. Harris and Connery didn’t let me down at all, as they were most supportive and quite entertaining.

I did my best to entertain, as well. At one point, I asked Sean Connery what I termed a “pedestrian question,” to wit, “How did you get started in showbiz?” Sean said he was playing amateur soccer and doing amateur theatricals, when he got an offer to act for money and an offer to play soccer for money. “I had to make a choice between becoming a professional soccer player and becoming a professional actor,” he told me.

Seeing my opportunity, I asked, “And what did you decide, Sean?” Connery began to answer, and then realized he had been sandbagged, recovering his equilibrium quickly enough to join in the laughter at his own expense.

My single spoken line in The Molly Maguires was scheduled for the second-to-last day of shooting, and a grand day it was. Harris, as McPartlan, entered the soundstage re-creation of the Pennsylvania saloon and asked about getting accommodations, and I delivered my line:

“There is a train leaving in twenty minutes.”

“Print it,” Marty yelled. “Now, reverse shot, with camera on Harris.”

“Print that one, too,” sez Marty, after we’d done it again.

He chose to use the second take in the end, and my face was not seen as I spoke my single line, and thus a great closeup was lost to cinematic history.

The film was released to a good gush of publicity, but it wasn’t successful. It’s possible that hanging the hero, whilst the informer walked away smirking, didn’t appeal to the average moviegoer. Nonetheless, the film has acquired a bit of, as they say, cult status, so it can be seen on television regularly.

It had been a marvelous five months, and I was delighted to have been part of such a congenial company and a bit downhearted at the ending of it all. However, I still had the television show and I was reveling in my new role as host. We shot in front of a live audience, and I felt as much like a host with guests in my living room as I did a talk-show host. I liked to walk down into the audience to talk to them during the show, and I think I was the first talk-show host to use a shotgun mike Phil Donahue–style, extending it to someone in the audience so he could speak his piece on the air.

One of my guests was Betty Friedan, the author of The Feminine Mystique and one of the early leaders of the women’s liberation movement. At the time I wasn’t too enlightened on feminist issues; if I look back on it now, it’s hard for me to believe I held such Neanderthal views. There I was, wildly lib eral on the war, on labor unions, on every social and political issue you could name, but I held the traditional patronizing, conservative attitudes on anything having to do with women’s issues. The other guest that night was the actress Pamela Mason, an acerbic Brit married to James Mason, who was anti–women’s liberation in all its forms. I retain the distinct impression that Friedan showed me the error of my ways and managed to put Pamela Mason in her place, too.