Chapter 25
AFTERMATH
In 1960, Murray McDonnell, then thirty-seven, had appeared the picture of cheery confidence in his company’s spanking-new offices at 120 Broadway, their walls covered with expensive modern art, which, he said, many of his customers accused him of having had finger-painted by his children. He proudly pointed to the fact that the stocks recommended by his research department had performed 93.4 percent better than the Dow Jones Industrial Averages. Ten years later, he seemed not a broken man but older, quieter, a little sadder, the victim, he feels, of circumstances. Within his family, he is regarded not as a pariah, but with a curious and difficult mixture of bitterness and love; incompetence is a hard shortcoming to forgive. “Explain Murray to me,” one of his sisters asked their mother. “He is my son,” Mrs. McDonnell said simply.
Murray’s brother-in-law, Peter Flanigan, is close to President Nixon in Washington, and may have helped Murray’s situation somewhat. But the punishment—barred for life from ever being a principal in a member firm of the New York Stock Exchange—was harsh enough, and Murray McDonnell has become persona turn grata with the Securities and Exchange Commission. On April 13, 1970, another unlucky day, the SEC filed an action against Murray and his company in the United States District Court of the Southern District of New York, charging that from, on, or about November, 1968, to the then present time, McDonnell & Company and Murray had been, and were still, offering for sale, and selling, shares of the common stock of the company, and the promissory notes of the company, to over eighty McDonnell & Company employees for approximately $2.9 million. No registration statement, as required by the SEC, had been filed. As a result of this, Murray McDonnell was accused of “having directly and indirectly violated, are violating, and are about to violate Sections 5-A and 5-C of Securities Act 15, U.S.C. 77-Ea and 77-Ec.” The complaint alleged that Murray had offered and sold stock and promissory notes of his company “by means of untrue statements of material facts and omissions to state material facts necessary in order to make the statements made.”
The complaint went on to say that Murray had not stated the true condition of the McDonnell back-office operations, nor the true state of its books and records, and that McDonnell & Company had failed to comply with the financial requirements imposed upon the company, and other member firms, under Rule 325 of the New York Stock Exchange. It charged that Murray had concealed the large operating losses of the company, particularly for the period of September through December, 1968. On April 19, 1970, Murray McDonnell consented to the judgment against him: never again to sell stock in his company, and life banishment from any post in a member firm. He was, however, permitted to continue as a registered securities salesman on his own. He has managed to take a numberof his old accounts with him, including those of the Catholic Church, and still manages to earn a large annual income from commissions.
There are, of course, the countless other lawsuits to be faced as a result of the company’s demise, all arising out of the same charge: fraud and deception. Many of these cases may drag on for years, but at least one other judgment has been handed down against Murray, obtained in Illinois by George Mark, who had been one of the officers in Murray’s firm, whom Murray had solicited to buy stock without the proper prospectus being filed with the SEC.
When a firm such as McDonnell & Company goes bankrupt, the Stock Exchange steps in. In order to see that customers of such a company do not lose money, or lose as little as possible, the New York Stock Exchange several years ago established a special trust fund, contributed to by all member firms. The fund is used to pay off customers who have had accounts with firms that have lost money, or have been unable to return their customers’ securities. In the case of McDonnell & Company, the Stock Exchange had to pay off more than $8.5 million.
It is also, ironically, possible that a number of people profited greatly from the demise of McDonnell & Company. Because of the hopeless confusion in the back office, the sloppy record-keeping, and the nonfunctioning computer system, it was not easy to tell which customers had been paid off and which had not. A McDonnell customer might claim, for example, that he owned securities which the company had not sent him when, in fact, they had been sent to him. Such claims were often impossible to check. Or the customer might write for his securities, wait for an interval without receiving them, and then write again. If, in the interim between the two letters, the securities were mailed, new securities in the same amounts might, under the chaotic McDonnell system, be mailed out a second time. The customer might not choose to admit that he had been paid off twice, and there is no way of telling how many people were paid in duplicate or even in triplicate. When the lion dies, the jackals descend.
There are more than twenty million Americans of Irish descent in the United States today—six times the present population of Ireland—out of 47.3 million Roman Catholics, and as opposed to roughly six million Jews. They have succeeded, it might seem, by sheer force of numbers. But one of the great secrets of the success—and the failure—of the Irish in America is based on that mysterious ingredient known as charm. It was his charm that brought Alfred E. Smith very close to the White House, and helped bring John F. Kennedy, the first Irish Catholic President, all the way into it. Charm may also have helped destroy Kennedy, who insisted on riding bareheaded in an open car through the streets of Dallas (it would make a better impression). Charm for years made Grover Whalen the official “greeter” for New York City, and charm and an instinctive ability to please people gave John Ringling North the Greatest Show on Earth. There is charm in the voice of Morton Downey, and it was charm that made everyone want to shake the hand that shook the hand of John L. Sullivan.
Charm has sent the Irish in America sailing into High Society, and made a preoccupation with the upper classes a characteristic even of those who didn’t quite go sailing in—as was the case with both John O’Hara and Scott Fitzgerald, whose fiction nearly always dealt with the ways of the very rich. Charm was at the heart of the appeal of fictional Irish, from Scarlett O’Hara to Kitty Foyle. It has been said that Ireland is a nation of poets, dreamers, and orators, and the Irish have certainly carried on this tradition in this country in the arts, letters, the theater, and politics. They have given us Lotta Crabtree, George M. Cohan, Victor Herbert, Laurette Taylor, Maureen O’Sullivan, Maureen O’Hara, Maureen Stapleton, Frank Fay, Patricia Collinge, James Cagney, Ray Bolger, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Barry Sullivan, Pat O’Brien, Eugene O’Neill, John Drew, and all the Barrymores. They have given us lively entertainers and columnists—Ed and Pegeen Fitzgerald, Jack O’Brien, Pete Hamill, Frank Coniff, Bob Considine, Joseph X. Dever, Jimmy Breslin, and Joe Flaherty of the Village Voice. They have given us a string of Sullivans—Frank Sullivan, Mark Sullivan, Louis Sullivan, and Annie Sullivan, who gave “ears” to Helen Keller. There is even charm in Ed Sullivan’s Celtic gloom. It was a kind of Celtic mysticism that led Bishop James Pike, born a Catholic but an Episcopalian convert, to wander into the desert to his death. It was his charm that led President Franklin D. Roosevelt to appoint Basil O’Connor to head up his March of Dimes. If a Jew, Raoul Fleischmann, published The New Yorker, and a Protestant, Harold Ross, edited it, it was an Irishman, appropriately—John Peter Toohey—who named it.
John Quinn, who was Thomas Fortune Ryan’s lawyer and also one of the twentieth century’s most important collectors of manuscripts and paintings, was Irish himself, but he affected a disdain for the race. Quinn once wrote, “Ireland consists of drunkards, murderers, thieves, humbugs, ex-policemen, Unionists—and honest men.” He went on a draw up a chart of national stereotypes:
The French:
{Cowardly, untrustworthy, and light-minded
The Spanish:
{Lazy cruel, guitar players, and untrustwothy
The Germans:
{Fat, and very untrustworthy
The Americans:
{Unprincipled, rushing, untrustworthy, and very nasty
The Japanese:
/>
Imitative
The Irish:
{All of the above, with the addition of not being funny any more
Mr. Quinn did not add charm to his list of Irish traits.
“Everything about the Irish is attractive,” says Charlotte McDonnell Harris. “They’re beautiful-looking, witty, gay, and very brave.” Mrs. Harris points out that Ireland was the first British colony, and the first to break the backbone of British colonial rule on the eastern side of the Atlantic. When Britain gave independence to Southern Ireland in 1922, after four years of terrorism and guerrilla warfare, Britain started down the long road of imperial withdrawal that would wind through India, Palestine, Kenya, and Cyprus. The Irish charm and willingness to do battle have made them excellent politicians, excellent salesmen. Murray McDonnell was a good salesman, and yet, in a way, his charm and salesmanship contributed to his downfall and disgrace because, if one is a salesman, one must have something sound to sell. Meanwhile, the family points out, Murray has taken his punishment like a man.
With charm, good looks, social poise, and sales ability has been linked another Irish trait—the dark and gloomy side of the Celtic nature. Perhaps this combination of characteristics has contributed to a problem that runs like a recurrent theme through Irish life—alcohol. Like the dashing and heavy-drinking Scott Fitzgerald and John O’Hara themselves, the Irish have provided—particularly in the 1920’s and 1930’s, when drinking was regarded as something of a social accomplishment—a number of dashing and hard-drinking figures who might have stepped right out of the pages of Fitzgerald or O’Hara novels. There was Judge Morgan J. O’Brien’s son, Kenneth, who cut a striking social swathe in New York in the gilded, madcap era of Prohibition. Extraordinarily handsome, he had been a great social leader at Yale, in all the best clubs and honor societies. He is said to have been the prototype of a character in O’Hara’s Butterfield 8, the splendid-looking judge’s son who is sent to Yale for social polish, and then to Fordham Law School to gain local political know-how. Kenneth O’Brien made a brilliant marriage—to clarence Mackay’s daughter, Katherine—and joined his father’s law firm. But he drank too much, and was not too successful as a lawyer. Through his father’s influence, he was appointed a justice of the New York State Supreme Court, though the legal profession and the Bar Association were critical of the appointment. He was a fair judge, but his drinking and high living led to his eventual divorce and early death.
A contemporary of Morgan J. O’Brien’s, with the latter’s same style, assurance, and social suavity (it was O’Brien who opened up Southampton to the Catholics), was James A. O’Gorman. A successful lawyer like O’Brien, O’Gorman was the first Irish Catholic to be elected to the United States Senate. It was in the days when state legislators still elected Senators, and the Democrats had at first backed William Sheehan, who was known as “Blue-Eyed Billy,” and who had the support of Tammany Hall under Charles F. Murphy. But the Tammany Democrats were anathema to the wing of the Democrats of which Franklin D. Roosevelt, then a State Senator, was a leader. O’Gorman was then chosen as a compromise candidate to end the split, and this gave FDR his first state-wide prominence.
James O’Gorman’s son, James A. O’Gorman, Jr., was every bit as handsome and popular as Kenneth O’Brien, but he, too, had a drinking problem. He became a lawyer too, but, perhaps because he was overshadowed by his father, he never matched his father’s achievements.
George MacDonald was another imposing patriarchal figure. Born on a farm in western Pennsylvania, he had gone to Venezuela to seek his fortune, and found it, like Doheny and Buckley, in oil. He came back to New York and made another fortune in utilities. He had the appearance and the bearing of the actor C. Aubrey Smith, who specialized in playing roles of titled nobility in films. He had been made a Papal Marquis, and liked to be called Marquis MacDonald, and the Marquis was a glorious sight in his red Papal Chamberlain uniform at ceremonies in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, or in his white tie and tails flashing with his assorted ribbons, medals, and decorations at the Knights of Malta banquets, where he was a Grand Master. His name decorated the boards of all sorts of corporations, and he loved clubs, belonging to the Metropolitan, the Turf and Field, the New York Yacht, the Piping Rock, the Creek, and the Pilgrims. At one point, he kept five private cigar vaults in five separate New York clubs.
His son, Byrnes MacDonald, was another glamorous young man in the twenties and thirties. At Princeton, he played polo and, because his father thought dormitory life would be too harsh for him, he rented a large private house near the Princeton campus where he lived with a manservant during his undergraduate years. Byrnes MacDonald’s father had brought his son up to be a gentleman of leisure, and so Byrnes never worked at all. He devoted his life to society, travel, his clubs—he belonged to even more than his father—and partying.
Yale—perhaps because it was considered to wield more power on Wall Street than Harvard or Princeton—was usually the favorite college among F.I.F. families who did not send their sons to Catholic universities. An urbane and stylish and party-loving Yale dropout was Maurice B. (“Lefty”) Flynn, whose father had become a wealthy New York insurance broker. At Yale, Lefty Flynn had been enormously popular—a varsity football player, a talented musician, in all the best clubs—and a wild and gilded youth of the glittering Cole Porter days. Halfway through college, he eloped with an actress, went to Hollywood, partied extensively, got a divorce, married another actress, and then became a movie actor, mostly in Westerns, married several more times, and finally settled down with Norah Langhorne, one of the famous Langhorne sisters of Virginia, one of whom became Lady Astor. Lefty and Norah Flynn became one of Hollywood’s most glamorous, popular, party-going couples.
Another famous Yale Irishman was Tom Shevlin, who was an All-American end in the early 1900’s. The son of a Minnesota lumber tycoon, he was every bit as colorful and popular in the raccoon-coated Stutz-Bearcatted era of New Haven as Lefty Flynn, and his father supplied him with unlimited funds for automobiles, clothes, entertainment, and whiskey. After college, however, Tom Shevlin settled down with the family lumber business and worked successfully at it, though he died young. His children became prominent as social figures in New York and Palm Beach, and one of his daughters-in-law received a great deal of publicity when it was reported that she had been the secret “first wife” of John F. Kennedy—an allegation that was denied by the Kennedys, and has never been proven.
Even in proper, WASPish Boston, the Irish charm and good looks have gradually helped the Irish Catholics make social inroads. Until quite recently, Irish names hardly ever appeared on the boards of Boston’s most prestigious banks, corporations, museums, and hospitals, and there were virtually no Irish Catholic members of the elite Vincent and Somerset clubs. If an Irish name appeared on the letterhead of a prominent Boston law firm, it was assumed to be there only for the purpose of dealing with Boston’s Irish politicians. Recently, however, the situation has been changing, though it is still considered “better” in Boston if an Irishman is from somewhere else. If, for instance, he has come to Boston from New York or California, via a correct New England prep school and Yale, he will have a better chance of being accepted socially—and rising in business—than a boy who was born in Dorchester and went to Boston College.
Throughout the story of the Irish in America runs the theme of money—money and, with it, social acceptance. If anything, money has been more a preoccupation with the Irish than it has been with the Jews, who tended, when they made money, to spend it more on philanthropy and cultural endeavors than on high living, great houses, and fast cars. Second only to the Church, and keeping the Faith, has been the importance of making money to American Irish families. J. Patrick Lannan, the multimillionaire industrialist, has recalled how, as a child, his Irish father drummed into him the necessity of making money, getting ahead, making more money. Whenever old man Lannan was approached by one of his children for money, he would wail, “Sure, an’ it’s a beggar
’s ass I’ll be scratching when I’m ninety!”
Scott Fitzgerald himself liked to point out that on one side of his family, the Fitzgeralds, was aristocracy; the other side was peasant. “I have a streak of peasant vulgarity that I like to cultivate,” he said (and in his celebrated drinking bouts he certainly managed to achieve his aim). His mother, Fitzgerald used to say, was “a rich peasant,” Milly McQuillan. She kept telling him, “All this family stuff is a lot of bull. All you have to know is where the money is coming from.” And John O’Hara, through all of whose novels the money theme runs strong, remained embittered that his father, a prosperous doctor, died without leaving enough money for his son to go to Yale. O’Hara had to go out and get a job instead. O’Hara complained so bitterly, and so often, about this deprivation in his life that, many years later when O’Hara was in his forties, a friend commented, “Let’s take up a collection to send John to Yale.”
Chapter 26
“ROBERT THE ROUÉ”
Probably the circumstances that distress the founding fathers of the First Irish Families—if they are indeed watching their voluminous broods from their Catholic heaven—would involve the many instances of divorce, mixed marriage, and subsequent lapses from the Church that have occurred among members of the later generations. Of the fourteen children of James Francis McDonnell, four have been divorced, although only one—Anne Ford—has remarried, and to a divorced man. (Her brother, Gerard McDonnell, divorced his wife, and then remarried her a week later.) Today, even the site of the great Ford wedding is gone—washed out to sea in a great Northeaster storm. In 1956, Jeanne Murray and Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt were divorced after eleven years of marriage and two children, and Vanderbilt married another Jean—Jean Harvey, related to the Chicago Cudahys. Jeanne Vanderbilt, though she has been “romantically linked” in the press with a number of men, from Joseph L. Mankiewicz to Pete Rozelle, has never remarried. Her brother, Jake Murray, has been married three times, divorced twice (his second wife died), and has left the Church.
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