by Des Bishop
Within two weeks of my dad’s diagnosis it was my thirty-fourth birthday and I spent my birthday in the hospital room, looking after my dad. So many of my friends have kids now, and I don’t, so this was the first time I was responsible for looking after someone in this way. There was a tenderness in being this close to my father; there was no awkwardness between us, and there was no awkwardness within the family. We showered my father with love, and it was the most remarkable atmosphere.
I felt so necessary, filling up his wash bowl and rubbing him down with the cloth. There was something about washing under his armpits that made me feel so good: I guess because I thought it was making him feel clean. It was almost as if I was trying to wash away the horror of the first few days and make him feel like he was back in the game. I would give him gentle massages and put a hot cloth on his skin. I was trying to copy some of the tricks I had picked up from too many days killing time in hotel spas while I was on tour. It might be one of the only positive legacies of the Celtic Tiger. I was trying to pamper him as much as I could.
I will never forget the sound of my father’s unkempt stubble. I felt I could hear each individual hair as it was released from the backs of my fingers as I stroked his face. I can still smell the moisturizer we used to rub on his legs to stop the skin from cracking. The best of all, though, was the way he used to feel so much better after it and was very vocal in his praise and gratitude. Despite the fact that I was now parenting my parent, I still had the delight of a son who is impressing his dad. It was lovely.
I learned many things about my dad’s taste in music during his stay in the hospital. To pass the time I used to show my dad videos on my iPhone of stuff he was into when he was younger. For my dad, the fact that he could watch videos from a device in my hand blew his mind. He really got into it. He was a huge Moody Blues fan, a fact which I had never known before. He sang along to ‘Nights in White Satin’ in his hospital bed. We watched John Lennon and ‘The Peanut Vendor’ by Stan Kenton, which I had never heard of, but my dad remembered going to see him in London. We also listened to ‘Morning Has Broken’: Dad told me that he had thought of this song on his first morning in his new hospital room. From the window, there was a distant view of the Manhattan skyline. Dad had been up all night, and as he watched the morning come to life he sang that song to himself. I know that at that time he was already thinking about death. (When my dad died, my brother told me that he knew he was going to die in the morning because of the way he talked about singing ‘Morning Has Broken’ a year and a half before.)
Singing was a big thing for my dad. He loved to sing. Whenever he talked about his mother he would say the same thing: ‘She loved to sing.’ When I think of it, that is all he ever said about her when we were young. Even my cousins in Midleton would say that about her: ‘She had a great singing voice.’ When my father told me he went to see her before she died, he said that they just sat down and sang the old songs from Cork.
5
When we were young it was hard to pin down exactly who my dad was. He was born in 1936 of an English father and an Irish mother – so, I often joke, he was born to hate himself. His Irish identity was a huge part of him, even though he sounded and acted more like an English gent. His mother, Hannah Ryan, was from Midleton, County Cork, and she had moved to England with her sister Peggy. My paternal grandfather, Stanley Bishop, was from Sussex.
We were so into being Irish. I mean, look at us: it was not even St Patrick’s Day, we were just going to Mass!
Growing up, I thought I was the son, grandson and great-grandson of men who fought in the British Army. This is despite that fact we were brought up to believe that we were Irish first and foremost. My mother was strongly Irish-American. O’Hare was her maiden name. Her father was from County Down, and she was quite republican too. She worked for O’Dwyer & Bernstein, a law firm that often represented republican prisoners on the run from Britain. As kids we marched for County Down in the St Patrick’s Day Parade, and we got goosebumps when we would see the ‘Get the Brits Out of Ireland’ banners hanging from office blocks all along 5th Avenue.
My dad liked to write Irish songs and, sometime in the 1980s, he was even awarded the No. 1 song of the year on Fordham Radio, the Irish station in New York, with a song about children in Northern Ireland called ‘Run Children, Run’. I am not sure if it made any money, but all the profits went to Project Children Northern Ireland.
Then again, in his job in Burberrys, he was incredibly British. He would talk about soccer with some of the other English guys and he would be like a different person. He would always tell the same story that the Arsenal footballer Bob McNab said to him, ‘that in his day Georgie Best was unplayable’. I must have heard that story a thousand times. He would become almost cockney when he was on a roll with these guys. At work, it was better to be English. We could always tell who he was talking to on the phone at home because he used a different accent, depending on where the person was from. My dad was always who he thought you wanted him to be.
It was also hard to know much about my dad’s past because his mother lived in England, in a nursing home, and his sister Joan did too until she moved to Australia to follow her children when they emigrated there. All my relatives were on my mother’s side and we were all very close. My mother’s mother had seventeen grandchildren, and when we were young we saw each other every holiday. All my cousins loved my dad and they never really saw him as their uncle through marriage, so it was easy to just feel like this was our entire family. I had no connection to my dad’s family and his past, so the scant information I had seemed to be enough.
When he was eighteen my father joined the British Army. I don’t know much about the details, but I know he was in the Army Physical Training Corps. I did not know much about that either; but a few years ago I met Northern Irish comedian Roy Walker, whom I recognized from Catchphrase, and he said he had also been in the Army Physical Training Corps and he seemed very proud to have been a part of that. I know that my dad served in Malaysia, and I believe there were a few decent fights in that one. He was not much for talking about his time in the army, as I think he was paranoid about what his Irish friends might think about it. It was an important period of his life, however, in which he received the only real education he ever had. Boxing and gymnastics were a big part of his life in the army and he also played football for the Sussex Regiment.
When he finished with the army, fitness continued to be central to his life, and he even tried to make a living doing gymnastic exhibitions. I know he also had a window-cleaning business, and I think for a time he was happily living in Bexhill-on-Sea in East Sussex, his home town. Then one day while training on a trampoline he landed the wrong way and was propelled into the air at an angle. He landed flat on his back on the bar of the trampoline and broke his back. I heard him tell the story many times. Sometimes he said he had been drinking; I can’t say for certain. He ended up having three spinal fusions and was in the hospital for the best part of a year. It was the end of his career as a gymnast.
My father is the one at the front of the picture. My dad was more than just handsome, he was seriously fit.
Dad always said that at some stage during his recovery a friend of his who had moved to London suggested he should move to London too and become a model. It was easy to see why he would have suggested this, as my dad was definitely model material. When he was well enough he moved up there and eventually ended up with the model agency, Scotty’s. Their client list in the late 1960s was pretty impressive and included George Lazenby. The industry was really just getting off the ground then, so it was an exciting time to be part of it.
I always think this picture says it all. He was an incredibly good-looking man in his day. Don’t get me wrong, I am happy with my own looks, but I can’t help looking at this picture sometimes and thinking, ‘You kept a couple of genes in your pocket there, you greedy bastard!’
He
was a very successful model, and various relations over the years have told me stories about how they would be waiting in the Underground in the 1960s and all of a sudden they would realize that their cousin was staring at them from every poster. I think he really wanted to be an actor, though, and I would imagine he must have thought he had a chance, seeing how successful he was as a model. He had bit parts in The Day of the Triffids and Zulu and was in a film called Last of the Long-haired Boys that I don’t think was ever released. He did some adverts too, but I only know of ones that came after he had met my mother.
Then came the story that we would be told over and over again. It turns out that Scotty’s provided a lot of the men who auditioned for the part of James Bond in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. I think it must have been a tough job finding a replacement for Sean Connery; Roger Moore could not do it as he was committed to The Saint, and Timothy Dalton had decided he was too young. The casting director had decided he wanted to cast a model. Mike Bishop was one of those who read for the part. The only fact I know for certain is that Scotty’s was definitely a part of the casting story. According to research I’ve done, my dad was not one of the main contenders – but that is not the way he told the story when we were kids. In fairness to him, it was really my cousin Ira (the husband of my mother’s first cousin Maureen) who let the story grow. He sold televisions for a living in Greenwich Village and was obsessed with film. He loved the story and would bring it up every Christmas, Thanksgiving and Easter. He always said that Lazenby beat him to it, so in my mind my dad and Lazenby had been sitting outside an office, waiting to be told the news; it was that close.
Perhaps there are some Bond fans who are thinking that my dad was lucky, as it is commonly held that George Lazenby was the worst James Bond. My dad never saw it as lucky: if George Lazenby was the worst James Bond, then he was worse than the worst James Bond.
Bond fans need to be told now that there are no James Bond jokes or stories in this book. I have never actually watched an entire James Bond film because we were not allowed to watch James Bond in our house. My dad hated James Bond and would always make us change the channel if a Bond movie came on. I don’t think he wanted to be reminded of what might have been in the late 1960s.
The other reason why the legend of his near-miss grew was because my dad was in a production of John B. Keane’s Sive in London when the hunt for the new Bond was on. He sometimes said that the Bond people had seen him in the play and that is how he got the audition.
Any man who can pull off wearing boots like that could definitely have been considered for James Bond.
My cousins in Midleton always said they had seen a newspaper article about him being up for the Bond role and that a woman had the article in a pub somewhere in town, though I’ve never seen it. Either way, the Midleton cousins held on to that story. To them, their nephew and cousin was nearly James Bond. They must have told everybody because, a few years later when my dad visited Midleton, the local paper ran a story, which I have seen, headlined ‘BBC Star Visits Midleton’, accompanied by a picture of my dad.
I was always very critical of the embellished stories my dad told, but really he was just playing to the crowd. The family wanted the stories just as much as he did.
It seemed as if everything was going great for my dad in London as the 1960s were coming to a close. He was part of the fashionable and arty ’60s London scene of actors, models, artists and hangers-on. With his girlfriend Valerie he set up a beauty salon in Chelsea and the opening was quite a society event. In today’s world he would have been turning up in the social columns and the pages of OK! and Hello! magazine. He and Valerie hung out with a heavy-drinking crowd. His close friends were actors Dudley Sutton, Donal McCann and Dermot Harris, the brother of Richard Harris. Years later Dermot died from alcoholism. (Dad was also friends with Dermot’s wife Cassandra who, coincidentally, would end up playing Countess Lisl von Schlaf in For Your Eyes Only and who married Pierce Brosnan, who later became James Bond.)
Back when I was a teenager I always doubted my father’s name-dropping of people he knew from his drinking days in London. The best stories he told in later years were the tales of his drinking escapades with the painter Francis Bacon. I did not believe them at first. My dad could do an impression of him, which meant nothing to me when I was young, but when I watched a documentary about Bacon in recent years it turned out his mimicry was spot on.
I first got an inkling that maybe my dad wasn’t all talk on my eighteenth birthday in November 1993. I was in Blackrock College repeating my Leaving Cert. and the dean, Fr Reilly, came to tell me that I had special permission to listen to Late Date on RTÉ Radio One, as there would be a request played for me by the DJ, Val Joyce. The request was from Donal McCann, who wanted to wish the oldest son of his good friend Mike Bishop a happy eighteenth. (Val Joyce played a Tom Petty track as he said it was the only thing he had that would suit a boy of my age.) It just so happened that Donal McCann was on the cover of the edition of Juno and the Paycock I was studying for the Leaving Cert. The penny only dropped two weeks later when I saw his name credited as the man in the picture: my dad’s buddy was on the cover of my textbook, so he must be famous.
My dad’s career had a lot of momentum in London, so I am not sure why he decided to leave it all and go to New York in 1969. It seemed a glamorous life but somehow he had become disillusioned with it, and when Gerry Ford of the Ford Modelling Agency came to take some of London’s models back to New York, my father jumped at the chance. Like many people in the entertainment world from Britain the lure of cracking America was too strong. My dad would later regret that decision because all the work he had done in London to build his reputation was wasted. He never really had any acting success in New York, and they would quickly forget him in London.
Though we were not children of the entertainment industry, I guess if there was one unique thing about being the children of a man who once modelled for the Ford Modelling Agency it was that …
… we modelled for the Ford Modelling Agency. From the age of eight to twelve I used to work as a child model, as did my brothers. There is not much to say about it, but I always like this photo because it was actually about us. We were not just some generic kids in a catalogue. This was a feature in Children’s Business about ‘Brothers in the Modelling Game’. They even asked us a few questions. It says underneath, ‘While the two younger Bishop brothers, Aidan, seven, and Michael, nine, wish for a little baby Bishop to play with, older brother Desmond, twelve, would rather have a sister closer to his age so she could bring her girlfriends around.’
Desperate to be funny already at twelve.
6
Most of our summers were spent out at the Mineola Pool Club in Long Island. In Nassau County many of the towns had a pool club for local residents. Some of the towns near Queens also allowed non-residents to join for an increased fee. This meant that many families from our area drove out on the Long Island Expressway on hot summer days to spend the day there. We had chosen Mineola because some people my mother grew up with, the Lennons, also went out there.
Nanny used to come out with us to the pool club most days, which was kind of a nightmare because both my parents smoked, as did Nanny. So we would all pile into the 1980 Ford Fairmont with red, fake-leather seats. The car would be about 120° when you got in and the seats would burn your bare skin; the shorts of the mid-1980s were still very short. Nan never inhaled her smoke so we would get all her smoke as well as my parents’, who were up in the front. My dad was only there on Fridays and Sundays because he worked on the other days, so it was not so bad on those other days. When my dad was with us, my nan would be in the back with us, so it was quite a tight fit and we three boys had many fights back there on those sweaty vinyl seats. Sitting there, in the smoke and the heat and the traffic, with my brothers’ sweaty skin sliding off mine, it was easy to get frustrated.We would only stop fighting when my mother would attempt
to hit us while keeping her eyes on the road, doing 60 m.p.h. on the L.I.E. She had a great blind reverse backhand, as did all mothers back in the early ’80s.
My grandmother was obsessed with the NY Mets baseball team and she carried a transistor radio with her everywhere so she could listen to games. As the 1980s progressed the Mets got very good and it became very important for us to be quiet a lot of the time, particularly when the Mets’ star player, Daryl Strawberry, was up at the plate. We used to have a spot outside the pool club in the park where we would spend part of the day. We would have barbecues out there on the weekend evenings. My nan hammered a nail into one of the trees in the shade so she could hang her radio on it. That nail stayed there for years and she always had her place to hang the radio. I assume the nail has rusted away by now.
Happy times. The Mets won the World Series in 1986.
I’m the one hiding under the towel, so I must have been in a mood as I was normally not camera-shy. My nan and Mrs Lennon are on the left and Tommy Kennedy is behind my mother on the right.
My nan’s friend from Monaghan, Mrs Lennon, also went out to the pool club with her family. Her kids had all grown up with my mom and her siblings on 160th Street in Flushing. Mrs Lennon’s grandson, Tommy Kennedy, was a hero to me as he was a good bit older than me and he took me under his wing. I guess he was the alpha male we had not really known in our house; most of the time our dad was quiet and refined. Tommy was larger than life and full of bravado.
