In a hidden glade outside the walled garden, I came upon a nest of lily of the valley. In the banks by the fields, there was a profusion of wild strawberries, violets, buttercups, dandelions, thistles, primroses, bluebells, and daisies. Where the cows had fertilized the pastures, Mary and I would go out with baskets to collect mushrooms. In the fall we picked hazelnuts and blackberries. We strung shiny brown horse chestnuts from a knotted string in a game called Conkers, in which you would try to smash your opponent’s with your own. Being in the fields and woods was part of the day’s routine; there were always places to inspect, to excavate—so many secrets buried at St. Clerans.
• • •
I was sitting on the radiator by my bedroom window at the Little House, looking down at Punchinello in the courtyard. The windowsill was littered with dead and dying wasps. “Nineteen fifty-nine is a very good year,” I said to myself. For no particular reason, it felt like an epiphany.
We were having our first Christmas at the Big House. Friends of Dad’s were coming and they had a daughter, Joan. Her father, Jules Buck, had been Dad’s cameraman during the war on his documentaries Report from the Aleutians and The Battle of San Pietro. Both movies had been commissioned by the War Department as recruitment films, but the message had proved contrary—my father once said, “If I ever make a movie that’s pro-war, take me out and shoot me.” The Buck family had been living in Paris and London, where Jules was now working as a movie producer.
It was early evening and dark outside when I met Joan and her parents in the main hall of the Big House; they had just come in from Shannon Airport. Her mother was called Joyce. She had short hair and wore high heels and she was very pretty and friendly. She urged Joan to share her comic books with me. I had heard that Joan was three years older than I. We were about the same height, and she looked at me suspiciously. She had a pale complexion, dark shoulder-length hair, full lips. She thought I was tiny and mouselike with big front teeth. Joan claimed to her mother that she had a tummy ache. From her shoulder hung a green leather bag with a gold medallion clasp, which fascinated me. Under her arm she carried a stack of Archie and Little Lulu comics. She seemed to have a pretty firm grip on them.
I trailed upstairs as the Bucks were shown to the Grey Room. Beyond a gold Japanese screen, night was falling through the bow windows overlooking the wide horse pastures, between the side roads reaching out to Craughwell and Carabane. Joyce Buck pulled aside the brocade curtain that framed the alcove to the toilet in the bathroom and raised her skirt, as I looked solemnly on. Joan attempted to pull the curtain to shield her mother from my obvious interest. Joyce laughed and said, “We’re all girls here!” She explained to Joan that she would be going down to the Little House to stay with me in my room. This idea did not seem to please Joan one bit. Tony had moved over to the loft above the stables that Dad had occupied before the Big House was ready.
I don’t really remember what it was that forged our friendship, or why Joan, already a sophisticate at eleven, should have tolerated the attentions of a fawning eight-year-old. But Joan and I became best friends that Christmas. I wished I were Catholic so that Jules and Joyce might become my godparents.
Jules Buck was working with Peter O’Toole, who had created a stir in the West End in a play called The Long, the Short, and the Tall. Peter had signed to do a film about Lawrence of Arabia with the great British director David Lean. He and his wife, the glamorous Welsh actress Siân Phillips, had been invited to stay over at St. Clerans on their way to their own home in Connemara for Christmas. Peter had blond hair and crystal-blue eyes. He looked like a god. He spoke theatrically, with an Irish inflection. A few days later, Cherokee Hart arrived. At one time a girlfriend of Dad’s, she had since married the novelist Hans Habe, from whom she was now separated. She brought her daughter, Marina, a beautiful eight-year-old green-eyed blond, who joined Joan and me, sleeping on a foldout cot in my bedroom at the Little House. Cherokee was staying up at the Big House, and Marina cried for her mother the first night. Marina introduced me to her Barbie dolls. I was mesmerized by them. She wore a red nightdress with a bib that read “don’t tease me,” which gave you the idea to do just that. Eric Sevareid, the distinguished broadcaster, and his wife, Belén, arrived to complete the guest list.
I only dimly remember my mother’s presence in the midst of all of these visitors, but I know that it was from this time that Joan formed her deep attachment to Mum. Joan said later, “I just fell in love with her; she was always ready to play.” She told me that when she would see me crawling all over Mum, she was sad not to have that with her own mother. Mum gave her approval, stimulus, ideas, books—opened worlds for her and was the most profound influence in her life. Even before she entered her teens, Joan was an extremely intelligent person with a highly developed critical eye and an even higher level of expectation from her friends.
A few days into her stay, Joan decided that we should perform a theatrical piece for the adults, and, having given it serious thought, had opted for the three witches from Macbeth, act four, scene one. We earnestly set about finding our costumes. Marina chose a blue silk nightshirt of my father’s, and Joan a maroon kimono. I chose one of the car rugs—a heavy, rustic sheep’s-wool blanket. With back-teased hair, I felt the look was most effective. Tony was in charge of the special effects and had been persuaded to click the lights off and on to simulate lightning during the performance.
Clutching our wooden spoons, we took our places in the dark around an African brass cauldron into which an ample jug of tomato juice, doubling as baboon’s blood, was to be poured during the performance. The audience—Bucks, O’Tooles, Sevareids, Hustons, and a smattering of kitchen help—were seated in the marble foyer, facing the inner hall. Suddenly, what had begun as a lark turned deadly serious. As I looked out from the shadows at the illuminated faces in the outer hallway, my heart began to race. Tony turned on the lights; there was a murmur and a brief spatter of applause. Joan started her verse and then turned it over to me. Heat rose in my cheeks alongside pure panic. I felt like someone had slapped me. Overwhelmed, I gasped for air. The line “Toad, that under cold stone” rang out thinly and died off into silence. I stood up and dropped my wooden spoon. “This is silly!” I cried, and fled from the scene, trailing my thick black Connemara blanket, to hide in shame behind the curtains in the study. Tony set up a hunting party to find and flay me for ruining everything. The girls sounded furious. Finally, after a good wait, I emerged to seek my mother, to curl up in her lap and cry hot tears into her polo-neck sweater. Not what you’d call a very auspicious beginning.
I saw Peter O’Toole recently, after all these years. He was in Hollywood, putting his hands and feet in concrete at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre; he was frail but ever beautiful. After the ceremony, I sat beside him at Musso and Frank’s and revived the story of my historic Shakespearean failure. “Don’t you remember?” he said. “You caught my eye . . .” And all at once it came back to me—the flash of electric blue, and then the total loss of memory. I was astounded that he remembered the moment.
Despite the traumatic aftereffects associated with my introduction to Shakespeare, I went on to write two set pieces that Christmas. The first was The Drama of Love, imaginatively based on the supposed affair between Martin Tierney, our valet in training, and Vera, a slender, pretty girl who worked in the kitchen. The pages were heavily illustrated, with Vera’s mouth drawn in the shape of a heart. The other piece was a one-act play involving a pope, a fisherman, and a priest, in which every sentence began with “Bless you, Father” and ended with “Amen.”
Other than the botched attempt at Macbeth, I can recall only a few early theatrical experiences—one, a vague memory of playing an acolyte to the Virgin Mary in a nativity play that the nuns had put on in Loughrea, and the other, going to see a friend of my parents, Sonia French, from the next county, sing “Oklahoma,” which, rather than inspiring me to sing, gave me the idea to create a surrey for Penny, which she of course hated. I hazily recall
attending a pantomime with Nurse in Dublin, and a Chinese woman, all done up in a red-and-gold costume, with tiny little feet that she couldn’t even walk on. She had to be carried around in a litter, and the bells in her hair made a tinkling sound. Other than that, we sometimes went to the circus, which in rural Ireland usually consisted of a couple of acrobats, a clown, and a dancing dog.
Mum was traveling when I appeared in the nativity play, so I described the experience to her in a letter.
St. Clerans
Craughwell
Co. Galway
1960
Dear Mum,
The show was wonderful, there were lot of senes for exampel, the flower girls witch wore lovely bonnets and dresses, the lourdes where they prayed before the Virgen Mary, the girls had white dresses with vails I was in that and I dident stirr from my place but I think you could hear my heart beat for miles away. Then came the Japanese Princess—and the first play, well, you see there are two plays one at half ten in the night and one at half three in the day. And what I mean to say is that, I was very frighten in the three o’clock and you could see my hands shake and I was so frighend that I frogat my mouvements and to keep my head up and look proud and hauty. But in the night show I did not fuss up and shake my hands and I kept my head well up. Mum I never saw such a big croud of people, dad came, glades came, Bets came, Tony came, Nurse came, Mary came, Idelette came etc. I was in the two plays four times and I loved it I and we got a maveluse clap I forgot to tell you Bye Bye Have a good time in Swesser or Austrer
Love, Anjel xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Xxxxxxxxxxxxx
The grown-ups dressed for dinner, the women in cocktail attire or evening gowns, the gentlemen in black tie. On big occasions, Dad would wear white tie and a red tailcoat and black velvet slippers with foxes’ masks, with ruby eyes embroidered in gold thread. Jules Buck took a series of photographs that first Christmas at the Big House: the women in saris, my mother with her long neck and even gaze perched on a cream-colored sofa among the other ladies in the drawing room.
We sometimes loaded up into several cars and drove out the gates of St. Clerans with the guests in tow, for windy sightseeing expeditions to Co. Clare or up to Clifden in Connemara to see the beautiful clear lakes and have picnics and shop for Aran sweaters. When they commented on the beauty of the landscape, Dad became almost proprietary, smiling proudly. “It’s quite something, isn’t it?” he’d say modestly, as if Ireland herself belonged to him—his most beautiful and valuable possession.
After these outings, we loved to go to Paddy Burkes pub. The fastest oyster shucker in the world, Johnny, worked there. He’d won first prize at a contest in the U.S. for several years running. And Paddy himself was a favorite of Dad’s. They made a big fuss when Dad walked in. The oysters came straight out of the bay. You’d squeeze lemon on them, and they’d wriggle. I thought they were slimy, but Tony used to eat close to two dozen at a shot, then order two dozen more. We were allowed a Babycham when we went there. It was sweet and bubbly, with a little blue deer on the bottle, and actually had a bit of alcohol. I would always ask for smoked salmon and brown soda bread, the best bread ever.
On the way home, in the car, there were songs. I remember resting beside my father, with my head on his breast, listening to him sing, “Oh, my pretty dragoon. My flower that faded too soon. My heart’s like the strings on my banjo, all broke from my pretty dragoon.” I loved when he sang that song, because the “oon” was really resonant in his chest. And then “Waltzing Matilda,” although none of us really knew all the verses. And then there’d be “Alouette, gentille alouette.” Roundelay songs, like “Michael Row the Boat Ashore.” And from my brother, “Kevin Barry,” an Irish revolutionary song about a young man who meets his death by hanging.
In a clear voice, Mum sang the Scottish air “Matty Groves,” about a lord who goes away to battle and upon returning to his castle finds that the servant boy is sleeping with his wife:
How do you like my feather bed?
And how do you like my sheets?
And how do you like my fair young bride,
Who lies in your arms asleep?
It’s well I like your feather bed,
And it’s well I like your sheets!
But it’s best I like your
Fair young bride, who lies in my arms asleep!
“Mrs. McGraw” was my forte, another Irish revolutionary song. “Now, Mrs. McGraw, the sergeant said, would you like to make a soldier out of your son Ted?” we’d all caterwaul. There would have been quite a few black velvets, a champagne-and-Guinness combination, consumed at Paddy Burkes, and so the adults would be feeling no pain. We’d be covered up in the back of the car with the woolen blankets we’d laid down for picnics, rough sheep’s wool with the smell of oil still in it. There were not to be many repetitions of these happy moments en famille. Although it was not mentioned to me at the time, Mum had already decided to leave Ireland.
• • •
The summer I turned nine, Mum had arranged a student-exchange program with the assistance of our tutor, Leslie Waddington. A girl my age called Adama Boulanger appeared at St. Clerans. I assume the basic intention on Mum’s part was to help me along with my French. Around the same time, a boy called Pierre Edouard arrived to fill in as a companion for Tony. I remember little about Pierre other than that he frustrated Nurse by peeing in his bed nightly. Adama stayed for a few weeks, tasted freedom for the first time in her life, and returned to her parents and France after a great holiday, happy and content, speaking English a lot better than I spoke French.
Mum was very excited because Adama’s parents, both doctors, owned a windmill, a moulin, in northern France. She found this terribly romantic and arranged for me to stay with them the following summer. She had shown me pictures enthusiastically, but for me the vacation was a torment. Anything you wanted to do, you had to ask first, even if it was to ride a bicycle around their property or take a dip in their pool. Adama had a younger brother, Charles, and a little sister of about five called Angélique.
Each morning we had a tartine for breakfast and were forced to drink a bowl of warm goat’s milk, which I found repulsive. Every afternoon we were sent to our bunk beds for what seemed like an eternity to take a nap. Charles had secreted a vast number of cigar labels on the underside of his mattress, and these proved something of a minor distraction during the enforced periods of rest. I loathed staying with the Boulangers, and when I spoke to Mum on the phone I begged her to visit. Thrillingly, she replied that she would come. I was overjoyed to see her, the only problem being that Angélique never left her lap for the entire first day, which made me terribly jealous. I wanted to sleep with Mum in her bed, but this was not particularly welcomed by her or by the Boulangers.
The next morning, I awoke to howling from the direction of her room. When I ran in, Charles was prostrate on the floor, screaming. Mum’s hand was bleeding. As I understood it in the retelling, it seemed that he had come into her room with the intention of playing and, in his overexcitement, had bitten her. She in turn had bitten him back, which seemed only logical to Mum, but obviously not to his parents. After a few heated words between them, Mum came to Adama’s room and packed my bag.
I said goodbye to Adama, and Mum and I drove off down the coast toward Mont Saint-Michel, where they made omelets like soufflé in long-handled covered copper frying pans on an open fire. At one three-star restaurant along the way, we had lobster in the shell with garlic and butter, and we drank the local cider. I was Mum’s ally and sidekick. It felt great to escape the moulin.
The following summer, when Joan Buck returned to St. Clerans, we swam in the Japanese bath, and Tony tried to pull off her bathing suit. Joan told me that she was going to star in a movie in England called Greyfriars Bobby, which meant that she couldn’t ride horses or climb trees or jump on the trampoline or do anything remotely dangerous. I found this very irritating.
The night before she was to depart for London, I hid her passp
ort in the antique picnic box Dad had brought me back from Japan and denied all knowledge of its disappearance, which convinced her there were ghosts at St. Clerans.
• • •
Platinum blond with pale skin, in her late thirties, Gladys Hill, a refined and fair-minded woman from West Virginia, became Dad’s assistant in 1960, succeeding Lorrie Sherwood. Billy Pearson christened her “the Iron Maiden.” She had been Sam Spiegel’s secretary during the filming of The Stranger in 1945, when Dad was helping Sam and Orson Welles with the script. Gladys left Sam in 1952 to marry an electrical engineer; she lived with him in Guadalajara and they began collecting pre-Columbian art. In the fall of 1959, after she had divorced her husband and was working for an independent producer in Los Angeles, she wrote to Dad about a project. He sent her a cable: “Since you like to travel and since your job is temporary, why not come to Ireland and work for me forever and ever?”
Gladys moved into the studio next door to Dad’s painting loft, above the Lynches’ house. We loved going up to Gladys’s for parties. She would play Trío Los Panchos or Trío Los Paraguayos on the record player and sing along. It was like a little Mexican fiesta in her loft, with multicolored rugs from Guadalajara overlaying the rush matting on the floor and her fabulous collection of pre-Columbian art and objects on the bookshelves lining the walls. Gladys would pull out a drawer by her bedside, lined in ocher velvet, and show me, piece by piece, her cache of Mayan and Aztec gold mythical beasts—birds, lizards, and frogs.
After a few margaritas, Gladys might be persuaded to sing “Down in the Meadow,” which went:
In an iddy biddy pool
Fam free liddle fiddies
An da mommy fiddie too!
I loved when Gladys sang that song. Dad called her “Glades,” because I’d misspelled her name in a letter once, and she was Glades from then on.
She was sweet when she was tipsy and slurring her words. As with all the women surrounding Dad, she loved him like no other, but I doubt that she ever had anything to do with him romantically. She was too canny for that. She was also a considerate moral compass who looked after his life: communicated with his friends, made his dates, traveled with him, returned letters, and wrote scripts with him; negotiated with his business managers, his present and ex-wives, his lovers, his gambling partners, his old friends and new acquaintances; and followed him from home to location, with a lifer’s dedication. I was always grateful that Gladys was present as a buffer when I visited Dad on film sets. She kept a lid on things, and I loved her for her kindness and decency.
A Story Lately Told: Coming of Age in Ireland, London, and New York Page 7
