Singing My Him Song. Malachy McCourt

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ