Singing My Him Song. Malachy McCourt

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      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.

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