Irish America magazine - Oct/Nov '05 issue: Mo Mowlam, Eileen Collins, Changes in Irish America, 20 Great Interviews, 20 Moments In History, 20 Best Movies About Irish-Americans, Beer, Patrick Fitzgerald, Billy Bob Thornton

Justice William Brennan, Jr. | Maureen Dowd | Colin Farrell | Chuck Feeney | Michael Flatley |Seamus Heaney | Mary Higgins Clark | John Huston | Gene Kelly | Donald Keough | Frank McCourt | Alice McDermott | George Mitchell | Bill Murray | Edna O’Brien | John Cardinal O’Connor | Maureen O’Hara | Gregory Peck | Martin Sheen | Jack Welch

Justice William Brennan, Jr.

By Sean O’Murchu

As a Supreme Court Justice for 33 years, William Brennan was considered – ruefully, by his many conservative detractors – to be one of the most influential shapers of public policy in the country over the last three decades of the 20th century. He was appointed to the court by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1956.

During this 1990 interview at his office Brennan began by discussing his youth in Newark, New Jersey and his parents, William Joseph and Agnes (nee McDermott) Brennan, both born in County Roscommon.

How did your parents meet?

My mother came to the States to live with an aunt, a Mrs. Butler, who had a boardinghouse in Newark. My father had been working on building the canal at Trenton, and didn't like it very much. He had a chance to get a job in Newark at Ballantine's brewery. He needed a place to live and somebody told him about a Roscommon lady who had a boarding house. That’s how my mother met him. She was about 17 or 18 at the time.

How did your father’s rise in the labor union come about?

He started shoveling coal at Ballantine’s. The conditions were bad so he started organizing within Ballantine’s and then other breweries in the city. There were no trade laws to help you in those days. You just had to fight your way through. He did it so well that he moved up the organized labor hierarchy around Newark. At the same time he was also moving up in the International Brotherhood of Firemen and Oilers.

Where you influenced by his work ethics?

With my dad, you had to be working at something, preferably at something that you liked, all the time. And I had every kind of job in the world. Across the street from us was a dairy farm and my brother Charlie, at five in the morning, would milk the cows and by the time they had cooled it and bottled the milk, I would walk across the street and deliver it all the way up to the school, which was two miles away, and then in the afternoon I would deliver papers. Another job I had was with the trolley-car system. The transit company dreamed up the bright idea of having high school kids carry a change purse and go up and down the trolley aisles with change so that there would be no delays. That paid $5 a week.

Tell me about your mother.

I wish I could do justice to her. Mother was just absolutely extraordinary, really, she was a sweet, caring woman, fending off my dad when he got upset with something we were doing. She would protect us.

Did your parents ever return to Ireland?

They went over in 1928. That happened to be my first year in Harvard Law School. You got your grades sometime in the summer and I remember how impossible it was to get telephone service in those days. My father sent telegrams saying, “Did you get your grades, did you get your grades?”

Was your being a Catholic a factor in your confirmation?

There were unfortunate suggestions that on issues concerning the Church, I would be favorable to the Church.

I was asked about this when my appointment was up for confirmation before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary. Senator [Joseph C.] O’Mahoney of Wyoming said, “Mr. Justice, if a case presents a conflict between the Church and the Constitution, who prevails, the Constitution or the Pope?” I said, “Senator, I took my oath to support and defend the Constitution just as faithfully and sincerely as you took the same oath when you were sworn in as a senator and, of course, the Constitution is what I’m here to interpret and the Constitution, obviously, is what I will interpret, no matter what kind of effect it may have on anything.”

You defend the freedom of people to question you.

I feel very strongly about that. I think that the most important provision of our Constitution is the First Amendment. It defines for us the kind of society we are and that we want to be. No matter what the criticism, I will never deny any citizen the right to say what he feels.

In the past 10 years, you have tended to write far more dissents than in your first 15 years or so here. Do you feel that a lot of the work you’ve done is now being undone?

No. Diversity of views is so essential in our scheme of things. Colleagues may differ, but he or she has a responsibility to keep saying what he thinks, even after he’s been turned down, as I have by colleagues on my view that the death penalty is unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment. Don’t forget, Plessey & Ferguson, separate but equal, was the law of the land for some 70 years before it was overruled in Brown versus Board of Education. Things can change. I’m not too often in the majority on the major issues of the day, but it can all change again.

Maureen Dowd

By Dermot McEvoy

It is hard to believe that such a petite, charming woman as Maureen Dowd could be viewed as a shrew by not only conservatives because of her coverage of President Bush and the Iraq war, but by liberals who have never quite forgiven her for her critique of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair.

The author and Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for The New York Times, was born in 1952 in Washington, D.C., the youngest of five children. Her mother’s parents were from Mayo. Her father, Michael, immigrated to the U.S. from County Clare in 1914. He joined the Washington, D.C. police force and became inspector in charge of Senate security.

“My dad was the national president of the Hibernians. My mom was the historian of the Hibernians. In fact, that’s how I was conceived, at a Hibernian convention in Newark.” She leans forward to share the intrigue. [Dermot McEvoy talked to Dowd at The Four Seasons Hotel in New York City in September and November, 2004]. “My dad was jealous. Some other Hibernian was paying attention to my mom and they had a big fight and he had to make up. So I was conceived at a Hibernian convention in jealousy and rage.” A burst of laughter ends the story.

Dowd’s journey to the Times and a Pulitzer started with 16 years of Catholic education. After graduation the trip to fame got a little bumpy. She worked at the Washington Racquet Club selling tennis balls until her parents intervened. “They said, ‘We didn’t sacrifice to get you this college degree so you could wear a tennis dress to work every day.’”

Dowd’s brother, Kevin, knew the Metro Editor of the Washington Star and Dowd soon found herself working the lobster shift as a “dictationist.” Eventually she escaped the pool and became a general reporter and a tennis columnist. After the Star folded she worked for Time magazine for two years before being hired by Anna Quindlen at The New York Times.

As strange as it may seem because of the critical columns she writes about the current president, Bush Senior remains one of her biggest fans. “We have always had a good relationship,” she says bluntly. “I don’t really have relationships with politicians in that way, not in the way James Reston [of The New York Times] used to [with JFK]. I try to think of it as not antagonistic, exactly. I just want to be the readers’ advocate. That being said, as a White House reporter, he [the elder Bush] was always lovely and gracious to me. And occasionally now he’ll write me notes.”

When asked if she was surprised by the results of the election, she admits that she wasn’t. “I thought President Bush and Karl Rove held the whip hand throughout the election,” she says, “making John Kerry dance to their tune. His timid, reactive campaign backed up their assertions that he was timid and reactive. Also, W. and Dick Cheney were better at scaring voters to death.”

Although she is hard on the Republicans, Dowd also has some “tough love” advice for the Democrats. “I think they need to stop nominating easy-to-stereotype, wooden Northeast liberals and get some candidates who can capture the music of history and the pulse of the nation in their stump speeches,” she says. “Democrats have a narrative to tell of helping the have-nots and the underprivileged and working class in society; certainly, they can talk about values.”

What kind of an agenda does Dowd foresee for the Bush administration in the next several years? “Dark. Secretive. Conservative. Belligerent. Unilateral. Drilling in Alaska, and in the Irish Sea, if they could figure out a way to claim it.”

When informed she must be doing something right if both sides dislike her so much, she replies in a soft, elusive voice, “The only difference is that I’ve gone from Democratic readers going ‘Dear Media Whore’ to conservative readers going ‘Dear Liberal Slut.’”

She considers her predicament before adding thoughtfully, “I always thought Democrats were more genteel when they were mad at you, but they weren’t. They were just as vicious as Republicans.”

When we met last September Dowd was just beginning to promote her book of collected columns, Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk. Her readers relish her cast of characters, wearing sobriquets as veneers – there’s President Bush (aka King George II, W., 43), Dick Cheney (Vice), and the ever popular Donald Rumsfeld (Rummy). She readily admits to having an angle, or, as she puts it, a “shtick.”

“Mine is to be right on the news,” she says, “and to try to be very newsworthy.” When asked why she called it Bushworld, she replies, “They [the Bush administration] created this other universe where everything is backwards, the opposite of the way it is in real life. They’ll be putting more pollution in the air and it will be the Clearer Skies Act. With Iraq, the connection is between Iraq and Al Qaeda and it turns out the connection is Iran and Al Qaeda. We’re fighting them there so we don’t have to fight them here, but then they’re coming here too!” She stops to laugh at the inanity of it all. “So it’s a world, it’s like this whole universe, where they never let in any information that doesn’t fit with their preconceived notions.”

Colin Farrell

By Ciaran Carty

“Jaysus. It’s getting bleeding crazy,” Farrell says of his overnight star status. “You couldn’t actually give it too much thought or your head would be destroyed.”

He still can’t believe what has happened to his career. It’s only four years [this interview took place in 2001] since Farrell made his debut in the Irish TV mini-series Falling For a Dancer, after he had opted out of Dublin’s Gaiety School of Acting. “I didn’t think I should have to pay £2,500 and take a year out of my life to be told that I was crap,” he says.

He gave up on school, too. After three years at Castleknock, where he played rugby (“because they let you get away with murder if you did”), and two years at Gormanstown, he finished up at Bruce College. “That didn’t work out either. I was just too busy messing around. So I took off to Australia when I was 17.”

Farrell hung around The Performance Place on Sydney’s Cleveland Street, where he made his stage debut in a play about the outlaw Ned Kelly. “It was perfect for somebody who’d never done more than ‘bang-bang you’re dead’ playing cowboys and Indians in the back garden,” he says. “The play was terrible but it was the first time I’d rehearsed with a bunch of actors. And once back in Dublin I decided, feck it, I’ll give acting a go.”

He made his European stage debut playing a teenage autistic boy in Gary Mitchell’s In a Little World of Our Own at London’s Donmar Warehouse.

“It wasn’t exactly Chekhov, but it was great storytelling,” he says.

“It was like a movie on stage. Kevin Spacey came on a night off from his rehearsals for The Iceman Cometh, which was about to open on the West End. We began to hang out. He told me there might be a part for me in Ordinary Decent Criminals, which he was about to film with Thaddeus O’Sullivan. So Thaddeus cast me. I got an American agent, Josh Lieberman. I didn’t realize until I got to L.A. that Lieberman also represented Donald Sutherland, Elizabeth Shue, Cuba Gooding Jr. and Ed Harris.”

When Farrell was 12 he saw his big sister Catherine – he’s the youngest of a family of four – play Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Gaiety School of Acting. “I knew acting was a possibility because she’d done it,” he says. “Catherine and I, more than any of the others, were always into the movies, staying up late as kids watching the old Hollywood black-and-whites.”

Without Catherine, Tigerland might not have happened. Farrell had been late for an audition with veteran director Joel Schumacher, who was in London checking out talent. “I was only five minutes late,” says Farrell, “but the old bastard had his coat on and was going out shopping. He’d seen about 30 or 40 guys and he’d had enough. We talked for maybe four minutes. I thought, well, feck that, there’s a plane ticket wasted.”

Schumacher remembers it somewhat differently. “Colin just filled the room with humor and charm,” he recalls. “I decided to have him read for the lead in Tigerland.”

Catherine filmed her brother in his flat in Irishtown. “She’s very good with a camcorder,” he says. “It was the most crucial few minutes I’ll probably ever do on film.”

Schumacher watched the clip back in L.A. and promptly offered Farrell the lead role of Bozz, a rebellious Texan loner who stands up to his drill sergeant. “Colin reminded me of Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke, or Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” says Schumacher.

Farrell wasn’t bothered by having to talk American. “I grew up on The A-Team and all those TV shows,” he says. “Any star I watched was American. I’d been talking American in my subconscious since I was a kid.”

While he was still shooting Tigerland, Schumacher cast Farrell in the claustrophobic suspense thriller Phone Booth. “I’m in a phone booth in downtown L.A., gripping a receiver to my ear,” says Farrell, explaining his role. “At the other end of the line there’s a rooftop sniper who has me in his sights. If I hang up, he’ll kill me. The cops have come because he’s killed someone outside the booth. They think I’m the killer, and if I don’t come out, they’ll kill me.”

Immediately afterwards, Farrell moved to Austin, Texas for American Outlaws. “It was a complete change,” he says.

“I had to get over all the seriousness of Tigerland, where I was trying to find ‘the truth.’

“American Outlaws is a romantic-action-adventure comedy. Jesse James is a character I’ve been playing since I was two. It was great craic. I’d done a bit of bare-back riding when I was playing Danny in Ballykissangel, but nothing like this. All I had to do in Ballykissangel was trot two yards, get into the shot and get off. American Outlaws was the real stuff.”

For Farrell, home is still his small flat near Sandymount strand in Dublin. “There are a few nice pubs around the corner, and a chipper [fish and chip shop],” he says. “That’s all I need. I don’t have a toothbrush or a pair of slippers in L.A.”

He pads across the wooden floor, barefoot. “I’ve been lucky,” he says. “I’ve skipped about 100 rungs on the ladder. So I don’t have to go and live in L.A. or do the scene there to get noticed. I can go there, do the work and get out. I’m in no hurry to get anywhere. I don’t have any plans. I don’t have a map. If you did in this business, you’d destroy yourself.”

Chuck Feeney

By Conor O'Clery

Chuck Feeney comes across as someone who really wants little more than to end his life as the ordinary guy who left Elizabeth, New Jersey to become a GI after the Second World War. He has accumulated more wealth than any other Irish-American of his generation but you won’t see him at receptions or black-tie functions that mark the social life of corporate Irish America.

“I’m just not the kind of guy who gets any kick out of attending these mutual admiration society dinners,” he told me.

In 1988, Forbes magazine included Feeney in the top 20 of its 400 richest people list, estimating his worth at $1.3 billion.

However, Feeney did not belong on the list. In 1982, he had secretly transferred his entire 38.75 percent interest in Duty Free Shops (DFS) to a charitable foundation, keeping less than $5 million for himself. “I did not want money to consume my life,” he said. To maintain secrecy, the organization did not bear his name. Feeney declined even to take personal tax deductions on his giving.

“I just felt I didn’t see the need for blowing a horn,” he said when asked why he wanted to stay anonymous.

Feeney’s anonymity came to an end when in the mid-1990s he decided it was time to get out of DFS. The company that makes Moet & Chandon champagne bought DFS, and the 1997 sale left Feeney’s charity worth $3.5 billion.

Now Feeney has just put into practice something he had been considering for many years. He has decided that “Giving While Living” should be his legacy, and he hopes his example of giving now to make a meaningful impact will encourage other philanthropists to increase their charitable giving while alive.

The New Jersey native persuaded the board of Atlantic Philanthropies, which he created two decades ago, to convert $4 billion in assets into cash, disperse it over the next several years to good causes, and shut up shop. It is better, he reckons, to concentrate its vast resources on the problems of today, and leave it to the next generation of philanthropists to address the issues of the future.

“Wealth brings responsibilities,” said Feeney in his clipped New Jersey accent. “People have to determine themselves whether they feel an obligation to use some of their wealth to improve life for their fellow human beings rather than create problems for future generations.”

He said he has a reluctance to say to people, “Jeez, you’ve got a lot of money, you should do something about that!”

One senses however that he feels very strongly about the fact that the richest one percent in America give only two percent of their wealth to charity, and many of the new rich in Ireland have become remarkably tight-fisted when it comes to philanthropy. “Money is more worthwhile to people in need when things are tough rather than when things are good,” said Feeney. “If I had ten dollars in my pocket and I do something with it today, it’s already producing ten dollars’ worth of good, as opposed to writing a bill at five percent per year.”

People with vast wealth should also start giving early in life, he declared. “Everyone knows when they’re born but nobody knows when they die. If you want to give it away, think about giving it away while you are alive because you’ll get a lot more satisfaction than if you wait until you are dead.” Besides, he said, “It’s a lot more fun. Giving gave me a lot of pleasure.”

One of the contributions Feeney made to the peace process, for which he admits he took “a lot of stick” in the media, was to fund the Sinn Féin office in Washington out of his own pocket to the tune of $720,000. “The goal was to establish a Washington office to put Sinn Féin on a respectable platform so they could say this is what Sinn Féin does. We’re not the IRA, that’s another organization.” He also privately funded loyalists looking for a way out of the violence.

Feeney, who has Irish and American citizenship, visited the North 11 times as a key member of the group that helped persuade the Clinton White House to reach out and encourage Irish Republicans to end violence and take their chances at the negotiating table. “Clearly we weren’t players in the action,” said Feeney, who always managed to avoid being photographed with the group, except once when an Irish Times photographer climbed onto a railing outside Sinn Féin headquarters in Belfast, and got a snapshot of the elusive philanthropist before he could slip away into the background. “We were not dumb enough to think that we were the motivating force,” he said, “but clearly there was a time, a mood, to do something. And we were up there.”

Michael Flatley

By Debbie McGoldrick

Michael Flatley can recall the times spent on the “pay your dues” circuit, traveling the country as a warm-up for headliners like The Chieftains. After all, he didn’t make his everlasting mark on the world stage until well into his thirties.

“I’ve got no regrets,” Flatley said. “It’s been a hard road but a good road.”

The kid from Chicago now presides over a multi-million-dollar business empire. He currently has three troupes performing around the world, and his London-based Unicorn Entertainment company owns all the merchandising and video rights. His shows, Lord of the Dance, and Feet of Flame have grossed millions of dollars.

Flatley and his four siblings – a brother and three sisters – were born and raised in Chicago, where his father, Michael, from Co. Sligo, owned a successful construction company. Michael’s mother, Eilish, a native of Co. Carlow, was a stepdancer of note in her day, and her son was determined to follow in her footsteps. He started formal lessons at the relatively late age of 11, but made up for lost time, winning his first Irish World Dance Championship when he was 17. He wrapped up his competitive career with an astounding 168 championships in various events, a record yet to be met.

“You go to Ireland and people have so much pride and passion and personality, and they’re oozing with character, and it’s such a contradiction that they dance like this (he makes a stiff upper body move). I can understand it in competition, but when I got off stage I just wanted to cut loose. I remember the first time I did the Moonwalk on tour with the Chieftains and everyone just started screaming, and I knew there was no turning back.”

Flatley and another Irish-American dance star, Jean Butler, were asked to perform in 1994 as the intermission act for Eurovision, staged that year in Dublin. The two performed a seven-minute high-octane routine that was an intoxicating combination of revolutionary dance skill and breathtaking stage presence. Irish dance hasn’t been the same since.

Riverdance was expanded into a full-length show and was an instant hit when it debuted in Dublin in 1995.

Just when Flatley thought that things couldn’t be better, the Riverdance management team claimed their star developed an out-of-control ego. He said he just wanted to maintain some sort of creative control over the show he helped develop. Riverdance replaced Flatley, and the show took London by storm.

It’s not an episode he cares to talk much about now, but he has nothing but words of praise for the show. “I don’t have any hard feelings now. I wouldn’t be where I am today if all of that didn’t happen.” Thus came Michael Flatley’s Lord of the Dance in the summer of 1996.

“I always wanted to do something that was completely Irish,” says Flatley. “I wanted it to be a simple storyline, a good versus evil story, and that’s how Lord of the Dance ended up.”

In 2002, Flatley decided to leave the stage. However, even in retirement, Flatley continuously worked on the next project. Flatley’s world is a place where there are always new horizons to conquer. His projects for that year included breaking ground on an Irish casino on land he purchased on the Las Vegas strip, a Broadway opening for Lord of the Dance, tinkering with a film script, and making an album of flute music. Not to mention a rigorous workout routine for a new show.

“I’ve been working on doing a cool new kind of Irish-American show with a big patriotic American finish,” he said. “I think I have to put it on hold until the war is over. I have to be careful. The last thing you want in this day and age is anything that could be perceived as political.

“This is a show that’s tied in deep with my heart,” he said. “It’s taken me these few years to get the body back, the dancing back.”

Flatley is still interested in making a film, an idea he’s had on the back burner for some time, and he’s always toying with a screenplay.

“I’m so tired of seeing these Irish movies that are so depressing,” he says, “with people cursing and shooting each other. I’m always a fan of doing something upscale and classier.”

Flatley spends most of the year living in his palatial French Riviera retreat. Some years back he also spent millions on an historical Irish castle in Co. Cork called Castlehyde. “Ireland is the only place for me,” he says.

When he first made the purchase, it was so he could be closer to his fiancée, Dubliner Lisa Murphy.

“Lisa puts up with a lot from me. She knows my life is mostly business and I don’t get to see her very often, but that’s just how life is.”

Flatley wouldn’t have it any other way.

Flatley launched Celtic Tiger in Budapest on July 9, 2005. He and his fiancée, Lisa Murphy, split in 2004 but have since reunited.

Seamus Heaney

By Patricia Harty

Seamus Heaney was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature “for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.” The first person from Northern Ireland to be so honored, Heaney was born on April 13, 1939, the eldest of nine children, to Margaret and Patrick Heaney, at the family farm in Mossbawn, County Derry.

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he spoke of “poetry’s power to do the thing which always is and always will be to poetry’s credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in so far as they, too, are an earnest of our veritable human being.”

Patricia Harty spoke to him in New York on the occasion of his birthday, April 13, 1996. His book Spirit Level had just been published.

What does it mean to call yourself a poet?

I think if you call yourself a poet it means that you live by it, so to speak, and for it, in a very serious way. There’s a phrase of Ted Hughes which I like very much. He said that the true poem emerges from the place of ultimate suffering and decision in us, and I think if you call yourself a poet, you publicly consecrate yourself to living somehow by the places of suffering and decision.

How does it feel to have the world reflect back at you that yes, indeed, you are a poet?

I think the discipline which writers must perfect is the discipline of doubting the world, the discipline of self-knowledge and self-castigation. Certainly the activity should induce a sense of vigilance – it’s a kind of spiritual exaction to be a writer. But the answer is that I accept the recognition in good faith.

Can you tell me about your mother?

My mother was very strong – very unrufflable, steady on the emotional keel. Righteous and majestic and vulnerable. Her McCann family were terrific, they had the volubility of protest, they were democrats.

My father had a different kind of majesty, the country farmer’s silence and hauteur. My mother had an unbending thing which she shared with women of that generation, a child a year in eight, nine, 10 years. The giving-birth factor involved, I suppose, a willful adherence to the compensations of Catholicism – the cult of the suffering mother of Jesus, the cult of the suffering Jesus, and the cult of St. Anne, the mother of Mary. These were actual real psychic resources for sublimation in the lives of women. In particular, for ones who were going through, without much consolation or understanding, the solitude and exhaustion of childbirth and child-rearing and the biological entrapment of being in a place with no birth control.

Nowadays I remember that affirmative bold outcry of prayers from women in church as a cry of rage and defiance. My mother wouldn’t have put it that way – she would have seen it as a form of transport and endurance.

Are you a disciplined writer?

I’m not very disciplined, no. I’m half disciplined. I’m not a person who gets up every morning at the same time and sits at a desk and plunges into it. Prose writers have to do that. On the other hand, the older I get the more I feel that you should peg out a pitch and provide space for the game to be played, mark out a landing place for the muse if she wants to come down. So time, time alone, when the pages are in front of you, or you’re reading, time is what’s important. In the beginning, I used to say to myself anything that’s worthwhile forces its way through. And to some extent that’s true.

Mary Higgins Clark

By Mary Pat Kelly

Mary Higgins Clark is one of America’s premier “who done it” writers. Her books are worldwide best-sellers. Several of her novels have been made into television dramas and major movies. In April 2000, she signed a five-book deal with Simon & Schuster worth an astonishing $64 million, but as one book after another passes the million mark in sales, the arrangement looks like a bargain.

All four of Higgins Clark’s grandparents were born in Ireland. She considers her Irish heritage an important influence on her writing. Her father owned a pub in the Bronx, and as a young girl Mary listened to the yarns told by the Irish patrons. “The Irish are by nature storytellers,” she says.

Soon after her marriage Higgins started writing short stories. She sold her first short story to Extension magazine in 1956 for $100. But the untimely death of her husband, Warren, in 1964 left her with five young children to support. She went to work writing radio scripts and, in addition, decided to write books. Every morning she got up at five and wrote until seven, when she had to get the kids ready for school. Her first suspense novel, Where Are the Children? (1975), was a best-seller.

Higgins Clark still belongs to the same writing group she formed over 30 years ago.

In your books there’s a sense of danger intruding on ordinary life.

Well, it can. That’s what I write about, the fragility of life. . . For example, I’m so sick of hearing about generation gaps. I got along with my first family. I got along with my husband beautifully. I get along with my children. My grandchildren like me. There are millions of people like that. For all the people who are having problems, there are so many who are thoroughly happy with their families. The trouble comes from the outside.

Who were your early influences?

[My writing teacher] Bill Mallary – he was a short story writer who sold a lot to the Saturday Evening Post – said, “Write what you know.”

He said, “Take the most dramatic incident that occurred to you as a stewardess and ask yourself, what if?”

I started out as a Pan American stewardess. I was 21. I flew to Europe, Africa and Asia. This was 1949. The war had ended and I was seeing the whole world. They were still cleaning rubble out of London. I was in a revolution in Syria. India had just gotten its freedom, but it was still a colonial empire.

I had been on the last flight going to Czechoslovakia before it was closed to Western planes. We went in with no one on board. The Soviets were having an air show. There were a couple of thousand people at the airport and they turned from watching all those military formations to wave and cheer for our American plane.

When we landed the terminal was empty except for seven Americans huddled together, the men we had come to pick up. There were soldiers all over with guns. The captain said to me, “Don’t wander around. I’m going to fuel up and get out of here – I don’t like it.” When we left, the people watched us go in total silence. One of our passengers was weeping and said, “There’s no one in that crowd who wouldn’t give half of the rest of his life to be on this ship.”

I thought, suppose a stewardess goes to the back of the plane and there’s an 18-year-old kid trying to hide. He’s a member of the underground. And they’re searching the airport, coming towards the plane, and he says, “Help me.”

She has to decide whether or not to turn him over or try to help him. She knows that even if she succeeds, she’ll lose her job. It’ll be an international incident. Then you throw in a little love interest. Of course, she tries to save the kid, and does. It’s [the book] is called Stowaway.

What would you say about your women characters?

They’re strong. They are often self-made. They are intelligent. They are the main viewpoint character, even though I use multiple viewpoints. And they always solve their own problems, even if in the end they get a little help.

John Huston

By T.J. English

“Was it good for you?” asked the legendary director John Huston, his distinctive voice bellowing across the sound stage.

“Fine, perfect,” replied assistant director Tommy Shaw, a stout, white-bearded terrier of a man, who in turn motioned to Fred Murphy, the cinematographer, and asked, “How was it for you?”

“Good,” said Murphy, ever so politely. “Couldn’t have been better.”

With that the 80-year-old director stood for the first time in hours, his familiar white mane and weather-beaten face glistening in the stage lights. “Let’s call that a print,” he said, stretching tentatively so as not to entangle the plastic tubes running from his nose to a nearby oxygen generator.

Immediately the crew de-scended in a flurry of activity, moving lights and cameras for the next set-up in the on-going family affair that has become The Dead, Huston’s eagerly awaited adaptation of the James Joyce short story and his 36th Hollywood film.

Hampered somewhat by the fact that Huston is confined to a wheelchair most of the time – with the oxygen tanks and generator constantly by his side – the cast and crew often had to strain to hear Huston’s pronouncements – but nobody was complaining. Indeed, the entire cast, led by Huston’s daughter, Anjelica, and including some of Ireland’s most venerable stage actors and actresses, were effusive in their praise of the director of The Maltese Falcon, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The African Queen and numerous other heavyweight film achievements.

“Remember, what we want here is the moment, that precise moment when he sees Gretta. Everything else is secondary,” Huston directs. He then sits forward in his wheelchair, gasping momentarily for air. The light from the video monitor illuminates his frail body – the ever-present oxygen tubes running from his nose to the nearby generator – as he waits in silence for his assistant to give the command to commence filming.

“Asking about Joyce is like asking about Shakespeare,” said Huston, a trace of exasperation in his craggy baritone voice. “We’re talking about a man whose work changed the course of history. It would be difficult – impossible really – to pinpoint his influence. “

“What we wanted to do,” he said, of the eight-week shoot in Southern California, “was not so much to adhere paragraph for paragraph to Joyce’s prose, but to capture a certain mood, an exuberance for life that exists in the story.”

Huston traces his own love affair with Joyce back to his youth, when his mother first smuggled a copy of Ulysses into the States in 1928. “It was banned at the time, you know,” remarked the director. “But I remember it vividly, even the blue-paper cover it was wrap-ped in. And, of course, I’ll never forget reading it; it is probably what motivated me to become a writer and a filmmaker.”

But even with his deep love of Joyce, Huston had always steered clear of tackling the author’s larger works on film because, as he put it, “Filming Joyce didn’t seem practical.”

It wasn’t until Huston was approached by producer Weill and Schulz-Keil specifically about filming “The Dead” – Joyce’s 50-page conclusion to Dubliners and one of his more accessible works – that he began to entertain seriously the notion of finally paying tribute to the man whose work had had such a profound impact on his own development.

Huston’s enthusiasm for the project was further enhanced by the fact that for nearly 20 years he had been a resident of St. Clarens, County Galway, on the west coast of Ireland. A familiar face at hunting functions in Galway throughout the ’50s and ’60s, Huston even went so far as to become an Irish citizen. His conversation is frequently punctuated with loving references to his estate in St. Clarens, which he left, regretfully, in the early ’70s because of poor health and spiraling taxes.

“Has working with an Irish cast made me nostalgic?” asked Huston. “God, yes. But nostalgia for Ireland sweeps over me often, not just when I’m working with an Irish cast. I love Ireland and I miss it very much.”

Consequently, it was at Huston’s insistence that the cast for The Dead be, as he put it, “real Irish, not just people who claim to be.

“It was important that we preserve the integrity of the thing,” said Huston of the casting, adding with a chuckle, “I would think anyone who would go about filming The Dead without an authentically Irish cast should be sent into exile.”

Director John Huston died on August 28, 1987, three months after this interview.

Gene Kelly

By Michael Scanlon

Gene Kelly got his first big break on Broadway in the Rodgers and Hart musical Pal Joey. He had graduated from the University of Pittsburgh and was operating his successful dance schools in Pittsburgh and in Johnstown, Pennsylvania when he decided to try his luck in New York. Within a short time he landed the part of Harry the Hoofer in William Saroyan’s hit The Time of Your Life where composer Richard Rodgers spotted him and asked him to audition for Pal Joey.

From there he went west and began his legendary Hollywood career making a total of 33 motion pictures, taking as his dance partners such stars as Judy Garland, Rita Hayworth and many others.

Kelly, who was proud of his Irish roots, held dual citizenship. Since his grandfather was born in Ireland, he was able to obtain an Irish passport.

What was the difference between you and Fred Astaire?

Well, if you look at his pictures and mine, you will see that he was always sleek and rich with a top hat, white tie and tails, and I was more the common man in the street with a tee-shirt. And that difference was reflected in the dances. And certainly in my political ideology, I was always a liberal Democrat, and I felt for the masses and I didn’t want the dancing I did to be any kind of high-class looking. And I say this, of course, with no sense at all of derogation. I just wanted my style to look athletic and reflect the common man. Whereas most dancers who had come before me, like Astaire, reflected the dancing of the rich.

Could you tell us about Judy Garland?

Judy was a miraculous entertainer and she could learn scripts just by reading them through once. I deem myself lucky to have done my very first picture with her, For Me and My Girl.

We loved each other. I was married at the time and we had no so-called love affair; she was a deep friend of my wife and me and we were very close to her. I dearly loved her as a friend.

What about directing?

I actually love to create the dance more than I love to dance it. So naturally, I got into directing. That was my greatest joy. Once I created a dance number, I didn’t care about performing it as much as I did when I was creating it. So the directing was always more of a pleasant task to me than the actual performing.

There were so many Irish in this field.

Yes, you’re right about the Irish dancers. That’s a phenomenon of the time. The Irish really dominated popular dance in twentieth century America, no doubt about it. I think it came from the fact that the dancing in Ireland for centuries has been clog dancing and reels and these dances certainly influenced the American people in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries so that it actually became part of American tap dancing.

How Irish are you?

My full name is Eugene Curran Kelly. Curran was my mother’s family. Her father came from Country Clare. And so I’m Irish on both sides.

At what point did you decide to become a professional dancer?

My father was out of work, so for purely economical reasons, my whole family started to give little dance lessons. My mother started a dancing school with us and it grew and grew. And finally as I learned more and more from teachers, mainly in Chicago where I went to study every summer, I found that I was really interested in doing dancing as my living. So I stayed with it. And it wasn’t until I left college that I made the final decision, because up until then, dancing was just a way to put myself through university.

Dancing and choreography has been so much a part of your life and your passion. Do you miss it?

I retired from dancing quite a few years ago. You can’t dance well enough when you’re old, and when I danced, I wanted to dance well enough.

So I just said, “That’s it. I quit.”

Gene Kelly passed away in 1996.

Donald Keough

By Niall O’Dowd

Donald Keough’s love of Ireland and all things Irish led to his involvement in fostering Ireland’s economy. He led several groups of American businessmen, including Warren Buffett, on economic missions to the country over the years.

In 1993, Keough retired as president and COO of The Coca-Cola Company, and that same year he and his wife, Marilyn, endowed a chair of Irish Studies at Notre Dame. In 1998, the Keough Notre Dame Center of Irish Studies was officially opened in Dublin.

A graduate of Creighton University and a navy veteran, Keough is currently chairman of Allen & Company. He serves on a number of boards including The Coca-Cola Company. And he has been awarded honorary doctorates from Trinity College, Dublin and is a recipient of the Laetare Medal, the highest award that can be bestowed by the home of the Fighting Irish. He has also been honored with the American Irish Historical Society’s medal and was Irish America’s Irish American of the Year in 1993.

Keough, the son of a cattleman, grew up in Dubuque, Iowa during the Depression.

How would you assess the importance of what is happening in Northern Ireland to Irish-Americans?

Peace is taking that cloud of anxiety off the whole island. I think that you are going to see its benefits written large for future generations. It is just unthinkable to me that this peace process could end in failure.

I hope that we can get a sort of common voice among all of the various groups that are interested in Ireland. And let’s not be shy about it, we want to bring this place, North and South, into the next century with enormous dignity. We want Ireland to be a place where young Irish men and women who want to help build that nation, have a place to work.

In many ways people would now view you as the Irish chieftain over here.

When you got interested in Ireland, a lot of people got interested, and this has had a huge impact.

I am no chieftain but I have made Ireland a principal activity of my life, and that’s involved many people I touch. I get enthusiastic about things I care about and I care deeply about Ireland, and maybe that has allowed other people to begin to feel that way too.

Many leading Irish-Americans now look to you as their teacher, their guide on Ireland. What would you like to teach them in the future?

Well, I always like to share what I have in my head with people I care about and I care about a lot of people. And I learn something every day, and at the end of each year I say to myself, what did I learn this year, how have I grown?

It’s a privilege for me to be a small voice in all of this. Suddenly an Irish door has been opened in America, and across the country people with Irish in their blood have become not just more aware of it, but more interested in and prouder of it.

My generation were really the first generation of the post-famine Irish to have the luxury to lift our heads up, take a breath and say, “I want to know more about that place where we came from.”

I think the next generation – my children – are going to be even more interested and more curious and more sensitive to that little island that has produced over 70 million people around the world.

Frank McCourt

By Brian Rohan

Frank McCourt went from retired New York City high school teacher to international celebrity in a matter of months with the publication of Angela’s Ashes, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. 

Frank managed to save the fare for a boat to America by the age of 19, the point at which Angela’s Ashes finishes. He arrived in New York City by ship, on the eve of the Korean War. The young Irish kid was drafted into the U.S. Army and sent on a troop ship to Hamburg, West Germany, where he recalls a gruff-voiced drill sergeant handed out the assignments:

“McCourt!”

“Yes sir.”

“McCourt, what’s the first thing you do with a dog?”

“Er....Feed him, sir.”

“No, McCourt. The first thing you do with a dog is let him know who’s master.”

With that, Frank found out that he would be spending the Korean War training German shepherds.

“They figured, hey – he’s Irish, so it must be animals or agriculture,” McCourt recalls. “But of course I was from the slums of Limerick, I knew absolutely nothing about animals. They gave me six weeks of training and then they gave me my own dog. Then I became a trainer of dog trainers. Surrounded by dogs. And to this day, I hate the things.”

McCourt returned to New York where he joined a generation of young men suddenly able to change its situation through the G.I. Bill.

“Every day of my life I say, ‘Thank Christ the Chinese invaded Korea,’” he says. “It was a terrible thing to do on the Koreans, but it was one of the best things that ever happened to Frank McCourt.”

The Army vet went to New York University and read voraciously: novels, histories, plays, poetry – whatever he got his hands on. He supported himself by working at Merchants’ Refrigeration in lower Manhattan.

“On a hot, horrible day you’d be taking these sides of beef off refrigerator trucks from Chicago out into New York and 95 degrees and into the deep freeze room, then back out into New York and 95 degrees and back into the refrigerator trucks, and so on. From an early point, I realized I was always going to be too scrawny [for the work], so I kept reading.”

McCourt qualified as a teacher and began work at a tough, public vocational school on Staten Island.

“That was in the days of Blackboard Jungle,” says McCourt, referring to the 1959 film about rebellious and gang-crazy school kids and the post-war phenomenon of ‘teenagers.’

“They were poor kids who were told from an early age they were stupid, so they were sent to vocational school. Naturally, I decided to teach them Shakespeare.

“The other teachers thought I was crazy. ‘Shakespeare?’ they’d say, ‘They’ll kill ya.’ All they had in the school were these dreary old novels, books like Silas Marner. The dirty old man book, the kids called it.”

McCourt bought a box of $1.65 Shakespeare collections – with his own money – and handed them out to a classroom of 35 skeptics. McCourt says the students were soon converted.

“They loved it,” says McCourt. “There was no analysis or any of that, we just started reading out loud. We got to Hamlet and they’d heard of it, they knew it was this famous or important play. They’d start reading these soliloquies in a big, theatrical voice, you know, ‘To be or not to be. . . .’

“I’d say No, no no – didja ever worry about life or didja ever feel depressed? That’s the way it is – just talk it. They began to understand what Shakespeare was up to.”

Frank McCourt’s Teacher Man: A Memoir is due out in November, 2005.

Alice McDermott

By Sarah Buscher

In 1998, Alice McDermott’s fourth novel, Charming Billy, captured the National Book Award. Few were surprised. McDermott had previously been nominated for two Pulitzers and another N.B.A. But McDermott was so sure she wouldn’t win she didn’t prepare an acceptance speech.

Standing in front of hundreds of the most powerful people in the world of writing, she gracefully improvised, joking, “I wouldn’t be true to my heritage if I though this was entirely a good thing . . . I will clutch onto my Irish humility with great vigor.”

McDermott describes the influence of the Irish love of words on her writing as “inevitable.”

Born in Brooklyn, New York and raised on Long Island, McDermott is second-generation Irish. Her grandparents came from counties Mayo and Kerry.

“I knew we were Irish and I knew that Irish was the best thing to be,” she says.

McDermott clearly draws on her childhood experiences in the Irish-American community for her novels, exploring such themes as religion, family and alcoholism. Charming Billy arose out of the desire to individualize the stereotype of the Irish-American alcoholic.

Writing comes naturally to McDermott. She wrote her first novel when she was ten years old, and she was always the designated skit-writer in the all-girls Catholic high school she attended.

She met her husband when she was attending the graduate writing program at the University of New Hampshire. He was a graduate student at Cornell Medical School. They married and moved to New York City, setting up home in student housing for married graduate students.

It was here that McDermott began to work on her first novel and pretty soon she had a contract with Houghton-Mifflin. Her first book, A Bigamist’s Daughter (1982), was followed by That Night (1987), a finalist for the National Book Award, and then At Weddings and Wakes (1992), and Charming Billy (1998).

McDermott remains refreshingly matter-of-fact about the cut-and-thrust world of publishing, and prefers to concentrate on the writing itself.

“So much of it is outside the work and I think, realizing that and taking that to heart makes it easier to put it all aside when it comes to the actual writing,” she says.

“For everyone who says ‘I love your work,’ there’s someone who says, ‘What? Are you kidding?’ And if you live and die by that, you’ve missed the point entirely.

What it comes down to is what words are put on the page. Once you’ve done that, it doesn’t change, but how it’s read and how it’s observed can change all the time. If you think of it [writing] as a constant truth, if that’s what you’re writing for, then nothing else matters.”

The mother of three boys, McDermott balks at portrayals which describe her as a housewife who turns to writing to escape the desolation of suburbia.

Her lifestyle, she says, is not something she has “fallen into,” but rather one she has deliberately chosen.

“I was a writer way before I had children, way before I moved back to suburbia, and will be no matter what the future brings,” she says firmly.

One of the most striking features of McDermott’s writing is its wealth of detail and physical imagery.

Her finely drawn characters haunt you like a childhood memory. McDermott says that the visual nature of her prose is an aid to her when she’s actually setting the words down.

“For me it’s a way into the fiction,” she explains.

“To see clearly the worlds the characters exist in helps me to understand them. It sorts of goes back to a casting of a spell – if I can find the right physical details, then I can understand the characters in their world.

“It’s not so much a conscious choice of writing visually. It’s a way of entering the story that I hope, in turn, is a way for the reader to enter it. It gives me a door. I don’t write stories that are plot-driven and so I like being able to dwell in the place that the characters are. And I think the more sensuous it is, then the more access I have to these people’s lives.

“When I begin a day, I tend to rewrite what I’ve written the day before and add to it or take out as I need to. That’s a way of going down into the novel again, reentering it through the language – so I rewrite and rewrite.”

George Mitchell

By Patricia Harty

There would not have been a peace agreement on Good Friday 1998 without George Mitchell. Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams reflects the views of most Irish nationalists when he says: “Senator Mitchell’s role was indispensable to the success of the negotiation process and to the securing of the Good Friday Agreement. There can be no doubt that without his patience and stamina the outcome could have been very much different.”

On the unionist side, David Kerr, press secretary for David Trimble, also praised Mitchell’s role and the way he conducted himself in the multi-party talks. “He was extremely capable and fair: a genuine person who gave everything he had to making the process work. He acquitted himself very well and did the American people proud. I don’t think anybody else could have done what he did, it was a remarkable political balancing act.”

President Clinton appointed Mitchell, a former U.S. senator from Maine, first as economic advisor and then as chair of the Northern Ireland peace negotiations. He spoke to Irish America in 1995, shortly after his appointment as economic advisor.

What made you consider this unpaid position [economic advisor] when many jobs were open to you?

Somebody asked me recently why was I spending so much time at this since it was an unpaid position. I said it’s a labor of love, and I meant it. I truly enjoy it. I admire the participants, and I think that it’s an opportunity, for me as an Irish-American, to play a role in what I think is an historic event. I have enjoyed reading many books on English and Irish history in preparation for this assignment and I really believe this is a moment of historic opportunity that could be the framework for life in Ireland for not just a few years but decades, or perhaps even centuries. It’s a historic time, and a tremendous opportunity to make some progress.

What was the atmosphere in Northern Ireland like on your visit?

There was, it seemed to me, a real genuine, tangible enthusiasm about the absence of violence, about the opportunity to lead normal lives and a desire to move forward with the peace process and also very positive feeling toward President Clinton and the effort being made by the United States.

It’s unfortunate that very few Americans are aware of the role that the President has played in this effort. Yet when you go over to Ireland, everyone states it and acknowledges it, and people are very generally aware of and recognize the crucial role played by the Clinton administration.

Do you think the Adams visa was crucial to the peace process?

The President made the right decision at each stage of the process and by his actions has encouraged progress towards peace. I think his timing has been right, and his actions, while obviously difficult and controversial, have been correct.

Tell me about your own Irish background.

My father’s parents were born in Ireland and emigrated to the United States just before the turn of the century, some time in the 1890s, we think. The name was Kilroy. My father was born in Boston in 1900 and never knew his parents. All the children were raised in a Catholic orphanage in Boston.

Apparently what happened is that the mother died and the father couldn’t care for them and put them in an orphanage. My father was adopted when he was four by an elderly, childless couple who lived in Bangor, Maine. They changed his name to Mitchell — his name at birth was Joseph Kilroy — and shortly thereafter moved to Waterville, Maine, where I grew up. My father’s older brother Francis was also adopted by a family from Portland, Maine, but he later made contact with my father, and the families became quite friendly, and we have had regular contact over many years.

Tell me about the early Irish settlements in Maine.

There was a downturn in the Irish economy in 1829 and 1830, often called the small famine, and a lot of them came over and landed at Grosse Ile in Canada. They had no means of transport and so they walked to the United States and they walked through Maine. There was a lot of violence along the Maine border in 1830, and a number of them stayed in Maine, in fact, there was quite a substantial settlement, while many more went on to Boston. So I’m quite familiar with Grosse Ile. It led to the first large wave of Irish immigration into Maine.

Do you hope to get back to Ireland soon?

Yes. One of my objectives is to return at a time when I can simply enjoy it. That is to say, not on a business trip, on a pleasure trip, on a vacation. I really enjoyed meeting and talking with the people.

Bill Murray

By T.J. English

Born in Wilmette, Illinois on September 21, 1950, Bill Murray grew up, one of nine children, in an Irish Catholic family (one sister is a Carmelite nun). He left home in the early ’70s to join Chicago’s Second City comedy group and found fame with Saturday Night Live, before conquering Hollywood and becoming one of the most highly regarded actors of the day.

This interview took place in 1988 at Murray’s then new home, a comfortable hideaway that aptly reflected his newfound financial success. T.J. English found Murray to be even funnier in person than he is in his movies. What follows are snippets of conversation that took place between the laughs.

How about the issue of fame? Your life must lose some of its spontaneity.

That’s true. One of my favorite things used to be traffic in New York. There’s a traffic jam and there’s a Cadillac honking or something. I would jump in the middle of the street — I used to do this all the time before I was famous — and say, “Excuse me, there’s a Mercedes that has to get through here.” I’d push people out of the way. “Can we get this car out of the way here, there’s a Cadillac that needs to get through,” and just push people out of the way, smacking their cars and stuff. Whack! Just jump into it. You can’t do it now because if you do somebody shouts, “Hey, hey, Meatballs!” The whole thing is lost, the point you were trying to make or whatever fun you wanted to have is undercut.

What was life like growing up in Wilmette?

Wilmette is sort of an affluent place to live, but we were definitely at the bottom of the social register. When you say to people in Chicago you’re from Wilmette, they think you’re the Rockefellers. But we didn’t have the dough. Most of my friends had plenty of money. The idea of college was nothing to them, but not for us. I have five brothers and three sisters. My father died when I was 17. My mother got a job and everybody covered for themselves, if they were big enough, although I wasn’t big enough.

Do you ever find yourself looking back on Second City as the foundation for things you’re doing now?

The thing I learned there was the difference between a good laugh and a cheap laugh. But when I think of learning how to be creative, how to dig into the zeitgeist, turn over new stones, that came later when I was working for National Lampoon. We did a radio show and a live show. That was a strong group of people; we really had a competitive kind of fun. I had quit Second City and hitchhiked to New York to visit Brian [Murray, his brother]. He was working on National Lampoon and they were going to begin this live show. I came in and met the people. They needed someone to work on the Radio Hour, so I slept on my brother’s floor for a while and got the job.

Was it tough following in Chevy Chase’s footsteps on Saturday Night Live?

The first year was almost a complete wash. Dan [Akroyd] actually kept writing me into scenes with him where I would be the second cop. He’d write a scene where two FBI agents would walk in and I’d be one of them. Two cops, two FBI agents, two electricians, that sort of thing. It wasn’t that I had to live up to Chevy’s shadow, because I didn’t feel that from the other actors. But I didn’t know any of the writers, really, and they have to know what you can do before they can write for you. So I didn’t really get cooking until the last show of the season when I wrote something for myself.

Tell me about Tootsie.

I was sort of a concession. I don’t think anybody really wanted me as much as I was a name nobody felt like arguing about. The director said, “I can make anybody look good. Use him!” They thought they had a bomb on their hands. But Tootsie was three times as big as Meatballs, and Meatballs was a serious hit. Tootsie is in a very rarefied economic world.

Since we’re on the subject of economics, what do you do with all this disposable income you’ve been acquiring?

I recommend to anyone who wants to be rich and famous to be rich first and see if that’s not enough. Because I enjoy being rich a lot more than I enjoy being famous. The only good thing about fame is that I’ve gotten out of a couple of speeding tickets, and I’ve gotten into a restaurant when I didn’t have a suit and tie on. That’s about it.

As for the money, the sort of Elvis Presley thing of buying your mother a car is great. My mother has learned how to spend money. I mean she used to call and say, “Bill, we really need a boiler.” Just for the hell of it, I’d say, “Why don’t you shop around and see which one. Don’t blow a lot of money, just shop around and get a bargain. I don’t want you spending senselessly on this boiler. I don’t want a boiler that’s too big for the capacity of the house.” I’d say stuff like that just purely for the devilment of it.

Edna O’Brien

By Susan O’Grady Fox

From the publication of her very first book, The Country Girls (1960) to her most recent books, Edna O’Brien’s works have gained wide acclaim, particularly among American readers. One of Ireland’s most influential writers, she is famous for her rich and sensuous prose, and her books often deal with disappointments in love.

In 1986, she talked to Susan O’Grady Fox about growing up in Taumgraney, County Clare, and her early influences.

My life in Ireland as a young girl was quite lonely and was devoid of anything literary. There were no books at all in my house. My mother was most mistrustful of the written word.

But for some reason I always had this total vocation to writing. I loved writing compositions. I would actually ask the other girls to let me write theirs.

Our house was about a mile from the village, and it’s kind of pathetic, but on the way home from school I was so excited about doing these essays that I used to sit down on the road, or on a wall, and start writing.

The Traveling Players were the other big excitement in those days. They came about twice a year and put on melodramas, always melodramas: “East Lane,” “Murder in the Old Red Barn,” and those sorts of plays. I thought they were the most truly vivid, wonderful people I had ever seen.

I dreamed of going away with them, so I wrote a little play called “Dracula’s Daughter” in which the girl went to Dracula to see if she could go away with him. When I think of it in retrospect, obviously it was complete romantic masochism.

So these were the sort of excitements of my youth.

The biggest stimulation was nature. The landscape was utterly and randomly beautiful – the bog lilies, wild irises, oak trees, ash trees — all the different trees. Then there’s the light; the evening light in Ireland seems to me to be the most beautiful thing I have ever known, and as a child I sort of imbibed it. I spent so much time out of doors, as much as I could. That was the sort of love of, and if you like, companionship of nature, I had.

Away from nature, literature and the inner self, I felt that nearly everything one did back then was wrong. I had a sense of sin and a sense of guilt just drummed into me by people who had had it drummed into them. I’m not blaming them as much as saying, just tough luck.

Religion was vitally important. Holy pictures hanging in the kitchen and every night the rosary said. I remember the kneeling down, it was a tiled floor and it was very cold, there was just one fire and just one lamp — no electricity — and there were mice. They used to come out of the shoe closet. We’d be kneeling, praying and my mother would jump up screaming because of the mice.

Then we went to Mass, of course, Holy Communion and Confession. The religious life wasn’t as in other countries where people pray and wear medals and all that – it was, so to speak, part of one’s fears, and feelings and fantasies and everything about sexual desires were all smothered over.

I remember once seeing a couple who had been courting for five or ten years. They never met except on Sunday in the afternoon, they would go for a walk – she was quite fat, this woman, she had a kind of bustle – and I remember once hearing the man, he sort of touched her on the back and said, “You have a big backside.” I thought it was the most sinful thing I had ever heard. I did not think it was crude though. I thought it was sinful. That’s how regressive it was.

The women – I can remember them all very clearly in my mind. I can go up the street of the village I lived in and think of them all swathed in clothes and knitted stockings. I think that’s where I must have conceived some love of glamour, because there was no glamour at all. Glamour was a ticket to “you know what,” to sin. So that formed part of my character and part of my fear.

I think that a lot of people who leave Ireland, and indeed many who stay there, have that [love-hate] syndrome. Love-hate seems to apply more to Ireland than to any other country. It’s amazing because it does haunt you. You do want to go back and at the same time, when you go back, you realize that you feel constrained and constricted.

John Cardinal O’Connor

By Niall O’Dowd

John Cardinal O’Connor was installed as Archbishop of New York in March, 1984, and elevated to Cardinal in May, 1985.

He was born, the fourth of five children, in a row house in a blue-collar Philadelphia neighborhood on January 15, 1920. After ordination, he worked as a diocesan priest before joining the Navy. He served as a chaplain in both the Korean and Vietnam Wars. When he retired from the Navy after 27 years, he had risen to the rank of Rear Admiral and Chief of Chaplains of the Armed Forces. During his years in the Archdiocese of New York, Cardinal O’Connor ministered to both the rich and to the poor. He took his Irish heritage seriously and worked for peace in Northern Ireland. One of his proudest moments came in 1995 when he was Grand Marshal of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in New York.

Were you conscious of your Irish roots growing up?

Oh my goodness yes. My father was the youngest of thirteen children. He was the only one born here in the United States. He was born shortly after the family moved here. You’d have thought that Parnell was his brother-in-law the way he talked about him. So I grew up Irish, as did so many kids in the old days in the great Irish cities.

I think that in my student years I was very conscious of my Irish heritage. I became immersed in the works of Patrick Pearse, Joseph Mary Plunkett, Padraic Colum, the Irish poets and essayists of the day. They gave me a certain intensity of feeling about the country. It’s pretty difficult to read something like Pearse’s poem “The Fool” without getting all stirred up about it.

What was it about your visit to Ireland that made you feel like becoming more active on the Irish question?

You use the word feel and I think it's an appropriate word. I think intellectual analysis and academic exercises and discussions don't do quite the same thing, for no matter how many such discussions you engage in, if you don't get the feel of injustice then I don't think you will have the commitment to try and change the situation.

I was very much disturbed in a session that we had with the Northern Ireland Development Board. . . . I got the impression that the moment we began talking about discrimination against Catholics a chill entered the air and there was a pretense that such was not the case, or that it could all be rationalized, that it was a matter of geographical location or that it was a matter of the ghettos in which they lived. I think one of the bishops mentioned The MacBride Principles, and that seemed to cause a great eruption.

You know if my father had one passion above all else, it was one of justice towards the working man. He could tolerate no injustices, particularly on the part of big industry. He would tell story after story of the exploitations of workers, coal miners in Pennsylvania for example. He was a great union advocate. That’s in my blood, and when I sat with this group and they tried to tell me that everything was fair and equitable, that there was no basic injustice – it had all been washed away – it just distressed me very much.

Maureen O’Hara

By Patricia Harty

Known for her remarkable beauty and her fiery screen persona, Maureen O’Hara was born Maureen FitzSimons in County Dublin in 1920. One of six children, O’Hara began acting at age six with the encouragement of her parents. At 16 she joined the Abbey Players, and shortly thereafter she was “discovered” by actor Charles Laughton who took her to London.

She made her first movie, Jamaica Inn, with legendary director Alfred Hitchcock. Soon after O’Hara’s arrival in Hollywood she was “sold” to RKO. It was director John Ford who gave her a chance to prove herself a great actress. Their first movie together, How Green Was My Valley, won a total of five Academy Awards. In all she made 60 movies, five with Ford, who used her as his muse for The Quiet Man.

In her own words, she said, “I acted, punched, swashbuckled, and shot my way through an absurdly masculine profession.” Patricia Harty talked to O’Hara in March 2004, on the publication of her biography ’Tis Herself.

Why do you think The Quiet Man is still so popular with Irish-Americans?

Not just Irish-Americans, it has a particular effect for Japanese, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, American, Canadians, and South Americans.

Everybody in the world loves it because it is a story that could have happened in any country.

If you were to sum up John Wayne in a sentence . . .

Such a fine man is very hard to sum up in one sentence. He loved his family, adored his kids and was very loyal to his friends. He never let a friend down even if it meant putting himself in danger.

Director John Ford was quite abusive and, in fact, he even socked you one time.

He was very abusive to almost every actor who ever worked for him. Every stunt man, every mechanic and every lighting man. He was abusive if it suited him and what he was after. But he was a genius. He was the finest director any of us ever worked with, and we were proud to work with him and work for him.

But sometimes it was terrible. One day on Rio Grande he was being so awful to John Wayne, just belittling and terrible, and Wayne just stood there with his head down and took it. I thought “Give it to him. Sock him in the jaw.” But Wayne didn’t.

You have said that the publicity department created Maureen O’Hara.

Not just Maureen O’Hara, any actor who was under contract to a studio. The publicity people were ordered by the studio to see to it that your name was in the paper every day. So they had to think up a lot of phony stories. One time I read that I’d been bitten by a spider, and it never happened at all.

So you didn’t always have control over what you wanted to do.

We were the property of the studio and they felt that we had to do what they told us to do. If you refused they had the right to suspend you. And suspending you meant they put you off salary for the duration of the time it took to replace you, shoot the movie and finish it. That made it kind of difficult to pay your grocery bill.

Would you say the love of your life was your husband Charlie Blair?

Yes. He flew the first land plane with passengers and mail non-stop from the United States to Shannon. And the plane he went over the pole with is in the Smithsonian, and another of his planes is in a New England museum.

If you had to do it all over again, is there anything you would do differently?

There are a couple of things I wouldn’t do, but I wouldn’t change my life. My career just came like a flood and swept over me and I didn’t get to finish things I really wanted to do. I would love to have sung just one opera. I would have loved to sing Carmen. I would still go for a dramatic career, because that was what I wanted, that was what I planned and that’s what I got.

What’s next?

Staying alive. And of course if some fantastic script came along it would be great.

Gregory Peck

By Patricia Harty

Gregory Peck appeared in some 55 movies, received five Academy Award nominations, and won an Oscar for the role of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, which he also produced.

Sitting across from me in black turtleneck, cardigan, and corduroy pants, sporting a beard, Peck at 81 looks strikingly handsome on this June afternoon. The Southern California sun shines in on the Peck family living room, a luxurious mix of overstuffed sofas, fine antiques, paintings (including a small Renoir) and photographs: of Peck’s mother Bunny on her 75th birthday, from whom he inherited his good looks; of his father (who bestowed on him his eyebrows); of two couples, the men in top hats – Peck, his pal David Niven and their wives at the Ascot races. And in the middle a large photograph of a group with unmistakably Irish faces – 30 cousins gathered for one of Peck’s visits to Kerry.

On the desk in his study sits a clay model of the Statue of Liberty, “to remind me that my grandmother and my dad came through Ellis Island.” With that in mind we begin our conversation with talk of a trip to Ireland.

Did you feel in touch with your ancestors in Ireland?

I did. I saw my father everywhere.

He was born in the U.S., in Rochester, but his American father died quickly from diphtheria. So my grandmother took her infant son back to the family farm in Ireland. They came back when he was about ten, and stayed.

He always had a bit of a brogue, and he loved to tell stories. He used to talk about being a boy in Ireland and say that there was no entertainment other than telling stories or singing a song, or once in a while going by horsecart to Dingle.

My father was a jokester. When he was really getting on, 76, 77, with white hair, he loved to drive into gas stations, fill up, and hand them his credit card. I was already well known in the films by that time. The attendant would look at the old boy and say, “You’re Gregory Peck!” My dad would say, “Oh yes, but I’ve not been at all well lately.” That was typical of my dad.

You’re a cousin of Thomas Ashe, who took part in the Rising and died from force-feeding while on hunger strike.

He was a patriot. Multi-talented too. He wrote poetry, he was a bagpiper, he was a teacher. Once, years ago, we hired one of the carriages by the Plaza Hotel to ride around Central Park on my wife’s first visit to this country. The carriage driver said, “Mr. Peck, I’ve heard that you’ve got a bit of the Irish.” I said, “Yes, I have an Irish grandmother, and my father lived there as a boy.” He said, “That was County Kerry, wasn’t it?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “Well, the portrait of one of your cousins, Thomas Ashe, is hanging in a place of honor in a bar in Queens.” I went out there and sure enough, in this obscure bar in Queens, there is, not a very good painting, but it has in bold letters, “Thomas Ashe the Patriot.”

What are your memories of working on To Kill a Mockingbird?

It seems to me, looking back on it, that we were in a state of grace. We seemed to be riding along on a stream or current in a river of emotional involvement with the characters so that the acting almost took care of itself. We were emotionally immersed in telling that story through those characters. I think we filmed it in only ten weeks. I could hardly wait to get to work in the morning.

Your first visit to Ireland was to work with John Huston on Moby Dick.

We filmed in Youghal. We were there because it was John’s Irish period. It was definitely the wrong place to go out to sea looking for whales. There were no whales in the Irish Sea. But John wanted it to have some kind of Irish connection. It really was a struggle. We always said that John Huston tried to kill all his leading men.

We went out day after day from Fishguard, four, five, six miles at sea with our mechanical whale, which was about 65-70 feet long. On a day with very rough seas, a fog bank coming toward us, very dark, ominous skies, we had no business being out there. The tow line broke on the back of the whale. I was slipping and sliding trying to hold on. I wasn’t fastened to anything, as I just drifted off into this fog bank. I knew that I wouldn’t last long if I slipped off into the water, which was very cold, and I certainly didn’t know which direction to swim in, Ireland was one way, Wales another. I did actually think I could die. I imagined the Mirror in London: “Movie Actor Lost on Rubber Whale.” It went on for about 20 minutes, but it seemed like an age, before I was rescued.

Did you ever work with John Ford?

No. He had Fonda, Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, he had his stock company. He didn’t need me. I made a Western called The Gunfighter which was quite good. I won the Silver Spurs award in Reno, Nevada, as the Best Movie Cowboy of the Year.

I went up to get my silver spurs and one of the first people I saw when I came back was John Wayne. He said, “Well, who the hell decided that you were the best cowboy of the year?” and I said, “Well, Marion, you can’t win it every year.”

Gregory Peck died in June, 2003.

He was 87.

Martin Sheen

By Tom Dunphy

He was born Ramon Estevez, the seventh of ten siblings, nine boys and a girl, on August 3, 1940 in Dayton to a Spanish-born father and Irish-born mother (“she taught me all the Irish songs”). Estevez took the stage name Martin Sheen upon moving to New York in the early 1960s to pursue acting. (“Martin” came from the last name of a casting director friend; “Sheen” from the ubiquitous TV bishop.) Unlike countless other Hollywood types, Sheen has been married to his wife, Janet, for over 40 years. And he is patriarch of an acting family — daughter Renee Estevez and sons Emilio and Ramon Estevez and Charlie Sheen have achieved varying degrees of fame, and infamy.

Martin Sheen has good reason to laugh these days. His TV series, The West Wing, is a critical and ratings success, and has given Sheen a career boost as he enters his fifth decade of acting. Sheen plays President Josiah “Jed” Bartlet, a blunt, common-sense pragmatist who wrestles with his presidential decisions and his faith.

“They’ve allowed me my Catholicism, which places the issues we raise on the show in a moral frame of reference,” says Sheen. “To see the most powerful man in the world get down on the floor of the Oval Office and ask forgiveness for his sins — finally I got to do something personal.”

Why does Sheen think West Wing has resonated so strongly with the American public? “I think we are causing public debate on some very undebated issues,” he contends. “We’re talking about gun violence, about justice, about racism, about the environment, about these issues that touch us. I think that’s what people are responding to.”

Martin Sheen has made cinematic forays into the White House into somewhat of a personal cottage industry. In addition to his Bartlet character, Sheen played chief-of-staff A.J. McInerney in the 1995 feature film The American President, John F. Kennedy in the 1983 miniseries Kennedy, and Bobby Kennedy in the 1974 miniseries The Missiles of October.

Sheen has few regrets, but portraying Jack Kennedy is one of them. “It shouldn’t have been done, quite frankly. I was ill-prepared, the company was ill-prepared. He’s too big an icon to portray. It was hopeless,” he says.

Sheen turns downright evangelical in talking about the late president. “The image of that brilliant, handsome man, that young father — Kennedy sparked an energy, enthusiasm, idealism. He changed the world! He’d express an idea and it became policy. He said, ‘We’re going to the moon,’ and we got there in less than ten years! He willed it.

“The main ingredient of his administration was confidence,” continues Sheen. “He was like a cocky, streetwise Irishman. He knew he pissed some people off. He had a knowledge of the media, and he played it like a piper. He knew exactly how to get them to dance to his tune. He was charming and brilliant, and people were in love with him and he knew it.”

Playing the Kennedy brothers had a great effect on Sheen, and he still mourns their loss. “That family is indelibly etched in my heart,” he says. “JFK’s death was bad enough, then Reverend King, which was another massive wound, then Bobby. This country is still crippled by their deaths. Crippled! We lost Bobby, and got Richard Nixon. Gimme a break. We never got over Nixon.”

Martin Sheen is a man who acknowledges — and celebrates — his Irish roots. He keeps a home in County Tipperary and holds an Irish passport (in addition to his American one). “I love Ireland,” Sheen says. “I think I love it too much.

“Ireland is one of the few countries in Europe that has never invaded anyone, never beat anyone up — except when they fought the British — but Ireland has never conquered anyone,” Sheen says. “What Irish flag was ever planted on foreign soil and claimed for itself? None.

“They sent missionaries, they sent writers, they sent artists, they sent nuns, they sent teachers into the world. Which is far more powerful,” he says. “I love to go to other parts of the world and meet Irish people. You go to some of the worst situations in the third world and you’ll find Irish nuns, Irish doctors, you meet Irish priests, Irish lay people serving. You say to them, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ and they’ll say, ‘Sure, why not?’ It makes perfect sense.”

His late mother, the former Mary Ann Phelan, fostered a sense of Irishness in the Estevez home. “She was so feisty, so cocky. I learned all the Irish songs from her,” says Sheen fondly.

Sheen is well acquainted with Northern Ireland politics, and is not afraid to opine on the topic. “If David Trimble had half — a third — of the courage Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams have, we wouldn’t be where we are today,” he says. “I’m terribly proud of Clinton’s foreign policy. I could nitpick, I suppose. But we would not have a Good Friday Accord if not for the president. He took some real chances.”

Jack Welch

By Patricia Harty

Jack Welch is arguably the most famous CEO in the world. During his 20-year reign as the head of General Electric the company’s market value grew from $13 billion to $500 billion. During our interview in the GE building, in October, 2001, Welch is by turns beguiling, sentimental and impatient. His parting gift to me is a copy of the Financial Times (if I knew more about business, I would more readily understand his philosophy!).

The final deal of Welch’s tenure as CEO fell through because of the European Commission’s antitrust ruling on the GE/Honeywell merger. He bears no animosity, he says. “Business is a game – if you are not tough enough, don’t weep on the sidelines. Go and find a game that you are good at.”

You’ve been called the toughest boss in America. Would you agree with that?

I’d like to call it tough-minded. Then I can’t argue one way or the other. The facts are that I was the first one to do what we had to do as a country. There’s 100,000 people being laid off in dot-coms – being laid off in industry after industry after industry. You don’t see big announcements from GE.

The practice of getting rid of the bottom ten percent. It sort of worries me a little bit.

Go ahead, let it worry you. It doesn’t bother me, because they’ll go to work for some other place where they’ll be happier. Companies don’t give job security, only satisfied customers do. If you don’t have customers, then you don’t have income.

In your book you credit your mother with instilling this drive in you.

Well, she was a smart, into-everything woman who I was born late in life to. I was an only child. She was my best friend. So if things didn’t go right I’d talk to her about them, talk to her about my girlfriends, talk to her about everything. She was my buddy, my manager, my critic. She was everything. She taught me to play to win, but know how to lose. Although she was never short of whacking me one if she thought I was too strict with my own kids or something. She was always right there. She was fantastic.

Where did your mother’s desire to see you succeed come from?

Well, she had a lot of brothers and a couple of them drank too much and were always getting in trouble. She had to sneak some of my father’s money to get them out of trouble. I don’t know where it [the drive] came from. My father was first-generation but my mother had been here a while. Her great-great-grandmother came here in 1810 or something. I wonder why my mother didn’t do better in school. I wonder why she and her family didn’t progress further. They’d been here like three generations. And she was the smartest one in the area.

She was third-generation, but she still seemed Irish to you.

Totally Irish. And she always said there were only two kinds of people, those who are Irish and those who wish they were Irish. I mean, it was bred into my toes.

Do you think that Ireland will manage to hang on to the Celtic Tiger?

Ireland’s going to have to have more of an entrepreneurial outlook. Ireland is now a HAVE versus twenty-five years ago a HAVE NOT. That means jobs will migrate from Ireland while Ireland’s intellect will have to improve. Ireland will have to start a lot of its own businesses. When I was there I read that Gateway was moving out of Ireland, too high cost. Well, that’s what happens when you win, you get to be a HAVE, the jobs get to be expensive. Unemployment comes.

What would you say to these people out in Seattle and elsewhere who are protesting globalization?

I don’t know what I’d say to them because the only ones that make any sense to me are the labor unions in the developed countries. If I’m a labor union in America, I’m concerned I’m going to lose some jobs. If I’m an environmentalist, though, I know that if the good companies of the world go to the undeveloped areas, they’ll improve the environment. Now, you can use statistics any way you want, and say the rich have gotten richer, and the gap has widened. But the bottom has come up. Ireland is a perfect example.

Do you think that GE is getting a bad rap on PCBs? (A liquid chemical which GE used prior to 1977 became the focal point of a massive Hudson River dredging proposal by the Environmental Protection Agency).

Totally. Go and look out the window at that river and try dredging 8 billion pounds to find a few molecules down there. It’s cleaning itself by 90 percent in the last 15 years. I make the case in my book, I put it clearly, nobody’s argued the case yet.

GE owns NBC. What would you say to critics who say that big business doesn’t belong in the media industry?

If you look at the PCB stories, our network has done about five to one compared to the other ones. Just to prove that point to people like you.