“Speaking,” I said.
“The fans here want to know if they could send a delegation of three up to your room to get signatures and pictures for all of them.”
“Three?” I asked.
“Yes sir,” sez he.
“Send them all up.”
“But there’s more than twenty of them,” he protested.
“That’s okay,” sez I.
“It’s your funeral, Mr. Harris,” sez he.
In the bathroom, the star-turned-singer had launched into the song “How to Handle a Woman,” from Camelot. When the bell rang and I opened the door, Harris warbling in the background, I was faced with about an acre of wide eyes and acne. I invited them all in and told them to make themselves comfortable and to help themselves to anything at the bar. I asked them to tell Mr. Harris that Mr. McCourt was called away on some urgent business and then I left.
When Harris regained his sense of humor and resumed speaking to me, he told me that he’d walked out of the bathroom bollox naked to discover that a considerable number of the citizens of New York were comfortably ensconced in his hotel room. He was not too amused by my prank, but I explained to him ’twas a small price to pay for having left me in jail overnight in California.
’Twas about then that I was temporarily rescued from the suffocating torpor of the saloon. One day, a very well-dressed man approached me at Himself and said he would like to talk to me about hosting a television show. There was a need, he said, for a natural kind of chat show with some humor and bite to it. I admit to having peered about to make sure he was talking to me, and indeed he was. I said I’d be delighted to do it and hands were shook and commitments made.
As it turned out, the first show had to be taped in California, because by the time I was scheduled to go on the air, I had fortuitously become involved in a movie as well. Richard Harris had introduced me to Marty Ritt and Walter Bernstein, a couple of stalwart survivors of the blacklist in the McCarthy years, who were now making a movie called The Molly Maguires.
The Molly Maguires were a group of Irish coal miners in Pennsylvania in the 1860s. They suffered the usual economic terrorism at the hands of the mine owners, and when they attempted to organize, they were brutalized and fired. ’Twas said they had resorted to the bit of sabotage, and knocking off an occasional payroll, and for this some of them were arrested and hanged.
Sean Connery played the leader of the Molly Maguires (the name, by the way, lifted from a secret society in Ireland who were said to dress as women so as to escape detection when they made their forays against the Brit landlords), a man by the name of Black Jack Kehoe. Richard Harris played James McPartlan, an Irishman and an informer, who was paid to infiltrate the group and report on their doings.
Paramount Pictures took over a little village called Eckley in Pennsylvania, where little was required to take it back to looking as it looked in 1860 except to bury some telephone wires and spread some coal dust on the dirt road. On either side of this rough little road were still standing old company houses, little cabins, each with a garden patch complete with the outside lavatory in back. They had small porches out front, and on good days ’twas not unusual to see a retired miner sitting there coughing what was left of his life away, now that the coal dust had done the dirty work of destroying his lungs.
Pneumoconiosis is the doctors’ name for this incurable disease, otherwise known as black lung, or silicosis. I was fascinated by these men, who spoke proudly of being miners, never regretting working in the nether regions, but dying all the while. They couldn’t get comfortable, these old men, either sitting up or lying down, and their breathing was so tortured it caused palpitations in my own chest from my empathetic efforts to help their respiration.
Just as surely as those miners’ lungs had been destroyed by their years in the mines, parts of that beautiful country had been destroyed by strip mining. Thousands of tons of coal dust had been spread over thousands of acres of lovely green land, giving stretches of it an appearance not that different from the surface of the moon. Though it was an abomination to the environment, it gave Marty Ritt a wonderful opportunity to shoot an oddly colorful but dead and deadly landscape.
So, to this forgotten town came a film company with lights, generators, rain-making equipment, cameras, trailers, a hundred or so crew members, and the actors Connery, Harris, Brendan Dillon, the beautiful Samantha Eggar, Bethel Leslie, Frances Heflin, the terrifically talented Anthony Zerbe, the huge Art Lund, and a grand actor named Frank Finlay who came over from Britain to play the part of the evil police chief. I had been cast as—what a surprise!—the local saloon keeper, in whose premises the Molly Maguires plotted their dastardly doings. My part had me attending wakes and going to mass to hear the priest condemn secret societies like the Mollies because, as usual, the Church was in cahoots with the capitalistic savages who were murdering the miners.
I also had to referee a strange football-like game invented for this film, a combination of soccer, rugby, basketball, boxing, wrestling, and mayhem. We played that scene on a blistering hot July day, on a field bereft of grass and rock hard. We were all dressed in the heavy woolens of the period, resulting in people falling down from heat stroke and exhaustion. To end the game, I was instructed by the director to run to a certain spot, look down the field, look at my pocket watch, blow my whistle, and wave my arms. I was so confused with heat and dust that, when I got to the designated spot, I took out the whistle, looked at it, and then attempted to blow the watch, which caused a huge hoot of laughter amongst the hundreds of spectators and players.
It was a most convivial company, with most of the shooting taking place during the day, and dining out and storytelling in the evenings. Marty Ritt had his story of being blacklisted and anecdotes brought back from Hollywood. Walter Bernstein had been in the army during the Second World War, on the staff of The Stars and Stripes, and had slogged his way through German-occupied Yugoslavia to get an interview with one Josip Broz, a.k.a. Marshal Tito. Of course, he had his own blacklist stories, and let us know that his screenplay for The Molly Maguires was a metaphor for informers like Elia Kazan and others who had squealed to the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Sean Connery was quite the reserved type until he decided you were safe enough to talk to, but turned out to be one of the best storytellers of all, especially about his early days in choruses of South Pacific and other musicals. He had a good self-deprecating sense of humor. He was married then to a rather fiery actress named Diane Cilento, and they had a small son named Jason; they arrived to join Sean sometime after the film began.
Although provided with a driver, Connery always chose to drive himself. One morning, he arrived on the set with the windshield of his car smashed to smithereens, and he went on and on about how a body can’t even park a car in a rural area these days without some goddamn vandal doing it damage, and if he caught whoever it was they were going to have their asses kicked good and proper.
We all made the usual murmuring sounds of sympathy and went about our business. Came lunchtime and we were joined by little Jason Connery, who, when we were all gathered around the table, piped up in his English accent, “Daddy, Mummy was so very angry to break the window in your car. Why did she do that?”
Sean whisked the lad away so fast we never heard the rest of the story.
It was altogether a pleasant summer, as Diana and Conor were able to come and live with me in a rented house. Some members of the company had set up a daycare center, so our lively three-year-old boy was kept occupied.
When you are on location with a movie company, there is a womblike quality to life itself. The film becomes the whole of your existence, and when you have a reasonable part you are well taken care of. They drive you back and forth, they feed you, they clothe you, all medical needs are met, with the result that you shut out the world and all its turbulences and troubles because you are too occupied with wondering if your closeup shots are going to be in the final cut.
That year was a strange one,