Moby Dick, filmed on location in 1954 in Youghal, County Cork, directed by John Houston, was released in 1956, the year I was born and as they say in the movies.. 'Tha'r she blows'.... me and the great white whale... so much in common... both 64 years of age this week, one extinct, the other, well, a bit of a relic.
After he had finished making the blockbuster movie, Moby Dick, John Huston came to live in St. Clerans House, a former 'Burkes of Clanricard' dowager house, just three miles from Loughrea, but only a mile and a half from the kennels of The Galway Blazers. He invited many stars of the day to stay with him including Paul Newman and Jean Paul Sartre.
I imagined he had come to Loughrea to keep an eye on my progress, and in his spare time to drink expensive wines and 'cocktails' in Loughrea's unique tavern, Aggie Maddens, which catered for his guests every need., and of course as 'Master of the Hunt', he showed his prowess as a fearless hunter, riding over the stone walls of Galway with the notorious Galway Blazers fox hunt, which role he held from 1960-71
He also sponsored cups and trophies for everything from fishing on the lake to drama festivals in the Temperance Hall. Every town needs a benefactor, and Loughrea and district were truly fortunate to have attracted Huston.
His daughter Anjelica Huston, went to school in the Mercy Convent in Loughrea, an ordinary, unassuming, unpampered child, like any other child in the school, and somewhere along the way, she began hanging out with my older sisters, doing sleep-overs, while keeping an eye on my progress, and giving me acting lessons... well not really, only I wish.
I remember well though, acting with Anjelica in my sisters' staging, in a stable in our back-yard of 'Hansel and Gretel', on an improvised stage, a long pine kitchen table that my father had bought at the auction before the state-inspired dereliction of Dunsandle house, home to the Bowes-Dalys, another Clanricarde connection.
We performed their self-scripted play to a crowd of about thirty kids from the town, who were charged tuppence each for the privilege of watching them, but more importantly, me, on my acting debut in the old stable in our back-yard, with John Huston directing, around 1961.
I wore a yellow chicken suit that John Huston had specially made for me in Hollywood. All the costumes were professionally tailored by movie-studio seamstresses, and flown in for our play by the great director himself.
I played the important supporting role of the bird that ate the bread that Hansel and Gretel laid as a trail in the woods so they could find their way home, but without the bread-trail, they got lost, and called into the witch in the Ginger-bread house, and the rest is, well a rather Grimm fairy tale.
The show was a resounding success and launched Anjelica onto the world stage in roles in Prizzi's Honor, Enemies, A love story, The Grifters, The Witches, The Addams Family, Crimes and Misdemeanors, and of course, The Dead, and many, many more films and TV shows, eventually becoming a successful director in her own right, following in her father’s footsteps.
By the time our run of two shows of Hansel and Gretel was over I reckon I'd eaten a whole sliced pan, and the yellow fluffy suit no longer fitted so good.I don't remember who played which roles, one of my sisters and Anjelica played Hansel and Gretel, but I will always remember that yellow chicken suit, now long gone, having been worn in as dress-up by dozens of kids from the neighborhood, especially at Halloween, and frankly my dear, none of whom filled my chicken feet worth a damn.
Anjelica's mother, Enrica Soma, was tragically killed in a car accident in Dijon, France in 1969. Anjelica was sent off as a boarder to Kylemore Abbey, to be finished off as a young lady, and John sold off the house in 1971, and moved back to the USA.
I felt a void in my life after the Hustons left town ...it wasn't that they didn't care about me any more, just John had more pressing engagements, and divorces, to be getting on with.
In his autobiography he wrote of being married five times, four times to beautiful women and once to an alligator (4 divorces, 1 death, Enrica was not the alligator).
I visited St. Clerans only once, as a young teenager, just before the house was sold in 1971.
A Mrs. Creagh, whom my dad knew through greyhound circles, was Huston's housekeeper, or secretary, I'm not sure what her role was exactly, but for some reason, she showed my dad and I around the palatial 'Big House'.
Barrett Brothers, Painting Contractors from Loughrea, had just finished painting the rooms downstairs and the house was truly stunning. Unlike most houses in Ireland back then, there wasn't a hint of magnolia, nor a roll of wall-paper anywhere, just beautifully painted stuccoed walls, brightly lit by enormous windows that looked out on gloriously manicured grounds. Huston's wife had done a magnificent job in lovingly restoring the old manor house, which had Huston not bought it, would have gone the way of hundreds of Galway's stately houses, being deliberately de-roofed and destroyed by the State through a deadly combination of taxes, greed and revenge.
I was probably 13 years of age, and I was awestruck.
The house was simultaneously alien and stunning. I remember vividly imagining myself lazing in the Japanese sunken bath, surrounded by sliding silken screens. It was at once decadent and delicious, and as big as a swimming pool, I thought.
I immaturely imagined bathing there, but my then uninformed imagination in 1971 was unable to process the rich lifestyle that went along with such trappings.
There were collections of art and antiques all over the house, from Africa, South America, Mexico, Japan and Ireland. John Huston collected art wherever he made a movie.
One decorative display remains with me to this day, two stunningly-beautiful, kingfisher or humming bird, azure-blue Inca/Aztec lifesize feather costumes or capes hung on the walls of the large reception hall. I had never imagined such beauty, from such delicate material. I imagined Montezuma's priests wearing such glorious garb as they cut the hearts out of their sacrificial victims atop their pyramids.
Those feathered costumes were showpieces of Huston's incredible collection of primitive Inca, Aztec and African carvings and figurines which filled the display cases that lined several corridors in the house. It was a museum and an art gallery... and a loving home as well.
Everybody should be exposed to art, certainly that afternoon had a lasting effect on me, book-ending my up to then appreciation of Irish art and treasures which I had seen in the National Museum in Dublin.
St. Cleran's was nothing like our home... it was a palace. Unfortunately after 1971, the house went through a succession of owners who 'lacked the class' for such a gem, one of them even concreted in the sunken bath!
Fortunately, St. Clerans became a palace again when millionaire Merve Griffin bought it as a trophy hotel and made it into a very high class resort. It is a private home now, owned by a Galway entrepreneur, still beautiful, still stately.
My acting career took a nose-dive thereafter.
The last two Irish-made movies with any Huston connection didn't include me, as I was too young to act in them. 'Alfred The Great', and 'The Dead'.
Every man and older boy in Loughrea got a role as an extra in 'Alfred The Great', playing Saxon and Viking warriors in big fight scenes, precursors of similar battlefield scenes in Game of Thrones and Vikings and Saving Private Ryan. I am unsure if there was any Huston involvement in the making of Alfred the Great, but the coincidence of location and timing alone would lead me to think that their choice of Kilchreest, in east Galway for their studio was no coincidence.
Alfred the Great was filmed in a big, purpose built studio, a huge shed beside the ruined Norman castle in Kilchreest, just 3 miles from St. Clerans House. The locals were paid five pounds a day and got to grow the first 'Conor McGregor beards' in Ireland. One enterprising fella even made money selling them big toads from the bog for one of the scenes.
The extras in 'Moby Dick' got thirty shillings a day, (one pound and ten shillings), an unheard of sum in 1954 that made penny millionaires of many of them, y'know Cork people! Not so many Loughrea lads became wealthy working in 'in Alfred the Great'. The seventies had just dawned and they spent all their hard-earned cash on beer and Planxty concerts.
Anjelica Huston starred in 'The Dead', which was directed by her father John Huston, and her older brother Tony Huston, who also lived in St. Clerans and went to school in Loughrea, though I have no memory of him.
'The Dead' is a classic Irish movie with a cameo singing appearance by Frank Patterson, playing an autobiographic role, as the celebrated tenor, Bartell D’Arcy, yes, surely a play on one of the tribes of Galway.
Patterson co-incidentally, lived in Bronxville, NY, when Mary and I lived there in 1989. We met him a few times before he died and he once recounted to me a few anecdotes about making 'The Dead' which is based on the final story in James Joyce's book of short stories, 'Dubliners'.
It recounts the story of a couple, Gabriel and Gretta Conroy, attending a New Year's soiree in Dublin. Gretta, played by Anjelica, is a direct play on Joyce's wife, Nora Barnacle. Her real-life first love, a teenage crush on a young student in Galway, comes to the fore when after listening to Patterson's rendition of 'The Lass of Aughrim' Gretta breaks down crying uncontrollably. Joyce masterfully tracks the tragic, inevitable death of a marriage, metaphorically portrayed by Anjelica's weeping for the loss of her character's first love, Michael Furey, aka the student Michael Bodkin, from Prospect Hill, in Galway, who died of consumption having caught a cold singing to the real life Nora before she left Bowling Green for Dublin and her fateful date with Joyce on the 16th of June, 1904, Bloomsday, which we celebrate annually, to this day.
Huston loved that tale and making that movie was his final directors role. He died as it was being edited. The Huston School of Film at NUIG, endowed by the Huston family, is his living testament to his time spent in Ireland.
Anyway, the great white whale of Melville's imagination, the star-struck box-office acting career of my youthful imagination, and Aggie Madden's pub in Loughrea are all distant memories now. Maybe just as well.
