Crisis in the Redfellow diaspora

Redfellow Hovel was over-populated with grandchildren over the holiday period. The Redfellow menage and its paintwork largely survived.

Now, comes brave news.

One of the outings was to Billy Elliot, the Musical.

As a result, two New Jersey grade-school children have returned home to share a song with their fellows. It goes like this:

So, merry Christmas, Maggie Thatcher:
May God's love be with you.
We all sing together in one breath
"Merry Christmas Maggie Thatcher".
We all celebrate today,
'Cause it's one day closer to your death.

Probably their other grandfather, a good comrade out of Brooklyn, would not wholly disapprove. He might need a concordance to recognise the minor politico tagged in the punchline:

Oh my darling, oh my darling,
Oh my darling Heseltine:
You're a tosser, you're a tosser
And you're just a Tory Swine.

The Pert Young Piece sardonically adds that it's just as well they haven't yet found the DVD of Brassed Off, with Mr Chuckles's speech on God and the Tory Party.

Ah, there's not much wrong with the kids of today.

Sphere: Related Content

The not-so-good and the not-so-great, number 20: Dorothy Phillips

Let Malcolm sidle up on this one.

The Irish Times has a tradition of fine and ironic writing. So Anne Marie Hourihane is under pressure to meet the norm in her TV review column for the Weekend Review. Beside a picture of Brendan Gleeson depicting Winston Churchill in Into the Storm, we get a paragraph:

He was his country's saviour -- although his country was far too reticent to say so. His predictions of disaster went unheard. In the end, of course, he was vindicated. Indeed, as the international landscape darkened, he became a beacon both of hope and of certainty. During the early days of the conflict, a bewildered population gathered each evening to hear his famous broadcasts to the nation. And then he went and joined Fine Gael.

The reference there, of course, is George Lee, recently RTÉ's Economic Editor, who suddenly transmogrified into the FG candidate for the Dublin South-East by-election. It had been a Fianna Fáil seat: the top two places on the first ballot were both Fianna Fáil. Fine Gael were a poor third and fifth. In the by-election FF staggered in third, with less than 18% of the vote. The people's heart-throb was George, swept home on the first count with 53.4% of the vote. Lee is currently the face fronting a three-parter about the fall of the Wall.

But that's not the point: merely an explanation for the diaspora who might not be fully up-to-date.

What piqued Malcolm was the delectable Anne Marie's wind-up (ambiguously so) on the Churchill bio-pic:

Churchill was a man who created himself and wrote his own scripts. the makers of Into the Storm were wise enough to draw heavily on his speeches, and to show how much trouble he took in constructing them. It was Churchill, for example, who first came up with the term "Iron Curtain" to describe the division between the West and the Soviet Union.

Well, no, actually. It was Joseph Goebbels, on 25th January, 1945, in Das Reich.
Iron curtain

The Oxford English Dictionary has the term back to 1794, referring to the theatre's safety curtain. There's a frolic on wikipedia taking it back to the Babylonian captivity. When the OED considers the metaphorical usage, to imply an "impenetrable barrier" (the Churchillian implication), that's when it gets interesting, and finally brings us to Dorothy Phillips:

1819 EARL OF MUNSTER Jrnl. Route across India 1817-18 iv. 58 On the 19th November we crossed the river Betwah, and as if an iron curtain had dropt between us and the avenging angel, the deaths diminished.

The Earl of Munster? Who he?

He was George Augustus Frederick FitzClarence, who would have been in his early 20s when he wrote that Journal cited by the OED, the eldest "natural" (as they say) son of Prince William, third son of George III, and his long-term live-in lady friend (ta-rah! at last!), Dorothy Jordan. We'll come to him in the next "episode". For now, let's focus on her, at the top of this post: quite a looker. Several distinguished bods can claim descent from that unsanctified relationship: they include Adam Hart-Davis (the TV presenter), Oliver Reed (the actor) and David Cameron (the would-be Prime Minister).

Dorothy Jordan

She was born close by Covent Garden in 1761. Her parents were Captain Francis Bland (who, as we shall see, is the Irish connection) and an actress, Grace Phillips, herself a parson's daughter from West Wales (who may well be a TCD-man, Scudamore Phillips). Captain Bland subsequently married another lady, Catharine Mahoney of Killarney, which was held to be legal: it is asserted by Burke's Irish Records there was a previous Catholic marriage between Bland and Grace, before either was of legal age.

Francis Bland -- let's stick with him for a trice -- was the son (by a second marriage) of the Rev. Nathaniel Bland of Derriquin Castle in the County Kerry, another TCD man who held a series of appointments as an Irish Church lawyer. Francis Bland's relationship with Grace lasted from 1760 to 1774, and produced perhaps nine children. It appears that the Blands paid off Grace, on the basis that she didn't use the Bland surname for her children.

So Dorothy Phillips (as she began) had to make her own way in the world, and her only obvious profession was ... well, on the stage. It seems that the casting couch is not an invention of Hollywood. She was soon involved with Richard Daly, yet another TCD-man, who briefly built himself a monopoly of the Irish theatre (including the Smock Alley Theatre, from which the Macready dynasty would spring). The Phillips-Daly liaison produced one child, but, since pregnant women had to have courtesy titles as "Mrs", she became Mrs Dorothy Jordan.

Discarded by Daly, Dorothy Jordan moved sharply on to Sir Richard Ford, a magistrate no less, whose father was a shareholder with Sheridan (a Dubliner, of course) in the Drury Lane Theatre. Ford and Dorothy Jordan produced three children, before Ford ran into financial problems with Sheridan. Our Dorothy moved swiftly onward and upward.

The Duke of Clarence, Prince William Henry, had been taking an interest in Mrs Jordan for some time. In 1790 she became his live-in "companion" at Clarence Lodge, Roehampton, (later at Bushy House) with a salary of £1200 p.a. Cartoons of the time show the Prince sitting on a chamber-pot, crudely known as a "Jordan". Even so, Mrs Jordan seems to have been held in good public (ahem!) odour: when, in due course, Clarence dumped her in the hope of improving his bank-balaence with a wealthy heiress, the balladeers sided with her.

When Doorothy Jordan was discarded she received an allowance 0f £4,400 a year. She continued to appear on stage until 1815, when she retired to France, was swindled by her son-in-law, and within the year died near Paris.

Now for her son, the "Earl of Munster" Sphere: Related Content

The Great Macready

(The not-so-good and not-so-great, number 16, addendum)

Malcolm, never one to waste good useless knowledge, couldn't get his teeth out of Macready without a further nibble.

So, a bit more gratuitous detail.

Macready was meant not to go on the stage: he was sent to Rugby School as the first step towards a "respectable" profession. When the father's business turned sour, he was out of school, and trying to rescue the theatrical empire.

As the previous post noticed, in 1810, aged 17, he was playing Romeo in Birmingham. The following year it was Hamlet in Newcastle, opposite the great, if aging, Sarah Siddons. By 1815 he could command a stellar salary of £50 a week; and was being courted by London managements.

In September 1816 he accepted a five-year engagement at Covent Garden, where the male principal was Junius Brutus Booth (yes: father of Abraham Lincoln's killer. Small world). Macready's first great success was as Richard III (1819), then, in the following season, as Edmund to Booth's Lear. Lear had been out of the repertoire for years, for reasons of unfortunate comparison, and was restored only after the death of George III.

Along with other Covent Garden stalwarts, Macready fell out with Charles Kemble as the new manager of Covent Garden: he transferred to Drury Lane, where he appeared for the next 13 years. In 1826-7 he toured the United States. Then back to London, leading up to a spectacular off-stage assault on the manager of Drury Lane, Alfred Bunn (a court case and a fine of £150 ensued). After the deaths of other main players, now the doyen of his profession, he was back at Covent Garden, and celebrating his successes by supping with Wordsworth, Browning, and Walter Savage Landor.

In 1837 he became manager of Covent Garden, reviving Lear and other tragedies. This was Macready's best contribution to his contemporary stage. Shakespearean productions had been brutalised by the likes of Nahum Tate (sadly a Dubliner and TCD man), who "improved" Lear with a happy ending. Macready restored their original form. He staged dramas by new writers, notably Edward Bulwer(-Lytton). After a couple of seasons, his enthusiasm for management faded (perhaps aided by salacious gossip about his relationship with his leading lady); and so he moved on, to the Haymarket. Then, encouraged by Dickens, he ran two seasons (1841-2) at Drury Lane, before a second American tour (which enriched him to the sum of £5,500, though it also laid seeds of a ruction with Edwin Forrest -- see below). After which came success in Paris, before a series of short engagement in London, culminating in a royal gala night at Drury Lane, which raised £1,100, and ended in a minor riot.

This was as nothing to the disaster of his final American tour in 1848-9. The festering row with Forrest broke out into public acrimony. Both sides had claques (who may, or may not, have been orchestrated). It worked up to the audience breaking up the Astor Place Theatre in New York. For Macready's next performance, three days later, the Forrest supporters came, literally, mob-handed. There ensued a full-blown riot, which resulted in a score of deaths. That was the effective end of Macready's final American tour.

Back in England, Macready undertook a series of farewell performances (1849-51), ending in a spectacular Macbeth at Drury Lane.

Macready retired to Dorset. His wife died suddenly (many of their children also died prematurely) and Macready dedicated himself to good works, as a church-warden and patron of night-schools. Macready remarried: he was 67, she was 33. They had one son (see the previous post).

Sphere: Related Content

A Seasonal Performance

A trip to the theatre, slumming. Just a damn good emotional, generational wallow. Nothing intellectual (that's Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, on the list, still to come. With the delicious Samantha Bond).

Yes, you've got it in one: Jersey Boys at the Prince Edward Theatre.

Now Malcolm should have knocked this one off on one of his trips to the former colonies. It somehow didn't happen. He puts that down to local prejudice from his New Yorker son-in-law.

So, to the London production.

Magnificent ironwork set. Lots of dropping and sliding panels. Electronics galore. Very tasty; very, very tasty. The back-projected sky-line, featuring the iconic Pulaski Skyway, twitches Malcolm's clothing to remind it of its down-market source in the Jersey Gardens Mall, Elizabeth, NJ. That's another way of saying that Jersey has problems:

Some people are not thrilled to live in a place where you gotta drive over a turnpike, past a landfill, through a dump, just to root for a team that's from New York anyway.

Jersey boys have a problem, the guy from Hoboken:

"I'm gonna be bigger than Sinatra."
"Only if you're standing on a chair."

Simple storyline (though with a lot to be read into it -- see below): guys meet up , work their way through the lowest tiers of show-biz, and finally find their "sound" and make it big. Yeah: that sounds just like, inter alia, the Glenn Miller Story. This one, though, is louder. Wait for the end of either act: much louder. And, at the end of act one, they shine lights at you. In the process they become the Four Seasons:

"So, you like our new name?"
"Oh, I love it. So did Vivaldi."
"Some guy stole our name? I'll go talk to him."
"That's okay, ... he's already dead."

Of course, since it's a musical, all the hits are there. They come so fast that, at the end of act one, Malcolm was trying to recall what was left. Answer: a lot.

Beyond that it's:

• boy already has girl, boy meets another girl, she leaves him;
• boy has gambling problems, his mates give him a dig-out;
• boy and boy discover they really don't like the touring life, and drop out;
• producers don't understand how talented our boys are, but give way in the end;
• the moment of total pathos (Valli's grown-up daughter is a heroin death):

You pay your taxes. You put your trust in the system, you think your kids are safe. What're you supposed to do, put 'em on a leash? Chain 'em to the bed? They grow up, they grow out, and then some motherfucker with a needle is waiting and it's over.

• rapid synopsis to satisfactory end.

But you knew all that.

And the songs are still great.



On the way, there's even a bit of real wit:

"Hi!"
"So who's the girl in the song? Your girlfriend?""
"No, it's any girl - every girl. It's what T.S. Eliot calls the 'objective correlative'."
[Beat]
"You're not from around here, are you?"

So, no catharsis: the nearest it gets is:

They ask you - what was the high point? The hall of fame, selling all those records, pulling Sherry out of a hat - it was all great. But four guys under a streetlamp, when it was all still ahead of us ... the first time we made that sound, our sound ... when everything dropped away, and all there was was the music ... that was the best. That's why I'm still out there singing. Like that bunny on TV with the battery , I just keep going and going and going. Chasing the music, trying to get home.

Yeah, just a gentle, nostalgic burn, all the way back to Kennedy's Presidency.

But it still had the audience (grey and even arthritic) standing and wanting more.

Strongly recommended.

The punchline:

There is the occasional philosophising.

What caught Malcolm's attention was a speech given to "Frankie Valli", as a reaction to the British invasion (the Beatles, the Stones) in the early 1960s. This made a distinction between "their" audience and "ours", "the guys out in Nam", the girl with aching feet behind the shop counter, the lad at the petrol station.

The "Boss", another Jersey Boy, continues to speak to that other audience. Sphere: Related Content

When comes such another?


Hidden at the bottom of the New York Times's morning e-mail:

- ON THIS DAY -

On Oct. 2, 1967, Thurgood Marshall was sworn in as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, becoming the first black to serve on the high court.

This clicks through to the news report from 1967:

President Johnson paid an unannounced visit to the Supreme Court this morning to witness the swearing in of Thurgood Marshall, who became the first Negro to sit on the high court. Mr. Johnson took his seat in the "family section" near the bench, shortly before the Justices took their seats for the opening of the new term. The President left immediately after the five-minute ceremony. He did not attempt to congratulate Justice Marshall, who remained on the bench with the other Justices for almost an hour, as 223 lawyers were admitted to practice before the Court. Justice Marshall, the great-grandson of a slave, gained national fame as a counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He swore today to "administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich."

Thye image above (left) is of marshall as LBJ's Attorney General: the others are from the stage production and are of Laurence Fishburne.

This anniversary reminds us, in so many ways, how far we have come since then. And how far still to go (not original: see third point below).

First, there's that subtle change of vocabulary. The Times in 1967 felt free to use the term "negro", whereas today's prompt uses "black". No qualms there about those dubious hyphenations like "Afro-American".

Second, there's the nudge that LBJ was as progressive in his domestic policy as he was accursed in his Ind0-China embroilment (though, in fairness, he inherited both from the sainted JFK).

Third, last, and most significant here, it reminds Malcolm that he caught Thurgood, Laurence Fishburne's superb one-man show at the Booth Theater. This is George Stevens' racy narration, directed by Leonard Foglia, of Marshall's life, from the streets of Baltimore to a quarter-century on the Supreme Court. It's more than a play, as is witnessed by the publication of an educational guide (and it's not a kiddie's guide, either) to go with it.

Apart from being a cathartic experience, Malcolm noted this was the most mixed audience he had seen in any theatre/theater ... no, not "for a long while" ... ever. It denied one of the implications of Arthur Miller's title, A View from the Bridge: this was no privileged audience who had ridden from Long Island or Connecticut, into Manhattan, passing over the heads of the folk living below the Brooklyn or Triborough bridges. And rarely has he shared a mood of such involvement. As Charles Isherwood's review properly began:

It’s a safe bet that Thurgood is the only play on Broadway at which the announcement of a famous legal verdict is greeted by a burst of heartfelt applause.

For once the fictive drama was reflecting the true man: it was making a difference. Just as Marshall had done. Sphere: Related Content