Singing My Him Song

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, with tragedy—personal, national, and international—hitting everywhere. My sister-in-law’s husband, Warren, had returned from Vietnam safely and had gone to work at NBC. On the surface he was still the same ebullient and cheerful lad who went on that foreign venture, but a series of car crashes while drinking belied that. A researcher at NYU later came up with the statistic that veterans of the assault on Vietnam had proportionately more car accidents than any other group, and Warren had several. The last one occurred when riding with his brother Jimmy, who survived, but Warren suffered injuries that led to swelling of the brain, irreversible coma, and, after a few weeks, a merciful death.

For a while, though, I was seduced by the comforts of the movie actor’s life and abandoned all protest and demonstrations.

When our location shooting wrapped at the Pennsylvania site, the company and all our families were airlifted to Los Angeles. We checked into the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, but that proved to be disastrously expensive, as we’d no kitchen facilities, and the per diem could not quite cover the expense of room service. Diana, we had discovered, was very much pregnant again, and all this gadding about far away from home was a bit too much for her, and getting settled was essential. As small as my part was, I still had a couple of months of shooting to do.

Despite my being in many scenes, I had only one line to speak in this entire epic, and a memorable line it was. When the informer James McPartlan appears in the village, he is understandably viewed with suspicion. The cover story he presents is that he is on the run from the police, for “pushing the queer” in Buffalo. No sir, that is not an assault on a homosexual in upstate New York; it was the jargon of the time for passing counterfeit money. When this sham criminal queried me on getting lodgings, I responded with, “There’s a train leaving in twenty minutes.”

There’s another scene wherein the police raid my saloon and a magnificent brawl breaks out ’twixt the miners and the constabulary. At one point, the chief of police whacks McPartlan on the head to make it clear they considered him part of the mining riffraff and throw off any suspicion that he was their spy.

Harris and Connery, who was also in this scene, went to Marty Ritt and asked him to postpone shooting the fight; they were doing all their own stunts, they explained, and might get hurt, and it would be better to do it last, just in case. Marty said that was good thinking, and added, “By the way, I like Malachy. Let’s keep him, too.”

I stayed on the production until the end, and that’s how I came to be one of the highest paid one-line actors in movie history. As Connery pointed out, “If I were getting paid as much as you for each line, I’d never have to work again.”

So it was that Diana and I were looking at a splendid house in Los Angeles that had once been owned by Will Rogers. The real estate agent told us it had last been rented to one of the Beach Boys. He’d let in a bunch of squatters and then abandoned the place, and it was now up for rent again. It sounded great, as it was furnished and the price was reasonable, and the only problem would be kicking out the squatters and getting some bed linens and a few other assorted items along those lines.

When we arrived for our inspection, we had a bit of difficulty getting in. Inside the house, a dozen or so young people were lounging about, with a good strong smell of pot permeating the whole place. They were not a friendly group; indeed, they were quite hostile in demeanor, which made me a bit uneasy, and made Diana downright fearful. Then we went out back to look at the swimming pool (in the shape of the state of California), which the real estate agent had warned us might need a little work. A little work, indeed. The bloody thing looked as if it had not been cared for in years, and it was half full of scummy water. However, that was not the focus of our attention.

Seated at the edge of the pool, his feet dangling, was a thin, smallish, bearded young man, dressed in a black shirt and jeans. We said an awkward hello, but there was no response from him other than a savage, hate-filled glare. Diana began making frantic signs to me, indicating that she wanted to get the hell out of there. I told her to relax, there was nothing to be concerned about, that I would take care of everything.

When we left, I told the agent we’d take the place.

Diana took me aside and said, “If you do, you will live in that house all by yourself, because I wouldn’t live there if it were rent free.” We continued to argue about it, and I eventually told the agent that I’d changed my mind.

Diana had told me that she had never in her life felt such malevolence before, and that she felt the people in that house were a threat to the baby she was carrying. I, being full of bravado, was going to boot them all out and take over the manse, but was glad I hadn’t tried. The assorted gang in possession of the house were the followers of Charles Manson, the young man with hate-filled eyes seated by the pool.

We eventually found a reasonable house in Brentwood, complete with garden, and I settled in for the remaining two months of the shoot. I began commuting to New York once a week to tape my new television show, Sound Off with Malachy McCourt, but the first show was taped in California, with Sean Connery and Richard Harris as guests. We shared a bottle or two of the whiskey beforehand so the wheels of talk wouldn’t squeak, and though I was a bit nervous with first-show jitters, it all went smoothly, more of a conversation than an interview. Harris and Connery didn’t let me down at all, as they were most supportive and quite entertaining.

I did my best to entertain, as well. At one point, I asked Sean Connery what I termed a “pedestrian question,” to wit, “How did you get started in showbiz?” Sean said he was playing amateur soccer and doing amateur theatricals, when he got an offer to act for money and an offer to play soccer for money. “I had to make a choice between becoming a professional soccer player and becoming a professional actor,” he told me.

Seeing my opportunity, I asked, “And what did you decide, Sean?” Connery began to answer, and then realized he had been sandbagged, recovering his equilibrium quickly enough to join in the laughter at his own expense.

My single spoken line in The Molly Maguires was scheduled for the second-to-last day of shooting, and a grand day it was. Harris, as McPartlan, entered the soundstage re-creation of the Pennsylvania saloon and asked about getting accommodations, and I delivered my line:

“There is a train leaving in twenty minutes.”

“Print it,” Marty yelled. “Now, reverse shot, with camera on Harris.”

“Print that one, too,” sez Marty, after we’d done it again.

He chose to use the second take in the end, and my face was not seen as I spoke my single line, and thus a great closeup was lost to cinematic history.

The film was released to a good gush of publicity, but it wasn’t successful. It’s possible that hanging the hero, whilst the informer walked away smirking, didn’t appeal to the average moviegoer. Nonetheless, the film has acquired a bit of, as they say, cult status, so it can be seen on television regularly.

It had been a marvelous five months, and I was delighted to have been part of such a congenial company and a bit downhearted at the ending of it all. However, I still had the television show and I was reveling in my new role as host. We shot in front of a live audience, and I felt as much like a host with guests in my living room as I did a talk-show host. I liked to walk down into the audience to talk to them during the show, and I think I was the first talk-show host to use a shotgun mike Phil Donahue–style, extending it to someone in the audience so he could speak his piece on the air.

One of my guests was Betty Friedan, the author of The Feminine Mystique and one of the early leaders of the women’s liberation movement. At the time I wasn’t too enlightened on feminist issues; if I look back on it now, it’s hard for me to believe I held such Neanderthal views. There I was, wildly lib eral on the war, on labor unions, on every social and political issue you could name, but I held the traditional patronizing, conservative attitudes on anything having to do with women’s issues. The other guest that night was the actress Pamela Mason, an acerbic Brit married to James Mason, who was anti–women’s liberation in all its forms. I retain the distinct impression that Friedan showed me the error of my ways and managed to put Pamela Mason in her place, too.