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This Chapter is from Emeralds in Tinseltown: The Irish in Hollywood, written by Steve Brennan and Bernadette O'Neill, and published by Appletree Press
The Abbey Theatre - Lost and Found in HollywoodThe renaissance of Irish drama that the Shields brothers were embroiled in had kicked up a fiery young playwright out from the cracks of the cobblestones of Dublin. His name was Sean O’Casey. And Irish audiences were none too happy with how this working class writer saw them. “I remember the time we put on The Plough and the Stars (by O’Casey) in 1926. The second-night audience threw things so steadily it was almost worth your life to go out on the stage. We acted around the missiles for two acts but in the third act the barrage got too heavy for us and we finally ran the curtain down,” Shields recounted of those tempestuous days. “W.B. Yeats made a magnificent speech, telling the audience that they were disgracing themselves in the eyes of the world…”But even if one fiercely conservative element of Irish society was disgracing itself with violent outbursts at such unthinkable contentions as the existence of prostitutes and sex out of wedlock in Ireland, being put about by the Abbey Players, the world of theatre beyond Ireland didn’t seem to care. This valiant troupe of actors, writers, poets, artists and dreamers had wrenched a new style of theatre from a long sleeping spirit, a minimalist method of acting that stressed mood, expression and form as much as it did the golden dialogue of its writers. By the 1920s the Abbey Players were being invited to tour around the world, which is how the brothers first came to America. Whistle-stop tours of the United States became a regular feature for the Abbey Players. Shields delighted in telling of one stop in Portland, Oregon, when the company was so anxious to catch a train to the next venue that the scenery was thrown eight stories from a window to the snow-covered ground to save time. “The audience was requested to remain in the theatre to avoid falling objects,” the actor recounted. But the brothers’ first American screen appearance would not come until 1936 when the Irish-American director John Ford brought them from Ireland to make his screen version of O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars. “The reward was six weeks at $750 a week – more money than we in Ireland believed the mints produced,” Barry Fitzgerald remembered. “I intended going on from there to the South Seas and around the world. But just as I was oiling up the bicycle and packing the other shirt, Mary Pickford put me under a one-year contract – and never used me. I have been in Hollywood ever since.” Following his year of inactivity under contract to Pickford, the work began to flow in for Fitzgerald. Irish-American director Leo McCarey cast him in the role of the parish priest in Going My Way. He had seen Fitzgerald years earlier when the Abbey had visited Broadway with Paul Vincent Carroll’s classic The White Steed. McCarey had been so impressed with the actor’s work that he had “filed me away for future reference”. This was the beginning of a peculiar relationship between the eccentric actor and Hollywood, in which Fitzgerald carved out for himself an island of privacy, surrounded himself with mementos of Dublin and held an open house for any acquaintance from home, or acquaintance of an acquaintance, that would call. He shunned the town’s high society parties, dressed and spoke pretty much as he pleased, while remaining one of the industry’s highest paid and sought-after actors for many years. Arthur was not so quick to settle, but in 1944, more because of precarious health and the need to live in a warm climate, Arthur set up permanent residence a few blocks from his brother in Hollywood with his wife Aideen O’Connor, also of the Abbey. The film town embraced the brothers. Their most recognised film was of course John Ford’s Irish romantic ditty The Quiet Man, with John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara. Fitzgerald played the roguish matchmaker while Shields was the wily Protestant clergyman. The brothers also appeared together in Ford’s Long Voyage Home. Other Hollywood roles for Shields included Drums Along the Mohawk with Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert, and Lady Godiva with Maureen O’Hara. But others from the Abbey would not find Hollywood so generous a host. The legendary Sara Allgood was a case in point.
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