Irish Eyes

Gwen Orel Interviews Patty Duke And Malachy McCourt About The New PBS Special

Didn't know Patty Duke was Irish? That's OK. Neither did Malachy McCourt, who wrote the script for the PBS special "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling - An Irish Parade of Stars," airing this month on PBS, that Duke narrates.

"I was astonished," said McCourt. "Everybody will be astonished too."

"It's not a secret," Duke laughed, on the phone from her home in Idaho. "You look into my eyes and you know, that's an Irish girl. Still, she admitted, "I realized when they asked me that my history has never been forthcoming as a person of Irish descent." She's never done a movie or television special or been in a play with an Irish theme.

And yet, she identifies deeply with her heritage. Her father's people were from Ireland, and came over in the late 1800s, her mother's from Germany. Her paternal grandfather Duke was a bartender in a pub on Second Avenue and 37th Street. "My father used to take me to his father's bar, and sit me on the bar where I would say the pledge of allegiance and get pretzels. Of course, my father would get in trouble when we got home and I would say, 'we went to grandpa's bar!'" Her grandfather spoke with a thick brogue, she remembers. "A lot of the time I didn't understand what he was saying."

Born Anna Marie Duke, from Elmhurst Queens, her managers and caretakers (from age 8 on) the Rosses changed her name to Patty.

Duke was a hugely popular child actress: she portrayed Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker on Broadway in 1959 (running until 1961), opposite Anne Bancroft. In 1962, she won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in the same role in the film. She was the youngest person ever to receive an Academy Award in a competitive category (Shirley Temple had received a "special Academy Award" at age 6 in 1934, after making 9 films that year).

She became known as the "all-American girl," starring in her own television show, "The Patty Duke Show," from 1963 - 1967, starring as "Patty Lane" and her own "identical cousin," the "prim and proper" Cathy Lane.

She went on to take a role in The Valley of the Dolls in 1967, graduating to more adult roles. Most recently, she has been playing Madame Morrible in the San Francisco production of the Broadway hit musical Wicked.

The omission of any Irish-themed work helped solidify her decision to do the special. "I think it's long past due," she said from her home in Idaho.

The special consists of Duke introducing clips of footage from the 50s and 60s of entertainers singing many of the classic Irish and Irish-American songs.

Standouts include Bing Crosby singing "Molly Malone" and "McNamara's Band," an amazing trio of Rosemary Clooney, Maureen O'Hara and Pat Rooney singing "It's a Great Day for the Irish" on the Ed Sullivan show, "tough guy" actor Robert Mitchum singing "Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral (That's an Irish Lullaby)" with the Ames Brothers, and footage of The Clancy Brothers with Tommy Makem, and Judy Collins. There is also beautiful footage of Dublin during that period, and the Irish countryside.

McCourt had seen some of the footage before - who could forget seeing the Clancys and Tommy Makem on Ed Sullivan? "I remembered Carmel Quinn of course. I told them get that stuff!"

Other segments, particularly Robert Mitchum and the Ames brothers, amazed him. While the special coincides with March, the month of St. Patrick's Day, McCourt points out that "many of the great patriots and writers were not Catholic." He'd love to see "Ireland Day" take its place.

Writing a piece about "the meaning of being Irish" was not hard, he said, but he was very impressed at the way Duke spoke his lines, with feeling, rhythm and heart.

Wearing a green scarf and an Aran sweater, Duke introduces the special with the words, "what is it to be Irish? If your ears can pick up the soft melody of harp and reed when a wind is sowing through the trees, if all your toes begin to twitch at the sound of a woodpecker tapping on a tree, if your head moves in unison with the branches in a high wind, if a tear starts in your eye when you hear the lonely crying note of the curlew, and if you hear a familiar voice singing, and suddenly discover it's your very own self, all of which indicate that you're almost certainly Irish. And if you're not Irish, then it's likely you want to be. For we are the music makers, we are the dreamers of dreams." Footage in the background shows people dancing in traditional costumes, a country fiddler, castles, branches of trees, and green fields.

"I'm so Irish I named my first-born Sean, my dog's Seamus, and my dad's name was John Patrick," she tells viewers, after Bing Crosby sings the title song. To the Irish Examiner, she pointed out that the dog is an Irish wolfhound.

But Duke missed out on glorying in that Irish heritage as a girl. "There was no celebration of it, no stories passed down." She's not even sure where her people are from. She thinks it's Cork, but there's some speculation that it's Killarney. Perhaps, she says, the special might inspire an email from someone who says "I know some of your relatives in Ireland." So if you're reading this and know the Dukes of Killarney or Cork, drop us a line.

When she was growing up, "it wasn't popular to be Irish, and so it was kept kind of quiet except in the neighborhood of the whole Irish clan of people." Duke remembers from her childhood, "there were references to 'shanty Irish' and 'lace curtain Irish,' and we were alternately both."

In her career, she has played strictly American roles. "As a child, the people who ran my career wouldn't have it come up, because if people didn't like the Irish, I wouldn't get the job." Today, she would love to play a role of an Irish or Irish-American woman.

McCourt realized when creating the script for the special, that the "door of respectability" has been a curse for the Irish. McCourt explained, "The Irish have been so ashamed of being Irish, of being ourselves. We are a poetic people, a demonstrative people, with great ability with language, song and spirit." But, he said, speaking from a snowed in day in his apartment on the Upper West Side, at times the Irish were blamed for being what they were. That caused them to deny their own strengths.

The songs and clips in this special are "sentimental, foolish in a way; they are not great patriotic numbers; they are not the poetry of Yeats and Seamus Heaney. I used to scoff at them too... but they sustained the Irish when we were trying to get a foot in the door of acceptability. It will give people a warm feeling. Nobody will see it without a nostalgic tear in the eye and thinking, isn't it nice to be Irish."

Duke said, "I learned a lot in the telling and the introduction of those songs. You only hear about the potato famine, but the Irish were a very industrious people who did a lot of other things. It was fun to learn why music is so important to the Irish and always has been, probably because it was their way of escaping when things were rough."

That was true in her own home, where when there were gatherings, "there was the singing of the traditional Irish-American song." Her own mother sang "Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral" to her as a lullaby. She had to sing as well, and often performed that song, but "not as well as my mother."

She feels a special closeness to the song "Danny Boy" as well. "It's part of my heritage, and it's a beautiful song." Of course, at parties, "we all sang it very badly, but most people were drunk so we didn't care."

"Also, we were big St. Patrick's Day parade people. My sister marched in the parade one year. The famous story is her boots were too rough and scarred her calves, but she kept marching."

While there isn't a parade handy in Idaho, if she finds herself in Chicago or New York she firmly intends to show up. On St. Patrick's Day, she'll be eating corned beef and cabbage, and "singing some Irish songs."

She listens to contemporary Irish music, including Celtic Woman, and "in my dreams, I can stepdance." Although she hasn't been to Ireland yet, except for stopovers in the airport, making the special has inspired her to dig deeper into her heritage and find her family there. After having had her heritage suppressed as a child actress, she loved "every bit" of making the special. "I thought, ha ha, look at me, I'm Irish!"

"The Irish always had a great ability to have a laugh at ourselves. We had the traditional Stage Irishman who drank and warbled sentimental songs and got nostalgic for the old country-but behind it, we were making progress, putting people in political machines."

That PBS makes these Irish specials as fundraisers is "a great tribute to the Irish. You do not see pledge drives on Armenians or Zanzibar," he quips, thinking of "a to z."

"It's a great compliment, to the power and progress the Irish have made, and a tribute to how far we've come."

If her parents could see it, Duke said, "they wouldn't say anything. They'd just weep. They would grin, and weep."