‘The Dark Pool’ by Ciara O’Dowd
Night falls abruptly in Hollywood in late August. Like a clap of thunder, darkness comes and the heat is gone. I know this from my time living there, some years ago now; I think about it often. Over my desk is a black-and-white photo of a woman sitting on the open top of an apartment block on North Cherokee Avenue, just off Hollywood Boulevard. It was taken some time around 1942. The woman is petite, dressed in slacks and a smart blouse, fair hair pinned back from a heart-shaped face. Her head is cocked to one side and she doesn’t smile, although she isn’t stern, as she stares at the camera. I can feel the waning California sun on her skin, can sense the lethargy the heat brings. The relief of the darkness is close. ‘Hold on,’ I urge her. ‘It’s coming. This will pass.’ But the question that is always there as I stare into her mournful eyes: ‘What are you thinking, Aideen?’
I’ve been researching and writing about the Irish actress Aideen O’Connor since I discovered, in an archives room in a Galway library, a trove of letters she wrote to her sisters in Dublin in the 1930s and ‘40s. Initially, she travelled in America for months a time, touring and performing with the Abbey Theatre Company. She stayed in glamorous hotels, danced in fashionable nightclubs and mixed with the theatre crowd in all the big cities. Then she’d come home to her sisters and father in Ranelagh, to work in the office of the theatre by day and perform at night. She’d lost her mother at an early age, and the theatre crowd soon became a second family. Eventually, she left the Abbey Company and went to live in New York, before moving out to Hollywood in the early 1940s. Aideen died in 1950, aged thirty-seven, from complications arising from alcoholism. She left behind a husband and a toddler daughter.
Each time I write about Aideen, I mention her death as soon as possible. I want to move past it as quickly as I can, to be free to talk about her life. Her death is not a punchline, but a transition between chapters. To tell a life story chronologically is to invoke cause and effect, to trace meaning from the ending, and to let the final reckoning with life outweigh everything that came before. I choose to work, rather, with a form of syncopated time, where I select the notes to amplify, to let the arc of her story take a different form. One such conjunction in the life of the actress I discovered and wanted to tease out was an unlikely friendship at the most difficult of times. A soulmate appeared in Aideen’s life, and then slipped away, with one of the waves the universe brings. It was the type of random, exhilarating friendship that can happen in only one city: New York.
*
I shall stick to the stage for good or evil now!
– Letter from Aideen to Eileen O’Connor, mailed from San Francisco, March 1935
Sean O’Casey’s play The Silver Tassie was produced at the Abbey in 1935, its opening night coinciding with the first showing of a revamped auditorium. The theatre’s dark hallway had been replaced by a bright, extended lobby and there were red velvet seats. Aideen played Jessie: a young hussy strutting alongside male lead, Harry Heegan. Her character’s first arrival on the stage is heralded by someone announcing: ‘Look at the shameful way she’s showing her legs.’ Aideen’s performances were marked by a precise physicality, her ability to capture the small, gestural movements of young Irish women, devout or rebellious. Jessie Taite is flirtatious but also forward-thinking and unafraid of censure. She finds work and becomes financially independent while Harry is maimed fighting at the front. Jessie chooses not to be tethered to her childhood sweetheart out of sympathy, but moves on with her life. O’Casey describes her: ‘Ever dancing around, in and between the world, the flesh and the devil.’ That strikes me as an enchanting way to see the world: dancing between it and the devil.
As my research moved from the carefree, invigorating years of her twenties into the period beyond the safe confines of Dublin, I encountered the darkness that hovered around Aideen’s life. She was intelligent and well-educated; and a secure position in the Irish National Theatre’s first company had a respectable prestige attached. But, as for many of the single women in the company, there were often money struggles, and prestige didn’t release her from the pressures on all Irish women of the time: to dress appropriately; behave demurely; be seen at every Mass and sacrament with head bowed. Aideen was strong-willed; she was ambitious and stubborn. In her early twenties, she was, perhaps, too naïve to understand how her ambitions would clash with her Catholic faith and middle-class background.
My research into Aideen’s later life started to circle around one particularly difficult year: 1939. I pieced together everything I could find about her movements that year, and let the pattern emerge.
In June 1939, a twenty-six-year-old Aideen was spending her summer break from the theatre in Cobh, Co. Cork. She stayed with the family of her deceased mother, in a house high up the town, close to the church and with a spectacular view of the sea. She had been offered a part in a Terence Rattigan play due to tour the UK, but was holding out for a role in New York. After repeated requests from Aideen, increasingly frantic, a telegram arrived with the offer needed to secure her an American visa. She sailed from Cobh to New York in early July, without going back to Dublin. Aideen travelled alone, but she would reunite in America with the love of her life, actor and theatre director Arthur Shields. He was married, with a young son; they both left behind in Ireland families furious at their scandalous adultery, and a few close, worried friends. They were devoted to each other and would live as husband and wife until his divorce could make their union official. Their only child, a daughter called Christine, was born after they married.
During one of my sun-baked afternoons in Hollywood, Christine Shields shared with me sections of her mother’s journals from that time. These fragile, narrow date books are kept safe by Christine, who has painstakingly deciphered many of the scribbled notes. The journals repeatedly mention two friends: Iris and Kay. Iris, I quickly figured out, was an actress and the wife of theatre producer Eddie Choate. The Choates put up Aideen and Arthur in their apartment in the Whitby building on West 45th Street, a small, vibrant show business community in an elegant building in the centre of the theatre district. But who was Kay? Christine and I speculated, but she had no information or plausible suggestions. All we knew was that in the midst of the troubles heaped on Aideen, the desolation and disappointment, this woman visited, supported, cheered and entertained her.
Christine and I went to the apartment building on North Cherokee Avenue where her parents first lived in Hollywood, talked our way into the private lobby and wandered the dark halls of closely-packed doors, finding ourselves eventually at the fire escape that led to the roof. The roof garden, where Aideen posed for photographs, is no longer accessible. We were disappointed at this discovery, but stoic; the rooftop of our imaginations perhaps more beautiful than anything we would actually find. As we left, I knew I had to know more about this friend, Kay.
After some false starts, cul-de-sacs, and much time drafting emails packed with carefully constructed personal questions, I could prove that Kay was in fact Katharine Swift-Warburg: the first woman to compose the entire score of a Broadway musical, and the long-term lover and musical collaborator of debonair, New York-born composer George Gershwin. To the musically uninitiated, Gershwin’s music is familiar. ‘Rhapsody in Blue’; ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So’; ‘Summer Time’ are tunes frequently heard in lifts and in the background of shopping centres, as well as in symphony halls. But even to those versed in musical history, Kay Swift is not widely known or appreciated.
At first glance, the relationship between these two women is an unlikely alliance: a convent-educated girl of the middle-class suburbs of Dublin and a musician-turned-socialite rich from inherited money. And yet, once you spend time with these women, you discover that for all their differences, they had much more in common than the backgrounds that divided them.
New York is a harsh, unforgiving but electric city that flings people together in the most random way, and forges friendships as intense and dazzling as the lights of the skyscrapers at night. I thought about that as I tramped up through the city in flurries of snow one dark February afternoon. I walked from Times Square up Fifth Avenue to Central Park and onwards up the east side of the park. The streets became progressively quieter, the pavements easier to navigate. Each time I paused for breath and looked behind me, the city spread out its magic. In my walking boots and winter coat, I traced the journey of Aideen O’Connor from West 45th Street (where she was staying in 1939) to the Lenox Hill Hospital on East 77th Street, where she was a frequent visitor.
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You know me, the old carthorse. Always feeling so well it’s hardly decent.
– Kay Swift to Mary Lasker, from California, c.1947
In 1939, Katharine Swift-Warburg is living in a zebra-skin-filled apartment on East 52nd Street. Years before, she has abandoned her married name for the snappier Kay Swift. She is a diminutive, dark-haired woman with huge eyes and a regal chin, forever wrapped in exotic fabrics, thrumming with energy. As it’s early evening, Swift has swapped her strong coffee for her perennial vod-ton and is contemplating going out for dinner before finding a nightclub to dance until the early hours. For now, she is at her piano, surrounded by scraps of paper covered in musical notation and intent on meeting a deadline. On top of the piano, as always when she plays, are the antique gold cuffs George Gershwin gave her on the premiere of his musical An American in Paris. Paintings the couple chose together hang on the walls, along with numerous photographs of George in various poses. Outside, the streets are thronged with traffic. It’s blustery, with a dull sky, and the radio in the next room is full of gloomy news of foreign affairs in Europe. But none of this stops Kay beating time and dancing as she plays on. In between bars and sips of vod-ton, she hears the doorbell. The doorman announces a visitor; Kay invites them up. She puts on lipstick and takes out the vodka bottle, eager to catch up with her friend before they go out for dinner and dancing. The door opens and in walks Aideen O’Connor.
I can’t even attempt the conversation these women shared, although I think of them both as dancing around between the world and the devil, laughing heartily all the while. I do know the troubles that were swirling around outside that cozy apartment filled with music in late summer 1939. I believe the women were introduced by an actor Kay briefly dated, Eddie Byron, a close friend of the Abbey Company in America. But their friendship outlasted Kay’s affair with Byron, and continued for years to come. I also know the things these women had in common: a love of dancing, theatre, fashion and alcohol. Swift, even at her most cash-strapped, was extremely generous. She frequently gave clothes and jewellery on a whim to friends and colleagues; she got joy from sharing simple (and more expensive) pleasures. On a regular basis, she drank too much and behaved in ways she shouldn’t. She would send flowers and apologetic notes the next day; Aideen would also regularly write apologetic letters, stinging from hangovers. I like to think Kay explained to Aideen her ‘disappointment adjustant’: a genetic trait inherited from her mother, she believed; it was an ability to deal with life’s harshest cards and then to demand a new hand from the deck, to begin again with a smile. I like to think that, because Aideen lacked such a genetic trait.
Mere months after Aideen’s arrival in New York, Arthur Shields was seriously ill with TB. He was sequestered in Lenox Hill hospital; hence my pilgrimage. He had been bankrupted by a failed production on Broadway and the stress, on lungs already weak, rendered him dangerously unwell. If he survived, which wasn’t at all certain, there was a long period of recuperation ahead. Without a marriage certificate, or an Equity card, Aideen’s status was (at best) uncertain. Professionally and personally, she was losing a grip on who she was, or might be. For good or evil, she had thrown her lot in with theatre and with Arthur Shields. Now both were threatening to abandon her. Kay Swift understood such passion, and she also had personal experience of the consequences.
When she first encountered George Gershwin at a party in the spring of 1925, Kay (a classically-trained musician) had recognized a soulmate; so had he. Gershwin persuaded her to take a job as a rehearsal pianist for a new Rodgers and Hart show. With her millionare, banker husband James Warburg frequently away in Europe on business trips and her three daughters under the care of their nanny, Kay often called the Warburg chauffeur- driven car to take her downtown. There, in a draughty rehearsal hall, she banged away on a piano and watched the musical A Connecticut Yankee take shape. There’s a photo of her in a spotted dress with a white lace collar at the piano during a rehearsal, smiling broadly, exuding happiness. After a few solid song hits of her own, Kay wrote the entire musical score for Fine and Dandy, a romantic comedy which captured the realities of the 1929 economic crash, while putting a glossy sheen on the hardships. It was a critical and popular hit, running for 236 performances.
One of the songs in Fine and Dandy contains the line: ‘Nature will provide for those in love’. The lyrics were written by her husband, James Warburg. In what may have been a last-ditch attempt to prove his talent and save his marriage, Warburg wrote lyrics about the inability of lawyers and bankers to fulfil women’s needs and their need for thrilling love affairs.
Kay Swift celebrated the Christmas of 1934 in New York City with Gershwin; her divorce was finalized on December 20th and her children were with her ex-husband. Somebody else spent the festive season of 1934 in New York: Aideen O’Connor was away from her family at Christmas, spending it on tour with the Abbey Company. The company stayed in the art deco surrounds of the Edison Hotel, drinking cocktails under the magnificent Christmas trees and preparing to perform on December 26th.
Having spent many blissful evenings with Gershwin in the dark and smoky jazz clubs of New York, soaking in the cadence of this music, Kay was an invaluable assistant when George started working on the opera Porgy and Bess. Her technical skills were much more proficient than the self-taught Gershwin; she could notate and orchestrate with more precision and speed. Blind to the unhappiness of her daughters and the anger of James, Kay worked tirelessly on the production, appearing at casting auditions and rehearsals. George and Kay had a hit show and each other; they were invincible. Then life got in the way.
Gershwin left for Hollywood with his brother, the lyricist Ira, in August of 1936. In modern parlance, the couple ‘took a break’, to see if their romance was the real thing. The following year, Gershwin fell ill. He was listless, depressed, clumsy, and having problems composing. Nobody thought to tell Kay. Yet, she knew instinctively that he was suffering and in July 1937 she left a show at the interval, to be at home waiting for the phone call when it came. Gershwin died suddenly of a brain tumour. Swift’s ‘disappointment adjustant’ kicked in. Little scared her; nothing stopped her playing music. She grieved for Gershwin until the end of her life, but it was a full life.
When I followed Aideen’s path to visit her ailing lover, Arthur Shields, in hospital, I stopped off outside the Warburg family home on East 70th Street, seven blocks from the hospital. A luxurious double-fronted townhouse, it had a nursery on the top floor and many rooms for entertaining and parties. There was a full-time nanny, a driver and limitless funds for clothes and socializing. Kay Swift walked away from all of that to be with George Gershwin. Gershwin died on the far side of the country, without saying goodbye.
To the weary yet determined Aideen that arrived in 1939, Kay was a single female professional living alone in New York City. Aideen knew that Kay’s ex-husband and his new wife had full custody of her three daughters, so that she could work full-time to support herself. After working for Radio City Music Hall for eighteen months, Kay became director of music for New York’s World Fair. She wrote her own promotional blurb for Radio City Music Hall and described herself as a sort of Dorothy Parker at the piano, who worked for eighteen hours at a stretch before going out to socialize.
Despite the lengthy working day, Kay always had the energy to call on friends, invite them for drinks or dinner, and to go dancing. Aideen had more free time, but with little money to entertain herself, she relied on others to help her out. Buoyed by Kay’s energy and encouragement, Aideen continued to audition and look for work in the theatre. She had no other skills to sell, or wasn’t prepared to learn anything else.
Over breakfast with Iris and Eddie Choate in their apartment one Sunday morning, Aideen heard Chamberlain announce World War II on a wireless. She would recall this moment years later, long after the war was over: the chill in the air, the shock and terror. Arthur was away seeking work when she heard the news. The possibility of packing up and returning home to Dublin dissipated with that announcement; travel was too dangerous and expensive, and prospects at home too dark.
A note in the show business column of the New York Times newspaper early in 1940 reported that Aideen O’Connor had left rehearsals of a production of Grey Farm, due to open at the Hudson Theatre. The columnist suggests the departure was voluntary; it wasn’t. The article adds that Aideen was ‘the third actor to do so’. Then and now, all actresses are dispensable on Broad- way, and before Aideen had crossed Times Square to return to the Whitby building, she had probably been replaced by Mavis Temple. Iris didn’t know what to do to console Aideen. There was a tearful phone call to Arthur, who was resting up at the Hollywood Athletic Club in Los Angeles with his brother. But the line was bad; Aideen was crying and Arthur couldn’t follow her news for the sobbing. Some days later, Eddie Choate wrote a letter to Arthur outlining the situation, including the financial mess Aideen had been left in. Arthur again encouraged her to stay in New York, where she had prospects of work and had company.
I don’t know if Arthur relented, or if Aideen showed her usual single-mindedness. But she packed her belongings in the Whitby building, hauled her bags to Grand Central Station, and got on a train to the West Coast. She used the last of her savings, or borrowed the money. Kay Swift was not there to wave her off. Kay had taken off on her own adventure: she had fallen in love with a rodeo cowboy, and after a three-week courtship, they eloped and moved to a ranch in Oregon. But as with all true friendships, this wasn’t the end; it was only a hiatus.
*
They were kindness itself.
– Kay Swift to Mary Lasker, from Hollywood, c.1941
With the heady days of New York behind them, Aideen and Arthur slowly settled into life at the base of the Hollywood Hills. He had occasional work in films; she had one part offered to her, but after a frantic few days rehears- ing she was replaced. When Kay visited the Hollywood studios and couldn’t find a hotel in the vicinity, they quickly offered her their spare room. Swift wrote about how fond she was of ‘the Shieldses’ and how much she enjoyed having dinner with them and Arthur’s brother, Barry Fitzgerald, who arrived punctually every evening to be fed. But she also remarked on the solemnity of the apartment and the fragile nature of the couple. If to her family at home, Aideen was leading a glamorous, immoral life in Los Angeles, Kay’s description is very different. She remembers it was the kind of place where you felt you couldn’t use the bathroom during the night. When she was caught short, she crept there on bare feet, praying she wouldn’t wake the delicate couple. Kay was bold enough to pull the plug, but in doing so, she broke the ‘whole godamn mechanism’ and left the toilet roaring ‘like a wolf for three days’, until a plumber was called.
I found this anecdote about Swift’s visit to the North Cherokee apartment in a folder of letters written to another friend, Mary Lasker, now archived in Columbia University. I read it, and other descriptions of her stay with Aideen, through splayed fingers, as if I had pushed open one of the doors on that dark corridor in North Cherokee and wandered in where I shouldn’t have.
The plumbing roared on. Kay Swift went to her business meetings; Arthur went to the studios. Aideen stayed in the apartment, housekeeping and reading in the sultry afternoons, sitting on the rooftop when the sun began to descend. And yet the fact Kay was there at the end of the day, sitting opposite Aideen at the dinner table, with her irrepressible good humour, makes me feel better.
From her sporadic visits to Hollywood over the 1940s, Kay continues to mention Aideen and the changes in their lives. She is amused by the arrival of Arthur’s eldest son, Adam, with his Irish accent and innocent ways, as he is enrolled in Hollywood Junior High. She cheers on Arthur’s continued success in the movies: ‘Everything’s clicking for Boss, after so much hell.’ She remarks on Aideen’s pregnancy, although she doesn’t appear to realize how much her friend is suffering. Aideen passed away before dawn on July 4th 1950, before the flag-waving, parades and parties would begin to celebrate Independence Day.
How does one measure friendship? In the number of mornings lost to gossip over coffee? In mentions of the name in a journal? In dresses lent and tissues provided? In archival papers I trawled, I found a letter from the Vice President of the United States Trust Company of New York addressed to the American Consul General in Vancouver, Canada. It was a letter of support for a visa application for Aideen O’Connor. She had recently transplanted to Los Angeles and was now in that perennial bind common to Irish emigrants: she couldn’t work without a visa; she couldn’t get a visa without work. But this letter assured financial support for Miss O’Connor: it confirmed that Mrs Kay Swift Hubbard ‘enjoys an annual income from a trust fund in excess of $10,000.’
Hubbard was the name of Kay’s third husband, her rodeo cowboy. She divorced him in 1946. But that trust fund pre-dated Hubbard, and also George Gershwin. It was a trust fund established by the parents of James Warburg on the occasion of Kay’s first marriage in 1918. It was promised to Kay before she got married and provided grandchildren; it would continue all her life. It was the only steady income Kay Swift had to depend on as she aged, and she signed it over to Aideen as soon as it was needed.
It was this detail, this confirmation of the origin of the trust fund and its significance in Kay’s life, that cemented in my imagination the friendship of Kay and Aideen. It also convinced Kay Swift’s granddaughter, Katharine Weber, when I made contact with her and tested out my theory of their friendship. Many would have dismissed my email as crazy; Katharine Weber has the heart and imagination of a writer and embraced the possibilities, the clues and the archival traces with gusto. Her family memoir The Memory of All That became my guidebook in New York. We became friends, and to discuss further her grand- mother, my research and this random connection, she invited me to meet with her at her holiday home in West Cork. That was how I woke in Glandore one June morning, and briefly thought I was back living on the Galway docks.
I’d lived in Galway when I first discovered Aideen’s letters, and began to get to know her. Since then, she had brought me to Cobh, to Hollywood, to New York (twice) and now back to Cork. As I surfaced from slumber, the trawlers were in at the pier, heaving, metal against metal, and the rigging singing in the wind. The tang of the sea was the same, and my bed was scattered with books and notebooks, where I’d fallen asleep mid-sentence. The possible conversations between Kay and Aideen in that New York apartment mesmerized me there, as they had so often before.
I hoisted myself up on the pillows to see more of the view from my window. Fishermen in thigh-high waders strode up and down the hill from the water. Further out, sailing boats bobbed on their moorings. I was looking out on Keelbeg pier. I was looking at the harbour where the ashes of Kay Swift are scattered. Swift wanted to be cremated and scattered at sea; Glandore is the Webers’ second home and where Katharine spent her honeymoon.
Aideen never made it back to Ireland. She is buried in Culver City, a thirty-minute drive down the freeway from Hollywood Boulevard; none of her Irish family attended her funeral. Aside from reviews of The Silver Tassie and other Abbey productions of that time, you have to work hard to find mentions of her in Irish theatre history. Like other actors and actresses of the time, her work in giving voice and form to the characters of great play- wrights like Sean O’Casey has dissipated, heard only in the echoes of all the other performers playing those roles in the decades since. But now, when I look at the picture of her over my desk, I think of the relief of cool dark- ness coming, and of the friendly face of Kay, who is humming loudly as she mounts the stairs to the apartment.
Glandore harbour is believed to have been the inspiration for Irish writer Maeve Binchy’s 1995 novel The Glass Lake. I learn this curious fact as I have my breakfast looking out on the water. I remember that when I visited Los Angeles, I lived in an Airbnb in an area called Silver Lake: a bohemian community. I shared the home of a London woman who had an Irish dancing school and introduced me to the wonderful ways of Hollywood. All of this makes me think about a veritable pool of creative, inspiring women, Irish and American, supporting and amusing each other over the decades. It makes me think about Irish women forever dancing around between the devil, the flesh and the world.
From issue #7: autumn/winter 2018
About the Author
Ciara O’Dowd studied Drama and English at Trinity College Dublin and Glasgow University before gaining a Masters in Writing from NUI Galway. An Associate Researcher with the #WakingTheFeminists movement, she was an author of Gender Counts: An analysis of gender in Irish theatre 2006-2015.
