FRED O’DONOVAN has had the kind of jam-packed life that would make for a cracking memoir, but he’ll never write one. He did try once to set it all down, but “Charlie Haughey put me off”. Whatever reasons the former taoiseach had for dissuading O’Donovan from recording his memories, Haughey is just one of a number of well-known names from politics and entertainment that pepper O’Donovan’s reminiscences.
Bing Crosby – “a tired man but an incredible artist” – whose show in Dublin he helped produce; Jack Benny, “the nicest man I ever met in show business”; and the actor Peter O’Toole, of whom more later.
Now 80 years old, he can’t believe he’s made it this far. “I can’t get used to the fact that I’m alive,” he says with a huge grin. “In 1948, I was told I’d a year to live.” He had contracted TB while flying planes for the RAF, and doctors in Switzerland gave him 12 months.
Sixty years on, ill health is not the only legacy from his airforce days, which also gave him his first experience of showbiz. When US singer and film star Paul Robeson came to entertain the troops at Long Kesh, O’Donovan was charged with producing his show. “It made me realise what a wonderful business it was.”
On his return home, he began to work in radio and theatre, starting off in the latter as assistant stage manager, "the lowest form of life". Which is why Cyril Cusack and Tyrone Guthrie got him to call the legendarily contrary playwright Seán O'Casey during their 1955 production of The Bishop's Bonfire.
“The first time I phoned, I said ‘Is that Mr O’Casey?’ ‘No,’ he says, ‘This is the gardener.’” O’Donovan finally got O’Casey to talk to him, and the two men developed a relationship over subsequent phone calls.
“I learned more from O’Casey on the phone than anybody,” says O’Donovan. “He said ‘Listen to what people have to say. Get in the bus and listen, get in the tram and listen, go into a pub and listen.’ And what he said, although I never turned to writing, helped me in directing.”
If O’Casey was difficult, George Bernard Shaw was worse. Visiting the playwright in London to ask him to reduce his royalty fee, O’Donovan instead was bombarded with questions about Dublin. When he finally managed to make his request, Shaw wouldn’t budge. “He said ‘You produce shows? Well the first thing you have to think about is who wrote the shows. They’re first priority. Never try and short change them.’ ”
O'Donovan didn't get the reduction in royalties he was looking for, but it didn't stop him putting on the play, and other shows and broadcast productions over the years for audiences all over the world. When the legendary American Ed Sullivan Showcame to Ireland, it was Fred O'Donovan who got the call. "I agreed to do it as long as he'd use Irish artists." Among them was Maureen Potter, who impressed her US audience so much that she was later offered the Barbra Streisand role in Funny Girl. "I had to tell them she had a slight problem. She was a little bit pregnant."
Potter instead stayed at home as the star of O'Donovan's wildly successful revue show, Gaels of Laughter, which packed out the Gaiety Theatre during its summer runs in the 1960s. It returns for one night only next Monday as a tribute to its creator. How did he feel when told about its revival? He grins. "I felt like emigrating straight away!"
His modesty seems genuine, and though the walls of his Howth house are studded with photos of O'Donovan in the company of de Valera, Meryl Streep and others, there's not a trace of hubris in this sparkly octogenarian. He may drop a name or two in conversation, but only if he's got a good story to go with it. Like the time he had Peter O'Toole all set to play a part in Shaw's Man and Superman, until the actor was suddenly afflicted with a mysterious condition. "He couldn't raise his arm," recalls O'Donovan. "I was up the walls . . . I thought he was dying." He sent O'Toole to be examined by a surgeon friend, who called him back with the diagnosis. "He had a Zube lozenge stuck in the hairs under his arm."
You can tell that show business has given O’Donovan plenty of giggles, yet ask him what work he’s most proud of, and his answer is immediate. “The Irish Cancer Society,” which he co-founded with Prof Austin Darragh. Yet for the most part, he’s still best known for the entertainment he made possible. “I’m lucky,” he says. “I’ve worked in a profession I love, with people I love, in a country I love. What more can a man ask?”
Gaels of Laughterwill return to the Gaiety for one night only this Monday, January 25th. It will be hosted by Gay Byrne
