Frances and I were time travellers.
She was born in 1925, and was 94 when we met. Starting with Calvin Coolidge, she lived through 17 American presidents. Frances had more friends – and more stories from the last American century – than anyone I knew. After I watched the film noir Born to Kill (1947) she told me she knew the film’s roguish star Lawrence Tierney. He was a piece of work in the film and, she told me, he was no cakewalk in real life either. In my mind, we were friends before I was born. I see pictures of Frances as a young woman, and I think, “I know her, too”. I imagine us both aged 35, laughing our heads off in PJ Clarke’s on 3rd Avenue, circa 1959.
Frances Ballantyne, who died on June 10th aged 100, had quite a life. She used to say, “I have a lot of acquaintances, Quentin, but very few friends.” I took that as a hint, not that she was icing me out of her knitting circle, but that she counted me among those she held dear. I was honoured to be included among her friends. Grace Kelly’s father taught her how to play poker, and she once appeared in newspaperwoman Dorothy Kilgallen’s New York Evening Journal Voice of Broadway column as “the girl in the red raincoat with the sad eyes”.
But Miss Frances didn’t have sad eyes for very long, not for most of her 100 years, anyway; she had curious eyes even when she lost her sight. She had eyes burning with a fire that consumed books, jazz, politics and Life – not the magazine, but that thing that is all around us, all the time. I called her almost daily during lockdown and, at 7pm every evening, we listened to a tentative, faraway trumpet together on the telephone, sounded in honour of medical workers. She thought it was a child on the trumpet. I guessed it was a young adult still learning how to play.
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She “saw” me, even though she was blind by the time we met each other. I loved seeing myself through her eyes. I felt good about myself when I was around her. It’s funny to have a friend who has never seen your face. I endeavoured to help her out with that: “How do I describe myself? Do you know Brad Pitt?” She’d shake with laughter. She knew that I didn’t look anything remotely like Brad Pitt. Born into an Irish-American family in Connecticut, she never liked cod or porridge because she ate so much of it during the Great Depression.
We signed up for tap-dancing classes on 72nd Street. Frances asked, “Quentin, what colour is your tutu?” Every week I described a different colour; sometimes they were shorter and had more ruffles. She got a kick out of that and, the greatest compliment of all, she got a kick out of me, the good and the bad and the exasperating, which meant a lot, because she was a pretty tough customer. Once she ordered me to call a fellow, who I had nothing in common with, to cancel a planned second date. She was fair and she was kind. As someone with little time left, she didn’t want me to waste any of it.
She moved to New York in the 1940s, and hung out on the stoop of her brownstone in Hell’s Kitchen in the 1980s, where her neighbour, a young actor called Kathy Bates, would shoot the breeze and have a beer. She slept in Central Park with other New Yorkers in the era before air conditioning. They carried gas cylinders up the stairs to the tenement flat; the smell of gas got into their clothes. Wiseguys from a nearby Italian restaurant protected Frances and her girlfriends from men who tried to harass them. New York city, I knew from her personal experience, could be a glamorous place, but also dangerous for women in a world before CCTV.
When Frances turned 100, I told her she was my only “centurion” friend. I meant to say “centenarian”, but I didn’t correct the record. “You are a centurion,” I said. She fought the good fight for more years than I have been alive. In the 1980s, during the height of the Aids epidemic in New York, she recalled how some people jumped up from a park bench if a person with symptoms of Kaposi sarcoma sat down. It was important for her never to forget. She had in-depth knowledge of JFK’s domestic and foreign policies, and did not put him on a pedestal like other Irish-Americans. I had never before had a friend like Frances, and I probably never will again.
She was patient, funny, smart and a politically active New Yorker. Frances could argue her point, but she never lost her cool. We talked about sex, relationships and politics. Although she was a Democrat, she did have friends who were Republican. Even from behind her dark glasses, which protected her eyes from the light, she believed in dialogue over judgment. When a person who “sees you” disappears into the divine, ethereal nothingness of time, or the afterlife, they leave a void, but she embarked on that journey, willingly and with dignity. Such was her strength, it took weeks for her to finally slip away.
Covid was one of the strangest eras she lived through, she said, but McCarthyism remained one of the darkest. She left us during the protests in LA, but she passed the baton during her lifetime. When Frances wanted to make a change, or file a complaint, she wrote directly to the chief executive officer. She trained as an actor, appeared in a TV comedy pilot, and among her many career trajectories, worked for an organisation that found housing for people with low income. She described herself, jokingly, as “shanty Irish” and me as “lace-curtain Irish”, even though she had a well-known penchant for Campbell’s loose tea. I, meanwhile, scoured the internet for Barry’s.
She also taught me the difference between being alone and loneliness, and that the latter is an inside job
She taught me about friendship, letting the right ones in, letting go of needing to be liked by others, and the importance of liking and accepting yourself for who you are. “Once upon a time I used to pursue people who didn’t like me,” she told me. “If I finally had them in my life, what did I do? I had people in my life that I was so upset about and I had to pretend that I liked them, and pretend that I was whoever it was they wanted me to be. I don’t have to do that any more. This is who I am. The people who do like me are the people I want in my life and I am delighted to have them.” She spoke in a slow, considered manner, in those aged, earthy tones.
She also taught me the difference between being alone and loneliness, and that the latter is an inside job. “I’m not uncomfortable being alone and I’m never bored,” she said. “I accept my life a day at a time.” I felt guilty leaving New York, and our coterie of friends on the Upper West Side, but she said, “Quentin, New York is my home. My roots are here. Your roots are in Ireland. That’s your home.” I left a lot behind when I left Dublin, and I left a lot behind when I left New York. But her words made my decision easier. She knitted hats and scarfs for prisoners, and I took a couple of those, knitted with love and dedication, with me.
In school she was scolded by the nuns for having friends outside of her “own kind”. She was friends with people of all religions and cultures – gay, straight, black, white, Jewish, Christian – and when she told the nun that the Bible preached inclusivity and generosity of spirit, the nun slapped her. But that slap only propelled her forward. Her parents weren’t thrilled either, but she found her own family in the Metropolis. She married three times and her first husband was black; interracial marriage was not at all common in the 1940s, but she lived by her own moral compass and her own social mores. Of course, she still voted.
She moved to New York at the end of the second World War, and she hung out in the West Village. When he missed the train home, James Baldwin crashed on her sofa. That was before he was a celebrated writer and cultural icon. But it was just a side note for Frances in a rich life that will mostly be known only to her. “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced,” Baldwin said. Frances never stopped learning and listening to jazz. She had a ferocious curiosity. When she could no longer read, friends read to her and she rented countless audiobooks from the library.
During one of our last dinners, I told her I had to have potentially life-saving heart surgery. At the end of our meal, our friend Beth, Frances and I all held hands. We sat in silence. I needed calm, and I needed courage. We had more than 200 years between the three of us. And yes, it made a difference. The quiet moments with loved ones are filled with a powerful, healing energy if you choose to seek it. Here was a woman with a life force in the 0.02 per cent – that’s roughly how many people live for a full century. She was cool as a cucumber with bad news, and she was cool as a cucumber with good news.
She did regret never visiting Ireland, so memorialising her here is my gift to her. I’m not sure if Frances believed in an afterlife, but she talked about going to her cloud and, as our friends Beth and Kathrina reminded me, the first thing she wanted to do was apologise to anyone who needed an apology from her during her lifetime. In a world of selfies, Frances thought of how she could be of service to others, no matter their political beliefs. She worked hard to maintain humility. It was a daily practice. “I am still interested in growing,” she said. “I do have character defects that I’d like to get rid of. I need to change because I want to change.”
She may indeed now be on her cloud and, even if it’s only in my mind‘s eye, it makes me fear death that little bit less
She did not complain, although she had plenty of reason to; she asked for help when needed and offered it to others when asked. She couldn’t see, but she cooked every day and lived independently. But finally her time came. After days of semi-consciousness she had a lucid day and, when Kathrina put me on speakerphone, Frances said, “Did you purchase your house yet?” Those were her last words to me. How could she care at a time like this, or even remember at a time like this that I was househunting? Because, simple as it seems, she was genuinely, wholeheartedly invested in other people.
Some of Frances’s ashes were scattered by friends near the Eleanor Roosevelt Monument in Riverside Park. She may indeed now be on her cloud and, even if it’s only in my mind‘s eye, it makes me fear death that little bit less. If she can exit so gracefully, perhaps so can I. That’s the hope, anyway. For Frances to have a spiritual connection, she needed a human connection. That might be why her landline almost never stopped ringing. There’s one way I can keep her around, and make sure she is never far away during my own lifetime. Whenever I am faced with a challenging situation, I can ask, “What would Frances do?”
Frances Ballantyne, a New Yorker, was born on March 5th, 1925 and died on June 10th, 2025
