Nine Irish Lives by Mark Bailey

Author:Mark Bailey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Published: 2018-02-11T05:00:00+00:00

THE DIRECTOR

Rex Ingram (1893–1950)

BY PIERCE BROSNAN

I write this from my home in Los Angeles—Malibu, more specifically. I’ve spent the morning painting. I like to paint every morning when I’m home, as I am now—enjoying a bit of down time before I leave in a few weeks for a film in Italy. I can hear my wife, Keely, downstairs. She’s probably reading the New York Times, the print version, which we just can’t seem to shake.

I close my eyes and try to imagine this city of Los Angeles roughly eighty years ago—this would be in 1936—and a scene found over the hill from here, on the southern edge of the San Fernando Valley in what was then the sleepy little suburb of Studio City.

On a tree-lined street, in an ordinary house, a forty-three-year-old man is walking around his property. He’s handsome—Irish American, with a strong nose and high forehead, his short black hair combed back. The man steps into his studio, just as I’m in mine, and dips his hands into a bucket of clay. He begins to sculpt a mythical creature—a satyr of sorts. His wife keeps her own company inside.

Watching him, it would be hard to guess that just a few years earlier this man—Rex Ingram—was Hollywood’s hottest director. He was responsible for some of the silent film era’s biggest commercial and critical hits, with his wife and creative partner, Alice Terry, as their star. Bringing an artist’s sensibility to what was a new directing style, he lit up movie marquees and popular magazines across the country, launching silver-screen stars like Rudolph Valentino and Ramon Novarro, and making himself and his movie executives wildly wealthy along the way. But here he is, alone in his studio.

I suppose—you go up, you come down.

From my window, I stare out at a wide expanse of blue ocean. Ireland feels a long way away. It’s not easy getting here; this I know. Certainly, ending up as he did in Los Angeles, it had been a long journey for Rex. There were incredible highs and some lows too, and at least four remarkable films to show for it, but overall, it was a long journey indeed.

REGINALD INGRAM MONTGOMERY HITCHCOCK—later to be known as Rex Ingram—was born in Dublin in 1893. I myself was born only an hour’s drive north in Navan, County Meath, more than half a century later. Navan was then a little rural town on the banks of the River Boyne and worlds apart from the city. Not that any of this matters much: I realize Rex is the star of this story, and even though we are both Irish, both in the business of film, and both artists independent of that work (for Rex, in sculpting, and me, painting)—I’m only supporting.

The Hitchcock family was middle-class Protestant. Living there in the Dublin neighborhood of Rathmines, they represented what’s known as the Ascendancy, a privileged class of Protestants carrying the British flag, as it were, among us Catholics. His mum, Kathleen, was culturally refined, demure, and warm.

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