The Great Parade by Peter Filichia

Author:Peter Filichia
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466867123
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

CHAPTER FIVE

The Dramas

We’ve already seen shows about those whose real names were used (Fanny Brice, Martin Luther) and those who had them obfuscated (Laurette Taylor, Boris Thomashefsky, and Adolf Hitler). Finally, depending on your point of view, there was also Kris Kringle.

Dramas in 1963–64 certainly portrayed many actual people, some named by names, other masked. But back then, when people heard the name Dylan, the real person who immediately came to mind was a poet surnamed Thomas and not a singer whose first name was Bob.

Over the last fifty years, that has changed. But Dylan Thomas (1914–53) was the most famous poet-cum-bad-boy of his era. No wonder that Sir Alec Guinness was willing to portray him.

Playwright Sidney Michaels centered on the last year of Thomas’s life, when the poet was thirty-eight and his wife, née Caitlin Macnamara, was thirty-nine.

Those are the statistics. Emotionally speaking, Caitlin (Kate Reid) was more than a year older. After Michaels’s three-hour drama Dylan had concluded, many theatergoers came away thinking Dylan’s level of maturity was around thirty-eight months. What endurance Caitlin had to remain married to him for sixteen years; she might have even stayed longer had he not died only two weeks after turning thirty-nine of 1) pneumonia, 2) pressure on the brain, and, of course, 3) a fatty liver. (His daughter, Aeronwy, swore till the day she died that the doctor attending him had administered a morphine overdose.)

Audiences might not have sided with Caitlin from the outset, given that her first line was “So here you are, you scum.” When she brought up her father’s friendship with painter Augustus John, Dylan vaingloriously said, “I’ll come off better’n he will in a thousand years.”

If we can judge by Google, Thomas was correct. As of this writing, the score is Dylan, 539,000 hits; Augustus, 276,000.

When Caitlin said he wasn’t as famous as he thought he was—that “nobody in your home town even knows who you are,” he corrected her. “In my home town,” he grandly proclaimed, “I’m known as the drunk.”

The couple was living in Laugharne, Wales, but Dylan had undoubtedly made a trip to Ireland to kiss, hug, and pet the Blarney Stone, for he made many witty observations. When Caitlin asked where he’d been the previous night, he said he was with “Fishermen. Whores. The kind of people Christ used to pal around with.”

“You don’t give an f’ing damn about me,” Caitlin said. True, she only used the first letter of that four-letter word, but for a woman in that era, the contraction was potent. Caitlin was no shrinking violet when she became purple with rage. When Dylan accused her of being with “seven truck drivers,” she responded, “I have to have some fun.” When he was away—as he often was—she bemoaned being stuck with “three Dylan-aping time-sucking brats.” Again, love vs. career: Caitlin had been a model and modern dancer until motherhood took over.

Now she’d have no help, for Dylan would enjoy six months of lucrative poetry readings in America. Yes, but

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