Ryan's Daughter When Hollywood came to Ireland
A new book sheds light on what really happened when Hollywood arrived in Dingle for the filming of the now classic
When the Ryan's Daughter crew of 200 colonised the Dingle peninsula, the director David Lean took over the newly-built Skellig Hotel, which was largely empty during the winter months. Across town, the film's biggest star, Robert Mitchum had made his own arrangements, as Paul Benedict Rowan describes in his forthcoming book Making Ryan's Daughter If the Skellig was the official residence of Ryan’s Daughter, then Milltown House was its disreputable, outrageous cousin – during Mitchum’s time – where all and sundry were drawn. His personal assistant, Reva Frederick, had briefly come over from Los Angeles and picked out the small hotel across town from the Skellig, which Mitchum ended up renting out in its entirety from another family of Sheehys. Milltown House was more like a guesthouse, perched on the edge of Dingle Bay and accessible from the town across a narrow causeway. It would achieve almost instant notoriety once Mitchum took it over, becoming known as the ‘Dingle Brothel’, much to the horror of landlady Margaret Sheehy, but it was so much more than that. It was more like a drop-in centre for locals who Mitchum had befriended, and an oasis for crew, actors and stand-ins. Living with him was his ‘man’ when he filmed in Europe, an ex-British guardsman called Harold Sanderson, whose loosely defined role encompassed doorman, stand-in, drinks mixer, fixer and bodyguard. Mitchum regarded the hotel with a typically bemused air. ‘It had nine rooms numbered one to 10 – I never could figure that out. Upstairs, at one end of the hall, the sign said “Bath” and “T-I-L-E-T” at the other. It was $450 a month. Furnished it with a bunch of directors’ chairs.’ Mitchum had visitors, many of them over from England, where he had worked and played on numerous occasions, and he would inform folks on the set that ‘number 7 is hot tonight’ based on who was occupying that particular room at the time. He had other stories with which to amuse the crew. The telephone at the front desk of Milltown House remained in operation during Mitchum’s stay, and while he waited
for Lean to call him to the set, he would end up talking to people on the telephone from places like Liverpool and Leeds. Could they have their usual room, please? The family was coming. Mitchum would respond: ‘You can have room 9.’ ‘We were in number 6 last time.’ ‘Number 6 is occupied.’ ‘What’s happened to Mrs Sheehy?’ ‘Oh, she’s moved on. It’s run by a rich American now and he’s turned it into a nudist colony.’ Oiling the wheels of discourse were cases of whisky, brandy and other spirits delivered to the house by the drinks giant Seagram’s, whose owners the Bronfman family also had a stake in the film studio financing the movie, MGM. Mitchum put the socialising down to research, as he had come over a month before he was needed for his first scene to settle himself in and work on his Irish accent. He did this by inviting locals around for drinks. Amongst his guests would be a senior member of the local Gardaí, the parish priest or the doctor. They would come in for a tipple and be there for four or five hours. The conversation would occasionally stray into politics or the wars in Biafra or Vietnam (Mitchum wasn’t long from a celebrity tour of duty in South East Asia), not to mention the growing tensions north of the Irish border, which the actor was following closely. Mitchum studied his history and liked it to be known that he wasn’t just a he-man; he was a highly literate he-man. While he was supposed to listen, he also ended up doing a lot of the talking, so his Irish guests had to adjust their ear to his hipster, jazzman talk. Mitchum told them about his time working on the aircraft production line at Lockheed during the Second World War, when he became fast friends with a red-headed Irishman, Jim Dougherty, who used to share the lunch box prepared for him by his teenage wife, Norma Jean Baker, later to become Marilyn Monroe. Then there were his numerous run-ins with the law – ‘sassing the cops’ – which resulted in him doing time on a chain gang in Georgia after being busted for vagrancy during the Great Depression, when he rode freight trains around the US for years. Grass grew wild on the side of the line, and he later picked up another jail sentence for ‘conspiracy to possess’ marijuana, a famous Hollywood scandal that had forged his reputation. Half the time his guests didn’t know whether the stories he told them were true or not, but they checked out, even if he liked to give them a twist. His guests were surprised by how well read he was, and how he could quote at length from poems by Keats and Shelley. When Mitchum and his wife Dorothy had the flu, he called the unit doctor and renowned storyteller, Donal Savage. The doctor arrived with a female companion and had a drink. After a couple of hours swapping yarns, Doctor Savage said: ‘You never did meet my wife, did you?’