CURTAIN FALLS ON OLYMPIA’S QUEEN
She was central to the theatre’s history but Maureen Grant’s personal story was just as entertaining as much of what appeared on stage
WHEN she was pregnant, Maureen Grant had a bad fall and spent a month in the Coombe Hospital up to the birth. Her boss Stanley Illsley, who coowned Dublin’s Olympia Theatre with Leo McCabe, called a supervisor over and said: ‘I believe Miss Grant had a baby. Does she know who owns it? Is it any of the lads backstage?’
He was stupefied to learn that far from being Miss Grant, Maureen was Mrs Grant — and already had seven other children. ‘Oh, Jesus, Mary and Joseph!’ he said. ‘Give me a large brandy!’
Always lucky to appear what she called ‘neat’ while expecting, she had kept marriage and children a secret because this was at a time when many women were forced to give up work once they wed, and she had no intention of doing so. Far from firing Maureen, Mr Ilsley sent a congratulatory cheque for £5 (around €130 in today’s money) and a bundle of baby clothes.
He also stipulated that Maureen wouldn’t take a holiday for seven years, she later told the Storymap oral history website. On the very last day of that agreement, she had her ninth child...
He was a wise man, because Maureen, née Fox, didn’t just work at the theatre — to generations, she was the Olympia, running the bar at the legendary venue for drama, panto, comedy and music.
After she retired, the domain she reigned over for almost seven decades was renamed Maureen’s Bar, but it might just as easily have been called Maureen’s Creche, because as often as not, she took the children to work with her. Indeed, one of them, Jimmy, eventually became the venue’s general manager. Incredibly, alongside her own nine children, she also adopted four.
‘They were all over the place,’ she later said in an interview with Irish Examiner. ‘I used to wrap Jimmy in a blanket and hang him on the back of the toilet door. Give him a spoonful of Dozol and a dummy and he’d sleep all night.
‘I had another one, Pat, in a crisps box behind the bar. And another one in an old pram outside in the laneway in Crampton Court. If it was now, they’d have me in jail.’
Over the years, she met and was loved by international superstars who performed there. One of her favourites was Kris Kristofferson, who kissed her on the lips and dedicated a song to her on one of his albums. ‘His wife doesn’t mind sharing him with me — sure I’m harmless,’ she later joked.
The one who made the biggest impression was Hollywood superstar Tyrone Power. ‘He has a pair of eyes, Jesus, you could powder your nose in them,’ she said. ‘You’d commit sin for him.’ (In an intriguing aside, Power may have been aware of this too — when he died of a heart attack at just 44, his will unusually stipulated that his eyes be made available for corneal transplant.)
Maureen died this week at 95, bringing the curtain down on an extraordinary life for an ordinary Dubliner. A tribute from the Olympia read: ‘As most of you will know,
Maureen had been an integral part of the theatre since 1949, and all who encountered her were lucky to enjoy her warm welcome, her fascinating stories, her quick wit, and her sharp tongue. She has been adored by staff members, artists, crew and guests of the theatre for decades, and her loss will be felt far and wide.
‘She often joked that she would always be a part of the theatre as she planned to haunt it after she’s gone. We’ve no doubt we will all be feeling her presence on Dame Street forever.’
Tributes flooded in from the likes of Aslan, U2, Brendan Gleeson and many others who enjoyed frequently raucous sessions in the bar after performances, but it all might have been so different.
In the late 1940s, her mother-in-law wanted a cleaning job so Maureen took her to the union offices in Liberty Hall to see if anything was avail
‘I’d keep one child in the crisps box behind the bar’
able. Not as a cleaner, they were told, but the man they spoke to said the Olympia was looking for a barmaid for three weeks cover. ‘It might suit you,’ he told Maureen, and she later admitted to a white lie to get the job. She told the manager she had worked in Sadler’s Wells in London, only because she saw a poster on the wall for that theatre as she waited for the interview. He asked her to lift her skirt: ‘Excuse me!’ she said indignantly. ‘I’m not looking to be a dancer.’
Nor, as it happened, was she even talking to the manager, but to a magician in the show, chancing his arm. After the real interview, during which she lied about the magician’s unwanted advances so he wouldn’t be fired, she got the job, though the manager told her years later that, in relation to the Sadler’s Wells claim,
he knew she was chancer too but had hired her anyway. Her pay was 19 shillings and twopence a week, or around €39 today.
She took two weeks’ holiday to have her first son, Jimmy, whose existence she had to keep secret, and then went straight back to work. ‘I was finding it very hard to get someone to look after my children, and I couldn’t afford it anyway,’ she told photographer Ruth Medjber in 2014. ‘I’d leave Jimmy swinging in his blanket on the back of the toilet door. I’d keep an eye on him through the glass.’
When her secret finally came out, seven babies later, life got a little easier, and the whole family became staples at the venue, with 11 working there over the years, including on stage. She even did her washing in the Circle Bar and put it on the hot pipes, so the children’s clothes would be dry for school the next day.
She saw the theatre at its most glamorous, when people dressed for it, a far cry from the crowds that later made Midnight At The Olympia one of the hottest tickets in town.
‘The seats in the front would be reserved and the cars would pull up outside with the ladies in their beautiful dresses. It was gorgeous,’ she told Medjber. ‘The ushers had to parade in the front hall. We’d stand there and be inspected. If the seam on your nylons was crooked, you’d be sent to fix it.’
Legendary black-and-white comedy stars Laurel and Hardy were two more who captured her heart. ‘They used to come down with their wives, two lovely women. They were just normal guys,’ she said. ‘They loved my children, and wanted to adopt half a dozen of them!’
When Maureen finally gave up working, she didn’t give up the theatre, regularly reappearing before curtain-up and during the interval to collect money for the cancer ward in Beaumont Hospital.
For her long service and her goodnatured stewardship of the hospitality areas, she was awarded the Variety Gold Heart Award for Outstanding Contribution to Irish Entertainment, and while that was a tribute she was delighted to receive, it was not her proudest moment.
‘I always used to joke that I’d love to see my name in lights,’ she told Ruth Medjber. ‘One night at the end of a show, I was called up on stage and they put a blindfold on me. When they took it off, the cast were all sitting in the stalls and they told me to look up at my bar. There it was — my name in lights.’
Her ambition was to die in the Olympia, but that was not to be. She will, though, always be a part of the theatre, as long as those lights continue to twinkle and proclaim to all that they are on hallowed ground. This will always be Maureen’s Bar.