Arthur Shields was married three times – to Bazie McGee, to Una O’Connor, and, on 17 September 1955, to Laurie Bailey – and he had two children, Adam and Christine, both resident in the United States. Nonetheless, he chose to be buried in Ireland in a single plot alongside his brother Will Shields, known the world over as Barry Fitzgerald.
Although eight years older than Arthur Shields, Will had always been the little boy in the family. As Arthur came of age, his relationship to Will was sometimes a protective one. Neither brother, however, was dominant; they supported one another when support was needed.1 They went into the Abbey within a few years of one another (1913 for Arthur, 1917 for Will); they left it within a few years of one another (1936 for Will, 1939 for Arthur). They both worked on Broadway in the late 1930s, and sometimes in the same productions. In March 1940, when Arthur Shields was released from hospital after his collapse with tuberculosis, Will drove him from New York to Hollywood, stopping each day in a different town to obtain from the local doctor the required out-patient treatment. Thereafter, they were both settled in California. In their Hollywood hills community Will was a regular at Arthur Shields’s dinner table. On weekends Arthur Shields and his family became frequent guests at Will’s vacation home in the Santa Barbara hills. Along with the families of their sister and their niece, the Mortisheds and the Slotts, the Shields brothers kept an extended family vitally centred while living in Los Angeles, where the velocity of centrifugal social forces is often shattering.
The greatest days of their creative achievements came to an end in the summer of 1952 with The Quiet Man. The Internet Movie Database lists another thirty-three appearances in television or film for Arthur Shields, and seven more roles for Barry Fitzgerald, but none of these is a highlight of two careers with many earlier brilliant successes.
After The Quiet Man was completed, Will Shields learned that he had Parkinson’s disease. It is observable in that film that he often holds one hand in another when he has nothing else to grip (the reins of a horse, a pint glass, etc.); a primary symptom of Parkinson’s is a trembling of the hands. For the autumn of 1952 Fitzgerald was contracted to star in an Italian movie, Ha da veni … Don Calegero! A foreign country, an unknown director and the early effects of Parkinson’s disease made him ‘over-tired and out of sorts’, so Arthur Shields stayed in Rome for three and a half months to help him out.2 Afterwards the brothers agreed that Will should not again take on such demanding professional duties.
Will Shields was put on several speculative medications (no single treatment for Parkinson’s was known to be successful) and sleeping pills were prescribed on top of the other medications to ensure rest. He occasionally got confused and overdosed himself. Once, on a sudden impulse, Arthur Shields ran round to Will’s house on Gardner Street. He arrived just in time to save his brother from death by overdose.
In 1959 Will Shields went to Ireland. Feeling moody and distracted, he went to his friend J.J. Molloy’s doctor in July. He was judged to be in a toxic state from the amounts and combinations of medications he was taking.3 In mid-October he collapsed from a blood clot in the brain. Surgery was carried out at St Vincent’s Hospital, Dublin. Back in Los Angeles Arthur Shields was just then opening with Mary Anderson in a production of The Plough and the Stars at the Civic Theater. He was unable to come to Ireland until 1 November. After arriving at the hospital room Arthur Shields gave Will a Camel, and Will just let the cigarette burn, never moving at all, even as the lighted end burned down to his fingers – Arthur had to jump up and take it away from him. To see his brother in such a state was heartbreaking. The always gentle little man, so nimble and light on his feet, even had unaccountable, staggering fits of violence. Arthur Shields had a meeting with Dr Donovan, and was not consoled about Will’s prognosis.
Only five months later Will himself wrote a letter with this completely unexpected news: ‘I’ve made a good recovery and am looking forward to summer here.’ In August 1960, after a season of fishing and yachting, he declared his intention to head back to his home in Gardner Street, Hollywood, live with his sister ‘Bid’ Shields Mortished, then convalescent, and employ a young couple to look after them both. But in October, before he could put this plan into action, he had to go into St Patrick’s Hospital in Dublin. He died on 4 January 1961.
Going through Will’s effects in the hospital, Arthur Shields came across a letter of consolation from a Father Lynch, which arrived after the actor had already entered a coma. Shields took the time to write Father Lynch, and reflect on his brother’s life:
Barry was a shy little man … he was uncomfortable in crowds and really dreaded meeting new people, but he was not a recluse, and did enjoy certain company, especially when ‘old chat’ was good. He always loved our Christmas parties, when the children were all around, and he could sit back, smoke his pipe, have an odd drink, and open his presents. He never married, not that he disliked the company of women, but I think he was held back from proposing to anyone through shyness.4
In all their years together in Dublin, New York and Hollywood, Shields could recall only one quarrel between them. That was in February 1926 after the first production of The Plough and the Stars. Sean O’Casey was weighing the possibility of leaving Ireland for London. Will advised him to go; Arthur Shields felt strongly that O’Casey should stay, since both the Abbey and the country needed him, and he needed them too. The two brothers did not speak for twelve days. Then their mother ‘told us we ought to be ashamed of ourselves to allow something completely irrelevant to come between us’. Never since, Shields told Father Lynch, had they fallen out with each other.
The funeral service for Barry Fitzgerald was held in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, where Jonathan Swift had once been Dean. An elegy was delivered from the high pulpit by the Archbishop, the Most Revd Dr G.O. Simms – very personal in tone, and giving thanks to God for ‘a lovable life, lived with an unusual serenity and simplicity, yet a life of wide influence’. The Cathedral was crowded with old friends from the theatre and many others whom Shields did not know – ‘more Catholics in the church than Protestants’. Shields felt it deeply. At the interment in Dean’s Grange, he saw Helena Molony at the cemetery gate. He made the others wait while she, old and partly crippled, made her way to the graveside. The great feminist Republican had been an actress in the Abbey, and was the one who in 1916 asked Arthur Shields to hide the printing press on which the Proclamation had been printed.
When Arthur Shields was in Dublin the previous November to look after his brother, he had been invited to call upon President Éamon de Valera at Áras an Uachataráin (formerly the Viceregal Lodge). Shields reported to his wife Laurie that he was ‘not at all impressed’ by de Valera. ‘God bless us, but he has a lot to answer for.’5 Both men had fought in the Easter 1916 rebellion. Shields had been a leader of the Abbey Theatre and a key figure in the representation of Ireland on Broadway and in Hollywood, while de Valera had been the single most important leader of the Irish state in the century. Yet they did not at all see eye to eye on the new Ireland that followed the national movement for freedom. Shields regarded with horror the Civil War de Valera had started over the Oath to the king and the partition of the Six Counties in the 1922 Treaty.
He resented the constitutional declaration that Gaelic was the ‘national’ and ‘first official’ language of the country (afterwards, compulsory for actors employed by the Abbey Theatre). The ban on divorce, and in general the privileged position of Catholic doctrine in the 1937 Constitution, were injurious to him, his son and his second wife Aideen. Neutrality in World War II seemed wrong to Shields – although German on his mother’s side, he was all for the Allies. Basically, the new Ireland did not have a place, he felt, for people like himself, a Protestant by background, a secularist, an intellectual and an artist. Still, it could not be said that Arthur Shields was bitter, or had lost his love of Ireland, its people and its literature.
After the success of The Quiet Man, John Ford dreamed up schemes for further collaborations with the Shields brothers in putting the Irish Revival on screen. One of his first ideas for Four Provinces Films, the production company he formed with Lord Killanin and Brian Desmond Hurst in 1951, was a treatment of James Stephens’s The Demi-Gods, starring Barry Fitzgerald and Maureen O’Hara.6 That film was never made, nor did Barry Fitzgerald again act under Ford’s direction.
Three years after Barry Fitzgerald’s death, Ford was preparing to direct a movie based on the life of Sean O’Casey, Young Cassidy. He called upon Arthur Shields – perhaps for the sake of good luck, and the touch of Abbey Theatre authenticity – to serve as a voice coach and play a part. By this time, however, Shields himself was ailing. His old bout with TB, and a lifetime of smoking Camel cigarettes, had left him with emphysema.
Arthur Shields was financially secure. Barry Fitzgerald had shared out his sizable fortune among the extended Shields-Mortished-Slott family. Earlier, Arthur had bought a 10-per-cent stake in Ziv Productions, a television production company, which paid him returns. He also became the pitch man in commercials for Italian Swiss Colony wine; that brought a regular income. This advertising work came about in a period (1957–60) when the California wine industry was just getting on its feet, and Americans were not yet customarily drinkers of wine. The fact that Shields was Irish, and presumably associated with the consumption of whiskey and porter, did not stand in his way. He fitted the stereotype of a cultivated and European gentleman. And who would not trust the word of a priest about wine, even if he were only a stage priest?
His wife Laurie, amazed at all that this kindly, modest gentleman had done before she met him, was determined that he should get his life-story on paper. It seemed important to do not just for his daughter Christine and the wider Shields clan, but for Ireland and for theatre. She facilitated a number of long interviews with theatre scholars from American universities. In his recorded recollections, Shields was very definite in his beliefs. Writers, he thought, were at the basis of theatre, both in creating a sense of self in the audience – ‘It was the plays of the Abbey Theatre that made me increasingly aware that I was an Irishman, even before I was a member of the Company’ – and in forming the pediment upon which all the actor’s work is raised: ‘The real greatness of the Abbey was that it was a writer’s theatre, not an actor’s theatre, director’s theatre, electrician’s theatre, or a scene-painter’s theatre … The playwrights were really in charge. My advice to those who want to start a theatre is that they should start with the playwrights, and make sure they have plays really worth performing.’7
Yet strangely enough, after working with three generations of Irish writers – Yeats and Gregory, Robinson and O’Casey, Denis Johnston and Paul Vincent Carroll – Arthur Shields went off to Hollywood, a place where the writers, however essential, were not in charge. In the rank and file of production companies, they came behind the producers, the directors, the stars and sometimes even the cameramen.
In Hollywood, at the very fountain of representations for the world as a whole, Shields and his former Abbey Theatre colleagues – Barry Fitzgerald, Sara Allgood, Una O’Connor, J.M. Kerrigan and others – managed to embody something of the ‘real greatness’ of the Abbey: the writers’ perceptions of the human story at the dayspring of a nation. They did this by the ways they played their parts in movies based on Irish plays, like The Plough and the Stars, and in other movies that transmitted knock-on effects of those plays, like How Green Was My Valley. The Shields brothers enjoyed a creative and collaborative sympathy with John Ford that parallelled writer and actor relations at the Abbey.
John Ford’s movies with Abbey actors drew upon the Irish heritage and also aspired to leave new proofs of the national genius. Movies like The Long Voyage Home and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon were not marked as essentially Irish; they were multi-ethnic and universal in their range. These too, however, like The Playboy of the Western World and Juno and the Paycock, are great cultural achievements. The connection has not hitherto been biographically traced between the plays of the Irish Revival and a certain group of distinguished movies of Hollywood’s golden age, but the connection is there. That quiet, modest gentleman Arthur Shields may be foremost among those who forged the link.
1. Laurie Bailey Shields, Notes for a proposed biography, Shields family papers.
2. Arthur Shields to Eddie Choate, 27 August 1951, Shields family papers.
3. J.J. Molloy to Arthur Shields, 7 July 1959, Shields family papers.
4. Arthur Shields to Father Lynch, 24 January 1960, Shields family papers.
5. Arthur Shields to Laurie Shields, 7 November 1959, Shields family papers.
6. John Ford to Michael Killanin, 9 September 1952, Lilly Library.
7. Homer Swander, ‘Shields at the Abbey’, p. 2.