While I wait to hear from Maureen, I listen to an interview my father did with her and Frank’s brother, Philip.
Right away, I notice how hard Philip and his wife, Ariel, are trying to please. They pull out poetry books and yearbooks and discuss family dynamics, histories, motivations. They tell my father they’ll help him track down one of O’Hara’s favorite childhood playmates, and put him in touch with a cousin who has the family’s whole genealogy. And they roll with my father’s lack of confidence. I don’t know that I’d be as patient.
Philip and Ariel O’Hara—Oak Park, Illinois—4/14/77
Peter Schjeldahl: Let’s see. Do you want to— Should we experiment with on the record / off the record?
Philip O’Hara: If I say off the record, you can stop the machine, okay?
PS: Okay. All right … Otherwise it’s on the record?
PO: Yep. Took a long time to establish that, but at least we got it worked out. Go ahead, Peter.
One reporter friend of mine writes sensitive national security stories. I asked her once about best practices for going off the record. She said that as a reporter you are in control of the interview, and you set the ground rules. She identifies herself to her subject as a reporter. The interview subject tells her things with that understanding. If he starts to tell her something is off the record, she says, “No, wait! If you don’t want this in print, please don’t tell it to me. I’m a reporter, and I only want to know things I can write down. Please just tell me things that I can use.” She says often the person will then say all the same things he would have anyway, but she will have it properly sourced and doesn’t have to sort out later what’s fair game and what’s not.
My father doesn’t seem to have the experience to take control like that. It seems his confidence has been rattled by how much harder this project is than he thought it would be. I hear a weariness in his voice every time Maureen’s name comes up.
He’s giving her too much power, I think, and he’s creating a fight where there doesn’t need to be one. If he’d just be nicer to her, I’m sure she’d come around. In any case, he should stop being so distracted. He should notice all the good that is there instead.
Philip is full of details about O’Hara that I’ve never heard before. Their parents met when their father, Russell, was the college English teacher of their mother, Kay. One of Kay’s brothers was killed driving a Coca-Cola truck when he lost control and crashed near the family home. One of her sisters was a librarian who died of brain cancer. Another sister, a nun and English teacher, died of tuberculosis. (Philip says the archdiocese didn’t give her proper medical care and he’s still angry about it.) Frank and Philip’s maternal grandmother’s brother, J. Frank Donahue, owned much of the real estate in Grafton. The Donahue company also had a hand in livestock, farm equipment, and undertaking. One of the family’s favorite stories was of the time when, in the field behind their home at 6 North Street, an eagle swooped down and carried off a black lamb.
I love all these details, and I love how expansive Philip is in discussing the family. He repeatedly talks about how women in the family were “typical ghetto Irish Catholic victims.” There was a long tradition in the family of intellectual maiden aunts. He says Russell’s sister Grace was among the women who denied her own dreams in order to serve as caregiver for her parents. She and other aunts gave Frank, firstborn of the firstborn, countless books with loving dedications in the front. They made his education their business.
Polar opposites in almost every way, Frank and Philip never saw eye to eye about the family. Over drinks at the Gotham Bar in Manhattan as late as 1965, Frank told him that he hated their mother. Philip insisted that while she’d had problems, she was a stronger advocate for Frank than his father had been and a force for good in his life. She insisted he play the piano, be refined, have a social life. In high school, he was even able to audit classes at the New England Conservatory in Boston, where he likely would have pursued a degree if he hadn’t been called to war. What’s more, Philip argued that their mother was an interesting person. As a Girl Scout troop leader, she’d caught hell once for trying to teach the girls about different religions, going so far as to take them on an unauthorized field trip to a synagogue.
Frank was unmoved, Philip said. He hated Grafton, though Philip didn’t quite understand why. Frank said, “Well, Phil, when you’re older you’ll understand.” And Philip said, “I’m sure I will, but I don’t now.”
PS: So your earliest memory of Frank was that he was going off to parochial school and what else?
PO: Well, you know, Frank and I lived two totally different lives. It was like we lived in different families. I’m really reaching in my recollection, but he was the most beautifully dressed kid that went off to school every day. My mother had always taught him to be polite and be nice. And I’ll never forget the day that a kid took a piece of birch wood and broke his nose. And my mother had told Frank never to fight back. And so Frank didn’t get his nose broken once; he got it broken twice.
PS: By the same kid?
PO: Yes. And Frank never lifted a finger to defend himself.
Broken twice! By the same kid! O’Hara’s nose would be crooked for the rest of his life—a testimony to his mother’s pacifism.
Philip said he always regretted that the family sold a piece of farmland they owned in Grafton called Tower Hill. Before he went to the navy, Frank had asked the family to save it for him because he wanted to raise English and Irish setters there. When they sold it, Philip says, it broke Frank’s heart. And yet, for the sake of American letters, it’s probably better that after the war Frank went to Harvard and then New York City instead of becoming a dog breeder on Tower Hill.
When Frank’s father, Russell, died at age forty-eight of a heart attack at a bowling alley, Frank came home from Harvard for the funeral. “Frank was totally emotionless, like a goddamn zombie,” Philip says of Frank’s demeanor after their father’s death. “We waked my father in our house, typical Irish wake. And then all of a sudden, we heard these gargantuan screams and cries. It was Frank upstairs in his own room. It took a great deal of effort to calm him down. It had built up in him for so long.”
Russell hadn’t left a will or prepared Kay to take care of herself, so Philip reported that his aunt Grace moved in and criticized everything Kay did. The family liquidated the Donahue company. Philip, who was fourteen at the time, believed his mother was given far less than her due, and he resented Frank, then twenty-one, for not stepping in and protecting her interests.
Around this time, Kay started drinking heavily and left the children to their own devices. I can’t imagine what they went through, raising themselves after dealing with so much trauma. Philip scraped together the money for Maureen’s private-school education (Frank chipped in what little he had), asking a couple of local people to cosign notes and borrowing from the schools. He tells my father with pride in his voice that he paid it all back when she graduated.
Frank sent his little brother and sister cards and letters while he was in the navy. Maureen, a refined and pretty little girl, adored her brother and took to heart his advice on what books to read and what music to listen to. But Frank didn’t return home often, and when he did, he avoided talking about what he’d seen in the war. The only thing Philip remembers him saying was that Philip’s canary had to be sent away because its chirping reminded Frank too much of the sonar beeps he’d lived with on the ship.
PS: He was at one point a lookout for planes because he was particularly sharp-eyed and could identify any model of plane from a long distance. He said he used to lay awake at night worrying that he was going to be responsible for the shooting down of the next great Japanese composer.
PO: Is that right? That’s a story I haven’t heard.
PS: He was already more interested in art than in war or politics.
PO: One of the greatest stories I remember about him was … I was in the army. I was on my way to Korea. It was 1953. And he invited me to New York for the weekend. And I arrived and he lived on Forty-Ninth Street. Right by the Great Gatsby’s, right there by the UN Building. He’d been shot. Have you heard this story? He lived on the fourth floor—
PS: He was shot while you were there?
PO: Oh, yes.
PS: Give me your memory of that event.
PO: And so, I came in and there were all kinds of police guys there. I knew goddamn well this was his room. I walked in the room. It was a fourth-floor walkup, and I’d never been in the room before.
PS: And this is just when you arrived?
PO: Yes, absolutely.
PS: And he’d just been shot?
PO: Yes! Minutes before. Twenty minutes before, ten minutes before. I’d taken a bus to the West Side Terminal from Fort Dix, New Jersey. I walked in and all the goddamned lights in the world are on, and Frank is sitting on a wooden chair like that ladder-back chair, but not as nice. And he’s naked except for a towel around his bottom. And there’s a doctor and nurse around and lots of police.
The tape stopped there, but my father paid a second visit to Illinois a couple of months later and heard the rest.
He seems even more hesitant on this trip. He repeats a number of questions that were answered on the first trip. He asks how he might get in touch with one of Frank’s childhood friends, forgetting that he was told on the first visit she’d committed suicide. Nevertheless, Philip and Ariel seem even chattier than before.
Philip and Ariel O’Hara—Oak Park, Illinois—6/16/77
Ariel O’Hara: Was he drafted?
PO: No, he volunteered immediately after he graduated. And that’s interesting. My mother insisted that he not be in the trenches. She wouldn’t stand for him being in the army. She wanted him to have a—she was a big clean-sheet person. In the navy, you may get torpedoed and go down to Davy Jones, but you’ll go down with clean sheets. [Laughs.]
PS: You’ll have clean underwear on.
Philip continues the earlier story of the shooting.
PO: What happened was he told me he was accosted by four boys. He’d been to a delicatessen by the Belmont Plaza to buy food for us for the weekend. And he was accosted by four kids. He hit one with a bottle of milk and then he ran. He heard a shot. Felt nothing. In the hallway he felt something warm going down his leg. He had a raincoat, trench coat on. Of course, when he got into the apartment, he realized it was blood. He called the building super. Anyway, I got in a huge fight with the nurse and medical guy there. They said he’d been stabbed. I said, “Jesus Christ, it’s a bullet wound. You can see the puncture in the skin.” And I got the raincoat and showed them the hollow mark. They still refused to believe me. He was terribly angry with me that I was being so uppity with the authorities [who said] that it had to be a stab.
Philip took his wounded brother to the hospital at Welfare Island. Then he went back to the apartment and, scared to be alone in the city at night, turned on all the lights. At four o’clock in the morning the telephone rang. The detective asked Philip how he was. He said, “I’m so goddamned scared. Every noise I hear I’m ready to jump out a window.” The detective said, “We’re watching the building.” Philip said, “Shit, that doesn’t make me feel any better.”
I could listen to Philip talk about his brother forever. I’m starting to get a sense of the characters in O’Hara’s orbit. When Philip says Frank’s friends showed up the next day to take over, I’m not surprised by the list of caretakers: Grace Hartigan, Jane Freilicher, Hal Fondren, James Schuyler, John Ashbery.
Philip went back to Fort Dix. The bullet wasn’t removed because it was embedded in the muscle—something that would cause pain later in life.
When, thirteen years later, O’Hara was hit by the dune buggy on Fire Island, Philip took a midnight flight to be at his brother’s side in the hospital. He said Frank told him: “Phil, why did you come? Go home and take care of Ariel and the kids. I’ll be out in the morning.” Philip says Frank was dead twenty minutes later.
The ensuing melodrama poisoned Philip against many of Frank’s friends. Philip particularly hated Patsy Southgate, whose apartment became the group’s headquarters in the days that followed O’Hara’s death. Everyone was drunk and unhinged, he said, with Southgate’s young children there, taking it all in. In response to some complaint of his, Southgate told him it would have been better if Philip, not Frank, had been crushed under the dune buggy’s tires. Philip says he had to fight for permission to invite his and Frank’s mother to the funeral.
PS: Whose idea was it that Kay not be invited?
PO: All of them. The idea was he hated her, and she wouldn’t be there, including Maureen.
PS: Including Maureen?
PO: Yes. Oh, yes. And I just told them that she was going to be there or there’d be no funeral.
AO: You have to interject to say that had been a particularly bad time for Kay. That whole period.
PO: She was institutionalized.
AO: And it was a particularly devastating time for Kay, which had all kinds of ramifications for people that that affected.
PO: My view was the mother of the child— I don’t give a shit if she was a felon—
PS: Yeah, when you die, your mother gets to come.
PO: That was my position.
I’m struck by what Philip says here, something I know I must have heard before but that hasn’t sunk in until now: Frank O’Hara didn’t choose Maureen as his executor. He died with no will. That meant it was up to Kay, Philip, and Maureen, as next of kin, to figure out what to do with the estate. Kay was not considered competent, so only one question remained: would the estate go to Philip or Maureen?
Philip told my father that when it came to the executor job, “I said whatever Maureen wanted was fine with me.” The main thing he said he wanted was for his brother to have a proper funeral, with a real burial in a real cemetery and the whole immediate family there, including their mother.
He got his way. Kay arrived at the funeral looking every inch the elegant New England matriarch. With her hazel eyes and impeccable outfit, she stood out against the crowd of poets and painters who wept like children and drank like sailors.
Maureen, then twenty-nine, became their brother’s literary executor, with the power to act on O’Hara’s behalf when negotiating contracts with publishers, renewing copyrights, and collecting royalties. From then on, she would be the sole decision maker when anybody sought to quote from his work beyond the limited lines allowed according to the doctrine of fair use. For the rest of her life, unless she handed over control, she would act as the sole guardian of her late brother’s reputation and legacy.
Even though she was younger than almost everyone else at the funeral, Maureen probably did seem the most grown-up. Philip shared the opinion later expressed by O’Hara’s friend Ned Rorem in Gay Sunshine magazine: “Frank O’Hara died, and New York City was overrun with widows of all sexes. I’ve never seen such spiteful behavior. The number of people who acted like barnyard creatures gnashing at each other instead of coming together in a common cause. Each one said, ‘Frank loved me the most. Frank gave me this poem.’”
Philip returned to Illinois furious at his brother’s friends, and at what he called the joke of a hospital out on Fire Island that let his brother die without proper treatment, and at what he considered insufficient consequences for the kid driving the dune buggy. He even wrote to Governor Nelson Rockefeller demanding a ban on Fire Island dune buggies—an effort that he says was “magnificently unsuccessful.”
After he’d fought all the battles he could think to fight, Philip finally mourned his brother. One was a lean cosmopolitan poet, the other a heavy suburban businessman. They didn’t agree about their mother, nor about Grafton. But for the last five or six years of Frank’s life, the two had started going out together once a month or so, to the Gotham Bar, the Five Spot, the Jazz Gallery. They went to Italian restaurants. They played bocce. And Philip liked some of his brother’s friends very much, especially the beautiful painters Jane Freilicher and Grace Hartigan.
A decade after Frank’s death, in Philip and Ariel’s house in Oak Park, wind chimes sound in the distance, teenage children run in and out of the room, and a new pet canary chirps. Philip tells my father: “We didn’t have a lot in common, but we got along pretty well.”
On our best days, that’s what I think about my father. And I think that while we don’t have very many things in common, we do have the best things: writing and books and Frank O’Hara.
On one of my father’s two trips to Oak Park, Philip and Ariel let him go down into their basement to look at the five hundred books they’d saved of O’Hara’s collection.
My father talks into his tape recorder while looking through them. There are papers tucked into some of them: a list of kennels specializing in Afghan hounds; fragments of poems; photographs, including one of the British poet Steven Spender; a postcard from Edward Gorey. Many are gifts from his parents—“For our dearest son”—or from his aunt Mary or aunt Grace or other relatives. On the title pages, O’Hara notes where he read the books and what the year was.
Philip and Ariel O’Hara—O’Hara’s pre-1950s Library—1977
PS: Sinister Street by Compton McKenzie. Harvard ’47. Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen. Grafton ’47. Winter Words in Various Moods and Meters by Thomas Hardy. Harvard ’48. Here’s something interesting: The Theory and Practice of Strict Counterpoint by Victor von Lytle, Musical Doctor. Ditson Company. Philadelphia. 1940. I think. Yeah. Inscribed Francis O’Hara. Los Angeles 1946. Tucked into the book, a neatly typed transcription of a passage from The Dead by James Joyce. It starts, “A few light taps upon the pane made him turn toward the window,” and ends, “faintly falling like the descent of their last end upon all the living and the dead.”