Dublin, 1920—a city caught between insurrection and civil war. On the cusp of independence from the yoke of British tyranny, Ireland was divided within itself as it sought to come to terms with the death of its martyrs and the birth of its new identity. In a few years, brother would fight brother over the shape that new identity would take.
Such thoughts weren't foremost in the minds of Marguerita Lilburn and Charles Stewart Parnell FitzSimons as they cradled their second child in the fashionable suburb of Ranelagh on August 17, 1920. An argument broke out about what the child should be called. (Even this early, she was causing drama.) Her father liked the name Kate. A priest who was a family friend suggested Mary, since she'd been born just two days after the Feast of the Assumption. Her mother—a formidable woman—ruled this out, and they finally settled on Maureen.1
Marguerita Lilburn, a former operatic contralto, was widely considered to be one of the most beautiful women in Ireland. The young Maureen regarded her as “gorgeous,” with her long red tresses. “When she left the house,” she remembered, “you'd see all the men leaving their houses as well just so they could walk down the street beside her.”2 Charles FitzSimons, one of thirteen children, hailed from farming stock and was a retail hatter by trade.
Maureen, who earned the moniker “Baby Elephant” because of her early pudginess, had an interest in acting from as far back as she could remember. Her first dramatic outburst supposedly occurred when her mother tried to change her diaper. When she was five she started dancing with her own shadow. Theater was her priority then. Maureen and her brothers and sisters—younger siblings Florence, Charles, Margot, and Jimmy and older sister Peggy—acted out scenarios from dramas they made up themselves. “We were an Irish Von Trapp family,” was the way she put it.3 Peggy, a soprano, was the best singer. She was invited to perform all over Ireland at state and diplomatic functions and was even offered a scholarship at the prestigious La Scala College in Milan. She turned it down to become a nun, joining the Sisters of Charity.
Maureen taught her younger brothers how to walk and talk. Her main motivation was that she wanted them to participate in the backyard dramas she put on for the spalpeens of the neighborhood (spalpeen is a Gaelic word meaning “rascal”). The amount of attention young Charles received from their mother caused Maureen no small degree of concern: “My little brother Charlie was my mother's darling. I suffered such black jealousy of him, so bad that I'd often say, ‘I'm going to have all girls when I grow up and get married. If I have a boy I'll make him scrub the floors!’”4
The FitzSimons world was hermetically sealed. “From my earliest childhood,” Maureen confided, “my brothers and sister [sic] and I were so close we didn't need outside friends. I never quite outgrew that.”5 “My earliest memory,” she recalled, “is of all of us sitting round the fire while Daddy and Mammy would entertain. Daddy was an actor and singer. Mother was a vain, magnificent woman with big black eyes and dark red hair. They both had a great interest in theater so that's where my love of performing comes from.”6 Her grandfather was different. He regarded the stage as the devil's stomping ground.
Maureen had grand ambitions: “When I was six or seven my sister Peg and I would sit in the back garden on a cement pathway where the sun always shone. I would say, ‘I am going to be the most famous actress in the world, and when the world falls down on its feet and accepts me, I'll then retire in all my glory.’”7 The rest of the family shared her grandiose ideas. “We thought we were going to stop the world. We believed it and thought it and spoke it. But we weren't smart ass.”8 Neither were they mollycoddled. “Everything Mother assigned to us had to be done exactly as she told us. If any of us made a mistake or deliberately bungled the job, my father, though kindly and possessing a fine sense of humor, did not spare the rod.”9
Maureen and Peggy were inseparable as children. “If you threatened to spank one,” her mother remembered, “tears would spring from the eyes of the other.” Such togetherness became almost xenophobic in time. “As soon as they were old enough to get around, they took upon themselves the task of defending the house from invaders. Their weapons were gooseberries, which they stripped from their father's bushes and threw at passersby.” There were other amusing moments in their near twin-like relationship: “When I took them to the seaside for their first visit and they stuck their toes into the cold water, the same idea struck both of them at once. ‘Mommy,’ they screamed, ‘Please fetch the kettle of hot water and warm the sea!’”10
Maureen had an exploring mind. One day her mother discovered she'd ripped open a toy she had, a stuffed pony. Asked why she did this, she replied, “I just wanted to know if it's the same as me inside.” When her mother inquired what that might be, she pronounced, “Oh…Lots of pipes and things!”11
When she was five, a gypsy predicted Maureen would be rich and famous but that this fame and fortune would slip through her fingers. She also predicted the young girl would leave Ireland one day. At six she had her first taste of the greasepaint when she read a poem onstage between two acts of a concert at school. She felt at home before an audience: it would be the pattern of her future.
She enrolled in the Ena Burke School of Elocution and Drama to improve her enunciation. She took singing and dancing lessons there. At ten she joined the Rathmines Theater Company, becoming an “official” actress at this tender age. She also started fencing, something that stood her in good stead for the swordplay that would become part and parcel of her career in years to come. She was doggedly unfeminine then, more at home hurling than playing with dolls. The idea of dating boys was light-years away. At ten she played Robin Hood in a Christmas pantomime.
“I was a blunt child,” Maureen admitted, “blunt almost to the point of rudeness. I told the truth and shamed all the devils. I didn't take discipline very well. I would never be slapped in school. If a teacher had slapped me I would have bitten her. I guess I was a bold, bad child, but it was exciting. When I went to the Dominican College later on I did not have beaux as the other girls did. There was one lad who followed me around for two years. He told me at last that he never once dared to speak to me because I looked as though I would bite his head off if he did.”12 She also liked to knock at people's doors and then run away before they opened them.
But that wasn't the whole story. “There were two sides to me. The other side loved moonlight and quietness and music and fairies and no one speaking and beautiful paintings and dark green trees. My mother used to give what she called her Musical Evenings. I loved these more than I ever found a way to say. We children would be put to bed but I would not sleep. I would creep down the stairs and sit on a prickly mat outside the door, listening to my mother sing.”13 Marguerita sang in different languages; the music ranged from opera to folk.
If music was Maureen's first love, theater was her second. Films came way down the list: “I had never even thought of being in the movies. I seldom went to the movies and never thought they compared in any way to the theater.”14
The FitzSimons family moved from Ranelagh to Milltown, as the city bled farther and farther out to the suburbs. On Sundays Maureen walked the Twisty Turny Lane, a narrow pathway close to her home that stretched for miles. She fished for minnows and sticklebacks in the river Dodder and bought gumdrops for a penny in the Dropping Well bar. She rode horses and swam and romped like her brothers. She started writing a book but tore it up when it refused to go in the direction she wanted.
She also pleaded with her father to form a soccer team for women. He was one of the first directors of Shamrock Rovers, a popular Dublin soccer club. He'd played Gaelic football in his native County Meath during his youth but fell out with authorities in the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) because of his preference for soccer. At the time, soccer was primarily a British game, and Gaelic footballers were banned from playing it or even attending matches. Charles left the GAA in protest and became more involved with Rovers. His eager daughter shared this new passion of his, “assuming her seat on match days in the director's box. A self-confessed tomboy in her youth, Maureen never missed a game.”15 Her two brothers played for the team as well.
“I was mad about Rovers,” an excited O'Hara informed Eoghan Rice, who wrote a history of the club. “When I was young, all I wanted to do was play for them.” In her teens she became more familiar with the team: “I idolized players like Sacky Glen and Paddy Moore. Sacky was great at getting balls into the box whereas Paddy Moore would just throw his head at them and score. It was very exciting to watch.” In later years she was devastated to learn that Glenmalure Park in Milltown, where she'd first watched these players, had been knocked down to make way for a housing estate. “Glenmalure Park was like a second home to me. Every weekend the crowds used to flood past our house on the way to Milltown for the big game. I couldn't believe it when they knocked it down. I still haven't gone back to Milltown. I don't know if I could bear to look at it.”16 There was one distinct advantage to her father's ownership of 25 percent of the club: “Boys were all nice to me because they got into the soccer games free.”17
Her growing beauty was downplayed at the time. Maureen's parents seemed to be unaware of it. Maybe they feared making her bigheaded or narcissistic. Her father playfully taunted her for having “skin like an elephant's hide and hair like hay,” while her mother chastised her for “walking around with your head scrooched into your shoulders, and eating like a horse at meals.” The reason for her stooped posture was an awkwardness about her height. Before she was twelve she was five feet six inches tall. Because Charles was six feet four, Marguerita started to worry about their daughter being “the tallest girl in Ireland.”18 She was relieved when Maureen grew only two more inches.
She won nearly every acting competition she entered. Radio Eireann, Ireland's only radio station at the time, asked her to perform in some plays it was airing. She jumped at the chance, receiving the princely sum of £1 for each of them.
Maureen joined the Abbey Theater at age fourteen, performing menial chores such as sweeping floors and painting sets to establish herself. Her mentor was playwright Lennox Robinson, a leading light in the Irish literary renaissance of the 1930s. Despite this, she would later complain that she “never got the chance to do anything worthwhile at the Abbey.”19 That wasn't the Abbey's fault—or hers. It was simply a question of timing. If she hadn't been pitchforked to stardom, she likely would have been a stalwart of the famous theater for decades to come: she was on the verge of landing a leading role when fame struck. (Her mother had appeared at the Abbey before she married, and her brothers would feature in some of its plays as well.)
She won the Dublin Feis Award in 1934, playing Portia in The Merchant of Venice. Two years later she became the youngest pupil to graduate from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. In 1937 she was the inaugural winner of the Dawn Beauty Competition, which put a different perspective on the direction of her career. She pocketed £50 for her troubles.20
Like many actresses, a painful self-consciousness accompanied her need to perform. “One night when I was sixteen, father crept into the back row of the theater and I sensed that there was someone out front watching me, perhaps critically. My arms became like lead. I gave a rotten show that night. I grew up with the terrible feeling that I was being laughed at.”21 Despite her thespian success, her father insisted she develop bookkeeping and secretarial skills so she would have a more traditional career to lean on should La Scala not come calling.22
At age seventeen Maureen was offered her first major role in the Abbey, but before rehearsals began she met actor-singer Harry Richman, who pointed her in a different direction. She was having lunch with her parents in the Gresham Hotel when the manager introduced her to Richman.23 They exchanged a few words, and that was that as far as she was concerned. She thought nothing of the meeting because Richman had been tipsy, but a few days later the Abbey rang, telling her mother that Elstree Studios wanted to see Maureen for a screen test, on Richman's recommendation.
Maureen's first impulse was to say no, but a friend reminded her that she could always come back to the Abbey if things didn't work out, whereas the offer of a movie screen test was a one-off opportunity. A few days later she went to London with her mother. They stopped at Elstree Studios to thank Richman, who was filming a comedy called Kicking the Moon Around. The film's director, Walter Forde, asked Maureen if she'd say a line in it, and she did. She was billed as Maureen FitzSimons for the first and only time in her career. This was the classic “blink and you miss her” cameo that most stars have somewhere in their back catalogs. The film itself was negligible, a musical comedy that acted as a showcase for Richman's limited talent. Using O'Hara's name, it was released in the United States as The Playboy and later as Millionaire Merry-Go-Round. (Years later, O'Hara spotted Richman on a Hollywood street and stopped to thank him for giving her her big break. Amazingly, he had no recollection of even meeting her, let alone making her a star.)24
Then came her first screen test. The stagehands rigged her up in an outfit that made her look like a hooker, which angered her: “They put me in this gold lamé gown with huge accordion pleats dangling from my arms and they covered me with Mata Hari makeup. The whole test was to walk to the phone, pick it up and hang it up again. I thought: My God, get me back to the Abbey.”25
Afterward, though, she was invited to a talent agency run by Connie Chapman and Vere Barker. Barker introduced her to Charles Laughton, already a movie legend. Also in the room was Erich Pommer, Laughton's partner in their company Mayflower Films.26 He was the ex-head of the major German studio UFA and had produced Erich von Sternberg's first big success, The Blue Angel. Pommer had arrived in England penniless after Hitler deposed him as the head of UFA. He believed that Mayflower would enable him to rise, phoenix-like, from the ashes of his old glory. Pommer wasn't overly friendly to O'Hara in the way Laughton was, having something of a stentorian manner. He offered her a job as his secretary if her film career didn't take off.
O'Hara wasn't nervous about meeting Laughton. “I have never been nervous in my life,” she pronounced, “not of anyone or anything. I do not have any nerves, I suppose, and I do not have any fears.” She added, “I did not get the swollen head either because so great an actor had sent for me. You can't get a swollen head when you are brought up in a family of six.”27
Laughton wanted to hear what her voice sounded like, so he presented her with a book and said, “Please read from this.” She replied, “I am very sorry but absolutely no.” She would be happy to take the book and test for him the following day, she told him, but refused to do so unprepared.28 Laughton was apparently impressed by her arrogance. He asked Barker if there was any existing film on her, and Barker mentioned the test she'd just done, so Laughton decided to take a look at it.
He was of two minds after viewing her screen test, as they'd daubed her with makeup and poured her seventeen-year-old body into gold lamé. Pommer rose to her defense: “Is it her fault if they made her up to look like a gargoyle? Let's send for that kid.”29 Laughton was still undecided after a second viewing, but he couldn't get the image of her “haunting” eyes out of his mind.30 Irish journalist Valerie Shanley thought it went deeper than that. “Gentlemen may prefer blondes,” she ventured, “but Hollywood is partial to a redhead. A cascade of pre-Raphaelite curls is what most likely mesmerised Charles Laughton when he first saw a screen test of Maureen FitzSimons.”31
Maureen left not knowing whether Mayflower was interested or not. Nor was she perturbed about this. She didn't think about the screen test because, she said, “I didn't care very much. I was not filmstruck.”32 When she got home, though, she found a seven-year film contract from Laughton waiting for her. She was overwhelmed: “You could have knocked the whole family over with a shamrock.” Her parents were dubious because she was so young. They mulled over the situation overnight, and the following morning they said yes. This was the matter-of-fact way O'Hara remembered the occasion: “I signed it, my local parish priest came up on his bicycle to 13, Churchtown Road to co-sign it and I was on my way.”33
She decided to tour Ireland to celebrate. She packed “an old pair of slacks” and went trudging around the country for a break. She didn't even bring shoes with her, going barefoot because “I like the feel of it.”34
Maureen then moved to London, and Laughton immediately put her in a movie that was being made on the quick. He wanted her to get accustomed to the way the camera worked, to see how she'd accommodate to it. The film was called My Irish Molly. Like Kicking the Moon Around, this title changed when it was released in the United States, where it became Little Miss Molly.
One could argue that O'Hara never looked as enticing as she does in Little Miss Molly, even if she isn't “Maureen O'Hara” quite yet. She wears no makeup, and there's no Hollywood glamour, but despite (or because of?) that, she is rapturously beautiful. Her accent is thick, which is perhaps why she didn't mention the film much. It also looks as if it were made in the 1920s rather than the 1930s, so primitive are the sets and the characters. Think Sean O'Casey meets Lady Gregory, and you'll have some inkling of what to expect.
The plot is ham-fisted. Child star Binkie Stuart displays Shirley Temple curls and a Shirley Temple voice (although she speaks so slowly at times it's almost as if she's been anesthetized). She's the eponymous orphan who comes to Ireland from Britain to stay with an aunt who is intent on cheating her out of an inheritance. Local lad Danny (Tom Burke) has his heart set on Molly's cousin (O'Hara), but she prefers American emigrant Bob (Philip Reed). Reed makes no attempt whatsoever at an American accent, sounding like Ray Milland throughout. It's a quaint film that O'Hara scholars should view if only to see early evidence of her natural instinct for dramatic timing and scene interpretation. (Was it this footage that Charles Laughton showed to Alfred Hitchcock to entice him to cast her in Jamaica Inn? Quite possibly.)
Laughton appropriated her like a cause after shooting ended. “He'd always wanted a daughter,” she speculated, “and that's how he treated me.”35 He primed her in the mechanics of film, emphasizing the primordial importance of the camera in picking up nuances of expression that would most likely go unnoticed in the performance of a play. The devil was in the detail, he stressed. She had to fight her instinct to emote, or verbalize.
Laughton offered her a part in the gothic melodrama Jamaica Inn, based on a Daphne du Maurier novel. It was being directed by Alfred Hitchcock. One of the reasons Pommer and Laughton were interested in Jamaica Inn was that du Maurier's Rebecca had just been published to solid media attention, and they were hoping to jump on that bandwagon. Hitchcock was also hoping to direct the film version of Rebecca in Hollywood. He accepted the directing deal before reading the script for Jamaica Inn and would live to regret it: he was horrified by its amateurishness.
Meanwhile, Laughton thought Maureen's surname would hurt her career. “We don't think it would look good on the marquee,” he exhorted, “we want to change it.” “I'm proud of it,” she protested. “It's a wonderful, old, old name.”36 But the die had been cast. “He didn't suggest I change my name,” she sighed, “he just changed it. He gave me the choice of O'Hara or O'Meara. I said, ‘Neither’ and he said, ‘Okay, you're Maureen O'Hara now.’ That was it.”37 His choice was probably prompted by the fact that Gone with the Wind had just come out, and the name Scarlett O'Hara was in people's minds.
It's ironic that the film that made her name was also the one that eliminated it from the public eye.38 She may have been Maureen O'Hara to the world, but “I have never ceased to be Maureen FitzSimons and I never will cease to be her. I am Maureen FitzSimons from Beechwood Avenue.”39 Perhaps, but as far as the moviegoing public was concerned, Maureen FitzSimons was—to coin a phrase—gone with the wind.
In Jamaica Inn she played Mary Yellen, an orphan who comes to live with her aunt and uncle at their eighteenth-century Cornish tavern. She then discovers that it's the headquarters for a ruthless band of brigands who wreck ships for a living so they can rob the contents. Their leader is Sir Humphrey Pangallan (Laughton). He takes a shine to Mary but eventually has to use her as a hostage to escape when his true exploits are discovered by undercover lawman Robert Newton. Mary is caught between loyalty to her family and love for Newton.
In the book, the main shipwreck occurs on Christmas morning, resulting in Mary's loss of faith. This obviously wouldn't do in the film version, for a number of reasons (including O'Hara's strong faith), so it was excised, as was Mary's “atheistic” decision to offer “no prayers to God this Christmas.”40
Laughton was disgusted that the villain had been changed from a parson (in the novel) to a squire and threatened to walk off the picture if his character's occupation didn't revert to the original, but he was fighting a losing battle on that score. The austere public of 1939 wouldn't have countenanced the idea of a clerical ne'er-do-well, not to mention the censors. Hitchcock initially had a problem with Laughton playing Sir Humphrey because of his history of villainous roles. Since the revelation that Humphrey is the leader of the brigands is the film's main surprise, he thought this would be hijacked by Laughton's presence. A war developed between Hitchcock and Laughton, with Laughton blithely indifferent to the director's indignation at being unable to control the actor or the production. Hitchcock would later exclaim, “I always say that the most difficult things to photograph are dogs, babies, motorboats, Charles Laughton and Method actors.”41 He found his main star unmanageable. “A Laughton picture is one long battle from start to finish,” he snorted, “Laughton versus Laughton.”42 Hitchcock said of the scene in which Laughton ties O'Hara up, “I am primarily interested in the Jekyll and Hyde mentality of the squire.”43 But even here, Laughton tries to thwart the director, using a silk scarf instead of a rope to bind O'Hara in what is a rare touch of sensitivity from the merciless psychopath.
The film begins atmospherically, with a pounding musical score counterpointing the crashing of the waves as a raid takes place. After the music stops, we get nothing but the continuous jabber of dialogue, which dilutes the drama of the piece enormously. Laughton is more a comic character than a fearful one, yet he holds the film together, as most of the other actors descend into a different type of melodrama. But O'Hara doesn't make this mistake, delivering her lines with a self-belief unusual in one so young—though her posh British accent seems out of place. She was caught in a dilemma for most of the film, however. Her challenge was to negotiate a middle ground between the Scylla of overacting and the Charybdis of being so outgunned by Laughton that her performance became invisible. She achieved this simply by getting the material to speak for her and letting her impossibly beautiful features do the rest.
When Jamaica Inn was released, to Hitchcock's dismay, du Maurier insisted that her name be removed from the opening credits.44 It was hard to blame her: she barely recognized her book. The film was poorly received by the critics. The New York Herald Tribune found it “singularly dull and uninspired, a mannered and highly lackadaisical melodrama.” Film Weekly carped, “The makers of this film seem less at pains to make our hair stand on end than to prove to us that they can fake a shipwreck as well as Hollywood.”45 Frank Nugent's words touched a nerve: “It will not be remembered as a Hitchcock picture but as a Charles Laughton picture.”46 It couldn't seem to make up its mind whether it was high drama or farce.
There were some positive reviews. One critic wrote that, while the movie sacrificed subtlety to spectacle, “the newcomer, Maureen O'Hara is charming to look at and shows distinct promise as an actress.”47 In many ways, she was the real discovery of the film: “eighteen years old, fresh from Dublin and luxuriating in her colleen loveliness, hair a-tumble, eyes a-sparkle, lips a-pout.”48
She invited her parents to London for the premiere, and her haughtiness was evident in her recollection of the event: “We were never impressed by the trappings of stardom and fame. Besides, my family was very prominent throughout Dublin, and we were theater and opera people.”49 Her odd attitude continued when she arrived at the cinema and surveyed the crowds: “They didn't make a fuss over me. Why should they? I wasn't a star yet.”50 But she seemed to expect a fuss. The “yet” is interesting. It hints at an expectation of glory.
After the premiere she had her first real taste of fame when she was besieged by fans. As her cab pulled away from the theater, she watched the crowd in hot pursuit. Three blocks later, there were still two “panting, persistent autograph fiends” following her.51 She asked the driver to stop, then she got out and gave them her autograph.
The premiere changed everything for her: “I was a tomboy growing up. I was always jealous of the freedom boys had. I thought it was terribly unfair that they could do things like rob an orchard and not get into trouble. They call it ‘box the fox’ in Ireland—stealing apples. But after I saw myself on the screen in Jamaica Inn I realized the girl up there was beautiful. I didn't want to box the fox any more.” No matter how many times she saw herself onscreen afterward, she couldn't replicate the excitement of that night. “The first one is always the sweetest,” she said.52
She returned to Ireland for a brief vacation after the hype died down. While there, she had a disturbing experience with a group of women who seemed to resent her success. It happened one night when she accompanied Patrick Brock to a party at the house of a playwright he knew. In the car on the way to the party, there were a number of actresses who, according to Brock, “rebuffed every effort she made to be friendly.” He concluded that they “stupidly thought that because of her blossoming film career she was arrogant. It was very sad. She was puzzled and hurt.”53 Maybe this was the night O'Hara realized she could never get her simple past back again.
Jamaica Inn fared better in the United States than in Britain, which was fine by Hitchcock: he knew America was where his future lay. Laughton thought Mayflower's days were numbered, so when RKO offered him a Hollywood contract, he jumped at it. He told O'Hara he would bring her with him: she would play Esmeralda in his new film, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Laughton had another reason to snap up RKO's offer: a condition of his five-picture deal was that RKO would pay off Mayflower's avalanche of debts. Traveling from Europe to America meant that he could wipe the slate clean in more ways than one.
Things weren't so simple for O'Hara. Unfortunately, she'd just signed a seven-year lease on a house in Hyde Park and had lived in it for only six weeks.54 That was now money down the drain. She'd also gotten herself entangled in a messy relationship during the making of the movie. On the way to the set, she would sometimes say hello to a production assistant named George Brown. One day a friend of Brown's told her George wanted to go on a date with her. She was flabbergasted, as they had exchanged only a few polite words up to this point. Brown took her horseback riding, and she fell off the horse, providing a convenient excuse to cut the date short. A few days later he asked her to dinner, and she agreed to go. Again, she had little to say to him. They danced for a while and then she excused herself, claiming she had an early start the next day. He started to plague her with phone messages, which she reluctantly took, shocked at his persistence. He then insisted that she meet him at a certain address before she sailed for the United States, and she grudgingly agreed. When she arrived at the house in question, her heart almost missed a beat. There she found preparations for a wedding ceremony. Brown told the official that O'Hara was twenty-one and therefore free to wed without parental consent. Before she knew what was happening, the ceremony was under way. She wanted to run from the room, but something stopped her. It was like an out-of-body experience, a surreal movie where nobody said “Cut” and her next line was “I do.” It wasn't that her heart ruled her head, because she had no feelings for Brown. Nothing could explain it. Reader, she married him.
When the ceremony was over she ran from the building, hyperventilating, in the middle of a panic attack. What had come over her? In the words of one writer, she “accidentally” married Brown in the seedy ceremony.55 Another attributed it to her being “in a limbo between girlhood and womanhood,” or perhaps it was simply “an ill-considered act of rebellion.”56 When O'Hara got home, her mother knew something was wrong, but she wouldn't say what it was. She was too distraught to divulge anything.
O'Hara boarded the Queen Mary, the ship taking her to her new life in Hollywood, with her mother and Laughton. Her mother continued to ask her what was wrong, and she continued to sidestep her interrogations. She pulled off her wedding band and hid it in her purse, but her mother found it and confronted her. Eventually she broke down and confessed. Her mother was aghast and kept asking her daughter why she had done this insane thing, but there was no answer; it was as inexplicable to her as it was to everyone else. “It was not a marriage,” she protested years later, “because it was never consummated.”57
Meanwhile, Laughton had left his wife, Elsa Lanchester, behind in London. Lanchester and O'Hara didn't get along. Lanchester thought O'Hara wasn't as sweet as she appeared, remarking, “Butter wouldn't melt in her mouth, or anywhere else,” an oft-quoted barb. This belief was fortified when she heard about O'Hara's secret marriage to Brown. Lanchester always thought O'Hara sublimated her guilt over this marriage and turned it into endless bursts of work throughout her career. Lanchester was understandably aggrieved by Laughton's attentions to O'Hara, who virtually became his surrogate daughter. Laughton and Lanchester had no children of their own, so this might have been expected. Lanchester said she refused to have children with Laughton after she discovered he was gay, but O'Hara believed Lanchester had had a number of abortions and couldn't conceive as a result.
Though O'Hara had married Brown in June, it was July before the media got hold of the story. A report in the Irish Times stated: “The ceremony took place by special licence at St. Paul's Church, Station Road, Harrow, Middlesex on June 13. Mr. Brown remained behind to work in the new Paul Robeson picture David and Goliath. Mrs. O'Hara will not see him again until she returns to England in October next, a leading lady to Charles Laughton in The Admirable Crichton.”58
An interview with Brown appeared in another newspaper the same day, suggesting that he believed O'Hara was married to him for keeps. He didn't sound like a man who had just cajoled a woman to the altar. “I am very pleased indeed to have an Irish association of some kind,” he beamed, citing a connection to Eugenie Houghton. (O'Hara herself was a descendant of Richard Houghton, who had been Lord Mayor of Dublin twice, in 1651 and 1655.) “We kept our marriage an absolute secret,” Brown continued. “It was our intention not to tell anyone about it until my wife came back in October. We intend to have another marriage ceremony in a Catholic church as soon as Maureen returns.”59
Brown didn't work on David and Goliath. O'Hara didn't return for a Catholic wedding. She headed for greener pastures, and the undistinguished production assistant was left with only memories of what might have been. He would never see his runaway bride again.