Pete Nilsson’s speech at Michael Hess’s funeral service, St Peter’s parish church, Washington DC, 21 August 1995
I have spent the last few days trying to understand Michael’s passing. I’m not sure I’ve succeeded because deep down I know Michael did not want to go . . . He had so much he still wanted to do . . . For someone who looked forward to achieving so much more in life, how do you justify his passing? The answer is simply – you can’t. Michael left us before his time and fought hard all the way. He wanted to go on living until the very end. Keeping his illness to himself was his way of focusing on life and not giving in to death. When he finally went, he went very quickly. One of the great mysteries of death is where does all this knowledge and intensity go when someone closes their eyes for the last time? I hope it has gone to each of us in some way. I know that I am a different person for having known Michael over the past fifteen years – a better person. It is with that comfort that I say goodbye to him now, knowing that – through us – he will live on. Many of you who have shared a drink with Michael know that he liked to quote a toast from Yeats, and I’d like to end by making that toast to Michael:
Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That’s all we shall know for truth
Until we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.
When Jane Libberton came to meet me at the British Library that New Year of 2004, she brought with her the snaps of Anthony that Sister Annunciata had been caring enough to take all those years before. She told me everything she had gleaned from her mother – the name of her lost brother; that he was born on 5 July 1952; that he had been taken to America by an unknown woman; that he had blue eyes and black hair.
We agreed that we did not have much to go on. The name of Anthony Lee would not help us – he would almost certainly have taken the name of his new family – and Philomena’s experience of seeking information from the nuns at Sean Ross did not bode well. I was close to concluding the whole thing was a wild goose chase. I was about to tell Jane I wasn’t interested, but I didn’t.
Philomena’s family had grown over the years. Every time a grandchild or great-grandchild was born – especially when she found Jane pregnant and a single mother at the age of seventeen – she had been desperate to tell her children they had a brother in America. Philomena’s own brother Jack had told their sisters Kaye and Mary about the little fellow from Sean Ross Abbey and they had all urged her to tell her family, but the hold of the Church was abiding and cruel and Philomena kept her secret for fifty years.
Jane had often noticed her mother got sentimental just before Christmas. She would start talking about her childhood and the bad old days with tears in her eyes, and Jane had never understood the reason for it. In 2003 she found out. On 18 December Philomena had a couple of glasses of sherry and, fuelled by alcohol and long-repressed emotions, told her children of her secret disgrace. She told them this was the anniversary of the day their brother had been taken away from her; that he was living in America now and would be fifty-one years old.
As Philomena talked, Jane had gone to the drawer in her mother’s sideboard and pulled out the black and white photographs of the little boy she had always been told was a distant cousin somewhere in rural Ireland. Philomena had said, ‘That’s him.’
The three of us travelled to Sean Ross Abbey in the spring of 2004. The nuns were lovely. None of them had been there in the 1950s: Mother Barbara and Sister Hildegarde were dead – we photographed their graves in the carefully tended nuns’ cemetery – and the convent records showed that brave young Sister Annunciata, Mary Kelly of the Limerick Kellys, had not lived to see her thirtieth birthday but had died in England soon after her transfer to London in 1955. The current mother superior was a friendly, educated woman from the outskirts of Liverpool who had devoted her life to the care of disadvantaged and disabled people, making Sean Ross a haven for youngsters with cerebral palsy and other debilitating conditions. The nuns were evidently used to enquiries from former inmates of the mother-and-baby home: when we explained the purpose of our visit, they began a practised routine involving tea and cakes in the parlour, the viewing of albums of old photographs and seemingly genuine expressions of sympathy for those who had suffered.
‘We can’t take away your pain,’ the mother superior said, ‘but we can walk through it with you hand in hand.’
We visited the chapel where Philomena and Annunciata had sung in the choir, and the corridor where Philomena was beaten by the angry nun. The girls’ dormitories and the children’s nurseries were still there, but the French windows were broken and the long rooms were empty and abandoned – birds had made their nests in the beams and the parquet floors were littered with chunks of plaster. The laundries where Philomena had toiled to wash away the stain of her sins were gone, flattened to make way for disabled housing. The remains of the medieval monastery still stood, three ruined walls covered in ivy with an oak tree growing within them, but the mother superior told us the council had warned they were dangerously unstable and the order would have to find the money to underpin them, money the nuns did not have. On a patch of bright green grass by the old Georgian convent house a white maypole stood ribbonless in front of a tall alabaster angel.
We thanked the nuns for letting us see the place and raised again the purpose of our visit: would they be kind enough to show us the adoption records of Anthony Lee? The mother superior said she would love to help, but any records that still remained had been sent to a centralized office at a convent in Cork which now dealt with archives from all the old orphanages. She gave us the name of the place and the nun who ran it, and we left. On the way out I took photographs of the convent and of the three very different graveyards – the one for the nuns, the recently tidied field where the mothers and babies were interred and the ancient burial ground in the shadow of the ruined monastery.
Back in England, Philomena phoned the number the nuns had provided. It was for the Sacred Heart Adoption Society in the Bessboro Convent in Cork, and her call was answered by the head of the agency, Sister Sarto Harney. Sister Sarto promised to look in the records. Her letter, a couple of weeks later, contained no new information.
Dear Mrs Gibson,
You were admitted to Roscrea on 6 May 1952 and discharged on 14 January 1956. Anthony was born on 5 July 1952 at 7 p.m., breech delivery, weight 7 lb 10 oz., a full-term baby. Anthony was discharged for US adoption on 18 December 1955.
Letters to the Irish Adoption Board brought equally negative results – they had no record of any Anthony Lee – and a prompt but disappointing reply came back from the Foreign Ministry.
Dear Mrs Gibson,
I can confirm that this Department had papers in connection with the issue of a passport for Anthony Lee so that he could travel to the United States for adoption. The file, 345/96/755, access to which is restricted, as with all similar files, is now in the custody of the National Archives. I am mindful of the restrictions on access to certain information which arise from the constitutional right to privacy and the requirements of the National Archives Act, 1986.
I enclose herewith a copy of the sworn statement that you made on 27 June 1955, surrendering Anthony Lee to the Superioress of Sean Ross Abbey and authorizing her to make him available for adoption.
You may wish to contact the Sacred Heart Adoption Society in Cork, where the records of Sean Ross Abbey are now kept.
Our search had run into the sand. Confidentiality and restricted access were constant official themes. The Irish Foreign Ministry referred us to the Sacred Heart Adoption Society and the Sacred Heart Adoption Society referred us to the Foreign Ministry.
But an unexpected breakthrough gave us new hope.
Shortly after the disappointing news from the Foreign Ministry, the photographs of our visit to Sean Ross Abbey came back from being printed. Jane and I pored over the pictures of the convent, the derelict nurseries and the graveyards in the convent grounds. We saw the crosses marking the graves of Mother Barbara and Sister Hildegarde in the nuns’ cemetery with their dates of death neatly recorded, and we saw the sad memorials to dead babies and dead mothers, erected after the orphanage had closed by parents and relatives. A stone tablet read, ‘This garden is dedicated to the babies and infants who died in Sean Ross Abbey and are buried here. May they from their place in Heaven pray for us who loved them on earth.’ The burial ground had no marked graves, but around its edges small plaques had begun to appear to dead children – ‘Martin: 29.10.1945 to 28.12.1945’; ‘Daughter, our memories of you will never grow old; they are locked in our hearts in letters of gold’ – and to young mothers who died in childbirth – ‘Josephine Dillon, aged 28 years. RIP’; ‘Mary J. Lawlor, aged 14½ years. RIP’. Among the memorials, one caught our eye: ‘In loving memory of Anthony: If tears could build a stairway, / And memories a lane, / We could walk the way to Heaven / And take you back again.’ The name jumped out, but this Anthony was a baby who had died at birth.
Jane picked up a photo for a last look. It showed a new and rather shiny gravestone that was neither in the nuns’ cemetery nor the field of mothers and babies. This one was in the shadow of the ruined walls of the ancient monastery, amid old headstones overgrown with grass and covered in moss. The name on the inscription was unfamiliar to us, but Jane spotted something: the birth date was the same as that of Philomena’s son Anthony – 5 July 1952. The photograph was blurred and it took two enlargements and a magnifying glass to read the carved silver lettering on the black marble background.
Michael A. Hess.
A Man of Two Nations and Many Talents.
Born July 5, 1952, Sean Ross Abbey, Roscrea.
Died August 15, 1995, Washington DC, USA.
It was the only gravestone in the whole of the abbey that did not belong to a nun or a mother or child who had died there. It could be that another baby had been born on the same day but now there was the terrible possibility that Philomena’s search had brought her to Anthony only to discover he was forever beyond her reach.
We renewed contact with the Church archivists. An enquiry to the Sacred Heart Adoption Society brought a polite letter from Sister Sarto: it did not confirm that Anthony Lee was one and the same as Michael Hess, but it did make the offer of a personal conversation with Philomena. When the phone rang a week later, she was in an agony of uncertainty.
Sister Sarto’s first words raised her hopes: ‘Mrs Gibson, I have news for you about Anthony.’ Then she asked, ‘Do you have anyone with you?’ Philomena confirmed she was not alone and sat down. ‘Mrs Gibson,’ Sister Sarto said, ‘I’m so sorry, but your son is no longer alive . . .’
Philomena wept. She was distraught. She blamed herself for not speaking about Anthony earlier, while he might still have been found. It was hard to know what to say to a mother who has lost her child not once but twice.
‘You mustn’t blame yourself,’ I said a little lamely. ‘It’s not your fault.’
But she did blame herself.
‘If only, Martin, if only. I curse myself every time I think of it. If only I’d mentioned it all those years ago, maybe he wouldn’t . . . But it was so ingrained down deep in my heart that I mustn’t tell anybody. We were browbeaten; it was such a sin. Then I thought we’d found him, but now he’s gone forever! Oh Lord, it makes my heart ache! All those years I used to worry about him and I wanted to speak about him. I’m sure there are lots of women to this very day – they’re the same as me; they haven’t said anything. All the time I was thinking Lord, I wish I knew . . . It was a secret I kept all my life, but I’ve never stopped praying for him, praying for Anthony, and maybe now he’s up there in heaven . . .’
Philomena spent the weeks after the discovery of her son’s death planning to visit his grave. She went in the summer of 2004 and had a Mass said on his birthday. She gave the nuns money to put flowers by his headstone and engaged a local gardener to plant a tree in his memory. It calmed her. She seemed more resigned to the second loss of her child, even if consumed with regrets. We spoke about continuing the hunt for Michael Hess, as we now knew him, and eventually she said yes, she did want us to keep looking.
We knew Michael’s name and we knew his birth date. We did not know where he had lived in the US or what sort of work he had been engaged in, but something stirred my memory. I had been the BBC’s Washington correspondent from 1991 to 1995 at the end of George Bush Senior’s presidency, and I recalled that I had come across a senior White House official named Michael Hess, but this was well over a decade before, and most of my Republican contacts had left or retired.
While I worked on the White House connection, we followed our last Irish lead, the marble headstone in the shadow of the ruined monastery. Roscrea is not a big town and there is only one stonemason. We wrote to ask if he would tell us who had brought Michael Hess to be buried in the place of his birth.
We were still waiting for his reply when I heard back from Jill Holtzman Vogel in Washington. Jill was a recently elected Republican state senator in Virginia, having previously served as George Bush Junior’s counsel in the contentious Florida recount that swung the 2000 election. In an email in January 2005 she confirmed that Anthony Lee, the little Irish orphan, had grown up to become Michael Hess, chief counsel of the Republican National Committee.
I did not know Michael personally, but I joined the RNC Counsel’s Office in 1997 and Michael’s legacy was still very fresh. They talked about him all the time. He was clearly loved and respected by the people there and he was part of a lot of office lore. I am really touched by your effort to help Michael’s mother. I will forward your contact information to the people that I know were close to him and I hope they will be able to assist you. Jill.
I forwarded Jill’s email to Jane and got an immediate reply.
Dear Martin
Thank you so much for passing on the email from Jill Holtzman Vogel. You have no idea how much it pleased my mum to hear such nice things about Anthony. Although she shed a few tears, I think it makes her feel a bit better to know that he was so obviously liked by people who knew or knew of him. Any little piece of information is just so precious to her and it would be so good if we can find out even more. The months since we heard about his death have been hard, and I think hearing some positive things about him really does help her. Jane.
On Jill’s recommendation I flew to Washington and spoke with many of Michael Hess’s professional colleagues in the Republican Party, including the current leaders of the Republican National Committee. I spoke to the RNC secretaries who had worked with him, and all were effusive.
‘He was a lovely man; he was very gentle,’ said Nancy Hibbs, who first met Michael when she was a twenty-three-year-old administrative assistant. ‘I remember when I met him I thought he was one of the most attractive men I’d ever seen. He was adorable. I was very young, but he was a very, really nice guy and such a gentleman. He had a stressful job, but he never was unkind to anybody. Held a door for a lady, you know . . . please and thank you; never ordered anybody around. Used to bring all the girls roses from his house in the country. We work with a lot of people who – especially then, when I was younger – people who were very brusque with young people, but he never was.’
Mark Braden, initially Michael’s boss at the RNC, spoke about the importance of his redistricting work for the party.
‘He was a brilliant lawyer. We are all the children of his litigation, our litigation back in the early and mid-eighties. Redistricting was a big deal. We took a lot of political heat over that . . . but Michael was the developer of all the theories and arguments. Without them . . . the Republicans would not have been able to win a majority in 1994. They would not have got the majority they got . . . so his legacy lives on. He was one of my closest friends. It was a tragedy when he died.’
After a week in Washington I felt I understood the public side of Michael Hess, but the private man eluded me. His sexuality remained cloaked. Nancy Hibbs at the Republican National Committee made it clearer.
‘We all knew he was gay. But nobody talked about it because, as you can imagine, the Republican Party . . . It was a different time then. And he was so handsome – that beautiful black hair and piercing eyes – so of course all the girls were like, Oh, what a darn shame!’
Eventually a Washington contact told me, ‘You must talk to Pete Nilsson,’ and that same evening at the Watergate Hotel I found a message from my wife: the Roscrea stonemason said the man who ordered the monument for Michael’s grave was – Pete Nilsson. I found Pete’s contact details with little trouble, but he was out of town and would not be back before my return to London. I left him a message and he called me in England: he had heard about my research and was willing to talk to me.
Philomena, Jane and I met Pete Nilsson at my house in London in April 2005.
The information Pete provided at that and several subsequent interviews, together with the introductions he provided to other people in Michael’s life, made the writing of this book possible. But more than that, it gave Philomena the cathartic reassurance that her actions had not blighted her son’s life – that he had never stopped loving his birth mother, and had never stopped seeking for her.
Pete brought photographs and mementos of Michael, and Philomena and Jane soaked up every image. They wanted every detail Pete could give them, every success Michael had known. Philomena marvelled at the standard of life he and Pete had enjoyed.
‘He had a good life, didn’t he? I could have never given him all of that,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t have given him that, Peter.’
Philomena was unconcerned that her child had been gay. She embraced Pete almost as a substitute son. Michael had been hers, with her black hair and her musical talent. She urged Pete to tell her that Doc and Marge had been kind parents; she was delighted to hear that Michael and Mary had stayed so close and that they had considered themselves brother and sister for life – the thought seemed to comfort her. But there was also shock and anger when Pete said that Michael had lived his whole life not knowing if she had abandoned him at birth or if she had been with him in the convent.
The idea that the mothers had given up their babies right after they were born was one the nuns seemed deliberately to have fostered, perhaps out of shame that they had kept the girls working as virtual prisoners for three years and more. Mother Barbara and Sister Hildegarde had deliberately misled Michael and Mary when they visited the convent. The lies seared Philomena. ‘How could they tell him I abandoned him! How could they do that! I never wanted to give him away – never!’
Pete spoke of his visit to Roscrea with Mike in 1993, and Philomena was outraged that the nuns had not told them her family lived just down the road. But she was consoled that Michael had never given up his search for her.
‘Oh now, that is what I always felt. I felt he wanted to find me . . . that he must have wanted to find me. And that is why I wondered so often if he came, you know. Somehow there must have been something, because all my life I have sensed it and all my life I have never, ever forgotten him. I have prayed for him every day. I was sure one day I would find him.’
Pete told her of the day they sat in the ruins of the old abbey and of Michael’s wish to be brought back to be buried in Ireland. She wept when Pete spoke of his death and the funeral service the Republican Party arranged for him in the shadow of the Capitol. Pete had the order of service from the Mass and showed her the names of the Republican luminaries who attended; he told her of the personal phone call from Nancy Reagan on behalf of herself and the former president and of the moving eulogies from Mark Braden and Robert Hampden. Pete listed the pall-bearers who carried Michael’s body from the church and he told Philomena how ‘Danny Boy’ was played as the coffin, draped in the flag that had flown over the Capitol, went slowly down the aisle. He spoke of the extravagant ‘Irish’ wake that was held for Mike and the sympathy of the Republican officials who attended an overwhelmingly gay occasion.
But he also told Philomena that Doc Hess and two of his sons had come to Washington for the funeral Mass. There Doc announced that he intended to take possession of Michael’s estate, his insurance money, his share of the apartment in town and the house in West Virginia. Pete had had to show him Mike’s will in which everything had been left to him. There were arguments too over where Mike would be buried. Doc tried to have his body taken to Iowa, and Pete brought in their lawyer to stop him. In the course of their dealings Pete came to realize that Doc and his sons had never known that Michael was gay; now they were discovering that he had died of AIDS. The conversations were difficult. Doc and his boys were unfriendly and dismissive towards Pete. They left Washington without saying goodbye and never contacted him again.
Philomena asked how Pete had managed to get Michael buried in Roscrea, and Pete told the whole story. Mike’s body had been cremated at the Metropolitan Crematory in Alexandria, Virginia, and Pete had written to ask the mother superior of Sean Ross Abbey if she would agree to his dying wish.
Dear Sister Christina,
It is with sadness that I write this letter . . . Although Michael lived a very happy and successful life in the United States, his last wish was to have his ashes returned to the place of his birth . . . Michael’s emotional connection to the Abbey ran deep and I would not feel true to his wishes by burying him anywhere else. Michael asked that a donation be made to the Abbey in his name.
Throughout his life he held his Irish roots very close to his heart. I know he will only truly be able to rest in peace if he returns to the Abbey . . .
Pete explained that the deal had been brokered by an Irish priest called Father Leonard: ‘I’d met Father Leonard socially when he’d been to the States. He was one of those Irish priests who were the core strength of the Irish Church. I said, “I really want to get Michael buried at Roscrea in the grounds, but they don’t have it open for burials.” I said, “See what you can do. I’m ready to donate a big chunk. Tell them I’ll send them a cheque and see if we can make it work.” He called me back the next day.’
The burial took place on 9 May 1996 and Father Leonard officiated. Pete produced a copy of the priest’s funeral oration: ‘We are about to lay to rest the mortal remains of Michael Hess . . . Michael set out from this place in 1955. After a very successful life and career in the United States, he has returned to the land of his forebears . . . He is now at peace.’
All paths in the search for Philomena’s lost child had led back to Roscrea and the convent where his story began.
After speaking to Pete Nilsson, I talked to the other significant people in Michael’s life, including Robert Hampden, Susan Kavanagh, Ben Kronfeld, Mark Braden, John Clarkson and Mark O’Connor, who later emailed me: ‘Martin, one final thought I should share is that while we were young and frivolous back then, and not so serious about relationships, Michael was my first love, with all the intensity that implies. I miss him very much.’
Susan told me Michael’s death had left her bereft. ‘When I think of Michael, I try not to focus on all the end stuff, which is very sad. When I think about him I just think of how much fun we had. It was always, ‘What are we going to do? Are we going to do this or are we going to do that?’ I just remember everything was an event; he always made things special. And I think, God, life has gotten so boring without him.’
Most importantly, Pete put me in touch with Mary, Michael’s sister in life if not in blood. She lives in Florida near her grandchildren and looks back on her odyssey with the little boy from Roscrea with an awareness of how different things could have been. If Anthony Lee had not tugged at the heart of Marge Hess that day in August 1955, Mary would have flown alone on the night flight from Shannon to America; she would have been alone with her new family that Christmas in St Louis, and she would have faced the rest of her life without the support of her closest friend. She has been back to Roscrea herself; she has taken her new husband there; and she is talking of following Mike’s example and searching for her own birth mother. She lives in the certitude that she will one day be reunited with her brother.
‘Michael was my confidant and I was his all through our lives. I have missed him so much these past years since he’s been gone . . . When I was in Roscrea I was talking with the mother superior and I told her, “Really, you know when I die I would like to be brought over and buried here. Is it going to be a problem for me to be buried next to my brother?” Because when Michael was buried there nobody had opened a grave in a hundred years so they had to get special permission to do that. Now, she told me that if I wanted to be buried at Roscrea then I could be buried where the nuns are buried; she said I could be buried in that graveyard, you know, and I kind of thought about it and that would be OK, but I would rather be next to my brother.’
Philomena goes regularly to Roscrea and I have stood with her at her son’s graveside. It is over fifty years since she last talked to him in life, but she talks to him now.
‘Thank God you are home again in Ireland, son. You’re here where I can visit you now . . . But you came here and no one told you anything. No one told you I was looking for you and I loved you, my son. How different it all would have been . . .’
The quest to find Anthony has come to an end, but there is one final thread. On behalf of Philomena, I spoke to the archivists of the Irish government and the Limerick post office in search of a tall dark civil servant named John McInerney. He was in his early twenties when he met Philomena Lee at the Limerick Carnival on the Ennis Road in October 1951. Some lines of enquiry have emerged and are being pursued, but that, as they say, is a story for another occasion.