The Real Mrs. Brown: The Authorised Biography of Brendan O'Carroll (8 page)

The young Brendan understood you had to play the part of the waiter completely and put yourself to one side.

‘When I’d get a complaint I’d always agree.

‘“Waiter, this piece of steak isn’t quite right . . .”

‘“Quite right? You’re right, sir. It looks like shite. Let me take it back for you.”

‘“Well, it’s edible, I suppose.”

‘“Edible? No way. It’s fit for the bin! Let me sort it.”

‘What I learned was that the customer wasn’t always right. But he was always the customer. And your job is to make sure his experience is the best you can make it.’

And so he learned how to please people. Brendan would never forget this when it came to creating the Mrs Brown stage show. Early on, when he wrote gags, there were times when the audience didn’t laugh. But he’d try to stick with them because he believed they would work. And they wouldn’t, no matter how they were presented. Brendan came to realise the audience is always right. The job is to please them, not your own ego. But at times it was hard. Indeed, one experience could have resulted in less robust people spending fortunes on a treatment couch.

‘The German hotel manager lived in a suite with his wife. And Mrs Herr would have room service every day. But the waiters hated to serve her because she was a horror.

‘One day, I placed this lady’s order on her table, all perfectly prepared, and she was about to dismiss me. But before doing so she dipped her finger in the French dressing, which every waiter prepared, including me.’

‘“And vast ees dis?”

‘“It’s French dressing.”

‘“Dees is not. It ees deesgusting.”

‘And she walked away, got a piece of paper and a pen and wrote out a recipe for French dressing, which she then pinned to my jacket. She told me I was not to enter her apartment for the next six months unless I had the recipe pinned to my lapel. And so it remained there. I worked at cocktail parties with this recipe still attached. People looked at it and laughed. And it was humiliating. But I knew that if I reacted she would win. I wasn’t going to let her win.’

Brendan had a way of dealing with the ignominy.

‘I decided that the recipe wasn’t pinned to me, it was pinned to my jacket. You can always take off the jacket.’

At the end of the six-month sentence, Brendan unpinned the recipe. And that afternoon as he carried a tray across the restaurant, he was apprehended by an angry Mrs Herr.

‘“Where is dat recipe?”

‘“Mrs Herr, the six months is over. And unless you can think of a very good reason why I should pin it back on, I won’t.”’

Brendan had learned a great deal in his first year as a waiter. But life was soon to serve him up problems that he’d really struggle to cope with.

Teenage Kicks

BRENDAN and his two Finglas friends John and Jimmy were always on the lookout for new ways to have fun. One night Brendan ‘sourced’ a vehicle. That didn’t mean he stole it; he just borrowed it for a night.

‘It was a Mini,’ he recalled, as he chatted to me in a Glasgow bar late one night, having just appeared as Mrs Brown on stage.

‘And I drove the three of us all the way over to Cavan – 65 miles from Dublin – with me driving, in second gear all the way.’

The getaway driver could barely see over the steering wheel.

‘We went to Cavan because there was a fairground there and so we all got onto the helter-skelter, and slid down the mats. But at the bottom John got up, and then collapsed. And he was white as a ghost. So we said, “Are you okay?” And he wasn’t, so we headed home. And on the way back, I said, “John, that was so scary. We were worried for you,” and he said, “Yes, but don’t tell me mammy. She won’t let me go to school tomorrow.”

‘Now, can you imagine a kid saying that? But he was so bright and so eager, and the best footballer I’d ever seen. And he was a really good-looking bastard. If there were three good-looking girls around, he’d get the three of them.’

John Breen managed to go to school the next day but the collapse had been a warning of things to come. He died just two years later of leukaemia.

‘John knew he was dying, although his parents never told him what was wrong with him. But he worked it out, checked the symptoms in an encyclopedia. And he never told his parents he knew.’

Brendan had lost his dad. Now he’d lost his best friend. It made him all the more determined to get the very most out of life. But the death of John broke up the trio. Things were never the same again. Jimmy spent more time with another pal.

Brendan never considered turning to God for help in getting over his grief. By this time, his relationship with the Catholic Church had taken a turn for the worst. He was becoming a little tearaway. And with a skinhead haircut and the cheek of the devil, he didn’t exactly endear himself to youth club managers and the owners of local teen discos. So, just going on fourteen, and still working at the Intercontinental, he decided to open his own nightclub.

‘Me and my pals couldn’t get in anywhere, so I had the idea of opening my own disco. And I discovered the man who owned the building I wanted was called Bill Fuller.

‘I went in one day and asked his secretary if I could see the owner. She looked at me curiously and then showed me into his office.

‘“What can I do for you, son?”

‘“Well, Mr Fuller, I want to rent your basement out, at Number Thirteen Gardiner Road.”

‘“
You
want to rent the basement?”

‘“Yes, yes, I do.”

‘“For what?”

‘“For a disco.”

‘“A disco?”

‘“Yes.”

‘And amazingly, he agreed. And it was ten bob a week rent.’

‘It does sound a bit precocious, but I also remember a bloke called Jeff Serratt, now the managing director of Pepsi-Cola in Ireland, who was a rep at the time. And one day he knocked at the door of the nightclub.

‘Jeff said, “Is your father in?”

‘“My father’s dead.”

‘“Well, I’m looking for the person who owns the nightclub.”

‘“That’ll be me.”

‘And he said, incredulously, “You?” But after this initial shock I got on great with him. And not only did he supply me with Pepsi, he built us a sign for the nightclub.’

Brendan’s story was almost a movie script, Dublin’s own
Expresso Bongo
.

‘I thought I was the dog’s bollocks at the time. The taxi men in Finglas in fact used to call me Little Lord Fauntleroy, because I wouldn’t take a bus anywhere.’

Brendan had picked up on Maureen O’Carroll’s preference for living a little of the high life.

‘Oh, sure,’ he goes on. ‘If I were buying a pair of boots in the city, I’d take a taxi, go into the shop and try them on, and have the taxi wait to bring me back.’

The club was open on a Thursday, Friday and Saturday. But how would a 14-year-old club boss cope with facing trouble from irate punters, or local gangs?

‘There was no problem with the local gangs because, well, I was in the local gangs,’ he says, smiling.

‘And I had three bouncers who were the McCourt brothers, and they all boxed for Ireland. So, you see, there were simply no problems.

‘And you have to remember that the skinheads didn’t want to get barred out of the only place they could get into.’

The little basement club, run by Dublin’s Bugsy Malone, ‘made a small fortune’, charging two shillings and sixpence entrance money.

‘It was like running a party every night.’

One night, a young Finglas lady called Doreen Dowdall came to the party.

A stunning, dark-haired girl with brown, twinkly eyes, Brendan liked her immediately.

‘She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life. She had pierced ears, her head shaved back, a black Crombie coat with a velvet collar, black polo neck, black three-quarter-length skirt, black knee-length stockings and black loafers.

‘I thought she looked incredible. I knew then I wanted her to be my girlfriend. She was just so special.’

Brendan clearly liked black. But he knew a relationship would be highly problematic.

Doreen, who worked for a clothing manufacturers, came from the other side of the tracks. Not in a Montague-Capulet sense – there was little economic divide in Finglas; everyone was skint. But Doreen lived in an area into which Brendan’s gang, the boys from the Hardy Street area, dared not walk.

Yet, the little skinhead pushed his concerns aside.

‘I let her – and her mates – in for free,’ he says, offering irrefutable evidence of his interest in the young lady.

‘Then I asked her to dance and she said, “I wouldn’t have anything to do with ya, ya sap.” So I pursued her for six months, but she was always with her mates.

‘She told me years later that she took terrible advantage of me. She would ring me up and say, “I saw a pair of Wranglers in a shop window in town.”

‘“What size are you?”

‘“Ten.”

‘“Right, I’ll sort it.”

‘And I would get her the jeans. And the following day she’d call and say, “I’d love another pair of those Wranglers.” And I’d say, “A ten?” And she’d say, “No, get me an eight.”

‘The next week it would be a twelve. She was getting jeans for all her pals. And I knew this, of course. But it didn’t matter. What mattered was she was interested in me. And I was captivated. Eventually, she agreed I could go to the pictures with her – but she’d bring her friends along as well.

‘Meanwhile, my own mates were slagging me, telling me I was wasting my time. But it was a challenge for me. And I told my pals that once she had agreed to go out with me, I’d tell her to forget it.

‘Anyway, I think what happened was I stopped ringing her. I didn’t see her for maybe a week. And she rang me, saying, “I miss you.” I said, “Tough, that’s the way it goes.” But we agreed to meet that night and she said she would go out with me.’

A first love always finds a way. But the way ahead was rocky.

‘I told all my mates. And they said, “Right, when are you dumping her?” And I hummed a bit and said, “I never said I would definitely do that . . .”’

He didn’t. And Brendan and Doreen became a couple. They conquered the gangland divide, and the relationship developed. The disco didn’t, however. Brendan spent the profits on Wranglers and taxis, and the punters gradually fell away.

But now there were two women in Brendan’s life. Since his father had died, his mother had been reliant upon the Special One more than ever, for company, conversation and laughter. The pair sparked off each other. But they argued with an intensity that only people who care for each other can do. And they loved to push each other to the limits.

Yet, although Brendan was precocious, determined to grow up as quickly as possible, he was in no rush to leave his mammy behind.

‘When I was fifteen, Dublin Corporation decided that people should be able to buy their Corporation houses. And I remember the letter coming through the door at the time and I thought, “Jesus, I’ll buy this!” But they wouldn’t sell the house to me. They would only sell it to my mother and me, just in case I was the type to throw my mother out and they’d have to find another house for her.

‘So we bought it in joint names, and I just gave her the money every week for it. It was seventeen hundred quid, thanks to the allowance we got for all the rent that had been paid previously. And that’s what we did.’

The plan would later come back to haunt him. And there were other signs he was rushing in the direction of adulthood way too fast.

‘I was mad into the dogs,’ he recalls of visits to the racetrack. ‘The thirty-second climax they used to call it, because that’s all it takes for the fastest dog to run a race. What happened was that the first three times I went to the dogs, I won big. On the third occasion, I was only fourteen years of age, I had five shillings. And I won eight hundred and fifteen pounds, eighteen shillings and sixpence on that night. I thought, “This is easy.” Big mistake.

‘I was hooked, and it got worse as I got older. I used to get off the bus at Shelbourne Park on a Saturday night after getting my wages. I’d walk across the road to the bus stop where you got a bus back into town. But I’d lift the sod at the bus stop and put a 50p piece under the sod and leave it there so that I’d at least have my bus fare when I came out. I knew I was going in to lose my bollocks.

‘Doreen used to bring me to the pictures on a Sunday night because I’d have no money left. She’d go out to the jacks – the toilet – and I’d be into her bag, snaring a fiver. Monday night, I’d go out to Harold’s Cross with that fiver. She told me years later that she left a fiver in her purse, right there for me to get it every Sunday night. She knew me so well.

‘The stupidity only slowly became apparent to me. One night, after winning on the sixth and seventh race, I came out with twenty-three quid. I got onto the bus. On the way home, I was so delighted. But I had gone in with thirty-five. Here I was, celebrating losing twelve pounds. I thought to myself, “This is sick!” I stopped that night. My life as a gambler was over.’

A racetrack gambler, perhaps. He’d gamble later in life, for far bigger stakes than a few weeks’ wages.