Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show (9 page)

His first film there,
A Lad from Old Ireland
, packed theaters back in
the United States, a box-office sensation, because every Irish immigrant, and all people of Irish descent, wanted and needed wonderful images of home.

In 1911, riding the magic carpet of his success, Mr. Olcott came back and set up a permanent company in the village of Beaufort near Killarney. He invited leading male and female actors from all over the world to work with him there, in films such as
Conway, the Kerry Dancer; The Colleen Bawn; Rory O’More;
and dozens more. All told, the Kalem Company made more than a hundred films in Ireland back then, many in and around Killarney.

Sarah Kelly had known Mr. Olcott slightly since New York days; he knew her work thoroughly; he sent out a call for her, and she answered.

They sailed excellently, despite some choppy seas. Venetia remembered it well, and described it to me one afternoon twenty-one years later. She said that she couldn’t be torn away from the rail, where she wanted to stare at the ocean all day. They didn’t get seasick, and the ship also delighted Mrs. Haas. Always a bonus—the lifting of that frown.

For Sarah, the voyage became a social whirl. Her fame had begun to cross the Atlantic with her; man after man pursued her.

“My dear Ben, I dined at a different table every night,” she said to me.

Of Mr. Anderson not a word was mentioned. Sarah hadn’t told him of her decision. On the day of sailing she simply failed to turn up at the Waldorf. He went there every afternoon for two weeks and waited for her. Eventually, when no reply came to his letters, he found a way to inquire discreetly, and that was the first Mr. Anderson knew of Sarah Kelly’s departure. She had turned her back on him—and his money. But she knew, she told me, that he’d follow her one day.

Beaufort lies some miles from the town of Killarney. Once settled in the Great Southern Hotel, Sarah hired a sidecar with a driver, called a “jarvey.” They told her in Beaufort that Mr. Olcott had gone elsewhere with his actors to shoot some scenes for the production under way. Mr. Olcott’s chief assistant, “a girl named Mae,” said Sarah, “with blond bangs reaching down into her eyes, and lips tight and red as a new rose, wrote out very carefully, in very large handwriting, the directions.”

Mr. Olcott was “most anxious,” Mae said, to meet his new leading lady.

The jarvey didn’t even look at the piece of paper. “They’re out at Moll’s Gap,” he said, and cracked his long whip. The horse, he said, knew the way.

Whatever the ancient feelings coursing through her, Sarah looked every inch an American: prosperous, helpful, charming. She enchanted all she met, including the jarvey.

She asked him to repeat the names of the places through which they passed, and while telling me she rolled them on her tongue. Tullig; Kilgobnet; Suanavalla; Coolcummisk; Dunloe; and finally Gortacollopa, where they found Mr. Olcott. Wearing a white peaked cap and check knickerbockers, he was standing in the middle of the road beckoning to somebody. And then they saw two people, obviously his actors, walk swiftly across a field to a gate, which they climbed, and upon which they sat and batted heavy eyelids at each other.

In the fashion that would become iconic, Mr. Olcott shouted, “Cut!” He turned to greet Sarah, kissed her hands, and offered her an engagement that would last, on and off, for as long as he stayed in Ireland.

She went to work on the following Monday, in a film called
Rosaleen’s Return
, about an Irish emigrant girl who comes home to her birthplace and restores her family cottage. From a ruined hovel with the thatched roof falling in, she makes a white-painted haven with picket fence and rambling rose. A “sow’s ear to silk purse” plot—how could she lose?

Sarah, with very few lines to mouth, gleamed and soared. The camera loved her, full-face and profiles, which Mr. Olcott pronounced “very unique.” Those eyelashes, that rosebud mouth, that sloping nose—he lost part of his heart to her, and then lost most of the rest to her daughter.

“What is your name?” said Mr. Olcott, to the child swinging her legs from the garden gate.

“Venetia Kelly, and my profession is that of actor. And you, sir?”

He professed himself “swoony for that kid” and that night wrote a film for her. He called it
The Courage of Esmeralda
.

I
n Killarney the last bolt of this Kelly family preamble slides home—because a major character now appears, brought there in a cardboard box by King Kelly. A man who made every room turbulent upon his entrance, whenever King Kelly held out his arms, it became a race between Sarah and Venetia. That day Sarah won, as she would for the rest of her father’s life. Venetia wrapped her arms around his beef of a leg and held on, until he prized her away and lifted her up to be kissed.

He had no luggage; he said it would arrive later, and that the railway company had lost it. Who could ever believe him? Sarah had to go out and buy him clothes. Out of his copious pockets, however, he began to pull things—sticks of barley sugar, a chocolate bear, a tiny bottle of scent, a lace handkerchief. On the floor beside him he had already deposited a large box.

“Tell me a story, tell me a story,” Venetia cried, and King Kelly, with the child still in his arms, found the sofa and sat down.

“What kind of a story would you like?” he said. “You know that for the whole year you’re eleven years old you can have any story in the world because eleven is a magic number.”

“You said that too when I was ten,” said Venetia. “And when I was nine. And eight, and seven. What’s in the box? Is it for me?”

“Venetia, honey,” said her mother, but the warning of good manners faded in the gale of laughter.

“I’ll tell you the story first,” said King Kelly, “and then I’ll open the box and you’ll see why I told you the story.”

With Venetia settled on the arm of the chair from where he could look straight into her face, he began to tell his tale. I’m repeating the story here as Venetia told it to me many years later, and I’m repeating it because it formed such a fundamental influence in the early making of Venetia Kelly’s Traveling Show—and in the management of Venetia’s life.

There’s a man I know, and I know him well. He’s living up in the north of Ireland, and he’s a very unusual man—because he had a very unusual teacher. His teacher taught this man something that nobody else ever knew—how to talk to animals. He understands everything that animals say, even to one another. Because, as you know, animals and all creatures have their own language
.

If this man hears the crows out in the field and they’re cawing and jawing, he knows they’re discussing where the next best bit of food might be. And if he sees the cows coming in to be milked, he hears them saying to each other, I hope there isn’t anybody milking us tonight who has cold fingers. He told me that himself. And every time the dog barks or the cat meows, he knows perfectly well what they’re saying—because his teacher taught him every animal language he needed to know. When he was a young lad, he tried to tell his family but they laughed at him
.

One day, he was going off to his aunt’s house with his father and mother, and they were driving in a lovely painted pony trap drawn by their own horse on the farm, and the horse’s name was Myko
.

Now my friend had conducted many secret conversations with Myko the horse. As he had had many secret conversations with the dog, Ted, and with the two pigs, Betty and Buster, and the cat, Chester, posh cat it was, name like that. All these chats were secret, you understand, because the animals didn’t want to get my friend into trouble with his parents, and he certainly didn’t want to get them into trouble
.

Well, they were belting along with Myko in great rapid form, and the sun
shining, and suddenly Myko gives a big whinnying neigh out of him and my friend jumps up off his nice leather seat and says, “Stop, stop.”

His father looks at him and says, “I’ll do no such of a thing,” and my friend says, “Stop, you have to stop—one of the shafts is going to break.”

Well, against his better judgment, his father looks out over the front of the trap and sure enough he sees that the shaft has a big crack in it, and he draws the reins slowly tight until Myko the horse comes to a gentle standstill. They all get down and inspect the damage and as they do so the shaft finally breaks off and falls down like a dying thing
.

If they’d all been still aboard when that happened, they’d be as dead as doornails. The father scratches his head in puzzlement, and the horse lets out another whinny
.

“Tell him you heard a crack,” says the horse to the boy. And the boy says, “I heard a crack.”

“Back there on the bridge,” whinnies the horse
.

“Back there on the bridge,” says the boy
.

“I suppose,” says the father, with a snigger as big as a curse, “the horse told you.”

The boy said nothing. And now he felt worse than ever, because the animals were talking to him in their language and they didn’t know any of his language. So he decided to teach them. That night, when they were all home safely, Ted the dog came up into his bedroom as he always did and snuck into the bed with him. He said to my fiend, “Myko told me about today and the broken shaft.”

My friend said, “Ted, I feel awful bad. Because I know how to speak in dog and horse and cat and pig, and you don’t know any of my language.”

Ted the dog said to him, “Why don’t you teach us?”

And so my friend started off teaching the dog to say “Hello” and “How are you” and “Please” and “Thank you.”

In no time, all the animals in the farmyard were speaking the boy’s language. And then they hit a snag—and it could have had very bad repercussions
.

One day, the boy and his father were mucking out the pigsty and the father said to the boy, “These two will soon be ready for the table.”

The boy said, “What does that mean?”

The father said, “It means the same as it always meant. We’re going to kill them and eat them.”

Now Betty and Buster understood exactly what he’d said, because of course they now spoke English, and Buster said out loud, “Oh, no, I don’t want to be killed.”

“Who said that?” said the father, turning around in great surprise
.

“I did,” said my friend, quick as a wink, and he went over to Buster, squatted down beside him, whispered, “Say it again,” and when Buster said it again the boy moved his lips
.

“How did you do that?” said the father, amazed out of his head
.

“I read about it,” said my friend. “They call it throwing your voice. Vent—something.”

And thereafter, if one of the animals spoke in English, the boy pretended it was him, and he had them all warned not to say a word in English unless he was nearby
.

“Did they kill the pigs?” Venetia asked.

“No, that’s the thing,” said King Kelly. “The father was so amazed that he invited people over, and he made bets with them that the pigs could talk. And he won all his bets.”

Venetia remembered how the room exhaled when the story ended. Then she made King Kelly reach for the box. He opened it and took out a big doll.

“Now,” he said to Venetia, “I’m going to show you how to teach this doll to talk.”

He had brought her a gift almost as big as herself, a ventriloquist’s doll or dummy, and it wore dungarees and a plaid shirt. It looked like an Irish farmer—to be more accurate, it looked like the American doll manufacturer’s impression of an Irish farmer.

“We have to give the doll a name; he can’t go ’round the place without a name,” said King Kelly. “What’ll we call him?”

Quick as a flash, tongue sharpened to a point, Venetia said, “There’s only one name for him.”

They all looked at her, and she said, “Blarney.”

A
nd what of my own parents at this time? While the Kellys were climbing into their firmament, where did my family stand in the world? What comparison could I make that would connect us?