Love in many guises

INTERVIEW:A documentary on the life of Nuala O'Faolain is unflinchingly honest in its approach. KATHY SHERIDANtalks to broadcaster Marian Finucane, a great friend of O'Faolain's, who narrates the programme

THERE IS AN obvious hazard in involving yourself in a film about a beloved friend who has died. It’s bound to be a luvvie whitewash – right? A few precautionary steps can be taken, of course. Ensure your subject has an unusually honest family. Pray the friend/presenter turns out to be a decent journalist. Find a film-maker who didn’t much like your subject.

Patrick Farrelly, an old friend from RTÉ days, was running a successful New York-based production company with his wife Kate O’Callaghan, when the idea was mooted that he should make a documentary about Nuala O’Faolain with Marian Finucane. When Finucane told Nuala’s sister Noreen, a London-based solicitor, that Farrelly was a possibility, Noreen asked: “What does Patrick think of Nuala?”

“Not much”, said Marian.

“Perfect”, said Noreen.

“Or words to that effect,” adds Finucane.

The other hazard is that people might think the film is all about Finucane. “It’s not. This is about Nuala,” she says repeatedly. But there is hardly a cigarette paper between the two. We know that Nuala, the damaged, ferociously bright, recklessly truthful wanderer, chose to confront death publicly with a pitilessly honest interview conducted by her friend. And it was Nuala, godmother to Marian’s little girl Sinead, who pounded the hills with Marian in those terrible months before Sinead’s death from leukaemia, helping her to deal with the “unthinkable”.

At Nuala’s little bolthole in rural Clare, images of Sinead and herself take pride of place – those bright, smiling faces meeting the gaze of the camera as it pans around the livingroom, pausing briefly for a side glimpse of a contemplative Marian. And later, as the film and Nuala’s life come to an end, we see Nuala facing into a camera again, only this time with wistful eyes, shaven-headed, her face marked by radium treatment, her body bloated with steroids.

It takes little insight to conclude that Nuala’s final illness was a double hammer blow for her friend. Already bowed with grief, Finucane found herself revisiting agonising conversations and protocols learned in another time.

“One of the things about it, was me thinking bloody hell, I’m not having these conversations again with Nuala, with the same outcome inevitable.” In fact, she found that nearly all of the “homework” had been done. “If you take that interview that I did with Nuala after the diagnosis, I think that a lot of it was pre-ordained nearly, before we switched on anything, by conversations we’d had in the past.”

Similarly, when it came to decisions about who could visit Nuala in her final days, all those conversations had a familiar echo. “When Sinead was dying, I would have cut the legs off anyone who would cry in the room with her – because life goes on as normal, inasmuch as it can. We were ruthless about that.”

The immutable rule in the Finucane-Clark household was that anyone “who was going to come in that door and collapse in tears, was barred”. And that included Finucane’s mother, who accepted the verdict “with some relief”.

In the film, the great absence is Nell McCafferty, Nuala’s partner for 15 years, up to the mid-1990s, an intrinsic part of that tight, profoundly supportive circle as Sinead was dying. “She didn’t want to take part in the documentary,” Finucane says. And yet, she is unavoidably, powerfully present; the woman who picked up the pieces after Nuala had hit bottom and admitted herself to St Pat’s, before the pair embarked on their relationship.

Contributions from friends such as Evelyn Conlon, Patsey Murphy, Brian Sheehan and Polly Devlin suggest a picture of a casually cruel Nuala, who “characteristically reeled Nell in and pushed her away at the same time”. Nuala’s sexuality is not glossed over either. Despite her own devastating declaration after that lengthy relationship with McCafferty, that she would crawl over 49 women to get to one attractive man, Nuala was bisexual, said Conlon, firmly. To claim that she was straight was like someone who’d been heterosexual all along saying they were now a virgin.

Sides are taken after a break-up, although Finucane is adamant that she did no such thing. “After a break-up – and I’ve been though it myself – I suppose one person gets hurt more than another. And the person that gets hurt imagines that people take sides, even if they’re wrong. Or perhaps there is a feeling that there wasn’t enough respect for the relationship itself.

“I think maybe Nell felt that she wasn’t treated like a heterosexual married couple would have been in a break-up. In my view, that’s not true because I completely forgot they were gay. I was a friend of Nell’s. I will always regard her as a friend. If she currently doesn’t wish to engage under the old rules of friendship . . . I’m around.”

In any event, Nell never did get past the gate-keepers, as Nuala was dying. “They weren’t on speaking – eh, friendly – terms. That was the past,” says a friend in the film.

“I don’t think Nuala could cope with big, strong emotions at that stage,” says Finucane. “And all that was a long time ago. She and Nell broke up around 1994 or ’95. My marriage broke up and I know I wouldn’t be looking for my former husband if I was dying, because that’s over. What Nuala wanted then was calm. She didn’t want loads of people around. She wanted Brian Sheehan, Luke [Dodd] and myself – but she didn’t want us there all the time either. She didn’t want fuss, tears or drama or anything else because she couldn’t cope with it.”

She had had her fill of drama. Interwoven throughout the narrative, like a fine, dark thread through white linen, is the chaotic, squalid childhood, her father’s legions of mistresses, her mother’s desperate alcoholism and calamitous notions about the primacy of “passion”, from which O’Faolain never escaped.

Video clips of her father, Terry O’Sullivan, show the social columnist with The Irish Press sophisticated and dapper in evening dress, smoothly discussing oysters and starry hotels where his drink was poured as he came through the door. A black-and-white photograph of Nuala’s aunts – her mother’s sisters, among them the woman who had a long-term affair with O’Sullivan. And yet another of O’Sullivan – this time with an 18-year-old girl – while at home, the family slept under coats for the lack of bedclothes. They moved house frequently – once in the dead of night – and never had money for bills.

We learn, astonishingly, that O’Sullivan was always paid the same as the paper’s editor, Douglas Gageby. So where did all that money go? Noreen suggests that he “flashed the cash” around town, yet other sources told Finucane that he never paid for anything, not his clothes, his shirts, his shoes, or his restaurant bills. Such was his power, that if he said, “that’s a beautiful lamp”, it was parcelled up and sent over to his mistress’s place the next day.

“He broke all the rules,” says Finucane, “but that was a society outside of a society. Nuala emerged into what has been described as an intellectual wasteland, where absolutely everything was governed by the church and that’s why she lost her place [and scholarship] in UCD. So the father was philandering around with who knows how many women but the minute Gráinne [Nuala’s sister] gets pregnant, it’s a ‘scandal’ and she’s whipped away. I mean how many babies had he with different people? But in their own home, it’s a scandal and Gráinne is whipped off, up to Belfast to another rich mistress’s house.”

The mistress, prone to hitting the gin and tonic at 9.30am, would receive visits from the father while Gráinne was there, during which they would disappear for their “activities”.

Gráinne never saw her baby again. While the film roves through O’Faolain’s life, from Dublin to Clare, New York to Paris, and features moving interviews with colleagues and friends along the way, it is her three sisters, Gráinne, Noreen and Deirdre, who tend to linger in the mind, each distinct and different, each of them wry, funny and heart-breakingly honest.

“Talking about their parents and their upbringing, what Noreen described as 100 per cent neglect, you look at them as an absolute triumph in survival,” says Finucane. “They didn’t all survive and triumph, of course. They all break up over Dermot because he was the youngest.”

One of the enduring mysteries of this film is the number of old photographs showing a smiling, shiny, well-nourished father, mother and happy brood. Finucane admits that they flummox her too. “They do look clean, shiny, nourished, but then, the father had a professional photographer in his life, remember, and would have had for all these photographs. We don’t have any pictures like that of my family I can tell you. But that is our only explanation. There is a picture of little Dermot [who became an alcoholic and died young] at six or seven, in a pub, unkempt, dirty. When they were in Balbriggan, they were sometimes sent home from school because they weren’t properly dressed.”

By the end, there is no mystery about what shaped Nuala O’Faolain’s life or her problems with intimacy or her life-long belief – in the words of an old St Louis teacher – that she could never be truly loved.

In many ways, her neediness was like an animal clawing inside, rendering her child-like. Anna, the 16-year-old daughter of John Low-Beer, O’Faolain’s partner in the latter years, describes their relationship as “tempestuous”. “She couldn’t control herself at times, in the same way a child can’t,” she says coolly.

“Nuala would say, ‘well I’m a child too’,” said Low-Beer. But towards the end, it becomes clear that Nuala was figuring it out, teasing through the mysteries of trust, even going for counselling with Low-Beer. “She worked at it. She wanted a domestic life, she wanted a relationship. There was this book, it might have been called After the Affair, and she had one in every house she was in.”

The film was made with a torrent of tears. Finucane describes one New York interview where the interviewer was in “floods of tears”; the cinematographer’s partner had just had a cancer diagnosis; the other woman on camera had just had a baby and had to halt regularly to express milk. They were all in tears, while a small dog systematically bit the toes off everyone in the room, apart from Finucane (who had broken her two ankles) and Patrick Farrelly.

Did Farrelly warm to his subject in the end? He came to “appreciate” her, he says; yes, “definitely appreciating her, but not that you’d want to make her a 14-day walking companion”.

Nuala will air on RTÉ1 on Monday at 9.30pm

NUALA O’FAOLAIN WAS wayward, academically brilliant, recklessly truthful, a leading figure in modern Irish culture, and a household name in Ireland since the 1980s. A TV producer, teacher, author and columnist, covering everything from birdwatching to snobbery in the arts to hypocritical clergy, one whose feminism “stemmed from a fundamental belief in social justice”, in the words of her friend Luke Dodd.

When Gay Byrne asked about the startling tally of men in her memoir, Are You Somebody?, she answered memorably that there were all sorts of reasons for all the sex, “including for the exercise”.

Are You Somebody? turned her into an international star in the mid 1990s. The book stayed in the New York Times bestseller charts for months and turned her into a full-time writer.