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- Stars Nobody Heard Of
Stars Nobody Heard Of
by Aubrey Malone
How can you have left us, Keith,
With all those millions of facts
Stored up in your encyclopedic brain
The names of stars nobody ever heard of
And producers and directors
And second unit cameramen
And set designers
And grips
And crew hands
And roadies
And stunt men
And of course writers
Because you spent the last 25 years
Writing a book about writers
Before abandoning it
As suddenly as you took it up.
How can you have left us
Without even a goodbye
Or showing us one of those films
You insisted on putting on,
The ones with the bad dialogue
And the rat-tat-tat delivery of the stars
And the corny plots you loved
Maybe for that very reason
And the predictable plot twists
And the happy-ever-after endings.
You died at home
Which was a tribute
To all the people like Jacqueline
And David and Derek and Stephen
And their wives and children
Who loved you and cared for you
And kept you out of nursing homes.
We were all very relieved about that
Because we feared the day
You’d have to go to hospital
Even more than you did
We knew you hated doctors
And we remembered the way
You used to quote Brady, our relation,
When he said,
‘The best part of a hospital
Is the outside’
in his Scottish voice.
Earlier today
I stood over your coffin
And remembered you sitting
In the front room
Of your house
In Ardmore Drive
In the grey chair with the board across it
That you used for your tea
With your glasses half way down your nose
And the remote in your hand
Like Alan Ladd with a gun in a film noir
And the way you’d get so excited
When you put on one of your old movies for us
The ones with the grainy texture
And the muffled sound.
You used to turn up the volume
As the credits came down
And the MGM lion roared
And you’d turn it up even higher
If we dared to talk
At any point
Because that was the one unforgivable sin
At your showings
And turning up the volume
Was your way of telling us
To shut up
Because you were too nice
To say it in words.
.
I was born in 1953
The year ‘Shane’ came to town
And that made me feel special
Because ‘Shane’ was the greatest film ever made.
We knew that because you told us it was
And if you said something it was true
Because you knew everything about films
You were Moses leading us to the Promised Land.
Your eyes lit up with joy
As Shane rescued Joe Starrett
Or Errol Flynn rode into the valley of death
Or James Cagney cheated the electric chair
And as I looked at you
Looking at the screen
From your grey chair
With your hands across the board
And your eyes on fire
I’d realise that you were back
In Ballina all those years ago with Clive
Skipping off school to go to the Estoria,
Our home from home,
For the double feature that was
‘Retained’
That magic word
And hoping none of the priests would be there
To give out to you
And ask you why you weren’t at home
Doing the lessons
That seemed so drab
In contrast to the buckskin of Shane
Or the golden curls of Jeanette Mcdonald
Or the chain metal of Errol Flynn
Or the wagon train heading east
Away from the injuns.
I never knew you growing up, Keith,
Because you were the eldest
And I was the youngest
And there was a whole world between us
But years later when I grew up
I became a part of your world,
The world of Bogart and Cagney
And all the other stars
Nobody ever heard of
Whose faces I knew from the books
You left lying around the house
To entrance us.
One of them was called ‘Silent Movies.
It had a red cover.
Another one was called ‘The Talkies’
And it was black.
They were both as big as the Bible
And as heavy as two phone books.
They had hundreds of photos
Because photos were always very important to you
Even though your own book was about words
I spent hours flipping through the pages
Of these books
With the hundreds of photographs
And I used to wonder how different people looked
In those faraway times
And how it was that people like Lillian Gish
Had such dreamy eyes
And such a heart-shaped face
And where were all those eyes and faces now.
I finally got to know you in 1970
The year the family moved up to Dublin
Making Ballina a thing of the past.
The cobwebs were blowing over the Estoria now
Over all the posters of ‘Casablanca’
And ‘The Glass Key’
And ‘The Maltese Falcon’
And ‘The Caine Mutiny’
And all the other films you went to
Time and again
Or as often as you were let
To marvel at their wonder.
I remember how you used to hoist
Your trousers up like Bogie
And speak like him too
With that tough guy drawl.
I finally met you in your flat in Cabra Park that year
And you stood before me
In your sensible Unidare suit
And after asking me how I liked the’ big smoke’
You got on to the much more important fact
That there was a film on in the Carlton
That you were going to see.
It was ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’
And you booked seats
For Ruth and Basil and me.
A few days later
We all filed into them like sheep
And Paul Newman and Robert Redford came out
With their guns blazing.
I don’t remember you going to too many films
In the seventies
Though we scoured the Metropole
And the Astor
And the Corinthian
For the few black and whites
That were still available
For anachronisms like us,
Reading the small print of the newspapers
For some forgotten classic.
In the eighties the world of videos came in
And now you were able to record all your favourite films
From the television
And feast on them nightly
After the day’s hard labour
In a job you hated.
Jacqueline recorded them diligently
And you inspected them nightly
Like Louis B. Mayer
In his private screening room
In Ardmore Studios.
In 1989 you took early retirement.
Now you had all day to watch films
If you wanted
But that could never be enough for you
With your great work ethic,
So you started your screenwriter book,
The one you’d keep at for 25 years
Without ever wanting to see it published
Because publishers got in the way of writing
Just as doctors
Got in the way of health.
You lie before me in a funeral parlour
without shaking today, Keith,
Still with the stillness that only came to you rarely
In your last years,
As Parkinsons disease took hold
And I wonder what you wouldn’t have given
For that stillness In life
When you were there to appreciate it.
You aren’t now so it’s wasted
But then that’s the absurdity of life
And death.
A few days ago I saw the sentence
‘Keith Dillon-Malone died peacefully’
On the obituary notice
In rip.ie
And it struck me
That it was the first time I ever saw your name in print -
Not on the cover of your screenwriter book
Where it should have been
But on a website for the deceased
And earlier today at Glasnevin Cemetery
Not too far away from Iona Villas
Or Cabra Park
We toasted your memory
And people spoke of your gentleness
And kindness
And bravery
In the face of your illness
And how memorable you were to everyone
Who ever met you
Even once
Because you were our superstar
Even if you never had your name in lights
Or on the cover of a book.
When I told Basil you died
He said you were probably in heaven now
Telling jokes to God about films
And I thought that too
And in my mind’s eye
I saw you up there
With Cagney and Bogie
And George Raft
And Edward G. Robinson
And Edmond O’Brien
And Zachary Scott
And Audrey Totter
And Steve Cochrane
And Agnes Moorehead
And Sterling Hayden
And Joel McCrea
And Ellen Corby
And Randolph Scott
And Zasu Pitts
And Raymond Burr
And Peter Lorre
And Elisha Cook Jr
And Jack Elam
And all the other stars
Nobody ever heard of.
I realised then that now become one of them
Our own personal star in heaven
Unknown until today
In your own personal Hall of Fame.