23
I MET JOHN McHugh in the autumn of 1966, when I was a cub reporter on the Sun-Times and he was a rewrite man, two years my senior, on the Chicago Daily News. He worked the overnight shift, and among his duties was taking calls from readers. After midnight, they wanted to settle bets. “And what do you say?” McHugh would ask. He would listen, and then reply, “You’re one hundred percent correct. Put the other guy on.” Pause. “And what do you say?” Pause. “You’re one hundred percent correct.” If he was asked for his name, he said, “John T. Greatest, spelled with three T’s.” He explained, “They can never figure out what that means.”
John was one of ten brothers from Sligo, Yeats country, on the west coast of Ireland. His father, “Trooper,” had been a member of the IRA gang that held up the Ulster Bank of Sligo. “They were raising funds for the cause,” he explained. “All of the money was never accounted for. Trooper is the only man in Sligo who has a son who graduated from Indiana University.” He was entrusted to Indiana under the protection of a cousin in Indianapolis who was a nun. John himself had studied briefly for the priesthood under the Christian Brothers but was expelled at fifteen, charged with smoking.
Late one night at the Old Town Gate, we decided to pay a visit to his homeland. David Lean was filming Ryan’s Daughter on the Dingle Peninsula, and MGM was flying in film critics to visit the location. We traded one first-class ticket for a couple of cheap ones. Robert Mitchum, my favorite movie star, was living in a rented cottage on the edge of town, and he drank scotch with us one night while he fed peat to the fire and listened to Jim Reeves records with his man Harold, who had been a paramedic with the Coldstream Guards.
On that trip McHugh became the great friend of a lifetime. As young men we sowed wild oats. As middle-aged men we ripened. As old men we harvest, and always we laugh. We flew on to Venice, where McHugh bonded with Lino, the trattoria owner. Although they did not speak a word of each other’s language, McHugh was so successful at communicating that Lino gave him his apron and installed him behind the counter.
Sophia Loren was on the mainland, in Padua, filming The Priest’s Wife with Marcello Mastroianni. The studio laid on a car to take me over for an interview, and I took along McHugh, “from the Chicago Daily News.” In those days film critics flew everywhere on the studios’ money and with the approval of our papers. We had to rise early in the morning, and I was hungover. On the road, I gave McHugh his instructions: “I’ve interviewed a lot of these stars and I know the drill. Just keep quiet, let me do the talking, and they won’t know any the better.” But when Loren glided into the room, I was paralyzed by hangover, drenched with sweat, and speechless. McHugh whipped out his Reporter’s Notebook and came to the rescue.
“Miss Loren, is that a tiara you’re sportin’?”
“This? It is a hair clip.”
“I see.” McHugh took notes. “Miss Loren, I understand you recently gave birth. Can you confirm that?”
“Yes, it is true. I had my little Cheepee. When I was pregnant, I had to stay for weeks in a clinic in Switzerland. Now I feel like a true woman. Carlo visits from Rome on weekends. If I never make another film, it is all right with me. Now I am a mother!”
McHugh nodded and took more notes.
“And in addition to little Cheepee, have you any other hobbies?”
“You call my baby a hobby?”
“I meant… like poker, or something?”
In those years I was living in the attic of the house of Paul and Anna Dudak, at 2437 North Burling, and paying $110 a month. Pop was a retired window washer from the Ukraine, where he had been an anarchist playwright. Anna was an Okie from the Dust Bowl, who spent six weeks every winter in what Pop referred to as “Lost Wages.” She said it cost her less than at home: “Nine dollars for a motel, $1.95 for the buffet, and I never gamble.” When some friends from O’Rourke’s Pub came over one night, Jim Hoge looked around and said, “Jesus, Roger, I pay you too much to live in this dump.”
An apartment opened up on a floor below, and John moved in. Like me, he had to survive a severe grilling from Pop: “We have here only intellectual gentlemen, who enjoy the luxury of conversation.” The Dudaks did no drinking to speak of, but these interviews were always smoothed by Pop’s secret recipe cocktail, made of Pepsi and Green Chartreuse. The front yard of his house, never very popular with the neighbors, was populated by a zoo of colorful little animals, sunk in concrete to prevent theft. In the backyard was a pond with a showerhead to supply a fountain, and in this pond floated a plastic frog with an orange golf ball glued to its head.
One year McHugh and I returned from another trip to Ireland. John entered his apartment, fell in bed without turning on the lights, and awoke at dawn to see snakes crawling all over the walls. He called me and I hurried downstairs. He’d not been imagining things. The snakes were there. Pop had painted them in florescent greens and yellows. “I am working in my capacity as a room decorator,” he explained. “For trendy young gentleman, I have created psychedelic wall paintings.”
He had also improved my attic apartment, where the roof leaned at low angles over the rooms.
“Ebert!” he said, greeting me in front of the house. “Does your mirror steam up when you shave after a shower?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Working in my capacity as an inventor, I have solved the problem!”
He led me upstairs and proudly showed me that he had cut a square hole through the roof and installed a sliding pane of glass in it, directly above the bathtub.
“Prop open the window when you shower,” he explained, “and steam escapes to outer atmosphere, leaving mirror ready for shaving!”
This innovation proved flawed. Even on summer days, the outside breeze blew chilly into the shower. On rainy days, twigs and leaves would wash past the sliding glass into the bathtub. When I lay soaking, I would find myself being regarded by squirrels’ beady little eyes. They found the glass warm in wintertime, and my tub began to collect squirrel shit.
John was popular with the ladies, although his girlfriend in the 1970s, Mary Ulrich, who was a banker, once told me: “John’s idea of being charming on a date is to look up from the bar, notice me sitting next to him, and say, Mary, me old flower! How long have you been sittin’ there?” Miss Mary, for so she was known, was a perfect lady. Skirts instead of pants. Nylons. Heels. Business suits. Every hair in place. She loved the guy. Nobody could figure it out. She cooked for him, mended his shirts, took naughty Polaroids that no one was allowed to see. She hardly drank.
Mary eventually fell in love with a lawyer, but thanks to John’s influence, he was a colorful one. John, in the meantime, had left the Daily News to become a feature writer for Chicago Today, the former Chicago’s American. “The best job in town,” he told me. “It’s what I dreamed of when I was down in Bloomington that last summer. I had just graduated and had my degree in my pocket. I got a job with the Arab Pest Control, crawling under houses and spraying around bug poison. One day it was about ninety-eight degrees, and a trap door opened above my head. It was the lady of the house.
“ ‘It must be hot down there,’ she says. ‘Wouldn’t you like some nice cold lemonade?’
“I tell her I would. I stand up through the trap door but don’t climb into the kitchen because I’m all covered with sweat, dust, and cobwebs. She pours me out a nice big glass from a pitcher from the icebox. Then she calls her little boy into the room.
“ ‘Junior,’ she says, ‘you take a good look at that man. If you don’t study hard and go to college, that’s what will happen to you.’ ”
After Chicago Today folded, John went to work for the news division of NBC Chicago as the assignment manager. At one time his two principal anchors were Maury Povich and the legendary Ron Hunter, who was possibly the model for every character in the movie Anchorman. John liked Maury but found Ron unendurable: “He’s so vain that instead of wearing glasses, he has a prescription windshield on his Jaguar.” Anchormen value stories when they can go on the street and be seen in the midst of the action. One day McHugh came up with a juicy assignment for Povich. “The next day,” he told me, “Ron Hunter comes into my office, puts his feet up on my desk, and says, ‘John, that was a good story you had for Maury yesterday. What do you have for me today?’ I tell him, ‘Contempt.’ ”
At NBC, John met the sunny Mary Jo Broderick, with whom he has lived happily now for many years. Our friend Zonka died a few years after buying the New Buffalo Times across the lake in southwest Michigan. John took over editing and publishing the paper for a year. By then he had come to like the area, and he and Mary Jo purchased a little white frame two-story in Three Oaks, the home of a dandy Fourth of July parade where Shriners circle in formation on their power lawnmowers. Three Oaks, with barely three thousand souls, has an excellent downtown art theater, the Vickers, which Mary Jo faithfully attends every week. McHugh never goes. When he was a child, once a year he was delegated to take all of his brothers to the movies. “It was always the same show: How Green Was My Valley. Every time I saw it, nine months later I’d have another brother.”
I lived at 2437 North Burling for most of the years between 1967 and 1977. Then I bought a coach house behind the Four Farthings Tavern on Lincoln Avenue. I held a housewarming, at which one of the guests was my friend the press agent Sherman Wolf, a really nice man, which helps explain this story. Sherman found me in the kitchen and said, “Congratulations on your new house! You’ve worked hard and you deserve it. It’s a real step up from that pigpen you used to live in.”
“Sherman,” I said, “I don’t believe you’ve met my landlady from Burling Street, Mrs. Dudak.”
Sherman turned red. “Oh my God!” he said. “Oh, Mrs. Dudak, actually it was a very nice place on Burling, the rent was low, Roger was happy there, I was just trying to think of something nice to say to Roger.”
“Now, Sherman, don’t you apologize for a thing. It was time Roger found something better, and we’re happy for him.”
Sherman fled to the deck outside the kitchen door. McHugh was sitting out there.
“How are you, Sherman?”
“God, John, I’m so embarrassed I could crawl into a hole. I just told Roger this place was a lot better than that pigpen he used to live in, and who was standing right there but Mrs. Dudak!”
“I’ll bet that made you feel awful,” John said.
“It’s one of those things you can never take back,” Sherman said.
“Sherman,” John said, “I don’t believe you’ve ever met Mr. Dudak, who is sitting right here next to me.”
“Good… lord!”
“And Sherman? When Roger moved out of the pigpen, I moved in.”