Generations of ambitious young people were subject to predators

Thinking you’re cool gives you no armoury to cope with a sexual predator like Weinstein, writes Terry Prone.

LIED about my age at the time, although it really wasn’t much of a lie. All I did was state that I was 16 when in fact I was no more than 15 and a half. But I was tall and wore heels and 15 and a half may be the only age at which a woman is happy to look older than she is.

I lied to get into the Abbey Theatre School of Acting, the first step on my career path, the culmination of which would — I was convinced — see me become the greatest Irish actress since Eileen Crowe. That was the plan. Luckily, by the time I failed to achieve it, nobody other than theatre nerds remembered Eileen Crowe, and the word “actress” had been expunged from the lexicon. But attending the classes was thrilling, as was appearing in minor productions as ‘Third Extra, Stage Left’, and sent me home each day bubbling with excitement and questions. One of the questions, voiced at tea time, was straightforward enough.

“What’s your crotch?” I asked.

My sister coped badly with this, her laughter colliding with a mouthful of tea in a way that had consequences for all of us, given that the kitchen table was on the small side. You might believe that a 15 and a half year old who claimed ignorance of what her crotch was could have been pretending, but that’s the truth of it. I had never heard the word. Crotches were not part of our family conversation, back then. Or since, now that I come to think of it. They just didn’t surface casually in the familial discourse. So, other than my sister choking and apologising, the query proved to be a silencer.

My mother, who had a genius for spotting implications, didn’t answer the question but demanded to know why I was asking.

“Well,” I said. “Mr Dermody told us all you couldn’t do a love scene unless you get your crotches together.”

Mr Dermody was Frank Dermody, a producer in the Abbey who was in charge of the School of Acting. Looking back, I suspect it was a position handed to him the way large corporations deploy impossible people for whom they have no real use. They put them in charge of strategic planning. The National Theatre put Frank Dermody in the one role for which he had neither qualifications nor competence: Training the next generation of actors.

Dermody was a little bald guy permanently wound up tight as a spring. He was also a binge drinker, which circuitously led to his extraordinary way of talking. Apparently when he went out to get drunk, he would quite sensibly decide to preserve his false teeth from the consequences of a possible fall. He’d take them out of his mouth, wrap them in a hanky, and secret them in his coat pocket. Which was fine, except that he was also a pipe smoker, and when he got seriously drunk, he would shove his still-lit pipe into his pocket, where it would slowly set fire to the hanky. The end result was that the false teeth got melted into a shapeless lump of pink and white plastic. The first couple of times this happened, he replaced them, but around the third time he lost interest in his dentures completely and went gummy instead, which gave him an epic lisp and forced him to over-emphasise everything in order to be understood at all. For us acting students, a training session with him was like trying to learn the pronunciation of Swahili from a deranged gorilla.

Not understanding him was the least of our worries, because there wasn’t much of a curriculum. Guest lecturers would come equipped with a theme, references, and exercises but, for the most part, Dermody obsessed about one thing: fFalling correctly. Now, I never bothered to check, but I suspect the number of roles in plays requiring an actor to fall out of their standing position and hit the floor in a fluid and uninjured way is small. Dermody was, nevertheless, persuaded that if we could do that trick on demand, world fame would follow as day follows night. Whenever he was short of an idea for a class, we ended up falling about. On one occasion, as he demonstrated the perfect fall, the rake or slant of the stage spilled him into the orchestra pit, where he landed among the drums. We were way too terrified to laugh, but to this day remember with some pleasure the five minutes of noise attendant upon him disengaging from the timpani.

Although the rest of the students were a few years older than I was, we were all in the age-range favoured for exploitation by Harvey Weinstein, and as vulnerable as his victims. Like all teenagers, we thought we were the coolest on the planet, we believed we invented sex, drugs, and drink and we let on to be fearless. All of which came home to haunt us, as sex, drugs, drink and pretended fearlessness come home to haunt every generation. Not to mention thinking we were cool.

Thinking you’re cool gives you no armoury to cope with a sexual predator like Weinstein or a search-and-destroy merchant like Dermody. Although the latter was gay and did time when that was still criminal, his capacity to scar young people for life didn’t reside in sexual predation but in raucous, vicious public humiliation. We were mocked for being fat, for being ugly, for having no talent. Sometimes we were mocked in a way that made no particular sense but still humiliated us, as in the case of the unfortunate young actor who had to walk across the stage as a newspaper seller in a period play, calling out: “Freeman’s Journal, Freeman’s Journal.” At the dress rehearsal, which was traditionally attended by nuns and priests who were not otherwise supposed to go to the theatre, Dermody erupted from the stalls, bellowing: “Ah, Freeman’s Testicles!” The poor young actor told the rest of us later that the straw he grasped at was the possibility that his tormenter’s weird pronunciation might have meant the religious present didn’t understand him.

Did we complain to management? No. Did we tell our parents? Not when — as I found out — telling them led to threats of being taken out of the School of Acting. Did we even think it was unfair? Amazingly, no. We hated it. But we saw it as the price of eventual fame. Of course, only a handful of that class, including Bosch Hogan, Niall Buggy, and Frank Grimes, ever became famous. The rest faded into the obscurity of real life, bearing the scars of a war they’d never signed up for, carrying tales that went untold because of the fear that they would be disbelieved or made to look like complete fools.

Show business and sport produce generation after generation of young people, rendered vulnerable by their ambition. And generation after generation of older predators playing different kinds of power games.