Terry Prone: Collective silence spared sexual aggressors like Brendan Behan

Long before MeToo made it possible to speak about sexual assault, Brendan Behan is alleged to have attempted to rape publicist Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Those who loved Brendan Behan bought the myth of him as the unwilling, unwitting victim of hangers-on who insisted on pouring alcohol into him

One of Ireland’s most loved writers tried to rape my friend. The writer was Brendan Behan. My friend is Letty Cottin Pogrebin.

Back in the 1960s, when Behan was already a major name in literature, everyone knew he had what was then called “a drinking problem”. It would be hard to miss it, given his appearances on television when he arrived on set incapable of coherence while also incapable of silence. Those who loved Behan bought the myth of him as the unwilling, unwitting victim of hangers-on who insisted on pouring alcohol into him.

Were it not for these “friends”, went the theory, Brendan would have been teetotal. But, one way or the other, he was a decent man and a genius and you had to love him.

Meanwhile, in Manhattan, a little blonde named Letty Cottin, with a kid’s voice, was a successful career woman working in publishing as a publicist. She had invented the book auction and come up with smart, innovative ways to package new books so as to attract the attention of journalists. 

The small publishing house for which she worked (Bernard Geis and Associates) had a contract with Behan, which hadn’t done them much good because, three years after his deadline, he had not submitted one single page of copy to them.

In 1962, Behan left his house in Dublin to buy a packet of cigarettes and decided on the spur of the moment to catch a flight to New York, which at the time was possible.

Arriving in Idlewild Airport (now JFK), he telephoned the man who owned the publishing house, saying he’d be arriving at their premises within the hour ready to buckle down on the first book he owed them. All they had to do was provide a typewriter, bottle of Jameson Gold Reserve Irish Whiskey, and an empty office.

Bernard Geis sent Letty out for the whiskey. When she came back, she set up a typewriter and an ashtray. Perfect. They waited. Then waited some more. A day moved into a week and all they heard of Brendan was of him starting a brawl in PJ Clarke’s pub.

Letty was told by her boss to go find the writer. No matter how you slice it, then or now, this was no part of her job spec, but even a sparky girl who went on to become a bestselling author and one of America’s leading feminists was wary of refusing. Instead, she handed out notes to vagrants and sex workers hanging around the Chelsea Hotel, where Behan had registered, and leaving the same note with bartenders and drinking cronies at pubs he had not yet been barred from.

“If you run into Brendan, tell him to meet me tonight,” read the notes, which provided the address of an all-night party in Greenwich Village because she was counting on the promise of free booze to lure him downtown.

Letty recalls: “Sure enough, around two in the morning, he bellied up to the punch table [along with several of the emissaries I’d deputised to corral him]. Brendan was a sad sight — whiskey-soaked, his brogues relieved of their shoelaces, his shirt smudged with what appeared to be that morning’s egg yolk, his trousers cinched around his rotund gut with a length of clothesline — but he was there. Drunk. Wasted. Reeking. But there.”

Letty enlisted the help of other drinkers to get him to his hotel, where she reminded him of his contractual obligation and secured his promise to appear the following morning ready to start work.

Exhausted, she headed for the revolving door when he yelled at her.

“Brendan had picked up one of those bottom-heavy, free-standing bronze ashtrays and, wielding it like a baseball bat, fixed his bloodshot eyes on the lobby’s huge plate-glass window. ‘Go now,’ he snarled, ‘and I’ll send this fucker out with ya. But it’s leaving through that winda!’ 

"The desk clerk gasped. The bellman froze. ‘Barney Geis sent you to take care of me, so take care of me. You accompany me to my room or I’ll smash that winda to smithereens.’”

To prevent the lobby being torn apart, with consequent court appearances and corporate reputation damage, Letty caved. When they reached his room, he pushed her in, slammed the door, threw her on the bed and was suddenly on top of her, “thrusting, groping, stinking, sickening me with his sharp soured breath. I resisted with all the force I could muster. I cried, kicked, squirmed, beat his chest with my fists, stunned by the brute strength.”

Knowing that she was losing the fight, she eventually wept: “Brendan! You can’t do this to me! I’m a nice Jewish girl!”

He backed off, demanded to know why she hadn’t said that in the first place and told her to stop worrying, because he loved the Jews.

Letty watched in utter disbelief “as he perched his broad butt on the edge of the bed and gently patted the mattress to indicate he wanted me to sit beside him… as he jauntily delivered himself of a lecture on how much the Irish and the Jews had in common.

“For openers, our shared hatred of the English, who’d persecuted Jews in Palestine during the British Mandate, and have been hounding the Irish Catholics since the Reformation. Both peoples suffered calamities, he said; the Irish, the Troubles, the Jews, the Holocaust, which, he allowed, ‘was quite a bit worse’.”

Trembling and sitting as far away from him as possible, she tried to figure out an escape, conscious that if her assailant could interrupt himself en route to an act of rape in order to show off his knowledge of Jews and Judaism, he could just as unpredictably pick up the assault where he left off.

Eventually, she got out. After several more drunken episodes, Behan did sit down and produce the guts of what became Brendan Behan’s New York. That book, a hit at the time, covers high living in Manhattan. But not attempted rape.

“Had I complained about the assault,” Letty recently wrote, “I would have accomplished nothing beyond embarrassing my company and humiliating our star author, and, pugnacious as he was, Brendan would have retaliated with some scurrilous accusation that undoubtedly would have sullied my reputation more than his.

The upshot: Bernard Geis Associates would have lost the next three books by the universally adored Brendan Behan, and I would have lost my job.”

Almost 60 years before #MeToo made it possible to talk of sexual assault, Letty said nothing. Made no complaint to the cops. She now bitterly regrets that.

“My silence, and the silence of my girlfriends and every working woman I knew, spared sexually aggressive men like Brendan Behan, if not from criminal charges, from the public humiliation they deserved, and gave them a free pass to assault the next woman with impunity.”