Peter Murphy is a big guy. Relaxed, affable, with
no chips. He is, he says, “a fat single white guy, with a cat . . . I’m
basically any comedian’s wet dream.”
Currently he works near Boston “in consumer electronics. I sell televisions”.
He spent three years at the University of Connecticut (UConn). “ I did more drinking than I did studying,” he says.
He
was a “typical jackass American of that age. I didn’t know what I
wanted to be so I changed majors every three months and I majored in
having fun. I loved UConn . . . In what would have been my junior year I
moved to Boston.”
Then he went to Emerson College. “It’s an arts school. I never went to a lot of the classes. I hated structured academia.”
His
father got him his first job.
“To get myself through school, to make a
living, Eamon, through the Irish Immigration Centre, got me a job at a
hotel and I got a job in a bar called the Last Hurrah . . . It got me
into the restaurant industry.”
He worked in
restaurants until 2003 when, through a love of film, he began working at
the Tweeter chain of consumer electronic shops.
It went out of business
in 2008, after which he started his present line of work “selling
high-end electronics, 100 per cent commission”.
Now aged 38, Murphy first became aware of his father as a small boy.
“I
was five or six. My grandmother told me. I don’t remember the instant
when she told me. My mom always had this newspaper article with a
picture of Eamon blowing on some brass instrument, a trumpet . . .”
One
morning in 1983 or 1984 his mother, Annie, woke him, saying, “ ‘Listen,
wake up. Do you want to see your father?’ And I said, ‘What do you
mean? I’ve seen the photo.’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘do you want to see him?’
“Then
she brought me downstairs . . . I remember coming down the stairwell
and [on the television screen] I could see [President Ronald] Reagan on
the one side and I could tell there was another person on the other . . .
and I recognised him right away. It was, what do you call it? An
epiphany. It was some Sunday-morning political show.”
He
was 15 years old before he met his father for the first time. It was
“in the law offices of the attorney Peter McKay, who represented the
paternity suit my mom made . . . in New York. That was the first time I
met Eamon.”
It did not go well.
“He didn’t want to
talk to me. In hindsight I was the representation of the end of
everything he worked for. Of course I took it incredibly personally. I
ran down. Got the elevator. Came downstairs. Tried to keep a stoic face.
Saw my mom and burst into tears . . . You’re 15, have questions. He
didn’t want to answer them. I felt slighted.”
The
purpose of the meeting was “to get something back for the years that my
mom had to, basically, pay for me. For me the most important thing was
meeting him. When you’re 15, you don’t understand. So, it was what it
was.”
They met again shortly after The Irish Times broke the story, in May 1992, that revealed Murphy’s existence.
“I
met him in 1992 a few months after, maybe June. I can’t remember
correctly. I met him quickly. He wanted to strike while the iron was
hot. He met me right away. [At the first meeting] I was an angry little
prick, but he was patient and calm, understanding. He said he wanted to
do it again and I said, ‘Maybe’. I agreed when I was up at UConn.”
Their
second meeting was at the university. “It was the fall of 1992 or
spring 1993. I was still a little bit . . . I was not going to give in
to him. He was entrancing. One of those figures. It was a heck of a lot
more positive an interaction.”
Their next meeting was in New York, “and
that was a great time, summer of 1993. He was so engaging. There was no
agenda, no ‘Let’s get into this’. We just talked. He was very smart, the
way he dealt with it. He really kept it open and airy and ‘Just let’s
have a good time and let’s talk. You have a question for me, ask it. I
may be able to answer it and I may not.’ That’s just the way it worked.
We talked about politics, anything, the day, the weather, I don’t know,
whatever came into my brain.”
They continued to
meet regularly thereafter, “at least two, maybe three times a year.
Somewhere around 2001 or 2002, it reduced down to one time a year.
Because, I mean, at this [stage] he was 75.”
In
the latter years they met in Boston. “Always in Boston. The first few
times in New York. I moved up to Boston in 1995. Once I moved up to
Boston we always met there. He loved it . . . I worked in the restaurant
industry for a long time. I went to all the places either my friends
managed or I worked at . . . They loved to meet him.”
These
get-togethers “were Olympic-like events of eating and drinking”, says
Murphy. But about 10 years ago he noticed for the first time that his
father was losing his sharpness.
“I think it
must’ve been 2002 or 2003. He got very flummoxed. At first I blamed it
on the alcohol . . . It was the following year that we needed to have
lunches, not dinners. I don’t know if that was the beginning of the
deterioration or just . . . he was 76 or 77 years old.”
Having seen his maternal grandmother deteriorate from Alzheimer’s disease, Murphy recognised the symptoms in his father.
Then,
following one of their phone conversations, “I knew right away. About
three years ago. I called him up and he didn’t know who I was.”
Recounting
the conversation Murphy says, in a Kerry accent, “ ‘Who are you?’
‘It’s Peter.’ ‘I don’t know you.’ ‘Are you okay?’ ‘I can’t talk to you .
. . I . . . I . . . I’m sorry and I’m sorry, I can’t talk to you.’
“He could hear my voice. He knew he should know who I was.”
It was the last time they spoke.
“I tried calling the number many times after that,
and it just went, ‘This voicemail is full,’ and I just said, ‘You know
what, they’ve got their hands full.’ ”
Regarding how they got on, Peter anticipates the questions.
“Did
I form a relationship? Did I get to love the man? Sure. But in the end
we were never father and son. We were two people who got to know each
other. Him, very much in the twilight of his life. Me, as a young adult.
We became very good friends. That’s all I ever wanted from him.”
Where the Catholic Church’s treatment of his father is concerned, Murphy is very clear.
“It
was ridiculous. I mean, six years’ penance in a foreign country and
then the five years he spent in England made it even more egregious and
more painful because of how close he was to his goal and all he wanted
to do was go home and say Mass. Was that so terrible?
“
So, no, especially with what has come across our eyes in the last 20,
17 years . . . all the paedophile scandals. To tell you the truth, I
felt this way from the get-go. What did the guy do? He had an affair.”
Being forbidden to say Mass in public was something Bishop Casey found particularly hard.
“The
last two or three times that we met, that was it. That’s all he wanted
to be able to do. He felt if he could do that he could really be at
peace with everything that had happened. That was one thing that gnawed
at him that he wasn’t able to take part in or to do . . . His faith was
paramount to who he was. No matter what he believed, that was a massive
part of him. And the Church? He loved the Church. No matter what it did
to him, he still loved it.”
Annie Murphy’s former partner Arthur Pennell, who contacted The Irish Times in 1992 to reveal who Peter’s father was, died in 2006. He and Annie Murphy
had separated about five years earlier. She is now 65 and lives in
California with a new partner, an artist, “a very bright guy, very
sardonic, very interesting sense of humour. They get along like two peas
in a pod,” says Murphy.
His mother doesn’t dwell
on the past. She has moved on. What happened was “part of her life.
She’s got her art. She draws, writes stories and that.”
He has no sense of anger.
“I’ve
no time for that sh*t, to be blunt. There’s enough stresses in my life.
I’ve to pay bills. I’m getting fat. I’ve got to lose weight. You know
what I mean?
“I’m nearly 40, around the corner. I
don’t want to waste my time being angry about something neither I nor
anyone else has any control over. That’s the kind of stuff that gives
you ulcers and cancer.
“Don’t get me wrong. I’m
far from perfect. I’ve got my own idiosyncrasies and asinine things, but
[I’m not being] angry about things [that happened] over a long period,
about stuff I can’t control.”
* Peter Murphy appears in the first part of Print and Be Damned, a four-part series that starts on TV3 tonight (Thursday)