In 1959, I shook my first Republican hands, and I didn’t even have to count my fingers afterwards. In those days I was more concerned with my survival than the world’s. It went like this:
But before that, in late 1958 while trying to get acting jobs, I was going to political parties in Greenwich Village and stuffing envelopes on weekends for the daughter of a Bronx Democrat, whose name, I regret to say, I don’t remember. Hers was Rachel. Why is it that I never forget a girl’s name?
That autumn Rachel dumped me for someone Jewish, and I proceeded to fall in love with Katherine Joly, a Catholic actress from Maine who, at the time, was hanging around with another unknown actor named Robert Redford. That’s another story.
When you’re still in the shallow grasses of love, politics rarely come up unless one of you is running for office. And as we started working together in the theater and love swallowed me whole, my political fervor faded like a summer tan.
She mentioned, in passing, that her family were Republicans. Daddy Cyril M. Joly, she said, had a resume that sounded to me like a presidential candidate: Colby graduate, Harvard Law grad, a district court judge, chairman of the Maine Industrial Accident Commission, district governor of Rotary International. Her oldest brother, Cy, was a lawyer and the mayor of her small town, Waterville. “Would you like to come home with me and meet them?” Sure.
“Of course,” she added,” I don’t think we should mention that we’re serious.” That was the first moment I was even aware that she was serious.
I packed what I thought would pass as a Republican wardrobe: a blue wool blazer with brass buttons, dress shirts and tasseled loafers. I went and bought two sober ties and got a good haircut. I was hooked and didn’t want to take the chance of being rejected because of politics.
Well, short story is that I was surprised to be welcomed so warmly. I thought surely that an unemployed actor would be the last profession a judge would want in the family. Then it occurred to me that the idea of my actually “being part” of the family had never occurred to them. They thought she was only trying me out like a new chair.
So there I was farther north than I knew America went, shaking hands, dining nightly and sleeping in the most Republican household in town.
As I said, I had never really met a Republican before. In my Irish Catholic, solidly Democratic neighborhood, there weren’t any, and if there were, they had to be off the streets before dark.
So in the next five or six days, I kept my mouth shut and my ears open. I was taken to parties and social affairs, where I was introduced to the Joly family friends, a solid group of red-tied Republicans with names that all of you old solid Republicans remember: Judge Mort Brody; John Thomas, the founder of the now prestigious Thomas College; auto magnate Charlie Gaunce; attorney and now retired Justice Don Marden; and Willard Arnold, hardware icon.
They were gentlemen, all nattily dressed with nattily dressed wives, children and grandchildren. They were soft-spoken men who looked me in the eye and didn’t seem to be sizing me up. They were genuinely interested in what a New York actor did for a living, and that I appeared to be well-educated and polite. I think it was the Republican wardrobe I had chosen that fooled them.
They were all hard-working and successful and lived in nice, unassuming homes with lawns and flower gardens they themselves tended to. They and their town seemed like a big Norman Rockwell political painting for the cover of Saturday Evening Post.
I left Maine impressed with Republicans, or at least those I had met.
I went to bed last night remembering these men, because I had spent two hours on MSNBC listening to three modern bloviating charlatans who could well be the grandchildren of Moe, Larry and Curly.
The Republicans I had met that week in Maine in the ’50s would today be shocked, stunned, embarrassed and offended.
Today as I stand knee-deep in this political manure field, I honor the long dead whom I didst meet that summer long ago, and at least for myself and in the memory of the Republican family who embraced me, I offer a sincere heartfelt apology.
J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer. His book, “Will Write for Food,” is a collection of some of his best Morning Sentinel columns.
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