Royal flush – Frank McNally on Judy Garland, the Theatre Royal, and Mulligan’s pub

This weekend marks the centenary of the birth of Judy Garland, who was born in Grand Rapids, Minnesota on June 10th, 1922. The name by which we know her was a fiction, of course. And it’s interesting to wonder whether the great fame she enjoyed or endured might have happened had she retained her ungainly original surname, Gumm, under which she and her siblings first performed as a vaudeville act. The Gumms stuck together for several years, suffering some unplanned audience laughter and, according to legend, a billing on one occasion as the “Glum Sisters”.

There are differing versions of how they ended up as Garlands. But as for Judy, one man who claimed responsibility for the rebrand also admitted, in an echo of Shakespeare, that she was so naturally talented, the name was irrelevant.

The Irish bit of her heritage, towards which she leaned heavily, were Fitzpatricks from Dublin. And she certainly seems to have felt at home in that city, especially when selling out the vast Theatre Royal for two weeks in 1951 while adding an impromptu serenade from her dressingroom window for fans who couldn’t get tickets.

Having performed the traditional song A Pretty Girl Milking her Cow for the film Little Nelly Kelly, she even took the trouble of learning the original Irish version An Cailín Deas Crúite na mBó for the Royal run. Meanwhile, in an arguably even more impressive demonstration of her commitment to being one of us, she is said to have been a regular visitor to the nearby Mulligan’s pub.

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By poignant coincidence, this month also marks the 60th anniversary of the Theatre Royal’s closure, which was blamed by its owners – the Rank organisation – on the coming of television. The coming of money may have been a bigger factor. In the rising economic tide of 1962, they could make a lot of more of it by flogging off the site.

Dubliners seem to have taken the closure stoically. Too stoically for one commentator, this newspaper’s Myles na gCopaleen who, although himself in need of major refurbishment by then, attempted to stir a popular uprising on the issue.

A week before the end, on June 22nd, 1962, he warned Rank that the apparent calm in the face of their arrogant decision was misleading: “The present attitude of the Royal management is one of unqualified impudence. Something must be done about it. Something will.”

In all apparent seriousness, he went on to urge the government to “stop [Rank’s] nonsense about closing up and selling out to housebreakers at the end of the month, and then enter into negotiations for the purchase of the theatre as a national property”.

More typically, he concluded with an appeal to his supposed friend, the taoiseach: “Come, Lemass! Be a big fellow! Don’t fail to do this just because I was the first to suggest it. I will leave a bottle of stout for you under the counter in Milltown Golf Club.”

But not even bribing the taoiseach with drink could forestall closure. The theatre’s fixtures and fittings were auctioned off on July 12th, including 3,000 cinema seats, central heating system, and – yes – the final curtain itself.

A small consolation for some Dubliners was that, as part of the bold new 12-storey office block that was to replace the theatre, casting Poolbeg Street into darkness, the developers undertook to provide “spotlighting” on Mulligan’s.

The thing that replaced the Theatre Royal was finally demolished this spring, to the joy of most Dubliners. I’ve met a few people over the years who professed to like Hawkins House but they must have been the original architects, or their descendants, because only a mother could have loved it.

I would have preferred if the demolition had been carried out by the old-fashioned method of dynamite, or something similar. They could have sold thousands of tickets for a lottery in which the winner would have had the honour of pressing the button.

Instead, the building was first wrapped like a giant modern-art installation and then dismantled gradually with a minimum of dust or drama. Even the cathartic effect of watching it disappear slowly from the grandstand that is The Irish Times newsroom – located on the second floor of a building opposite – was denied most of us by remote working.

Its brutalist neighbours have all gone too now. Meanwhile, and encouragingly, Mulligan’s is still there, minus the spotlighting of the 1962 master plan but now itself shining like a small lighthouse in a storm, having seen the entire city block in front of it rise and fall.