ON A page by itself, just before Chapter 1 of Edwin O'Connor's The Last Hurrah, is this disclaimer: "All characters and situations in this novel are fictional, and any resemblance to any persons living or dead is purely coincidental."
But when The Boston Globe mischievously sent a review copy of the book to James Michael Curley — this was in 1956, two years after Curley had lost his final attempt at a comeback in Boston politics — the former alderman, state representative, mayor, congressman, Massachusetts governor, and prison inmate sent back a note that hinted he would be speaking to his lawyers about a libel suit. Like countless readers since, Curley saw a good deal of himself in Frank Skeffington, the novel's central figure — a magnetic, shrewd, ruthless, sentimental politician, the Irish-Catholic mayor of an unnamed "red-brick city" just like Boston — and he professed not to like what he saw.
The threats of lawsuits continued for a while, until Curley's sons pacified him by pointing out that readers everywhere adored the character of Skeffington. Before long he had stopped denouncing the novel and swung to the other extreme, embracing it as his own life story.
One day, some weeks after The Last Hurrah came out, O'Connor spotted Curley climbing into a cab and — not without trepidation — went over to introduce himself. To his relief, the old man told him he'd enjoyed the book — especially "the part where I die."
This was not what O'Connor had been expecting, and he tactfully tried to set Curley straight. "Isn't it strange, governor, how so many people confuse fact with fiction?" he began. "Skeffington with yourself, for instance? I know and you know, the difference between the two, that the one isn't like the other"
But Curley wasn't paying attention.
"Yes, there I am in my bedroom, dying," he was saying. "Breathing my last ..."
The Last Hurrah was a tremendous hit; it went through 15 hardcover printings in its first eight months and became the second-biggest selling novel of 1956. (Peyton Place took the top slot.) It was a critical success as well. "Here, after a century of trying, is the first successful Irish-American novel," proclaimed John Kelleher on the cover of The New York Times Book Review. One day later, Orville Prescott gave it a second rave: "It is the best novel about American politics and the best novel about Irish-Americans I have ever read."
The Last Hurrah is about Skeffington's last campaign for mayor, but it is about more than that: It is about the demise of the era of big-city bosses, the way television changed electoral politics, how the Irish in America climbed out of their immigrant poverty on a ladder of politics, and their clash — especially in a city like Boston — with the Yankees and Brahmins who had arrived long before them.
O'Connor filled his tale with irresistible characters, but even more than that, with irresistible blarney. There is, for instance, Skeffington on City Hall reporters:
"It's a point of pride with most of our political journalists that they don't know a great deal about politics; if they did, it would interfere with what I believe they call their 'objective analyses.' The finest example of an objective analyst we've ever had was a reporter named Mulrooney who used to write a City Hall column. He was so objective that he didn't know where City Hall was. . . . He was widely read and considered one of our leading authorities on municipal administration."
Or Charlie Hennessy, an eccentric gadfly, on the mayor:
"Only last week I wrote letters to the sociologists down at Yale, Harvard, and Princeton, telling them to get their best men over here to watch Frank Skeffington in action before it's too late! Oh yes! Important! I told them to get them over here and watch him set the buffoons on fire, all laughing and jumping and cheering and stamping their feet, while he stands up there nodding his head and in the big air-conditioned voice telling them fifteen lies and a bedtime story to send them home happy! Marvelous! The talent is inborn, dear folks! A terrible mayor but a great entertainer!"
Two years after The Last Hurrah was published, Columbia Pictures made it into a movie starring Spencer Tracy. But only now, 41 years later, is it being brought to the stage. It will have its premier this week at Boston's Huntington Theater Company, which is located just a few blocks from the street where Curley was born in 1874. (Disclosure: I volunteer my support as one of the theater's overseers.)
Curley has been dead for 41 years; politicians of his ilk aren't being manufactured anymore. And a lucky thing for the Huntington, too. When the film version of The Last Hurrah was released, Curley claimed it was a degrading invasion of his privacy and went to court to keep it from opening. The studio indignantly replied that it had paid Curley $25,000 to sign a release, and produced the document with his signature. All brass, Curley declared the signature a forgery — but allowed himself to be appeased with an additional $15,000.
That was in 1958. One shudders to think what he would have demanded in 1999 as his price for letting the Huntington bring the fictional Frank Skeffington to life once more.
Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.
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