LONG before Lulu learned to Shout, another Dennistoun lass set Broadway ablaze. Best known as the lead in the musical, Finian’s Rainbow, Ella Logan was a proud Scot. It showed in her love of a fight. Logan conquered the bloody coliseum of American showbiz, but remains unknown in her native heath.
She didn’t fall down the Generation Gap. But fell afoul of our national characteristic: The Scottish cringe. This week I renewed my acquaintance with Logan for a planned book on her niece, jazz singer, Annie Ross.
My Donegal grandfather said: “Nothing gets my Irish up like the Scottish cringe.” He was right.
Our dismissal of achievement isn’t modesty. It’s self-disbelief on a grand scale. We do everything on a grand scale, including miniaturising our accomplishments.
“A kent his faitherism” reared its head after the recent death of theatre director Bill Bryden. One home-grown commentator expressed “astonishment,” that Bill was recommended to American playwright David Mamet by “none other than Harold Pinter.”
It was the reverse. Mamet was looking to place his play, and Bill Bryden happened to run the National Theatre in London. Maybe we can’t our heads round a Greenock lad being a player in the Big Smoke?
Screenwriter Peter McDougall introduced me to Bill at a revival of the latter’s play, The Ship. A story which many interpreted as a lament for a lost Scotland. It wasn’t. It reminded us we are builders, and we can build again. A metaphor for national renewal.
In our cups, we cooked up a scheme to recreate Frank Sinatra’s night spot, The Cal Neva. In Greenock.
A pal of Peter’s, who resembled Moe Greene from Godfather II, claimed connections with the famous Frank Lafferty construction firm. His name was Zeke. He’d been named after Zeke Zarchy, lead trumpet in the Glenn Miller Army Air Forces Orchestra.
Aviator glasses perched at the end of his nose, Zeke, appraised me with suspicion. “What does the kid bring to the table?”
McDougall took this as a personal slight. “McGeachan is indispensable. He’s a Sinatra zealot of such fanaticism, the dimensions of the Cal Neva are etched in his brain.”
Denied full membership of the “Scotia Nostra,” I was retained as a technical consultant.
Bill was married to the Carry On actress Angela Douglas. A project whereby she’d form the centrepiece of a hologram reunion with her co-stars was mooted. Sid James’s guttural laugh and Kenneth Williams’s flaring nostrils beamed on the banks of the Clyde seemed surreal. Like student nights where pals passed round those funny cigarettes.
Zeke emerged as the plan’s éminence grise, promising Welsh songstress Kerry Katona would fly in for our grand opening. Then he called a midnight meeting.
He arrived flanked by an entourage, who glared at me while guarding doors. Zeke said Sinatra Enterprises were threatening to, “open a can of lawyers,” on us. The dream died.
Most schemes shouldn’t survive the hangovers.
But a permanent dream is we recognise that, as Scots, we not only punch above our weight. We pack one helluva punch.
Brian McGeachan is an author and playwright. His books include They Rose Again and The Cardinal. His plays include Twisted and The Johnny Thomson Story.
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