Unlikely cultural icons

Above are photographs of Gerry Duggan and Gerry O’Driscoll respectively, one looks like a doorman and the other was one. So far, so what you may say, but these two unassuming Irishmen played significant cameos in two of the most iconic works of the 20th century, better make that three technically; one by design, the other by accident. One offered a screen-test that would have made a big film franchise a lot more credible, the other offered the bones to another big film franchise’s screenplay, making it infinitely more credible. Let’s dig deeper on this unlikely supposition.

Gerry Duggan never achieved stardom, but was a respected stage and TV actor having come late to the game just before turning 50. His was very much the tale of the wandering Irishman. Born in Dublin in 1910, he moved to New York at 16 at the height of Prohibition before settling in Australia. How a man in the Antipodes made acting inroads at 49 for parts in Europe shows impressive dedication. A good working title to his autobiography would be ‘From Pinchgut to Poopsnaggle’ being the bookend roles he played in his long career. Ironically, he was beaten as the best British newcomer for the former role at the BAFTA’s by a 13 year old Hayley Mills. 

He claimed his on stage highlight was with the role of McLeavy in Joe Orton’s revival of Loot in 1966, but in 1964 he was starring in Beckett’s play The Old Tune in its British debut. Considering how fussy and hands-on the maestro was, that was quite an achievement in itself. Perhaps the fact that they were roughly the same age and exiles from Dublin helped the cause. However, 1964’s real highlight for Gerry was getting to be in the biggest film of the year. That role, although relatively small, was one that begs a big ‘what if’ to the writer. 

I think the producers missed a trick by not using Gerry D later on in the franchise; he had the perfect name, Hawker, he had a good rapport with Bond and he was smart. Best of all, he was low-key – the swagger of his boss was not his bag, if you’ll pardon the pun. There’s something inherently ridiculous in having a drop-dead gorgeous hard-drinking gambling Lothario as the ultimate secret agent. Sure, Bond had the glamour, the girls and the gadgets, but all he was missing was a klaxon to announce his arrival anywhere. In reality, we’d no sooner have seen the opening titles and Bond emerging from the gunbarrel sequence than we’d hear a muffled thud from a sniper’s rifle and the blood that filled the screen would be that of Bond himself, roll credits, Bond will not be back in Thunderball or anything else, thank you very much. 

Weak cameos and woeful explanations

Later Bond films had a cantankerous M played by Judi Dench having a lot more say in the films, but that was just to satisfy a stage dame’s status rather than really helping the plot out. The blithe justification in Casino Royale for the massive cock-up on how a so-called intelligence agency just happened to employ poor Vesper Lund, the most compromised person working in Whitehall to be ‘the money’ for Bond’s poker game beggars belief: ‘We should’ve picked up on it but sometimes we’re so focused on our enemies… we forget to watch our friends’. Really? I mean come on, really?! ‘Well you can say goodbye to that damehood right there lady and pack your Louis Vuitton bags’ is what I’d say if I’d heard that dog-ate-my-homework excuse. Needless to say, this would never have happened on Hawker’s watch!

Completing the Daniel Craig arc of puny excuses for advancing the plot, in No Time to Die, Bond blames the missus for being attacked at the start of the film. That’s a tissue thin piss-poor excuse if ever I heard one! Might not the baddies simply have followed you by any chance, you thundering great peacock with a klaxon? There’s a pair of them in it – not believing that having his baby is something he should know about takes some beating considering she’s a psychologist! Another example of a wasted recurring character – there was a lot more chemistry between Paloma and Bond in their one scene than with love interest misery guts Madeleine. 

Licence to Kill did have Q having a much bigger role and it was a better film because of it, despite yet another wooden performance by Dalton. So when I looked at Goldfinger once again recently, I thought there was a minor role that tapped along nicely. Hawker, as the baddie’s stalker, would have worked if the producers had any imagination going. It would have allowed for exposition and comic relief along the avuncular lines of Carl Reiner in Ocean’s Eleven.

The movie has dated badly in parts with many a questionable line for other minor parts. One of his Bond’s ‘squeezes’ gets nothing more than a ’Dink, say hello to Felix Lighter, now Dink say goodbye Felix,’ before getting a slap on her arse and instructions that there’s men talk to be done! The dutiful Felix himself completely misses the fact that his colleague was in danger and shrugs it off saying with Bond it is all about dames or drink. At least when Hawker appeared, he was on the ball and helping advance the plot – again, my apologies for yet another woeful pun! Jill Masterson’s role was to show that Goldfinger was a cheat and a bad loser. Hawker confirmed both of these characteristics, but kept his head, unlike poor Jill and the golf club statue. Aware that Goldfinger bore grudges with ‘troublesome employees’, perhaps Bond should have killed birds with one stone – saving a good man and recruiting a helpful wingman in one afternoon. 

Cut to the changing rooms and the two lads sorting out payment. An admonishment to Bond for having to lug his sodden 25 pound bar of poxy gold around merited the line ‘ye know, I thought it was a bit heavy to be a few ham sandwiches‘ would have fitted the overall tongue-in-cheek tone nicely and helped establish the beginning of a beautiful friendship. In handing over the caddy fee with a bonus, Bond could then have handed him his card and told him to give him a shout in a week or so – ‘you’re as good ash gold there, Hawker’. Set up established.

In a parallel universe, I see Hawker working diligently and successfully as the ultimate wingman, the secret agent’s very own secret agent, enjoying the perks of the ridiculously glitzy world as the Mickey Sixpack everyman. Let’s go even further – howsabout making Hawker the real brains of the operation à la Ben Kingsley’s Watson to Michael Caine’s Holmes in Without a Clue. Then again, an Irish Svengali being the brains of how the British Empire saved the world time and again may just be my patriotic fervour getting the better of me!

Gerry O’Driscoll,a.k.a. GOD, is a man that has enthralled me for some time. I even put a letter in to The Irish Post in 2019 to see could I find out a bit more about him with no success, therefore adding to his mystique. He has been lost in time to the streets of Kilburn where his fellow Irishmen had either died, moved home or got priced-out from the slow and insidious gentrification of the whole area. 

In the early 1970s, GOD worked as the doorman at Abbey Road Studios in St. John’s Wood and would have seen all of the big stars come and go in his time there. He was the perfect man for such a job as he was neither star struck or one to sell juicy gossip to the tabloids. Chances are he’d have been more star struck by Big Tom or the now late Brendan Bowyer up the road in the ‘Galty than any hipster skipping up those hallowed steps.

Paul McCartney’s interview answers ended up on the cutting room floor. A rock legend he may have been, but he simply didn’t cut it on what Waters wanted from the exercise. Waters deemed his answers unusable. “He was the only person who found it necessary to perform, which was useless, of course,” Waters told Pink Floyd biographer John Harris. “I thought it was really interesting that he would do that. He was trying to be funny, which wasn’t what we wanted at all.”

Enter one Gerry O’Driscoll, doorman of Abbey Road Studios, who rocked up to the mike and created something that Macca could not do; he spoke truth to power, well rock power at any rate and nailed it first time. Gerry elicited in one take, with no script and no rehearsal his thoughts on a handful of leftfield questions thrown at him by Roger Waters. It’s like something from a fairy-tale, where the gallant prince is cast aside in favour of the infinitely more eloquent local farm hand for the top prize at the royal court. At the height of the Troubles, a straight-talking no-nonsense Irishman with a Limerick accent as thick as the day he got the boat over remained calm and focused as he spoke his piece where a Beatle had abjectly failed.

Of the questions asked of GOD, the following were used in the final cut of the album: –

#1 0.43 Speak to Me ‘Do you think you might be mad?’

 Gerry: ‘I’ve always been mad, I know I’ve been mad, like most of us are. Very hard to explain why you are mad, even if you are not mad’.

#2 0.39 Great gig in the sky ‘Does death frighten you?’

Gerry: ‘I am not afraid to die. Any time will do, I don’t mind. Why should I be frightened of dying? There’s no reason for it — you’ve got to do it sometime’.

#3 6.00 Money ‘When were you last violent and were you in the right?’ 

Gerry: ‘I certainly was in the right!’ 

#4 1.37 Eclipse ‘What do you think of the dark side of the moon?’” 

Gerry: ‘There is no dark side in the moon, really. Matter of fact, it’s all dark’***

Clare Torry originally got the princely sum of £30 for her singing on the Great Gig in the Sky, but as anyone who hears it will testify, she completely transformed that song. She successfully sued the band in 2005 and now gets joint co-writing credits for the song and no doubt a nice slice of the pie to boot. The lawyer in me says that if someone who gave a wordless contribution to the song can get 50% of the action, then GOD who effectively gave the only lyrics to the song was entitled to a share too. Thankfully it is a moot point now, but I suspect GOD got even less, if anything, for his contribution which just adds to the man’s cachet. 

What GOD brought to the album was the potency of a truth teller, who when combined with the rest of the magic, became an immortal cosmic seer. Between not being afraid of dying, being in the right in a conflict and portentous talk of the dark side, GOD was Obi-Wan Kenobi some four years before Alec Guinness ever raised a light sabre. Yes, I fully contend that not only did GOD help elevate DSOTM to the rock pantheon, he was also the answer to George Lucas’s prayers in finding a hero ‘speaking words of wisdom‘ to quote a DSOTM wanna-be.

I don’t think it is too much of a stretch to think that George Lucas, along with the rest of the world, heard GOD’s words again and again from its release on the 1st March 1973 as he was working on the bones of what became Star Wars. Lucas began writing the first draft of it in January 1973, ‘eight hours a day, five days a week’ by scribbling small notes, conjuring up odd names and assigning them possible characterizations. These initial names and ideas were used to compile a two-page synopsis entitled Journal of the Whills, which told the tale of the training of apprentice CJ Thorpe as a “Jedi-Bendu” space commando by the legendary Mace Windy. 

Concerned that his story was too difficult to understand, Lucas began writing a 13-page treatment called The Star Wars on April 17, 1973, which had thematic parallels with Kurosawa’s 1958 film The Hidden Fortress. While Lucas’s film is heavily reliant on that 1958 film for structure, Lucas seemed to get into his writing stride from Spring 1973. I’d contend that by throwing on the must-have record of the time, Dark Side of the Moon, Lucas would have been repeatedly exposed to a disembodied foreign voice with an ethereal echoey quality whispering pure Jedi creed. Goodbye Mace Windy, hello Obi-Wan Kenobi via GOD. 

So there you have it – two Gerrys who happened to be in the right place at the right time, both having interesting footnotes in pop culture. Alas, Gerry D never got to have the Bond sweeper role; in fact he didn’t make another film in the 60s, but at least he ended the decade on a high. As for the other Gerry, a.k.a GOD, no doubt after he finished up that recording, he went for a cigarette break and got back to work. If anyone ever mentioned the album when it came out, I suspect he just shrugged his shoulders and couldn’t see what the fuss was about having never actually heard the album.

*In truth another man with that most iconic of Irish names can lay claim to another forgotten part in Goldfinger, that of the actor Michael Collins who dubbed every line of Gert Lobe’s character so he could be understood to audiences. 

**The film Kennedy watched the night before going to Dallas.

***Gerry had added ‘The only thing that makes it look light is the sun’ which was edited out.

There’s a tenuous Beatles link with the first Gerry too. In reading up on Gerry Duggan, he alluded somewhat diplomatically to the fact that Joe Orton was killed by his jealous lover as that lover had found out about Orton starting a relationship (and I paraphrase) with the manager of a well-known band who would be dead from suicide two weeks later.

Below are three playlists in salute to the sounds that are conjured up by the article.  My first selection is of atmospheric espionage tunes – no direct Bond anthems (too obvious) – but plenty of nods and side scores, right up to No Time To Die.  Great for a dinner party I’m told and with loads of curveballs from Orson Welles’s famous cuckoo speech to Radiohead’s two failed Bond anthems. 

The second playlist is the sort of music I’d hope to hear in a Star Wars bar. Inspired by the tunes we did hear in them – or Jabba’s palace – from the first three proper Star Wars films, I ran with tunes that sound about right in keeping the space funk a going.

Finally, and maybe with The Wizard of Oz on the go as a tribute to Dark Side of the Rainbow, it is the opus that never grows old, Dark Side of the Moon guest starring Gerry O’Driscoll – shine on, you crazy diamond!