The photo here is the earliest one of dad that I know of. It is a proper fancy posed store/studio photo and he is well-fed and well-dressed. It jives with what I know...that Dad was a kind of upper middle class baby, born at the end of the good fortune from the previous generation that was in the process of being gobbled up by "la dolce vita" - Saratoga Springs Style.
Dad's grandfather had dough and the generation of his father - the exquisite George Donohue - used that up in a reasonably short period of time. The industrious part of the family built amazing things in Saratoga - The Hall of the Springs, the Bottle House, and the next generation enjoyed the glorious life in Saratoga, gambling, drinking and so forth...not shown here is a photo I remember but do not possess of my grandfather waiting tables in a stunning white tux.
By the time I knew George Donohue, in the 1970s, he was an anachronistic man with such elegance that everyone was drawn to him. He had handwriting like a prince, and was regal in his bearing, although he lived on Social Security. I always thought that he had bailed out on his family, but later on my Dad revealed that he was not the culprit, but the story was more complex. My grandmother was Helen Donohue, a redhead until her death - a recluse for the last 20 years of her life, mass-goer. Still an enigma. I recall a succession of cats all tabbies - all named Mr./Mrs. Morris after the cat in the TV commercial. I recall that the nuns brought her groceries, and she did not seem to know how to cook, and her red hair dye over her snow white hair made her look comical, like Bozo the clown. I recall that she once went partying with her cousin in a magnificent black car with bat wings up near Syracuse and my Dad and Uncle had to go find them.
Back to the chubby baby Phil - he looks like a typical baby boy of the 1930s. This photo gives no indication of the stories I heard from his childhood. The earliest story was the one about him buying ice creams for a penny each and selling for a nickel each at the race track to the rich New Yorkers - his first job. There were stories about shining shoes and an actual shoe shining kit that may be in storage someplace. Stories about caddying for Jock Whitney and other swells. A story about the filming of the Hollywood film "Saratoga Trunk" and his mother may or may not have been an extra. The Canfield Casino in Congress Park and all of the life around that. Monty Wooley at Saratoga and a painter he knew, so much color.
There was Walter Gries, his grandfather, in a hotel suite with awards and so forth on the walls, who was so deeply impressive to dad. He threw cash to Dad and Mike. He was a diamond cutter. A developer of the gyroscope. The system of having a precise timing bar at the bottom of a photo-finish in a horse-race was a patent of his. He was taken into custody by the USA government during WWII because of the gyroscope knowledge and his Bavarian/Austrian birth. He was released after. All this was part of dad's repertory.
Finally the dark part of the story - his mother turned Dad and Mike over to the Christian Brothers, keeping her daughter at home. The stories about the Christian Brothers were unspecific - cardboard shoes, lice, bad haircuts, hunger, anger, a feeling of despair when he lied about his age to join the Marines and leave his brother behind in order to assure that he would be educated properly. The whole Christian Brothers part made no sense to me until later - when I saw the film "The Magdalen Sisters" in the New York Film Festival and the Director later compared the process of Priests convincing parents to turn their troublesome adolescents over to the church - girls to the Magdalen Sisters in Ireland / boys to the Christian Brothers in the USA. Something clicked at last.
Dad's parents, although they had this baby picture made, were not "parental." Not in any sense I know. His dad was beautiful and fun and fascinating, but not a father, really, and his mom was not maternal in any way whatsoever. However, he took them both on in the end of their lives - made their lives ones of grandparenthood, inexplicably. He re-formatted them to suit his needs, but the ambivalence with which he did this showed through.
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