2 Childhood Heroes, 2 Starkly Different Ends
A maternal cousin who blazed brightly and a paternal uncle who committed suicide
My cousin Jimmy, my great aunt Celia’s son—James Plunkett Kelly, who wrote under the pen name James Plunkett—was an acclaimed Irish novelist, dramatist, and short-story writer. His masterpiece, *Strumpet City*, depicts the 1913 Dublin Lockout and labor struggles with what critics called naturalistic grit.
He grew up working-class in Dublin, left school at 17, studied violin at the Dublin College of Music, worked as a union official, and eventually became head of drama at RTE. He wrote about Dublin’s laborers, its petty bourgeoisie, its lower intelligentsia—the people who showed up and did the work. The people like AJ. I only met him once in 1968 at a family tea in Dublin. I barely got to talk to him because he was so popular We shared so many interests—writing, music, and of course, Mother Eire. He died in 2003 at 83.
I think about him when I write. Same grit. Same refusal to look away. Different ocean.
My uncle Richard was my other distant hero. André’s son, my father’s kid brother. When I was a teenager, I idolized him. Just eight years older than me, he felt like a big brother. He’d come up to Ledge Acres in a red Alfa Romeo convertible, leather jacket, white scarf—pure James Dean. He lived in Greenwich Village, and in 1972 I lived a few blocks away. When my brothers and I did a drive-away car to California in 1974, Charlie and I visited Richard and his wife, and they took us to the Tassajara Hot Springs. He was magic to me then. I didn’t see him that often or for very long and then decades intervened.
Richard de Saint Phalle was an American lawyer who specialized in business, commercial litigation, and insurance coverage litigation. He was admitted to the bar in New York in 1969 and in California in 1975. He worked at Buchalter, Nemer, Fields & Younger, A Professional Corporation in San Francisco, where he focused on commercial and insurance litigation. He also served as an Assistant United States Attorney for the Northern District of California, rising to Chief of the Civil Division. He was a member of the Bar Association of San Francisco and held leadership roles, including Chairman of the Committee on Early Settlement Procedures from 1991 onward. Richard de Saint Phalle was born on February 17, 1944, in New York, New York, and earned a Bachelor of Arts from Saint Mary's College in 1966 and a Juris Doctor from Catholic University of America in 1969.
But something happened to him over the years. He hardened. Changed. Became insufferably negative, snarky, cruel. At the law firm where he worked, I learned his nickname was Double Dick—because he was one. Once, when he was working as a political operative for the Carter campaign, he tried to persuade my brother Jacques to fake getting hit by a car to create a traffic diversion. Jacques refused.
After his suicide, I tracked down a woman he’d been seeing, another political operative. She told me about his alcoholism—how they’d get together for a weekend and he’d mix up an entire sink full of margaritas. A sink. Full.
I couldn’t stand to be around him by the end, and yet I had worshipped him when I was young. That’s the thing about the de Saint Phalle inheritance. It glittered. It seduced. The red Alfa Romeo, the white scarf, the Greenwich Village apartment. But underneath was the deep freeze, passed down from André, and it destroyed him.
Richard didn’t survive the ice palace, committing suicide via champagne and Tylenol after divorce and estrangement left him alone. I carry him too—the memory of who he was before it got him, and the warning of what happens when you can’t break free.
I’m still here. Still writing. Still remembering.
Click here for a wonderful memoir of Jimmy by one of his neighbors.
