Dear Frankie, the play about the life and career of agony aunt Frankie Byrne, starts a nationwide tour this week. John Byrne meets Frankie’s daughter, Valerie McLoughlin, who was given up for adoption by the legendary broadcaster.
Depending on your age, a combination of Frankie Byrne’s husky voice, Frank Sinatra’s fantastic phrasing and a certain theme tune (Lulu's Room by André Previn) can bring you back to a time when radio ruled in every home across the country.
From the early 1960s until 1985, Frankie Byrne was recognised as the country’s agony aunt, thanks to a lunchtime show on Radio Eireann (as it was then) that was incredibly popular.
Back then, if you had a problem or doubt in a relationship, Frankie Byrne was the one you sought for help. From lovelorn teenagers and jealous husbands to concerned mammies and vulnerable single women of a certain age, the correspondence flowed and a nation sipped tea while Frankie held court over the airwaves.
Frankie Byrne passed away in 1993 at the age of 71, eight years after her final radio programme, but lives on in Dear Frankie, a play by Niamh Gleeson. Covering her private life as well as her professional one, Dear Frankie proved hugely popular when it first toured in 2010, and its current revival begins with a week-long run at Dublin’s Gaiety Theatre.
Although Frankie was an agony aunt to an entire nation, she wasn’t immune to life’s complications and secretly had an affair that left her single and pregnant in 1950s’ Ireland, an almost impossible situation at that time.
Giving her daughter up for adoption was obviously a key moment in Frankie’s life, but they were reunited a decade before her death, which was a source of great comfort for Valerie McLoughlin, who had spent a large chunk of her 20s tracking down her birth mother, oblivious to the fact that she was one of the most famous women in Ireland.
“The show is lodged as something like a background noise while I was growing up”, she recalls as we chat in Dublin’s Skylon Hotel. “But I wouldn’t have paid a huge amount of interest to it. Not then; not when I was growing up. It wasn’t until my late 20s, when I met her . . .”
Although Valerie grew up in a very comfortable and loving family, she was “hugely curious from an early age” about her birth mother’s identity. “My mother – my real mother – was very supportive”, she says. “She had some information that helped, but she didn’t give it to me until just before I was married, when I was 20, and I just kept that information that I had and tracked her down about seven years’ later.”
The eldest of five adopted children, and living a normal existence away from any media glare, she was surprised to learn that the ‘Frances Byrne’ she was looking for was one of the country’s biggest stars.
“It was a big surprise, off course it was”, she says. “She was actually a little older than my adopted mother, which was fantastic. Everybody met everybody and they got to know each other well . . . And in fairness it’s a leap of faith: you just don’t know what you’re opening up. I know a lot of friends over the years who have been adopted and they found parents . . . and it doesn’t always work out well and you don’t know how hurt you can be. And a lot of people are.”
Describing her as “incredibly charming”, Valerie met Frankie in 1983. “So we knew each other for ten years, which was long enough”, she admits, before noting, “I suppose it’s a slightly manufactured relationship as well, and lots of things came into play. She was ill, and I wasn’t able to take care of her as I had my own two parents. So, for a variety of reasons, I wouldn’t have seen as much of her in the latter years. The play is very close to my memory of her, but the bulk of it is about when I never knew her.”
Valerie has seen the play several times and laughs as she recalls some of the venues, from Dublin to Cavan, Cork and the Aran Islands. “It goes through her career, her relationship with my biological father, and the fallout from that – her alcoholism and all that sort of stuff. So I didn’t have the experience that her niece Barbara would’ve had with her. She lived with her, so she really knew her.”
Although she’ll never know how her life would have been had Frankie kept her, Valerie is very happy with her lot. “I fared very well”, she laughs, pointing out that she’s now got her own, grown-up family, “Three boys and a girl, and two grandsons”, she says, proudly.
How does she think she’d have fared with Frankie? “I’d imagine my upbringing would’ve been more chaotic – but it would’ve been more interesting.”
* Dear Frankie runs at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin March 26-30 before touring nationwide.
