Slimming for the Beach

Per­haps the best legacy of all is laugh­ter. When Jim Gree­ley died sud­denly, hav­ing just turned 53, his part­ner, his fam­ily and huge cir­cle of friends were dev­as­tated. Yet when they came together to con­sole each other, within min­utes, mem­o­ries of Jim released ser­ial, heal­ing laughter.

He has been described as one of the great char­ac­ters of the Irish fash­ion indus­try. That is true, but of course every­one is much more than any one per­son thinks they are. Jim had many facets, all of them fas­ci­nat­ing, and he touched so many people’s lives that the full account of the good he did can only be guessed at.

The most sen­si­tive of men, his anten­nae always picked up a person’s trou­bles, no mat­ter how well dis­guised. He was a deep lis­tener, and knew exactly when to lis­ten and when to make you laugh at yourself.

He was born in Kevin Street in the Dublin Lib­er­ties. His mother had been a French pol­isher, and his father col­lected and sold antiques and mem­o­ra­bilia. One of his aunts, Nelly Mol­loy, pre­served her Iveagh flat in Patrick Street in the orig­i­nal Edwar­dian style. One of Jim’s broth­ers, Tommy, and one of his two sis­ters, Mary, were in the well-known group the Ivy Folk in the early sev­en­ties, while a sec­ond brother, Fran, was in the The Ohio Show­band. The fam­ily home was a trea­sure trove of Art Nou­veau posters and antiques, but more than that, it was a bea­con of hos­pi­tal­ity, his mother Maisie car­ing for and deeply inter­ested in the char­ac­ters that Jim brought home. His sec­ond sis­ter, Nancy, still lives in Kevin Street.

In Synge Street CBS, he met Paddy Doyle, the author of The God Squad, and this was to be a life-long friend­ship, begun when Jim, in a typ­i­cal ges­ture, maneu­vered Paddy’s wheel­chair up and down the six flights of stairs in the school, to much hilar­ity. Another life-long friend­ship blos­somed when he took up win­dow dress­ing with Maura Smith in Brown Thomas of Grafton Street in the early sev­en­ties. Never were man­nequins dressed pro­fes­sion­ally with so much fun.

In 1974, he traded his blue dun­ga­rees which were his trade­mark in Brown Thomas for a nurse’s uni­form in Stewart’s Hos­pi­tal, where he was to work for thir­teen years. Friends from that period noted his sen­si­tiv­ity and ded­i­ca­tion in work­ing with the clients there, once again dis­guised by a sense of fun.

Around this time he har­boured the ambi­tion of buy­ing a hearse and paint­ing it pink, in order to drive around town and gauge the reac­tion. He never hid the fact that he was gay, yet he never flaunted it either. It sim­ply didn’t occur to many of his friends until he met Richard in the mid– sev­en­ties. When finally asked directly by a woman, a close friend of fif­teen years, he laughed heartily.

Jim treated every­one with the same human­ity, whether they were street walk­ers or ambas­sadors. On one occa­sion in the eight­ies, he was return­ing from a fancy-dress party, and on get­ting into his car which was parked by the canal, a brolly crashed onto the roof. When a star­tled Jim looked out to see the slight fig­ure chal­leng­ing him, recog­ni­tion dawned. “Ah, Jim,” she said, “I didn’t rec­og­nize you. I thought some­one was try­ing to steal your car!”

Such was the love and devo­tion he inspired.

In the late eight­ies he went into part­ner­ship with Richard to run the Richard Lewis Cou­ture Salon in South Fred­er­ick Street. With his pas­sion for art and pho­tog­ra­phy which he’d had from an early age, it was a nat­ural move, and allowed him to develop his impres­sive organ­i­sa­tional skills. He had a par­tic­u­lar flair for find­ing appro­pri­ate venues for Lewis’s shows, most lately in the beau­ti­ful Art Deco for­mer Gas Com­pany, now the TCD School of Nurs­ing, in Octo­ber. In his last few years he took to com­puter tech­nol­ogy, and main­tained the Richard Lewis website.

At his crowded funeral in Mount Jerome, Richard paid him this mov­ing trib­ute: “We had thirty-one won­der­ful years together. How many peo­ple can say that?”

Peace to your ashes, Jim, and thanks for the many laughs.

PC

Jim Gree­ley. 1953–2006.

[First appeared in The Irish Times (hard copy edi­tion only) Mon­day and Tues­day, Jan­u­ary 1 and 2, 2007]

Update Feb­ru­ary 2010: Richard alerted me to the video of You Were Life, a song about Richard and Jim in the show Sil­ver Stars.

Writ­ten by Sean Mil­lar, and directed by Bro­kentalk­ers
this per­for­mance was in The Pub­lic The­ater, 425 Lafayette Street, New York.