Oh, My My
The New York Times has a story that Tony Hendra’s daughter says his bestselling, confessional book Father Joe contains a rather large sin of omission: Namely, that he molested her when she was a child. He denies this.
Is it true? I don’t know, obviously. I don’t have enough information. But to the extent that it is credible, it’s credible because of other things about and by Mr. Hendra that I have read over the years.
Hendra has long been a more-or-less unknown yet key figure in both British and American comedy. Born in Britain, he attended Caimbridge and performed with future members of Monty Python Graham Chapman and John Cleese. After moving to America he became a major contributor to the National Lampoon of the early ’70s, where he met and became friends with the brilliant writer Michael O’Donoghue. A friendship that went in the dumper when Hendra slept with Amy Ephron, sister of Nora and O’Donoghue’s ex-girlfriend. Shortly therafter he put together the Lampoon stage show Lemmings, which gave many future movie stars including John Belushi, Chevy Chase and Christopher Guest an early break. Since then he has written one or two books on comedy, and reportedly was working with George Carlin on the comedian’s autobiography, though that was several years ago and no such book has surfaced.
I remember disliking one of Hendra books on the National Lampoon generation of comedy, though not the specifics of why. But what really stays with me about Hendra, at least as far as reputation and perception goes, comes from Dennis Perrin’s biography of O’Donoghue.
He quotes Lampoon collaborator Sean Kelly’s description of Hendra: “Tony knows good and evil, and he chooses to do evil in a Graham Greene, fucked up way to affirm its existence.”
The time Kelly knew Hendra best and from which he presumably draws this description coincides with the time Hendra’s daughter says the molestation began.
Again: Absolutely not stating that I believe her accusation to be solid fact. I simply don’t know. For one thing, according to the article some of her charges stem from recovered memories through hypnosis, and I’m always very skeptical of these.
I guess I’m just saying given what I know, or think I know, about Hendra, I wasn’t able to dismiss the posibility without a second thought. Or at least not without typing this out.
