That Old Shillelagh

The smartest thing that Philip Joseph Christopher Aloysius Regan ever did was to drop his nightstick and pick up a shillelagh. Shillelagh on his shoulder, an Irish grin on his handsome face, and a fine, free-swinging Irish ballad on his tongue, Phil Regan has been packing them in at the nightclubs, and attracting the kind of admirers who can help a man when he wants a little help. One night last week, he had to do two shows in two different Chicago hotels, and to get between them had to race his long, grey convertible back & forth through Chicago's Loop traffic from the Palmer House to the Stevens. The cops along the way had a fine understanding of his problem.

In the Palmer House's gold-laced Empire Room, Chicago's Irish have been crowding in nightly to hear cocky Tenor Regan sing Paddy McGinty's Goat, The Toorie on His Bonnet, and Dear Old Donegal. Warming their Irish faces at the front tables with Illinois' Governor Dwight Green, were Chicago's Mayor Martin Kennelley, Judge Tom Courtney and Federal Judge Philip Sullivan (of Sewell A very-Montgomery Ward fame). Behind them were droves of Chicago's Irish cops and aldermen, and even a scattering of priests. They liked it best when Regan swung into The Same Old Shillelagh, brandishing a shellacked stick which was not the old shillelagh that his father brought from Irrreland. At the Stevens, Phil had suddenly to fill in for Dorothy Shay, the "Park Avenue Hillbillie," who was ill with laryngitis. The patrons had come expecting to hear Dorothy's leering Feudin' and Fightin', and got nothing but Phil Regan's clean Irish ballads. But they too kept calling for more.

Tenor Regan, who is now 41, joined the New York police force in 1931. While a rookie, he captured a killer, and was promoted into plainclothes. He was just a dick, singing for his own pleasure at a party, when a CBS executive heard him, auditioned him for the Burns & Allen show. Then Movie Director Clarence Brown saw him dancing with Gracie Allen at a party, and signed him for a picture. Since then he has made more than a dozen unsensational B-movies (Sweet Adeline, Sweetheart of Sigma Chi) and a fairly sensational $100,000 a year at it.

Married when he was 17, Regan now has four children, the oldest 23, the youngest 17. He knows close to 200 Irish ballads, half of them too bawdy to sing in public, and half of what's left, too sad. His theory: "Why should I make the customers cry, when I can make them happy?"

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