Father Roles | Chapter 7

I am literally standing in front of the.

. 1,, 2,, 3, 4, 5... 5-story building where I was conceived. This building, for many decades, was the place where babies were made in perhaps somewhat shady circumstances. Sketchy circumstances, let's put it that way.

I wanted to see it. This building on the east side of Manhattan where fertility treatments were done for about 50 years. I mean, the mind boggles with how many babies were created in this place, how much life, how many, maybe tens of thousands of people, literally, exist because of this, because of what happened inside. And, you know, I'm standing here.

just after finding out over the last several days and weeks that my father was likely a man named Vincent McNally. And, you know, it's kind of moving to think that he might have come to this office.

and either brought with him or actually donated semen at this very place. It was likely October of 1977, and here we are, October 2023.. My mom would have just turned 31 a few weeks earlier. I don't know if my mom went in one entrance at a certain time of day, and Vincent went in another entrance at a different time of day, but I can imagine that this might have been the only place where they, you know, walked the very same streets at approximately the very same time.

This is where I come from.

After I left the clinic, I went to lunch nearby, got a burger and a beer, told the guy next to me at the bar my story, and when I left, I checked my e-mail and had a message from our intern, Natalie, that made me run right into the subway.

But the public records I found so far showed that Vincent lived in California. And sure, we had heard he was kind of a vagabond, but was he ever actually in New York and at just the right time to line up with my birthday?

Before I went to California to knock on the door of an 87-year-old stranger with a microphone in my hand, I wanted to be sure I knew what I was talking about, that we weren't making some terrible mistake.

Okay.

Our intrepid intern, Natalie, she went to the New York Public Library and looked up telephone directories from the 70s. And I asked her to look up Vincent L. McNally, see if he was in the city, to put him here in 1977, so we would have been able to find him. Donate. Sure enough, she found an address for him in the heart of the village.

And I jumped on a F train and came down here so quick. Here I am. Holy shit, there it is. This is his apartment building.

My father's apartment building.

Oh, jeez, I'm out of breath, so.

. Excited. Seven-story building. Some beautiful cornices.

This is a key piece of the puzzle that we just put on the board here.

I'm, like, thrilled by this news.

This is a neighborhood I've hung out in a billion times. This is where I used to come from Long Island as a teenager, to hang out in the city.

And this is where he was living. And this is where he theoretically came back to after he made this donation of semen back in 77.. He would have taken the same path I did, back on the train downtown to the village, which, in the 70s, would have been an extraordinary place for sure.

A place of the heart of the counterculture. This was the coolest thing I could have imagined. I mean, it's cool as hell. He lived in the village in the 70s. Did he see, like, Bob Dylan at Cafe?

Wah? I mean, we're on a legendary block. Dougal Street, holy shit. Let me take a picture. And a selfie to send to my siblings.

I mean, he walked these streets. He was where I was, I know for sure now.

So, clue 1, cousin Ryan's story. Clue 2, Vincent was in New York when I was conceived. He had been living in a neighborhood I know so well, just a few blocks from the radio station where I've worked for a decade. And later, I looked at the pictures I took outside of where he lived, and I realized Vincent's old apartment building is now above a restaurant called, of all things, Papa's. The third piece of evidence that came through was a new DNA test result for the other potential relative out in Las Vegas.

She took the test, and it came back a few weeks later showing we share the right number of centimorgans to be first cousins once removed. If Vincent's brother Joseph was my father, she instead would have shown up as my niece. This was the scientific confirmation that Vincent was instead the right guy. Christina, our DNA sleuth, thought the evidence was convincing.

. It's potentially my father on the other line.

You're going to pep talk yourself. You are going to, like, do some calisthenics before. You're going to have a big cup of coffee.

From Waveland and Rococo Punch, this is Inconceivable Truth. I'm Matt Katz. Episode 7. Father Roles.

I wrote a script for my call to Vincent. I'm Matt, and I'm doing my family history, and I believe I'm related to Margaret Lehane and Michael McNally, because I have DNA matches to both of them. I found your phone number on the internet. Can I ask if I have the right Vincent McNally, who is the son of Margaret and Michael McNally? I also plan to tell Vincent that I'm making a podcast about my search.

And I was prepared, given that he's 87 years old, to explain what a podcast is. So I sat down at my desk to make the call. My wife was working in the other room. All I needed to do was dial. But before I called the man who donated the sperm that created me, I had one last impulse.

I decided one more search. I was probably just procrastinating, but I logged on to this database that I sometimes use. So, I've been assuming he's alive and want to get to him before he dies. But then, I just looked up his name in another database that I have access to, a really comprehensive database that journalists use to look up people. And I did find a death record from September.

It's not the official record. It's a summary of a death record from 2019 for Vincent McNally. Same year of birth.

For the Vincent that we've been tracking down. Says he died at a nursing home in California four years ago. Which would have been exactly a year after I knew I was done or conceived. But

it took us all this time to figure out who he was and

I guess according to this, it's too late.

I mean, that sucks.

God, the highs and lows of this whole experience are so intense.

For the last several days, I was sort of assuming he's alive because we hadn't found a death record. And now I have. And that means I missed my window to know.

how this happened. And what he did his whole life. And who he was.

I was texting with my siblings this morning. I don't even want to tell them this until I know for sure. Because it's.

you know, we kind of fantasized about this idea of, you know, going out there and knocking on his door and finding him and I mean, now we've, I'm not going to know anything else about him. Turned out to wonder if I had like aggressively pursued this earlier. If I had signed up for 23andMe sooner. If I had. you know, there was a year window, exactly a year window, when I knew I was donor conceived while Vincent was still alive.

If the fact that I was donor conceived hadn't been kept from me for so long, maybe I could have found him. I could have met him. But I ran out of time.

I've met my siblings, which has been fantastic. Now I'm meeting some cool cousins. So I'm getting something out of this whole experience. No question about it. I'm answering questions.

No question about it. But the ultimate.

the ultimate man with all the answers, I'll never be able to talk to him.

I'm just going to have questions forever. That's the way it is. And that's okay. You know. I know a lot more than I ever did.

And I know the truth now more than I ever did, but

I don't know. I'm sad about it.

The next day I gave the pitch of my life to the woman on the other end of the line at the nursing home where Vincent McNally died. Can I tell you my little story here, and then maybe there's some way you might be able to help me? Or indirectly. can I just give you my? it's an unusual tale.

I told her everything. DNA test. My father died before ever meeting him. Death record says he died in your facility. She told me she couldn't tell me anything.

You know HIPAA. And I said don't tell me anything. Just do me a favor and pass my message on. Relay my story to whoever the contact you might have for Vincent McNally's family or estate or next of kin. And that's exactly what she did.

I got a call back about an hour later from the person who, from what I can tell, was closer to Vincent McNally than anyone. That person, though, ultimately did not want to be involved in my search or this project. In fact, they said they didn't like what I was doing at all. They explained all this to me in a long email, and after I got the message, I just laid down on my bed on top of the covers and I cried. It was the first time my 12 year old daughter had ever seen me cry.

I think I felt like after this long road, after coming so close to knowing this man and who he was, I hit another barrier. Another rejection.

But I did come away from my conversations with this person with two facts about Vincent. First, where he lived. New York City, yes, and then Asia and then California. And second, his profession. Vincent was a stage actor.

That detail was a gift, because even if I couldn't talk to anyone who knew Vincent McNally if he was an actor in theaters for so many years, that was another. lead. Actors, leave paper trails.

I could never meet Vincent, but I could find my own way to him by learning as much as I could about the life he led before he decided to sell his sperm. Kids are often really interested in their parents lives. before they were parents. I was no different. So, with Natalie and Emily from our team here, we just started searching for any biographical information on him.

This time, instead of an Irish doctor, we were looking for an Irish actor.

In the weeks after I learned Vincent died, we searched online and in library archives of closed theater companies and we found a trove of documents about his work. Articles, reviews, letters, fan mail, profiles, playbills, scripts, audio clips, pictures. From there I put together a timeline of his life, accounting for where he was and when and what he was doing, all up to the point he walked into a medical office in 1977..

We found out so much about him that, even though he was dead, it felt like he was slowly coming to life.

And it turned out. one of the roles he played several times on stage was that of a father.

I called my friend Dan to talk over what I found. Dan was the person I kept thinking about when I was researching Vincent. Can I start by giving you an intro befitting what you do for a living, because it's very actually relevant to what we're going to talk about. Please. Our next guest.

you may know him from Cobra Kai on Netflix, the beloved food podcast Green Eggs and Dan, and Inconceivable Truth. My bestest of friends, Dan Adut.

I don't know any other actors, so you're really the only person I can talk to about that. And then, second of all, you lived for a long time in the very neighborhood where he lived Greenwich Village in Lower Manhattan. When I found his address, I called you to ask you just about the block and tell you this thing, and then... I think you were just.

sperm donor father. I feel like I'm cheating on Richard when I call him your dad. Your sperm donor father.

That's where he was living at the time, which is so wild because I know that building very intimately. I kind of lived there.

I remember the actual apartment.

There's other relatives there. Vincent's father was an auto mechanic. His mother worked at a laundry. They had a nice house in Lower Haight, right in the middle of San Francisco. I did some real research, dude.

I found some stuff. So, he goes to Catholic high school. He played varsity football his junior year. Wow. Right?

So, he's into drama. apparently. He goes to Colorado State University for a bit, and oh, this is like totally needless information. but just to give you a sense of the research I did. His freshman year at Colorado State University, he got a ticket for parking on the sidewalk, pleaded guilty, and paid a $3 fine.

Honestly, I said it half-jokingly, but it's also kind of serious. What you're doing now is completely insane.

I kind of love it. I also don't kind of understand it. But I do. I'm here for you. But I just wouldn't want the potential of shining a light on every single part of my life from someone that I don't know.

But now? No, man. No way.

And he's like a serious.

. Hey, no offense, Dan. He's like a serious actor.

This is like two performances a day, high school auditoriums, that type of thing. Travels all over California. He's quoted as saying, I learned a lot. You can't fool children. In 1963, he's in Merchant of Venice as the storyteller Solerio.

He was, quote, suitably rambunctious, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. The next year, he's in Hamlet. A reviewer said he was properly tormented. He was doing both very serious Shakespeare and then edgy, kind of progressive theater, from what I can tell. He plays a heroin-addicted saxophonist who sold his horn to get high in a play called The Connection.

The cast performance is called Stupendous by a reviewer. He's apparently a pretty good actor at this point.

It's very in-depth. And I've learned so much about him from this. Okay. One of the two headlines is, McNally loves stage, but spurns nude roles. He won't get naked on stage.

He says, he likes to play both tragedy and comedy, but the only parts he won't accept are any to be played in the nude. It's too distracting, he said. It's much more exciting to imagine an act of love than to watch it on the stage. Wow.

Then, in this article, he makes some very interesting admissions about life as an actor. that would indicate why he ended up donating sperm for $20 or $25 a pop. He says, quote, it is very hard to earn a living as an actor, but, he says, there is nothing I want to do but act. It's like being high on drugs. It takes three hours to come down after playing a part.

When I'm not acting, there is no reason to get up in the morning. Working in an office must be very dull.

He does say he won't do commercials, he won't do TV, he won't teach, he won't direct. Like, this is the only thing.

he sacrificed more than I have. And this is how the reporter in this profile of him captures his personality a bit. The reporter writes, McNally just decided to up and go to New York. No job, no money. He spent his first three days at the Greenwich Village hotel.

that charged $1.

75 for 12 hours. A real flop house, he says. Then he goes to NYU and passes himself off as a graduate student. He faked being a grad student to obtain one of their student housing apartments. And he passed a bad check for the first month's rent and gathered furniture off the city sidewalks.

It sold on one night literally one ticket. Wow. This must have shook him. Knowing what we know about him at this point, right? I mean...

Yeah.

And that's, I guess, a thing with actors and artists, right? I don't know what you're.

He wanted kids. And he got them. He did.

Thanks, man.

So he was.

. Wow. Isn't that weird? It's weird that that's, like, why is that even in there, right? Yeah.

Right. I'm, like, trying to wonder if he was... wanted to be a father, if he would like being a father, and then he's like, I'm getting all these sort of messages. Wow.

So his next performance is also about being a father, and it's also about the tension in that, you know, paternal relationship. And in this case, it's, like, way fucking head-on. It's literally about a father estranged from his children, and then they show up, unannounced and unwelcome, at his doorstep. And he... Come on.

Swear to God. Vincent plays the father. He had three children in this show. He has at least four we know of in real life, and we never got a chance to show up at his doorstep, but I guess now here we are. I mean, so crazy.

So I.

. The show's called The Uninvited. It comes out in 1975.. It gets a rave review in The Villager. It's a, quote, disturbing story of the struggle for a family to survive.

Vincent plays this father. He's visited by his children, who are looking for reassurance and salvation, which is,

emotionally prepared, for, you know, exactly what's happening.

Or, he played a good, bad dad.

He ends up doing the same show a year later, and our amazing intern, Natalie, got a hold of the actual script. Now, this stuff is, like, out of control. The opening musical number is called I've Got Myself a Daddy.

The lyrics were, why did he run away? And it opens, and then it goes into this scene in the show of the son tracking down his father. Quote, I haven't seen him in a long time, the son says. And then he meets a sibling who's a half-sibling. And he says to that sibling, he's your father, too.

This is, like, the exact conversation I had with my new sisters, when I found them. Yeah. I've got myself a daddy, and he's your daddy, too.

Now, how much do you have to hear before you know how unwanted you are?

Whoa, dude. Right?

These lines in the play were kind of haunting.

So now I know it. So maybe that's what I was after.

You should be getting your meaning from those people.

Don't get me wrong. This is fun. This is really cool, and it's really interesting. But I do think you've gone off the deep end on. if I don't find these things out, I'm not going to be whole.

And you're very whole. You're one of the more whole people that I know. And I think that you should try to compartmentalize this and try to see this as a fun, cool escape room adventure that you went on.

But you already have the meaning that you're looking for. There's nothing else to find.

That's all the meaning you needed from this. That's the best meaning you got from this. Because that was really souring your life, and now you're free of that. So, you know, take that as the gift that Vincent gave you.

As far as we can tell, Vincent never performed again. Those father roles were his last on stage. At the same time, his acting career appears to have ended, he started donating sperm.

Next time, on Inconceivable Truth. Any idea how an actor would have come to donate sperm?

Inconceivable Truth is a production of Waveland and Rococo Punch. I'm writer and host Matt Katz. The story editor is Erica Lance. Mixing by James Trout. Emily Foreman is our producer.

Natalie White is our intern. For research help in this episode, special thanks to Christopher Bananos of New York Magazine, and to the folks at New York Public Library Special Collections, Denison University Archives and Special Collections, and Stanford University Library Special Collections.

Our executive producers are Jason Hoke at Waveland, and John Perotti and Jessica Alpert at Rococo Punch. For photos and more details on the series, follow at Waveland Media on Instagram, X, or Facebook. And you can reach out via email at podcasts at waveland.media. That's Waveland. W-A-V-L-A-N-D.

If you like the series, please leave us a review. And, as always, don't forget to tell a friend or relative.

I'm Matt Katz. Thanks for listening.

One more thing I found meaning in. I used to act. We performed together in a play once, Dan, in high school.

The perfume, the blood on the carpet, the tennis balls. I'm shoving up my ass. Everything. A year I planned for this vacation. You know what I got to show for it?

My acting was horrendous. I, just, like, yelled everything. I had, like, an inconsistent New York accent through it all. I've had enough.