Father Roles | Chapter 7

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Listener discretion is advised. I am literally standing in front of the one, two, three, four, five, five-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 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 of 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 email and had a message from our intern, Natalie, that made me run right into the subway. This is West 4th Street, Washington Square.
Natalie was helping me with a problem. I needed to confirm that this guy, Vincent McNally, was my sperm donor.
The DNA looked promising. My new cousin, Ryan, had even told me that Vincent had donated sperm.
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 had 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, 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 he would have been able to 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 apartment building.
My father's

apartment building. Oh, geez, 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 to live in the village in the 70s. Did you see, like, Bob Dylan at Café Wain? I mean, we're on a legendary block.
Dougal Street. Holy shit.
I'm going to take a picture. And a selfie that I sent to my siblings.
I mean, he walked these streets. He was where I was, I know for sure.
Now, wow. Love it.
So, clue one, Cousin Ryan's story. Clue two, 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 shared 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.

I think it's worth making contact with him.

He doesn't have any socials.

I do have a phone number for him. I'd be scared shitless to make that call, though.
Oh, no, don't be. I make cold calls all the time for work.
Like, I call the relatives of crime victims. I call dirty politicians who don't want to talk to the media.
And I'm always nervous, even though I've been doing this for, like, more than 20 years. Yeah, it makes your heart beat a little fast.
For sure. Yeah.
And this is like a similar kind of call, except it's... I know.
It's potentially my father on the other line. When this call happens, because it probably will happen, I think it's just really quickly getting to the, hi, I'm so-and-so, and I'm doing my family history, and quickly get to Michael McNally and Margaret Lehane.
Like, he'll know who they are, obviously. They're his parents.
So I think that's a great next step. 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.

I was thinking a glass of Irish whiskey.

From Waveland and Rococo Punch, this is Inconceivable Truth.

I'm Matt Katz. Episode 7, Father Roles.
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Listen in and download the new season wherever you get your podcasts. 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 Lehan 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 of 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.

So, I mean, that sucks oh god the highs and lows of this whole experience are so intense for the last several days 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. Ah.
You know, 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 have, 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 this 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 for 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. Fuck.
How do you mourn a father you never knew was your father? For me, the way I handled it was to continue the search, to find out all I could about who Vincent was. I needed to know who my father was.
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 Adub. Hi, Dan.
That was a good intro. That was like a stand-up intro.
Thanks. Like I was going on stage.
Thanks. Dude, you are an actor and comedian, obviously.
So I have learned all of this crazy stuff about my father in recent weeks. And I keep thinking about you.
And I wanted to, I needed to tell you everything about it. And I feel like you're the closest person I know who might be able to like understand and give context to the bits of his life that I'm piecing together.
First of all, he was an actor. You're an actor.
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 like ask you, you know, just about the block and tell you this thing.
And then I think you were just stoked that you found the address. Right.
And I was like, I was like, wait, this address sounds really familiar. It was the same exact building that my ex-girlfriend paloma lived in uh and it was her dad's apartment and he was living there in the 70s so it was the exact same building that your uh yeah sperm donor father i i feel 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 like intimately.
Like I almost like I kind of lived there for a while. First of all, this is New York City.
It's the biggest city in the country. There's hundreds of thousands of buildings.
And this was the same building that

you were in many times and that he was in and that I was in. I remember, this is like 20 years ago, visiting you and Paloma at that apartment and being in the building.
I remember the actual apartment. What's really crazy is that Paloma's dad was also kind of a journeyman actor.
and they had to know each other.

Had to have.

They had to.

That's amazing. So a little background on him.
And I'll tell you how he ended up in New York City in the 70s other than, you know, there to donate sperm. So he was first generation Irish.
His parents arrived separately from different parts of Ireland. They landed in the 20s, and they make their way pretty immediately to San Francisco.
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? The reason I say wow is a lot of you only know Matt Katz by his voice.
But if you've seen his body. It's hard to imagine me doing anything on a football field other than handing out towels to the quarterback when he comes off the field.

Or doing an expose interview on like helmet to helmet crashes.

Right.

So he plays varsity in his junior year and then drops it his senior year for drama.

Wow.

So he's like committed to this thing.

It seems to be an early passion. 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.
This is the reason that I would never, ever donate sperm, by the way, okay? Because some jackass little kid is going to go through every single thing I did and put it out there for everyone to hear. No way.
It was in Colorado.

My body, my sperm.

Don't park on the sidewalk if you don't want your son,

who you never met, to bring it up on a podcast 60 years later.

Never done it.

Honestly, I said it half-jokingly, but it's also kind of serious.

What you're doing now is completely insane. And I kind of love it.
I also don't kind of understand it, but I, you know, I do, you know, I'm here for you, but like, 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. Right.
I mean, he could never have imagined at the time. I mean, eventually he must have realized this, but he could have never imagined that at the time that we would have like tracked him down even in death.
But here we are. Yeah.
Look, pre 23 and me, I'd be slanging sperm left and right. I'd give it out for free.
I wouldn't even ask for money. Be fruitful and multiply.
Enjoy. But now, no, man.
No way. So, having said that, here's his full life story.
Up to a point. Joins the army.
He's an infantryman in West Germany after World War II in the lead up to the building of the Berlin Wall, which is kind of interesting. And then he seems to really take up acting full time.
So this is the early 60s. And he's like a serious...
No offense, Dan. He's like a serious actor.
No offense taken. I don't consider myself a serious actor.
Okay. He ends up in Dallas, performs Shakespeare.
He was the lead in a traveling children's theater production of Puss in Boots. Did 257 performances.
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, like, 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, and the cast performance is called Stupendous by a reviewer.
So he's apparently, like, pretty good actor at this point. Like a good stage actor.
Good stage actor. And he's traveling a lot.
His great niece had described him to me as a rolling stone. So eventually, he joins this really prestigious theater group called the Actors Workshop of San Francisco.
It's described as adventurous and anti-establishment and daring in its productions, and they do some challenging work. And then there's this big profile of him in the Granville Sentinel.
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, 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. That to me is an interesting genetic trait that I don't know that you've nailed down on is that his commitment to his craft is kind of in pathological and your commitment to your craft is quasi pathological.
I've tried to get you to sell out many times. I can tell you exactly when I've told you to sell out.
Well, 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. Wow.
That's the crazy thing is like these guys, they sacrifice so much to like, it's just for that high for the applause. Well, the applause didn't always come because he ended up landing a gig in 1968 off-Broadway Theater in Greenwich Village.

He plays Ernest Hemingway,

and the show is about Hemingway's relationship

with F. Scott Fitzgerald.

But the reviews of this thing are terrible.

The write-up from Variety says

it may go down as the only two-character show

to give a performance for which the cast

outnumbered the audience.

It sold on one night, literally one ticket.

Wow.

It must have shook him. Knowing what we know about him at this point, right? I mean...
Yeah. No, this is a catastrophic failure to him.
He says he's making about $50 a week, but plays only last 15 days. So in between plays, he's a market research analyst, a movie theater manager, and a security guard.
There's weird details in this article that seem way too personal, considering it's just a story about a guy who is coming to act with college students for a few weeks. It's like, why are these details in there?

Are they in there just to inform me 50 years later?

He says that his desire to only act and his lack of money have kept him single.

And that's, I guess, a thing with actors and artists, right?

I don't know what you're talking about.

I have no idea what you're talking about.

Okay.

The article says that someday he would like a child.

He wanted kids and he got them.

He did get them.

And I think he'd be proud of you, Matt.

You know, I think he'd be stoked to have you as a kid.

You're a good kid.

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I think he might have liked being a father because he played fathers often.

The show that he performed at this college, it's about a father and daughter and their mutual recognition of their heritages and their inner selves and the enduring power of love. And Vincent plays an Irish father.
And according to the article, Vincent was, quote, obviously excited by the father role he plays. That's like an actual line from the story.
So he was, 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 wanting 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 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.
Come on. I swear to God, Vincent plays the father.
He had three children in this show. He is 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 the show is 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 Blaise's father is visited by his children who are looking for reassurance and salvation, which is like, wait, it's...
Oh, my God. I know.
Oh, my God. I'm like, is that what I'm looking for? I'm like, well, maybe, yeah, I think that actually is exactly what I'm looking for.
That's crazy to think that he actually emotionally prepared for, you know, exactly what's happening. The review says the play flows from memories to metaphors.
And then it says the cast is excellent. Vincent McNally stands out in the role of Ed Shaw.
Wow. He played a good dad.
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.
I mean, 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. It's definitely weird.
Sometimes I think you're guilty of trying to make connections that aren't there. This one's fucking weird.
Vincent, he's playing this character, Ed Shawaw who doesn't want to see his kids he says that one of the biological daughters quote i never wanted her just because i'm her father doesn't mean anything i don't know what you kids are after i got nothing to tell you except that you're beginning to give me the creeps 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. Yeah, but it's a decent question.
What is it that you're after? This was kind of a lot of what I wanted.

I went to identify him, which I did.

I wanted to meet him, which I can't.

And then I wanted to know as much as I could about him.

And I think it's fitting that I have been able to find out everything about him until this point before he did this thing that created me.

So now I know it. So maybe that's what I was after.
Maybe. I just, I feel like there's a difference between looking at this whole thing in terms of curiosity and then also in terms of giving you meaning.
I think it's really cool and really interesting, but I think you should try. I don't think it's a substitute for creating meaning in your life, like why you are the way you are and all that stuff.
I, you know, I think that you have a lot of people in your life that are here for you that love you, you should be getting your meaning from those people, you know?

And 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,

like escape room adventure that you went on.

But you already have the meaning that you're looking for

and there's nothing else to find.

That's fair.

The best thing that came out of this, in my opinion, is that you could ignore who you thought was your birth father. Right.
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.
Thank you, Vincent.

You're right.

You're absolutely right.

And then all the details of his life are just kind of a cherry on top.

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?

I cannot tell you because I have no situation

where I would have used a non-medical person

as a fresh donor of insemination. 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 Parati and Jessica Alpert at Vercoco Punch.
For photos and more details in 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 a 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.

Oh, let's put the word act in huge quotes.

Huge air quotes.

I used to act, he says.

Vincent's turning in his grave.

I performed in California Suite in high school in a Neil Simon play, which he also performed in Neil Simon plays. Alongside your high school girlfriend, Kelly, who people may remember from episode one, she found the videotape of our performance.
Oh, my God. I'm paying for everything you understand.
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?

My acting was horrendous.

I just, like, yelled everything.

I had, like, an inconsistent New York accent through it all.

I've had enough.

I'm a nervous wreck.

I want to go home.

I need a vacation.

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