“He did a good job, and that’s what mattered.” Barbour added in an interview: “I had been told” that he was gay, “but that wasn’t any of my business.” “But for you, I wouldn’t have known that Michael Hess was the child that was given up for adoption,” said Haley Barbour, who was chairman of the RNC when Hess, then its general counsel, died in 1995. (And if you haven’t seen the movie, multiple spoilers lurk beyond this sentence.) Some top Republicans have been just as surprised to learn of the twisting tale. But the nuns at Sean Ross Abbey in Roscrea, Tipperary, Ireland, told neither mother nor son of the other’s repeated inquiries.
Louis and Rockford, Ill., and in the last years of his life, he undertook a parallel search to find his birth mother. Michael was raised by his adoptive family in St. His adoption was part of a program of forced adoptions practiced at the time by the Roman Catholic Church. He was born in the Irish abbey where his pregnant mother had sought refuge and, after his birth, was compelled into servitude for more than three years. Michael Hess (named Anthony Lee at birth) was that son. Dench portrays Philomena Lee, a frightened young Irishwoman who was shamed by the Catholic Church into giving her toddler son up for adoption to an American couple in 1955, then years later, embarked on a desperate quest to find him. Now, nearly two decades after his death from AIDS at age 43 - and to the surprise of some of his former co-workers and bosses - Hess is the central presence (or, more precisely, the central absence) at the heart of “Philomena,” the hit Academy Award best-picture nominee for which Dame Judi Dench just snagged her seventh Oscar nod. And he was an adopted child, the son of an unwed mother who had given him up for motives he never fully understood and that haunted him for life. Patrick’s Day and all things Irish, and his darkly handsome looks turned more than one head - of both genders.īut Michael Anthony Hess also grappled with two realities that would have been dislocating for anyone: He was a gay Republican lawyer in an era of much greater political and cultural divisiveness over homosexuality. He was a terrific cook, and a demon dancer and DJ. He was one of the unseen insiders who make Washington run: a top expert on congressional redistricting whose legal work at the Republican National Committee helped the GOP win the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years.