Jason was a willful child, always testing the limits, but, Ireland wrote, he “had a straight-through connection to my heart.” When the others had left, she placed a rose and a rosary on his casket and bent to kiss it.įrom the start, Jason was the odd child out among the seven reared by Ireland and Bronson-his two by his first marriage, her three with McCallum, a daughter they had together and the daughter of a friend adopted unofficially when her mother died. “I came to honor my son,” she said softly. A figure in black, she stood at graveside with other mourners behind the chairs set out for the family. “Vicky” was an outsider looking in as they buried Jason. Two years ago, Ireland and Jason found his birth mother, “Vicky,” a dramatic encounter she describes in “Life Lines.” She told them: that their son’s father was a drug dealer and heroin addict who died of an overdose that Jason’s grandfather was an alcoholic.
She thinks the trigger might have been Ritalin, prescribed when he was a small boy to control hyperkinesia. It was in Jason’s system, just floating around in there waiting for something to trigger it.” “We were told his father was an architect. “We didn’t know his father was a drug addict,” she said. The private adoption, after she suffered a miscarriage during her 10-year marriage to McCallum (of TV’s “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.”), had been arranged through a lawyer, and, Ireland and McCallum learned later, he had not told them the truth about the days-old infant. “I think I may have adopted an addicted baby,” Ireland said, “but I was only 25. The tragedy of Jason David McCallum stands apart from the too-familiar story of the world-weary children of Hollywood celebrities whose search for excitement ends with a fatal overdose. (The coroner’s autopsy was inconclusive, pending results of toxicology tests.) When someone’s had a dialogue with drugs for so many years.” And, she said, “We may find out that he had broken down and taken drugs again.
She had worried that he was becoming addicted to painkillers prescribed to relieve the leg cramps that were a result of years of drug abuse. We do know that they didn’t find any needle marks, any traces, on him.” “He’d been through another detoxification program. He said, ‘I’m clean, I’m happy, I’m looking forward to the future.’ “I think he was clean,” she added. Ireland said she had spoken with Jason by telephone the day before he died and “he was very optimistic. She and Bronson invited mourners to their Malibu house after the services. I’m not bad.”Īt the services, she appeared pale but dry-eyed, reed-thin in a black suit, with a wide-brimmed black straw hat anchoring her blond wig. But I’m stronger than I’ve been for a long time. “Every three weeks, I have a massive chemotherapy program. “I’m in the middle of treatment,” she said. She and Bronson had returned by chartered plane. Family and friends worried that Ireland was not strong enough to make the trip West, but, she said in a telephone interview two days after Jason’s death, “Of course, I had to come.” A doctor treating Jason for hepatitis B had told them: “The kid’s on the needle. In early 1985, another call to the Vermont farm-a bucolic retreat that Ireland calls “my favorite place in the whole world"-had shattered their lives. It was Paul who had telephoned Ireland and Bronson at their home in Vermont to tell them that Jason was dead. “This is for you, Jay-Jay,” Valentine said. Then he and Valentine McCallum, the brother born nine months after Jason was adopted, sat on folding chairs before Jason’s rose-blanketed casket, and, on guitars accompanied by a violin, played a song written by Valentine, a rock musician. In the chapel, Paul McCallum, 31, had given the eulogy for the little brother who used to stroke his head when he had a migraine-and once ate his pet caterpillar.
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