Bathed in the late summer sunshine on the western fringes of the Isle of Lewis, it’s easy to see why Great Bernera, with its white sandy beaches and ancient history, might appear the perfect balm for a troubled soul.
And so it must have seemed for 62-year-old Claire Kellerman, a self-described mystic healer, when she first washed up on the tiny Hebridean outcrop (population 250) two summers ago, following an early life of privilege in Hollywood, shot through with unbearable heartache.
Yet ‘healing’ and ‘peace’ have been in short supply since her arrival.
This week it emerged that Claire – who is the adopted daughter of the late M*A*S*H actress Sally Kellerman, whose portrayal of blonde US Army nurse Major ‘Hot Lips’ Houlihan in the original 1970 film beguiled audiences – is embroiled in a bitter dispute with two community groups, who now say they face financial ruin as a result.
The extraordinary saga began almost as soon as Claire arrived on Lewis in 2023, and reached its nadir last summer when she moved to the remote community of Great Bernera and was told her Australian cattle dog Tarkina was not welcome in a local cafe.
Now she is suing the owners of the cafe – a community-run charity – saying Tarkina is an assistance dog and she is being discriminated against as a disabled person. In a move that has further outraged locals she is getting taxpayers to foot her costs through legal aid.
At her modest housing association bungalow, reached at the end of a road amid wide stretches of moorland and heather, Claire insists it is she who is the victim.
Speaking exclusively to the Daily Mail she describes the campaign against her as a ‘witch hunt’, and says: ‘I’m not going anywhere.
Claire Kellerman, 62, is the adopted daughter of the late M*A*S*H actress Sally Kellerman
‘I live here because I am a songwriter, and have skills in Celtic mystic healing of trauma, and I can help facilitate people’s healing.
‘I have only moved here in peace and to share the joy.’
After a peripatetic early adult life which saw her dabble in opera, train the dogs of Hollywood celebrities including Julie Andrews, and work for a time in land management on the Hawaiian island of Maui, she arrived in the Hebrides convinced she had found her nirvana.
She may have been drawn to Scotland as her father was Scottish, but she says locals were hostile from the outset. ‘I’ve been attacked in church and on the streets. An old lady said, ‘You don’t look disabled’. And then a 93-year-old said, ‘Why would you want to be in a place you’re not welcome?’ And it’s like, I’m brand new here. I really don’t get it. I’m not an a*****e from America, OK, I’m a really caring, loving woman who is being targeted.’
Claire claims she was met with disproportionate anger last summer when she attempted to take Tarkina into the Bernera Community Association cafe in the island’s main settlement of Breaclete. ‘They were screaming at me, ‘Get out! We can’t have dogs in here. It says no dogs allowed on the cafe door’.’
She insists she tried to reason with staff that her dog was an assistance dog and should be allowed in. ‘All I wanted was an apology,’ she says. When none was forthcoming, she raised an action under the Equality Act of 2010.
Her case is now being handled by a small Glasgow-based firm, the Ethnic Minorities Law Centre, which normally deals with ethnic minority and asylum seeker claims, and will be heard at Stornoway Sheriff Court, in Lewis’s capital next year. Locals have a different take on events.
When the Mail approached shopkeepers on Bernera and in Stornoway this week they described a ‘rude’, ‘aggressive and ‘threatening’ woman who has ‘weaponised her dog’ and often reduces staff to tears.
They told us Claire often appears armed with a lawyer’s letter proclaiming her rights, something she doesn’t deny.
One shopkeeper said: ‘I’m just petrified of her, I’m petrified of what she is capable of doing, legally wise. And I think the whole town are. But I don’t want to be bullied like this.’
Claire dismisses her depiction as a bully: ‘The narrative says I’m aggressive, because I am 5ft 10in and I am loud. You know, that feels threatening to someone who’s trying to break the law.’
To further muddy the already murky waters, her lawyers initially sued the wrong company, targeting the similarly named Great Bernera Community Development Trust, which was forced to run up a £7,500 legal bill defending itself from the erroneously issued writ.
Sally Kellerman in pose for Robert Altman’s ‘M*A*S*H’ 1970 as Hot Lips Houlihan
Even though the trust was successful in court, it was unable to recover costs from Claire because she is protected by her legal aid status. Now it, like the Bernera Community Association (BCA), faces ruin. And while it may seem incongruous that someone who grew up in privilege in the Hollywood Hills needs to rely on council housing and legal aid, Claire insists she is not wealthy.
‘My parents were millionaires in the Eighties and Nineties, and then they were poverty stricken for the last 15 years of their lives,’ she claims.
Poverty may also await those she feels have crossed her. Both the community development trust and the BCA have launched appeals for financial help. And while the BCA’s fundraiser has topped £20,000, a source claimed it could need at least £60,000 to meet legal bills if it wins – and double that if it loses.
Local Labour Member of the Scottish Parliament Donald MacKinnon has urged the Scottish Legal Aid Board to review the ‘potentially devastating’ decision to award aid to Claire Kellerman, saying BCA was ‘a small charity doing important work in a rural community in Lewis’.
He added: ‘This absurd case is putting the survival of their organisation at risk.’
The legal aid board insists the application was handled ‘in line with all legal aid rules and guidance’.
Claire, too, is standing firm, saying: ‘No one should be attacked who’s disabled, and I’m protected by law.’
She complains there is no register for assistance dogs in the UK, so no one can tell them apart from pet dogs. ‘A person doesn’t have to look disabled to be disabled,’ she says.
She adds: ‘I have been targeted. I have not weaponised my dog, my dog is there to support me.’
When the case next comes before the courts in February, her disability will inevitably come under scrutiny. She claims it is born of severe childhood trauma and a past full of ‘everyone’s abuse, neglect, abandonment, death, loss of me’.
She says she’s been ‘permanently disabled’ since October 27, 2015, but declined to go into detail, saying there was no need to unlock her ‘entire private closet full of history’.
That closet is as colourful as any biopic. For a start, her birth mother was actually Sally Kellerman’s older sister, Diana, who gave up her daughter when the child was just five.
Her father was a young Scottish academic named Ian Graham, whom Diana had met when both worked for a non-profit think-tank in Malibu, California. But when Diana later revealed she was in a lesbian relationship with a musician called Gloria, she agreed to leave the marriage and not to contact her daughter until she was 18.
In Sally Kellerman’s 2013 memoir, Read My Lips: Stories Of A Hollywood Life, she says of Diana’s extraordinary decision: ‘She was convinced that Claire’s life would be easier, considering the times and the intolerance, if she herself was out of [it].’ In truth the bold move left Claire profoundly lonely.
Sally and Claire attend the ‘For the Love of the Game’ Century City Premiere on September 15, 1999
She tells us: ‘I would sing to the empty couch and pretend my mom was there because she had just left. My dad only had Beatles records, so I would just sing Let It Be, or Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds at the top of my lungs.’
Fresh tragedy struck when her father became ill with Parkinson’s disease and couldn’t look after Claire properly, so Sally Kellerman wrote to her sister Diana (who was living in the South of France) and asked if she could adopt Claire. Diana agreed, as did Ian, who died in 1976 shortly before Claire’s 11th birthday.
Sally acknowledges in the book that it was hard for the teenage Claire, who also felt ‘squeezed out’ when the actress met and married a man 14 years her junior.
‘Loss had defined her young life,’ Sally wrote. ‘Then, to top it all off . . . she got me as the consolation prize. It must have been scary to have grown up with a high-strung, singer-actress aunt-mom.’
Claire was at college and Sally was 52 when she and her husband adopted newborn twins Jack and Hannah, something she hoped ‘would give Claire more of a stable, family life’.
When the Mail contacted Claire’s stepbrother, Jack, in California, he confirmed that their parents ‘took good care’ of all three children, flying them by private jet to skiing holidays in Sun Valley, Idaho, and paying for Claire’s then boyfriend to come along. ‘They were there for all of us, no matter what,’ he said.
It was a cosseted life: ‘She got everything she wanted. My parents always took care of her. They bought her a house.’
Growing up, Jack remembered Claire as ‘very spiritual and into nature, and a health nut’, but her relationship with both her adoptive parents was ‘always rocky’.
He said: ‘I don’t really know why. I don’t know if Claire got jealous of my twin sister and me being adopted as well. She could be very sweet, but we are not close. We don’t speak much.’
He said he hadn’t been in contact with her since she moved to the Hebrides but wasn’t surprised by the row: ‘She’s always been the kind of person who likes to make small issues into big ones. I’m glad she loves her dog, but I don’t think what she’s doing is very cool.’
His sentiments were echoed by Kutira Decosterd, the manager of an eco-retreat on Maui, and who knew Claire when she lived there. She put it bluntly: ‘She was always an outspoken woman and I think she probably still is.’
Publicist Alan Eichler, who managed Sally Kellerman’s career until her death four years ago from heart failure, said: ‘Sally had a way of shutting things out that she didn’t want to deal with, but she never lost her love for Claire.
‘I got the impression Claire is a very mixed-up person.’
It’s a conclusion Claire herself would recognise, although she insists therapy has helped her come to terms with her mother’s abandonment and a series of family deaths, including that of her stepsister, Hannah, from a drug overdose at the age of just 27, and that of her adoptive father.
Claire tells the Mail: ‘I was five. Like I was bonded to this woman, and she just left. Never wrote. Never called. Never postcarded. I was angry for 20 years, but now I see her pain and her trauma through my own lens of my healing and I have nothing but compassion for all of them.’
Whether she can extend that same compassion to the good folk of Great Bernera remains to be seen.
Additional reporting by Barbara McMahon in Los Angeles.
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