RIP Malachy McCourt

 

Malachy McCourt, raconteur of the Irish experience in America, dies at 92

Mr. McCourt’s memoir ‘A Monk Swimming’ picked up where his brother Frank’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book ‘Angela’s Ashes’ left off

The Washington Post

By Michael S. Rosenwald

March 11, 2024

 

Malachy McCourt, a New York raconteur who excelled at playing himself — an Irish bartender with a predilection for the drink — before writing a best-selling memoir that picked up his family’s bleak immigrant story where his brother’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Angela’s Ashes” left off, died March 11 at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 92.

His son Conor confirmed the death but did not provide a specific cause. He added that his father was listening to a recording of “Will Ye Go Lassie Go” by the Chieftains, a traditional Irish folk band, when he died.

In summer 2022, Malachy McCourt entered hospice care but lived longer than his doctors ever imagined and was released that November. He returned to hosting a radio show. “Every day I wake up at 91, I am happy without a coffin over my head,” he told the New York Times.

As an actor, talk show guest and broadcaster, Mr. McCourt was a boisterous and entertaining counterpart to his more dour and literary-minded brother Frank, a high school English teacher whose 1996 memoir about growing up dirt poor in Ireland — after his baby sister and twin brothers died in early childhood — became a publishing phenomenon.

Before “Angela’s Ashes,” Malachy was the only McCourt brother — there were four — not toiling in relative obscurity after arriving in New York by steamship, one by one, beginning in 1949. With red hair and a bushy beard, Mr. McCourt became a popular bartender in an Irish neighborhood along Third Avenue in Manhattan, eventually partnering with an entrepreneurial couple to open a saloon named after him — Malachy’s.

“Third Avenue had a womblike quality,” Mr. McCourt said in a 1998 documentary his son directed. “There was blarney this, and Killarney that and O’that and McThis and the windows just lit up with green neon shamrocks.”

Mr. McCourt drank with customers and charmed them with tales of Ireland. In 1956, he befriended a writer for the “Tonight Show,” who told host Jack Paar that he should have the bartender on to display his Irish wit. He made his first of multiple appearances in 1958. Visibly drunk, according to the New York Times, he told Parr how he avoided paying electricity bills by mailing them back with the word “deceased” stamped on them.

TV commercials for Imperial Margarine and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups followed, along with small roles in sitcoms and movies and guest spots on Merv Griffin’s talk show. His most prominent on-screen role was as a bartender on the ABC soap opera “Ryan’s Hope.” In 1968, he landed a TV interview show on Channel 9 and later a radio show on WMCA, both in New York.

Mr. McCourt tested the patience of producers on both shows. On his Channel 9 program, he booked big-name guests including boxer Muhammad Ali and feminist Betty Friedan, but the station fired him after 10 days following viewer complaints about the show’s fierce criticism of the U.S. role in the Vietnam War.

He lasted longer on WMCA but ultimately was fired by R. Peter Straus, the network’s president who later became director of the Voice of America, the U.S. government-owned international news network. (“You can never trust someone who won’t tell you his first name,” Mr. McCourt said of Straus.)

One of Mr. McCourt’s biggest dust-ups at WMCA involved the Secret Service. In 1973, the agency commandeered a tape of his interview with Arthur Woodstone, the author of “Nixon’s Head,” a book critical of President Richard M. Nixon.

Mr. McCourt was furious at WMCA. “I don’t like the idea of the taking of a tape out of there with my voice,” he told the New York Daily News. “There was not even the courtesy of a call to me by WMCA informing me of what was happening.”

Mr. McCourt responded in a McCourtian way — by calling the Secret Service on the air to ask why its agents took the tape. As soon as he identified himself, the person who answered hung up.

“Some people say I’m vulgar and outrageous,” he told the Daily News. “I am.”

Following the blockbuster success of “Angela’s Ashes,” Hyperion paid Mr. McCourt $650,000 to write “A Monk Swimming,” a title inspired by the author once mishearing ‘‘Blessed art thou amongst women’’ — from the Hail Mary prayer — as ‘‘Blessed art thou, a monk swimming.” The book begins with Mr. McCourt’s 1952 arrival, at age 20, in New York and covers his early years as a dishwasher, longshoreman and, in his words, an “alcoholic tornado.”

“One problem I had with alcohol,” he wrote, “was the fact that, beyond a mild feeling of debilitation, ’twas a rare time I’d experience ‘hangovers,’ as they are called. If you are going to ingest the toxin, then ’tis well after having extracted the benefits of inebriation to dispose of that lethal leftover waste. So, before retiring, I would find a convenient porcelain altar, bend the knees to the floor, and do the reverse of Communion, in that it is better to regurgitate than to receive.’’

The reviews were brutal.

“Most of ‘A Monk Swimming’ is written in such a tone, which I take not to be Irish at all, but an imitation of an American stereotype of Irish,” the novelist Frank Conroy wrote in the New York Times. Carolyn See called the book “a distressing embarrassment” in The Washington Post.

Some critics dismissed Mr. McCourt as a less talented facsimile of his brother and said he was just trying to cash in of the success of “Angela’s Ashes.” “Malachy is the entertainer in the family,” Kirkus Reviews said, “but Frank is the writer.” Malachy McCourt thought it was all a bunch of malarkey. His critics, he told Newsday, “could osculate the royal Irish posterior if they don’t like it.”

“I’ll have a beautiful tour,” he said. “I’ll speak funnily, eloquently. It will be a great love-a-thon.”

He was right.

“A Monk Swimming” spent several months on the Times bestseller list — surpassing “Angela’s Ashes” in the rankings.

Malachy Gerard McCourt was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Sept. 20, 1931, a year after his brother Frank. The children of Irish immigrants, their father, Malachy was an alcoholic who couldn’t find work during the Depression. In 1934, their sister Margaret Mary died shortly after birth, sending their mother, Angela, into deep despair.

The family moved back to Ireland, settling in Limerick, “one of the juiciest slums this side of Bombay,” Frank wrote in “Angela’s Ashes.” Malachy and Frank had four other brothers, but shortly after they arrived in Limerick, two of them — twins named Oliver and Eugene — died amid the squalor of their home. Their father abandoned the family, leaving Angela to take care of the boys.

Frank quit school and moved to New York in 1949, hoping to make enough money to move his family over. In 1952, he sent Malachy $200 to board a boat. The others eventually followed.

“Was there thievery on the docks?” Mr. McCourt wrote in “A Monk Swimming” about his days as a longshoreman. “Hell, yes! We helped ourselves to fine Italian shoes, and there were days we dropped our trousers and wound yards of suit fabric around the torso, so that at quitting time, you’d observe scores of portly males waddling off the pier.”

Mr. McCourt eventually made enough money to rent an apartment on West 81st Street. Settling in as a bartender, his social life flourished. In the late 1950s, he met Linda Wachsman, a model, and they eventually married and had two children. Mr. McCourt drank to excess and acknowledged having affairs. After his wife left him, he trashed their apartment.

“I was going through a very bad period,” he told CNN. “I was turning out like my father. I was being the rowdy drunk, the irresponsible husband and then neglectful father. Drinking to excess and my wife then left me, and so I just plunged into a sort of morass of depression.”

At his lowest point, Mr. McCourt accepted a job — and not a legal one — smuggling gold into India.

In 1985, the same year his father died, Mr. McCourt stopped drinking.

“That was an enormous step,” he told the Globe and Mail newspaper. “I remember things now. When you’re an addict, you stop maturing.”

Mr. McCourt and Frank turned their stories into a two-man musical revue called “A Couple of Blaguards” in which they played themselves. The first act half was about their childhood in Limerick, the second about what happened to them in America. Malachy McCourt also wrote other books, including two more memoirs and a history of the Irish ballad “Danny Boy.”

In 1965, he married Diana Galin. In addition to his wife, of Manhattan, survivors include two children from his first marriage, Siobhan McCourt and Malachy McCourt; two sons from his second marriage, Conor McCourt and Cormac McCourt; a stepdaughter, Nina Galin; nine grandchildren; and a great-grandson.

Late in life, Mr. McCourt recalled driving through a rainstorm in Ireland decades earlier. He spotted an old man walking and picked him up.

“When he got out,” Mr. McCourt told the Times, “he said: 'Thank you sir for your kindness. May you have a happy death.’”

The phrase stuck with him.

‘‘When you think about it, a happy death means you had a happy life,” he said. “And I think I have.”

McCOURT, Malachy (Malachy Gerard McCourt)

Born: 9/20/1931, New York City, New York, U.S.A.

Died: 3/11/2024, Manhattan, New York, U.S.A.

 

Malachy McCourt’s western – actor:

Montana Trap - 1976