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
