The news last summer hit his friends like a punch in the gut: Malachy McCourt had entered hospice care. It wasn’t a complete surprise. McCourt was about to turn 91, and he was once known as much for his drinking as for his status as a public raconteur. He was part of a lineage that includes Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill, bar stool champions of the little guy and dispensers of hard-earned wisdom.
But very soon, it seemed, the last of this breed would leave the earth. Throughout his long and colourful career, McCourt suffered many misfortunes but always bounced back. This time he would not, and another chapter in New York history would be closed.
Then on November 9th came another not-quite shock: McCourt had been kicked out of hospice for not dying quickly enough.
“Who but Malachy McCourt could outrun the hospice?” says Colum McCann, the Irish-born novelist of Let the Great World Spin, who now lives in New York and has known McCourt for more than 20 years. “Malachy was provocative before it was fashionable, using his platform to speak out about social injustice. Even in his 90s, he supports young talent, especially in the Irish-American community. He has helped us uncover what it means to be an immigrant away from home, how one exists in new space, always pushing the edge.”
Actor Liam Neeson also shares much of McCann’s warm sentiments. “Malachy has always reminded me of a type of Merlin,” Neeson says, “a wise one with a delicious sense of humour.”
I, too, have been privileged to know Malachy McCourt for quite some time. His more famous brother Frank – who wrote the best-seller about their childhood, Angela’s Ashes – taught creative writing at Stuyvesant High School from 1972 to 1987. I took his class in 1981, when I was 15. He became my mentor, and I came to know the McCourt clan. I volunteered to produce two microbudget documentaries for Conor McCourt, Malachy’s son, during the mid-1990s. Malachy transformed my mother’s sombre Jewish funeral service into a lively Irish wake – at her request.
When I heard he was dying, I asked if he was up for an “exit interview”. He laughed and assured me he was eager to beat his obit. “But hurry up, love,” he warned. He was worried he might not see another St Patrick’s Day.
Every day I wake up at 91, I am happy without a coffin over my head
— Malachy McCourt
I soon found myself in McCourt’s Upper West Side livingroom. He sat in the electric wheelchair he has needed since 2021, surrounded by books and keepsakes, including a poster from his 2006 Green Party run for New York governor with his long-shot slogan: “Don’t Waste Your Vote, Give It to Me.”
The once plump and cheerful New York storyteller is now gaunt and cheerful. He explains he had a heart condition, skin and prostate cancer, and muscular degeneration. “I was doing okay at first,” McCourt says, “before I slipped and broke my leg on my way to bed.”
In his soft brogue, he played the hits, starting with his birth in Brooklyn in 1931, the second son of Irish immigrants. After his baby sister’s crib death, the grieving family returned to Ireland on a steamboat. Just three-years-old, Malachy roamed the decks, singing the song Paddy Reilly for bread and jam.
This time in Ireland is well documented in Angela’s Ashes. The family of six slept in one cramped room. Frank and Malachy, the oldest boys, shared a bed with their brothers, twins who later died six months apart at age four. The fragile mother, Angela, entered a catatonic state, smoking Woodbines and staring blankly into the fire, lost in grief.
Years later, on a rare sunny day in Limerick in 1952, Malachy, then 20, kissed his mother goodbye. Frank had returned to the US first and sent his brother the $200 liner fare. Malachy expected to see him when he arrived at the docks, but Frank had already joined the US army and been shipped to Germany. A friend Malachy met on the boat helped him get a job on Welfare Island (which was later renamed Roosevelt Island) as a dishwasher and cleaner for $35 a week. This was enormous money in his mind; it was enough to rent a furnished room in Manhattan on Third Avenue and 58th Street.
“Soon after I arrived,” McCourt tells me, “I discovered that my literary hero, PG Wodehouse, was listed at 1000 Park Ave in the Manhattan directory. So I rang him. And he said, ‘Wodehouse!’ And I said, ‘McCourt!’ And he replied, ‘Yes, sir, what can I do for you?’ And I replied, ‘Yes, sir, you brightened my life and my brothers’ lives in Ireland with your writing.’ He replied, ‘Very good.’ I took that as a positive and said, ‘I’d love to meet you sometime.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I am rather busy, but thank you for asking.’”
Third Avenue in Manhattan in that era was crowded with Irish bars with neon shamrocks. It was in a pub conversation with a New York rugby pal that McCourt scored a free summer share on Fire Island, where he sold Bibles on the beach for extra cash. During the summer of 1956, he met a couple of young writers for The Tonight Show, who thought that the new host, Jack Paar, would love the way this young Irishman could tell a story.
It still shames me. I was a mule
— Malachy McCourt
In the spring of 1958, McCourt made his debut on The Tonight Show. Despite being visibly intoxicated, he captivated Paar with a wild tale about how he avoided paying the electric company by sending his bills back after stamping them with the word “deceased”, sparking a national trend and his public career.
Following his TV appearances, an entrepreneurial couple offered McCourt a partnership in a pub on 63rd Street and Third Avenue as long as he worked behind the bar. Malachy’s Pub opened May 12th, 1958. When White Rock Beverages launched a national ad campaign featuring McCourt as “America’s most famous bartender,” celebrities like Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton started showing up.
At this time, ostensibly to discourage prostitution, women were prohibited from sitting alone at a bar. McCourt defied convention by welcoming anyone to sit and chat, inadvertently creating what some say was the first singles bar in New York. It was especially popular with the women from the ladies-only Hotel Barbizon across the street; they would sneak out after curfew, the story goes, wearing only raincoats – with nothing underneath.
One day at Malachy’s, Linda Wachsman, a striking model who went by the name Linda Claire, caught his eye from across the bar. They soon married and had a daughter, Siobhán, in 1959, and a son, Malachy Jr, a year later. However, McCourt’s repeated infidelities and heavy drinking led to their separation in 1961.
Here, McCourt pauses his monologue and grimaces. “It still shames me,” he says. “I was a mule.”
In October 1963, after his excessive drinking led to him being fired from the bar that bore his name, he stole back into his apartment – Linda had kicked him out – and drunkenly threatened to kidnap their children. He was arrested and held overnight on $1,000 bail. Even after his release, he spiralled further out of control; after meeting a man in an uptown bar with a shady scheme, he agreed to smuggle gold to India, where it sold for twice as much as in the West. He didn’t care if he was caught, he recalls, risking years in prison.
By the end of that tumultuous year, McCourt was the part-owner of a new pub called Himself. He remarried in 1965, to a woman named Diana Galin, and was eager to leave the bar scene after he and his customers were held hostage during a robbery. (Two days later, he says, the same robbers killed another bartender in the neighbourhood.)
The twins died and my father deserted us in Limerick. So when Frank got accolades and celebrity treatment, I felt like he earned it all
— Malachy McCourt
McCourt had been making occasional TV appearances, and he jumped at the chance to host a talkshow, Sound Off With Malachy McCourt, on Channel 9 in New York. His first show, on September 9th, 1968, featured actors Richard Harris and Sean Connery. The next guests included Muhammad Ali, who had refused to fight in Vietnam, feminist writer Betty Friedan and the Columbia University students who had protested by barricading themselves in their dean’s office. After a deluge of angry calls to the station’s owner, Sound Off was cancelled 10 days after it went on the air.
McCourt landed a couple of commercials (Imperial Margarine and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups), and he was nearly cast as Father Mulcahy in Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H, but he could not quite make it as a performer.
Then, in the 1970s, his luck turned. After scoring a radio slot on WMCA, McCourt also gained new fame as Kevin the bartender on ABC’s soap opera Ryan’s Hope. By the end of the decade, he and his brother Frank started performing A Couple of Blaguards, a storytelling show about their bumpy lives. The show became a modest hit at the Village Gate downtown in New York. Stuyvesant High School hosted a special presentation for students when I was a junior.
When I met him in the 1980s, his energy was practically perpetual, but at this point in the conversation, all the talking and reminiscing seems to have tired him out, and he needs a break.
Conor McCourt comes by to update his father on his St Patrick’s schedule. He was to march (by wheelchair) during St Pat’s For All, an inclusive alternative to the traditional Fifth Avenue parade. He and other Irish-American dignitaries would have breakfast with mayor Eric Adams at Gracie Mansion.
Conor recalls his dad’s role in The Dain Curse, a 1970s miniseries. His father had to shave off his trademark red beard for the part, and Conor and his younger brother, Cormac, did not recognise him at the door. When they realised who he was, they fell down laughing and called, “Mom! Dad has a visitor!” McCourt grins at the memory. “And she introduced herself as Mrs McCourt before the shock registered,” he adds.
Bad habits don’t change with a fresh shave. It wasn’t until the death of his estranged, alcoholic father in 1985 that McCourt stopped drinking.
But the biggest change would come a decade later, when Angela’s Ashes came out. There was a 25,000 first printing for his brother’s book, and expectations were modest. It was a runaway best-seller and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997. The once-anonymous Frank McCourt was now lionised by presidents and movie stars.
“The twins died and my father deserted us in Limerick,” McCourt recalls.
“So when Frank got accolades and celebrity treatment, I felt like he earned it all because, as a child, my big brother worked and earned money and gave it all to Angela, which allowed us to eat.” Long the star in the family, Malachy was now known as “Frank’s brother”.
[ Malachy McCourt: ‘Frank wouldn’t be happy unless he was miserable’Opens in new window ]
“Which stung,” he says. “But just a bit.” In 1998, Malachy’s own memoir, A Monk Swimming, hit the best-seller list, reducing residual jealousy.
Frank died in 2009, and then his two youngest brothers, Mike and Alphie, died shortly after.
“Every day I wake up at 91, I am happy without a coffin over my head,” he says. “I don’t know where I’m going, but I do know from whence I came. I’m a New Yorker, born, half-bred and bred, who outlived my brothers and closest friends.” He was grateful, he adds, for the companionship of his wife Diana, whom he describes as his “great love.”
McCourt tries to maintain his public life, and now that he’s no longer in hospice, he has resumed his role as a co-host of a Sunday morning radio show on WBAI.
In early March, he was invited to attend opening night of Craic Fest, an Irish film and music festival that was celebrating its 25th year in New York. The movie showing that night was a documentary about Richard Harris. Introducing the film was Irish filmmaker Jim Sheridan (who once cast McCourt in The Field, a 1990 film starring Harris).
[ The final indignity of Frank McCourt’s ‘shiftless alcoholic father’Opens in new window ]
Just as the lights were about to dim, McCourt wheeled himself into great applause, with Siobhán, Conor and two of his nine grandchildren following him. Sheridan’s face glowed with pride and relief. “It wouldn’t be a party,” he announced, “without Malachy McCourt.” – This article originally appeared in The New York Times
