An Irish Everyman

Malachy McCourt, author, entertainer and former man about town, came to America and made good, mostly by being the witty embodiment of old stereotypes. Nearing 70, he's kept the wit but not the drink.

By JOHN FLEMING

© St. Petersburg Times, published May 10, 2001

Malachy McCourt has some advice on how to interpret an Irish brogue.

"You are about to be grievously insulted when an Irish person's brogue deepens. So if you can't understand what they're saying, you are being insulted."

Even over the phone from New York, McCourt is a font of witty remarks on all things Irish. For almost half a century, as bartender and actor, talk radio host and TV talk show guest, raconteur and reprobate, he has been entertaining people with stories from his Irish youth.

His brother, Frank, also has the Irish storyteller's gift, putting it to use in the classroom as a New York high school teacher for many years. Then, with his 1996 memoir Angela's Ashes, Frank brought his stories of life in Limerick to a vast audience, winning the Pulitzer Prize for literature and spending more than 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

Malachy followed with a pair of memoirs of his own, A Monk Swimming and Singing My Him Song. Frank wrote 'Tis, a followup to Angela's Ashes.

Before the memoirs, there was A Couple of Blaguards, a play that the brothers McCourt concocted "after an hilarious evening of recounting our lives at a family gathering," Malachy writes in Singing My Him Song. They performed the play themselves, with the premiere taking place in a New York pub with a theater upstairs in 1977.

"Over the years, we did it many, many times," Malachy said. "It just evolved by itself and had its own life, with the result now that other people are doing it."

Howard Platt and Michael Judd, both veteran performers of A Couple of Blaguards, star in a production, directed by Judd, that opens Friday at American Stage in St. Petersburg.

"A Couple of Blaguards is a simple show," Malachy said. "It's the two of us recalling the characters in Limerick, like the hell-fire and brimstone preacher, who reviled Hollywood and how he was not going to preside over the 'Californication' of Limerick; the mayor of Limerick, the greatest malapropist of all time, who promised to put shoes on all the poor footless children of Limerick; the gossipy women going to wakes, and so forth."

When the McCourts first performed the play, their mother, Angela, was still alive, and she came to see it.

"She was outraged because of this terrible disease that afflicts so many Irish people over here: respectability," he said. "She didn't think we should be bringing out the fact that we lived in these horrendous surroundings in a squalid slum, and there was a lavatory out the door for 16 families.

"Anyway, she voiced her opinion from the audience one night. 'It wasn't that way at all,' she said. 'It's all a pack of lies.' People thought it was part of the show. So I said to her, 'Come on up and tell us your side of the story.' 'I will not,' she said. 'I wouldn't be seen on the stage with the likes of ye. I have a good name to maintain.' And sat herself down."

Malachy McCourt was born in Brooklyn, but the family moved back to Ireland when he was 3. He returned to the United States when he was 20.

"I arrived on the good ship America," he said. "It was June 17, 1952, and I got off that ship and the temperature was 97 degrees. I was wearing a tweed jacket and a flannel shirt and tie, twill trousers and wool socks and heavy shoes. I thought I was going to die, it was so hot. Still, coming up the harbor, the Statue of Liberty standing there, the Manhattan skyline -- the wonder of it all leaves you sort of speechless. Everybody should come in that way, I think."

McCourt started out working as a stevedore on the Brooklyn docks, but through charm and hustle and good fortune he soon became something of a New York character.

He was a regular on Jack Paar's Tonight Show, opened the first singles bar in Manhattan, acted with the Irish Players Company, played an affable Irish barman on the soap opera Ryan's Hope, had his own radio and TV shows. He hung out with celebrities like actor Richard Harris, also from Limerick but from the posh part of town.

In a way, McCourt was a professional Irishman, celebrated for his capacity to live up to stereotypes of using the language and prodigious boozing. He still has a way with words, but he gave up drinking in 1985.

"It's a funny thing about the Irish and language," he said. "If an Englishman speaks well, he's eloquent. If an Irish person speaks well, it's, 'Oh, he's got the gift of the gab' or 'He kissed the Blarney stone.' There's always this pejorative thing about our way of expressing ourselves. It's not taken seriously."

There is an undeniable truth to the cliches about the Irish and language, with the country's rich literary legacy, from Yeats to Shaw to Joyce to Beckett. McCourt thinks the colonial relationship of the Irish toward the English provides an explanation.

"We had nothing else to do but take the language of the oppressor," he said. "We took the language of the oppressor and turned it to sorcery. Any oppressed people has to be careful about what they say in front of the oppressor, so you either speak in code or use 100 words where one would do. That confuses your oppressor."

A Monk Swimming, his first memoir, covers the 1950s and '60s in a bawdy, unbridled account of highs (holding court at his popular saloon, Malachy's) and lows (a spell in New York's Tombs jail). Much of the time, he was bombed.

"I was one of those people who never appeared to be drunk, just ebullient and outgoing and all of that," he said. "But part of it was that you don't want people to know you, and one way of keeping people away is by adopting another persona."

He thinks the Irish, for all their famed extroversion, are an inward-looking people.

"You never see the palms of Irish hands. All other people -- Jews and Italians and Russians -- they wave and gesticulate. But Irish hands are always held in toward the body. We're not really an outgoing people. (Daniel Patrick) Moynihan said it well. He said there's no use being Irish if you don't know the world is eventually going to break your heart."

Singing My Him Song reflects a chastened McCourt, who has embraced a 12-step recovery program for his alcoholism.

"I drank, I sank, I'm here," he said. "It was a very strange thing to step off a ship, this guttersnipe from the slums of Limerick, and then all sorts of extraordinary things happened to me, good and bad. I had this almost spiritual belief in America. All the dreams I ever had came true. I'll be 70 in September, if I live that long, a day at a time, and I'm sober."

At a glance

A Couple of Blaguards by Frank and Malachy McCourt opens Friday and runs through June 3 at American Stage in St. Petersburg. Tickets: $20-$28. (727) 823-7529.

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