McCourt, raconteur of Irish experience, 92
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, 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, 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,” 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.”
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 onscreen role was as a bartender on the ABC soap opera “Ryan’s Hope.”
Following the blockbuster success of “Angela’s Ashes,” Hyperion paid McCourt $650,000 to write “A Monk Swimming.” The book begins with 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.”
“A Monk Swimming” spent several months on the Times bestseller list — surpassing “Angela’s Ashes” in the rankings.