How a girl from Dublin stole the heart of a Brat Pack legend
Heart-throb actor Andrew McCarthy
B RAT Pack actor Andrew McCarthy was more than happy to chat to fans after the screening in Galway of a film he had written and directed. But little did he know that one of those fans was about to turn his life upside down.
After a chance meeting with a tall, striking brunette outside the Great Southern Hotel, McCarthy knew instantly that he’d met the love of his life – or, as he puts it in his new book The Longest Way Home, he realised life was about to get complicated.
At the time, in 2004, the star of Pretty In Pink, Mannequin and St Elmo’s Fire was married with a two-year-old son. Yet he couldn’t get Dubliner Dolores Rice out of his head.
Looking back on their whirlwind first few months together – and the six years it took him to actually marry Dolores – McCarthy admits that the phrase ‘commitment-phobic’ could have been invented for him.
‘Oh God, commitment,’ he says, his voice trailing off as he chats to the Irish Mail on Sunday in New York just hours before flying to Ireland to join screenwriter Dolores and their six-year-old daughter Willow at their second home in Dublin. ‘There are still some days when, well, you know...’
When Dolores finally prodded him into finalising a date for the wedding he’d been procrastinating about, McCarthy, now 49, did what few men would have dared to do. He went off on a series of long solitary trips to some of the most remote spots in the world. While sailing along the Amazon, hiking across Patagonia, conquering Kilimanjaro and going way off the tourist track in Costa Rica, McCarthy tried to work out why he couldn’t give himself 100 per cent to the woman he so dearly loved.
His book is subtitled One Man’s Quest For The Courage To Settle Down, and even though he didn’t plan it, the memoir became a love letter to Dolores, a way of trying to explain why he always had one foot out the door. McCarthy first found fame in the Eighties as a member of the fun-loving Brat Pack, along with pals Emilio Estevez, Molly Ringwald, Rob Lowe, Judd Nelson, Demi Moore and Ally Sheedy.
At the height of his Eighties drink and drug excesses, he woke up in Amsterdam without a clue how he got there from Berlin, then chased a cocaine dealer who tried to rip him off down an alleyway.
‘I came home boasting about the benefits of blackout travel,’ he says. But by his 29th birthday he knew he had to sober up and get help for his alcohol addiction – he hasn’t had a drink since.
McCarthy’s love affair with Ireland also began in the midEighties, when he spent three weeks driving around the country with his best friend, Seve. For a while, they returned every year to a tiny family-run hotel in Doolin, Co. Clare.
McCarthy also loved to travel alone and after hiking for 800km along the Camino de Santiago trail across the Pyrenees from the South of France into Spain in the mid-Nineties he decided to try his hand at travel writing. But it wasn’t until 2003 that he actually did anything about it.
‘I met the editor of National Geographic Traveler,’ he says. ‘It took him a year to let me write something.’
In 2004 came the fateful meeting with Dolores at the Great Southern Hotel in Galway. She shook his hand, telling him she’d enjoyed the film he’d written and directed at a local arts festival.
The attraction was instant, he says. He stops short of saying it was love at first sight but he knew immediately that he’d met the woman he wanted to spend his life with. ‘It was a feeling,’ he says. ‘It was something odd, like: “It’s done now, I’ve met you. You don’t look like I thought you would but it’s OK, we’ve met”.’
But knowing only her first name, it took him three weeks to get her email address from the festival director and days more before he plucked up the courage to send her a note.
He kept it brief, politely telling her he had enjoyed meeting her. She didn’t reply for several weeks then, like his email, her note was cordial. But way underneath her name, she had typed the words ‘Who are you?’ It was enough for McCarthy to email a less formal note back.
With an inspired idea, he decided to write his first travel piece on Co. Clare – also giving him the perfect excuse properly to meet up with Dolores for the first time.
‘It was a place I had gone to often since the mid-Eighties, so I knew I could write about it,’ he says. ‘I pestered the editor. I don’t
I had little to do with planning the wedding. I just turned up and I danced
think he trusted me so I told him he didn’t have to pay me if he didn’t like it. He took a chance.’
He persuaded Dolores to meet him for a coffee during his trip. The hour-long meeting at the Old Ground Hotel in Ennis turned into an inseparable four days.
But McCarthy was still married to actress Carol Schneider and their son Sam was just two. They were college sweethearts who had dated off and on for 20 years before marrying in 1999. After he returned home, they attempted therapy but McCarthy’s heart was back in Dublin where Dolores lived.
According to McCarthy, the marriage to Carol was over almost immediately. He blames his failure to fully commit even after their son Sam was born in 2002. Carol also found herself what he describes as a ‘more suitable partner’.
McCarthy admits he rushed headlong into his relationship with Dolores, persuading her to give up her old life to move to Manhattan in 2005. It wasn’t always easy and there were many tears along the way as he struggled with commitment issues.
‘When we first met, dating and things just didn’t happen. It was so sudden, it was done,’ he says. ‘Then after our daughter was born six years ago we went on holiday to Vienna with Dolores’s parents. They babysat while we went out for dinner. We did our first dating, boyfriend and girl-
friend things, in Vienna.’
He proposed on a moonlit Caribbean beach just after the Vienna trip but they both kept putting off the actual wedding. It didn’t help that McCarthy was forever disappearing off on acting jobs or taking solitary travel trips.
‘I enjoy going to remote places, I like to be in a foreign place,’ he says. ‘Dolores will sometimes take off with me but when I’m away she has her own life.’
During McCarthy’s numerous trips, Dolores got on with planning their Dublin wedding in August last year. But, as McCarthy explains, he only arrived at the ceremony by the skin of his teeth. ‘ The wedding was chaos, everything kept falling apart,’ he says, explaining how missing documents like his divorce certificate delayed him several times. ‘Then my son broke his arm, the doctor only cleared him to fly at the last minute. I had very little to do with planning it, I just turned up. I was just there and, yes, I danced.’
The civil wedding was followed by a second ceremony in Dartmouth Square in Dublin with 100 guests, a picnic and céilí dancing. In the run-up to their wedding, McCarthy had started pulling together his notes to write his book. ‘Someone said the book was a love letter to Dolores and I guess it is,’ he says. ‘Writing helped me explain things. She was fine with it, she is much less private than me – she is just so Irish.’ The book isn’t just a love letter to Dolores, McCarthy clearly adores her parents Colm and Margot and her many relatives and friends. ‘Like it or not you get suckered in with these Irish families,’ he says. ‘I’m from a typical New Jersey family, we’re not like that, there are more boundaries. Then I was walloped into the middle of her people, you just have to surrender.’
The trip to Clare during which he first spent time with Dolores changed not only his personal life but also his professional standing. After seeing his words in print, he started churning out travel pieces for any magazine or newspaper that would commission him.
He still appears in the occasional indie film, has directed episodes of Gossip Girl and has regular slots on US TV series. But he’s happiest seeing his byline on long feature articles.
Dolores, who attended and then taught at University College Dublin, has her own writing career. She wrote Faithfull, a screenplay based on a book by singer Marianne Faithfull, and The Whole Of The Moon for Irish director Jim Sheridan and has staged two off-Broadway plays.
‘She is writer in residence at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center,’ says McCarthy, proudly. ‘She’s a screenwriter and a novelist. Her first book should be published soon.’
McCarthy plans to spend some family time at their Dublin cottage before hitting the road again. ‘I am going to Darjeeling in India to find the perfect cup of tea, although I could probably find that in Dublin,’ he says. ‘Then I am going to Brazil. I try not to have a bucket list but I’d like to go to Burma before McDonald’s gets there.
‘The children travel with me a lot now. We’re also backwards and forwards to Ireland – the children both love their grandparents and cousins. They have embraced Irish family life.’
He is intrigued to learn that his Brat Pack buddy Estevez and father Martin Sheen tracked their Irish roots for the TV programme Who Do You Think You Are? It’s something McCarthy would love to do. He knows his ancestors were from Clare, but says: ‘My aunt tried to trace it, she went to a local church but only went as far back as when they got on the boat to America.
‘The books were handwritten, the priest was taking down names, sometimes they were misspelled. So I’d love to have a go. Any excuse to get back to Co. Clare.’