AMERICA AT LARGE:The recent death of Frank McCourt, author of 'Angela's Ashes'rekindles memories of a friendship that lasted for more than 40 years, writes GEORGE KIMBALL
IN THE British edition of my boxing book Four Kings, a quote from Frank McCourt is displayed on the cover. I was signing copies in a London bookshop the morning after I learned of Frank's death, and each time I picked one up and saw his name it seemed to rekindle another memory from a friendship that went back more than 40 years.
I didn’t know the melanoma he’d been battling for the past four years had returned until he had to cancel his scheduled participation in a Bloomsday celebration, where he was to have read at a Tribeca bookstore with Pete Hamill and Colum McCann last month. I sent him an e-mail that week, catching him up on my recent trip to Ireland, and noting that I’d heard he had reapplied for admission to our club.
“Yeah,” came his reply. “I’m back in the club. I was doing my warbling on a cruise ship and had a seizure in the brain area. It happened in the Pacific. I like to call it ‘My Seizure in Polynesia’.”
In The Last Great Saloon, Frederick Exley described the Lion's Head of the late 1960s as a haven "for Irish intellectuals and Jewish drunks" and a man who couldn't hold his own on the subjects of baseball and boxing as well as politics and literature was inevitably going to be frozen out of a lot of lively conversations, and Frank was as well-versed on batting averages and the history of the heavyweight championship as he was on Ulysses. Although he kept company with a lot us who did back then, Frank never wrote about sports himself, although, once he became, at the age of 66, a published novelist and qualified for membership in the Rock Bottom Remainders, he did play (harmonica) in the celebrity band that included at least two sportswriters – Mitch Albom and Roy Blount.
The Lion’s Head clientele also included Malachy McCourt. Malachy was a sometime actor and radio personality, bon vivant and raconteur, but essentially one of those people New Yorkers are wont to describe as “famous for being famous”. Frank was a schoolteacher, famous only for being Malachy’s brother, and despite his ready wit and erudite knowledge of literature, there was never the slightest implication that he harboured designs on writing.
We’d kept in touch after I left New York. In the early 1980s Frank came to visit in Boston, bringing along his 10-year-old daughter Maggie and one of her school mates for a lost weekend that roughly coincided with, and may well have precipitated, the dissolution of his first marriage. Even today the details are somewhat sketchy, but the outing to Nantasket Beach wound up with the two of us planted on a couple of bar stools for the day while Maggie and her friend went through a small fortune at the adjacent amusement park.
When the girls periodically presented themselves at the pub asking if it was time to leave yet, one of us would peel off another $20 bill, send them back to the amusement park, and order another pint.
In the 1980s Frank and Malachy had teamed up for a two-man show called A Couple of Blaggards at the Irish Arts Center in New York. A pastiche of boyhood reminiscences, the play was so well received they periodically took it on the road. I remember going to a performance in Chicago on an off-night during a Red Sox road trip, and at least a couple of runs in Boston. Then in the summer of 1986 I was in Limerick and noticed a poster advertising that A Couple of Blaggards would open at the Belltable Arts Centre that evening.
I wandered over to the Belltable, where the rehearsal had just concluded. Accompanied by the director, Frank and I headed off to South’s, a pub he had favoured in his Limerick days and where he hoped he might meet an old friend or two, even though the director, a Limerick native, warned him that “a lot of the lads stopped going there, ever since they put in a ladies’ toilet”.
Now at this point Frank and Malachy had probably performed Blaggards close to 100 times in public, but, uncertain of the reception the material might receive, Frank was decidedly nervous about doing it before an audience that included his childhood friends and neighbours. There were, I believe, allusions to the response of the patrons the night The Plough and the Stars opened at the Abbey, which gave me pause to wonder: Did Irish audiences back then as a matter of course bring rotten fruit along to the theatre, just in case they didn’t like the play?
As it turned out, Frank had worried for naught. The Limerick audience that night appeared to enjoy the show every bit as much as those elsewhere had, and the run was incident-free. It wasn’t until eight years later, when Angela’s Ashes was published, that the begrudgers started coming out of the woodwork.
Even though some of them had to be the same people that laughed right along with everybody else when they'd seen their forebears lampooned on stage, they didn't like it much when both the president of the United States and the world heavyweight champion started quoting from Angela's Ashes. There was something about the permanence of the book and its bleak subject matter that set them off.
Before his celebrated visit to Southill 10 years ago, George Foreman made it a point to read Frank's book and Bill Clinton reported that he had been deeply moved. But in certain parts of Limerick, attacking Angela's Ashesbecame a cottage industry. One of the more outspoken defenders of the local honour explained to his readers that the Pulitzer Prize was actually "a minor American award" of little importance.
The first hint Frank was up to something may have come in the early 1990s when he confided in a few friends that he was attempting to incorporate the material from A Couple of Blaggards into a screenplay. Then on a 1996 visit to New York a friend asked if I’d read Frank’s book yet. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Frank McCourt wrote a book?”
And a splendid book it was, though Frank was every bit as surprised by how successful it became as the rest of us were that he'd written it at all. Angela's Ashes shot to the top of the New York Timesbest-seller list, and Frank was on every television talk-show in the country. Within a year he'd won the Pulitzer Prize and been invited to dinner at the White House.
Although we lived in the same New York neighbourhood, Frank and Ellen (on third try he had finally made a good marriage) spent most of their time at their “other” house in Connecticut, so we saw one another only sporadically in recent years – as often as not when another of the old Lion’s Head gang had died. Then the news came that Frank’s cancer had returned.
“You do your boxing anthology, I’ll do one on Body Betrayal, from Scarlet fever to typhoid to melanoma,” he’d written me in that last note. “I’ve had this melanoma for over four years. (No, I’m not competing with you!) Three surgeries, chemo, radiation. Hell, you know this stuff.”
He went on to describe having recently re-established contact with an old mutual friend for the first time in 10 years: “He’d been pissed off at me, but decided to forgive and forget when he saw in the paper that I was preparing to meet my maker.”
I was in Scotland on Sunday, shortly after the Open play-off ended, when my wife got word to me Frank was near the end and might not last the night. The next day I phoned Malachy, but got only an answering machine, and e-mailed Hamill asking for an update. It wasn’t until I got to London Monday evening that I learned Frank had died. In that last e-mail, a month ago this morning, Frank had promised “We’ll have that cuppa coffee. You have your Lucky Strikes. On second thoughts,” he added, “I’ll have a drink.”
