Singing My Him Song
a synopsis from Harpercollins Publishers
October 2000

In Singing My Him Song, Malachy McCourt's remarkable and entertaining sequel to his New York Times bestselling book, A Monk Swimming, McCourt invites readers along as he journeys through the next 37 years. Perceptively and skillfully weaving together the highs and lows of his adult life with newly shared memories of his childhood in Ireland, McCourt survived divorce and slowly climbed from the depths of his numbing alcoholic haze to sobriety. Along the way he rubbed elbows with the famous and infamous, discovered a talent for acting, met (and nearly lost) the love of his life, and summoned all his energy to battle prostate cancer. A surprisingly bold story of redemption that could easily have been one of self-destruction, McCourt captures the moment he reached the brink and chose life, and embraced forgiveness—both for himself and his family.

In Singing My Him Song, McCourt's distinctive voice rings with his familiar intonations as he was plugging away at his day to day grind. Brooding over his profession as a barkeep—first during the free-love and anti-war years of the 60s in the Hamptons of Long Island, and later as proprietor of several famous eponymous establishments in Manhattan during the disco days of the 1970s—a robber's loaded gun placed at this "recovering Catholic's" head (and an impending second marriage to the love of his life, Diana) convinced Malachy to find his fortune elsewhere.

Auditioning for commercials, McCourt discovered a natural talent for acting, and a perfect avenue to gather entertaining material. Through long-time friend Richard Harris, who grew up in Limerick with the McCourts, Malachy soon garnered his first film roll in The Molly Maguires, which also featured Sean Connery. Sly storytellers and pranksters all, McCourt reveals how during production, Connery (who insisted on driving himself to the set) showed up one day with his windshield smashed, loudly complaining about vandals and "if he caught whoever it was they were going to have their asses kicked good and proper." After Connery's young son arrived for lunch with his Dad, McCourt shares how the child "piped up in his English accent, "Daddy, Mummy was so very angry to break your window in your car. Why did she do that?" Sean whisked the lad away so fast we never heard the rest of the story."

Harris, too, would become the subject of a terrific yarn. Not long after he had left McCourt in jail overnight (the author was arrested for trespassing at Harris' pool after a midnight swim, and the actor thought it was amusing to let McCourt stay the night behind bars), a visit by Harris to New York provided Malachy with an opportunity for revenge. As Harris showered in his hotel suite, and McCourt waited for him, he pretended he was Harris on the telephone and allowed the concierge to let 20 of Harris' fans upstairs and into the room for autographs and picture-taking. "In the bathroom, the star turned singer had launched into the song "How to Handle a Woman," from Camelot. When the bell rang and I opened the door, Harris warbling in the background, I was faced with about an acre of wide eyes and acne," the author relates. Feigning another appointment, McCourt exited the room, leaving Harris singing in the shower. "When Harris regained his sense of humor and resumed speaking to me, he told me that he'd walked out of the bathroom bollox naked to discover a considerable number of the citizens of New York were comfortably ensconced in his hotel room."

This self-proclaimed "world-champion talker and self-righteous Irishman," with his inborn gift for regaling anyone who'd listen with a colorful story and political opinions, also cobbled together a successful radio career and a modestly successful television talk show stint. Singing My Him Song reveals that early in his career, while looking for a house in California, McCourt and his wife came face to face with the Manson family. While surveying Will Rogers' home, which had been rented by one of the Beach Boys who left a bunch of squatters in it, the McCourts encountered a dozen young people inside. "Seated at the edge of the pool, his feet dangling, was a thin, smallish, bearded young man," says McCourt, also recalling that the man was casting "a savage, hate-filled glare" their way. Later, "Diana told me that she had never in her life felt such malevolence before, and that she felt the people in that house were a threat to the baby she was carrying. I, being full of bravado, was going to boot them all out," McCourt adds, "but was glad I hadn't tried."

After several roles in television, including the soap opera Ryan's Hope, and a few more films, McCourt would eventually appear on Broadway in Mass Appeal, and co-write and act in A Couple of Blaguards, a long-running and popular autobiographical play with his older brother, Frank. Using his connections and persistence, he would also have a pivotal role in the successful campaign which would shut down the brutal Willowbrook State School, the place where Diana's daughter Nina briefly lived.

But at the heart of this intriguing life is McCourt's inner battle with himself and his potentially devastating addiction to the bottle. In the 1960s, McCourt says, "my own mind was my own worst enemy as it presented the world to me as a mocking, dangerous and demanding place." The author came to recognize that he was always up against the obvious - his unwillingness to accept that his early physical and emotional poverty caused him to distrust and shut down those growing closer to him - and was long powerless to admit his true feelings.

For the first time, an emotional McCourt shares some of the very real, painful, moments, of his early life. He relates that as a young boy, he told his mother, Angela, he loved her, "and she reacted as if I'd just slapped her in the face, and then she laughed at me." McCourt says that is was a very long time before he repeated that sentiment - and meant it. "I came to realize," he adds, "because I'd learned that whomever you love will inevitably leave you, and whatever you love will be taken away...it was best not to get too attached."

Even as he charmingly recounts his constant amazement at his increasing professional and personal successes—including his own talk show on WMCA Radio, interviews with, among others, Betty Friedan, Jonathan Winters, and Muhammad Ali, regular stints on the David Susskind Program and Merv Griffin Show, and a new baby with Diana - McCourt was unable to earn a steady income, or control his drinking, overreactions, and carousing. He says he, "was always on the alert for the slight or the put-down, the sneer at the Irish people, the witless mocking of my accent. At the same time, it was convenient for me to play the part of the wild Irishman, the fellow quick with the tongue and just as quick with the fists, and quick to romance the women."

In Singing My Him Song, McCourt honestly discusses his nagging depression ("the little black demons that used my soul as a venue for their daily outings"), fueled both by alcohol and drugs, and later from a rare imbalance in his liver (after he quit drinking). Yet he relates how he returned to the bottle again and again, even after his eldest son nearly died from a gunshot sustained in a street robbery, and even when he later banished his son from his life, a decision which now makes him "cringe with embarrassment and regret," and has long since been reconciled.

It was while in Ireland, for the opening of A Couple of Blaguards, that Malachy realized that Irish pubs, "have always held a fascination for me.... They were the places that claimed my father's time and money, and those of his friends." As the barrier between himself and his feelings slowly fell away, he began to come to terms with his past and to acknowledge his pain for the first time.

By constantly looking for his father in pubs the world over, Malachy finally admits that he recognized that he too "would lose himself" to drink. "All I found were lonely gray men staring ahead and nursing a pint or porter," he says, "which gave them the right to sit or stand at the bar until it was time to shuffle off to a lonely and lonesome bed. There was no comfort for me in those places, as the fear grew in me that I would finish my days a graying specter of depressed humanity, encased in isolation, nodding to a barman for a refill."

Chronicling his difficult "waking up" from his alcohol fueled numbness while he was in Limerick, "I couldn't seem to clean out the rage and bitterness and depression that were clogging my soul and spirit," he says. He divulges other painful memories, like the one time, at age 6, when his grandmother promised he could go on an all-day excursion to Galway. After months of planning - "every night for two months I dreamt of the sea and jumping into it" - they were on the way to the train, and his grandmother saw a cousin sitting around. Without hesitation, she told Malachy to go home. "I looked around, thinking she had seen a dog behind me, but there was no dog and she was talking to me. I looked to my mother for some sign that she wouldn't let this awful thing happen to me, but she looked away and shrugged helplessly. They walked off toward the railway station and left me standing alone at the top of the hill with a lump so big in my throat I couldn't even sob."

And McCourt shares a shocking revelation. "It was this time ... that memories of being sexually molested came flooding back. ... I couldn't ignore the feelings anymore, feelings about myself, and those men, and all the other adults who let things happen." Flooded with thoughts and feelings he had long dismissed and suppressed, McCourt returned to the States feeling poorly, overweight, a heavy smoker and drinker.

He "settled down to address the weight problem" first, and joined Overeater's Anonymous (because it was free). Through learning OA's 12 Steps—"people said to just substitute food for alcohol when I read the steps"—it became impossible for McCourt "not to notice that the steps said that alcohol was a prime culprit in the destruction of people's lives." But when "the compulsion, the obsession, to drink began to leave my life," the author says, "I sometimes wondered whey I ever did it at all, considering that in sobriety and in full possession of my faculties, I was perfectly capable of being absolutely cuckoo on my own."

Although sobriety allowed him to connect with—and forgive—his estranged father before he died (he had somehow been able to forge a better relationship with his difficult mother before she died several years earlier, as well) he continued having a hard time opening up to his wife and four children (his fifth child, his stepdaughter, Nina, remains institutionalized to this day). Singing My Him Song discloses how, well along his road to a clean life, Malachy's wife discovered him in a lie—about money. She threw him out and, lodging on friends' floors and couches, McCourt turned to welfare for survival.

Finding a bright spot in even the darkest moment, McCourt recounts how those in the welfare office recognized him as the regular character from the soap opera Ryan's Hope. "There were more forms to fill in, and, as I was doing that, pieces of paper were shoved in front of me for my autograph: a bizarre proceeding, signing for welfare while signing autographs." As sobriety continued to come to his aid, "I was able to sit down and write [Diana] a letter, apologizing for my rotten behavior," says the author. "Going on the principle that it's never too late to change, I decided to court her as if we had just met."

At the same time his marriage was mending, and as he discovered the profound joy that he could be counted on—and come through—McCourt reveals his shock as he faced prostate cancer. "I just wanted a chance to enjoy myself and to put things right," says the author upon hearing his diagnosis in 1998. "I railed at the injustice of it all.... But getting sober did not mean I suddenly became a haloed saint, or that all the defects took a hike into the wilderness, never to be seen again. Not bloody likely! You can take the brandy out of the fruitcake, but you still have fruitcake. Getting sober has allowed me to work on those defects and, bit by bit, to get better," he concludes.

Filled with entertaining anecdotes of 40 years of a public life, Singing My Him Song is also a realistic exploration of a person who has come full circle. By sharing how he broke the patterns of destruction and dysfunction that were sure to spell an early end, Malachy McCourt steps into a new role as a real-life, blood-and-guts survivor.