How bad a boozer was Brendan Behan? Bad enough to get himself banned from both the St. Patrick’s Day Parade and the Bristol Hotel, where he ran naked through the lobby. So bad that even Behan — author of the best seller “Borstal Boy” and “Brendan Behan’s New York” — called himself “a drinker with a writing problem.”
Now, decades after his death in 1964 at age 41, comes “Brendan at the Chelsea,” about 24 hours of his stay in the last New York hotel that would have him.
Written by Behan’s niece Janet, the play is a labor of love for her and her star and director, Adrian Dunbar, 55, who’s been “living with Brendan” for the last seven years.
“It’s just great to be here,” the Irish actor says, sinking into a red banquette at Sardi’s. It was at Sardi’s that Behan’s admirers — Lauren Bacall, Jackie Gleason and many more — stood and applauded him the night his play “The Hostage” opened on Broadway in 1960.
Dunbar can’t find Behan’s caricature on the restaurant walls — “he probably didn’t sit still long enough!” No matter, he adds: “His memory and words are kept alive mostly by the Dublin working classes, who show up in the thousands any time you put on one of his plays.”
Born poor, Behan (“bee’-in”) was precocious not only in words, but deeds: By age 16, he was lobbing bombs on behalf of the Irish Republican Army. Too young for prison, he was sent to a British reformatory, or borstal, where he read everything in the library. Soon he was writing poems, plays and stories in Irish and English.
“He had an extraordinary gift for language,” Dunbar says. “When he went to visit Sam Beckett in Paris, he learned to speak French in about three weeks. He wrote porn for a French magazine!”
Behan came here twice, for less than a year at a time. For an excommunicated, drunken bisexual — “They used to say he’d shag anything,” his niece observes — he found New York a kind of egalitarian nirvana. He hobnobbed with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and even managed to stay sober for several months, says Dunbar, who himself stopped drinking 15 years ago. But Behan was so unnerved by an upcoming interview on the Jack Paar show that he drank all the way to the studio.
“He was the first person to appear on TV drunk,” Dunbar says. “People thought it was because he was reckless, but he was scared.”
It was an outrageous performance, and journalists egged him on. “Behan Back on Booze Binge, Goes into Orbit in Theater,” read one giddy headline, after Behan got up onstage to dance a jig during his own play.
Not everyone cheered. “I wish there were some way I could rescue Behan . . . from the mad compulsion and the cruel ones who spike his soft drinks,” Leonard Lyons wrote in The Post in December 1960. “He recently came to my son’s Bar Mitzvah where the drinks flowed freely but he shunned them all.” Lyons then describes Behan, in a yarmulke, “dancing like an Irish king.”
After three boozy years back in Ireland, Behan returned to the city he called “my Lourdes, where I go for spiritual refreshment . . . a place where you’re least likely to be bitten by a wild goat.” He stayed at the Chelsea Hotel, not far from Arthur Miller’s room.
“He used to sneak across the landing and use Miller’s phone when he wanted to call long-distance,” Janet Behan says, “which really got on Miller’s nerves. He was just getting over Marilyn Monroe.”
By then, diabetes had numbed Behan’s hands and he could no longer type. His wife returned and dragged him back to Ireland, where he died four months later.
“If he only had money for beer, he would have lived,” Janet Behan says. “But he had money for Champagne and brandy, so he died.”
“Brendan at the Chelsea” runs through Oct. 6 at the Acorn Theatre. For info about the Brendan Behan Pub Tour — which stops at McSorley’s, P.J. Clarke’s and his other favorite watering holes — see brendanchelsea.com/PUBTour. Or if, like Behan, you believe “One drink is too many for me and a thousand not enough,” you might want to visit aa.org.