Memories are one thing, theater’s another. For two hours a night, Alice McAlary can relive the 20 or so years she spent with the hard-driving newsman who was the love of her life.
His name was Mike McAlary, and in Nora Ephron’s “Lucky Guy,” opening April 1, he’s played by Tom Hanks. Hilarious and heartbreaking, the show follows the columnist’s career as he pingponged between The Post and that other tabloid until his death in 1998. He was 41 years old.
Several months before, he’d won the journalists’ Holy Grail, a Pulitzer Prize. But as “Lucky Guy” suggests, his biggest prize may have been Alice. Says Maura Tierney, the “ER” star who plays her: “Alice is a very lovely, intelligent, elegant lady — and an extremely loyal person.”
Over lunch, Alice McAlary seemed all that and more: a trim, dark-haired beauty of 54 with an easy laugh, diamond studs along one ear and a small crucifix at her throat.
It was “a charmed life,” she says, their big house in Bellport, LI, overflowing with family and friends, even though it seemed light-years away from the NYC bars where McAlary and his mates slugged down beers and occasionally each other. Or, as Alice grouses in the play: “You’re on Page Six, and I’m off Exit 66 on the Long Island Expressway.”
It’s true, the real Alice laughs: “I used to make fun at how far it was! But we had a place in Brooklyn, and I used to go back and forth.”
They met at a Syracuse University hangout. She was a Massapequa, LI, gal majoring in education; he’d come from New Hampshire, hellbent on journalism. He didn’t yet have the Tom Selleck mustache — the one that looks so odd on Hanks — but he did have long hair, “so curly it was more like an Afro,” she says. “I thought it very sexy at the time.”
In fact, she says, she walked right into him and spilled his drink. “Now you can buy me another,” he said, and they ended up talking all night. They made a date for the next week, but when she arrived, all dressed up, he was dancing with someone else. She grabbed her coat and stormed out. He followed. They married a few years later.
In time, the kids started coming — four in all — while McAlary made his mark. He covered sports at first, but soon he found his real vocation: crime and punishment. His columns got star treatment, with salary to match — about $1 million over three years, one of the biggest paychecks in the business.
Then came the hard times: the ’93 car crash that almost killed him, followed by the story that nearly killed his career. Acting on a bad tip, he accused a woman of falsely crying rape. Did Alice ever challenge him?
“No,” she says. “I never doubted his work before and I didn’t start then. He wrote what he got. Yes, it was a difficult time, the worst time. But he was a fighter.”
But the fight had just started: Cancer entered the ring.
McAlary decided to take it easy. Instead of closing the bars, he’d stay home with Alice and the kids and write novels.
One day, before he headed off to chemotherapy, there was a phone message: An anonymous tipster — a policeman, Alice believes — said that two cops had brutalized a Haitian émigré, Abner Louima.
McAlary, uncertain, played the recording for Alice. “He was looking for me to say, ‘You have to do this,’ ” and that’s just what she told him to do. So he went from his hospital to the one where Louima lay, and once again, he got the story. This time, he got the Pulitzer, too.
Alice remembers the day his editor called with the good news. It was the spring of 1998, McAlary was dying, but “he was just beaming from ear to ear.” Several months later, on Christmas Day, he died. Their oldest child was 15; their youngest, 13 months.
Nora Ephron met with her several months later, Alice says, “but I was still stunned.” Years before, after she ran three miles in Prospect Park, she told Mike she felt great, “because my Nora Ephrons” — that is, her norephineprines — “just kicked in!” And now the woman behind “When Harry Met Sally” wanted to know about Alice and Mike. What intrigued her so about a man she’d never met?
Alice shrugs. “She loved the newspaper business, and Mike’s story had everything in it — drama, love, camaraderie.” It was to be Ephron’s last play. As Ephron’s son Jacob Bernstein wrote in the Times, “it occurred to me that part of what she was trying to do by writing about someone else’s death was to understand her own.”
And Alice? She married again and divorced, a period she’d rather not discuss. She sold the Bellport house years ago; now she lives in Port Washington with her youngest, Quinn, a freckled 15-year-old who looks just like his dad: “Put a mustache on him, and he’s Mike!”
They saw a rehearsal and preview for “Lucky Guy” and were “floored” by how Hanks caught McAlary’s boundless energy — the way he pointed his index fingers upward or opened his mouth wide in bliss.
So what would Mike have made of all this?
“Oh, my goodness,” she says. “He would have loved the attention!”