Mary Higgins Clark On Leading the St. Patrick’s Parade

‘My father came here with five pounds in his pocket’

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Not giving up is something she has applied to life, not just to her writing. She has had more than her share of knocks. Her father, an immigrant from Roscommon, who owned a popular bar in the Bronx, died when she was 11. Her oldest brother enlisted during WWII and died shortly after shipping out. Her first husband, Warren Clark, whom she’d known since she was a child, suffered a heart attack and died in his 40s leaving her with five young children.

 “You have to keep going,” she says, “especially when you have children.”  She cites the example of her mother who after her husband died, turned the family home into a boardinghouse. (Mary writes eloquently about all of this in a heartwarming memoir called Kitchen Privileges.)

It was her mother, a first-generation American with Irish parents who encouraged Mary to write. “Oh, I wrote my first poem when I was six. And of course it was terrible. I still have it on a yellowing sheet of paper. She thought everything I wrote was wonderful. And she’d make me recite it for the relatives when they came. I wrote skits and I’d have my brothers perform. And I wrote plays for the neighborhood kids. I was always writing.”

After high school Mary took a secretarial course and found a job in advertising. Her descriptions of this time could have won an Emmy for the TV series Mad Men, but despite the tough working environment, it proved a good start. Or perhaps Mary was becoming adept at turning lemons into lemonade.

“It was a blessing as it turned out. Because I worked as a secretary at eighteen to the creative director of the agency. So I was in all the meetings taking notes about why this campaign worked, why this caption worked, why the inside front cover of Life was the best buy, so I had a three-year tutorial in advertising. Served me very well when I went to work at the radio show.”

In between the advertising firm and the radio show, Mary worked as a Pan-Am airline stewardess for a year. She retired when she married, but when her husband died in 1964, she worked for many years writing four-minute radio scripts.

When she’d married Warren, she started writing short stories, and she continued to write every chance she could get after he passed away, which often meant getting up at five o’clock in the morning and writing for an hour or so before getting the children off to school.

“As soon as Warren and I came back from the honeymoon, I said I’m going to be a professional writer and I started taking a writing course at NYU. And my professor taught me everything I needed to know about writing. After two weeks he said, I want all of you in with a short story next week. And I looked at him and he said ‘Mary, you’ve been a Pan-American hostess. Take the most dramatic incident that occurred when you were a flight hostess, ask yourself two questions: Suppose? And what if? And turn it into fiction. And since then I still do suppose and what if. And I still do why.

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