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When Mary Higgins Clark says that being chosen grand marshal of the 2011 St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Manhattan is a great honor, she isn’t thinking of personal glory.
“I don’t consider it an honor for myself,” she said in an interview. “I’m a symbol of all the people who have gone before, of the people who came over here as my father did, with five pounds in his pocket in 1906.
“They were smart people,” she added. “They worked at what jobs they could get, and they pushed their way up.”
It happened that way in her own family, and Ms. Clark, 83, spoke with CNY recently about the parade, what it means to be grand marshal and how her own Irish background shaped her life.
She was born in the Bronx, the second of Nora and Luke Higgins’s three children. She had two brothers, both now deceased. Her father, an Irish immigrant from County Roscommon, came to the United States at 21 and later owned a successful bar and grill in the Bronx. Ms. Clark remarked that like many immigrants, he never saw his parents again after leaving home.
Her mother, Nora Higgins, was the daughter of Irish immigrants from counties Mayo and Sligo. She started work at age 13 as a salesclerk at Gimbel’s, and used to walk from 79th Street to the store at 34th Street to save the nickel carfare, Ms. Clark said. In time she worked her way up to become the bridal buyer at B. Altman and Company.
The Higginses lived in the Pelham Parkway section of the Bronx, but Ms. Clark’s father lost his business in the Depression and died at age 54. Her mother worked valiantly to keep the house but eventually had to move the family to an apartment.
Ms. Clark said that her parents, like other immigrants, placed supreme importance on education because it was the door to opportunity. They sent their children to Catholic schools; Ms. Clark and her brothers graduated from their parish school, St. Francis Xavier in the Bronx, and she went on to Villa Maria Academy there.
Commenting on the values inherent in her Irish background, Ms. Clark said that her parents passed them on “by example.”
“It’s what’s infused in your genetic structure,” she said. In particular, she mentioned her parents’ strong faith.
“My father said the Rosary every night on his knees, after he got home from work at 3 a.m.,” she said, “and he knelt and prayed by his bed every morning.”
Her mother, she said, possessed a “buoyancy” that enabled her to “accept everything, always with faith,” and never with an attitude of “moaning her fate.” She added that her mother always kept her sense of humor.
Asked about the importance of her own faith, Ms. Clark said, “It has been paramount.” She told the story of her life in a memoir, “Kitchen Privileges,” published in 2002. It is to be reprinted with a new epilogue in which she writes that her Catholic faith “has been the raison d’etre of my existence, the core of all that I am.”
After graduating from high school, Ms. Clark went to secretarial school and then to work.
“I felt I had to bring in some money,” she said. She married Warren Clark at 22 and had five children, three daughters and two sons. Widowed after only 14 years of marriage, she went to work to support her family. But she said she loves to study, and in her 40s she enrolled at Fordham University. She graduated at age 50 with a degree in philosophy.
Since childhood she had been writing: short stories, then a historical novel and finally the suspense novels that have made her known worldwide.
Her early stories drew many rejection slips, but she said she always knew she would succeed as a writer, in large part because of her mother, who strongly encouraged her from childhood and praised everything she wrote.
“That’s what I always tell parents and teachers: Find that flame of creativity,” Ms. Clark said, “and don’t talk about the spelling. Don’t say, ‘Your writing is sloppy.’ Praise, praise.”
She doesn’t take her success for granted. A reference to her astronomical sales—at least 80 million books in the United States alone—brought a swift interjection from Ms. Clark: “Thank you, Lord!” Her latest book, “I’ll Walk Alone,” will be published April 5. She plans to write another, and she also is working on a Christmas book with her daughter Carol Higgins Clark, the suspense writer.
In 1996 her daughter Patricia introduced her to John Conheeney, retired chairman and CEO of Merrill Lynch Futures. They met on St. Patrick’s Day and married near the end of that year. In the epilogue to “Kitchen Privileges,” she said that she was “blessed” in her marriage to Mr. Clark and now in her marriage to Mr. Conheeney. Their family life is busy and joyful, with her five children and six grandchildren, and his four children and 11 grandchildren.
An injury many years ago left Ms. Clark with a damaged ankle. Instead of walking the parade route, she will ride in a horse-drawn carriage. The idea came to her, she said, from seeing the carriages at Central Park; she has a home on its southern border.
“It’s such an image of old New York,” which makes it a perfect touch for the parade’s 250th anniversary, she said.
Ms. Clark is a board member of the American Irish Historical Society in Manhattan, and she said that she has viewed the parade for many years from its headquarters on Fifth Avenue, but she never expected to be named grand marshal.
Again she stressed that the honor is not for her personally, and that the parade is not just for the Irish.
“I firmly believe that everyone seeing that, whether they’re Swedish, or Italian—name any country—are seeing their own ancestors come over, and put up with so many hardships, and make a home for themselves and their children…And a generation or two later, they were doctors and lawyers and mayors and presidents. To me, it’s a universal story of the immigrants—personified by the Irish on that day.”
