Up the Mulligan Guards

THE MERRY PARTNERS (302 pp.)--E J Kahn Jr.--Random House ($4.75).

When Actor Victor Moore's father lay on his deathbed, he looked up and saw a strange physician hovering over him "I know you're a bum doctor, but you look like Tony Hart," the dying man muttered and closed his eyes in trusting contentment. Ned Harrigan's fans were no less staunch. A copy editor for the New York Telegraph added this personal postscript to a news column on Harrigan: "I'd rather hear Ned Harrigan sing one verse of the Mulligan Guards than Caruso warble his entire repertoire." Harrigan and Hart the merry partners, were the ruling entertainment team of the New York stage from 1871 through 1885. Declared a New England guide book of the period: "A visit to New York would be as incomplete to the countryman if he did not see Harrigan and Hart as if he had by some strange mistake missed going to Central Park."

80,000 Oysters. In his lively chronicle The Age and Stage of Harrigan and Hart, Author E. J. (for Ely Jacques) Kahn Jr. (The Army Life) loses no chance to digress on the New York of the '70s and '80s, when the city had open farmland, picnickers rode barges to Coney Island, and 300 Episcopal delegates on a three-week convention put away 80,000 oysters. Part biography, part social comedy, Author Kahn's book is a diverting and nostalgic nosegay thrown to the past Manhattan's lower East Side was so strongly Irish when Edward Green Harrigan was born there, in 1844, that the neighborhood was known as Cork Row.

Tony Hart was born eleven years later in Worcester, Mass. Both boys' hearts' pumped grease paint. Some grade-school doggerel of Harrigan's reads:

Win I am a man I don't give a damn But will be an actor.

These were Hart's sentiments, too, and his County Mayo-born parents thought so poorly of the idea that they once packed him off to reform school. As barnstorming vaudevillians, the two men met and merged in Chicago, when Harrigan was 26 and Hart only 16.

The Bloody Sixth. Doing blackface skits and clog dances, miming Chinese laundrymen, Swedish servant girls and balloon-pants Dutch comics, the team clicked in Boston and New York. Harrigan discovered that he could write, and found a timely subject, the clash of the immigrant races amid settings of squalid realism. Haunting the "Bloody Sixth" Ward with notebook in hand, Harrigan transplanted New York lowlife to the stage to the immense delight of such real-life prototypes in the peanut gallery as One-Lung Pete, Slobbery Jack and Jake the Oyster. Together with his father-in-law David Braham, Harrigan also turned out over 200 songs, one of which. The Regular Army, O!, ribbed contemporary recruiting methods so hilariously that one irate Army officer complained that it had grievously curtailed enlistments "

Most popular of all were the plays about the Mulligan Guards, broad satirical spoofs on the pseudo-military, semipolitical marching companies of the period, formed by immigrant groups who were blackballed from the snobbish regular militia. The hero, Dan Mulligan played by Harrigan, had two mottoes: "Erin Go Bragh" and "E Pluribus Unum " He was so Irish that he thought Lafayette's real name was Lafferty, and so American that he razed a Sixth Ward barber pole because it was painted in the colors of a German flag instead of the Stars and Stripes. For the rest, Harrigan and Hart relied on "knockdown and slapbang."

First Sweater Girl. The critics compared Harrigan to Euripides. Plautus Shakespeare, Dickens and Ibsen. Hart was dubbed "a genius" and the "Irish Apollo." In one peak five-year span Harrigan and Hart played to 10,000 people a week, netted $200,000, and gave the New York stage its first sweater girl--she wore no corset.

A fire turned the merry partnership to ashes. Their Broadway Theatre Comique burned to the ground in the winter of 1884. Harrigan accused Hart's brother-in-law of quitting his night watchman's post early. Hart upbraided Harrigan because Harrigan's father had allowed their $30,000 fire-insurance policy to lapse.

Relatives salted the wounds. On May 9, 1885, to tearful curtain calls of "Ned!" "Tony!' "More! More!", and despite the peacemaking efforts of New York's Mayor William R. Grace, the partners broke up.

Six years later, Tony Hart died in a madhouse, leaving an estate of 80-c-. Harrigan lingered on to 1911, losing his theatrical touch, his audiences, and finally his health. A few days before he died he remarked to one of his old acting troupe how bitter it was to have once been so universally beloved and then so utterly forgotten. His funeral proved him wrong.

More than a thousand mourners showed up, and one blind old Irishman insisted tremulously on being led to the coffin so he could kiss it.

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