What if the Ginger Man lived on — and left no forwarding address?

The mysterious life (and disputed death) of Gainor Crist — ex-Marine, suspected spook, and the real man behind J.P. Donleavy’s infamous literary rogue.

(A version of this article was originally written for the Irish edition of The Daily Mail in 2006. Which at the time didn’t have a website. The two people interviewed here, J.P. Donleavy and Ken Donoghue, are no longer with us. I am reproducing it as it may be of interest to scholars of The Gingerman). And also because I think it’s a good tale).

There are men whose stories die with them, and there are men whose legends have the bad habit of outrunning the facts. Gainor Crist belonged squarely to the latter category.

To the end of her days, Pamela O’Malley may have known which version was true. But if she did, she wasn’t telling.

She died quietly in February, in her Madrid apartment at the age of 76. Her passing, marked with a brief notice in The Irish Times, might have gone unnoticed. But for those who know the story behind J.P. Donleavy’s masterpiece The Gingerman, her death stirred old ghosts.

A retired teacher who had once instructed the offspring of Spain’s elites and had, in her younger days, defied Franco himself. Respectable. Dignified. The sort of woman who bore the weight of history like an old coat she’d long since stopped noticing. But there was more to her story. She was also the second wife of the man Donleavy based one of modern literature’s most infamous rogues upon.

Marine, law student, suspected spook, and perhaps the last true bohemian in a city that wasn’t ready for one. In Crist, Donleavy found the model for Sebastian Dangerfield — the book’s infamous anti-hero, who drinks, dawdles, deceives, and rarely pays the rent. “He went absolutely nowhere,” Donleavy once said of the character. But Crist? He went everywhere and nowhere all at once.

He had long vanished from the scene by the time Pamela died. Vanished, but gone like cigarette smoke in a closed room. Supposedly he drank himself to death in Tenerife in 1979. A grave in Barcelona stands in his name. But Donleavy never believed it. “I think he just disappeared off a Barcelona street to be honest and I think the reason for it was that he was either running from debts or was up to something strange.”

What is known is patchy, like the best of stories. Born in Ohio in 1921 or ‘22, Crist came to Trinity College Dublin on the GI Bill, fresh from the Rhineland and the bruising fraternity of the US Marines. A kind of accidental intellectual refugee with a thirst for Guinness and good conversation.

He shared a Howth house with George Roy Hill, future director of Butch Cassidy and The Sting, and haunted the Catacombs under Fitzwilliam Street with the likes of Brendan Behan. He married Constance Hillis, a studious Englishwoman who finished her Trinity degree — a claim few in their circle could make. But soon enough, she was history. Enter Pamela.

Donleavy came chasing his Irish blood and the shadows of Yeats. Together, they crashed into the late 1940s bohemian scene like wrecking balls of charm and disorder. Crist drank. Endlessly, some say. But never sloppily. He wore his vices like a well-cut suit. Dangerous, yes — but composed.

To those who knew him, Crist was no Dangerfield. He could charm a room and drink with the best of them, yet always hold his footing. “A very controlled drinker, but always at it,” recalls Ken Donoghue, a close friend in the Trinity set. “He exuded charm and was very funny in his conversation.”

“I first met him in the waiting room of the US embassy which was then in Merrion Square and he was with Constance, whom he called Petra. Gainor was talking to the consul about when the GI Bill money would come. I wanted to ask about the same thing.” Donoghue recalls. “He was told the money would be a long time in coming, so we went for a drink to the Seven Towers (which was then) just off Dame Street.”

The Catacombs-era was a sort of Dublin where Brendan Behan held court and people debated Marxism and verse in the same breath. Crist, for all his chaos, held his own. He was, says Donleavy, the man who walked into the pages of The Ginger Man and refused to leave.

His life was the kind that left footprints across continents and heartbreaks in every time zone. He had two children with Hillis, the serious one from Trinity, and another with Pamela. But domesticity was never going to tame him. When he left Dublin for Barcelona, she followed. When the drinking and the drifting became too much, she left him. A simple enough story, if not for the lingering question: did Crist really die?

Donleavy doesn’t think so. “I’m prepared to believe Gainor is dead and if he is let him rest in peace. But I have huge, huge doubts for two simple reasons. Nobody saw him die and nobody saw him dead,” he says, with the conviction of a man who’d seen too much of both.

There was the cross on the grave. Gainor, Donleavy insisted, was a hardened atheist. He wouldn’t have tolerated a crucifix over his memory. Then there was the matter of the company he kept. The last man he was seen with, according to the author, had ties to American intelligence. “That makes me even more suspicious.”

Suspicion turned to near certainty in the early 1990s when Donleavy spotted a man outside the Provost’s House in Trinity. A ghost with a gait. “I was staying with a lady friend at the Shelbourne Hotel and I went for a walk and saw a man coming toward me who looked incredibly familiar.” Donleavy details. “I thought to myself this must be Gainor, he looked like an older version of him and had the same walk. What makes me convinced is he had this same habit as Gainor of twiddling his thumbs while walking.”

“Anyway, I went back to the hotel and my lady friend said: 'God you look like you've seen a ghost' and I said I had – I'd seen Gainor Crist.” he elaborates.

And then there are the photos. Sent anonymously. A man in the American Midwest. The right age. The right look. Donleavy never threw them away.

Crist, according to those who knew him, was a riddle in corduroy. He charmed waitresses and confounded landlords. He claimed to believe in nothing and lived accordingly. But the notion that he might have faked his own death, or slipped into some bureaucratic grey zone, is not so easily dismissed. Especially not by Donleavy.

Pamela, for her part, said little. Just once, in 1995, she gave a quote to The Independent. “Gainor was a real person, not a character from fiction,” she said. “He cared deeply about people. I want you to make that clear.” A Communist Party organiser under Franco, she was imprisoned for her activism. While Gainor may have stayed just shy of the regime’s ire, she did not.

She’d known him in the reckless years. The Catacombs, the wildness under Fitzwilliam Street, the fog of hangovers and manifestos. She was the reason he left one wife and took up with another. She went to Spain. She bore his child. And when it all crumbled, she rebuilt.

"I remember that Pamela had very strong political views and that she was very beautiful but after this period myself and Gainer became less close,” Donleavy explains.

Crist’s friends and followers never agreed on the man. Some called him a sociopath, others a saint. But they all agreed on one thing: he made an impression.

Donoghue paints him as a man who could turn a bureaucrat inside out with a smile. Who drank with Behan and Roy-Hill, who never slurred a word, even when ten deep. “He exuded charm and was very funny in his conversation,” he said. He also recalls a night when Constance complained he never took her out. She asked if he’d mind if she went on a date with another Trinity student. “Not at all, my dear,” came the answer. But when she returned, the beginning of the end had arrived. Gainor had a way of letting people go without protest — but not without cost.

After Dublin, after Barcelona, after Madrid, the trail goes cold. Donoghue was the only friend to visit him in Spain. And as the years passed, the stories multiplied. Some said he was involved in shady deals. Others whispered of espionage. None, however, doubted his capacity to vanish.

“He was faithful to his first wife, devoted to his children, and never seen drunk,” said one source. “But he drank every day. And took immense pleasure in doing so.”

In the end, what we have are fragments. The Ginger Man. A novel that scandalised, seduced, and endures still. A cross in Barcelona that maybe shouldn’t be there. An alleged sighting in Dublin. A whisper from the Midwest. And a woman, now gone, who may have known more than she ever let on.

As Donleavy might have put it:

Far away / From the land / Of Kerry / Is a man / From the dead / Gone merry / This man /

Stood in the street / And stamped his feet / And no-one heard him.

If Gainor Crist was ever alive enough to inspire The Ginger Man, he was alive enough to outlive the book. And perhaps, just perhaps, alive enough to walk away from his own legend.

Wherever he ended up, the story never did.

Some men vanish into myth. Crist walked into it with his eyes open, lit a cigarette, and pulled up a chair.

*Ken Donoghue died in 2009, aged 87.

* J.P. Donleavy died in 2017, aged 91.