Barbara M. Brooks, Of ‘Mahoneyville’

Barbara Mahoney Brooks, a mother, author, and Georgica Beach fixture who was the matriarch of an informal artist and surfer commune in the earliest days of wave riding there, died of natural causes on Jan. 14 in New York City. She was 91.

Mrs. Brooks, whose second marriage to John Brooks, a New Yorker magazine writer and novelist who died in 1993, is perhaps best known for a memoir, “A Sensitive Passionate Man,” published in 1974 about her love affair and marriage to Dennis Mahoney. In it, she chronicles how her first husband’s alcoholism ripped the family apart and eventually caused his death. The book, a best seller at the time, was reworked into a fictionalized and favorably reviewed TV movie in 1977, starring Angie Dickinson and David Janssen.

Mrs. Brooks’s memoir thrust her into the literary and intellectual worlds of New York and East Hampton. Her property, in the Georgica area, became affectionately known as Mahoneyville and was a second home and hub for parties, meals, and creative living for her four sons in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, as well as their friends and their children.

Barbara Elizabeth Smith was born in Washington D.C., on Dec. 17, 1925, one of two children of a father who put himself through law school at night and eventually ended up working at the Interstate Commerce Commission. She graduated from Bennington College in the 1940s. By then she had met Dennis Mahoney, but their courtship was cut short when, as an Army infantry scout, he was sent to Europe ahead of the United States forces in the bloody Battle of the Bulge. Mr. Mahoney was shot through both legs by a sniper. While recovering in occupied Germany, he saved enough money, made by selling American cigarettes on the black market, to pay for his lover’s passage. They escaped to Paris for a few perfect days of happiness that she would often later recall.

Mr. Mahoney would go on to complete Harvard Law School on the G.I. Bill of Rights and begin a successful career in Manhattan. They were married in 1951. In the 1950s, they began to visit East Hampton and in 1955, for the exorbitant sum of $25,000, they bought a farmhouse and outbuildings on Lily Pond Lane near what was then the Georgica Life-Saving Station from Erastus Dominy.

The two-acre property had a house, cottage, and a barn, and the Dominys had run a boarding house there. To pay for the purchase, Mrs. Brooks also operated a boarding house for a few years and rented the outbuildings. The sculptor Bill King and his wife lived in the barn for several years, his sculptures in various stages of completion scattered around and some life-size figures installed to appear as if they were emerging from the hedges.

The core of Dennis and Barbara Mahoney’s social group were Irish Catholic families — the O’Connells, the Raymonds, the Shamashes, the Connicks, the Sprayregans, the McGiverns, and others, whose men had served in the war and gotten their shot at a good life thanks to the G.I. Bill.

Mahoneyville buzzed with life in the summer — with art, surfboards, and parties, and teenagers coming and going. The jetties and dunes at Georgica were home turf for their four sons and their friends, who took up what was then the new sport of surfing. By the late 1960s, the happy veneer at Mahoneyville was cracking. After Dennis Mahoney’s death in 1970, Mrs. Brooks turned to raising her sons and writing the memoir. It was recognized for its brutal honesty about alcoholism, which at the time was little discussed and poorly understood. It was her only book. Devastated by his father’s death, Curtis Mahoney was swept up by drugs and alcohol, which eventually killed him 1980.

Mrs. Brooks remarried in 1983, launching a new, happy chapter of her life. John Brooks was well known and much respected in New York literary circles, and Mrs. Brooks, an intellectual herself, slid comfortably into the role of literary spouse. She was known for a wry wit, kindness, and devotion to her family. She was adored by her sons and grandchildren and revered for her love, inner strength, and perseverance in the face of the loss of her first husband and second oldest son.

After Mr. Brooks died, she continued to split her time between New York and East Hampton, though she spent much of the year here, where her three sons and her grandchildren would gather spring, fall, and summer. In the warm months, she was a Georgica Beach institution, walking the beach to the jetties, often with a son, grandson, or friend.

Her surviving sons are Dennis Mahoney of Brooklyn and East Hampton, Nicholas Mahoney of New York City, and Seamus Mahoney of Minneapolis. Five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren also survive.

Wakes will be held at the McLaughlin Funeral Home at 9620 Third Avenue in Brooklyn tomorrow, from 2 to 5 and 7 to 9 p.m. A funeral Mass will be said at St. Patrick’s Church at 95th Street and 4th Avenue in Brooklyn on Saturday at 9:30 a.m.

After the Mass, friends and relatives will be invited to East Hampton for Mrs. Brooks’s burial at Green River Cemetery in Springs. A reception will follow.