POST HASTE

The correspondence from Executive Editor Paul Sann to Publisher Dorothy Schiff is poignant in the matter-of-fact way it captures Breslin’s despondency. It was unearthed by Howie Sann from his father’s files and the Dorothy Schiff Papers at the New York Public Library and shared with us.

The memo, neatly typed on the cheap and now yellowed copy paper, of course goes on to the mundane but all-important matter of money. Because the Post, like its staff, was no stranger to having not quite enough money to go around. Though the paper now made money, Schiff, like the man who would later purchase her paper, Rupert Murdoch, was heard to say, knew that you didn’t sweep money, even pennies, toward the door. “They’re my pennies,” the media baron said.

“On the matter of pay, I would suggest that we let the checks go through for the two columns Bres missed this week—and let him owe us two—but take him off payroll for next week. Is this okay?”

“Told Paul OK” is handwritten on her copy.

Society born and bred, Dolly Schiff, a debutante, a socialite, and a Republican by station had now become the owner of the paper and an active Democrat and New Dealer. In 1939 she had bought majority ownership of the Post, the oldest continuously published daily newspaper in America. It had been founded by Alexander Hamilton in 1801, and now Schiff, who at first named herself Treasurer and Vice President, would soon become the first woman newspaper publisher in New York. Her second husband, who she had awarded the title Publisher, had stepped aside. Her third husband would get the title Editor, but in 1942 Schiff would take the title of Publisher for herself.

Under Schiff the Post was a crusading, pro-union, staunchly liberal paper that took on big names in its exposés and still kept the paper sexy and breezy. She ran the paper with a firm hand, a sharp eye on costs and “closely supervised editorial policy,” according to The New York Times. When she sold the paper to Rupert Murdoch in 1976 he of course promised to change nothing, then made a 180-degree turn with regard to power, the powerful, social welfare, and reform.

One of the veteran photographers, Louie Liotta, explained on the way to a photo shoot in a tenement apartment of a disenfranchised Black family in Brooklyn, one of whose members had committed a violent crime: “It’s the same picture, just a different caption.” If you were to have heard the enthusiasm and optimism the paper’s hard-edged tabloid veterans voiced upon the sale to the 49-year-old Australian, you would know two things: reporters consistently best predict the past and Rupert Murdoch ought to have on his tombstone, “I won’t change anything.”

Breslin in 1967 was sure he belonged at the paper. He and his agent, Sterling Lord, had begun discussions even while Jock Whitney was still involved in publishing the short-lived successor to the Trib, the World Journal Tribune.

In a New York Post Office Memorandum that he wrote addressed to “Mrs. Schiff” after Breslin called him and began his wooing, Paul Sann said, “Sterling said Bres called me because he has reason to believe the ship is sinking and I am the only editor he wants to work for in the town. I said I loved Bres too . . .”

But it’s always about the money. And much future correspondence between Schiff and Sann regarding Breslin would be to that point: first rights, New York rights, syndication rights, editing rights, vacation rights. The correspondence goes on for pages and pages.

In the manner of Breslin himself, Sann in a memo dated December 6, 1967, invokes Fat Thomas.

DS: Mr. Breslin’s delayed in Sicily but his real authorized spokesman, Fat Thomas, told me last night that he’s pushing hard on his book [The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight] so that he can start the column again by March 1. Fat said Bres means to have us for his NY outlet and “don’t want dem bums on the News.” Fat could be right but I’ll get the star himself when he gets home.

The book is a novel built around the Gallo-Profaci wars in Brooklyn. Bres went to Sicily for the Mafia trial for background on the playful Walyos.

By February of 1968 the deal to get him there was done. But Breslin’s love of the paper would be short-lived. Five months after Bobby Kennedy’s death, the enfant terrible behavior that plagued his editors and colleagues throughout his career showed up.

It began on November 6.

Breslin had returned, by all accounts deeply wounded by the death of Bobby, to writing. On November 5 he covered the election-eve arrival of Richard Nixon at Kennedy Airport, the motorcade, the final campaign rally and the election night atmosphere at the Waldorf as the returns came in. There was a lot to cover and Breslin had a lot to say. The column came in long.

Paul Sann, whose tenure as Executive Editor lasted thirty years, had trimmed the column for space. Sann and Schiff—and she said this in a memo—believed one of the virtues of a column was to be able to tell all that needed to be told in the allotted space (except, of course, when in their wisdom it was okay to let the column run as long as they saw fit.)

Here is how Breslin repaid Sann: “Breslin called me at home at 6:30 last night in a towering rage fueled with liquor.” He told Sann the trims had cost him valuable lines and if this continued, he would not be writing for the Post. He told Sann that if he was not good enough to write to the bottom, he would “start on the Daily News on Monday.”

Breslin threatened to go to “dem bums” at the competing paper even though he would be breaking his contract. He told Sann the paper could sue. Somehow the discussion turned to the point of where the column was displayed in the paper. Sann, perhaps foolishly, suggested that another placement could result in a shorter column.

“I never finished my sentence. My friend hung up. I don’t know whether in the gray dawn, Jimmy will decide to favor us with some prose.”

He did.

Some of this correspondence is captured in a piece Howie Sann wrote for the Columbia Journalism Review. It should be noted that the piece, published September 8, 2017, was longer than the editors saw fit. It was trimmed. Howie Sann was still unhappy about that, he said, in a conversation that took place nearly six years later.

In the immediate aftermath of the Kennedy coverage, there had been from Sann and Schiff concern, compassion, and the idea that Breslin’s coverage of the campaign from start to tragedy could have been worthy of a Pulitzer Prize. But after the Nixon column Breslin began nursing the start of a vendetta against Sann, Schiff, and the paper that continued through 1975, when he proclaimed that the Post was “the worst paper in the world.”

In the end, wounded and angry, he would stay a little over eleven months. He wrote just over 104 columns: It was, at least, a little bit longer than the “cup of coffee” Tom Wolfe recalled having spent at a couple of the places he had worked before the Trib. But for Breslin, it was a shorter stint than his journeyman sports career at the Journal-American, which was his “prison” for a year and a quarter beginning in 1959. That stint was one where his sportswriting was evolving, and where he demonstrated his strengths when he committed a five-part series on the growth of bowling into a billion-dollar business once automatic pinspotters replaced the tedium of a pin boy’s day.

But the months at the Post were a critical time for Breslin.

They had begun to unfold well enough.

On February 26, 1968, Paul Sann, after months of negotiation, had received from Breslin’s agent, Sterling Lord, the deal memo that would bind him to the paper. Breslin had written brilliantly and beautifully before the death of Bobby. After the death of Bobby he had written some columns beautifully, some less so, like a player riding out a contract. And his output was smaller.

Before Bobby, there had been MLK. In the April 10, 1964, edition, he wrote:

The woman stood up and closed her eyes and started to sing.

She sang yesterday in the Ebenezer Baptist Church, over the casket of Martin Luther King, Jr., sang to his children one of who was too young for it and concentrated on a lollypop, sang to Coretta King, who listened with her eyes closed, sang to everybody who was in the church to bury a man who died trying to help.

And then it was gone and they were wheeling the casket up a side aisle. They wheeled it past Charles Evers, who was doubled over and weeping, and Robert Kennedy, who came down a row to be next to him. Martin Luther King Jr., shot in the twilight in Memphis, Tenn. Charles Evers had a brother, Medgar, who was shot in the back in the night in Mississippi. Robert Kennedy’s brother, John was shot from behind in the daylight in Texas. And further up the aisle was the sister of Malcolm X who was shot on a Sunday afternoon in New York.

The casket came out into the crowd waiting in the sun. It was hitched behind two mules. The mules started up the street away from the red brick church and 200,000 people, maybe 300,000; the Atlanta newspaper said half a million; walked with the casket and the mules. They walked under a high sun and the men took off their jackets and the women were singing softly and it would have been beautiful, except all of us have been here before.

There have been marches and funerals forever in the last five years and everything was supposed to change and nothing has changed. The Black man in this country is still a n— and his children are the children of a n— and the Congress of the U.S. has to fight with itself to pass a civil rights bill that isn’t worth drawing up in the first place when you see what really is needed. . . .

It is a beautifully crafted column and a very hard column to quote. And it is an even harder column to read in full.

John Doar was talking . . . while he walked in the sun yesterday. Once, John Doar put up his life in Southern towns as a Justice Dept. civil rights man. Last year, the Civil Rights Division became a domestic troop deployment agency and John Doar quit. And yesterday he walked behind his old friend Martin Luther King . . .

“You think of the dead on a day like today,” he was saying. . . . “Herbert Lee, he was the first in my time. Summer of ’61 in Liberty, Miss. There was another one they killed in that town. I think his name was Louis Allen. Then you had the Rev. Reeb in Selma. Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney in Philadelphia, Miss., Medgar Evers, Mrs. Liuzzo, so many of them dead. And we’ve gotten nowhere.”

On April 4, Breslin had been with the Rev. King and he wrote about his last hours, in Memphis.

“He couldn’t find his tie,” the column began. It continues with the Rev. Ralph Abernathy pointing out, “Martin, why don’t you look on that chair.”

“‘Oh,’ said the Nobel Peace prize winner Martin Luther King, Jr.; who like any of us was ready to blame anyone else for misplacing or taking his tie.”

The men in room 306 discuss dinner. They want soul food and wonder if another man’s 31-year-old wife is too young to know how to cook it.

It begins like this as a matter-of-fact column, filled with the commonplace: of walking onto a narrow balcony; of seeing the Cadillac, black, supplied by a funeral director and waiting to take King around. There is Jesse Jackson. There is Andrew Young. Names that also have never gone away. And there is a thicket. And it was from there the shot came this time:

He was 39 and for 14 years he had been trying to keep a country from falling apart and now he had been killed by one shot from a rifle. . . .

It was 6 P.M. on Thursday, April 4, 1968. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Nobel prize winner, lay in front of an open green door, with the cheap silver numbers 306 nailed to the door. The door was to a $12 a night double room in a place called the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tenn. . . .

He was 39 and he had a Nobel Peace prize and he spent his life trying to help, but very few listened.

The next day, April 5, there was fear, there were flames, and there were riots in Washington. Breslin was now there and he reported on this. And on the 9th, of course, he was in Atlanta for the funeral.

This writing on race, on riots, on civil rights and on hatred, by now extended back to the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the 1964 Harlem Riots, and it continues through the months before he arrived at the Post. If you want to consider Breslin’s state of mind when he arrived at Sann’s door, think of him as a young man who had more than four years immersed in and consumed by one of the most violent periods in a nation’s history.

During the year before—at a time after the Trib, and during and after the life of its short-lived successor World Journal Tribune—Breslin’s syndicated work appeared in various newspapers. During this time there was Newark. July 14, 1967. A riot. Armed conflict. Tanks in the streets. Twenty-six, at least, dead.

It started with kids running in the dusk with garbage cans and bricks and throwing them through store windows and reaching through the smashed glass and grabbing anything and running away. . . .

And now at 4 o’clock this morning the city of Newark started to come apart. . . .

It began with the tempo and simplicity of his Harlem riot coverage. But that seemed so long ago now, a time when riots were confined. Here, a city was plunged immediately afterward into decades of darkness: flight by whites, neglect by politicians and years and years of increasing violence, crime, and gang rule on the streets. Newark became a place where FBI agents from the field office there went to lunch in pairs.

In Detroit, just about two weeks later, his column ran under the headline “Guardsmen Shoot, People Loot.”

DETROIT—There is no sanity. A National Guardsman in an apartment on the first floor fires his M-1 up the dumbwaiter shaft and a Guardsman up on the top floor fires down the shaft. . . .

On a street called Linwood an armored personnel carrier comes out of the blackness and into the glow of a burning building. One street light is left on the block. The Guardsmen don’t like lights around them on the streets. They fire from inside the carrier at the street light.

It was urban warfare. Only in that regard and one other was it different from what could have been written in Vietnam. The other difference was that here troops were shooting at US citizens and the citizens were shooting too. Looters were shot. A fireman was shot right between the eyes. He left a child, Breslin reported.

On February 19, 1969, Breslin’s final column for the Post would appear. That same Wednesday, the front page of The New York Times had laid out above the fold a report on six wounded in an Arab attack on an El Al flight in Zurich. On the bottom in a narrow column the paper reported Mario Procaccino would run for mayor. And an important item ran with a picture across three columns on the lower right: “Radcliffe to Consider a Full Merger With Harvard.”

In a narrow little ad, in the style of a two-line personal, in type much smaller than that in even the boxed news index it was placed under, was this: “You are on your own. I am giving up my newspaper column. —Jimmy Breslin.” The ad had been addressed to Robert J. Allen, one of Jimmy’s characters.

What actually prompted the rift? There were a multitude of possible factors. Could it really have been a trim of a column that ran long in order to fit a box that the paper’s editors had determined would “always” run under a two-column-width piece? Desolation? Breslin’s placement in the paper? He later would claim his work was buried back by “the girdle ads.” Was it the fact that with the January 1969 publication of The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight to critical acclaim, bestseller sales numbers, and a movie with MGM soon on the way, he had become “awash” in money? This last idea would be reminiscent of his first conversation with Jock Whitney before he joined the paper, when he told America’s richest man that he could not afford him. Whitney had paid him $20,000 to start and $200 a week in expenses, according to the author Richard Kluger, an income that rapidly grew to surpass $125,000 per year.

Did the fact that Breslin saw himself as a novelist, and was now freed by his new-found wealth from the constraints of daily journalism, play a big part? Was the bellowing and quitting simply Breslin covering up the fact that with creditors at bay, and money in the bank with the promise of more on the way, he could turn to his true calling? The Novel. The themes of money, lack of money, ambition, failed ambition, genius, curly haired dreamer, betrayal, lifelong grudges, vitriol and revenge, and perceived slights would continue to appear throughout his career. And they would become more pronounced. To quote Joe Flaherty, who would soon observe Breslin closely during the course of writing Managing Mailer, his book on the Mailer-Breslin 1969 New York City political campaign:

“Breslin’s life . . . is starred in, written, produced, directed, and most important, publicized by Jimmy Breslin.”

And that in one neat sentence probably sums up as well as anyone can J.B. Number One.

After Bobby there were at least sixty-two more columns before the final column that ran on February 19.

Those columns included good ones that contained dark humor—“A Farewell to Bumpy (Johnson)”—and good ones that spoke of courage—“Lindsay in Harlem.”