Grief, despondency and chaos, money, newfound fame—these were not the only reasons underlying the rift. There was Breslin’s phenomenal, unpierceable ego, of course. He had been egomaniacal for a very long time and now it was fueled by more than book wealth, more than the promise of movie wealth. It was fueled by ambition and the promise of a home where he could achieve it. What beckoned this “police station genius” was Clay Felker’s New York magazine and a cast of bright, shining journalistic voices that had not been seen in such marquee lights before.
Even at the Trib there was the constraint of newsprint. Now there was the turned up volume of NEW! Now the pages were glossy. Bold. Set against a city establishment that was OLD! Literary ambition and journalistic freedom would soon be twinned with, and feature some of the same cast members, a quixotic political campaign based on ideas that were revolutionary: teach the Black students in the public schools, give the neighborhoods a voice, revamp the way policing was managed, and, to cap it all off, make New York City a 51st state. The campaign starred Norman Mailer and Jimmy Breslin. What could possibly go wrong?
So it was goodbye to the Post, welcome to the World of Clay. And through it would be the echoes of an enduring feud with both the editor and publisher of the newspaper he left. He and Mailer—who was himself Jewish—now seemed to view the Post with nonchalant antisemitism as the “Jew” press that was so predictably liberal as to not consider them worth covering. Welcome to the seriousness of Fun City.
The adventure that was New York had begun back at the Herald Tribune where the editors envisioned taking a staid Sunday magazine that was doing nothing to advance the new direction of the paper and turning it into something readable and exciting that could become the talk of New York. Clay Felker, recently of Esquire magazine, was brought in first as a consultant, and then as the editor. Soon it was packed with the prose of Breslin and Tom Wolfe.
The magazine got noticed. The writers got noticed. As the paper was folding, Breslin heavily encouraged Felker to buy the magazine and turn it into a free-standing entity. Felker borrowed $6,500 from the writer Barbara Goldsmith to buy the name from Jock Whitney. And Breslin helped cajole the investors needed to go from name to office space, writers, paper, advertisers and printers. He was named Vice President on the magazine’s masthead.
Felker was the genius of zeitgeist. He could capture it. He could create it. He was an incubator of voices. He could identify them. He could nurture them. He invented the “City Magazine” though no one who would attempt to emulate it understood, to paraphrase one of New York’s former editors-in-chief, the writer Kurt Andersen, it wasn’t a magazine about zip codes. It was a magazine that captured the current of ambition that electrified New York.
Tom Wolfe was a marquee writer. Breslin was on the marquee. And on the masthead as a Vice President. Felker was rightly called a rock star editor, and “hyper ambitious.” He helped Gloria Steinem launch Ms. magazine. He attracted the young and the hungry. Writers who were hyperperceptive and hyperambitious.
Tom Wolfe explained some of this in a July 14 cover story that ran two weeks after Felker’s death on July 1, 2008.
“As I recall, the first assignment Clay gave me was a story on the promenade les chic and les chic-lettes took every Saturday morning through the art galleries along Madison Ave from 57th Street to 79th Street . . .”
The story appeared. “And now les proto-chic-lettes came skipping and screaming . . . pretty young things in short skirts and jeans molded to their pelvic saddles. . . .
“As I say, I had never heard of this Saturday-morning art promenade before, but Clay had. He made it a point to hear about such things. . . . He was his own best reporter.”
Breslin, as the novelist Philip Roth once said, was the resident New York City “police station genius.” He gave the magazine, in the words of Gloria Steinem, street smarts.
“He was always street smart. Street smart means that you can inform and excite and invite readers from the street up. . . . He always had this nose for incredible characters. . . . He would introduce me. We were at New York magazine together or we would go someplace after work or something and he would introduce me to these characters that he’d been writing about.
“He also understood politics in other cities. I think, in my memory, he was the first person to say that what happened at the 1968 Chicago Convention was a police riot. You know, that the police had rioted. He and his friends who were cops were ashamed . . . because it was a blemish on the reputation of good cops. . . .
“The shocking thing for those of us who had been in Chicago . . . I don’t remember if Jimmy was physically there or not. For those of us who were in Chicago, there was one reality. Then we left Chicago and people were blaming the demonstrators instead of the cops. We were just stunned by this because we’d been there seeing cops beating people up with lead-lined gloves and shoving people through plate-glass windows in the street. To come back from that and see that the demonstrators were being blamed was just shocking. I remember Jimmy as being a bridge between those two realities and trying to name what really happened.”
Clay Felker’s New York was a universe, with solar systems that revolved around its white hot suns: Gael Greene, on the snobbery of seating in high end eateries, “How Not to Be Humiliated in Snob Restaurants.” Gail Sheehy in hot pants and white vinyl boots with her eyewitness account of the prostitution trade and the class structure within it. “Glo Glo” Steinem, whose Ms. was launched with unbuyable publicity when Clay included the entire first issue and Steinem’s cover story “Sisterhood,” as a pullout inside New York. According to published accounts, 300,000 copies were sold out in three days and 26,000 became subscribers. In residence were Peter Maas and Nick Pileggi, two of the best archeologists and historians of the Mafia. Ever. And of course, Wolfe, who seemed able in his magical, brilliant pieces to peel back any layer of society, such as he did in his notable dive into surfer culture, “The Pump House Gang.” These solar systems would rub up against each other, and somehow the planets never collided. Steinem, Wolfe and Breslin were fiercely loyal to each other for decades even after their solar systems had moved out to different edges of the universe.
It was, looking backward, at the heart of the start of the last generation of Great. Voices. In American Journalism. Outside the magazine there were others: Murray Kempton, Pete Hamill, Gay Talese among them. Hunter S. Thompson in what might have been a parallel universe. Each of these reporters was an iconoclast. Each was intensely literate. Though Breslin seemed to hide his books in his desk drawers. Each a lover of their status, the company they kept, the trail they blazed and the bodies they left behind. Each invaluable in telling the story of a city and a nation.
Breslin wrote dozens of pieces for New York between his arrival in 1968 and his departure two plus years later over differences with Felker over what Breslin, according to one account, viewed as a magazine now essentially devoted to telling its readers where to find the best hamburgers in New York. This was far less true than it might have been after the magazine fell into Rupert Murdoch’s hands for a while, then a series of corporate owners. Another version has Breslin discovering that that the writer Dick Schaap could barely get by on what the magazine, of which Jimmy was an executive, was paying him. Felker was robbing Schaap. Outrageous. But it suited Breslin’s desire: To. Leave. And now Felker was on the enemies’ list.
Some of his pieces were modestly titled, “How I Made Lindsay Mayor” and “My Triumphant Return to New York.” Others were cheeky outlets for his perceived slights, “People I’m Not Talking to This Year” and “Jimmy’s 1970 Black List” which appeared in the January 5 edition along with Judith Crist’s Ten Best and Worst and Joe McGinniss on “Hustling a Best Selling Novel.”
The cover’s main headline “Who’s Got Power in the City This Year” was by Ed Costikyan. And pretty much right then all that is good in BuzzFeed and its listicles was born. There was a difference, of course, the journalism and the original voices were missing from the latter day incarnation.
There are two Breslin pieces worth singling out. Because they show what everyone who has ever been a police reporter knows, despite the breadth and depth of your knowledge, there is in effect a class distinction that essentially delimits reporters who speak in plain English. So even as Breslin in these pieces displayed a continuous depth, and breadth, and growth, he seemed destined always cast as the guy in the gumshoes, press card in his hat, reading through the police blotter and smelling of booze. To be fair, he cultivated at least part of that image. And to be fairer, this choice, plus his incredible flaws as a human being, perhaps helped define his limits.
The first piece is a wonderful, groundbreaking profile of Joe Namath, the football hero of the New York Jets at that moment. It is a textbook example, or the textbook frankly, of how to construct a profile of a bad boy. Rather than quote from it serially, just one or two portions.
But first the pull quote at the top, above the byline:
“. . . The night before the Oakland game I grabbed a girl and a bottle and went to the Summit Hotel and stayed in bed all night . . . Same thing before the Super Bowl. It’s good for you . . .”
Then this:
They are trying to call this immensely likeable 25-year-old by the name of Broadway Joe. But Broadway as a street has been a busted-out whorehouse with orange juice stands for as long as I can recall, and now, as an expression, it is tired and represents nothing to me. And it certainly represents nothing to Joe Willie Namath’s people. His people are on First and Second Avenues, where young girls spill out of the buildings and into the bars crowded with guys and the world is made of long hair and tape cartridges and swirling color and military overcoats and the girls go home with guys or the guys go home with girls and nobody is too worried about any of it because life moves, it doesn’t stand still and whisper about what happened last night. It is out of these bars and apartment buildings and the life of them that Joe Willie Namath comes. He comes with a Scotch in his hand at night and a football in the daytime and last season he gave New York the only lift the city has had in so many years it is hard to think of a comparison. When you live in fires and funerals and strikes and rats and crowds and people screaming in the night, sports is the only thing that makes any sense. And there is only one sport anymore that can change the tone of a city and there is only one player who can do it. His name is Joe Willie Namath and when he beat the Baltimore Colts he gave New York the kind of light, meaningless, dippy and lovely few days we had all but forgotten.
Of the era, it is like Murray Kempton’s piece on Willie Mays that appeared in Esquire three years later: Unsurpassable sportswriting. It tells the story of a swinger who, the only times he didn’t drink or have sex or both before a game, threw interceptions. There is no judgment, just a delightful night out with Joe.
And this:
In the Super Bowl game, the Baltimore Colts were supposed to wreck Namath, and they probably were in bed dreaming about this all night. As soon as the game started, the Baltimore linemen and linebackers got together and rushed in at Namath in a maneuver they call blitzing and Namath, who doesn’t seem to need time even to set his feet, threw a quick pass down the middle and then came right back and hit Matt Snell out on the side and right away you knew Baltimore was in an awful lot of trouble.
“Some people don’t like this image I got myself, bein’ a swinger,” Namath was saying. “They see me with a girl instead of being home like other athletes. But I’m not institutional. I swing. If it’s good or bad, I don’t know, but I know it’s what I like. It hasn’t hurt my friends or my family and it hasn’t hurt me. So why hide it? It’s the truth. It’s what the ____ we are.
This profile, of a bad boy professional athlete, Tom Wolfe would note later, was the profile that became the template for all the “Bad Boy” athlete profiles that came after: “the John McEnroes, the Jimmy Connors.” It is, as Wolfe says, “a priceless piece.”
There are other such priceless pieces by Breslin and his cohort that played a significant part of redefining journalism. Two of them appeared in Esquire. One had appeared in the Trib.