In 1966, Esquire magazine had published a wonderful piece by Gay Talese, the gifted writer, who as a young reporter was one of the few Italian Americans to write for The New York Times. Talese was the son of a tailor down on the New Jersey shore. Talese’s prose was as impeccably tailored as Talese’s own wardrobe:
FRANK SINATRA, holding a glass of bourbon in one hand and a cigarette in the other, stood in a dark corner of the bar between two attractive but fading blondes who sat waiting for him to say something. . . .
Sinatra had been working in a film that he now disliked . . . he was angry that a CBS television documentary of his life, to be shown in two weeks . . . he was worried about his starring role in an hour-long NBC show entitled Sinatra—A Man and His Music, which would require that he sing eighteen songs with a voice that at this particular moment . . . was weak and sore and uncertain. Sinatra was ill. He was the victim of an ailment so common that most people would consider it trivial. But when it gets to Sinatra it can plunge him into a state of anguish, deep depression, panic, even rage. Frank Sinatra had a cold. . . .
Talese’s piece is beautiful. He reported it in the winter of 1965. Esquire gave him 15,498 words in the April 1966 issue. Three years earlier Breslin shaped his Costello piece in 1/15 of that and achieved a similar level of intimacy and as great an understanding of his subject in a little over a thousand words. They are equals in everything else.
In 1973, another such groundbreaking profile appeared. Esquire again published it. This one was by another man who would not have called himself anything more than a reporter, the great Episcopalian bishop of the dependent clause, Murray Kempton. It was a portrait of a baseball player, Willie Mays, who may have played one season too many:
He was twenty when he began these voyagings, and he is supposed to have said then that this first trip around the league was like riding through a beautiful park and getting paid for it. Out of all those playgrounds, only Wrigley Field in Chicago is still used for baseball; everywhere else he is older than any piece of turf upon which he stands. All has changed save him. Before the New York Mets had ever played one game as a team, Willie Mays had already hit more home runs than all but six players then in the Hall of Fame.
Mike Torrez, the Montreal pitcher, was not yet five years old the afternoon in 1951 when Willie Mays threw out Billy Cox from center field in the Polo Grounds, a ball traveling three hundred sixty feet to catch a fast man who had to run only ninety. Torrez paid his respects to this shrine by throwing two balls, the first wickedly close to the cap, the second evilly close to the chest. Willie Mays then watched a strike and another ball—he seemed as squat, as archaic, as immobile as some pre-Columbian figure of an athlete—then melted to protect himself with a foul tip and walked at last.
Ted Martinez came up to drive a long ball to right center and two outfielders turned and fled toward the wall with a gait that at once informed the ancient, glittering eyes of Willie Mays that men run like this when they have given up on the catch and hope only for a retrieval from the wall. Mays gunned around second and then, coming into third, quite suddenly slowed, became a runner on a frieze, and turned his head to watch the fielders. He was inducing the mental error; he had offered the illusion that he might be caught at home, which would give Ted Martinez time to get to third.
And only then did Willie Mays come down the line like thunder, ending in a heap at home, with the catcher sprawled in helpless intermingling with him and the relay throw bouncing through an unprotected plate and into the Montreal dugout. He was on his feet at once; his diversion had already allowed Martinez to run to third and he jumped up now to remind the umpire, in case he needed to, that when the ball goes into the dugout each runner is entitled to one more base.
You remembered how often it had been said that Willie Mays knows more ways to beat you than anyone who ever played the game. But that was no more than comment; and here was presence; and all historical memory was wiped out for this moment when Willie Mays had paused at third as if to array himself as proclamation of an army with banners.
Kempton was as gracious as Breslin was boorish, his prose as difficult to parse as Breslin’s seemed easy. He is too dense to quote in brief, and as he knew from long experience, he was too dense to edit in any meaningful way when he handed in his copy just as the clock ticked “DEADLINE.” And the editor looked it over, shook her head: “Oh, Murray.” Did her best and pushed the button. So to say Esquire gave him 2,400 words would not be as correct as saying Kempton handed in that many. He once declined a television interview by explaining that his sentences were longer than their segment. He delighted in the baroque.
In just a few paragraphs of these sentences he gives you in this article William Faulkner, Enos Slaughter of the Cardinals, the record Farewell Blues and Yogi Berra. This is a man who years later could come back from John Gotti’s clubhouse, the only journalist allowed in that day that Gotti won in state court, and announce to his editor, his marbled pasteboard-covered copybook in hand, “I will not cheapen myself by writing about Gotti today. I am writing about Proust.” Months later the Gotti story would come.
In the case of Willy Mays, Kempton’s citation of remarkable accomplishments had a simple purpose in the end:
Yet afterward his solitary gloom was impenetrable. It had been an afternoon to stir uneasy prospects. . . . all signs that the Mets would never know the comfort of being enough ahead or the resignation of being enough behind. No, it would go on all summer . . . until the familiar horror of those final weeks whose reiterated torment had brought him, as long ago as 1965, to confess how permanently drained he was: “No. There is nothing in baseball that can get me excited anymore.” And yet there is not another Met who has known the ordeal of a close pennant race more than once in his career; and Willie Mays has been there eight times before. . . . and this would be another one of those cruel summers that, for just a little while, in the sun with the extra men, he had been able to entertain the illusion of escaping. Scowling, he strode through the children who had waited for him at the gate and alone he drove away, his face fixed in its contempt for destiny; everything that he had proved through all those years was worthless to appease him; nothing was ahead of him but the implacable duty of needing to prove everything all over again. Fuggin kids.
The Mets won the pennant.
In capturing how Mays faces his destiny he places us with Mays in a manner Breslin would use throughout his career. This is the way it comes to them all: they play a season too many, and then they stand alone with their destiny.
Breslin and Kempton, two giants, strode across the carpet tiles of two newsrooms together over the course of their careers. Theirs was an uneasy respect; the emotional, public, raging Irishman, and the aloof redhaired southerner, whose own daughter would describe his coldness. An uneasy truce between two who could find the flaws not in each other’s work but in each other’s thinking and who were both constrained by manners—easy for Kempton—to share compliments, if at times they were grudging. Because Kempton could be as biting in a newsroom aside as Breslin could be harsh in his bellowing.
Talese, well, he did not share newsrooms with these two and he shared little with Breslin except what amounted to a lifelong grudge. He would not speak of him for this book but he had the courtesy to explain why.
dear Richard
I’m glad [you’re] busy with a book, and envy you as well. I’m struggling with a book I must finish by mid-August and fear I won’t make the deadline of this patient editor of mine, who is also unhappy with my constant excuses.
This is a way of asking you to forgive me in not making time to see you this summer, but there is another issue as well:
We’re told not to speak ill of the dead, and therefore I don’t want to express my true feelings about Breslin. But I make no secret to you of the fact that I never liked him, and he never liked me, and whenever I was in his company in large or small crowds, I made every effort to avoid him. By comparison, I loved many of the people he associated with, especially Pete Hamill and Tom Wolfe . . . but Breslin and me, it never could be a friendship.
Hope you’ll understand . . . sincerely/Gay”
Gay Talese was not the only person who cited not speaking ill of the dead in declining to speak about Breslin. He was, though, as you might expect, the one whose sense of decency and courtesy and good manners required him to explain why to a fellow reporter.
Three men, Talese, Breslin and Kempton, equally regarded as brilliant, equally difficult in their own ways. Equally capable of portraiture that defined what such works would be like for decades to come.
Costello is 72 now, but he looks the same as he did when he was on everybody’s television set back in 1951. There is a little gray in his sideburns, but otherwise his hair is still dark, still slicked straight back. Everybody says he doesn’t do much of anything these days. He’s up with the dog, then comes downtown for a little barbering, lunch early in his apartment at 115 Central Park West, walks at any of a few hotels, a turkish bath or a movie in the afternoon and then dinner some place and then home.
Now this sounds incongruous today, but in the Costello era there was an incredible looseness in government. There were some high officials in this town who, and perhaps this is wishful thinking, wouldn’t last a week in office today under similar circumstances.
But all of this gone for Costello. He is out of it now, and he stays to himself and he wants no part of publicity.
He prefers to stir his coffee if you bring up a question. But as he finished up dinner and started to go home, he volunteered one more answer.
“Yes, I think I would say that I think I could put together an off-track betting system in New York and make it work.” Which was an understatement. If there was anything that Costello ever did well, it was run gambling in this city. In the whole country to put it correctly.
“Anytime you try to get over 5 per cent for your money you’re taking a risk,” was his motto and he had risk takers going for him from coast to coast.
Now he’s 72, and he’s more than happy to leave the spotlight in the new crime hearings to Joe Valachi. Or Cago, as Costello knew him when they were on vacation together.
Kempton was ostentatiously erudite, Talese meticulous as his father, Breslin had a gift that is rarer than many others. He had a wonderful sense of humor.