While the columns are being written, Breslin’s wife Rosemary is dying. Breslin is seeking cures, consulting with doctors and attempting to manage his family, something foreign to him. On late night TV he hears of a possible cure. He explores it. The doctor who is supposed to have found the cure informs him that the television show’s statements had no basis in truth. He had found no cure. The Lufthansa heisters, Burke and Burke’s associates are aware of Breslin’s struggles, which are also financial. And they seem to have learned of the same possible cure.
Jimmy Grant came over. His wife, Dell, the singer at Pep McGuire’s was Jimmy Burke’s sister. Grant said “Jimmy has to talk to you right away. He’s on the phone. . . .
“You got to come down here,” he said. “I got something for the cancer . . . Come down. I’m at the Villagio.”
That was a restaurant on Rockaway Boulevard that was owned by Dominick Cataldo, who was a nice little guy but had a terrible reputation for doing a lot of work. The expression “work” meant murder . . . I am faced with meeting Jimmy Burke and Dominick Cataldo alone on an empty sidewalk in the night. But why not? I know Jimmy a long time. He would never hurt me. Sure, I had written a lot about him running the Lufthansa robbery. That was business. How could I not write about a holdup that big, six million? . . . At the same time, he and his crew were insanely shooting anybody who could link them to the heist. The police were going crazy with bodies. . . . And now Burke had something he thought could help me. Something out of the nights of nurses and hospital and doctors . . . it still seemed only sensible to go down and to see Burke.
Breslin took a cab and brought along a friend who was a detective on the Queens burglary squad.
As we were getting out of the cab, there was Jimmy Burke, alone, rumpled and loud.
“Why is he here?” he yelled . . . “I’m not going to kill you.”
Jimmy then walked up to us. “I know Rose when you married her. The doctors know how to cure the disease. They won’t do it unless they get paid. I got thirty-five thousand with me. I’ll give it to you, and you give it to the doctor tomorrow, and he’ll cure her. Don’t worry about getting it back to me. I just want to see her cured.”
I told him thanks but we were involved with a whole hospital full of doctors and so I’ll pass. “But I got to remember you forever.”
And so he did, writing this in the book The Good Rat, which came over twenty-five years later.
We learn a lesson here that seems overlooked in many journalism classes. To write the truth and be able to look the person you write about in the eye is a guarantee that you will do your best to be accurate in your writing, and that guarantee will win the respect of any subject who is at least aware of who they are. Fewer reporters who pretend to work on the tough beats on the street do this than you might think.
Burke was never caught in connection with the Lufthansa heist, but he died in jail, nonetheless. He was convicted of fixing a basketball game at Boston College, which Breslin notes “was the alma mater of the federal prosecutor in Brooklyn, Ed McDonald, who never stopped until Burke was sent away for a long time. Jimmy had left a mountain of bodies . . . and they buried him on a missed layup.”
Rosemary died in 1981. She was 50.
“Her death took the fun out of so much of the rest of life. No matter what,” her son Kevin Breslin said.
Her descent into the final stages of the cancer came at the start of a decade that would be filled with some of the most powerful city reporting of Breslin’s career. But it had begun years earlier, when he was drinking in the saloons of Queens. Heavily. Steadily.
“I was at New York University,” Kevin said. “My father asked me to meet him and my mother at Desmond’s bar on 53rd Street. Dessie Crofton was one of his best friends. It was in the afternoon. I guess she had just come from her first checkup. I remember my father told me that your mother has breast cancer and we’re going to have to start dealing with it. It was sunny outside. It was spring but I remember a chill ran through my body and mind.”
Desmond’s was a small, dark place with low light. It could have been nighttime inside. Breslin was calm, and Rosemary had a smile on her face.
“He had a drink. And he was smiling. I was young at the time so I guess they were just trying to keep it buoyant but somewhere in my mind I know I didn’t like any of it.”
Now life became journeys to and from Queens to Dr. Kevin Cahill’s suite on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. And to many other doctors, anyone who might have a cure. Or an answer to “Why,” which is really the question posed when the uncurable is unfathomable.
“When my mother died we were coming home at night on Queens Boulevard in the rain. And J.B. was just looking out the window and I swear he said . . . ‘the Boulevard of Broken Dreams.’ ”
It could have been the same window he looked out of when he was waiting for his uncle to return from work to the house in South Ozone Park.
“He said to me after Rosemary died, ‘Just go to work.’ He was very stoic like that.”
Where in the 1960s Breslin’s lens was focused sharply on events that would shape our nation and its discourse for decades to come, in the 1980s he defined how to report from the five boroughs of America’s largest city. He truly brought his City Column into its own.
At home: chaos.
“He was writing like mad. Kids were in school. It was a disaster,” Kevin said. He was recalling the fact that even before his mother died, once she became incapacitated, Jimmy Breslin could not cope with life alone.
The first column now that she had died was simply his eulogy, reprinted by his editors:
About a year ago, when she was unwell to the point where even she became unsure, she offered during prayer to her God a suggestion that she thought was quite good. Her youngest had experienced difficulty through the start of his schooling. Then suddenly, he had expressed great interest in attending one school. His mother developed great faith in the situation. And so, she proposed, give me this year while my son goes to this school. Let me try to help him as best I can. Then that should do it. He will be on his way. And I will be perfectly happy to be on my way. Providing the school works out.
Deals with gods, as we have known for centuries, rarely work out. But this one seemed to.
Whatever she asked for, she appeared to be receiving. And now, the other day, from the depths of a hospital bed, with her body in revolt, she looked up and said, “The report card was pretty good. But now I don’t feel like keeping my part of the deal.” Which was her notion of fairness. For all her life, she believed that true evenhandedness meant that those in need always were allowed more. And now, at the end, she desired to follow her own counsel. So as she left us, she did so with that most elusive of qualities, a little bit of charm. We of her family who remain have a special burden. We have lived with nobility. She was a person who regarded life as one long attempt to provide a happy moment or so for another person. Always, she was outraged by those who rushed about, shouldering past others, their sides lathered with effort, horses in some cheap race, as they pawed for material success. She knew that life belonged to those who seek out the weary, sit with the defeated, understand the clumsy.
She was so much a partner, as well as an Italian mother, who cooked on Sunday, made sure the bills were paid, kept silence when her writer wrote, that in writing her eulogy he could have also been writing about himself. They shared these beliefs.
She ran my life and those of her children almost totally. She leaves us with a tradition of decency that we must attempt to carry on. Her strength was such that even if those of us here today stumble now and then, I think the Rosemary Dattolico line of decency will reveal itself time after time in whatever generations there are to come.
“You never stop writing. You know that J.B. could never stop writing before it, and even after it even when he was crushed. After she died the house, empty and barren, just lost its soul.
“Even talking about it, trying to write a few words to you—just utterly heartbreaking.” Kevin Breslin was 68 when he sent that email.
“We lived in such a unique world with Rosemary. She was 50 percent of the equation. Yeah he had the poetry. She had the poetry, humor and energy, love, and trust. That was an unstoppable combination.”
She was gone. The paper came out every day. And his column appeared on its regular schedule. One wife. One death. One column.
I work for newspapers, write a few books, and that’s exactly what I should do, that’s that for you, Breslin.
I grew up being afraid of my feelings and suddenly my brain finds a way to make them my main strength. I replaced my feelings with what I felt were the feelings of others, and that changed with each thing I went to, so I was about sixty-seven different people in my life.
It was rare for Breslin to talk like this. And you really couldn’t be sure if this was all of it. Or if he had peeled away just enough of the layers, once again, to let you see inside of a character. It is one that seems close to his core, though. He wrote it in a book that was rare, too: I Want to Thank My Brain for Remembering Me: A Memoir.
Rosemary Breslin died on June 9, 1981. Jimmy Breslin and Ronnie Eldridge were married on Sept 12, 1982. A year and three months later. There seems little time to waste in middle age. But seen through the prism of a child or a teenager or even a young adult who has lost a mother, it of course seems all too soon. Grief is so present. And now the six young Breslins would lose a childhood home as the father moved to Manhattan, which was where his new wife had spent her life. The animosity toward this second wife, a woman with a ready smile and a politician’s ambition, would not end anytime soon. If ever.
If there are a few words you will see over and over in Breslin’s work as he calls attention to his own condition, they are “broke,” “money,” “newspapers,” and “drive.” He identified himself as broke, he did everything possible to feel that way—making a mess of expenses, tossing his money onto bars, taking a car service wherever and whenever he could not find someone to drive him. In the chaos and sadness after Rosemary’s death he remembered Ronnie, who he had met way back when she worked for Bobby Kennedy in 1968. He found her number and he called her. Things moved fast after that.
Marriage is a contract. And in every contract there are at least two sides. Love is written into vows. The partnership lies underneath those words. It takes nothing away from love. In Breslin’s case, he was hopeless without a wife. Simply unable to live, let alone drive a car.
“We had a lot of fun,” Ronnie Eldridge recalled. They would have had more fun without the kids, she might have said. This was around 35 years after the marriage vows.
And now that Jimmy was living on Central Park West, that other writer who never learned to drive and lived nearby, Murray Kempton, would stand on the sidewalk under the Breslin-Eldridge second floor window and they would converse before Murray remounted his bike and went on his rounds. A little fun there, too.
Joan Nassivera, who had been night city editor at the News when John Lennon died, later went on to be an editorial page writer. Before she went across town to The Times, she described Breslin succinctly.
“Yes, Jimmy was like a rare flower. He needed a lot of TLC. I will never forget the morning after Amy was born—actually the same morning as she entered the world at 12:18 A.M. and the phone next to my bed in the hospital room rang about 7, just as I was drifting off to sleep. Don’t ask how he tracked me down, but the voice on the other end was unmistakable. Good thing since he never identified himself, just started right in: ‘What’s up. What’s going on?’
“When I was working nights, Lou [Parajos, her husband at the time and an editor at the paper] often drove Jimmy around to wherever he needed to go for a column. So did I at times when I was free. I recall one Saturday taking him to Connecticut to a Sikorsky plant though I don’t know what the column was about.”
Driving is not in the normal job description of an important editor at a paper. But it was around Breslin.
And it was certainly in the job description for Rosemary, Ronnie, his sons, and his friends, as well as his editors.
Ronnie drove him, got him to events on time, arranged his insurance, his doctor and dentist appointments. Everything. And in the unwritten words beneath the vows, she got the power that came with being the spouse of a very powerful columnist.
But the partnership, according to a person who knew Ronnie, Jimmy, and all the kids both before the marriage and after the marriage and across both her political and his writing career, seemed to have no real room for the kids. Asked, there was no dispute on this point, nor that the father was a partner in this.
Childhood is always a lost country. It is for most, the first heist. It was so for Jimmy. For his children, who lived in sheltered chaos, the heist came late.
For the city of New York, while Lufthansa might have been the heist that delighted as the ’70s drew to a close, the heists of the ’80s were tales that included corruption and greed and fear and the theft of the public trust. In the post-Nixonian, post-Hope world, this was the landscape of New York.
When John Lindsay’s first day in office as mayor was greeted with a transit strike, he was heard to say, “It’s still a fun city.” Dick Schaap at the Trib, when he sat down to write, turned that into the antithesis of a Chamber of Commerce appeal. “Fun City” was a city that at that time was already beginning to crumble. Now, nearly 20 years later, it was “Fear City.”