Why would he write a column like the one that triggered the firestorm? He had been writing about his family—how he hated his children, how his daughter couldn’t get dates, for years. For all those years it had been more than okay. It was taken as his right. Even more tellng, why would he respond to a reportorial unknown the way he did? Why not pause? Because sometimes we do not see time passing us, a slow-moving freight now picking up speed as it leaves town without you.
Little Jimmy was lost without Ronnie Eldridge at home. A little boy betrayed. Humor masked anger. He was alone in the room again. Looking out the window, waiting for someone to come home. Humor masked anger, as it often did in these columns about those closest to him.
If love and work were for Freud the cornerstones of life, for Breslin the words chiseled into his heart were love and betrayal. He was more than capable of both. Of course, he also stole from his best friends. “I needed it,” was a battle cry.
In this, too, he found kinship with Runyon, who he said was understood to be a poet, therefore capable of betrayal, and forgiven for it, even by gangsters, notably Arnold Rothstein.
“Of course it was understood that Runyon, as poet, was allowed to be friend or betrayer in the same hour, and it was the role of those around him, these subordinates, to accept this gracefully,” Breslin wrote. And he demonstrated that he lived with this same expectation. He was the poet, you were the subordinates. As Joe Flaherty wrote all those years earlier during the campaign for city office: “Breslin’s life . . . is starred in, written, produced, directed, and most important, publicized by Jimmy Breslin.” Betrayal came with the turf.
In other cases, friendship and betrayal somehow became balanced bookkeeping entries.
Mickey Brennan was supposed to be somewhere else taking pictures, but tonight he was in Costello’s bar on East 44th Street.
It was a big assignment. Mickey had plenty of those. He was in demand. This time it was Richard Burton.
But Mickey Brennan was happy drinking from a sweating glass in a bar filled with noise and smoke and the belly-bumping bragging of men in ties and women who carried notebooks in their purses.
On the walls were famous drawings by a man named Thurber. A Sistine Chapel reportedly created to pay a bar tab. Near the door there was a pay phone.
There was Breslin. And he wrote a column.
It began fine enough:
Next to me at the bar as I celebrated turning in my novel was Mickey Brennan. Photographer. London Daily Mirror. The best thing about my novel, I told him, is that it is brilliant. As I had not been in a bar for some time I bought a drink. . . .
On this night Brennan had so many cameras strapped about him that he looked like a human bomb. When he moved his arm to throw down a drink the cameras swung about. As I was afraid of being injured, I said, “Put your cameras behind the bar.” He said he could not as he was about to rush to a theater and photograph Richard Burton and his bride.
I said to Brennan, “Burton can wait.”
Brennan agreed. He then began discussing journalism, of which he is one of the better parts.
And that was how the night began. The discussion was of George Will, and a set of papers stolen from President Jimmy Carter which he viewed at David Stockman’s house and said he did not use in preparing Ronald Reagan for a debate. This, Breslin felt, was a new tactic in debate preparation. He then took a little time to point out what kind of person Brennan was.
Brennan is a working man in journalism, although with a few flaws, one of which is he took a picture of me with a drink in my hand and promised to never show it to anyone except the bartender. I next saw the picture in the New York Post newspaper which used it as a bitter attack on me.
“I needed the money, mate,” Brennan said.
What happened by the end of the column should really have been no surprise.
At 10 P.M. Brennan said, “Mate, I’ve got to go take my pictures of Burton.”
“Stand fast and have another,” I said. “I’ll have him pose on the subway tracks if you want. He is a wonderful fellow. He will be happy to oblige.”
At midnight I could last no more and left the bar. “What about Burton?” Brennan called. As I was going out the door, I said, “I’ll handle it in the morning.”
Morning arrived. Brennan awoke with no pictures and the London Mirror squalling.
“My rent is on the line, mate,” Brennan announced on the phone.
I put in a call for Brennan to Burton. Burton did not get back to us, but the message left for him noted that it would be a corporal work of mercy to receive Mickey Brennan and pose, with wife, for a few special Brennan portraits.
Walking down Second Avenue in midtown in the morning light, headed south on the East side of the avenue was little Mickey Brennan all swirling curls and undone tie and flapping sport coat, sputtering red with a hangover and anger.
“Look what your fucking mate did to me.”
He slapped the paper at the young reporter.
“Look.”
There it was. Brennan’s career. In a column.
Breslin explained it. “I needed it.”
Brennan doesn’t care, except for one thing: “I wouldn’t want anyone to think I had any bad feelings toward Jimmy.”
They stayed in touch for all the years afterward. They talked with regularity. Jimmy gave him an introductory essay for a special edition of They Must Fall: Muhammad Ali and the Men He Fought, Brennan’s book of iconic images of the champion and those he boxed. As is the way with publishing, Mickey needed something in writing in the way of permission to use it.
Dear Mickey: I told you that you could use my piece. So now you have me writing a freaking note to say the same thing. What do I have to do next, put it in short story form? JB
Mickey Brennan understood the words “I needed it.” Because he too had lived by that creed.
Breslin’s daughter, Rosemary, understood how to avoid betrayal. Rosemary understood him and his need to consume everything in his world, anything in his world, extract meaning from it and put that meaning into words. This sometimes led to betrayal. She understood how to protect him from himself: don’t tell him.
His book The Church That Forgot Christ includes this dialogue that shows he also had if not a full, at least a partial, self-awareness of this need:
Suddenly, as I write I am interrupted. “Why are you saying that Mugavero was the best bishop?” my daughter Rosemary says. She says this as I write and this is why this book is so torturous to do. Not just because of her. Every phone call from victims and their families interrupts your whole life. This time my daughter has a printout of what I am writing in her hands and she is complaining. “He was such a good bishop he wanted ten thousand for an annulment.” Her husband, Tony Dunne, had married a woman when they were both young and it didn’t last. He and my daughter wanted to marry in a Catholic church ceremony, but the church doesn’t marry anybody divorced. Only an annulment gets you to the altar. An annulment is purchased. “And the ten thousand was nothing,” she said. “That’s only money. What they wanted was for Tony and his first wife to send letters saying that they had not talked about having children before they were married and then afterwards she refused to have any. They wanted Tony to lie. Then they wanted him to get the former wife to lie. After you get these lies, you put ten thousand with them and you get an annulment. That says the marriage never happened. If you put up twenty thousand, they’ll say that you never even knew the woman.” “How are you so sure?” “Because I was involved.” “Who was the money supposed to go to?” “The bishop. What are you, crazy? Never mind ten thousand. The lies. They said you had to lie.” “Why didn’t you ever tell me?” “Because it was my business and you would have written about it and gone on to something else and left us in turmoil. Your business was to pay for the wedding.” “What do you want me to do?” “Take out where you say he’s the best bishop.”
The book was published in January 2004, and in that year Breslin suffered another great loss: Rosemary the Younger, his daughter, died in June after bravely fighting a rare blood disease. She had battled it with poise, charm and an impressive workload. If she had a role model for suffering, you could say it was her mother, Rosemary One. Jimmy had to write a eulogy for a second Rosemary. In his obituary column, there was a father’s poetry.
Rosemary Breslin, 47, died Monday from a rare blood disease. A writer who crafted scripts for “NYPD Blue” and wrote a 1997 memoir entitled “Not Exactly What I Had in Mind: An Incurable Love Story,” Breslin was the third child of columnist Jimmy Breslin and the former Rosemary Dattolico, who died in 1981.
As it was with the mother who went before her, the last breath for the daughter was made before an onlooker with frightened eyes. First, there were several labored breaths.
And here in the hospital room, in a sight not distorted by passion, was the mother sitting on the end of her bed, as the daughter once had sat on the mother’s in Forest Hills for a year unto death. They both were named Rosemary. When the mother’s last breath told her to go, the daughter reached in fear, but her hand could not stay the mother’s leaving.
By now, Rosemary, the younger, is married to Tony Dunne. He knew she was sick when he married her. He then went through 15 years of hospital visits, stays, emergencies and illness at home and all he wanted was for her to be at his side, day and night. His love does not run. And now, in the daughter’s hospital room, as it always does, fear and deep love brought forth visions of childhood.
The daughter is maybe 4, sitting on the beach. She wants money for ice cream. The mother’s purse had money to pay the carpenter at day’s end. Earlier, the mother had tried to pay a carpenter by check and he leaped away, as if the check was flaming. The daughter plunged into the purse and found no change for ice cream. With the determination that was to mark every day of her life, she went through that purse, tossing large bills, the carpenter’s money, into the air, digging for ice cream change. She sat there infuriated, throwing money into the sea wind. The mother was flying over the sand trying to retrieve it. Another labored breath.
Then I could see her later, and with even more determination. Typing a script with tubes in her arms. Writing, rewriting, using hours. Clearly, being attacked by her own blood. She said that she felt great. She said that for 15 years.
I don’t know of any power that could match the power of Rosemary Breslin when sick. Suddenly, the last breath came in quiet.
The young and beautiful face stared into the silence she had created. Gone was the sound of her words.
The mother took her hand, and walked her away, as if to the first day of school.