Four women were essential to Jimmy Breslin throughout his life. These were the women who protected him, stood by him in his insecurity, tolerated his bellowing and self-involvement, raised his children, and shaped who he became and who he could be—and helped him in his final infirmity.
His mother, Frances, was the first. His wife, Rosemary, was the second. His patron, Joan Whitney Payson, was the third. His wife following his widowerhood, Ronnie Eldridge, was the fourth.
They were co-authors of his public personae as well as at least one of his private selves.
His mother, Frances, was a heavy drinker, as Jimmy would become, and a schoolteacher at Grover Cleveland High School in Queens. Later she became a welfare worker in East Harlem. There was so little money after her husband, the first James Earle Breslin, abandoned her and her son—who she called Jay, not Jimmy and certainly not James—and her daughter, Deirdre, that she bicycled to work. This was not yet in fashion.
“I think Jimmy, because he was raised by women [Frances and his aunt] actually had the better of us,” said Pete Hamill. The writer, who was closer to Breslin than almost anyone, recalled that “she couldn’t afford even the subways.
“She was one of these people that the welfare department had to check to see if you were really secretly wealthy, meaning—did you have a phone.”
Breslin, late in life, claimed that her welfare job was helpful to his work.
“She was head of the East Harlem office, which was a good place to be because [it had] all the mobsters that I was to grow up with and, you know, write [about],” Breslin said in a previously unpublished interview with Martin Dunn and Marie McGovern, formerly of the News, who recorded it for a TV series set in the era in which the sun had begun to sink beyond the horizons of a popular press. They kindly shared it.
Breslin loved his mother but there were, as with her son and his multiple selves, layers to her. She could be distant and unapproachable.
“[She was] the nightmare in the family, ‘Fran’, never Grandma Fran,” recalled Kevin’s twin brother, James Breslin. “She refused to be acknowledged as that. She would come over and ask to see her son Jay. Kevin would ask her why she calls him Jay when his name is Jimmy. She would just sit with an icy grin. Kevin thought she was the devil. She refused to talk to Jimmy’s wife, Rosemary. Fran resented Rosemary the Italian wife.” She felt, her son said, that Jimmy Breslin had married beneath his station.
In fact, “the former Rosemary Dattolico,” as Breslin characterized her in some of his work, was an amazingly tolerant and loyal wife, mother, editor, expense account auditor and partner in crime. The former Rosemary Dattolico kept a watchful eye on everything from their six children—James and Kevin (twins), Rosemary, Patrick, Kelly and Christopher—to the disaster Jimmy attempted to make of the family finances. In the early years the milkman had to be convinced to deliver when his bills had not been paid, the grocer had to be convinced to provide credit, the electric company had to be contacted before power was turned off because the bills had not been paid; many other bill collectors had to be fended off.
Jimmy’s bluster would not work, she knew. These tasks fell to her. In this chaos, he demanded silence, and he wrote. As his wife, she was on overwatch from December 26, 1954, until her death on June 9, 1981. She was his great love and she would come to coauthor the path to his destiny as a chronicler of crimes great and small.
“I think Rosemary felt real responsibility for Jimmy,” Pete Hamill said. “She knew that behind the tough guy bullshit façade there was a wounded guy living there and she did what she could do to ease the pain—mostly laughter. Mostly jokes.”
Rosemary, Hamill said, was “a very caring human being, she had a sense of irony, she could make jokes based on the absurdities of life, you know? But she had a real sense of responsibility for her life—she had all those kids. She had to take care of them. I’m sure Jimmy was useless in the great tradition of his own father.”
Michael Daly, 71 in 2022 when he was interviewed, was Jimmy Breslin’s young protégé, and his cellmate on columnist row at the News in the late 1970s. He has captured much of the art that was in Breslin’s newspaper work and has used it to tell his own stories with his own diction, in his own style. He describes his own mother, Mary, and Rosemary attempting to put Breslin’s expenses in order: “My mother and Rosemary the elder sat down at the kitchen table and they aged paper with cigarette ashes and coffee stains. And they created all these receipts. They had a little cottage industry of creating receipts.”
Later, great illness would strike Rosemary: breast cancer.
“Seven or eight years. It was a pretty long run, and it was harrowing,” Kevin Breslin recalled.
Now Jimmy Breslin would again face great loss—not the boy’s loss of his father, but a sensitive man’s loss of his wife, and with it the loss of the order she brought. For all his posturing, all his difficulty, he loved Rosemary and was not sure how to live and raise a family and write, without her.
“My father in his worst days, screaming and yelling and bucking and going to a hotel to write, saying fuck this, I don’t give a fuck,” Kevin Breslin explained. “He was a bombastic man. Then you’d be in the kitchen, they’d be hugging each other and was always saying, ‘Remember this is how much I love, I love your mother.’
“She brought out a whole different side to him. And in the kitchen he would say, ‘Watch this, little boy. Dad loves Mommy.’
“Thank God, you know, because the joint was wild. She was him; he was her. It’s like, it didn’t matter if the world’s caving in. They were like a team. He’d be inside pounding. She’d be right there calling it into the desk.
“But he maintained the highest level of work throughout her illness, and that would be more pressure than most people can handle. Six kids, all not even teenagers. Not only did he maintain the highest level of work, he proved that he could be the caring, thoughtful husband.”
Breslin was a person whose hunger, ambition, and career drove him from crisis to crisis and he always met them head on. Now this flawed man proved he could rise above himself when the greatest personal crisis struck.
Rosemary died at Lenox Hill Hospital on June 9, 1981. She was fifty years old.
Breslin had always written of her with affection. The last column would be a love sonnet.
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.
In Breslin’s bifold life, there next was Ronnie Eldridge, political operative, New York City councilwoman and Upper West Sider. They married on September 12, 1982, and she took him from the low-rise borough of his birth to the rarified precincts of Manhattan’s Upper West Side, in essence from the blue-collared shadows of places like Aqueduct racetrack and the sticky summer excitement of Coney Island’s Luna Park Cyclone roller coaster to the shadows of famous buildings like The Dakota and the shade of Central Park. The 20-block radius of her liberal-left life. By the 1990s, he described getting his exercise by swimming in pools in the sky overlooking the city. “I swim in the sky,” he said.
From the outset, which came well before their marriage—perhaps all the way back to the era of Bobby Kennedy—she helped refine his politics. She became his wife and protector from September 12, 1982, until his death on March 19, 2017.
Pete Hamill, as close to Jimmy as any man, his friend and his colleague, was at their wedding.
“I remember the day he got married to Ronnie I went in the morning I found Ronnie outside, before we go inside the synagogue—they will marry in the synagogue and a church. And I said, ‘Ronnie, please listen to me, don’t marry him. Adopt him.’ And she laughed out loud.”
One of her roles would be—like Rosemary, his sons, and at least one of his friends who became the basis for a character in his columns—to serve as his driver.
“Because he had to be married to a woman . . . who could drive.” Hamill, lying back on a couch in his final years of infirmity, had not lost his laugh. He used it now. “At one point my daughter Deirdre worked at the Arizona Republic out of Phoenix until she got laid off a few years ago with the whole slew of other people, but she gets a call one day from Jimmy; ‘I gotta go to an Indian reservation.’
“‘Yeah Jimmy what can I do for you?’
“‘Drive me!’
“You know, and she did. Cause she loved him. You know, when she had a brain problem, Jimmy called every day at the hospital.”
Hamill paused here. A technician needed to take his blood.
A few years later, Pete said, when Breslin himself was hospitalized, Ronnie was there to bear the brunt of the storm.
“I remember I heard that he was in the hospital up [at] Langone, and it was right near Christmas, and I decide to go up and see him. I went in the ground floor, nobody knew. ‘Where’s Mr. Breslin?’ They said, ‘Try the seventh floor.’ So off I go to the seventh floor, it’s totally deserted, nobody there, and I’m walking around looking, no nurses in the nursing station—nothing. And then I hear, ‘Get me the FUCK OUT OF HERE.’ And I knew I was in the right place . . .
“Ronnie was there that day, and she was sitting outside, exhausted by Jimmy’s anger at being in the hospital and she could hear him bellowing down a few doors down and she says to me, ‘Why is he like that? Why is he doing that?’ and I talked to her a little bit about what I just talked to you about—you know, the wound of the departure of the father and all that. Because in those days in neighborhoods, working-class neighborhoods, you never heard of somebody getting a divorce, or the woman being the person that ran away, it was the man.
“Some guys ended up in jail, that was a different kind of case, because it had shame attached to it; but there was also shame to the disappearance of a father. And so, he creates this mask that makes him sound like a tough guy, and he’s not really. And I think that’s why my friendship was always little different. I wasn’t asking him to perform the bullshit tough guy . . . But the tough guy persona, he used it well . . . You knew he couldn’t fight his way out of an empty lot.” He laughed. “He’s not going get into fistfights.”
This father was another great coauthor: if Frances was his first love, and Rosemary was his great love, and Ronnie was his last love, his father was the love he never had.
“The way I understand the story when the father finally died the word got to Jimmy, Jimmy had turned the guy down,” Hamill said. “He wanted to meet with Jimmy. Because Jimmy was famous for the beer commercials and stuff. Jimmy said, no. Too late. But when the word came that he had died, Jimmy paid for the funeral, the way I heard the story.”
And then there was the aristocratic Joan Whitney Payson, who in 1962 became the first woman to buy a major league baseball team “without inheriting it from a spouse or relative,” according to MLB.com. Payson bought the Mets, a brand new team, and in Breslin’s book on their disastrous and wonderful 1962 season, Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?, he captured with great affection this woman who was happiest when known as a fan, cared little or less about getting her own name in the newspapers, and gave credit for the team’s later pennant races and championship seasons to the players and the managers and coaches.
Recently Mrs. Payson was talking . . . while sitting on a couch in the parlor portion of her personal Pullman car, Adios II. It was hooked to the rear end of the Florida East Coast Champion, which was swaying through the icy weed stalks of the Jersey marshes . . . Mrs. Payson was heading for her annual two-month stay at Hobe Sound. Two dachshunds slept on the couch next to her. A brass spittoon was off to one side on the carpeted floor. It is for decorative purposes; the lady does not chew tobacco. She rested her feet on a huge felt turtle which bore a New York Mets’ insignia. “I just received him today as a present,” she said. “So I had them sew a Mets’ insignia on him right away. The tortoise and the hare. That’s the Mets . . . She had a glass of No-Cal ginger ale in her hand, but she saw to it that a Scotch and water, a stiff one, too, was produced for her visitor. She is a large, pleasant woman with light hair. She had on a green blouse and gray skirt and only one bit of jewelry. Which was enough. It was a ring big enough to shake up the Van Cleefs. Her first name is Joan and she is a Whitney. She is of the world of the Social Register and charity drives and art museums and chauffeured Rolls-Royces.
But of course, she was to his keen mind as an important an element of the story of this team as the players and the manager, Casey Stengel himself.
So this is not a woman who came to be a nice happy loser. At the same time, she’s not about to cry. This one knows the game. She is not somebody who merely sits off with her cash and looks at life from the window of a private Pullman car.
And she stayed long enough, until her death in 1975, to see the Mets through another remarkable season—the one that was to come in 1969, a championship season earned by a phenomenal team.
But it was her team’s first expansion club season, and the reason the loser team packed the stadium that was the main subject of the book, of course:
Nearly everybody was saying it by mid-June. And nearly everybody had a good reason for saying it. You see, the Mets are losers, just like nearly everybody else in life. This is a team for the cab driver who gets held up and the guy who loses out on a promotion because he didn’t maneuver himself to lunch with the boss enough. It is the team for every guy who has to get out of bed in the morning and go to work for short money on a job he does not like. And it is the team for every woman who looks up ten years later and sees her husband eating dinner in a T-shirt and wonders how the hell she ever let this guy talk her into getting married. The Yankees? Who does well enough to root for them, Laurance Rockefeller?
This woman then took that slim, brilliant book—Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?: The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets’ First Year—with its wonderful demonstration of this young man’s clarity, humor and understanding of how to tell the truth that was at the heart of a story, to her brother, John Hay “Jock” Whitney of Groton, Yale and the Social Register, and told him he must hire this brash young man for his newspaper, the New York Herald Tribune. He had bought the paper in 1958 and made himself publisher in 1961. Whitney, one of America’s richest men, had a plan to take the once-staid Herald Tribune and turn it into something bright and special, using dozens of his millions and a small army of bright young men—and a smaller number of such women—to do so.
Rosemary guided Breslin, Ronnie protected him, and Joan Payson, who was without a doubt to the private Pullman car born, arranged the trajectory of this young sportswriter’s career who, equally without a doubt, had been to the losers’ locker room born.
“Breslin is one of those fortunate men who have learned the most important things from women,” Pete Hamill wrote in the April 25, 1988, issue of New York magazine. “His father, James, was a piano player who went out for a pack of Camels in 1936 and never came back.” He didn’t even leave a sample of his handwriting, Hamill said.
And this is how Breslin, his mother, Frances, who was the first woman, and the one who raised him, and his sister, Deirdre, became the first crime victims found at the top of a flight of stairs. His father left Frances impoverished and alone. He left Breslin with the indelible memory of pain, poverty, abandonment and injustice: the stab that helped give him a real understanding of what it was like to be a powerless victim. His father gave Breslin his dark shadow.
“He was, not doing good against my, my mother. In fact, he found the street more [appealing] to him than the house. He could stay out on a street and if he got hit by a car going across 101st Avenue, where we lived, it would not start any wailing.” He walked out the door, across a worn-out covered porch, down a few steps, and disappeared, Breslin said.
Much later in his life, the father, James Earle Breslin, in need of cash, called his by now famous son, who helped him out and then said, in his version—which is of course different from Hamill’s, and probably from his own the next time he told it—“Next time, kill yourself.”
In this image, Breslin once again found a parallel with Damon Runyon. In his biography of that newsman and famous author, he noted, “As far as he was concerned, his ability was the result of immaculate conception.” Breslin quoted Runyon as saying, “Anything I have, I worked hard for. I sure didn’t get any help from anyplace. The only thing I ever got was a wire asking for money.”
From Runyon’s mouth, the angry words come out from the side and you can taste the whiskey in the sound. Breslin’s version also reveals an ugly anger and comes out as it was poured into the man’s foundation by a piano player’s hands at the age of four. When he was a child, he was betrayed. It was the hand he was dealt.
Often, across the years ahead, when he was at his worst, betrayal was the hand he himself dealt to others. As a betrayer, he would, it seemed, outstrip Runyon who also had a rap sheet for that crime.