James Earle Breslin, 48 years old and at the top of his game, stood in front of the open office door of a newspaper editor named Dick Oliver. He was wearing a blue pinstripe suit with a Countess Mara tie draped under the open shirt collar and around his fat neck, and he slashed the air with a Macanudo Robusto cigar.
“Do Not. Confuse me. With. The Facts. I tell the truth.”
Each word was as loud as the crack of a bat in the Bronx.
I stared down the long room with its submarine-low acoustic tile ceiling and saw, hanging down right there, marking the heart of the newspaper and the hours and then the minutes and then the seconds until the presses rolled, the large four-sided clock in its beautiful oak case. It hung, neither ominous nor friendly, more like a Greek god, ruling above the clatter of keys and the zmmmump and slam of returns and the cigar and cigarette smoke and the ground-out butts in the carpet and the smell of beer. I was as awestruck as a batboy seeing Babe Ruth step out of the Yankee Stadium dugout.
A cigar smoke plume rose above his black Irish curls as the words came right out of Breslin’s big mouth the same way they came out of his typewriter, and that was cleaner and better than anyone else who tried to tell the truth in a 1,000–1,100 word newspaper column.
He leaned in and out with each word, and now it was a boxer dancing or something else you had never seen or even read about in a writer or a poet or a singer unless you were very lucky. I’ve seen it since, once or twice, when the poetry comes out through the eyes, and the mouth moves and the arms move and the legs move and it is all one thing. It is far bigger than the man himself. Far bigger. Far better too. In Breslin it was the soul of the city rising.
That is my first memory of Breslin, and as good a way as any way I know to begin telling his story.
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It is as good a way as any because it is emblematic of Breslin’s impact: on the reader, on his family, on his editors and on those individuals who were the subjects of his ire. Nearly everyone who ever met him had a Breslin story.
Pugnacious. Passionate. Profound. Bombastic. Bully. Buffoon. Bellowing. Reckless. Resourceful. Vengeful. Nasty. Gracious. Gratuitous. Insecure. Heavy drinking. Grandstanding miserable bastard.
Better on deadline than anyone.
We all have multiple selves. Jimmy Breslin made it a point to admit—in fact, he made it a point of considerable pride—that he often wasn’t sure which of his personae were real or when he was inhabiting one of his subjects or his characters. And of course, he knew and he knew that you would know as soon as you heard it or read it that the whole thing was a conceit. He knew who he was, and what purpose each of those selves was serving. He was, as he often bellowed, “J.B. Number One.” A great reporter and a brilliant deadline artist, that was Breslin.
In this and many other things he owed a great debt to Damon Runyon, a debt that he repaid when he wrote his 1991 biography of that writer, Damon Runyon, a book that was in many ways Breslin’s autobiography. The part that is pertinent here is that when Breslin talked about his confused identity, he could bring a smile to your eyes. In saying of Runyon, “He put a smile into a newspaper, which usually has as much humor as a bus accident,” he was writing a sentence that set himself and Runyon apart from many of the other inhabitants of the “literary underworld” that in the twentieth century was an American newsroom. Like Runyon he was a liar, a cheater, a thief, and a tout. But each could put a smile on your face.
As to who the two men were: in each case their multiple selves were at their core neither simply self-centered, nor narcissistic, neither bombastic nor buffoon, neither ugly nor angry, though in fact they included all of those things taken together. No, like the chaos they each thrived in, these traits were the molten lead that each would pour into the typewriter. In Breslin’s case the lead would then come out the other side as solid and perfect words.
These columns of words did not disregard the facts. They were, at their best, fact after fact after fact; detail after detail after detail; observation after observation after observation; emotion captured in lyrical simplicity and taken together whether funny or sad, personal or global, harsh or sympathetic; they were nouns, verbs, subjects or objects; and yes, occasionally—very occasionally—adjectives and adverbs. It is what he did with these words that mattered.
His acolyte, his protégé, and his friend, the city columnist Michael Daly, once explained what Breslin strove for in his writing. “Emotional clarity,” Daly mumbled. “Emotional clarity.”
He had gotten right to the heart of the matter in two words. Breslin often achieved clarity by seeing the world through the eyes of the characters he created or through those of the subjects of his reporting. With charity. With empathy. With an understanding of the essential tragicomic nature of so much of so many lives. He always was ready to duel to the death with the forces arrayed against them. But he was not an earnest crusader. He was a reporter and poet equally. He was able to get you to see and also to feel what the victims of poverty, injustice, and the deceit of the powerful were stuck with. He did this in a way that is one of the hardest: he put you in the scene with them, and he made you see and feel through their eyes what was in their hearts.
In person, Breslin also had a great sense of humor and, when he let you see it, you saw that his own heart was very big.
“He had a hard head, but he had a warm heart.” In that, the wonderful and wonderfully precise reporter Barbara Ross said it best. When she said it, she was summing up an encounter she once had with his bluster.
He was, in this hardheadedness and so many other ways, so much of the time, and for so many, impossible to live with. His cyclonic greed for attention began in childhood and was unrelenting. It was, however, alloyed with genuine warmth and love. This made it almost tolerable. You could see this warmth in his eyes, in his joy and in his sadness when he spoke of his mother; his sister, Deirdre; his first wife, Rosemary; his daughters, Kelly and Rosemary, who both died too young; and his wife until the very end, Ronnie Eldridge, saint, safekeeper, chauffeur and gentle nurse to his ego, his conscience, and as time went on, his health. You could see it when he crouched down to play with children.
His affection was not maudlin. His sense of piety had no room for falsehood. This is important too, for piety and faith were at the core of his religious point of view: not the institution of the Catholic Church, which he saw as the husk of these things. In this, as in whatever he saw, he wrote clearly. It is explicit in his book The Church that Forgot Christ.
It is expressed a little more enigmatically in the epitaph he wrote for Jack Maple. A bowler hat wearing, spectator shoe shod, and bow tie wrapped New York cop, Maple was as ironic of character as he was cherubic in stature. He was the man who in 1994 invented CompStat with New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton. The predictive, accountability-driven approach to policing revitalized its stagnant management and dramatically reduced crime in America. Breslin’s chiseled words said less about Jack and volumes more about Jimmy, and the distillation of fact into truth.
BRESLIN SAYS NO, I WILL NOT ATTEND HIS FUNERAL
You should go to jail and visit prisoners
That is a corporal work of mercy
The dead don’t know that you’re there
So whadda ya go for, the family?
Who knows what they feel about the dirty bastard?
Maple’s family and friends in fact loved him. His home city, New York, was in fact grateful to him. Maple, in fact, suffering from cancer, held his own wake in the back room of a famous New York gin mill, Elaine’s, while he was still alive and could enjoy his friends arrayed in tuxedos as they toasted him and their world. And Breslin thought highly of him. So what is Breslin saying here? He is saying: if you want to worship, worship with your feet. This was what his God required.
Breslin, a Roman Catholic all his life, was sure God resided in your heart, and doubted it resided in any church. This belief about faith, mercy, God, and man resonated throughout the breadth of his more than six decades of reporting. Reporting well, for Breslin, could be a penance and it could be a corporal work of mercy. Just do a good job and do it for the living, as Maple did in his police work and when he held his own wake.
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When it came to the subject of crime writing, Breslin had a very high bar, his City Editor at the New York Daily News, Sam Roberts, once observed. Even so, there was plenty to go around and he reported and wrote about many crimes—those against the nation, those by police and those by mobsters.
His method, Sam Roberts explained, was simple: “You know what Jimmy said, he said, you know, journalism is a four letter word, W-O-R-K. And that was absolutely true. You couldn’t cover it from the office, you couldn’t cover it on the telephone, you had to go slap up the stairs of tenements, go up in the housing projects. It was all shoe leather. And it was absolutely true.”
Sam was 28 when he was City Editor of the Daily News. It was his 75th birthday when he sat down to recount it.
“Seventy five,” he began. “Now that’s a number. Seventy. Five.” Sam, like Breslin, had been laying out pages and writing headlines and stories since before the age of ten, putting together his own publishing operation on his parents’ floors.
“I was way too young to have that job at 28. I began and ended every day with Jimmy Breslin,” Sam said, identifying something everyone who ever worked with Breslin knew: Jimmy Breslin got up earlier and he worked later than almost anyone in the business. Sam also was a witness to all the doubters to Breslin’s veracity.
“All the people who faulted him and said, oh, this was made up or this was fudged and everything—well, virtually everything I saw turned out to be true. You know, yeah, it may have had a polished quote here or there or some characters in some way might have been a little composite.” But on the whole, Sam said, it was “wishful thinking” on the part of the doubters. Because the stories only Breslin could get came as a result of long hours and “W-O-R-K.”
Breslin, he said, had the hunter’s instinct. “He had to get ahead of the story.” The John Lennon murder, the Kennedy gravedigger, the perpetrators of the great Lufthansa heist: on all of those things he was way ahead of everybody else. “It was that imagination he had; it was that foresight. That just made him such a special person.”
“But as somebody said, if it wasn’t true, it was certainly truth,” the City Editor recalled. He was at one thing, however, a miserable failure, Sam noted: “He missed virtually every political prediction.”
In this last observation, he sums up centralized journalism in its twentieth-century heyday: as an authoritative way to predict the past. During the beginning of Sam’s tenure in that era, there were sharp spikes poised near the edge of desks on which to slap the sheets of copy paper on which tomorrow’s news was typed or crossed out and retyped. To a reporter, these pieces of paper were rent receipts. They wrote, as Breslin said, for money.
“There were spikes, before OSHA outlawed them, and there were typewriters. I remember when we switched to computers and everybody said, the city room is freaking too quiet and they made the keys chirp. And then somebody said, it sounds like an aviary and they had to turn that off. It was just, you know—as you know, for better or for worse, as I’m sure people said about us at the time, it was a whole different world,” Sam said.
Certainly, different from The New York Times, where Sam toiled in his mid-seventies, writing beautifully about New York and New Yorkers, and where algorithms measured what was trending, what ought to be moved to the fore, what things few seemed to care about. When Sam was hired at the Daily News, Ed Quinn, the head of personnel, told him to not tell anyone he had gone to Cornell University.
“Tell them you went to Tilden High, or something,” Quinn told him.
In this world, which would turn out not to be a world without end, the worst crime a reporter could commit, Breslin noted repeatedly, was to fail to find a sensation. He noted in his writing that in 1883, when one publisher new to New York observed that another newspaper had misunderstood sensation and had devoted just three paragraphs to the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge, the publisher, Joseph Pulitzer, knew right then that he could beat these “imbeciles’’ at this game.
When Breslin arrived at the Herald Tribune and observed how columnists wrote what they thought mattered, he knew he could beat them at this game. He would actually leave the building and go out on the streets to gather the material for columns that mattered. He knew that if bridge openings and horse racing and baseball could bring some excitement to the reader, it was crime, if the crime was big enough, that was the main event. Because if a crime was big enough for Breslin, it usually was big enough and sensational enough to make the front pages of New York City’s rival tabloids—the civic-minded, solidly blue-collar Daily News, where he worked steadily in the 1970s and 1980s, and the once-liberal New York Post, which from practically the day Rupert Murdoch bought it and promised he would not change anything was transmogrifying into a one-sided comic book that was soon to be a secret pleasure of many Manhattanites.
The crimes of David Berkowitz soared over Breslin’s high bar. Berkowitz committed horrible, unfathomable, serial crimes and as he read what Breslin wrote about them he decided that he considered Jimmy Breslin a friend, perhaps a muse, so he communicated with him and taunted him. And let his demons speak to him.
That was just a few months after November 1976 when, to many New Yorkers, “J.B. Number One” seemed to appear full-blown on the pages of the Daily News. Of course, like so many who appeared to be an overnight success, his career actually began decades before.
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He was born in 1929 to a father who was an itinerant piano player, who walked out the door as Breslin toddled. His father, also James Earle Breslin, left Jimmy, his sister Deirdre, and a mother who was by many accounts a lovely—if alcoholic, and at least one time suicidal—woman, in a state of abject poverty. Poverty, loneliness, desperation, survival, and it ought to be noted, cops—Breslin grew up with cops in his family and lived with an alcoholic uncle who was also a cop—these were part of the fabric of the youth who walked into the newsroom of a local paper, the Long Island Press. By 18, in his first bylined article for that paper, he demonstrated that while he might not always be the first on the scene—he was writing this time about the first television set to be installed in a local bar, and there were plenty of TV sets in plenty of bars already—he would be among the first to provide insight into what it meant. In this case, he demonstrated through the vivid portrayal of the bar’s occupants how it changed the nature of bent-elbowed conversation forever, except in those few establishments that valued words so much that TVs were banned or kept off except during a World Series, when the sound was turned down, and for presidential debates, when it was turned up.
He went on from that long-gone newspaper: other newspapers, press associations, sportswriting, books—his first was about horse racing, which, he explained, was all he could know about, growing up in the shadow of a racetrack, and therefore all he should write about. Then, somehow, full-grown and chubby and cocky, he arrived at the Herald Tribune, where he joined a company of journalistic revolutionaries and demonstrated a talent that few—even in that newsroom, and it held plenty of talent—could match.
There was, of course, the future novelist Tom Wolfe, who when he walked in with his PhD—and his genius, he recalled to an interviewer modestly—looked around and said, I can beat these guys. A few months later he found himself sitting a few yards downwind from the cloud of smoke that enshrouded someone who thought exactly the same way: Breslin. Essentially, that was how the two of them changed journalism. They knew, like Runyon, that they could beat this game. They could change the rules.
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Long before his arrival at the New York Daily News, Breslin had written about John F. Kennedy’s murder and his last rites in the emergency room in Dallas. He had written about Kennedy’s gravedigger. In these two pieces he changed not just the form, but the substance of how news was reported. He had traveled to London and poignantly written of the death of an aged and bedridden Churchill. In this, he showed us the tears on the faces of Blitz survivors as they recalled the moments when a flawed man punched above his weight for his nation. He had already become known to the all-knowing literati, and the novelists and press critics, as a shoe-leather member of the founding group of this thing they called (though he would not) “The New Journalism.”
He had lived in Harlem to write about riots. In this, he followed the great tradition of muckraking reformers. He wrote about heists that claimed the lives of heisters through mistrust and incestuous murder. In this, he showed how sources could inform and betray—just like him. He had captured the glint of the diamond vanity ring of a corrupt labor racketeer facing the judge and jury. His palette was richer than that of a courtroom artist. Retired Mob boss Frank Costello, crazy Joe Gallo and his lion, Joe Valachi, the Mob rat, and crime on the streets of New York; he had written about all of these. It was portraiture at its best. And there was Joe McCarthy, the senator who destroyed lives, stymied art, gutted government departments through his nastiness and his campaign against what he saw as communism. He had lampooned LBJ, tasted the jungle dirt of Vietnam and put you in the courtroom as Watergate verdicts were read.
His overnight success at the News came after more than 720 newspaper columns for the Trib and the Post as well as numerous Sunday feature articles and numerous magazine articles. It came after four books, one of which had been made into a very successful movie, a comic Mafia bouffe called The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. That book shared one remarkable feature with Runyon’s Guys and Dolls, which Breslin knew was a marquee trait: “He made the gangsters so enjoyable that they could walk off a page and across a movie screen.”
But the News was the tabloid of record. The blue-collar bible had more readers—even as it slid down from its peak paid circulation to around a million daily and close to two million on a Sunday—than several of Jimmy’s past homes at newspapers and magazines had when combined.
And now it would have Son of Sam. Subway cars were filled with the sound of tabloid pages turning. Sam had captured the fevered imagination of an imperiled imperial city—a city by now dubbed “Fear City.” And it was Sam who chose Breslin, whose prose he admired. So it is with Sam that we begin to widen our aperture to capture the personas of James Earle Breslin.