A Drinking Life: A Memoir

by Pete Hamill

  Finally, on a late afternoon in the last week of May, I took the IRT down to the old Post building at 75 West Street, went in through the Washington Street entrance, and rode the elevator to the second floor. I followed a gloomy marbelized corridor around to the back and then, for the first time, stepped into the city room.

  Looking for someone? a tall, bespectacled man said.

  Yes. Jimmy Wechsler.

  All the way in the back.

  The room was more exciting to me than any movie: an organized chaos of editors shouting from desks, copyboys dashing through doors into the composing room, men and women typing at big manual typewriters, telephones ringing, the wire service tickers clattering, everyone smoking and putting butts out on the floor. I remembered the day I saw Dan Parker walking out of the Daily Mirror building and the newspapermen hurrying to the bars of Third Avenue. They’d all come from a place like this. But this wasn’t a rag like the Mirror; this was the Post, the smartest, bravest tabloid in New York, my paper. All these men and women were doing work that was honorable, I thought, work that added to the ideals and intelligence of the world. I wanted desperately to be one of them.

  Wechsler was a small man with a large head and thoughtful eyes. He was wearing a bowtie and suspenders. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to his elbows. He took me into his inner office and I sat beside a desk littered with newspaper clippings, magazines, letters from readers, copies of his book. While we talked, he smoked cigarettes and sipped coffee. Near the end of our chat, he leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head.

  Have you ever thought about becoming a newspaperman? he said.

  I mumbled something in reply, but I don’t remember what. It must have been something like, Only all my life.

  Well, Wechsler said, call me in a couple of days. Maybe I can get you a tryout around here.

  At 1 A.M., on June 1, 1960, I was back in the city room, clumsily disguised as a reporter, and my life changed forever.

  V

  A DRINKING LIFE

  Oh, I could drink a case of you, darling

  And I would still be on my feet

  I would still be on my feet.

  — Joni Mitchell, “A Case of You”

  I read the news today oh boy . . .

  — John Lennon and Paul McCartney, “A Day in the Life”

  1

  IN HUMILITY and arrogance, I started to learn the newspaper trade. I was humbled by what I did not know, in the company of so many skilled craftsmen; I was arrogant enough to believe I could learn to do what they did. My teacher wasn’t Jimmy Wechsler; for the first eighteen months I worked nights while he worked days and we seldom saw each other. He allowed me in the door, but a man named Paul Sann kept me there.

  I saw him for the first time at six o’clock in the morning of my first shift at the Post. I had walked in that night full of fear and trembling, not knowing what to expect, carrying a copy of Under the Volcano to read on the subway home if they threw me out. The assistant night city editor was Ed Kosner, younger than I was by a few years. He parked me at a typewriter and asked me how much experience I had. When I told him absolutely none, he laughed and without pause explained the fundamentals. I would write on “books,” four sheets of coarse copy paper separated by carbons. The carbon copies were called “dupes.” In the upper left-hand corner I should type my name in lower case and then create a “slug,” a short word that identified the story for editors and typesetters. The slug should reflect the subject; a political story could be slugged POLS. But if it was a story about a murder I should not slug it KILL because the men setting type would kill the story. With that simple lesson, he gave me a press release and told me to rewrite it in two paragraphs, and my career had begun.

  All through the night in the sparsely manned city room, I wrote small stories based on press releases or items clipped from the early editions of the morning papers. I noticed that Kosner had Scotch-taped a single word to his own typewriter: Focus. I appropriated the word as my motto. My nervousness ebbed as I worked, asking myself: What does this story say? What is new? How would I tell it to someone in a saloon? Focus, I said to myself. Focus. . . . Near dawn, there was a lull as the editors discussed what they would do with all the material they now had in type. Beyond the high open windows, the sky was turning red. I walked over and gazed out and saw that we were across the street from the piers of United Fruit, whose bananas my grandfather had shipped from faraway Honduras a half-century before. I wondered if he had ever docked at this pier, ever looked up at the building that housed the New York Post. When I turned around, Paul Sann was walking into the city room.

  He had a great walk, quick, rhythmic, taut with authority, as he moved without hellos across the city room to the fenced-off pen at the far end, where he served as executive editor. He was dressed entirely in black, with black cowboy boots, carrying the morning papers under his arm. From where I sat, I watched him go to his desk, light a Camel, take a cardboard cup of coffee from a copyboy. His face was gray, urban, Bogartian, his mouth pulled tight in a tough guy’s mask, his gray hair cut short, and he wore horn-rimmed glasses which he shoved to the top of his head while reading. He immediately began poring over galleys, a thick black ebony pencil in his hand, marking some, discarding others, making a list on a yellow pad. Around seven, the other editors gathered at his desk to discuss the flow of the paper. Sann always wrote the “wood,” the page-one headline (so named because for decades it had been set in wood type). Then he moved into the composing room, where the trays of metal type for each page were laid out on stone-topped tables. He was still there when my shift ended at eight and Kosner gave me a goodnight. Sann didn’t talk to me that night. He didn’t talk to me for weeks.

  But in the weeks that followed, as I started going out on fires and murders, knocking on doors in Harlem and the Bronx at three in the morning, I came to understand that Paul Sann was the great piston of the New York Post. Wechsler gave the paper its liberal political soul; but Sann made it a tough ballsy tabloid. Wechsler pressed for coverage of civil rights, Cold War sanity, the reform politicians of the Democratic party; Sann was skeptical of all living beings, and leavened the political coverage with murders, fires, disasters, and gangsters. They didn’t much like each other, and their conflict was discussed almost every morning after the shift ended, at the bar in the Page One, a block away from the Post.

  One guy wants a newspaper, said Carl Pelleck, the best police reporter in the city. The other guy wants a pamphlet.

  Yeah, someone else said, but without Wechsler, it has no identity, no function, no soul. It’ll die.

  Listen, it’s gonna die anyway. It won’t last past New Year’s.

  The uncertainty about the paper’s future didn’t bother me; I was still working at the studio, and if the newspaper did go down I wouldn’t starve. But in the meantime, I’d have had the best time of my life. I just hoped it would last long enough for me to learn the trade. During my three-month tryout, I watched Sann from a distance and got to know other newspapermen up close, in the morning seminars at the Page One. I loved their talk, its cynicism and fatalism, its brilliant wordplay, as we stood at the bar and watched the stockbrokers coming up from the subways to trudge to Walk Street while we waited for the first editions to arrive. When the papers landed on the bar, the seminar would begin. This was an often brutal analysis of stories, headlines, and writing style, presided over by an immense, burly, mustached copy editor named Fred McMorrow, attended by two old pros named Gene Grove and Normand Poirier. They were funny and merciless. About my stories. About others, their works, themselves, and most of the human race.

  Then one stormy morning, an hour before deadline, after I’d written a story about the eviction of a family in Brooklyn, Sann called me over. He held the galley in his hands. I was nervous, still on a tryout, still provisional.

  Not bad, he said.

  Thanks.

  I like the part about the rain rolling down his face.

 
Thanks.

  By the way, did this guy speak English?

  No.

  So how the fuck did you get all these quotes?

  I speak a little Spanish, I said.

  You do? How come an uneducated Brooklyn Mick like you speaks Spanish?

  I went to school in Mexico for a year. On the GI Bill.

  No shit?

  No shit.

  He lit a Camel. Then he pointed at a paragraph near the end.

  You see this, he said, where you say this is a tragedy?

  Yeah.

  I’m taking it out. And don’t you ever use the fucking word “tragedy” again. You tell what happened, and let the reader say it’s a tragedy. If you’re crying, the reader won’t.

  I see what you mean.

  You better, he said, taking a drag on the cigarette, then sipping the black coffee. He glanced at the story again.

  Maybe in another eight or nine years, you could be pretty good at this miserable trade.

  Thanks, I said, and started to leave.

  Oh, by the way, Paul Sann said. You’re hired.

  2

  NATURALLY, I got drunk in celebration. The next day, I told my partner I was leaving the studio. He was furious, shouting You’ve left me high and dry. He was right, of course. But there was no going back. I’d found a life I wanted. Every day or night would be different. I would have a ringside seat at the big events of the day. I’d learn about death and life and everything in between. It was honorable work, not putting goods in pretty packages. Somehow the desire for freedom and the need for security had merged. If I worked hard, listened well, studied the masters of the craft, I’d have a trade I could practice anywhere. Even if the Post folded. I might never be Franz Kline in his heroic studio. But I wouldn’t be a buttoned-down organization man either. I’d be a newspaperman.

  After I was hired, after they gave me my first Working Press card, I brought my familiar sense of entitlement to the bar of the Page One every morning. Those mornings were free of the limits of time, and I would drink with McMorrow, Grove, Poirier, and others, while fishmongers made deliveries and the day-shift guys showed up for a morning pop before starting at ten. The Page One was the headquarters of the fraternity, a place completely devoid of character except for the men at the bar, a way station for all the whiskey-wounded boomers of the business who passed through on their way from one town’s paper to another. I loved it. I’d taken a cut in pay to work at the Post but I didn’t care. I had enough for food, rent, and drink. Each day, after the Page One, I’d take the subway to Astor Place and walk from the station to the flat on Ninth Street, where I’d sleep off the beer, wake up and eat pasta at the Orchidia on the corner of Second Avenue before going off again to the Post. My byline was in the paper every day, and I couldn’t wait to go to sleep so that I could wake up and do it all again. On days when I did no drinking, I often couldn’t sleep, as sentences caromed around my brain and I rewrote myself and others. On such days, I often moved to the refrigerator and found a beer.

  Everybody in the business was drinking then, the lovely older woman on night rewrite, stars and editors, Murray Kempton and the copyboys. Once, when I was working days, Poirier came to me and said, How do you call in sick if you’re in? We laughed and concocted a ludicrous story of eating a bad clam at lunch, and sure enough, at lunch hour, Poirier called in with his bad clam attack and took the rest of the day off. Another day, working overtime during some disaster in the dead of winter, I finished at noon instead of 8 A.M. and carried my exhaustion directly into the Lexington Avenue IRT, skipping the Page One. Standing in the middle of the subway car, his eyes glassy, a large black Russian-style fur hat making him seem even taller, was McMorrow. He was maintaining his balance with one finger delicately touching the roof of the subway car and he was barking, Copy! Copyboy! as strangers edged away from his dangerous presence.

  That first newspaper Christmas, there was a staff party in the penthouse office of Dorothy Schiff, the Post’s owner. The city editor got drunk and fell down the spiral staircase, breaking his arm. He refused to risk the hazards of a city hospital, saying I’d rather die here at my desk. He insisted on being taken to his home in Oyster Bay. So Poirier and I helped him to his car, both of us drunk too, and drove through the frozen night to Oyster Bay. When his wife opened the door and saw her wrecked husband and then saw us, she started shouting at us, You bastards, you bastards, look what you’ve done to him, you bastards.

  One election night, Kempton was in his third-floor office, sending down his copy one sentence at a time, until it was six-thirty in the morning. The night managing editor, George Trow, asked the copyboy to ask Mr. Kempton a simple, if urgent, question: “How much more?” The copyboy ran up the back stairs to the third floor, burst into the office and said to the paper’s greatest columnist: Mr. Trow wants to know, how much more? Kempton lifted his almost-completed bottle of Dewar’s and said, Oh, about an inch.

  After working a double shift one Friday, reporting three stories, rewriting three others, and doing captions and overlines for about fifteen photographs, I was reading galleys in the city room. At his desk, Sann was typing fast with two fingers on his Saturday page, a potpourri of news items and smart remarks called “It Happened All Over.” He finished editing it with a pencil, called for a copyboy, rubbed his eyes, and then walked over to me.

  Let’s have a drink, you lazy Mick bastard.

  We took a cab to midtown and went into a joint called the Spindletop. It was dark and fancy in a sleazy way; if it wasn’t mobbed-up then the decorator had been inspired by gangster movies. Sann ordered whiskey, I asked for a beer. We talked for a while about craft and newspapers and the Boston Celtics, whose coach was his friend. Then:

  You got a broad?

  No.

  Good, Sann said. This business is lousy on women.

  I had learned that already. My lovely Dominican was gone, defeated by the hours of the newspaper trade.

  But you’re married, I said.

  Yeah, to the greatest woman in America. But it hasn’t been easy for her.

  I sipped my beer, uneasy about saying anything.

  She’s sick now, he said.

  I’m sorry to hear that.

  She’s very sick, he said, as if speaking to himself.

  Then he turned and walked to the pay phone. I heard him placing a bet on the Cincinnati Reds. A few more people came into the bar, and then Ike Gellis arrived. He was the sports editor, short and stocky, Edward G. Robinson to Sann’s Bogart.

  Where is he? Ike said.

  Phone booth.

  I bet he’s betting baseball. He’s a fuckin’ degenerate on Fridays.

  Sann hung up and came straight to Gellis.

  Well, well, the world’s shortest Jew.

  I hope you didn’t bet the Reds game, Gellis said. The Giants’ll kill ’em.

  Shut up and drink, Sann said.

  Two weeks later, early on a Friday morning, Sann’s wife died of cancer. We heard the news about six A.M. Around eight, Sann arrived. He walked on his usual hurried way across the city room and went to his desk. He didn’t look at galleys or dupes of stories. He started to type. He typed for more than an hour, worked the copy with a pencil, called for a copyboy, and then got up and walked out of the city room without a word.

  Someone passed around a carbon of the story. It was a farewell to his wife. Tough, laconic, underwritten. He never used the word “tragedy.” My friend Al Aronowitz read it and started to weep.

  Oh, man, he said. Oh, man.

  Aronowitz was a great reporter, a wonderful writer, and a lovely man. But he didn’t drink, so I saw little of him after work. That morning he went to the Page One with me. We drank for a couple of hours in virtual silence. But the booze had no effect.

  I don’t know if I can work in this business, Aronowitz said. His wife dies and the first thing he does is come in and write about it.

  Shut up and drink, I said.

  3

  EARLY ON, I
learned there were limits to the myth of the hard-drinking reporter. One Saturday night, we threw a big party in the place on Ninth Street. It lasted until dawn. I was due at the Post at 1 A.M. Monday. But when we woke up on Sunday afternoon, Jake and Tim and I were still full of the exuberance of the party. We bought a case of beer and started drinking again. Other people dropped in. The day rolled on, full of laughs and drinks. When I arrived at the Post that night, I felt sober, seeing things clearly and thinking lucidly. But I was half-drunk. I must have laughed too loud or bumped against a trash barrel too hard, attracting some notice. Then I started to type and my fingers kept hitting between keys. Finally an editor named Al Davis came over and stood above me and said, I think you better go home. I was mortified. Davis was part of the saloon fraternity too; he wasn’t objecting to the drink but to the obvious fact that I couldn’t hold it. I got up and pulled on my coat and he stepped close to me and whispered, Don’t you ever do this again. And I didn’t.

  But if it was stupid to come into work carrying a package, as we said, that was no reason to stop drinking. As in most things, you needed rules of conduct. I drank in the mornings when I worked nights and at night when I worked days. When I was sent out to cover some fresh homicide, I usually went into a neighborhood bar to find people who knew the dead man or his murdered girlfriend. I talked to cops and firemen in bars and met with petty gangsters in bars. That wasn’t unusual. From Brooklyn to the Bronx, the bars were the clubs of New York’s many hamlets, serving as clearinghouses for news, gossip, jobs. If you were a stranger, you went to the bars to interview members of the local club. As a reporter, your duty was to always order beer and sip it very slowly.