The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution

by Marc Weingarten

  Can’t Anyone Here Play This Game? became a regional bestseller. Payson loved it and passed the book along to Jock Whitney. The Trib owner, too, was taken with Breslin’s flinty prose style, the way he sketched the team’s colorful characters using sharp-tongued quotes and roguish humor. Whitney brought the book to sports editor Hal Claassen and told him to inquire about first serialization rights. It turned out that assistant editor Lawton Carver had already broached the same idea to Claassen a week earlier. The Tribune acquired the rights, and Breslin’s career at the Trib was launched.

  Breslin had come a long way from his hardscrabble roots. He was born on October 17, 1929, in a gray frame house on 134th Street and 101st Avenue in Jamaica, Queens, the son of two alcoholics. James Earl Breslin, a piano player, abandoned the family when Jimmy was an adolescent. His mother, Frances, took a job as an elementary school teacher for a while, then found steady work as a supervisor in the city’s welfare department in order to support Jimmy and his younger sister, Deirdre. She never got over her husband’s abandonment and drank heavily. Breslin remembers one bender during which his mother put a gun to her temple and cocked the hammer. Mercifully, she didn’t pull the trigger.

  Breslin had a troubled relationship with his mother, an emotionally distant matriarch. But Frances was different at work—there she was a sympathetic supervisor who often invited black workers to her home despite the opprobrium of her Irish friends. From her, Breslin learned about basic decency and how the inequities of the city split along race and class lines.

  A poor student, Breslin’s solace was sports and sportswriters, particularly the great New York Sun columnist W. C. Heinz and Chicago Tribune writer Westbrook Pegler, whose anthologized collection of articles Breslin treasured. When he was eight, Breslin began collecting schoolyard gossip and hand-printing a one-sheet newsletter called The Flash; one issue featured the banner headline “Mother Tried Suicide.” Breslin wrote to avoid dealing with real life; he could just sublimate it all though his work, use it an excuse to “keep all storms in my life offshore.” He was never much of a book reader. “I read a Balzac novel once,” he said. “It took me two years to finish it.” Language was another matter; he loved playing with words and building sentences with them. After graduating from high school, Breslin hustled for newspaper work and found a job at the Long Island Press, attending class at Long Island University at night because “I needed it for my working papers. The Long Island Press was an incredible education for me, because I worked every desk—City, Sports, Night. It was incredibly hard work for no money, a backbreaking job.”

  Breslin moved up the newspaper chain quickly, taking sportswriting jobs at the New York Journal-American, a Hearst newspaper, and the Scripps-Howard syndicate. By the spring of 1963 the young reporter had grown weary of the sports beat, which was too circumscribed and a bit too easy for him. His first freelance column for the Trib, which ran in conjunction with the serialization of Can’t Anyone Here Play This Game? was ostensibly a story about the Mets’ first four-game winning streak, but it was really a gimlet-eyed portrait of a lovable no-goodnik, Mets first baseman Marv Throneberry:

  Without Throneberry we would all be lost. His brand of baseball, as displayed last season, made the Mets. He had to be your hero. Anybody a little late paying a loan could understand Marvelous Marv when he went for, then usually missed, a pop fly. Only the bucket-shop operator, who specializes in old widows, didn’t like Marvelous Marv.

  One evening after work in May 1963 Whitney asked Breslin to meet him at Bleeck’s bar, near the Tribune’s offices, to feel him out for a potential job offer. Breslin went into the meeting wanting no part of yet another low-paying newspaper gig; encouraged by the success of his Mets book, he was thinking about new book ideas and becoming a full-time freelancer. “Mr. Whitney, with all due respect, you can’t pay me enough to work for you. I’ve had it with newspapers,” Breslin barked, to which Whitney responded, “Well, what do you want?” Breslin knew that he had found a home and that Whitney was the kind of stand-up guy who would reward good work with proper recompense. He would be pulling down an annual salary of $125,000 within four years.

  A few months after being hired as a sportswriter, Breslin was given his own column on the split page (the first page of the second section). The objective for Bellows was to neutralize the paternalistic tone of old-line columnists such as Walter Lippmann and the Alsops with a column that was written in the common-man cadence of a working-class readership that the Trib had been criticized for avoiding. “I never thought about how to do a column,” said Breslin. “It just came naturally, I guess. It had a point of view and it had to spring right out of the news. Everything of the moment demands that it be done that day. Even when a few sentences don’t work when you get to the deadline, there is an immediacy that makes the column fresh. Like you were covering the eighth race at Belmont. But no one was doing it when I started. That’s why everyone thought it was new.”

  For Breslin, the greatest New York stories were to be found among the city’s working class, the low-level wage earners who kept the city’s industry churning. They worked in Manhattan, but they lived in the outer boroughs with another substratum of the working class: the shysters, the numbers runners, the small-time gangsters. Class was Breslin’s big subject; he wanted to show readers what it was like “out there” across the bridges, among the dispossessed who had been ill served by the uptown New York media, maligned by their crude stereotypes. Mostly Breslin wanted to share his ardor for New York in all its multifarious, gritty glory. “New York is all I know,” said Breslin. “It’s all I care about.” Like George Eliot or V. S. Pritchett, Breslin innately understood that everyone was interesting. They just needed someone to tell their stories for them. “On the surface, the Tribune was this dignified, Republican newspaper,” said Tom Wolfe, who was hired as a general assignment reporter in 1961. “But it also gained this following of the cab drivers with the cap over one eye, and Jimmy had a lot to do with that.”

  A big, hulking Irishman who stood nearly six feet tall and weighed 240 pounds, Breslin resembled a Greco-Roman wrestler gone to seed. Add to that his voice—a reedy, adenoidal screech filtered through a heavy Ozone Park accent—and Breslin could easily insinuate himself into any scenario that had story potential. “It’s news reporting, and that consists of using your two feet,” said Breslin. “The only lesson, then, that you could give people is how to climb stairs, because there are no stories on the first floor. Anything you’re looking for is four and five flights up.”

  Breslin, who never learned how to drive, conducted all of his research on foot. Often accompanied by his wife, Rosemary, he would just walk the streets, sniffing out stories in tenement buildings and Irish bars, making crucial contacts and a few lasting friends along the way. Equally as important was Breslin’s ability to hold his drink. Breslin once remarked that the best story ideas were the ones that sounded good after the hangover had worn off. Breslin’s story foraging frequently happened in bars, usually Pep McGuire’s place on Queens Boulevard. Pep McGuire’s was Breslin’s salon, the meeting place where the reporter befriended the shady, Runyonesque characters who would people his columns for the Trib.

  For many of his earliest columns Breslin used the raw material of his childhood: the kids in the neighborhood who “were a little poorer than some, a little more Irish than others, a little closer to the racetrack than most.” “Marvin the Torch” was about a four-hundred-pound bookie friend of Breslin’s who moonlighted as an arsonist, setting fire to money-losing businesses so that the owners could collect the insurance money. Like so many of Breslin’s greatest pieces, “Marvin the Torch” was a short story disguised as a newspaper story; it read like nothing in the Trib or any other newspaper. Breslin wasn’t interested in pat morality plays or the rote condescension that usually accompanied stories about petty criminals. His affection is obvious, but to Breslin, Marvin was just another working stiff, selling his services to the highest bidder. It began:


  Marvin the Torch never could keep his hands off somebody else’s business, particularly if the business was losing money. Now this is accepted behavior in Marvin’s profession, which is arson. But he has a bad habit of getting into places where he shouldn’t be and promising too many favors. This is where all his trouble starts.

  Marvin is hired to torch a custard stand located “on the wrong side of an amusement park”; for kicks, he intends to “make the roof blow straight up into the air without bending the nails in it.” Instead, a “good south wind” carries the fire out of control: “Marvin the Torch’s favor job on the custard stand had also belted out most of a million-and-a-half-dollar amusement park.” It was like something out of an old George Raft film, but it was happening in present-day New York, and Breslin could bring it to life with more verisimilitude and gallows humor than any other metro reporter in the city.

  “Jerry the Booster” was the story of a small-time department store shoplifter, a charming rake with a propensity to stuff 42-regular suits down his size-60 pants.

  “Yes, sir?” the salesman said. He said it the way he always says “Yes, sir?” to a customer. Only this time his nose was twitching.

  “I would like a whole new wardrobe of clothes,” Jerry the Booster said.

  “I want a suit,” a Providence boy called out from the right.

  “Could I have a little service, please?” a Providence boy called out from the left.

  “This looks nice,” the third Providence boy, his hands all over a navy blue, said.

  “Yes, sir?” the salesman said. But the salesman was not looking at Jerry the Booster when he said “Yes, sir?” The salesman, his nose twitching, was looking over Jerry the Booster’s fat head. The salesman was trying to catch the attention of somebody who was someplace else in Goldwater’s Department Store.

  “The bum is trying to get a cop,” Jerry the Booster said to himself.

  Jerry the Booster pulled on the salesman’s sleeve. “Say, mister,” Jerry said to the salesman, “look what I know how to do.”

  Jerry stuck his tongue out at the salesman. Then he swiveled his shoulders around. His fingers flicked at his belt line. And, in one motion, Jerry’s jacket slid off his back, and his pants dropped to the floor.

  “Nyaaahhh,” Jerry the Booster, tongue out, sang to the salesman.

  Like Gay Talese, Breslin was using dialogue to elucidate character, but instead of pathos, Breslin went for laughs. Sure, Jerry the Booster was a crook, but Breslin knew that the city would be a very dull place without guys like Jerry around. “Jimmy was incredible, the greatest newspaper columnist of my era,” said Tom Wolfe. “He turned out that column five times a week, and practically all of it was reporting. He introduced Queens to New York.”

  Breslin often didn’t sit down at his typewriter until 4 P.M. or later, and then he’d make a mad dash to his 5:30 deadline. “When everyone else would be filing to the subway to go home, I’d be going in the opposite direction, headed toward my typewriter at the Tribune,” said Breslin. “I felt guilty about it, but I never missed a deadline.” Breslin would plunk himself down at a desk in the city room, hunching himself, according to Tom Wolfe, “into a shape like a bowling ball. He would start drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes until vapor started drifting off his body. He looked like a bowling ball fueled with liquid oxygen. Thus fired up, he would start typing. I’ve never seen a man write so well against a daily deadline.” By the time he pulled the last page out of his typewriter, Breslin’s desk would becovered in a sea of crumpled notes and Styrofoam coffee cups, his copy a spiderweb of handwritten cross-outs and scribbled revisions. Somehow the words always scanned on the page. Editor Sheldon “Shelly” Zalaznick characterized Breslin’s deadline crunching as “absolutely heart-stopping, but I never remember him ever missing a deadline.”

  As someone who shared the same troubled origins as many of his interview subjects, Breslin skillfully endeared himself to even the most intransigent and cynical among them. A back slap and a few rounds of beers were effective social lubricants, but Breslin’s avuncular demeanor closed the deal. He was just like them, another poor schmuck behind on his rent and his gambling debts. “Jimmy had the knack, he still does, of becoming your instant best friend,” said former Tribune national editor Richard Wald. “And he was a very exacting reporter. He took reams of notes, until he had the name, rank, and serial number of everyone he interviewed.”

  Breslin’s colorful reprobates were engaged in a commedia dell’ arte of the city’s underworld, the elaborate scheming and double-dealing of the criminal class. The Trib’s readers lapped it up; Breslin became the Trib’s first writing star of the 1960s, profiled in the national newsweeklies and envied by his colleagues. But Breslin’s inside peek into a subterranean culture was regarded with suspicion by a number of his fellow journalists, mainly because the stories seemed too good to be true. Breslin’s gifts as a writer were obvious, but did he make it all up?

  The New York Times’s metropolitan editor A. M. Rosenthal thought so, so one day he went to Pep McGuire’s to see for himself. Breslin column regular Fat Thomas was at the bar; another thuggish Breslin favorite nicknamed Cousin was in the office; Mafia figure James “Jimmy the Gent” Burke was nursing a beer a few stools away from Thomas. It all checked out.

  One day in March 1964, Breslin was drinking in Bleeck’s when an anonymous messenger boy walked in and told Breslin to meet Charlie Workman at the Port Authority that afternoon. This was a strange message to receive from a man Breslin assumed was behind bars. Workman, also known as Charlie the Bug, was one of Murder Inc.’s most prolific killers; his most notorious hit, the murder of Harlem kingpin Dutch Schultz, had landed him in the state prison in Trenton, New Jersey, for twenty-three years. When Workman, accompanied by his brother, Abe, and his wife, Catherine, met Breslin, he was only a few hours out of prison on parole. He wanted Breslin to be the first to know.

  Breslin’s editor, Buddy Weiss, had too much faith in Breslin’s skill as a reporter to question his veracity, but he did allow him a certain degree of creative latitude regarding dialogue and the use of minor details to enliven some of his more fanciful set pieces. “Jimmy was so clearly over the top that you couldn’t take it seriously,” said Richard Wald. “And if the story wasn’t serious, there wasn’t the same amount of probity devoted to it. There was a lot of exaggeration in what Jimmy wrote, a lot of charged language and wild, crazy fabulations about the city, but he didn’t invent the people. I met Marvin the Torch. Of course, his name wasn’t Marvin.”

  But Breslin occasionally threw the names of people he knew into his stories, people who had no business being in there. For an article about a mob hit that had taken place on Queens Boulevard, Breslin implied that the real target of the murder, Joseph Buchwald, had had the good fortune of not being in town that day. Buchwald was the father of the Tribune’s Paris correspondent, Art Buchwald, and he had no connection whatsoever with Breslin’s story. “That really upset my father, when Jimmy did that,” said Art Buchwald. “He was implying that my father had something to do with the mob, when he didn’t. But Jimmy just shrugged it off, and the people he worked for were delighted by this stuff.”

  Weiss knew that Breslin would often disguise the names in his stories to protect the guilty, but he would often take issue with some of the earthy language that Breslin used. As a man who could give as good as he got, Weiss wasn’t cowed by Breslin, and the two would fight and yell at each other in the city room, making their arguments public spectacles, but Breslin never backed down. He wouldn’t change his copy for anyone, not even the men who were cutting his checks every week. When Zalaznick, the editor of the Trib’s Sunday magazine supplement, tried to change a few words in a story, Breslin accused him of being underhanded in an attempt to “tunnel under me” and destroy his integrity. “Breslin was a bad guy to tangle with,” said Zalaznick. “He could be very tough, but underneath it all I thought he was a very decent human being.”

  Pack j
ournalism was anathema to Breslin; if a clutch of reporters was feverishly heading in one direction, Breslin would hightail it the other way, in search of the real story. The best examples of this were the series of stories he filed in the wake of President Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963. This was a story Breslin knew he had to cover; aside from his affinity for the nation’s first Irish Catholic president, Breslin felt it crystallized, in one horrible moment, the nation’s tendency toward senseless violence that had torn apart America’s cities. Breslin arrived in Dallas on the twenty-second, just intime for the press conference with Kennedy’s doctors, including Dr. Malcolm Oliver Perry II, the attending ER surgeon at Parkland Memorial Hospital, who had tried in vain to resuscitate the dead president. While the other reporters grilled the doctors about the chronology of events leading up to Kennedy’s death, Breslin carefully probed Perry about his personal impressions, the thoughts that had raced through his mind when the president’s lifeless body was wheeled into view. Perry was nonplussed by Breslin’s line of inquiry; what direct bearing did it have on the tragedy at hand?

  But the assassination itself was being covered amply from every conceivable angle; Breslin wanted to bring this national tragedy down to human scale, telescope it into the story of Dr. Perry’s futility as he confronted a national tragedy. Breslin’s dispatch, called “A Death in Emergency Room One,” ran in the Trib’s November 24 edition, and began: