Before the internet ushered in the digital age, most news in America was delivered in black ink on pulpy gray paper, and big city newspaper columnists like Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hamill and Murray Kempton roamed the streets of New York City like giants.
One of the nation’s most powerful newspaper columnists in his prime, Breslin — who died in 2017 — was an eyewitness to many of America’s pivotal moments during the second half of the 20th century, and spent a lifetime championing underdogs and ordinary New Yorkers.
Veteran New York newsman Richard Esposito, who splits his time as a resident of both Hampton Bays and Manhattan, was a longtime Breslin colleague. He is the first to capture the legendary writer’s wild ride of a life in a new biography out this October, Jimmy Breslin: The Man Who Told the Truth (Penzler Publishing).
The deeply-researched and masterfully written new biography is both a celebration of one of America’s greatest newspapermen and a sobering look at a deeply flawed man. It comes from a writer who knew the famed reporter well. Nearly 35 years ago, following an ugly racist outburst by Breslin against a younger newsroom reporter, Esposito — then, the youngest editor on Newsday‘s staff — got stuck with the unpleasant task of informing the cantankerous columnist of his two-week suspension from the now-defunct Newsday offshoot paper, New York Newsday.
But the young editor learned a lot from the veteran columnist and his brilliant way with what Esposito refers to as “tabloid poetry” over the many years he worked both for and with Breslin.
“Tabloid poetry is like the shortest short story. You have 1,000 words, maybe 1,100 words — and with that compression, every comma matters, every attribution matters, every word matters. When you read Jimmy, you realize his grammar is perfect, his prose is perfect,” he says. “I look at it as poetry, as if [W.H.] Auden were a cab driver, you know, or if [William Butler] Yeats were a cab driver. [Breslin] understood poetry and how to make poetry that you and I and people with an eighth grade reading level would want to know about.”
Breslin began his career as a copy boy for the Long Island Press in the 1940s and went on to write for the New York Herald Tribune, the New York Daily News, the New York Journal American, New York Newsday and The Daily Beast, among others.
The Pulitzer Prize winning columnist penned a famous 1963 column about John F. Kennedy’s grave digger, and another that took readers inside the operating room where JFK died, both of which became staples of journalism school curriculums. Breslin got swept up in the ‘Son of Sam’ serial killer investigation when the killer wrote taunting letters to him at the Daily News in 1977 (prompting Breslin to observe wryly in a TV interview that “he probably is the first killer that I can recall who understands the use of a semicolon.”) He wrote a poignant piece about the two New York cops who rushed a dying John Lennon to Roosevelt Hospital.
The portly, hard-drinking Irishman was inside the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem when Malcolm X was assassinated, and steps away from Robert F. Kennedy when he was fatally shot in Los Angeles in 1968. He helped detain gunman Sirhan Sirhan by sitting on him. Decades before the Sopranos, he spoofed a violent Mafia family that included “Crazy Joe” Gallo in his 1969 novel The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. Breslin was badly beaten after he took a cab into the heart of the 1991 Crown Heights riots.
Breslin’s columns were master classes in unsentimental irony. After his deadbeat father reappeared in Breslin’s life at the height of his fame with his hand out, the columnist would write that the old man blew back into his life “like heavy snow through a broken window.”
Esposito recently sat down with Southforker to talk about the new book and what he learned from the iconic New York journalist.
SOUTHFORKER: As a journalist who worked with Breslin, what did you learn from him?
RICHARD ESPOSITO: “At a crime scene, let them all go home.” That’s what he taught me. “Stay at the scene until the tow truck tows the victim’s car away. Stay until the last cop picks up the last shell casing, because he might tell you what kind of bullet it was. You learn something no one else noticed.” That’s why we learned that the gravedigger who dug John Kennedy’s burial plot didn’t get to see the service himself, because he was off digging another grave for $3.01 an hour. Nobody else sat with [mobster] Frank Costello to talk about [mafia snitch] Joe Valachi. He sits there and he captures Frank Costello stirring his espresso. You, the reader, are there with [Breslin].
SF: You write that Breslin always said that the “story is at the top of the stairs.”
RE: That was his childhood. His childhood was at the top of the stairs. His father walked out on him. Walked out on his mother; never came back. And Jimmy, at 10 years old, was always looking for his father, and in a sense, that part of Jimmy existed till he died, a little boy who was wounded inside. He wrote about the wounded. He understood being wounded, and he knew he would find the wounded at the top of the stairs and tell their stories. He climbs to the top of the stairs to talk to a “Son of Sam” victim’s mother in her kitchen. As you read it you can hear him go up the stairs. You can hear the reverence in the writing when he’s approaching the mother. Not a lot of reporters put that work in.
SF: One of the things that distinguished Breslin was his use, rare among newspaper columnists, of the second person voice in his columns.
RE: He understood the second person, and that the second person puts you on the fire truck. You’re not watching the fire truck. You’re on the fire truck. You’re in Crown Heights during the riots. He knew that the second person is much closer than the narrative third person. He didn’t use the first person much — he could — but he knew the second person was the right voice to put you looking at the landlord through the character’s eyes.
SF: What did you learn about Breslin himself in researching and writing this book?
RE: A couple of things … One was just how heavy a drinker he was. He never realized that alcohol became a problem. He understood when it became a problem for other people, he would call and tell them, you know, stop. The second thing I didn’t know about Jimmy was how chaotic his home life was. I had no idea what a disaster he made, always. He needed the chaos like his idol [Damon Runyon, the subject of a biography Breslin published in 1991]. He really needed to live in it.
SF: You write that Breslin grew up with mobsters.
RE: He grew up with mobsters, in a borough [Queens] with no elevators, in small buildings where everybody lived small lives. Bus drivers, construction workers, cops, gangsters. So when he writes about the Lufthansa heist [featured in the movie Goodfellas], he’s sitting on a canal in Howard Beach, in a restaurant with some two-bit gangster, and the guy is telling him what really happened. Jimmy can make that phone call, get that guy on the phone.
SF: You paint a picture of a man of many contradictions.
RE: To write about Jimmy Breslin fairly, the first thing is you’ve gotta write about is chaos and how he used chaos. The second thing is about anger and rage and betrayal. The book tries to capture in full his chaos, his betrayals, his ugliness, and yet put it in context of his genius and his warm-heartedness.
As [reporter] Barbara Ross said, “he had a hard head, but a warm heart,” and the warm heart is what you see in his columns … when he’s writing about a homeless person who’s a veteran who’s had to live underneath an overpass. You feel his warm heart when he’s writing about a child, or when he writes about crack addicts, you feel his warm heart when he goes to the riots in Harlem in 1965 and in Crown Heights in 1991. You feel his warmth even though he is stripped to his underwear, clutching his press pass.
[The Man Who Told the Truth is available for pre-order purchase at Bookhampton.]
