Now that “local journalism” is popular again, reporters like New Yorker Jimmy Breslin must be vindicated. His method was simply to “walk the streets” to “see, hear and tell.”
Chronicler par excellence of the “man in the gray suit”, he was everywhere and at all hours. He arrived at the scene of the crime before the police or the forensic doctors. That's why Tom Wolfe said that “Breslin worked like a madman.”
He always rushed the 'closing' hours, but he did not fail in his last minute deliveries. He was typing furiously with two fingers on typewriters after making countless phone calls to corroborate what he had seen. In this he followed the most important rule of New Journalism: the facts had to be irrefutable.
When Abe Rosenthal was editor-in-chief of local information for The New York Times, he read Breslin's chronicles daily and was so amazed by his ability to accumulate relevant data and discover unpublished angles on the protagonists of his stories, that one day he commissioned a veteran of the Times to verify the veracity of a Breslin story. A few days passed and that journalist told Rosenthal: “Everything this bastard wrote happened just as he told it.”
In the first editorial office of New York magazine, which was on the fourth floor of what over the years would become the graphic design studio of Milton Glaser and Walter Bernard, they remembered him cursing when he went up the stairs while bellowing: “Why? “Won’t this fucking building have an elevator?” Notable anomaly in the city where elevators were defined by Paul Morand as “vertical railways.”
He knew every neighborhood in New York as if he were a local historian. He never learned to drive, so he traveled by subway, sometimes he let himself be driven by his driver, “Fat Thomas,” but he preferred to roam the streets, talk to people and discover great stories of “ordinary people who did extraordinary things.” He was the most famous, feared and admired columnist in a city that, as he himself remembered, was older than St. Petersburg, had more Jews than any other and was “the capital of Ireland.”
He had worked at the Journal-American. He moved on as soon as he was paid better and as long as he was given the freedom to write whatever he wanted. It was a loose verse. One of the best paid journalists in the city. He wrote five columns a week. After spending the day climbing stairs, knocking on doors, calling on the phone and making witnesses, friends and enemies speak, at five in the afternoon he returned to the newspaper and in an hour and a half he wrote his 500-word chronicles.
He was one of the fathers of New Journalism and spent his life, an old friend of his told me, covering the adventures of the biggest sons of bitches in the city, who there were piously called the SOB (Son of a Bitch).
He was born in Queens and died in Manhattan at the age of 88. His father, who was a musician, abandoned him when he was very young, and his mother was an alcoholic teacher. Jimmy also drank a lot, but was teetotal for the last 30 years of his life. He had six children, 12 grandchildren and millions of readers.
A fan of Dostoevsky, he swam every day and knew the city's underworld like no one else: from the capo di capi to real estate speculators and poor devils like Donald Trump, passing through all kinds of scammers, criminals and scoundrels. He was always more interested in the doormen, security guards, bodyguards and drivers than in his bosses. His “women of life” and his “madames” never let him down as sources of information. He had little trust in the commissioners and instead cultivated the police officers who patrolled the city. Tall and burly he looked like a Greco-Roman wrestling athlete.
When asked which were the two headlines that sold the most newspapers, he answered: “War” and “Big Guy Dies.”
In 1986 he won the Pulitzer with an endearing article about an AIDS patient, but his most famous report was a profile of a worker who earned three dollars an hour and dug the grave where John F. Kennedy was buried.
It was published in the New York Herald Tribune and was titled “Digging JFK's Grave Was an Honor.” He began like this: “Clifton Pollard was pretty sure he had to work this Sunday, so he got up at 9 a.m. in his three-bedroom apartment on Corcovan Street and changed into his khaki overalls before entering the kitchen for breakfast. His wife, Hettie, made him eggs and bacon. Pollard was in the middle of his meal when he received the call he was waiting for. It was Mazo Kawalchik, foreman of the gravediggers at Arlington National Cemetery, where Pollard works for a living. “Polly, could you be here around eleven in the morning?” Kawalchik asked. “I guess you know why that is.” Pollard knew it. "He hung up the phone, finished his breakfast, and left his apartment so he could spend the rest of Sunday digging John Fitzgerald Kennedy's grave."
Breslin began as a sports writer and always had enormous respect for that genre, so much so that one day he declared to the Irish Times: “When you live surrounded by fires, funerals, strikes, rats, masses and people screaming at night, sports are the only thing that makes some sense.” His sporting credo was that “losers are always more interesting than winners” and that press conferences were a waste of time, while the bars of pubs and taverns were great sources of news.
Today, on the corner of Second Avenue and East 42nd Street, a modest sign honors his memory. It is the “Jimmy Breslin Way.”
