PETE HAMILL: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of the New York journalist Pete Hamill is in the Guardian today; it went up on the paper's website ten days ago (18/8). You can link to that here. The piece was edited down considerably, because I over-wrote it and decided to let them sub out what they preferred to. What went mostly were the stories, which I felt were crucial, or at least entertaining and revealing, but in some cases would not have necessarily been so to British audiences, or the G's audience, whatever. Maybe I was also being too sentimental. As I ended my opening graf: "Only the most sentimental of cynical journalists could write, as Hamill did in Downtown: My Manhattan (2004) “The wanderer in Manhattan must go forth with a certain innocence, because New York is best seen with innocent eyes.“Jimmy Breslin would not have said that.

I also wanted to do some explaining about the New Journalism, though I can understand very well why this was a distraction. This graf was cut completely: "Although Hamill was credited by the literary editor Seymour Krim with coining the phrase ‘the new journalism’, unlike Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer or Gay Talese whose work appeared primarily in magazines like New York or Esquire, he was first a newsman, working to daily deadlines. Like his friend and competitor Jimmy Breslin, he was an Irish kid from the outer boroughs in love with words, but Hamill’s journey from high-school drop-out in Brooklyn to lionised star of Manhattan’s newsrooms was unique."

I wrote about his delivering the Brooklyn Daily Eagle when he was boy, and how the 1963 newspaper strike helped create 'new journalism' by sending daily writers to magazines where they had more time and more space to write. His year in Europe for the Saturday Evening Post was spent in Barcelona and Dublin, which might well have had something to do with the subject matter of his first novel, A Killing For Christ. 

Back in New York I wanted to tell the story about the circle that gathered at The Lion's Head, in Greenwich Village, which included Frank McCourt, whom, as I mentioned, Hamill claimed borrowed the idea for Angela's Ashes from his A Drinking Life. I also included one of my all-time favourite journalist stories about the Lion's Head, "where once he and the Newsday columnist Jack Newfield were asked to name the three worst humans of the 20^th century. On the backs of their napkins they scribbled identical lists: Hitler, Stalin, and Walter O’Malley, the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers who moved the baseball team to Los Angeles in 1958."  I tried to interweave the careers of Hamill, Breslin, and Newfield--in the photo above that's him and Newfield at an editorial meeting when they were running the New York Post from the South Street Diner (the name of the diner got lost in the Guardian copy)--but the inter-weaving, the back and forth between papers, got too complicated.

It seemed appropriate at that point to mention politics, both then and new. "He and Newfield were both friends of Bobby Kennedy’s, and worked on his 1968 presidential campaign. When Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles, Hamill was at his side. Hamill was a solid liberal in those days. In his 1969 essay The Revolt Of the White Lower Middle Class, for New York magazine, he wrote about this “they are in revolt against taxes, joyless work, the doubt standard and short memories of professional politicians”, warning New York would have to deal with their 'growing alienation'. It could have been written 50 years later about Donald Trump. Indeed, although Hamill had written powerfully about the presumed guilt of the Central Park Five, when Trump published his full-page ad in New York’s papers calling for the executions of the convicted rapists later proved innocent, Hamill called the future president 'Snarling and heartless and fraudulently tough, insisting on the virtue of stupidity...the epitome of blind negation'”. 

 

In 1970 he published Why Sinatra Matters. As a measure of sentimental cynicism, one could do much worse. But 1970 also the year "he was divorced from his first wife, Ramona Negron, whom he married in 1962, and was awarded custody of their two daughters. Work, drinking and being a father left no time for the writing he wanted to do, so on New Year’s morning 1973, at Jimmys, a mid-town night club, with his date Shirley MacLaine and friends like Village Voice journalist Joe Flaherty, another Brooklyn high school drop out who worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard before turning to the papers, he resolved to stop drinking. 'As a drunk I could always squeeze something from my talent, but I wanted to write books,' he later said. That year, he published his second novel, The Gift, about a teen-aged sailor on Christmas leave in Brooklyn during the Korean War.

Joe Flaherty I had forgotten about. He died in his early 40s, but he had served as Norman Mailer's campaign chief when Mailer ran for Mayor of New York with Jimmy Breslin (that's Hamill and Breslin in the photo on the right) on his ticket, and written a very funny book about it, Managing Mailer. The crowd at Jimmy's that night also included the actor Jerry Orbach (Law & Order). It would be Breslin, a couple of years later, who would leak the story of Hamill's relationship with Jackie Kennedy, and I made a further comparison, beyond their hard-edged Irish-American sentimentality, in pointing out both wrote less than successful novels about the 'Troubles' (Hamill's was The Guns Of Heaven, in 1984).

I managed to get my references to his Lennon interview and Dylan liner notes back into the published piece, but not my favourite quote from that essay on Blood On The Tracks: “But of all the poets, Dylan is the one who has most clearly taken the rolled sea and put it in a glass”. 

And I also wrote about some of his later work. His comic strip studies at what is now the School Of The Visual Arts led to his writing introductions to collections of work by Milton Caniff and Jerry Robinson. He also wrote a study of Diego Rivera, whose funeral he had attended while he studied in Mexico. And they cut my final graf, which surprised me, because cause of death is usually included and also because I thought I'd found a suitable line to tie the whole thing together. Here's my original conclusion to Pete Hamill's obit. RIP:

In 2014, Hamill suffered kidney failure and cardiac arrest. He spent nine days in a medical coma from which he was not expected to emerge. But he did, and the experience prompted his return to Brooklyn, where he was working on a book, Back To The Old Country. He and Breslin were the subjects of a 2019 HBO documentary, Deadline Artists. He died in Brooklyn, 5 August 2020, after breaking a hip in a fall after finishing kidney dialysis. Fukiko and his daughters Adrienne and Deirdre from his first marriage survive him. As he wrote in A Drinking Life, “Maybe words, like potions, were also capable of magic.”

JIMMY BRESLIN: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obit of the newsman Jimmy Breslin is up at the Guardian online, you can link to it here. It should be in the paper paper soon. It is pretty much as I wrote it, and what has been left out is what I needed to omit for space, and in consideration of an audience who were not familiar with his work. Luckily, I was writing for an audience of journalists, who understood it well.

One trim was the best quote I'd found about Breslin, from the Village Voice's ace muckrakers Jack Newfield and Wayne Barrett. It would have preceded the story that led up to his 2002 book about Eduardo Gutierrez. They had called Breslin "an intellectual disguised as a bar room primitive" and that was in many ways true. Damon Runyon was certainly his model, but his writing drew on a lot of literary sources, not the least of them Dickens, as well as endless hours on the phones and in the bars, and endless days with people.

The other I missed was the story of his jumping into a cab to cover the race riots in Crown Heights in 1991. When he cab got there, rioters pulled him out and beat him seriously, leaving him with, as he wrote, only his underwear and press card. He wrote that from the scene, calling in his copy before being patched up, as cops stood by. "How do you like your friends now?" they asked.

I probably should have stressed the hard reporting he did as well. I did mentioned he'd won a Polk award in 1985 for metro reporting. His 1986 Puzliter cited his AIDS story, but in 1986 he had also brought down Queens borough president Donald Manes in a payoff scandal; Manes would commit suicide a few months later.

I had also given his wives a bit more prominence. When he married his second wife he moved from Queens to Central Park West, began swimming every day, and as I mentioned stopped serious boozing after that bender with Moynihan. I couldn't get into much detail after the cast of Runyon characters he was often accused of gilding, if not inventing, in his stories. And I would have liked to have examined the nature of the Irish-American reporter: Breslin and Pete Hamill and so many others in their trench coats and tweed hats. But that's another essay. As might be his campaign with Norman Mailer, but Breslin wrote that one himself in Running Against The Machine (1969).

I had mentioned his nomination for a Golden Turkey award for his role in the 1978 movie If I Ever See You Again. He had a brief late night TV interview show on ABC, but he was no Studs Terkel; his skill at drawing the stories out of people in print didn't translate to the screen. When he got fed up with the network he bought an ad in the New York Times announcing that when his contract was up he would quit. I had also discussed the argument he had with a woman in the Newsday newsroom who accused one of his columns of being sexist, and for which (the argument) he was suspended. He took his case onto the Howard Stern radio show, not a bastion of feminist sensibility.

He was direct. I didn't speculate about his childhood, but his father literally walked away from the family: went to the store one night and never came back. In a different context I might have used the story the New York Times used, but it didn't fit my piece, and besides, they'd used it. But I'll repeat it here, verbatim from Dan Barry's obit:

after Mr. Breslin had become famous, his father, destitute in Miami, came back into his life “like heavy snow through a broken window,” he wrote. He paid for his father’s medical bills and sent him a telegram that said, “NEXT TIME KILL YOURSELF.” 

And I wanted to use this quote from Ron Rosenbaum, who called him "one of the great prose writers in America. Period." Asked for his favourite Breslin line, he quoted this one: "somebody always hangs out at a collision shop." Think about it.  RIP.