Joining a Bigger League

He admits to 220 Ibs., but the way they are spread over his 5-ft. 9-in. frame, he looks even beefier. He is a brash Irishman who comes on strong, forever "God-bless"-ing strangers, swearing at friends and consigning his enemies, who are many, to hell. When he made his big decision last week, Mr. James Breslin informed the world in his own waggish way--with a Page One ad in the New York Times, a paper for which he has never written. It said: "ROBERT j. ALLEN: You are on your own. I am giving up my newspaper column. Jimmy Breslin." It set Jimmy back $75.

For once, Breslin wasn't kidding. Robert J. Allen is a so-called friend who snatches money out of the hands of wheelchair cripples and has married the same girl four times, and was always good for a column when Breslin was hard up, which was often. But Allen, who is real even if he sounds like a figment of Breslin's fertile Gaelic fancy, will no longer read about his exploits in the papers. At 39, Breslin is giving up newspapering, the only job he's known. Among others, his decision saddens Fat Thomas, the 350-lb. New York bookie, who has gone so legit since Breslin began writing him up that he now works as an actor. "Jimmy says to hell with the big people," says Fat Thomas. "His whole thing is helpin' little people." Now Jimmy has decided to help himself. He has stopped writing his column for the New York Post*and five other papers partly because the $125,000 he conned out of publishers and ABC-TV last year is no longer enough.

A Greyer World. "I've been working too freakin' hard," says Breslin. "I want to escalate my standard of living." So even though he admits to being "an unlettered bum" who has read nothing murkier than Hemingway and Steinbeck, Mr. Breslin is turning novelist. His first novel isn't quite finished, but MGM has already bought the screen rights for $250,000, plus a cut of the gross. Titled The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight, it is about the lighter side of the Mafia. To command those prices, Jimmy's agent must be a Sicilian who can shoot straight./-

Breslin will turn out a monthly piece for New York, the magazine he helped start after the World Journal Tribune folded. But mostly he will write fiction, which some of his meaner critics claim he's been doing all along anyway. It's touch and go whether the world of letters will shine brighter because Breslin is there, but it's a certainty that newspapers will seem greyer without him.

Breslin has dropped his share of clinkers along the way, such as his Runyonesque columns about guys like Jerry the Booster, who distracts clerks by dropping his pants in department stores so his buddies can clean the racks of Hickey-Freeman 42-regulars, and about a barkeep named Mutchie, who sends notes to friends' funerals saying: "I am very sorry it had to come to this." But when Breslin graduated to writing his mood pieces about the day's biggest news events, from Selma to Saigon, he was often unbeatable. He has been called a male sob-sister, and wise guys belittle his Dick-and-Jane vocabulary, but he is not the dummy he pretends to be, and his blend of brisk action and understated generalizations packed a punch.

Breslin never pontificated about anything, but his attitude was rarely in doubt. His reporting from Viet Nam ignored military strategy, focused instead on the human tragedies on both sides, because Breslin has to write about people, not issues. He came away hating it all. "This thing," he says now, "it's like getting killed in an industrial accident."

It was Breslin who produced one of the first surgeon's-eye views of Emergency Room One in Parkland Memorial Hospital when Jack Kennedy died in Dallas. He detailed the final minutes of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis. "Here he was, trying to get dressed for dinner, and he had no tie." Breslin was only 20 ft. away from Bobby Kennedy when the Senator was shot in Los Angeles. "Robert Kennedy is on his back," Breslin wrote. "His lips are open in pain. He has a sad look on his face. You see, he knows so much about this thing." Bobby and Breslin were friends, and Jimmy confides that "if that kid had lived, they couldn't have gotten me out of newspapers with a bulldozer. But with him gone, who needs it?"

Nobody ever accused Breslin of running scared, but now that he is turning to writing books, he does fret about his own lack of discipline. Not about his background, though. "I'm not smart, but then you tell me who is. I shoulda gone to an Ivy League college, then I coulda lied like the rest of them jerks wearing the striped ties." He seems overly proud of his limited tastes in literature. "Portnoy's Complaint! I don't read nothin' that ain't written in English."

Breslin is equally proud of his capacity for bars, beer and booze. "I used to drink until it was lights out and you'd wake up in the morning with large holes in the night before." He could justify that in a column: "You've got to understand the drink. In a world where there is a law against people ever showing emotions, or ever releasing themselves from the greyness of their days, a drink is not a social tool. It is a thing you need in order to live." But a doctor has told Breslin otherwise--that he's a sitting duck for a heart attack--and he's cut back.

Worth a Shot. Breslin is a New York boy who once lived in a suburb, but hated it and moved to Queens. His long-suffering wife, renowned in his columns as "the former Rosemary Dat-tolico" and their six kids put up with him, which takes some doing.

Looking back, Jimmy Breslin spits at the business that made him. Excepting Millionaire Jock Whitney, who gave him a big play in the now departed New York Herald Tribune, Breslin has only scorn for publishers. "I worked for Newhouse, Scripps-Howard and Hearst--the Sing Sing, Leavenworth and Folsom of American journalism," he says. "People who are working for Newhouse shouldn't have the Guild as their bargaining agent. They should have the Mafia. And they should get a Pulitzer prize for malnutrition."

Breslin, forever the grouser, complains that he will miss writing daily because "I'll wanna be able to yell like a sonofabitch about something and I won't be able to." But he also claims to be tired of "seeing my stuff on the subway floor" and figures writing books is a bigger league. "You don't run at Suffolk Downs because you like the racetrack. If you can, you gotta run at Aqueduct. I might run a struggling sixth, but I gotta take a shot at it."

That sounds pretty convincing, but there may be a touch of blarney in it. More than a few of Breslin's colleagues are willing to make book that when the next big story breaks, Jimmy will drop his manuscripts, bust out of the gate and race down the same old track he runs so well. Never mind the blarney. After all, that--and a lot of talent--has made Jimmy Breslin a winner.

*Another New York Post columnist, Murray Kempton, also announced last week that he will quit to concentrate on book writing. t Actually, he is Sterling Ford, a Manhattan literary agent whose clients include Terry Southern, Pierre Salinger and Dick Schaap.

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