Making It News

By Donald Morrison

A BISHOP'S CONFESSION

by Jim Bishop

Little, Brown; 462 pages; $15.95

Jim Bishop's father liked to lecture his son about how, in his own days as an altar boy in Jersey City, he had been upbraided by the parish priest for yawning at a funeral. So when his father died, Bishop spent the requiem Mass watching an altar boy. "He almost made it to the end. Then the palm of his hand came up to his mouth. He yawned." Just one of death's little ironies, the kind that Bishop ran through his Smith-Corona portable for such bestsellers as The Day Lincoln Was Shot (1955), The Day Christ Died (1957), The Day Kennedy Was Shot(1965).

Now 73. and still sparing no detail, he gives his own story the Bishop treatment. "I reached into my sagging trouser pockets and pulled out a kitchen match," he writes of his first encounter, at age 14, with an unclad female in a dark room. "I struck it on my shoe and, when the flame flared, I held it high up between Tessie's thighs to ascertain the what and the where. For no reason whatever, the girl popped straight up in the air screaming." He barely graduated from the eighth grade and was fired from every job his father got him until, at 21. he became a copy boy at the New York Daily News. He fell in love. "Silence. The sound of dust settling... I waited. It came--the dull tentative growl of presses. It was slow. It gathered confidence. The hollow sound, like a train approaching a tunnel, hit its stride, and the floor, the walls, the ceiling trembled as though in fear of the news they had spawned." He lasted a year.

Broadway Columnist Mark Hellinger got him a reporter's job at Hearst's Mirror and taught him to write short sentences that tugged at the heartstrings. Bishop tugged away off and on for twelve years at the Mirror, drifted through jobs as a ghost writer for Hellinger, became an editor at Collier's and ended up as a freelancer, mired in drink, depression and debt.

At age 45, he dragged out a collection of notes he had been accumulating on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. The resulting book became a six-figure success, translated into 14 languages. Bishop was unexpectedly rich and courted. The Hearst organization signed him to write a syndicated column, and his Christ book became a bigger hit than Lincoln: "Ministers from around the nation were writing to say that I inspired them in their work. This is not amusing to a man who has stopped going to church."

In 1964 Bishop set out to trace J.F.K.'s last day. Robert Kennedy and Jacqueline conspired to silence his sources and made sure that their hand-picked author, William Manchester, beat him into print by a year. Nevertheless, Bishop's assassination chronicle became a bestseller, as did his books on Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr. and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Bishop offers some inside glimpses: J.F.K. changing clothes from the skin out five times a day. L.B.J. inviting Bishop for a shower-side interview and then going to hilarious lengths to conceal his private parts, the callous behavior of the white medical examiners who conducted the autopsy on Martin Luther King's body.

But Bishop has written about these people elsewhere. His accounts of his own maddening family seem fresher. His father was a 250-lb. police lieutenant who read the Encyclopaedia Britannica volume by volume. He moved in across town with a neighbor's wife when Jim was a boy, and came slinking back 16 years later, his police career wrecked by the scandal. After Bishop's first wife died in 1957, he married the divorced wife of a cousin, scandalizing his Irish Catholic relatives only slightly less than his father had.

Now, having outlived even his Smith-Corona, Bishop lives contentedly in Florida. "I had a glassy, superficial style and a seasoned touch for saying a lot in a few words," he says of his life's work. He is too modest. Bishop had strong legs, a sharp eye and, perhaps his greatest gift, a keen appreciation for fate's small amusements. The day Jim Bishop dies, keep an eye on the altar boy. --By Donald Morrison

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