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.