Asked how she ended up with men as different as Pablo Picasso and Jonas Salk, Françoise Gilot replied: “Lions mate with lions” Lions mate with Lions
Newspapers,” Peter said, leaning back against the bar, “will always break your heart.”
~ Born on June 24, 1935, Peter Hamill was the oldest of seven children of Billy Hamill and Anne Devlin, Catholic immigrants from Belfast, Northern Ireland.
A columnist for the Post, Daily News, Village Voice and Newsday, he also wrote screenplays and, like Andrew Peacock, had an affair with Shirley MacLaine.
Pete Hamill, a streetwise son of Brooklyn who turned a gift for
storytelling,
a fascination with characters and a romance with tabloid newspapers
into a storied career as a
New York journalist, novelist and essayist for more than a half
century...
Hamill died on Wednesday at the age of 85, days after breaking his hip from a fall. A lot of men
and women can turn a phrase, land a big interview, meet a deadline or
chase down leads. Hamill did all those things better than most of us.
Above all, his writing was top notch, and included magazine pieces and
several novels, and he even won a Grammy in 1975 for writing the liner
notes to Bob Dylan's "Blood on the Tracks" album.
Peter Hamill’s
New York is a marketplace of cultures, ideas, and objects. It is a
polyglot of buyers and sellers where everyone drives a hard bargain. It
is continuity and change locked in a permanent contest on every block.
Hamill's city is exactly what the likes of Robert Moses were trying to control when they imposed a top-down technocratic
regime on New York in the middle third of the 20th century.
In A Drinking Life: A Memoir (1994), Hamill shows us around the barrooms of Brooklyn and, in
the process, introduces readers to the vibrant intellectual life that
coexisted with the borough's workaday sociability during his early
adulthood. In his 1969 New York article "Revolt of the White Lower Middle Class," he finds the aggrieved outer-borough working stiff's frustrations
rooted not in knuckle-dragging bigotry but in the patrician didacticism
and social engineering being enacted by Mayor John Lindsay's
administration. Hamill's masterstroke against the managerial society was
his 1987 essay on "The New York We've Lost," also written for New York magazine. Far from a garden-variety work of nostalgia, it
describes with texture and color how the entrepreneurial sensibilities
of the city's residents created the countless spaces that made New York
the habitat of choice for people on the make.
Through all the changes to his city, Hamill saw it as a shared,
evolving place where the past and the present, the parochial and the
global, find a way to coexist in close quarters. And that remains the
fable that New Yorkers tell themselves about their home. For as long as
people discuss New York as a city where clever, persistent young people
can make lives for themselves, Pete Hamill's New York will not be
entirely lost
Remembering the legendary Pete Hamill, New York City’s “poet laureate”
Pete Hamill in 2007. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews, File)
The headline to describe Pete Hamill in the New York Daily News — the paper where Hamill worked for so many years — was impeccable. They called him a “legendary journalist and author.”
Using “legendary” to describe anyone can be tired and lazy — a cliche. But in this case, the description fits. It’s not hyperbole. It’s just right. Hamill was a legend. Truly.
In another time and place, the proper way to really show your respect would be to call him by another word:
Newspaperman — said with all the reverence that word can mean.
The legendary journalist, author and newspaperman died Wednesday, four days after a fall that broke his hip. He was 85.
Where do you even start? In New York, that’s where.
Hamill was pure New York, born in Brooklyn. A high-school dropout, he would go on to be the voice of New York, writing for FIVE New York papers: the New York Post, the New York Herald Tribune, the Daily News, Newsday and The Village Voice. He served as an editor at the Post and Daily News. He wrote 21 novels and more than 100 short stories. He also wrote for The New Yorker, Esquire, Rolling Stone and New York Magazine.
And he wrote about everything.
The Daily News’ Larry McShane wrote that Hamill was a constant witness to history: “As a kid watching Jackie Robinson break the baseball color barrier in Ebbets Field. Walking decades later with Robert F. Kennedy in the Ambassador Hotel when an assassin opened fire. And again on 9/11 in the shadows of the Twin Towers. … He went south to cover Martin Luther King, and stayed home for the last interview with fellow New Yorker John Lennon. He reported on ‘The Troubles’ in his ancestral homeland, and covered wars in Vietnam, Nicaragua and Lebanon. Hamill stood in Lower Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001, with paper and pen in hand as the World Trade Center’s 110 stories came tumbling down.”
Trying to capture Hamill’s career here in the confines of this newsletter is impossible, but his life and career need to be celebrated and remembered. If you get a chance, watch “Deadline Artists” — last year’s HBO documentary that chronicled the careers of Hamill and his longtime newspaper rival/friend Jimmy Breslin.
In the meantime, for more on Hamill, might I direct you to:
Another McShane piece in the Daily News in which colleagues, friends and fans remember Hamill. The Daily News’ Mike Lupica called him New York City’s poet laureate. The New York Times’ Robert D. McFadden called him the “quintessential New York journalist.” The New York Post’s Steve Cuozzo called him a “tabloid journalism hero.”
Many of Hamill’s columns can be found on the internet, but as we say goodbye to Hamill, I want to leave you with this:
Hamill’s interview with John Lennon for Rolling Stone in 1975. Oh my gosh, this is terrific. Lennon is only 34. The Beatles had broken up only five years earlier. They talk about Elton John and Bowie and Elvis and Dylan. And all of them are still so young. Absolutely terrific.
RIP Pete Hamill: Chronicler of New York's Marketplace of Ideas
Hamill’s city was exactly what the likes of Robert Moses were trying to control when they imposed a top-down technocratic regime on New York in the middle third of the 20th century.
When the reporter, editor, and man-about-town Pete Hamill died on Wednesday, the tributes to the 85-year-old Brooklynite were overwhelming. In death as in life, this son of Irish immigrants and 10th grade dropout has been described as the journalistic personification of New York. Hamill chronicled the everyman bustle of the "lost" postwar city he riffed on so eloquently. He showed off his hometown, at its best and at its worst, to both a local and a national readership in the pages of Esquire, New York, and The Village Voice. He provided play-by-play and color commentary on the passing scene during his editorships at the New York Post and the Daily News. Through a dozen novels, a half dozen works of nonfiction, and a library's worth of reporting, Hamill decanted his New York to an immense readership.
Along with Jimmy Breslin, Hamill has long been regarded as the city's Hemingway, a plain-spoken prose stylist who wrote with a populist authority about rough-and-tumble urban life. The fantastic 2018 HBO documentary Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists demonstrates how the city's late-20th-century librettists also shared Hemingway's ability to make himself a part of the story. Hamill, in particular, became a Manhattan gadabout, fraternizing with the glamorous in all the spaces where one would surely be seen.
Lost in the many touching tributes to Hamill is the strong anti-statist and anti-ideological streak in his writing. Most renderings of his life have focused in on his progressive bona fides as an enthusiastic booster of Robert Kennedy's presidential campaign. Some have also cited his more right-wing middle period in the late 1980s, when he wrote less than charitably about the Central Park Five and waded into ugly waters as he discussed their upbringings. But neither image really captures him. Hamill's literary legacy is not that of a liberal lion or a seething reactionary.
"I hated abstractions as a result of being a reporter. All abstractions lead you in to certain kinds of traps," Hamill said on a 2011 episode of City Talk. "Ideology, to me, whether it's religious or political, is not thinking." Over the course of a six-decade-long writing career, Hamill rebuked ideology by displaying an appreciation for nuance.