Pete Hamill

As usual the tie had disappeared, the feet were up on the desk, the glasses nestled on top of a head of fading red hair, and in between biting large chunks out of a mozzarella-and-tomato hero dripping with Tuscan olive oil, Pete Hamill was doing one of the things he enjoys most, which is spinning out a romance concerning the newspaper business. "At some point everybody sits around talking late at night and dreaming up the perfect paper," he was saying. "Usually, it's 'Goddammit, these idiots don't know how to run this thing. If we could get our hands on it we'd know what to do.' We all felt editors were trimming the best lines out of stories, or didn't recognize stories staring them in the face, or were filling the paper with stuff that was boring.

There had to be a paper somewhere on which all the reporters were fabulous, all the writing was great, where the layout was slam-bang and elegant at the same time, and where people couldn't wait to get up in the morning and read it, and after you read it you felt you were not going to be the same again. We called it 'God's Paper.'"

 Four years ago Hamill had a crack at playing out his fantasy, courtesy of the shady investor Steven Hoffenberg, sentenced in March to twenty years in prison, who had tried to bring the raggedy New York Post out of receivership. Hoffenberg hired him to remake the paper, if not exactly into something ordained in heaven, at least into one that could shake free of bankruptcy court. Hamill's sojourn lasted a bare five weeks, during which he led a staff insurrection against the owners, got fired for his insolence not once but twice, and ended up editing the paper from a diner down the street, in solidarity with editors who had been fired. The episode ended when Rupert Murdoch showed up to buy the Post a second time around, and advised Hamill that he could write a column if he chose but that his editing days were history.

 However much New Yorkers relish a good uproar, the Post fiasco didn't seem at all a suitable swan song for one of the town's favorite journalists, known for his sometimes eloquent newspaper columns, his feature pieces from around the world for Esquire and other magazines, his eight novels, three nonfiction books, and screenplays. Then, miracle of miracles, last January, at age sixty-one, Hamill got a second chance. Mortimer Zuckerman, the real-estate-developer-cum-media-mogul, asked him to take over as editor-in-chief of the country's first and foremost tabloid, the New York Daily News. Unlike some other ideas Zuckerman has floated -- one being his plan for a mammoth office building on Manhattan's Columbus Circle that would have thrown a shadow over a chunk of Central Park -- his choice of Hamill instantly struck just about everyone concerned as a terrific idea. "I think it will be one of the great partnerships of all time, the most important one since Katharine Graham and Ben Bradlee," effused the publicist John Scanlon, an old buddy of both Hamill and Zuckerman who ends a lot of his sentences with exclamation points.

 The News Hamill was called on to edit, however, bore little resemblance to the News of yore, or lore -- that brash, tough-guy tabloid of the '40s and '50s, its reporters shooting questions out the side of their mouths, always plunking for the little guy a gainst the swells and the privileged. For one thing, the paper had moved, vacated its wondrous Art Deco headquarters on East Forty-second Street, whose lobby drew crowds of tourists to the elaborate weather instruments, the giant revolving globe. Home now was an anonymous office building at Thirty-third Street and Tenth Avenue on Manhattan's far West Side, its look-at-nothing windows positioned high off the floor, giving the newsroom staff the feeling of working in a high-rise basement. And the reporters and editors were a little short on brashness, having weathered too many bitter years and bad times. Starting in the late '80s, the paper was continually threatened with a shutdown by its Chicago parent, Tribune Co., then sold to the British press baron Robert Maxwell, who bled it of cash to float his other enterprises and drowned at sea, an apparent suicide, just before the News, too, sank into bankruptcy. While the courts were sorting things out, the paper endured a vitriolic five-month strike that pitted reporter against reporter and ended in early 1993 when Zuckerman took over as publisher. He crushed the guild by isolating it from the other unions, humiliated the reporters by making all of them re-apply for their jobs, then hired back only about two-thirds of the newsroom. "Before Pete came it was very hard for people who had worked here for a long time to have ambition anymore," says Jim Dwyer, a Pulitzer Prize winner who came over after the death of New York Newsday and ranks as the paper's number one columnist. "For me personally, on a day to day basis, it was as if a spiritual extinction was happening."

 Added to the pain inflicted by its owners, the personality of the paper had also been twisted out of shape by the editors. Instead of hiring Hamill the first time around, Zuckerman chose a Brit named Martin Dunn from Rupert Murdoch's Boston Herald to lead the News in its do-or-die battle against the Post and New York Newsday. During his three-year tenure, Dunn employed a mix of stunts and celebrity-chasing to stabilize the News's circulation at around 740,000, not up to its million-plus of the l980s, but no longer plunging, and some 300,000 more than that of the rival Post. In the process, however, the paper relaxed its notable dedication to local news coverage and began lurching after the stuff traditionally staked out by the supermarket tabloids. Genuine stories got nudged aside by the antics of the royal family, Michael Jackson, and the ever-present Donald Trump; goings-on in the outer boroughs made the front of the paper only if they added measurably to the day's carnage.

 Not only that, but longtime readers detected a certain meanness in its pages. In one instance, the paper posted a large photograph on page one, for all his relatives and friends to see, of a fifty-two-year-old highly respected police commander whom the NYPD had reluctantly and quietly cashiered for showing up to work still inebriated after a late-night fund-raiser for a seriously ill officer. In another, a reporter was sent to flag down ten taxicabs and in each one, as a test of the driver's honesty, leave behind a wallet containing a hundred-dollar bill along with some identification. To absolutely no one's surprise, eight of the targeted cabbies chalked up the discovery as being their lucky day and slipped the C-note into their pockets. "The Daily News always pricked the pomposity of the mighty," says Tom Robbins, its chief investigative reporter, "But suddenly the paper went from 'Tell it to Sweeney' to 'Stick it to Sweeney.'"

 No more. Hamill knows his Sweeneys too well for that.

 The first-born of an Irish couple who had immigrated from Belfast in the 1920s, Hamill grew up one of eight siblings in a threadbare household on the fourth floor of a tenement in Brooklyn's then working-class Park Slope, and bore painful wi tness to the many ways in which poverty can set people apart. As detailed in his best-selling memoir, A Drinking Life, he trailed his old man into the saloons starting at age eight. After earning admission to Regis High School, the first-rank Catholic school in the city, he got taunted for his mean clothes and the way his mother would keep putting fresh cardboard into his shoes to cover over the holes. Dropping out, he joined the peacetime Navy, and, after a few knock-around years, including a try at painting (art has been a lifelong Hamill passion), he was hired at age twenty-five as a nightside legman on the old New York Post.

 This was the paper of publisher Dolly Schiff, of the famous editorialist Jimmy Wechsler, its star columnist being Murray Kempton, Nora Ephron about to launch her career as a feature writer. But the lessons that struck home to Hamill were handed down by the paper's executive editor, a curious anomaly named Paul Sann, now deceased. A Jewish guy from the Bronx who never attended college, Sann confronted the world with the manner and permanent grimace of Humphrey Bogart, outfitted in black, with western belts and cowboy boots, and he saw in the young Hamill a kid from the streets a lot like himself. "I never had that conversation with him where you ask, 'Why'd you pick me and not some other guy?'" says Hamill. "But he had a thing in his head that he would make a project out of me, the point being that these journalism schools don't know what they're doing, and that you can make a reporter out of someone without sending them to college."

 Mainly it was lean writing that Sann taught, short and to the point. "'Give me active verbs,' he'd say. 'The verbs are the Teamsters; they get the nouns to the market.' Or I'd hand in a story where I'd been throwing a million words at the thing, and he'd say, 'This isn't bad but, for Chrissake, you don't have to leave the English language for dead.' He was tough, but always encouraging; when you're young and uncertain, he was one of those people you needed who made you believe you could actually do this stuff."

 As Hamill applied Sann's dictums to his own writing, so now he's passing them along to his captive audience of young reporters as part of the renewal he hopes to generate at the Daily News. "I think if we do this right everyone's going to want to read this paper, and everyone in the newspaper business is going to want to work here. Well, maybe not everyone, maybe only every young kid, which is just as good."

 First, he's been busy getting rid of the "rewritese" -- that's what Sann called it -- those cliche newspaper phrases the reader can write for himself because he's heard them so often. "A reporter here recently used 'in broad day-light,'" says Hamill, "and I told her, 'Think about this phrase. Have you ever heard of narrow daylight? Wouldn't it be better to use a concrete description of the light, where you can really see it? I mean, think of the light in Edward Hopper, think of the light in Vermeer.' 'In broad daylight' is like 'strife-torn Bosnia.' I mean, what the hell is 'strife,' anyway? This sort of stuff is nothing I can make a speech to the whole staff about. I can only do this going door to door, take my time going around, and when people do it right, let them know."

 And color, he wants to get color back into the Daily News: "I want these young reporters to be able to write in a way that reflects what you hear, provide a sense of smell and taste, because the reporters are going where the vast majority of readers can't go. They have to do the hard news story first, phone that in to rewrite, but then they have to stay and look for something else. I mean, 'The body was lying on the floor, and the blood dripped over the second step, and there was a packet of Kents in his pocket.' It's the detail you want, the things that you can't catch at all on TV, the odors and the sounds."

 And those vacuous stories about celebrities, let's eighty-six all that stuff. "There was a certain amount of nose-pressed-to-the-window reporting that I want out. I mean I don't think we should stand in awe of Ivana Trump's yacht! In fact, I don't know why such people are in the paper. I keep thinking of news as a verb. Nouns are important, but the nouns must do something." In late March, Hamill dismissed two gossip columnists and filled in their "Hot Copy" column with legitimate news stories.

   As a pipeline into these groups he's hired reporters who speak Russian and Korean, started a monthly magazine aimed at Caribbean readers, and appointed an editor to coordinate coverage in every major ethnic community. Not all the stories are exactly positive. For a multipart series this spring, he freed up the paper's organized-crime team of Gene Mustain and Jerry Capeci to track a cell of ex-convicts from the Soviet Union to America, where they set themselves up as the epicenter of the Russian Mafia. More often, though, the paper has been focusing on the ones who get trampled in their struggle for some better grip on the good life. And on more than one occasion, its ethnic-beat reporters have come up with scoops. Last month reporter Ying Chan, who's since left the paper for a job with a journalism foundation, got an exclusive, a long-distance interview from parts unknown with Charlie Trie, the former Little Rock restaurateur and Friend of Bill who is wanted for questioning by at least two congressional panels about his major and allegedly questionable fund raising for the Democratic party. Trie, who risks contempt of Congress, told Chan, in English and in Chinese, that he wasn't coming back to the United States. "I don't care any more," he told her. "Who is helping me? Nobody."

 As a business proposition, however, targeting New York's wretched refuse doesn't quite accord with conventional wisdom in the advertising world. "Journalistically, it's admirable, but whether or not it will pay off is a large question," says John Morton, the newspaper analyst. "It's very difficult talking about this without sounding like an elitist, but local advertisers aren't convinced these are the people they want to reach very badly. Who they really want are the readers of The New York Times or Newsday."

 Morton, as it happens, has been forecasting the death of the News for years; and, according to publisher Zuckerman, his view of the situation happens to be a little myopic. Because the paper isn't publicly owned, Zuckerman doesn't have to furnish accompanying proof, but he insists that advertising linage is up by 50 percent since he took over and that at last the News is turning a modest profit. As a significant reason, he points to the recent arrival in the city of cheap, large-volume department stores, such as Kmart and Caldor's, and plans by Sears to open 110 new stores throughout the city and the state, all of which indicates to him that Daily News readers are in for a new level of courting. "There's a whole market now concerned with price and value, catering to the average middle-class man and woman," says Zuckerman, who also owns The Atlantic Monthly and U.S. News & World Report. "And these happen to be our readers."

 From where Hamill views it, this is also the audience that can return the paper to its glory days, get it back up over the million-circulation mark. "In terms of the long run it's gotta be the immigrants and their children -- that's our future," he says. "In the process of our writing about them, they're going to realize that we are the newspaper of all the American papers that they should begin to read. If we can get that job done, and do it with some sort of humor and style and verve, I think we can put out the greatest goddamn tabloid there ever was."

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