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TELEVISION; Jimmy Breslin Goes Hollywood, Family and All

By SAM ROBERTS; Sam Roberts, The Times's urban-affairs columnist, was city editor at The Daily News during much of Jimmy Breslin's tenure there.
Published: April 2, 1989

Jimmy Breslin was calling from California and, as is often the case during holidays and other occasions most people find reason to celebrate, he was depressed.

''Here I am in the Beverly Hills Hotel and there are people sleeping on the streets of New York City,'' he said. Then, with barely a pause, Mr. Breslin leaped to the underlying source of his brooding introspection, aside from the fact that he was out of town, tired and had spent hours watching ''Love Boat'' reruns while waiting on a Burbank back lot to deliver 14 words in the pilot episode of a possible television series that perilously parallels his seven-year marriage to Ronnie Eldridge. The pilot, tentatively titled ''For Better, for Worse,'' stars James Farentino (most recently seen in ''The Pad'' and the TV film ''Something So Right'') and Lindsay Crouse (''Places in the Heart,'' ''House of Games''); Mr. Breslin plays a bit part as a newsstand operator.

He ticked off the actors who the producers had considered or sought - Peter Boyle, Brian Dennehy and, finally, Mr. Farentino - to play the part of a middle-aged, widowed New York newspaper columnist who marries a politically savvy West Side widow and adviser to the mayor. Then Mr. Breslin paused.

''You see,'' he said finally, after reciting the actors' names again, ''I don't know who I am. So, how are they going to know who I am?''

Moreover, why would anyone spend more than $2 million trying to find out and then to package the answer into a one-hour script? Don Carlos Dunaway, the project's screenwriter and executive producer, was skeptical himself.

''If you're in television for more than 15 minutes,'' said Mr. Dunaway, who has been executive producer of the CBS series ''The Equalizer,'' ''someone comes in with an idea about a crusading journalist. It doesn't work, because journalists are observers, not participants. But what we had here was two extraordinary people and an extraordinary family situation. This was a middle-aged couple with a hot relationship. It's like Pat and Mike.''

More like ''Pat and Mike'' combined with ''Eight Is Enough'' - nine, actually, since that's what the merged Breslin-Eldridge brood numbers in real life (though it was pared in the script to four because, as Mr. Breslin explained, ''the cost of the show with our family would break them'').

Years ago, in a collection of Mr. Breslin's columns, two of his former colleagues at The Herald Tribune, James G. Bellows and Richard C. Wald, offered this explanation of Mr. Breslin's growing mystique as he climbed the journalistic ladder:

''He began to discover that Breslin was his most salable commodity. You take in the sights that other people see and you turn them out through the lens that makes you an individual, and suddenly other people see them better. . . . Breslin is just trying to capture the essence of his own life and turn it into words. He also happens to be lucky that people will pay to watch.''

Or, as Mr. Breslin put it modestly, ''Who would you make a show like this out of Felix Rohatyn and his wife? The only other one you could make a show out of that people would watch is Al Sharpton.''

In real life, or what passes for it in his case, Mr. Breslin, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for his columns in The Daily News on police brutality, recently completed the screenplay of his novel ''Table Money,'' is pounding out a biography of Damon Runyon, to be published by Putnam, writing his column three times a week for Newsday and revising his ''Queen of the Leaky Roof Circuit,'' which is to be produced at the Public Theater by Joseph Papp (''He's giving me the chance to be a starving playwright,'' Mr. Breslin says).

Ms. Eldridge's life is no less complicated. A former adviser to Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Mayor John V. Lindsay and, most recently, to Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, for whom she directed the State Division for Women, she is running in the Democratic primary for the City Council from Manhattan's West Side.

''Cuomo said her campaign would run very well if I stay out of it,'' said Mr. Breslin, who lately has been on best behavior, by his standards, as a model political spouse. With the campaign being managed largely from his living room, he finally left the apartment for an East Side hideaway to write in peace. ''I moved out of the district,'' he said.

Not to demean Mr. Dunaway's madcap script, but real life for Mr. Breslin and Ms. Eldridge and their over-extended family is a bittersweet situation comedy. Just keep a camera rolling in their second-floor Central Park West apartment and snip the film every 60 minutes or so (editing out the pregnant pauses in conversation and the brief dry spells in Mr. Breslin's otherwise prolific career, during which he retreats to his bed or to Long Island beaches for lonely strolls) and you've got enough material for several championship seasons. One thing Mr. Breslin and Ms. Eldridge agree on is that the show would present an opportunity, without being heavy-handed, to disseminate socially redeeming messages to a vast audience.