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Paul McCartney was chatty and genial
and Ringo Starr a font of friendly ban-
ter, while George Harrison sat quietly,
true to his ruminative reputation. As
the dancefloor filled and the room rum-
bled to the latest soul and blues sounds,
the Rolling Stones arrived and joined
the Beatles at their large table, girls cir-
cling, whisky flowing.
Two American journalists were also
at the Ad Lib club that night in 1964:
Pete Hamill, a young New York news-
paperman who would become re-
nowned for the serrated lyricism of dis-
patches that distilled the grime and
glamour of the city; and Al Aronowitz,
who would introduce the Beatles to Bob
Dylan (and marijuana) in a New York
hotel later that year.
Aronowitz sang the praises of Dylan
in the exclusive upstairs venue just off
Leicester Square in London. Yet John
Lennon, sitting next to Hamill, was in a
black mood and spoiling for a fight, as
the writer recalled in the magazine New
Yo r k. “To hell with Dylan,” Lennon
said. “We play rock’n’roll.” Then, in
Hamill’s telling, he sneered: “What the
hell are the Yanks here for?”
His report continued: “McCartney
reached over and touched John’s hand.
‘Ach, come off it, John,’ he said. Lennon
pulled his hand away and turned to me.
“ ‘Why don’t you f*** off,’ he said.
‘Why don’t you just get the hell out of
here.’
“ ‘Why don’t you make me?’ I said. He
stared at me, and I stared back. The
Irish of Liverpool challenging the Irish
of Brooklyn. The music pounded, and
then, as if he had seen something that
he recognised, he smiled and broke the
stare and peered into the bottom of his
glass. ‘Yeh, yeh, yeh,’ he said quietly, and
the moment of confrontation passed.
John Lennon left with Brian Epstein
[the Beatles’ manager]. I left with the
hat-check girl.”
Hamill enjoyed a warmer encounter
with Lennon in 1975, interviewing him
for Rolling Stone, and wrote a piece to
mark his murder in 1980.
Hamill’s instinctive optimism and be-
lief in America’s can-do spirit — which
he attributed to growing up in New
York in the Forties and Fifties as the son
of immigrants — was often challenged
by disillusionment at the country’s
racism, inequality and violence. He met
Robert Kennedy while working for The
New York Post after Kennedy, who was
senator for New York, sent him a letter
praising his on-the-ground coverage of
the Vietnam war. They became friends
and Hamill wrote to him in 1968 to urge
him to run for the presidency. Hamill
wrote a couple of speeches for the cam-
paign then spent weeks reporting on
the California primary election.
He was a few feet away, scribbling
notes, when Kennedy was shot dead in
a Los Angeles hotel in June 1968. He
was among the melee of shocked on-
lookers who tried to wrestle the gun
from the killer. A week later Hamill’s
visceral, mournful account of the night
appeared in The Village Voice, the
newspaper co-founded by his friend
Norman Mailer.
Some of Hamill’s most excoriating
criticism was directed at an acquaint-
ance, Donald Trump, in an essay for
Esquire in 1989 that described the New
York property developer as a symbol of
fury born of empathy for the downtrod-
den, Hamill covered everything from
sport and the arts to riots and wars and
published more than 100 short stories
and 20-odd books, many of them nov-
els set in New York. His first novel, A
Killing for Christ (1968), is a thriller
about a plot to assassinate the Pope on
Easter Sunday. Discussions with Frank
Sinatra with a view to co-writing the
singer’s autobiography did not come to
fruition, but he wrote an appreciation,
Why Sinatra Matters, after his death in
1998.
In 1976 he won a Grammy for best al-
bum notes for Blood on the Tracks bythe decade’s shallowness and greed,
“snarling and heartless and fraudulent-
ly tough, insisting on the virtues of stu-
pidity, refusing any invitation to exam-
ine one’s self”. Trump, Hamill wrote,
“became the centre of a gigantic self-
created wind, the El Niño of hype, cele-
brating his own existence, his own ab-
solutely delirious joy in excess. More,
roared the crowd.”
William Peter Hamill was born in
Brooklyn, New York, in 1935, the oldest
of seven children. His Catholic parentshad emigrated separately from Belfast
and he would later visit the city to re-
port on the Troubles. As a boy he was
highly attuned to the differences
between his home borough, then low-
rise and low-rent, and Manhattan, the
glittering, soaring neighbour across the
East River.
His mother, Anne (née Devlin),
arrived in New York on the day the
stock market crashed in 1929. She held
several jobs, including cinema cashier
and domestic worker. His father, Billy,
made fluorescent lights in a factory. He
lost his left leg when gangrene set in
after it was broken in a tackle during a
football match and no doctors were
available at the hospital to treat him
promptly.
Hamill’s mother nurtured a love of
reading in her offspring, but he dropped
out of high school, took a job as an ap-
prentice sheet metal worker and then
served in the US navy, though he har-
boured ambitions of becoming a comic-
book illustrator. In 1956 he spent a yearHe mocked Donald
Trump for ‘insisting on
the virtues of stupidity’
Obituaries
Risk-taking gallery owner
and art dealer
Gillian Jason
Page 50Hamill had relationships with several famous women, including Jackie Kennedy Onassis and, below, Shirley MacLainePete Hamill
Quintessential hard-working and hard-drinking New York journalist who helped to wrestle Bobby Kennedy’s assassin to the ground
RON GALELLA/GETTY IMAGESstudying art in Mexico and worked as a
graphic designer before turning his
focus to the written word.
A one-time newspaper delivery boy,
in 1960 he approached the editor of the
The New York Post, Jimmy Wechsler, to
ask for a try-out and was captivated by
the sights, sounds and smells of the
newsroom.
“The room was more exciting to me
than any movie: an organised chaos of
editors shouting from desks, copyboys
dashing through doors into the com-
posing room, men and women typing at
big manual typewriters, telephones
ringing, the wire service tickers clatter-
ing, everyone smoking and putting
butts out on the floor,” Hamill wrote in
his 1994 memoir, A Drinking Life. He
was offered a role on the night news
desk, “chasing murders at two in the
morning”.
At a Christmas party in 1961 he met
Ramona Negron, a 17-year-old from
Puerto Rico. They married two months
later and divorced in 1970. He
married Fukiko Aoki, a Japa-
nese journalist and author, in- They met when she in-
terviewed him in Tokyo.
She survives him with two
daughters from his first
marriage, Adrien, who
has worked as a writ-
er, and Deirdre, a
photojournalist.
One of his surviv-
ing siblings, Den-
is, also became a
columnist.
A general-
ist whose
prose was
sprinkled with
literary references
and shot through with a
Dylan. He also wrote screenplays, in-
cluding an uncredited contribution to
French Connection II (1975), and ap-
peared as himself in The Paper, the 1994
comedy-drama directed by Ron How-
ard about a fictional New York tabloid.
Readers also noticed his name in the
gossip pages as a result of relationships
with famous women, including the
former first lady Jackie Kennedy Onas-
sis, the singer Linda Ronstadt and the
actress Shirley MacLaine, though he
was reticent about discussing his pri-
vate life.
Hamill was often to be found at a cel-
ebrated literary hangout for “drinkers
with writing problems”, the Lion’s Head
bar in Greenwich Village, with friends
including his fellow Irish-Americans,
Frank McCourt, the author of Angela’s
Ashes, and the newspaper columnist,
Jimmy Breslin. From 1973, though, he
stuck to soft drinks.
Like his father, Hamill was a heavy
drinker, but he realised it was affecting
his memory and mental acuity and
threatening his career progression. He
downed one last vodka with lime at a
New Year’s Eve party in 1972, then gave
up alcohol.
“I don’t get aggravated with drunks as
much as bored,” he told The New York
Times. “Their conversation is like bad
writing. Everything is in italics.”
Another vice was tougher to forsake.
“Cigarettes are much harder to kick
than whisky,” he said.
Hamill had brief spells as editor of the
Post and the rival Daily News. His
month-long stint at the former came
amid a tussle over ownership in 1993 in
which Abe Hirschfeld, a wilfully eccen-
tric car park tycoon, took control and
promptly sacked him. The staff rebelled
and produced an edition crammed with
critical articles about Hirschfeld, in-
cluding a story on page three headlined
“Who Is This Nut?”. Hamill was rehired
and photographed squirming as
Hirschfeld kissed him, an episode
Hamill described as “the single most ig-
nominious moment of my life”.
In protest at dismissals of senior staff,
Hamill walked out of his office and edit-
ed the paper from a booth in a diner
next door. He left his position when a
previous owner, Rupert Murdoch, re-
gained control of the paper.
Hamill continued to write, including
a striking description of the events of
September 11, 2001, for the next day’s
edition of the Daily News; he was only
a short walk away when the aeroplanes
hit the World Trade Center.
He also became a Distinguished
Writer in Residence at New York
University. As his health faltered,
he moved back to Brooklyn,
worked on a book about the bor-
ough and planned for the afterlife.
He bought a cemetery plot near
the final resting place of “Boss”
Tweed, a notoriously corrupt 19th-
century politician.
“If you’re going to spend an
eternity,” he said, “better with a
rogue than with a saint who
would drive you into slumber.”Pete Hamill, journalist and author,
was born on June 24, 1935. He
died of kidney and heart failure
after a fall on August 5, 2020,
aged 85h