- Anthony Suau/Chicago Sun-Times
- Jane Byrne with Dan Aykroyd and and John Belushi in 1980
When Jane Byrne died last month, the Reader put together a package of articles we’d published on Byrne over the years. They made good reading—better reading, I believe, than the indulgent eulogies other media produced in haste for the occasion. Byrne is easily sentimentalized and we avoided that—by presenting stories written when sentimentality wasn’t a temptation.
What happened is that Royko wrote a column accusing Griffin of snooping around into Royko’s private life because “his wife was really on his back to dig something up.” Could this be true? Royko told me his source was Jane Byrne herself, who for reasons it was impossible to even guess at had dropped a dime on her own chief of staff.
Sneed went on, “I do recall chuckling about Royko’s column with Griffin and Brady, who were trying to figure out who was Tweedledee and who was Tweedledeedum. . . . I no longer remember the exact reason for Royko’s venom, but he was sensitive about his personal life—and had a habit of using a bar stool as a pulpit—as many of us did back in the golden age of newsprint and Guinness beer . . .
