by Gore Vidal
“I’d rather be in Palm Beach.” Hearst held up an early edition of the American. Even across the room, Caroline could read the headline “TR DEAD.”
“Is this a joke?” Hearst was known for practical jokes, involving fake headlines and stories calculated to terrify guests, not much different in tone, Caroline had observed, from his actual papers.
“No. He died at Oyster Bay last night. I think we’re first.”
“I hope we’re not last.” Caroline prayed that Mr. Trimble had been on the job early that morning. Since Roosevelt’s recent stay in Roosevelt Hospital, Caroline had ordered the obituary to be brought up to date; yet no one had really expected all that energy to be snuffed out on the eve of a political restoration. “What was the cause?”
“Some sort of blood clot. Last night. While he was asleep. I wouldn’t mind going like that.”
“Pops!” Marion helped herself to more breakfast wine, which turned out to be hock. In response to the news, Caroline drank a glass straight down. “You’re much too young.” Marion gazed fondly at the huge bear that Hearst had turned into, so unlike the slender, gaudily turned-out young man that Caroline had first met, twenty years earlier.
“This changes everything,” said Caroline, trying to recall just what would be changed.
“Well, the Republicans don’t have a candidate, that’s for sure. TR had the whole thing sewed up. Months ago. He and Taft had buried the hatchet. That took care of the regulars. Then he was going to run with Beveridge to keep the progressives happy. He would’ve won, too.”
“Against Wilson?”
“Yes. But not against me.” This was said so matter-of-factly that Caroline almost did not take it in.
“You?” Caroline stared dumbly not at Hearst but at the headline.
“Pops has all sorts of letters to and from that awful man, who took money from the oil people like Hannah … what was her name?”
“Mark Hanna was his name.” Hearst’s smile was more than usually thin. “I was going to really get him this time around, the way he got me over McKinley, claiming it was me and the American—or the Journal then—that inspired the killer when there are those who think that he may have had a hand in killing McKinley.”
“Roosevelt?” Caroline’s head was spinning.
“That’s the story. Roosevelt and Rockefeller were in on it, to keep McKinley from going after the Standard Oil monopoly, which is why Roosevelt never did go after Rockefeller until I forced him to, and then he did nothing much but make noise.”
Like so many inventors of the news, Hearst himself was capable of believing anything. When Caroline first became a publisher, she was struck by the number of otherwise sane people who would suddenly produce a carefully documented “proof” that President Garfield’s murderer, say, had been in the employ of the Jesuits or the Zionists. When the “proofs” were disproved, other documents appeared; and the plot widened. Now Hearst appeared to believe that Roosevelt had been involved in McKinley’s assassination. “Will you include this in the obituary?” Caroline was light.
“No.” Hearst led the way into the adjoining dining room. “But one day I’ll do something with it.”
“Poor Pops.” Marion took her place opposite Hearst. Caroline sat to Hearst’s right. As an elaborate breakfast was served by the Japanese butler, Caroline told of Blaise’s cablegram. But Hearst was indifferent to the Peace Conference and to Wilson, whom he disliked largely because he was a dreary schoolteacher who had got the prize that he ought to have had. But Hearst was eloquent on the subject of his latest enemy, the Irish governor of New York, one Al Smith, whose combination with Tammany had denied Hearst the mayoralty in 1917. “Now the Governor’s complaining because I’ve been made the official greeter of the troops when they come back …”
“Wonderful spot for Pops,” said Marion, looking wistfully at her empty wineglass. “Right in the center of all those news-reel cameras when the ships come in and the boys march off and there’s the Mayor, who appointed Pops and just made Pop—that’s my real old man—a city magistrate up to the Bronx.” This flood was stopped by the filling of her glass.
“Roosevelt was their choice to take my place next week when the Mauritania comes in. Well, he won’t be there, and I will. Mother won’t,” he added.
“Mother won’t what?”
“Be there. My mother.”
“She’s got flu.” Marion sounded satisfied.
“I didn’t know she was here.”
“She came for the holidays to be with the boys. I warned her. This place is sickly, I said. Anyway, she’s mending now. She’ll go back to California. She’s given away twenty-one million dollars in charity …”
“Less than you’ve spent on newspapers and,” Caroline looked at Marion and said, quickly, “art.”
“I’m not in that league. But I’m losing money. Are you?”
Caroline was used to the Chief’s candor with her. He treated her not as a lady or even as another man; he treated her as an equal, flattered her by his open envy of what she had done with the Tribune. “No. We’re profitable. It’s been a good year for the Tribune and …”
“1 didn’t mean the papers. You can’t lose money with a war on. No. I meant with your photo-plays.”
“Well, we’re suffering like everybody else. But we’re in the black.”
“Red is what Pops is in,” said the immediate cause of his losses, eating a truffled egg in aspic. “He pays too much for Mr. Urban and everybody—”
“I want the best. It’s like a paper—”
“We had a scene where I meet my beloved in an English country house and I’m playing—I forget who. It’s all a blur. I’ve been in five movies in the last year, playing five different people, with five hundred different costumes. Anyway, Pops comes on the set and I’m standing in front of this fireplace, crying my heart out with—oh, I remember now! Ramon Novarro, who isn’t my suitor but he’s blackmailing me because of something. And Pops says, ‘That fireplace isn’t right for the period.’ So Mr. Urban, the most expensive designer in the world, who tells Mr. Ziegfeld where to head in, says, ‘It is, and the grays set off the blacks.’ Don’t you love it? Anyway, guess who wins? So while they all have to go looking through Pops’s warehouses filled with junk because he knows he owns the right fireplace but can’t remember where he put it, the picture stops but everyone goes on being paid.”
“It’s things like that …” Hearst began vaguely; and ended, mind elsewhere. “We should make an anti-Red film …”
“I am making one.” Caroline never understood Hearst’s use of the first person plural, sometimes collegial, other times imperial, editorial.
“So’s Zukor. He bought the rights to that play … you know.”
Caroline did know, and she, too, had wanted to buy it, Paid in Full, by Eugene Walter. “Tim’s competing with it, he says.”
“We can’t have too many movies like that. When there’s no epidemic, there’s nothing like Reds for getting to everybody.”
“There’s a Marion Davies fan club in Moscow.” Marion Davies was touchingly awed by herself.
“There’s one probably everywhere in the world. And we thought newspapers were something. Funny how the Jews got in on this before we did.”
Like everyone else involved in photo-plays, Caroline had given the subject considerable thought. “Don’t you think it’s because they’re the same sort of people as the audience used to be? Just-arrived immigrants who could only afford movies at the nickelodeon?”
“Then why not the Irish or the Italian immigrants?” Hearst shook his head. “Fashion,” he answered.
“What does that mean?”
“Zukor and Loew own half the theaters in the country and Famous Players and Paramount, and they’ve just swallowed up Triangle and most of the other little companies except you and me. Well, they didn’t go to Yale like we did.”
“Like you did. I am only a woman …”
“Let him have it, Caroline.” Marion
was tipsy; she was also, or so she had told Caroline, a secret suffragette.
“They were immigrants, and they were in the fur business, and Zukor made a small fortune guessing what the fashion for next year would be. Red fox,” Hearst ended, cryptically.
“He was partial to red fox?” Caroline quizzed the oracle.
“He made a killing in June, figuring women would all be wearing red fox in October. Then he bought up the nickelodeons. Then he figured that you could make money with movies that run as long as plays, which everyone said was impossible, proving what had been good for the masses was now good for the classes. And it worked. Unbelievable. Here they are mostly Jewish furriers, who can hardly speak English, mostly from Hungary, of all places, and they’ve got the movies. Lucky, they’re good Americans, I’ll say that. They serve us well. Only where are we in all this?”
“Surely, D. W. Griffith—” Caroline began.
“He’s Jewish, too. But denies it. Because he’s a Southerner, and wants to be mistaken for a gentleman, God help him. Besides, he was an actor.” Hearst employed the most horrible epithet of their class.
“I’m an actor.” Marion glared over her wineglass.
“No,” Hearst said mildly, “you’re a star.”
“All in all,” said Caroline, suddenly a hard, cold business woman, “there’s a lot of money in movies.”
The Chief nodded. “Yes. Mine.”
They were joined by Edgar Hatrick, the eager young man who was in charge of Hearst’s movie enterprises. Since they were obviously about to discuss their business, Caroline excused herself and walked through chilly streets to the Plaza, a comfortable modern hotel that had replaced, in 1907, an earlier Plaza Hotel.
In the drawing room of Caroline’s suite, the ten newspapers that she studied every day from all around the country were neatly stacked, and as she went through them, one by one, to see how different stories were covered, she found herself daydreaming about movies. They were insidious. They were like waking dreams that then, in sleep, usurped proper dreams. There was power here but she was not sure what it was. There was crude propaganda of the sort that she had made at Creel’s insistence. But newspapers could do that sort of thing, too. There was more to this new fad than anyone had grasped, and she could understand why Hearst, too, was bemused by the whole thing. A moving picture was, to begin with, a picture of something that had really happened. She had really clubbed a French actor with a wooden crucifix on a certain day and at a certain time and now there existed, presumably forever, a record of that stirring event. But Caroline Sanford was not the person millions of people had watched in that ruined French church. They had watched the fictitious Emma Traxler impersonate Madeleine Giroux, a Franco-American mother, as she picked up a crucifix that looked to be metal but was not and struck a French actor impersonating a German officer in a ruined French church that was actually a stage-set in Santa Monica. The audience knew, of course, that the story was made up as they knew that stage plays were imitations of life, but the fact that an entire story could so surround them as a moving picture did and so, literally, inhabit their dreams, both waking and sleeping, made for another reality parallel to the one they lived in. For two hours in actual time Caroline was three different people as a light shone through a moving strip of film. Reality could now be entirely invented and history revised. Suddenly, she knew what God must have felt when he gazed upon chaos, with nothing but himself upon his mind.
SIX
1
Blaise shook his stepbrother’s hand. Since the death of Plon, André was now Prince d’Agrigente. Ten years older than Blaise, he looked as if he could have been Blaise’s father. The hair was white. The face was white; only the black eyes seemed alive in all that arctic bleakness. Like Plon, he had married money; unlike Plon he had maintained good relations with his wife, whom he saw several times a year. She lived at Aix-les-Bains in a family house. He stayed in Paris, with his mistress and her two children, neither his, he would say with a bitter pride, as he had been impotent for twenty years.
Blaise gazed with more curiosity than fondness at the stepbrother whom he had hardly known. André stayed close to Paris and Blaise stayed close to the Tribune. “You’re thin,” said Blaise, as they entered the bar of the Crillon. For all practical purposes, the entire hotel had been taken over by the American delegation.
“You’re not,” said André, looking about curiously. “I’ve never seen so many Americans all at once.”
“Come to America.”
“Why bother? They come to us. Do you like them?”
“I am one.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I do.” Blaise found them a table near the bar. The room barked and growled with English. Most of the men were relatively young, and there were not many ladies on view, since the President had insisted on absolute seriousness for the thousand or so American men who had come to Paris to arrange eternal peace for all mankind. Everyone took himself very seriously, the President most of all.
André ordered whisky; like the rest of his generation, he was very much in the English style. Blaise drank Pernod. “Is this president of yours as stupid as he appears?” André was above politics but not above Saint-Simon. The characters, not the politics, of important personages amused him.
“How stupid does he appear to you?” Blaise was surprised to discover he was deeply annoyed when Europeans criticized anything American; something he himself never ceased to do.
“Those speeches!” André’s eyes rolled upward. “He is so … so Protestant.”
“Well, that is the nature of his mission.”
“A messiah? Well, I can see that. Everyone can see that when he drives through the crowds, and the crowds go mad with stupidity, too. I watched him make his entrance here. The saint from across the water. I suppose now he’ll go home where he belongs.”
“No. He stays until the middle of February. Then he goes home, to adjourn Congress. Then he says he’ll come back.”
Lansing had appeared in the door to the bar. There was an immediate hush. Then two men rose from a table and joined him, and the three departed. “Is that a great man?”
“No. Just the Secretary of State, one of the peace commissioners.” When Wilson had appointed the American commission he had taken no one’s advice. Arbitrarily, the President had chosen Lansing, House, a general from the Supreme War Council and, as token Republican, that ancient enchanter-diplomat Henry White, a man of no political weight save his friendship with Theodore Roosevelt, now storming Valhalla or wherever it is that strenuous heroes go.
After the President’s triumphant entrance into Paris, even Blaise was optimistic that the treaty would soon be drafted. Technically, this was the Preliminary Peace Conference which would agree upon the terms to which the Germans, when they eventually joined the conference proper, must submit. But despite worldly laurels, the President did not immediately have his way. Since the conference was not yet ready to begin, Wilson was encouraged by Prime Minister Lloyd George to show himself to a grateful England and by Prime Minister Orlando to a grateful Italy. Thus, two weeks had been agreeably wasted. The crowds were head-turning; and the head that was turned, as the premiers had shrewdly intended, was that of Wilson. He returned to his Paris quarters, the Palais Murat, tired but exalted.
During this time, Blaise had worked with Colonel House, whose staff occupied much of the third floor of the Crillon, under the supervision of his son-in-law, Gordon Auchincloss, a cousin of the ubiquitous Apgars. Blaise acted as an unofficial liaison with the French press, which tended to mordancy on the subject of their savior, taking their cue from Clemenceau, whose view of those who would change man’s nature was sardonic when not sulphurous. The conservative André echoed the radical Clemenceau in this dark view of the human race. “It is pointless to ask us not to do everything possible to smash Germany to pieces. Look what they have done to us this time. Look what they did in 1870 …”
“Look what we did to them under
Napoleon …”
“They kill more people these days, and the survivors remember longer. My dear Blaise, the Germans will come back one day if we don’t split them up into little countries the way they were before Bismarck.”
Blaise knew all the arguments; all the answers. That was the problem with politics, whether domestic or international. As the great questions were always posed in the same way, they invited answers that were equally predictable and unchanging. How anything was resolved remained to Blaise a mystery. He assumed that this particular conference would be “won” by the most patient faction. Sooner or later, Wilson would tire. Yet Blaise was also convinced that the President was most certainly an agent of history, occupying the right place at the right time, and when all force was so gathered in someone with a plan, the Clemenceaus and Lloyd Georges and Orlandos would be powerless. Even Blaise had been impressed by the size of the crowds in the three countries that had lost millions of men during the last four years while even more millions had died of flu.
George Creel joined them, as if he had been invited. André gazed at him with the amused curiosity of someone at a circus, eager to be delighted by strangeness. “How is room 315?” Creel liked to pretend that he and Blaise were in warring camps, which, in a sense, they were. Colonel House and Lansing were at permanent odds, a situation reflected in the staff of each. Although Creel was the master propagandist, Colonel House and his son-in-law were formidable manipulators of the press, as Blaise could appreciate rather better than anyone else. Because Colonel House was apparently so self effacing, his was the only face that anyone of importance wished to confront. He who had been Wilson’s eyes and ears was now thought to be the great man’s brain. In due course, Wilson would grasp all this, and unless Blaise had entirely misunderstood human vanity, the President would free himself of the whispering Texas charmer. Lansing was too unimaginative to make trouble between Wilson and House, while Creel could do so only indirectly. On the George Washington, it had been Blaise’s impression that Wilson was not well pleased by either man. Each had told him, in his own way, that he ought not to commit the prestige of the presidency to what, after all, would be no more than a sort of cut-throat poker game, where gamblers cheated and knives glinted. But Wilson was filled with missionary zeal, worsened by the crowds that proved to him that he was the divine instrument of all the hopes of every single sweaty component of those gray-pink-brown hordes which, like vast stains, flooded ancient squares and swirled headlong down wide modern streets. The smell of the Paris crowd had been enough to drive Blaise back to his room at the Crillon on the third floor, where Colonel House reigned in well-publicized secrecy. “Three-fifteen wants to get started as soon as possible. What about the second floor?”
