Pulitzer

by James McGrath Morris

  As he said this, Sargent rapidly sketched a perfect charcoal likeness of Pulitzer on the canvas before him. Over the coming days he worked to turn the outline into a portrait. “He worked at a great pace,” observed Thwaites, “advancing upon his canvas and retiring much in the manner of a boxer sparring for an opening.” Sargent smoked continuously as he worked, filling the studio with the odor of Egyptian cigarettes. Although Pulitzer was a cigar smoker, he despised the smell of cigarettes. “None of us dared smoke them when near him,” said Thwaites. Yet now he made no objection. “For three sittings, Pulitzer behaved with singular sweetness.”

  On the fourth visit to the studio, the painting neared completion. When Thwaites studied it, he thought it showed a genial, aging man with a beneficent countenance. But on this day Pulitzer was followed into the studio by a man who wanted an appointment with him. “Tell him to go away,” Pulitzer shouted. “A look of fury and impatience entirely changed the face of the subject, and Sargent contemplated the scene with keen interest, while making a dab or two on the canvas.”

  In the end, with his final brushstrokes, Sargent captured the dual personalities of Pulitzer. “Hide, with a sheet of paper, one-half the face and you have a benevolent middle-aged gentleman,” said Thwaites. “Observe, now, the other half, and you have the malevolent, sinister and cruel expression of a Mephisto. Unconsciously, the painter had presented what he saw.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  FOREVER UNSATISFIED

  His image preserved for posterity by one of the great portrait artists of the era, Pulitzer boarded the homebound Cedric on July 5, 1905. As he crossed the Atlantic, his secretaries read to him from stacks of accumulated copies of the World, a habit he rarely shed. The paper was dominated by front-page stories about an insurance scandal rocking New York.

  The story had surfaced several months earlier, when twenty-nine-year-old James Hazen Hyde, heir to a vast insurance fortune, put on a costume ball for the cream of New York society. The event was held at Sherry’s, in a building on Fifth Avenue designed by Stanford White, with dining and reception rooms resembling those of French palaces. Actors, dancers, and musicians were hired. Waiters were costumed and wore makeup applied by the staff of the Metropolitan Opera. And even though it was the dead of winter, the rooms were decorated with wisteria, rosebushes, and heather to replicate the gardens of Versailles.

  Many of Pulitzer’s friends and acquaintances attended the ball, as well as his son Ralph. Katherine Mackay was dressed as Phèdre, a queen of ancient Greece whose love affair and its murderous consequences were a popular subject in French theater. Her silvery costume had a train carried by two black children. The press feasted on every aspect of the event, providing readers with pages of details and illustrations. The party, Town Topics said, “rivaled in splendor all the celebrated fancy dress affairs that have been given in the history of New York.”

  Under normal circumstance, the event would have receded from the front pages after a few days, and into New York lore. But the outlandish cost of the event—said to be around $50,000—provided Hyde’s business opponents with evidence they sought to prove his unsuitability to run his father’s Equitable Life Insurance Society. The ensuing corporate battle, which eventually embroiled all three of the nation’s largest life insurance firms, lifted a veil of secrecy hiding extensive corruption and misuse of funds. The revelations were milked for all they were worth by the press. They shocked readers because the money had been entrusted to the firms to protect working-class families from destitution in the event their provider died.

  The World aggressively followed every lead in the scandal, and by the time Pulitzer boarded the Cedric it had run 122 front-page stories. As the ship’s engines drove the liner across the ocean, his secretaries droned on about the Equitable affair. He grew unhappy. When he first heard of the scandal, he had urged his staff to pursue the story. Now he thought the paper had gone too far, and he dictated nearly 100 pages of severe criticism, unloading buckets of complaints on Frank Cobb about Cobb’s work on the editorial page. When Pulitzer disembarked in New York, he gave orders that temporarily checked the World’s determined pursuit. Several days later, as he traveled north to his retreat in Maine and reviewed a new batch of papers, Pulitzer changed his mind yet again. “Keep up the headline of Equitable Corruption,” he ordered. “Mistake to drop ‘Equitable Corruption.’”

  The staff usually tried to ignore Pulitzer at these moments—especially Cobb, who this time was suspended and then earned a bonus as his boss’s enthusiasm for scandal-mongering returned. Back in Pulitzer’s good graces, Cobb learned that he could earn even more if he could keep his publisher happy. “And you could not possibly please me more than by swearing to accept my criticism in the future without feeling hurt, even if it should seem to you to be wrong,” Pulitzer wrote. “Will you remember this? Swear!”

  How to please Pulitzer eluded those who worked for him. One reporter, who had considerable tenure at the World, finally had the temerity to sum up the frustration in a note to the boss. “To the mottos of ‘Accuracy, terseness, accuracy’ that are now on the office walls,” he wrote to Pulitzer, “I would add another line—‘Forever Unsatisfied.’”

  Within a month of his return to the United States, Pulitzer persuaded sixty-four-year-old William Merrill to retire and turn the editorial page over to Cobb. As soon as Merrill had packed up and left, Seitz received a telegram from Bar Harbor. “Please remove from door on the fourteenth floor the name and title of William Merrill and put on it the words: Mr. Ralph Pulitzer, Assistant Vice President.”

  Merrill was wounded by Pulitzer’s callous treatment. At his desk in the Dakota, a famous gabled apartment building on the Upper West Side, he thought back to a time when Pulitzer had held a dinner for his editors at the house on Fifty-Fifth Street. “Don’t remember me, I pray you, by anything I may have done in anger,” Pulitzer had told them. Then, placing his hand on Merrill’s shoulder, he had continued, “There may have been a little difference between Merrill, here, and me, but we are now just as good friends as ever.”

  Worried that he might not get a pension after nearly twenty years of working for Pulitzer, Merrill returned to the Boston Herald, from whence Pulitzer had plucked him years before. A few months later, he at last received a communication from his former employer, although it was indirect, as usual. Pulitzer, Butes wrote to Merrill, “never quite realized that he had lost a friend until he returned to New York, resumed his drives though the Park, recognized the Dakota and remembered that you were no longer there. It still seems impossible to him; he still cannot understand how such a thing could have happened.”

  Before Merrill could feel sentimental, the next paragraph announced the true purpose of the correspondence. Merrill was asked to return the letters Pulitzer had written to him over the years. Pulitzer was worried that, should something happen to Merrill or Merrill’s wife, “there is no telling into whose hands those papers might fall, and how they might be misused.” Merrill complied but added that the severance of their friendship remained a mystery to him.

  Ralph finally screwed up his courage and informed his parents of his intention to marry Frederica Webb. His selection of a member of one of New York City’s elite families was no surprise. Though Ralph worked at the World, he shared none of his father’s passion for politics or social causes. Tellingly, Ralph kept a photograph of J. P. Morgan on the bureau of his bedroom. In this regard, he was far more like his mother, particularly in his interest in high society. To the public, Ralph was a typical spoiled, protected scion of wealth. Two summers earlier, he had spent three weeks hunting and floating down the Missouri River in Montana in the company of a well-known guide. He proudly sent home a photograph of three bighorn sheep he had killed. Unfortunately, he had violated Montana’s game laws, and the game warden found the beheaded carcasses. The state brought charges against Ralph and threatened to have him extradited from New York if he didn’t come back on his own accord. In the end, he plead
ed guilty to two separate charges and paid $1,000 in fines, and his father paid the $2,000 in bills from a law firm in Montana.

  Money was of little concern to Ralph. When he shopped for his fiancée’s engagement ring, he felt compelled to buy one costing $5,300. He told his father that the only other choice, which was half the price, “was a very commonplace emerald which would not have born a triumphant comparison with the rings she already has.” Both parents made plans to attend the wedding, unlike Ralph’s college graduation. At the end of September, Kate returned to the United States after a long stay at the French baths. She felt disconnected. “With the world in which we must live,” she wrote to a friend, “the longer we stay out of it the harder it is for one to pick up the broken strands.”

  On October 14, 1905, on one of the few occasions since Lucille’s death seven years earlier, the entire Pulitzer family gathered to celebrate Ralph’s wedding to Frederica Webb in Shelburne, Vermont. The Webbs’ plans for the wedding—a union of two of New York’s most prominent families—were all that one might expect. The hamlet of Shelburne had seen nothing like it before. A few lucky locals received coveted invitations. In nearby Burlington, reported one newspaper, “every dressmaker in the city is busy into the night preparing the costumes of the favored one.”

  On the morning of the ceremony, a special train, ten cars long, brought guests from New York. Those attending the ceremony reached the little Trinity Episcopal Church in carriages with horses festooned in white chrysanthemums. Kate and the bride’s mother, both dressed in white satin with white hats, entered together. Ralph stood at the altar with Joe, who was his best man, while their father sat in a pew. Boys from New York’s St. Thomas Church sang as the bridal party processed.

  For a brief moment the wedding purged Joseph of his pained complaints about his children, particularly his boys. He became teary-eyed as Ralph and Frederica exchanged vows. It was a rare moment of sentimentality and affection for him. Ralph was similarly ashamed to show emotion in public. “I looked at you as we walked down the aisle,” Ralph later told his father, “in fact, yours was the only face I saw, and I felt a lot of things that I probably would not have been able to express to you.” This was as close as the Pulitzer men came to expressing affection.

  The father expressed his pleasure in the only way he knew. He bought Ralph a house—adjacent to his own in New York—and wrote a large check for the honeymoon. But by the end of Ralph and Frederica’s tour of Europe, Joseph was his normal self again. “Your allowance has been stopped,” he wrote to Ralph, “and the only thing you will get is your salary. Salaries, by the way, are not paid in advance.”

  Early in 1906, Pulitzer learned that after all the effort to get Joe into Harvard, the school and his son were a poor match. Joe cut classes, idled away hours enjoying lunches and quiet spells by the fireplace of a fraternity house, and overspent his allowance. Summoned to New York in February, Joseph threatened to pull Joe out of Harvard unless he changed his ways. He didn’t, and his father was true to his word.

  Joseph decided that Joe’s lessons would be better taught in the newsroom and that his new teacher would be Charles Chapin of the Evening World, the most accomplished and feared city editor who had ever worked on Park Row. Chapin was already legendary by 1906; a dozen years later he would murder his wife, and thereafter he would spend the rest of his life in Sing Sing prison, tending acres of magnificent rose gardens of his own making. At Pulitzer’s Evening World, Chapin was unbeatable in the guerrilla warfare of Yellow Journalism; he was also a newsroom tyrant who fired reporters for even the slightest mistake. Journalists put up with Chapin’s despotism because he was one of the most innovative and daring editors in New York. “Quite possibly, viewed as a machine, he was the ablest city editor who ever lived,” said Stanley Walker, the venerable city editor of the Herald Tribune.

  In April, Joseph called Chapin. “I am sailing for Europe in the morning, and I am sending Joe down to work under you,” he said. “Treat him exactly as you would any other beginner and don’t hesitate to discipline him should he need it. There is to be no partiality shown because he is my son.” Under Chapin’s tutelage, Joe worked assiduously at improving the writing and reporting skills he had learned at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. But he could not resist behaving like the owner’s son. He began to take leave from work and was soon absent for an entire week without permission.

  When he returned, Chapin fired him on the spot. “The office gasped with astonishment when it got noised about that I discharged ‘Prince Joe,’ as they called him,” recalled Chapin, “but Joe good-naturedly treated it as a joke and took the night train to Bar Harbor, where he fitted out his yacht and sailed in all the regattas that summer, or until his father returned from Europe and sent him out to St. Louis.”

  His father’s continued harshness inflicted great pain on Joe. Only a few months earlier, during a carriage ride and in front of Ralph, Joseph had dressed Joe down as “utterly worthless, ignorant, and incompetent.” But in St. Louis, far from his father, Joe found the home he needed at the Post-Dispatch. He eventually developed into the most successful editor and publisher among the Pulitzers’ children. Despite having named Joe after himself, Joseph would always remain to his death blind to Joe’s innate journalistic talents, which matched his own. Temperament separated the two men. Later in the year, after one of their periodic dustups, Joe wisely grasped their distinctness but unwisely shared it with his father. “One of the strange differences between us two, to my mind, is the fact that you have never come near learning how to enjoy life, whereas, I, I fear, have learned the lesson only too well.”

  After Joe was banished to St. Louis, one of Pulitzer’s last remaining connections to his own years there ended. At age seventy-seven, Carl Schurz died. The German-American had inspired Pulitzer to enter politics and—although, curiously, he never mentioned Pulitzer in his memoirs—had remained fond of him, even after their harsh political confrontations in the 1870s. Shortly before his death, Schurz showed a visitor a photograph of Pulitzer that he kept on his desk. Pulitzer instructed Butes to send a wreath with his card, and instructed Kate to represent him at the memorial service. “You would have been proud of your chief,” she said, after detailing the many tributes paid to Schurz.

  Kate, her companion Maud Alice Macarow, and Edith spent the summer in Europe, as Kate was under doctor’s orders to rest at Divonne-les-Bains. Her departure was marred by another quarrel with Joseph. After a prolonged silence, Kate wrote, “Now, don’t worry. Understand I have learned to make all allowances for the tricks your nerves play on you and stop being cross with me for it does you no good and does much harm.”

  In London, Kate returned to Sargent’s studio to have tea with the artist. In a pained voice, he told her, “I did not do you all justice in your portrait—you are much better looking than I painted you.” It was a compliment that she immediately shared with Joseph, sparking momentary jealousy. But, Kate graciously added, “he spoke nicely of you, said you had such a splendid forehead and were a wonderful type for an artist.”

  From London, the group went to Paris. Between stops at the salons of her favorite couturiers, on whom she dropped $15,000 that year, Kate toured the sculptor Auguste Rodin’s studio. Stephen MacKenna, the World’s Paris bureau chief, was a good friend of Rodin and arranged the visit. Rodin, who had begun his career as a controversial artist, had become immensely popular, and his busts were sought after by the wealthy. “He is in sculpture, as Sargent is in painting,” Kate said. “There is such soul, poetry, and mystery in his work that in looking at them you feel that you are sensing his touch.” The artist, donning his trademark cap, took Edith and Kate on a tour of his studio and his country estate outside Paris. “I wish he could do a bust of you,” Kate wrote to Joseph, “it would be just as wonderful as the Sargent portrait.”

  After Paris, the group moved on to Divonne-les-Bains. One night, when they came down from their hotel rooms for dinner, the waiter took them to a table righ
t next to one where J. P. Morgan was sitting alone. As they passed by, Kate bowed slightly, and Morgan jumped up to shake her hand. During dinner, Edith noticed that whenever her mother glanced in Morgan’s direction she would catch his eye and he would smile at her. Small talk soon ensued, and Morgan chatted about his farm in England, which Kate had visited when Morgan’s father was living there. When he rose to leave the dining room, Morgan offered Kate a large box filled with fresh strawberries.

  “Isn’t he hideous,” Edith said to her tablemates as Morgan exited the room.

  “I don’t think he is repulsive,” replied Kate, unwilling to indulge her daughter in cattiness.

  Macarow, her eyes following Morgan out of the room, murmured, “Well, the back of his head isn’t so bad.”

  Later that night, before retiring, Edith wrote to her father. “Oh dear, I have never seen such a hideous face,” she said. “It isn’t only the nose—even with a decent nose he’d be ugly—and he had the ugliest little bits of pig’s eyes.”

  Kate returned to the United States in order to be there in time for the birth of their first grandchild, Ralph Pulitzer Jr. “I am as happy as when Ralph was born,” Kate wrote to Joseph. “The baby is a darling. Terrible temper just like yours.”

  After consecutive failed bids to become president of the United States or mayor of New York City, Hearst rose like a political phoenix in the summer of 1906. He won the Democratic Party’s nomination for governor of New York. The press went wild with excitement, covering what otherwise would have been a dull campaign. Kate, who was in New York, accompanied Ralph and his bride to a rally for Hearst at Madison Square Garden. In the White House, Roosevelt could not tolerate the idea that Hearst, whom he despised almost as much as he hated Pulitzer, might hold the post he himself had held before becoming president. He worked to spread rumors of Hearst’s immoral behavior. When those charges did not gain enough traction, Roosevelt, resurrecting a hurtful charge, instructed his secretary of state to let it be known that the president believed Hearst had been partially responsible for the assassination of McKinley.