by Gore Vidal
Before January, it had never occurred to Blaise that Captain Dreyfus might be innocent. But the more that he investigated the case, the more certain he was that Dreyfus had indeed been falsely accused. When “that French dirty writer,” as Hearst always called him, “you know, the one one whose name begins with Z, like Zebra,” Emile Zola, accused the French government of covering up the truth, he was obliged to flee to England. That was when the Chief gave orders for the Buccaneer to stand by. He himself would lead the attack on Devil’s Island, with Blaise as his eager second-in-command. But then Spain not France became the enemy of Truth and Civilization; and the spring and summer were devoted to the expansion of the Journal’s circulation and, incidentally, the American empire. Now, as Colonel Roosevelt ran up yet another hill, as a politician, Hearst was prepared, at the least, to offer himself to the world as a hero; at the most, to change world history by precipitating a war with France.
The Chief put his feet upon the desk, and daydreamed, eyes half-shut. “We’ll need, maybe, a thousand men. We might hire some of Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, that’d embarrass him.” The Chief giggled. Blaise, his eyes on Bonaparte, wondered if that world hero was prone to daydreaming and giggling. “Check out the Rough Riders. Don’t tell them what we’ve got in mind. Just say a filibuster. You know, an adventure. In Latin America. Go after the tough ones, the real Westerners. We don’t want any New York swells.”
Blaise felt that he should interpret the latest news from Paris. “The government’s just promised a new trial for Dreyfus.”
“Court-martial is the phrase, I heard.” Just when Blaise had decided that Hearst was totally ineducable, not to mention in thrall to his own daydreams, he would suddenly demonstrate that in his crude but highly intuitive way he had got the point, usually before anyone else. “They’ll drag it out another year at least. We need a good story for the fall. Before November. Before election. This should do in Roosevelt.”
“How can you and Captain Dreyfus lose him an election in New York State?” Usually Blaise could follow Hearst’s peculiar logic: the key to it was entertainment. What would most excite the average uneducated man?—who would then part with a penny to read the Journal.
Hearst opened very wide his pale blue eyes and the usually straight brows arched with what looked to be wonder: he was ready to part with that penny. “Don’t you see? It’s all the same. Teddy winning a battle that was already won but getting the credit because he is who he is and all the newspaper boys were right there with him because I’m selling the war to the world. He couldn’t lose because I couldn’t lose. Well, if I break into Devil’s Island and free that poor innocent Jew, why, no one will pay any more attention to Teddy, who’ll be last summer’s news while I’m this fall’s news, and so Van Wyck gets elected.”
In a lunatic way, Blaise saw the point. Hearst’s meddling in French internal affairs, successful or not, would certainly be a sensation; and a diversion from the election. Blaise was also beguiled by the fact that Hearst could never remember Dreyfus’s—or any Frenchman’s—name.
“You’ve got the plans of the fort, haven’t you?” Hearst gazed out the window at the Hoffman House, where a line of carriages were depositing the guests for some sort of Democratic meeting. As the Fifth Avenue Hotel was sacred to the Republicans, so the Hoffman House was to the Democrats.
“Yes, Chief. They’re in your safe at the office. Also, the size—estimated—of the garrison, and the number of guards that look after Dreyfus.”
“I don’t suppose we could free all the frog prisoners.” Hearst’s imagination seemed now to be positively Mosaic, as he led all of those who had been slaves into the promised land of Manhattan.
“I think you’ll have quite enough to do just freeing Dreyfus.”
“I suppose you’re right. Well, I’ll go over all this with Karl Decker. He’ll be your side-kick. He’s got a real gift for these … uh, things.”
Karl Decker was a knowledgeable journalist who had managed to free from a Cuban prison an attractive young woman, who had been a passionate—what else?—enemy of Spain and its beast-like governor. Hearst had got a lot of play out of that adventure; now he wanted more. “I expect you to be right there with us, in the lead, after me.” The Chief looked very much like a small boy about to play pirate.
“I’d like nothing better.”
“Because you’re the only one who can talk to what’s-his-name. You know? In French. I never could pick up the lingo. You think you like publishing?” The small boy pirate had suddenly turned into a bland full-grown businessman, the worst of pirates.
“Oh, yes!” Blaise was as enthusiastic as he sounded. “I think it’s more exciting than anything else, especially the Journal.”
“Well, I have my critics.” The blandness was now absolute. Although Hearst was daily denounced by all right-thinking men and women, he seemed perfectly indifferent to the opinions of others. He liked stories, adventures, fun. He liked being number one in circulation if not yet in advertising. “I’ve also pretty much used up my mother’s … present. These wars can cost you a lot of money.”
Blaise was surprised not that Hearst had spent the seven and a half million dollars that Phoebe Hearst had given him three years earlier but that Hearst would admit it; however, that was part of the Chief’s enigmatic charm, to know who was what and how he should be treated. Employees were always treated with grave politeness; and Hearst’s voice was seldom raised. He was generous, in every sense; all he wanted in return was the absolute best of its kind. But he did not make friends with those he hired, even the editors. He was not to be seen in the bars around Printing House Square. He was also not to be seen in the men’s clubs of his class for the excellent reason that a cannonade of black balls would have shot down any proposal that he might be made a member of any one of them. “I’ve also been on the outside here,” he would say, more to himself than to Blaise; and Blaise decided that the Chief was quite happy to remain where he was, outside, yes, but terrorizing those inside.
When Blaise had left Yale in his junior year, Colonel Sanford had been furious. “What will you do? What are you equipped to do in life?” Blaise was too tactful to point out that the Colonel himself had not been equipped to do anything at all in life except spend the money that he had inherited from his family; although to be fair—something Blaise found difficult to be with a father who had always embarrassed him—the Colonel had, rather absently, made a second fortune after the war in railroading, using Delacroix money, a source of irritation to the family of Blaise’s mother, since none of it ever came their way.
“My son’s a Delacroix,” Sanford would say expansively, “you’ll get it back through him.” But when that same son left Yale, and moved to New York, and said that he wanted to go into the newspaper business, the Colonel was appalled; he was even more distressed when Blaise, who had always been fascinated by newspapers, declared that it was his ambition to be exactly like William Randolph Hearst, whose very name was a synonym for cad in the Sanford world. But the Colonel had yielded to the extent of instructing his lawyer, Dennis Houghteling, to arrange a meeting between Blaise and the dark—or rather bright yellow—prince of journalism.
Hearst had been gravely interested in the young man. “The business part’s easy to learn,” he said. “You just hang around the people who sell the advertising, and the people who do the accounting, and then you try to figure out how the more papers I sell, the more money I lose, and the more red ink they write their numbers with.” Hearst’s smile was not exactly winning. “The other end, the paper …”
“That’s what I like!” They were seated in the Chief’s office, overlooking Park Row. Hearst had rented the second and third floors of the Tribune Building, that monument to the honest founder of all that was best—if hectoring—in modern journalism, Horace Greeley. From Hearst’s window the domed City Hall was visible while the magnificent new Pulitzer Building was not visible, unless you put your head as far as you could out the window and l
ooked up the block and so saw the skyscraper headquarters of “the enemy” World.
“Well, the other end of putting out a paper depends partly on how much money you’ve got to spend and partly on how good you are at keeping the folks interested in … in …”
“In Crime and Underwear?” Blaise was brash.
The Chief frowned uncomfortably. “I don’t use words like that,” he said, somewhat primly. “But the folks like scandal. That’s true. They also need to be looked out for because there’s no one in a city like this who will take the side of the average citizen.”
“Not even the politicians?”
“They are what you have to save the folks from, if you can. I suppose you’ll want to invest in a paper.” Hearst looked at a number of random tear-sheets on the floor; they would, once he’d arranged them in order, become the Sunday Journal.
“As soon as I know what I’m doing, if I’ll ever know, of course. You don’t learn much at Yale, I’m afraid.”
“I was kicked out of Harvard, and glad to go. Well, you can start in here anytime; and we’ll see what happens.” Not long after this exchange, Hearst had declared war on Spain and won it. Now he would free Captain Dreyfus. Defeat Colonel Roosevelt. Start a dozen new papers. Everything seemed possible except, and the Chief looked Blaise in the eye, the face as tense as that of Bonaparte behind him, “I’ve used up all the money Mother gave me, and we’re still in the red.”
“Ask her for more.” Blaise was brisk; he saw what was coming.
“I don’t like to. Because …” The high voice gave out. The chief scratched his chin; then his ear. “I saw Houghteling yesterday. At the Fifth Avenue Hotel.”
“He’s a good Republican.” Blaise braced himself for the assault.
“I suppose so. But he don’t like pink shirts any more than I do. He tells me your father’s will is coming up for probate.”
“Well, it’s a slow process.” The Colonel had been killed in February; now it was September. The process of the law had stopped during the summer. “It might not be before the first of the year.”
“Houghteling says next week.” The Chief’s voice was flat. “There’s a lot of money there.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Blaise was beginning to feel clammy. “Anyway there are two of us, my sister—half-sister—and me.”
“Now is the time to get in on the ground floor,” said Hearst. “Now’s your chance. I’ve got my eye on Chicago, Washington, Boston. I want a paper in every big city. You …” The voice trailed off.
“Aren’t I sort of young to be … a partner?” Blaise suddenly went on the offensive. Why, after all, should he be nervous with Hearst when he had—or would soon have—the money that Hearst needed?
“Well, no one said anything about you being a partner.” Hearst might have laughed if he had thought of it. But he did not; he continued to frown. “I guess you could certainly buy an interest.”
“Well, yes. I guess I could.” But Blaise had spent enough time with the Journal’s dispensers of red ink to know that everything belonged to Hearst, personally; and there was, thus far, no sort of “interest” that could be sold. Blaise chose not to press the matter. He had his own plan, which might, or might not, include the Chief. More to the point, “I really don’t know how much I’m going to end up with, or for how long,” he added cryptically.
“Well, that’s your affair.”
George was at the door. “Miss Anita Willson and Miss Millicent Willson to see you, sir.” George kept the straightest of faces.
“Tell them to wait in the parlor.” Hearst rose.
“Get on to Decker.”
“Yes, sir.”
As Blaise walked down the hall, he saw the Willson sisters, staring at themselves in a mirrored screen in the parlor. They were plump, pretty, blond. At the paper there were those who thought that the Chief favored Millicent, who was only sixteen; others thought that he preferred the older Anita; a few thought that he enjoyed each of them, either separately or together, according to what degree the imagination of the speculating journalist had been depraved. All agreed that the two girls were very effective as part of a dancing group called the Merry Maidens, currently appearing at the Herald Square Theater in The Girl from Paris. As George opened the front door for Blaise, the Chief must have entered the parlor, because there were delighted cries. “Oh, Mr. Hearst! Mr. Hearst! We never dreamed there was that much chocolate in the world!” The voices were tough Hell’s Kitchen Irish. Hearst’s response was not audible. George’s eyes became slightly more round. Blaise stepped into the elevator.
Park Row was crowded with end-of-day traffic. Streetcars rattled down the center of the street while smart and less smart carriages stopped at City Hall. Blaise made his way, tentatively, from street corner to curb, careful to avoid as best he could the mounds of horse manure that the Mayor had promised would be removed at least twice a day. Blaise tried to envisage a city without horses; in fact, he had already tried his hand at fantasy. In the Sunday Journal, he had described a future world of horseless carriages. As it was, the Chief himself drove a flashy French automobile, fuelled by gasoline. Unfortunately, the only vivid difference between a horseless future and the present would be the necessary and unmourned absence of something that Blaise and the Sunday editor, the young indecorous Merrill Goddard, spent a whole morning trying to find euphemisms for. At the end, Goddard had shrieked, “Sanford, call it shit!”
Blaise smiled at the memory, and started unconsciously to mouth the word as he crossed the coupolaed hall at whose center a number of Tammany types had gathered about His Honor the Mayor, Robert Van Wyck, brother to the gubernatorial candidate.
But Blaise was doomed never to know what wisdom the Mayor was dispensing in the rotunda, because a tall old man with silver hair and rose-tinted side-whiskers, Dennis Houghteling, the Sanford family lawyer, signalled him from the marble staircase. “I have been with the Clerk of Wills,” he said in a low conspiratorial voice, the only voice that he had. Because the Colonel refused even to visit, much less live, in the United States, Mr. Houghteling had been, in effect, the Sanford viceroy at New York, and once a month he reported in careful detail the state of the Sanford holdings to its absent lord. Since Blaise had known Mr. Houghteling all his life, it was only natural that when it came time to probate the last of his father’s many wills, the matter would be entrusted to the senior partner of Redpath, Houghteling and Parker, attorneys-at-law.
“All is well,” whispered Houghteling, putting his arm through Blaise’s, and steering him to an empty marble bench beneath a statue of De Witt Clinton. “All is well as far as the law is concerned.” Houghteling began to modify; and Blaise waited, with assumed patience, for the lawyer to tell him what the problem was. Meanwhile, the Mayor was making a speech beneath the cupola. The vowels echoed like thunder while the consonants were like rifle shot. Blaise understood not a word.
“As we know, the problem is one of interpretation. Of cyphers; or of a single cypher to be precise—and its ambiguity.”
Blaise was alert. “Who will ever contest our interpretation of an ambiguous cypher?”
“Your sister will certainly contest our interpretation …”
“But she’s in England, and if the will’s been probated, as you say …”
“There has been a slight delay.” Houghteling’s whisper was more than ever insinuating. “Your cousin has spoken up, on behalf of Caroline …”
“Which cousin?” There were, that Blaise knew of, close to thirty cousins, in or near the city.
“John Apgar Sanford. He is a specialist in patent law, actually …”
Blaise had met Cousin John, a hearty dull man of thirty, with an ailing wife, and many debts.
“Why has he got himself involved?”
“He is representing your sister in this.”
Blaise felt a sudden chill of ancrer. “Representing Caroline? Why? We’re not in court. There’s no contest.”
“There will be, he says, ove
r the precise age at which she comes into her share of the estate …”
“The will says that when she’s twenty-seven, she’ll inherit her share of the capital. Until then I have control of the entire estate. After all, Father wrote that will himself, with his own hand.”
“Unfortunately, he—who usually refused to speak French—wrote his will in rather faulty French, and since the French number one looks just like an English seven, though unlike a French seven, your cousin is taking the position that the Colonel intended for this will to conform with the earlier ones; and that your father meant for Caroline to inherit at twenty-one, not twenty-seven, half the estate.”
“Well, it looks like twenty-seven to me. How did it look to the clerk?”
“I translated the text for him. Of course, the English version says twenty-seven …”
“So what’s the problem?”
“Twofold. Your cousin says that we have deliberately misinterpreted your father, and he will now contest our … interpretation of the figure.”
“He will? How can he? Only Caroline can and she’s three thousand miles away.”
“Your first supposition is correct. He obviously cannot contest a will with which he has nothing to do. Your second supposition—the geographical one—is mistaken. I have just spoken to your sister. She arrived this morning from Liverpool. She is stopping at the Waldorf-Astoria.”
Blaise stared at the old lawyer. In the background, someone proposed three cheers to Mayor Van Wyck, and the rotunda reverberated with cheering; like artillery being fired. Martial images filled Blaise’s head. War. “If they contest what my father wrote, I shall take them through every court in the country. Do you understand, Mr. Houghteling?”