Empire: A Novel

by Gore Vidal

  “I don’t think he’s afraid of Mr. Hearst, or much of anyone. You see, he has,” she explained demurely, “a bad back.” Caroline rose. They faced one another at the room’s center. As they were the same height, blue eyes glared straight into hazel ones.

  “I won’t give up any part of the estate,” said Blaise.

  “I won’t give up the Tribune.”

  “Unless you go broke.”

  “Or sell it to Mr. Hearst, and not to you.”

  Blaise was pale now; he looked exhausted. Caroline recalled a precocious girl at Allenswood who had actually been seduced. The girl’s highly secret report to Caroline, her best friend, was the only firsthand account that Caroline had ever received from that strange country where men and women committed the ultimate act. Although Caroline had pressed for specific details (the statuary in the Louvre had created a number of confusions, those leaves), the girl had been, maddeningly, spiritual in her report. She spoke of Love, a subject that always mystified, when it did not annoy, Caroline; and could not be persuaded to tear the leaf from the mystery. But the girl had described the transformation in the young man’s face from the archangel that she saw him to satyr or, a kindly second thought, wild animal, and how the face, all scarlet one moment, went gray-white, with exhaustion, or whatever, the next. So Blaise now resembled a lover at transport’s end. But what, Caroline wondered, was the transport itself like? Mlle. Souvestre had suggested that if her students were really curious about what she always referred to with not-so-delicate irony as “married life,” they study Bernini’s Saint Teresa at Rome. “Allegedly, the saint is in the throes of religious ecstasy, the eyes are closed, the mouth is disagreeably ajar. The expression is cretinous. It is said that Bernini was inspired not by God but by the grandest of human passions.” When asked if “married life” at its peak was similar to a confrontation with the Holy Ghost, Mademoiselle had said firmly, “I am a freethinker and a virgin. You must apply elsewhere for instruction in ecstasy, and after you have left Wimbledon.”

  “Come,” said Caroline graciously, “let me show you the paper.”

  Together they entered the long compositors’ rooms. Trimble, in shirt-sleeves, was correcting a galley at the long table. The cat was still asleep in the window. The city reporter was writing on a new typewriter-machine, bought by Caroline during the second day of her proprietorship. “I find the noise of typing soothing,” she said to the silent Blaise. “I am responsible for the Remington. It’s what Henry James uses.” Caroline looked at her pale brother expectantly; but his silence, if possible, deepened. “I’ve asked the reporters not to achieve the same results. Fortunately, they only admire Stephen Crane and Richard Harding Davis. This is the managing editor, Mr. Trimble.”

  The two men shook hands, and Caroline said, as an afterthought, “My half-brother Blaise Sanford. He works with Mr. Hearst, at the Journal.”

  “Now there is a paper.” Trimble was flattering. “You know, last winter we heard a rumor that you people were going to buy us.”

  “Since then Mr. Hearst has drawn in his horns,” said Caroline. “He’s not acquiring for the moment.”

  “What’s your paid circulation?” asked Blaise.

  “Around seven thousand,” said Trimble.

  “I was told ten last winter.”

  “Mr. Vardeman liked to exaggerate, I guess. Our advertising’s increased in the last month,” he added.

  “Cousin John got us Apgar’s Department Store. They are having their sales now.”

  The political reporter, thin of neck, red of cheek and eye, already partly drunk, approached. “Mr. Trimble, here’s an item. I don’t suppose it’s worth bothering with. From the White House.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Caroline. Although she was personally fascinated by politicians if not politics, she found the subject, as dealt with by the press, sinister in its dullness. Only those who were themselves political could find exciting or even fascinating the Tribune’s political news. Happily, most of newspaper-reading Washington was involved in government and they would read any political news. But Caroline, as always in imitation of Hearst, wanted to extend the readership to those who found politics as dull as she did, the majority. Graphic details of murders, robberies, rapes were what people wanted to read, a lurid golden thread running through the gray pages. But she wanted even more diversions for her readers—or readers-to-be. The political reporter, as if sent by Heaven, now gave her exactly what she wanted.

  “I was over talking to Mr. Cortelyou …”

  “The President’s secretary,” said Caroline, helpfully, to Blaise, who was again turning a healthy pre-transport red.

  “He said there’s no news from the Philippines. Then when asked what the President was doing at the moment, he said, ‘He’s out driving,’ and I said, ‘Well, that’s not much of a story,’ and he said, ‘Well, he’s driving in a motor car for the first time.’ So there’s an item, I guess. A smallish item, I guess.”

  Trimble sighed. “A very smallish item. For the social page.”

  “No,” said Caroline. “For the front page.” She had never felt so entirely heroic as she did now, showing off to Blaise.

  “What’s the lead?” asked Trimble.

  “First president ever to drive in an automobile.” Caroline was prompt.

  “But is that true?” asked Trimble.

  “Mr. Hearst wouldn’t care, and, I’m afraid, I don’t either.”

  “I think it’s true,” said the political reporter. “Grover Cleveland tried to get into a motor car several years ago. But because he’s so fat, he wouldn’t fit. Fact, nothing fits him except this one orange summer suit that his young wife hates, and finally got him to give away when she threatened to denounce him to the Irish as an Ulsterman.”

  “Wonderful!” Caroline was indeed pleased. “That’s what we want in your story. Do write it all. Now.”

  As the reporter was shuffling toward the Remington, Caroline stopped him. “What sort of motor car was it?”

  “A Stanley Steamer, Miss Sanford.”

  Caroline turned to Trimble. “Put that in the sub-head. Then we shall ask the Stanley Steamer people to advertise.”

  “Well …” Trimble was grinning now; he had got her range. Then both started as the door to the room was slammed shut. Blaise had fled.

  “Your brother’s kind of … moody?”

  “Well, his mood is certainly black today. He and Mr. Hearst did want this paper. In fact, he just asked me to sell it to him, and I said no.”

  Trimble frowned. “Would you make a profit?”

  “Yes.”

  “You should sell. We haven’t a chance. The Star and the Post have us beat.”

  Caroline’s pleasure in the Stanley Steamer story was now replaced by that sense of doom which often visited her when she awakened in the early hours of the morning, and wondered what on earth she was doing in a small house in Georgetown, publishing a newspaper that might, eventually, ruin her. “If it’s so hopeless, why does Hearst want to buy?”

  “He’ll pour in money. He don’t care what he loses. And he’ll have a Washington power-base. He’s running for president.”

  Caroline was momentarily distracted. “How do you know that?”

  “Friend at the Journal told me. Hearst thinks Bryan can’t win, and he can.”

  “How curious! The first time I spoke to him, he said he wanted Admiral Dewey.” But Caroline had grasped a point interesting to her in a way that politics was not. “You haven’t been talking to the Journal about a job, have you?”

  Trimble’s pale blue eyes now avoided her own, she hoped, steady gaze. “We’re losing circulation every month,” he said.

  “Not on the newsstands.”

  “That’s no money really. Advertising rates are fixed by your paid subscriptions.”

  “Then we’ll hold a—what is it?—you know, money for nothing? A lottery.”

  “With what money?”

  “If you stay, I’ll go in deeper.”
>
  Trimble looked at her, most curiously. “Why are you doing this?”

  “I want to.”

  “Is that all?”

  “I should think that that was everything.”

  “But no woman … no lady has ever run a newspaper that I know of, and there aren’t many men who have the knack either.”

  “You will,” said Caroline, no question in her voice and no appeal, “stay.”

  Trimble smiled. They shook hands gravely.

  FIVE

  – 1 –

  FROM ONE END to the other of the Brooklyn Bridge, electric lights spelled out “Welcome, Dewey,” so many points of arctic light against the night sky; while downriver, the Admiral’s flagship, the Olympic, was equally illuminated. Sirens blared. Occasional fireworks exploded along the Palisades. The hero of Manila had come home.

  Blaise sat beside the Chief in the back of his motor car, the top put down the better to enjoy the display, and the cool autumn night. Madame de Bieville sat in the seat opposite, next to Millicent and Anita Willson. To Blaise’s surprise, Anne was amused by the girls and, like all women, bemused by the Chief. For a week, Anne had taken the girls shopping in order to dress them up—or rather down—for Europe. Hearst had decided to go to Europe in November; winter would be spent aboard a yacht, on the Nile. Although Blaise had been cheated of his return to Europe, Anne’s arrival was consolation. Together they had gone to Newport, Rhode Island, and the fierce Delacroix grandmother had been openly scandalized and privately thrilled by the liaison between her youthful grandson and this French woman of the world. But like all good Newporters, Mrs. Delacroix dearly loved a French lady and a moneyed one was even more loveable. She had installed Madame in the east wing of her Grand Trianon and Blaise in the west wing, and when Mrs. Fish had suggested that there might be wedding bells between June and October, Mrs. Delacroix had said, in a voice reputedly, of thunder, “Mamie, mind your own business.” Mrs. Fish had done so: a business that included a picnic on the rocks by the sea, with Harry Lehr in charge of an artificial waterfall; but instead of water, champagne, sold by Lehr on commission, cascaded over the rocks.

  Anne had said to Blaise that she now understood the French Revolution. Blaise had said that he now understood why there could never be an American revolution. The sumptuous extravagance of the rich suited everyone, particularly the readers of the Journal. It was still believed, he was magisterial, that in the United States anyone could strike it rich, like the Chief’s father, and, once rich, “anyone” was obliged to live out every dream that everyone had ever had. There was still wealth to be had for the lucky; as for the rest, they could daydream, their imaginations fed by the Journal. Anne could not believe that it was possible to keep the unlucky forever content with stories of the fortunate and their extravagances, but Blaise thought it possible to string them, as the Chief would say, along forever, or as long as there were still mountains of gold and silver to be broken into and new inventions to be thought of. The native-born American still believed that hard work would earn him all the beef his family required; believed, also, that blind luck might translate him overnight to a palace on Fifth Avenue. The immigrants were somewhat different.

  Blaise recalled a conversation with a manufacturer at Mrs. Fish’s dinner table: “The Germans are the best workers, if they haven’t been told about socialism and labor unions. The Irish are the worst, and always drunk. Dagos and niggers are lazy. All in all, the best worker is still your average Buckwheat.” A “Buckwheat,” it turned out, was the name employers gave to any sturdy young native-born Protestant from the countryside. The Buckwheat obeyed orders, worked hard and stayed sober. If he dreamed, he dreamed only the right sort of dreams, which might even come true. Anne found all of this mystifying. In France everyone knew his place; and wanted to change it or, more exciting, change someone else’s for the worst. Of course, France was filled up, while the United States was still relatively empty. Although the frontier had ended with the invention of California, the newly acquired Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean were now American lakes, filled with rich islands and opportunities, and the far-away look could once again be detected in the noble Buckwheat’s eyes. Blaise had composed a panegyric to the Buckwheat, and gave it to the managing editor, Arthur Brisbane, who took out everything original, including the word “Buckwheat,” and published it in the Sunday Journal: “No derogatory nicknames for the native-born American,” said Brisbane.

  The Chief told the chauffeur to drive them downtown. “I want to see the arch lit up,” he said. “I want to see Dewey,” he added, looking at Blaise, as if Blaise were the Admiral’s keeper. “I want to talk to him.”

  Blaise did his best to give an impression that he would deliver the Admiral to the Journal offices for the next day’s editorial meeting. “The messenger to Manila,” as the Chief’s courier was known at the paper, had got nothing at all out of the old hero, who seemed interested only in his new admiral-ate. Mention of the presidency bored him, the courier had reported.

  As the motor car glided through the cool autumnal darkness of Central Park, the Willson girls broke beautifully into song: “I Met Her by the Fountain in the Park,” a particular favorite of the Chief, as well as of the girls, whose father, a buck-and-wing dancer-singer, had made the song famous in vaudeville. Hearst’s high toneless voice joined in. Anne beat time with a gloved hand, and smiled at Blaise, who felt embarrassed. It was always hard to present the Chief to the world as a serious man; yet he was.

  Just north of Madison Square on Fifth Avenue, the crowds began. Everyone was moving toward the arch which had been built over the avenue at Twenty-third Street. Special lights had been craftily arranged to illuminate the white magnificence of what the Journal had called the most splendid triumphal arch ever shaped by the hand of man. Mr. Brisbane, not Blaise, was the author of this hyperbole. But the huge version of Rome’s arch of Septimius Severus was indeed impressive, despite the streetcars that passed, diagonally, in front of it, toward Broadway as it converged with Fifth Avenue. Three sets of columns on either side of the avenue made an approach to the arch. On top of the arch, a statue of Victory held a laurel wreath. Life-size military figures, entwined with banners, sabres, guns, adorned column-bases; upon the arch itself, the Admiral was depicted, a latter-day Nelson come home to glory in a confusion of flood-lights, hansom cabs, motor cars and red-white-and-blue bunting, courtesy of Knox’s Hats on the Avenue’s east side. The Hearst car stopped in front of Knox’s, and even the Chief was impressed by the masses of people who, although it was after midnight, wanted to pay homage to the hero—or his monument.

  As the horse of a hansom cab predictably reared in passing the alien motor car, the Chief observed with predictable pleasure, “Roosevelt must be chewing up the carpet with those big teeth of his.” But Anne said, shrewdly, Blaise thought, “Why should he chew? The Admiral’s old. He’s young.”

  “Dewey’s sixty-two. That’s not too old to be president.” The Chief looked uncharacteristically sullen. “He’s in love.”

  “At sixty-two?” The Willson girls spoke as one; and everyone laughed. A newsboy, selling the Journal, waved a paper in Hearst’s face. “Evening, Chief!”

  “Hello, son.” The Chief was again smiling; he gave the boy ten cents, to the ragged accompaniment of a group of Sixth Avenue types who were now singing “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.” Opposite them, beneath a column, a well-dressed woman wept. “He’s all set to marry John McLean’s sister. She’s a general’s widow. He’s a widower. She’s Catholic,” the Chief added, brightening somewhat.

  “There is still such a feeling against Catholics?” Madame de Bieville looked almost her age by the harsh light of a street lamp directly overhead. Blaise wished she would turn her head to the left an inch, and allow flattering shadows to mask her. Talk of age always disturbed him when she was present. The Willson girls had already worked out his relationship to what, in their eyes, despite her foreign glamour, was an old woman. If the Ch
ief suspected, he made no allusion. But then, in sexual matters, he had a maiden’s tact.

  “Well, it’s the Irish mostly that keep on giving Catholics such a bad name,” said Hearst vaguely. “Germans, too, I guess. He’s a powerhouse, her brother.” The Chief looked at Blaise, without reproach, which was the worst reproach of all.

  John R. McLean was the owner of the Cincinnati Enquirer. He lived in Washington where his mother and wife jointly reigned much as Mrs. Astor did, alone, in New York. McLean was fierce, partisan, powerful. He would do anything to keep Hearst out of Washington. Blaise’s failure to buy the Tribune was a blow to Hearst, who was not about to begin, from nothing, a newspaper in the capital. The Tribune had been an ideal acquisition, and Blaise could never adequately explain to his partner—employer no longer: Blaise merely lent the Chief money at the going rate—that he had lost the paper to his own sister, who, to his surprise, eight months later, was still, if only barely, in business. They now communicated through lawyers. Anne thought that he should come to terms with Caroline, but Blaise refused. He would fight her to the end, which would come, rather anti-climactically, one way or another, in five years.

  “Who built the arch?” Anne changed the dangerous subject.

  “A committee,” said Blaise. “The National Sculpture Society.”

  “The American style.” She smiled into the light; and the resulting lines made Blaise both nervous and sad. “And what is the arch made of? Marble? or stone?”

  “Plaster and cheap wood,” said the Chief with obscure pleasure. “And lots of white paint.”

  “But then when the winter comes …”

  “It will fall apart.” The Chief’s tone was dreamy.

  “But there’s a subscription to rebuild it in marble. This is just the model.” As a young, new New Yorker of means, Blaise had already made his contribution to the fund.

  “It doesn’t look at all temporary.” Anne was admiring.

  “That’s the American way,” said the Chief. America personified, Hearst thought of himself; and, perhaps, thought Blaise, he was. Everything here was equally new, self-invented, temporary.