Empire: A Novel

by Gore Vidal

  “If the wives were subtracted,” Mrs. Jack said aloud what Caroline was thinking, “the result would be a lot more amusing than anything we’ve got in New York.”

  “Only,” said Caroline sadly, “they refuse to be subtracted.”

  “Try division.” Mrs. Jack gave her a sudden sharp, knowing look; and Caroline, for no reason that she could ascertain, gasped.

  Clara Hay gathered them up. “Come on, you two. Amuse Colonel Payne.”

  “Surely, he dislikes ladies,” began Mrs. Jack.

  “Who doesn’t,” whispered Caroline, taking advantage of Clara Hay’s deafness.

  “All the more reason for him to make a fuss over you, Mrs. Astor.” Clara was firm, always firm; she was also generally right. Colonel Oliver Payne was thrilled to be surrounded by Mrs. Astor and Miss Sanford.

  “We must,” said Mrs. Jack, voice more throaty and menacing than ever, “find you a husband—I mean, a wife, Colonel.”

  – 2 –

  BLAISE had accompanied his editor Hapgood to New York City to observe the election of the Chief to Congress, a foregone election, as Hearst had left nothing to chance. The original Democratic nominee, Brisbane, had stepped aside, to make way for his employer; and Hearst was duly confirmed as Tammany’s Democratic nominee in the Eleventh District. For this safe Democratic seat, the new head of Tammany, the cheerful Charles Francis Murphy, asked only that the Journal whole-heartedly support Tammany’s candidate for governor. Hearst had agreed.

  Now Blaise and Hapgood stood in windy Madison Square, where some forty thousand people were gathered to hear the election results, and view the fireworks laid on by the Journal. “He sure knows how to spend the money,” observed Hapgood, with awe.

  “Sometimes I think that that’s all he knows.” Blaise was sour. He, too, had spent money in Baltimore; in fact, the money spent was now at his side, a stout Teutonic man with a huge moustache, the paradigm of Hearst journalists in the copious flesh. But even Hapgood had so far failed to increase circulation figures. Currently, their hopes were based on a series about miscegenation, the one subject certain to thrill their readers, or so Hapgood, the Marylander, maintained. Blaise envied Caroline her city. When the capital was dull, there was Embassy Row; when the embassies were short of news, there was the White House, a never-ending source of “warm human interest,” to use the current phrase. Stories about the Roosevelt children and their ponies in the elevator, their appearances at state sessions on stilts, their snakes and frogs at table, and, above all, the Jovian sovereign Theodore, conducting himself like a king, destined by birth to his high estate. Caroline need do nothing to fill the columns of her paper; they filled themselves. All he had was miscegenation; and then what?

  Blaise had wanted to join Hearst at the Lexington Avenue house, but Hapgood suggested that they get a sense of the crowd first. “After all, if the Chief”—although he worked for Blaise now, the Chief was still the Chief—“is going to be the candidate in ’04, we’ll get some sense of it now, from the crowd.”

  “A lot of Bowery.” Blaise knew his Manhattan crowds. “Also Tammany.” Everyone was in a gala mood. Huge transparencies celebrated Hearst’s victory of fifteen thousand eight hundred votes over his dim Republican adversary; and his lead over the entire ticket by thirty-five hundred votes, which made him the largest Democratic vote-getter in the state. Tammany’s governor-to-be was not-to-be: in a close race, he had lost to the Republicans. This then was the night that Hearst had dreamed of. He had won his first election in the biggest possible way.

  Blaise and Hapgood found themselves not far from a band which kept playing, rather tactlessly, “California, Here I Come,” a tribute to Hearst’s origin rather than to his adopted domicile, which was now dispatching him to Washington. Overhead a manned balloon was lit up with colored lanterns. The crowd was festive, as well they should be; free schooners of beer were being served at one end of the square beneath the legend “William Randolph Hearst, Labor’s Friend,” while nearby an electrical sign proclaimed, “Congress Must Control the Trusts,” a not-so-subtle reminder that the current president was less than arduous in his efforts to master the country’s owners.

  Hearst’s socialism—if that was what it was—always bemused Blaise, who never ceased, for a moment, to be loyal to his own class and could not conceive any other loyalty. Although Hearst would have to pose as a friend of the working-man and the enemy of the rich if he wanted to replace William Jennings Bryan as the plain people’s tribune, he was not entirely the demagogue others thought him. The rich Mr. Hearst, who had inherited his money, disliked those other rich men, who had inherited theirs. He was genuinely attuned not so much to the hard-working worthy poor as he was to those excluded from society itself. Himself a sort of outlaw, he not only lived outside the law but used law to flout law. Hearst might yet strike that nerve in a still-savage land which would make him its natural leader. Blaise was, suddenly, aware that he was present at an historic moment, the genesis of what might be an astonishing, even Napoleonic career.

  As if to emphasize and punctuate the Napoleonic image, Madison Square exploded—literally exploded. Blaise fell to his knees on the pavement, while Hapgood sat down beside him with a crash. Sound-waves buffeted them like Montauk surf. The band stopped playing. Then the screaming began; and the sound of ambulances. Overhead the balloon hovered; then began its descent. The electrical sign still threatened the trusts, but the various transparencies had been abandoned, as people ran, in panic, from the square, where something, Blaise could not tell what, had blown up.

  “Anarchists!” Hapgood was now on his feet, ever the reporter, the Hearst reporter.

  In the cool autumn air there was the acrid scent of—what?—gunpowder, Blaise decided, as he and Hapgood, like brave soldiers in a battle, hurried against the fleeing crowd. Let others run from battle; they would go to war.

  The fire department arrived just as Blaise and Hapgood found the source of the explosion, a small cast-iron mortar inside of which a fireworks bomb had gone off, igniting dozens of other bombs. The principal damage had been to the windows of a building nearby. The glass had been pulverized, and like so many icy lethal bullets had laid low dozens of men, women and children. Some stood, screaming, faces bleeding; others lay ominously still on the pavement. Blaise stared down at a man, spread-eagled face down; in the back of his neck there was a diamond-shaped piece of glass which must have severed the spine. To Blaise’s amazement there was no blood, only the glass, shining in the lamplight, and the dark slit, rather like a letterbox into which someone had tried to insert a glass message.

  “How many dead, wounded?” Blaise was delighted by his own coolness; and realized what a truly easy time of it Roosevelt must have had at San Juan Hill. Everything so fast, so shocking, so pointless.

  “At least a hundred, I’d say.” Hapgood’s notebook was out; and he was writing and looking simultaneously; then police and firemen made them move on.

  Hearst was seated at his Napoleonic desk; he had forgone, no doubt forever, the bright plaids and festive ties of his Prince Hal days. Now he was in a statesman’s black frock-coat, with a black bow tie and a white shirt. The legs once so haphazardly arranged upon the desk were set, side by side, beneath it, as he talked into the telephone to Brisbane at the Journal office. George Thompson, now elephantine in appearance, had warned Blaise that the Chief was “handling the misadventure in Madison Square.”

  Blaise sat on the sofa opposite, as he had so often before in his days as apprentice. The Willson girls, each in a glittering ball gown, were at the opposite end of the museum-like room, playing Parcheesi. Somewhere, a supper party was being laid on to celebrate the victory of the rising political star. But for now, Hearst listened, murmured questions, shut his eyes as if better to visualize not the explosion in the square but the headlines that would describe it. Finally, he put down the receiver.

  “I was there,” said Blaise.

  With professional skill, Hearst questioned Blaise; too
k notes; ignored the chatter of the Willson girls. “There will be lawsuits,” he said finally, “even though the district attorney’s prepared to exonerate us. Well, it’s done. The important thing is to keep Roosevelt on the run. He’s been an ass over the coal-miners. You see, he’s the worker’s enemy.”

  “Yes,” said Blaise. It was odd to hear the Chief express political opinions. As a rule, he was indifferent to the rights and wrongs of any issue. All that mattered was how to play the news. Now he himself meant to be the news. Blaise wondered if Hearst understood the risk that he was running. He who had devoted a lifetime to making lurid fictions of others was now himself a candidate for re-creation. Blaise was not certain what a petard was but he understood about self-hoisting. Meanwhile, he congratulated the newest star in the political firmament.

  Hearst was matter-of-fact. “I should’ve gone for the governorship. But there wasn’t the time, and 1904’s almost here, and we’ve got nobody to put up against Roosevelt. I’ve got Los Angeles.”

  “Los Angeles?”

  “A paper there. The Examiner, I’m calling it. Then Boston’s next.”

  “What about Baltimore?”

  “I’ll need some organizing there, Blaise. Maybe you could see to it.” Hearst swung back and forth between newspapers and politics as if the two were the same, which perhaps they were to him at the moment, and if they were, Blaise saw trouble ahead. One could not be both inventor of the American world and the thing invented.

  George Thompson was at the door, round face more than usually flushed with late-night celebrating. “The gentleman you are expecting, sir,” was the cryptic announcement.

  Hearst leapt to his feet; as did Blaise. The Willson girls continued to play Parcheesi. The doorway now framed the unmistakable statesmanlike figure, in black alpaca frock-coat and string tie, of William Jennings Bryan.

  “Colonel Bryan!” Hearst presented five fingers to the Great Commoner, as Bryan was known to the inventive press; and the Great Commoner squeezed the fingers in his experienced grasp, and smiled his thin wide smile. Blaise had never seen the idol of the masses at such close quarters; was surprised to find him as impressive close up as he was in the illuminated distance of an auditorium, the voice surging from that barrel chest like a force of nature uncontrolled by mere man, much less by Bryan himself.

  “You have won the first of many victories.” Bryan’s speaking voice was agreeably low, not at all like the thunder of the hustings. “I, too, started with an election to the House of Representatives,” he added, as if, thought Blaise, this was necessarily a recommendation. After all, he had been beaten for every office since.

  Hearst introduced Colonel Bryan to the Misses Willson as “my fiancée and her sister.” The Great Commoner maintained his Old Testament poise. As for Blaise, he complimented him on a recent editorial in the Baltimore Examiner, convincing Blaise that Bryan intended to be a third-time candidate for president in 1004, unless the Chief could bring him up short. “We are all three publishers,” observed Bryan, sitting in a golden throne, covered with Napoleonic bees, an original, Hearst always said, “the property of the Emperor himself,” unaware that every railroad hotel in France had a similar set of chairs. Bryan removed from his pocket several copies of his newspaper, the Commoner, published from his home town of Lincoln, Nebraska. “For your amusement, gentlemen.”

  Hearst riffled the pages professionally; shook his head sadly. “I see, Colonel, you don’t follow my advice.”

  “Well, Mr. Hearst, I aim at a quieter public than yours.” Bryan was benign. He even smiled, vaguely, at the Willson girls, who ignored him. Blaise found it hard to believe that this simple farmer-like man could have so seized the nation’s imagination. Was it all art—or artifice? Could oratory alone create such passionate fervor, and such enduring antipathy? For at least a third of the nation, Bryan could do no wrong, ever; and if the inventors of the American world, through the press, had not so successfully cast him as a villain, a socialist, anarchist, leveller, he would now be the country’s president, and even more popular than the sly Roosevelt, for Bryan’s popularity was just that—populist, based on the plain people at large, whose voice he was.

  Bryan spoke knowledgeably—and not optimistically—of the election. “Usually, the party that’s out picks up congressional seats. But Roosevelt’s life is singularly charmed. We hold our own, and no more, which is why your election is deeply meaningful.”

  Hearst nodded his agreement. Blaise wondered if the Chief would make the mistake of thinking himself not only cleverer but more popular than Bryan. The Chief was sufficiently unused to the ways of the world to be overwhelmed by an election that had been entirely arranged for by Tammany. Blaise feared that the Chief, who could be surprisingly innocent, might mistake his large vote for personal popularity of the sort which Bryan generated in such quantities that only great money, shrewdly spent by Hanna, had kept him from the presidency. “I am honored, naturally,” said Hearst, slowly, as if speaking to a slow-witted journalist, “by the confidence that the people—the poor people—of the Eleventh District have shown in me, and I will do my best to fight labor’s battle against labor’s sworn enemy Theodore Roosevelt.”

  During this, Blaise watched Bryan’s face. Politicians, like priests, do not enjoy the exalted visions of laymen. Bryan’s square jaw and thin mouth were a study in parallel and vertical lines at precise right angles. No wonder he was so easy to caricature. “I’m sure you’ll do very well in Washington.” Bryan’s eyes shifted for an instant to the dazzling Willson girls; then, guiltily, he blinked his eyes. “If I may advise,” he began humbly, “we have yet another rich line of attack against our would-be emperor, and that is the empire itself.”

  As Hearst generally supported America’s imperial presence in the Philippines, he did not quite rise to Bryan’s bait. “I think Mr. Taft has the Philippines under control …”

  “No, Mr. Hearst. I’m not referring to crimes that we have already committed. I mean the one that Theodore is dreaming of. He glories in war, which I hate. Hate!” There was a rumble, like approaching thunder, in the room. The Willson girls abandoned their Parcheesi, to stare at the great—what else?—star, who seemed ready to perform. They might not care for politics, but there was nothing that they did not know about show-business, to which, all in all, Bryan, the spellbinder of the Chautauqua circuit, belonged, too. “I hate the love of war he demonstrates every time he speaks.” Bryan, aware that he had got the attention of the two girls, the equivalent now to at least two states of the union, grasped his lapels in a familiar gesture. “At West Point, he told the cadets, ‘A good soldier must not only be willing to fight, he must be anxious to fight.’ So much for Scripture, and the words of our Lord, Jesus Christ.” The voice’s famous lute-song filled the room, as did Arthur Brisbane, and a half-dozen Hearst employees, who entered, unannounced by George. “They estimate more than a hundred are dead!” Brisbane was excited; he became even more excited when he recognized the Great Commoner in the Napoleonic throne. “I’m sorry, W.R. I didn’t know …”

  “That’s all right. Colonel Bryan and I are, as always, as one. We complement each other.” Blaise knew that the Chief had never worked out the differences between “compliment” and “complement”; fortunately, he did not have to.

  “Would you join us, Mr. Brisbane?” This was the Chief’s polite way of telling everyone else to go, including the Willson sisters, who continued to stare at the great actor, who smiled gravely at them, as they passed him in a glitter of gold thread, a cloud of heavy perfume.

  Brisbane sat opposite Bryan; he was no enthusiast of Bryan for the simple reason that no man in history had ever been great without blue eyes. When Blaise had mentioned Julius Caesar, Brisbane had replied that the written evidence was not clear; also, what evidence there was about Caesar’s life indicated sexual irregularity of the sort that would preclude greatness. Blaise thought that the conquest of the world might weigh something in the balance, but Brisbane was an Ame
rican moralist, and there was no arguing with him.

  “Colonel Bryan is here,” said Hearst, grasping his own lapels in imitation of Bryan, “to discuss his European tour.”

  Brisbane nodded. “I’ve made all the travel arrangements, sir. You will leave in two weeks’ time; the terms are—as agreed.”

  “They were, when last we corresponded, agreeable. I am, after all, just a country newspaper editor.” Blaise was both surprised and impressed. Somehow, Hearst had managed to put the Great Commoner on his payroll. Obviously, the Chief would do anything to secure the nomination in 1904, and why not? If the party’s leadership could be bought, he would pay the price. He had made, as it were, a first down payment by signing up William Jennings Bryan to tour Europe and write a series of articles for the Hearst press, now six newspapers, soon to be eight. There was something Napoleonic in the way the Chief went about his conquest of the Democratic Party; and the republic for which it hardly stood.

  Brisbane spoke of details. Hearst gazed at the ceiling. Bryan seemed more than ever a monument to the common man. “I’m sending one of our best writers with you. His name is Michelson, and he’ll do the actual writing. Naturally, you’ll decide what you want to cover, of course.”

  “Of course. I want to meet Tolstoi, the Russian count.” Bryan was unexpected. “From what I read of him, we have a lot in common. Fact, I am said to have had a great influence on his own speeches—books, I mean. Also, Russia is important for us, very important, and it seems that he speaks for their common man as I speak for ours.”

  “I hadn’t realized,” said Brisbane, plainly startled, “that you were a reader of Count Tolstoi’s books.”