FIVE
WHEN I FINALLY REACHED GALVIN, HE INITIALLY SEEMED uncertain why he had called me. After an agonizing pause, he proposed that we meet for lunch, leaving me to wonder whether that had been his original plan, or a face-saving substitute. I didn’t care. I had my own purpose now; he was in my power as much as I was in his. He asked if I would mind coming back to his place on the river and I said not at all, I would be happy to revisit Tara North.
Galvin’s place looked empty now, without its merrymakers. The colorful parade of parked cars had disappeared from the long driveway, and the vast house on the river looked more forbidding without the musical banter of cocktail conversation. Galvin was waiting in his study. He was dressed in casual clothes, made of the fine Italian fabrics that allow the right sort of fellow to spend a thousand dollars for a shirt and a pair of pants. He looked as handsome as ever, but there was a restlessness in his manner that I hadn’t remembered. Maybe he was just lonely, communing with his wardrobe in that enormous house.
Galvin made small talk, or at least his oversize version of it. He had just come back from California, where he had been visiting a small biotechnology company he wanted to buy. The company claimed to have achieved a breakthrough in dissolving plaque in the arteries, which would allow them to treat heart disease without having to operate. Sounded pretty good to me. My father had died of a heart attack. I asked if he had bought the company. “Nope,” he said. “Too expensive.” That was why I wasn’t cut out for business, I thought to myself. I didn’t understand that everything has its price.
We ate on a screened porch, suspended between the muggy air outside and the cool blast of the air conditioner streaming through the open door. That was a Galvin touch—trying to air-condition the world. You couldn’t see the river from where we sat; just the stone wall and the sudden abyss beyond. The colors of the landscape weren’t crisp and distinct, as before, but a hot, hazy wash, like a watercolor painting that hadn’t quite dried.
Galvin’s chef had prepared a lobster salad—not the frozen rock lobsters either, but the big boys from Maine. It was served on a bed of lettuce and tomatoes so sweet and delicious that you couldn’t imagine they had come out of the ground. He poured me a glass of Meursault and a half glass for himself, which he barely touched. He was nicer to me now. The taunting “say something revelatory, Mr. Editor” tone was gone; I was his friend, a guest in his house. He picked at his lobster. The gleaming silver fork looked tiny in his hand. He gave me an awkward smile, not the radiant marquee of several weeks before, but something more tentative. There was an appealing vulnerability about him now, as if he felt like a visitor in his own mansion.
“I suppose I should tell you something about myself,” he said. “It was obvious, reading your profile, that you know almost nothing about me. An admirable job, given that. But still . . .”
“You wouldn’t tell me anything,” I answered. “That made it difficult. I could have made things up, but that would have bothered people. Not me particularly, but other people.”
“I didn’t trust you. In my business, people don’t like reporters. They’d rather not take the risk.”
“What is your business, may I ask? That was never clear to me.”
“I trade commodities. I buy things and then I sell them. It’s simple. That’s why you don’t understand it. And I’m lucky. That’s the other thing you have to understand about me.”
Looking at him, it was hard to doubt that last statement. “Luck, I understand,” I said, “but not commodities. So tell me. How did you get started?”
He put up his hands, like a man backed into a corner. He had no choice. He had invited me here, for whatever reason, and now he was my prisoner. He was going to have to talk. And I think he wanted to. Part of the burden of being a big man, larger than life, is that you have to carry it all on your back; you can never put anything down.
IT WAS AN UNLIKELY story, the way he told it—a series of little successes that, as they gathered momentum, took on the guise of inevitability. When he left college in 1971, Galvin had wanted to go to Vietnam—the emotional ground zero for young men his age—but as a relief worker rather than as a soldier. He applied to an outfit called the International Relief Fund. He’d heard rumors that it was a CIA front, but that was nonsense, he said. They sent him to Thailand, and he spent the next year working up country aiding refugees along the Laotian border, and back in Bangkok getting stoned with friends from the embassy. His memories of that time were of the green heat of the jungle and the empty laughter of Thai girls trying to hustle his money.
In 1972 he left the relief agency and moved to Hong Kong. He lived on Lantau Island, as poor as a Chinaman, sharing an apartment with a fellow Harvard dropout. Galvin was happy enough kicking around there, writing freelance articles for an oil industry newsletter. But his friend was getting antsy—fearing that if he didn’t get back to Harvard soon, the gravy train would leave the station without him. The friend packed up his opium pipe and went back to school, but Galvin stayed. He loved Hong Kong and had no interest in going home.
The first lucky accident came when a British friend in the commodities business suggested he join the firm. The Brit, though very stupid, was getting rich playing the futures market and Galvin thought, Why not me? He bought a new suit and pretended he knew what he was doing, and after a few weeks, he actually did. It wasn’t all that hard. The essence was to take sensible risks, and to keep your nerve. It was like poker; when you had a good hand, you bet all the chips you could find; when you didn’t, you folded. His first big score was in 1973, when he made a modest bet that oil prices would rise, only to have the Arabs impose their oil embargo a few months later. People thought he was a genius, and more money flowed his way. He soon found that he liked being rich. He bought himself a Rolls-Royce, ordered new suits from the tailor in the Mandarin Hotel, flew first class on airplanes—and the stack of money grew and grew. Over the next two decades, he built one of the biggest commodities firms in the world—with offices in Geneva and New York as well as in Hong Kong—but in the last few years, the business had begun to bore him. It was like having to play tennis all day, every day, forever. And there was the nagging fear that his luck would change.
“It’s time to cash out,” he said. “That’s why I came to Washington. I want to clean up my portfolio and start something new.”
He was beginning to come into focus, though I still didn’t understand how a twenty-three-year-old could buy a Rolls-Royce. That was a pretty big itch, to have to scratch so hard.
“Where did you grow up?” I asked. That was always a reasonable journalistic gambit. Find out where the string began, and see if you could follow it to the center of the maze. I didn’t think he would tell me much, but it was worth a try.
“Pittsburgh.” He said the word carefully, in two distinct syllables, Pitts-burgh, as if it were too big and rough for one bite.
“What did your dad do?”
For the first time, Galvin faltered. It was his house, his porch, his lobster salad, his father. There was no reason for him to say anything. But he had started now, and for reasons I didn’t understand then (and didn’t understand later either, even when I thought I did) he decided to continue.
HE HAD GROWN UP in a suburb called Mount Lebanon, across the Monongahela River from downtown Pittsburgh. It was the middle of the middle class—small lots, boxy houses, a boat parked in every driveway. Galvin had hated the place, growing up. Nearly everyone had something to do with the steel industry, whose mills and furnaces lined the banks of the river. The smart kids at his high school were all boring; their fathers were middle managers at the plants, and their idea of success was working downtown at headquarters. The bad kids were interesting, but they were on a dead-end trip to the mills, or to prison. This was an area where people’s idea of a big success was Joe Namath, who had played football a few miles down the river. Galvin played football too—he was big and tough enough to take the punishment. But he was heading to
Harvard on an academic scholarship, and that made him a freak. The yearbook said he was most likely to be elected president; his high school girlfriend knew that once he left Pittsburgh, he would never come back.
When a man tells his story and doesn’t begin with his father, you begin to suspect that he’s avoiding something. But he got around to it eventually. Galvin’s father worked at the international headquarters of the United Steelworkers of America. He was a sort of one-man research staff. When it was time to negotiate with the steel companies, Mr. Galvin would calculate what health benefits should cost, and how much to put into the pension plan. But he was a dreamer—that was his real vocation, figuring out how the world should work. He’d sit in his study and write memos about free health care, and free vacation resorts for working people, and free universities. Everything was going to be free, and when his inquisitive son asked who was going to pay for it, the old man would answer, “The bosses.” Mr. Galvin would put his memos in a cardboard box, and when he finished one box, he would take it down to the basement and start another. He was also working on a treatise he called The Encyclopedia of Labor, which each year grew more encyclopedic and less publishable. His father was a professional idealist, Galvin said. He spent his whole life being disappointed.
Galvin grew up hearing his father’s big ideas, and listening to Pete Seeger records and going to picnics with the Young People’s Socialist League. It was a working-class bohemia—the sort of world that’s pleasant to fantasize about but impossible to inhabit if you were a restless young man in 1967. When Galvin got to college that fall, he was astonished to find that the intellectual clutter of his father’s basement had become stylish. Everyone in Cambridge wanted to sing folk songs and grow up to be Woody Guthrie. For a while, Galvin tried to play along with the left-wing preppies who pretended to envy him because he was from Pittsburgh and his father was a union man. But their big ideas annoyed him. He’d heard them all before; they smelled like his father’s pipe tobacco. Making money, on the other hand, sounded interesting.
His father was mystified. He had never considered the possibility that his clever son would grow up to love business. He had named him after Carl Sandburg for a reason—his destiny was to speak for the hog butchers, toolmakers, stackers of wheat. The old man never realized that this was precisely what happened—that in the true American version of the tale, every hog butcher secretly wanted to own the packing house. But it didn’t sit right back home in Mount Lebanon. For many years, the father had remained in his modest suburban house and refused his son’s offers of financial help. But when his wife, the town librarian, slipped on the ice one winter and broke her hip, he decided that it was time to retire to Florida—even steelworkers did that—and let his wealthy son buy him a house in Sarasota.
GALVIN WANTED SOMETHING. THAT was the only explanation for this tender of self-revelation. I was curious. Part of the mystique of people like him is the sense that they don’t need anything. But I wanted something too, and it seemed important to get my request in first, before the remains of that lobster had been cleared. Otherwise, his agenda—whatever it was—would surely overwhelm mine.
“I have a business proposition for you, Mr. Galvin,” I said grandly, in the way I imagined businessmen liked to talk. He laughed, which would have discouraged a less desperate man.
“From what I hear,” I continued, “one of the leading publications in Washington may be looking for a new investor. I wanted to tell you about it first, before it was on the street. I thought perhaps I could play a . . . helpful role in introducing you to the owner.”
God! I was so bad at this. But he perked up immediately. The arsenal of charm was suddenly deployed. The thin smile; the hand on the elbow; the confidential voice. “I knew I had you pegged right,” he said.
“The publication in question, Mr. Galvin, is arguably the most important in the city. It’s experiencing some short-term cash flow problems at present, caused by an unfortunate decline in advertising. But with an infusion of capital, I believe those problems can be overcome.”
“Go on!” he said, but a hint of doubt had darkened his face. “Get to the point. What publication are you talking about?”
“Sorry, but I’ve never done anything this financial before, so you’ll have to bear with me. The publication I’m referring to is known, not without reason, as The Social Bible of Washington. It is, in fact, my own beloved but financially challenged magazine—Reveal.”
He groaned. “Shit!” he said. “Is that all?”
That was deflating, I must admit. But I pressed on.
“I know it’s not Time or Newsweek, but it’s not The New England Journal of Medicine, either. We have loyal readers, and we have advertisers—a few of them, at least. We are unfortunately going broke, and the owner—an attractive widow, bless her heart—is looking for a new investor. And I thought immediately of you. Maybe that was silly, but it seemed to me you’d make an outstanding publisher. Think about it: You could order up humiliating exposés of your enemies and flattering pieces about your friends. We could even give you a column called ‘On My Mind,’ say, in which you could share some of your thoughts about the topics of the day. Plus, you’d have me as a permanent lackey and hatchet man.”
Galvin chuckled at my patter. That stance seemed to please him—the jester who was willing to say anything that fell into his head.
“I like your enthusiasm, but I was hoping you were talking about another local publication that might need a cash transfusion. I have a strong interest in that other publication.”
“Ah! The other publication. Of course. And what might that publication be?”
“The Washington Sun and Tribune.” He said the words respectfully, the way a mountain climber might say “Everest.”
“No kidding!” I said. That wasn’t much of a retort, but it was the best I could do. The Sun, as it was known to nearly everyone, was the dominant newspaper in town. It was the first thing the president and Congress read each morning, and as a consequence, it set the city’s political and journalistic agenda. It was owned by two old Washington families, the Hazens and the Crosbys, who wanted to make enough money to pay the club dues, but not too much. The Sun was a plum. Ever since it bested the Post in a circulation war in the 1980s, the Sun had essentially been a monopoly newspaper. There was no sweeter prize in journalism, but people had always assumed it would never be for sale.
Galvin put a big forearm across the table, as hard as a crowbar. His eyes had lost the easy softness of before and had narrowed down to a sharp, insistent focus. It was clearer now what he did. He wasn’t in the business of making people happy, or at least not simply that. He bought and sold things, just as he had said.
“I’m going to tell you a business secret,” he confided. “The Sun is on the rocks. It’s barely profitable. You can’t see it on the books yet, but it’s a fact. The two families know it—they’re bickering, or so I hear—and they might consider a buy-out offer. That’s why I invited you to lunch. I wanted to see what you knew about the Sun. Or could find out.”
I sat back in my chair. A slight afternoon breeze had come up, rustling the limp leaves in the trees and blowing the bugs into hiding. Galvin was looking at me, waiting for an answer. His face was taut. You could trace a line of muscle and bone that began high on his cheek and ended in the sharp angle of his jaw. How extraordinary: He needed me.
I took off my big black glasses and rubbed my small black eyes. “What do I know about the Sun? I know that the Hazens and the Crosbys don’t like each other very much. I know that they got into a feud a few years ago when some of the younger family members got ideas about selling their shares, but supposedly that got patched up. I know that the editor, Howard Bacon, has been talking to The New York Times about editing their magazine, which he wouldn’t consider unless he was nervous about something. So come to think of it, I know quite a lot about the Sun. And I can find out more.”
“How?” That intensity was still on his face. He w
as going to climb this mountain, and he needed help.
“I know people there. I know people everywhere. That’s what I do. I’m Washington’s social chronicler.”
“Who do you know at the Sun? Be precise.”
“Well, I know Bacon a little, but not very much. I know some of the younger reporters. I know the Lifestyle editor. She’s a weasel, by the way—you should fire her as soon as you take over, and hire me. The person I know the best is the foreign editor. Her name is Candace Ridgway.”
I couldn’t tell if that name registered. He listened, but he wasn’t looking at me. He had risen and was staring out across the stone wall to the opposite bank of the river, which was as thick and green as a jungle. He turned back to me.
“I don’t want any bullshit. This is real. I need information about what’s going on over there.”
“Yes, Captain.”
“Because when that ridiculous magazine of yours goes belly up, you’re going to need a job.”
“Yes, Captain. That is most assuredly true.”
“So let’s do this right.” He put his arm on my shoulder. It felt heavy, consequential. “If we pull it off, you can come work for me. Lifestyle editor, comics editor. Whatever you like. You understand? This is the real thing.”
We took a walk. He showed me the gym he had built himself, over the garage. It was like a little health club, with Cybex machines, a StairMaster, a water cooler, towels neatly stacked—everything except girls in spandex tights. There was a new speed bag too, hanging from the ceiling. He had been an amateur boxer in college, he said. That was what he’d liked to do when he got stoned—he pounded the speed bag.
The Sun King Page 4