The Rothman Scandal

by Stephen Birmingham

  Then, one afternoon in the early spring of 1910, Rachel greeted him with a smug and knowing expression on her face. “Guess what? I’m pregnant,” she informed him. “What does that mean?” her bewildered lover, who still somewhat vaguely believed that babies were fetched out of a river, wanted to know. “It means there’s gonna be a Blessed Event,” she told him saucily, “and that you’re the father of it. It means you’re gonna have to marry me.” “But I can’t,” he protested. “I’ve got to finish school.” “You got to,” she said. “There’s no two ways. You gimme this Tiffany diamond ring, din’tcha? That means we’re engaged, in case you didn’t know it, greenhorn. If you don’t marry me, then I’ll tell your folks you got me in a family way,” she said with a toss of her red hair. “Then they’ll make you marry me ’cause I got the proof, and I know your folks are rich.”

  It was the young man’s first lesson in the cold connivingness and duplicity of women, and one he never forgot. It never occurred to Ho Rothman that the scheming girl routinely offered her favors, and the convenience of her secret mattress, to dozens of other partners, and usually in return for more than purloined candy bars or zircon rings, or that she had chosen him to be her victim simply because of the supposedly elevated financial status of his foster parents. Thoroughly frightened, he promised to meet her at the usual place the following afternoon, to take her to City Hall, where she told him they would find a justice of the peace to marry them.

  That very night, Sadye Rothman had decided to confront the boy about the missing ring. But she never got the chance. That night, after waiting until Sadye had closed her store so he could empty her cash box, he ran away from home.

  He never saw Sam and Sadye Rothman again, nor did he know what became of them. Nor did he know what became of the calculating girl called Rachel, or of his child by her—if indeed it was his child, or whether there was actually to be any child at all. Needless to say, the Rachel episode was not a part of Ho Rothman’s usual repertoire of tales of his early days in New York, nor was how pivotal this episode would become included in the story of how he founded Rothman Communications, Inc.—the stories he liked to tell around the family dinner table while August, the butler, in white gloves, poured the claret into Cristofle goblets. But at times, after long evenings of gin rummy with his male cronies—Jake Auerbach, Adolph Meyerson, and the rest—he told the tale, omitting the cash box part, and it always produced roars of raucous laughter. “If wasn’t for that trayfeneh, I not be here today!” he would shout, pounding on the card table with his fist, shuddering the brandy snifters. “If wasn’t for that little piece of dreck, I never get to Newark!”

  Oh, Rachel, Rachel, wherever you may be in one of life’s dark alleyways of perfidy, if you read of yourself here, think how different it might have been for you if you had been able to play your hand just a bit more cleverly.

  11

  Go West, young man! Of course those weren’t Horace Greeley’s exact words. What he actually said to Aspiring Young Men was, “Turn your face to the great west, and there build up a home and fortune.” But young Ho Rothman had heard of Greeley’s advice, and it was westward that he headed that night—west across the Hudson on the ferry to Newark, figuring, sensibly enough, that crossing a state line would place him handily out of Rachel’s reach. He spent that first night on a bench in the ferry terminal, as what a later generation would call a homeless person, alternately sleeping and trying to figure out what to do next. His only experience, he decided, was in the jewelry business, and he guessed he might be able to pass himself off as having been previously employed by the Sadye Rothman Jewelry Store in Manhattan. In the morning he bought a newspaper, and studied the Help Wanted ads. He was in luck! A jewelry store on Passaic Avenue was advertising for a delivery boy.

  He set off on foot through the unfamiliar city looking for the address. He never found it. Instead, he found himself turning a corner and facing a line of rough and angry-looking men carrying placards on long sticks that announced “TIMES-UNION UNFAIR TO LABOR!” The men eyed him menacingly, and as he tried to dart through their line they began swinging at him with their placards, and shouting, “Scab! Scab! Scab!” To escape them, Ho pushed himself through a swinging door, where an older man immediately seized him by the collar and said, “Get in here! Those guys could kill you for crossing their line! What can you do? Can you set type trays?”

  “Delivery—” Ho began. “Jewelry. Sadye Rothman—”

  “Okay, we can use you in the mail room,” the man said. “But remember, you’ll have to sleep here at the plant till those guys either give up and go home, or decide to come back to work. Five bucks a week.”

  And so that was how H. O. Rothman got his start in the newspaper business, as a strikebreaker for the old Newark Times-Union.

  The mail room! It was absolutely the most auspicious place for a bright young man to start in any business. Where else but in the mail room did such famous hosts and bon vivants as Lenny Liebling, the frequent dinner guest of U.S. presidents, get their start? And what better time to get started than during a strike, when the typesetters’ union had walked out, and management was pitching in to keep the paper running? In no time at all, Ho learned who all the important people in the organization were, what each one did, who counted for more and who counted for less, and who told whom what to do. As a strikebreaker, he was working shoulder to shoulder with executives and editors and reporters whom, under ordinary circumstances, it would have taken him months to meet. He had also found himself a place to sleep, even though it was across bales of newsprint on the mail-room floor.

  The work was hard, and the hours were long, but within two weeks’ time—which was how long the strike lasted, before the typesetters grumblingly returned to work, with none of their demands met—young Ho Rothman knew, or thought he knew, all there was to know about the Times-Union’s operations. After all, the smart mail-room messenger also got to read all the mail, all the interoffice memos and even the letters marked “CONFIDENTIAL.” The confidential correspondence made particularly interesting reading, and Ho had not been at the paper for more than six months before he felt he had a clear grasp of the publication’s considerable strengths, and its even more considerable weaknesses.

  It was at the Times-Union, too, that he first acquired the nickname “Ho” that was to stick with him for a lifetime. He had been given a name badge with “H. O. Rothman” printed on it, and, as he scurried about the newspaper offices on his daily rounds, he found himself being greeted with calls of “Ho, ho, ho—here comes Ho!” He took this teasing in good spirit because he knew he was an excellent messenger. At the same time, he had assumed for himself certain perquisites. During the strike, when they had all been pulling together in the face of the union’s demands, and when all the nonstriking employees had been pitching in to do whatever they could to get the paper off the presses every day, there was a spirit of relaxed camaraderie, and everyone got to know everybody else on a first-name basis. Even the newspaper’s owner and publisher, James Meister III, who had always been “Mr. Meister” or “J.M.” to his staff, became, for the duration of the strike, “Jim.” Once the strike was over, most employees resumed the more formal style of address for the scion of one of Newark’s oldest and wealthiest families. But to Ho this seemed both awkward and unnecessary. And so now, when the mighty James Meister III encountered Ho Rothman in a corridor, and greeted him with a cheerful “Hi-ho, Ho!,” Ho Rothman returned the greeting with an equally jaunty “Hi-ho, Jim!”

  Of course some of the senior employees were somewhat taken aback by such temerity on the part of the company’s most junior employee. But there was nothing they could do about it, and James Meister III didn’t seem to mind, and even seemed mildly amused by such forwardness. Besides, Ho Rothman was known as the spunky lad who had dared to cross the picket line.

  The Times-Union’s greatest strength, Ho had decided, was its gleaming new physical plant, where all the most modern—for those times—linotyp
e and printing equipment had been installed. James Meister III had modeled his printing plant on Mr. Henry Ford’s assembly-line innovations in Detroit, and the Times-Union was able to turn out newspapers, from final-edited copy to newsprint, faster than any paper in the East. But this great strength had caused, ironically, the paper’s greatest weakness. To finance all these improvements in the printing process, Mr. Meister seemed to have seriously overextended himself. Remember that 1910 was a year of severe economic recession. Wall Street had suffered one of its periodic “Panics,” and advertisers had cut back their schedules. At the Times-Union, the costly strike had not helped matters at all. A number of bankers, young Ho learned from some of the confidential letters and memos, were already beginning to call in, or demand more collateral for, funds that had been borrowed by Mr. Meister.

  As his months of employment wore on, Ho realized that the Newark Times-Union was sinking into deeper and deeper financial trouble. The bankers, and their law firms, were writing increasingly sternly worded letters. What, they demanded to know, did Mr. Meister intend to do about his continued indebtedness? When might the bank expect an interest payment on notes he had signed? Mr. Meister, who was now spending more and more time on mysterious missions outside the office, seemed to have no ready answer. The messenger boy could not help but notice the stack of unanswered telephone messages that was mounting on the publisher’s desk. When he encountered his boss in the corridors now, the expression on Jim Meister’s handsome face was grim and preoccupied.

  Ho Rothman felt sorry for his friend and his predicament. And, Ho happened to know, Meister’s state of mind was not being improved by the state of his romantic life, which appeared to be in some real disarray. A woman named Eloise had been writing him angry and importunate letters. Ho knew that this Eloise should not be writing to him at his office, and he also knew from hard-earned experience the amount of trouble that a woman was capable of causing. “I know you’ve been seeing that blonde floozy again,” Eloise had written, “and I know that she’s nothing but a chorine from Mr. Ziegfeld’s Follies. Really, Jimmy, I thought you had better taste! How would you like it if I slapped a breach of promise suit on you? Daddy says I could, and Daddy says if I don’t he will! And if you continue to refuse to answer my letters, and don’t return my telephone calls, I’m going to march right down to that office of yours and make a scene the likes of which you won’t soon forget! Daddy says …”

  Ho Rothman had developed an intense disliking of this Eloise, and her daddy.

  The other great weakness of the newspaper, in Ho’s opinion, had to do with its content. Out of budgetary considerations, no doubt, the paper had made it a policy to report primarily local news and, in those days, Newark was far from the exciting, vibrant city that it is today. Today, Newark boasts one of the highest crime rates of any city in the world, and scarcely a day goes by without a murder, or a drug bust, or a prostitution ring exposed that will make for an attention-grabbing headline. But in 1910 and 1911, Newark was a sleepy little place where very little of interest happened. The news of Newark, as reported by the Times-Union, reflected the town’s uncompromising dullness. A shoplifter apprehended at the lingerie counter at Bamberger’s might make a feature story. The fire department called in to rescue a cat out of a tree could easily make the front page. Church potluck suppers filled the society pages. A photograph of the mayor of Newark, headed “Ouch! That hurts!” might reveal in the accompanying story that the mayor had recently visited his dentist.

  News of the big city across the Hudson was left to the Manhattan dailies to report. The Times-Union had no foreign bureaus, and any news of international import was lifted from other newspapers and reported in the Times-Union a day later. Subscriptions to the various wire services had been dropped, and even the syndicated comic strips had been abandoned, and a single strip called “Beanie,” drawn by a local artist, had been substituted for the funnies page. (The local artist turned out to be an eighteen-year-old nephew of James Meister III.) The astrology column was written—which was to say made up—by James Meister’s secretary. Roughly once a month, a Times-Union reporter took the train down to Trenton, to see what the state legislature might be up to, but nothing much of interest seemed to happen in the capital, either. Probably the best-read feature was the advice-to-the-lovelorn column. Readership of the paper had been declining for several years before Ho joined the staff, and as readership declined so did advertising revenues. In fact, the entire enterprise seemed to be in an inexorable spiral of decline.

  At night, in the tiny boardinghouse cell that Ho had been able to rent for a dollar a week, with kitchen privileges, the young messenger boy used to compose imaginary banner headlines describing fictitious events—schoolchildren disemboweled by rabid dogs, headless torsos fished out of the Passaic River, earthquakes, tidal waves, shipwrecks off Sandy Hook—that might make the readers of the Times-Union sit up and take notice, that might lift Newarkers out of their increasing torpor, that might make them snatch papers from the newsstands.

  The first really disturbing news to reach the paper’s staff appeared in a general memorandum in early June of 1911—a memorandum which, of course, Ho Rothman was among the very first to read. It was going to be necessary, the publisher announced, to “trim” the staff somewhat. Ho read this with a sinking feeling because, as one of the paper’s newest employees, he was certain that he would be among the very first to be let go. But when the actual trimmings were made official, and the names of those dismissed were posted on the bulletin board, his name was not among them. The trimming, in fact, seemed to be from the top, with the senior, best-seasoned, and highest-paid staff members being the first to go. From now on, this bulletin explained, certain duties at the paper would be “telescoped.” The woman who wrote the popular advice-to-the-lovelorn column would also cover society news, write the pet-health column, and cover the daily police blotter. The sports editor would additionally cover cultural events, edit the business page, handle obituaries, and prepare the church calendar. James Meister’s secretary would write the “You and Your Doctor” column in addition to the horoscopes. And so on. But a messenger, it seemed, would always be a messenger.

  The next blow fell nearly six months later, in December. In another memorandum, the publisher announced that “due to certain bookkeeping problems,” employees’ paychecks would be delayed “for a few days.” One can well imagine how an already demoralized staff reacted to the news that, within weeks of Christmas, their salaries had been placed in a state of suspension. The editorial caliber of the newspaper grew palpably more flaccid and careless during the anxious days that followed. The “few days” turned into two weeks, but then, to everyone’s profound relief, the payroll was somehow met. A line formed at the bank as Times-Union employees rushed out to turn their paychecks into hard cash.

  But the worst news of all came a month later, on January 23, 1912. Ho would always remember that date, and he would always remember his horoscope in that morning’s paper, not that he took much stock in such things: “Opportunity knocks for you today. Tell others what you think, and you will be rewarded.” That morning, a heavy brown manila envelope was hand-delivered to the mail room by a messenger from City Hall. Naturally, the mail-room boy was the first to learn its contents. The envelope was sealed, but as Ho entered the publisher’s empty office—his office was nearly always empty now—the brown envelope itself looked so official and forbidding that Ho decided to moisten its flap and open it.

  Inside was a notification from the City of Newark’s Department of Taxation and Finance. Though the document was filled with elaborate “whereases” and “henceforwards” and “heretofores,” its message was clear. Unless grievously delinquent property taxes, owed to the City of Newark by the Times-Union Company, were paid within ten business days, the Times-Union’s properties would be put up for sale at a public sealed-bid auction “to satisfy the city.”

  That afternoon, Ho Rothman had a telephone call from James Meister’s
secretary. “J.M. would like two black coffees and one regular coffee, and three sweet rolls for a meeting in his office,” she said.

  Ho scurried out, without even putting on his coat against the icy winter weather, to the delicatessen around the corner, sensing that a real crisis was at hand. He placed the order, and then, on an impulse, decided to buy something extra for his friend, which he paid for with his own money.

  When he returned to the publisher’s office, he found James Meister seated behind his desk facing two other stern-looking men in business suits who were seated opposite him. Ho immediately noticed how tired and drawn Jim Meister looked—his eyes bloodshot, his jaw slack—and Ho wondered briefly whether Jim had been drinking. He distributed the coffee and sweet rolls to the three men. Then he said, “I brought something special for you, Jim.”

  “Oh? What is it?”

  He handed the paper container to his boss. “It’s an egg cream,” he said.

  Jim Meister lifted the lid of the container, and sniffed. “Hmm. An egg cream,” he said. “What’s in it? Eggs and cream, I suppose.”

  “No eggs, and no cream. But an egg cream is what it’s called.”

  “What’s it taste like?” He took a sip. “Hmm. It tastes like—well, it doesn’t taste like much of anything, does it. Kind of fizzy.”

  “We Jews say that egg creams are good for the soul.”

  He smiled a thin smile. “Good for the soul,” he repeated. “Well, in a way that’s rather appropriate, considering the business at hand. Ho, these gentlemen are my attorneys, and we are in the cheery process of preparing my last will and testament.”

  The two men rose a little stiffly and uncomfortably, and shook Ho’s hand.

  “Ho,” Jim Meister said, “to whom would you bequeath an estate that is totally bankrupt? To whom would you leave an estate that is way over the Plimsoll line with debt? Not to your worst enemy, I suppose. And yet, if I am going to declare bankruptcy, it is apparently advisable that I prepare a last will and testament and leave all my bad debts to somebody, or so these boys tell me. Whom would you leave it all to, Ho?”