The next morning, she slept late, as she often did on Sunday mornings. When she opened her eyes, there was no sign of Mel. She rose, put on a loose cotton robe, and opened the sliding parchment panel that separated the bedroom from the rest of the house.
The day was bright and sunny, and an easterly wind was raising whitecaps on the sea, and there was a heavy surf. From the top deck, she surveyed the beach, bridging her left hand across her eyes to shield them from the sun. There was still no sign of Mel. He was probably off somewhere, walking Cronkite. She stepped back inside the house.
That was when she saw it. The Sam painting had been hung on the white wall. He had driven a nail into the white wall, and hung it there. For a moment she thought her heart would break.
Then she burst into tears.
20
Back in the spring and early summer of 1912, with his—and the Explorer’s—new celebrity, Ho Rothman found himself flooded with new orders for subscriptions. Newsdealers from across the Hudson, in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, now begged to stock the weekly tabloid on their stands. This put Ho in a unique position of power, and he was quick to seize it. Newspapers were sold in those days—and most are today—on a returnable basis. In other words, newsdealers were able to return any unsold stock to the publishers for credit. Ho informed the big-city dealers that, if they wished to stock his newspaper, the terms would be cash, and no returns. There was considerable grumbling over this policy, but Ho was adamant. “Supply and demand,” he said, citing one of Sadye Rothman’s capitalist precepts. “You demand, I supply. No returns.” This no-returns policy continued to apply to Rothman newspapers to this very day.
Handling this sudden spate of new business, needless to say, presented serious distribution problems for the youthful publisher, but Ho was still unwilling to take on any extra paid hands. Fortunately, his new friend Sophie Litsky and her family came to his rescue. The Explorer went to press on Thursday evenings, and was distributed Friday mornings. Early Friday morning, before school, Sophie herself took on two of Ho’s Newark routes, toting the papers up and down the streets in a child’s red express wagon. Her two-years-older brother, Morris, who had a bicycle, was able to cover a more extensive area. On Friday mornings, Mother Bella Litsky herself undid her apron and joined Ho on the ferry to Manhattan to help him make his deliveries in the city, and presently even Rabbi Litsky, caught up in the enthusiasm for the enterprise, abandoned his phylacteries and his Talmudic texts and, in his black hat and flowing side curls, joined his wife and Ho on the weekly cross-river treks to New York, where, on streetcars, the three fanned out in different directions across the metropolis and to the outer boroughs, carrying bundles of newspapers tied in twine. The rabbi’s only condition was that he be home by sundown for Shabbes.
The reasons why the entire Litsky family were so eager to assist their young friend were not entirely altruistic. Privately, Bella and her husband had noted that this ambitious, hardworking young mensch—this national hero and celebrity-of-the-moment who had not only been the first to report the worst disaster in maritime history, but who had also forewarned that it could occur—might be an excellent choice as a husband for their Sophie, when the time came. Of course Ho had no such plans. But he did not discourage the Litskys from supposing that he might.
Still, even with the Litskys’ help, Ho was getting only two or three hours’ sleep out of twenty-four. And, on the short ferry crossings, it was not uncommon to see little Ho Rothman curled on one of the vessel’s hard wicker benches, with a bale of Explorers as a pillow, sleeping until roused by the bell that announced that the ferry had entered its slip.
Ho had followed his Titanic stories with a series of profiles of some of the great men who had gone down with the liner—Benjamin Guggenheim, Isidor Straus, the traction heir Harry Elkins Widener. Some of these stories paid off in interesting ways. For example, he had headlined one “JOHN JACOB ASTOR—AMERICAN HERO!” His account of Mr. Astor’s heroism was a mixture of contemporary reports and certain fictional details that Ho invented himself. He wrote of how “Colonel” Astor assisted his pregnant wife into a lifeboat, and promised to follow her in a later boat, which was true enough. And he added that the colonel had then spent his final hours seeing to it that little children were warmly bundled up in caps, mittens, and mufflers before being lowered in boats into the icy sea, which Ho thought was a nice dramatic touch.
Not long after that story appeared, he received a letter from her private secretary saying that Colonel Astor’s widow wished to see him.
In his best suit, he presented himself at the front door of the Astor mansion at 840 Fifth Avenue, where he was greeted by a butler in a black swallowtail coat and a gold-and-white-striped vest. Ho had reached out to shake the butler’s hand, and the butler had accepted the handshake rather limply. Later, this would become one of the great stories he told around the dinner table at “Rothmere”—how he had shaken the hand of Mrs. Astor’s butler.
The butler escorted him to the Venetian drawing room, where Madeleine Astor sat in a kind of throne—a small, delicate-looking young woman with a gold throw across her lap, which was intended to conceal her pregnancy. She extended her hand, and Ho bowed formally. “I just want to thank you for what you wrote about my husband,” she said. “I always knew he was a hero, but I did not know that he spent his last hours seeing to the welfare of the little children. That was so like Jack, and I was very much moved by your account of it.” Then she handed him a check for a thousand dollars.
At the same time, capitalizing on his fame as the newspaperman who had predicted the Titanic disaster, Ho added a regular feature called “The Explorer’s Crystal Ball.” The Crystal Ball department specialized in predicting other dire occurrences, and it was soon one of the best-read features in the paper.
It didn’t matter that many of Ho’s predictions did not come true. They made titillating reading. He predicted that the sixty-story Woolworth Building that was going up in downtown Manhattan—to become the tallest inhabitable structure in the world—would blow over in the first high wind. It is still standing to this day. He predicted that the New York Giants would defeat the Boston Red Sox in the World Series, but the Red Sox won. He predicted that the Leaning Tower of Pisa would fall down in six months’ time. He predicted that President Theodore Roosevelt’s split with the Republican party to form his own “Bull Moose” party would result in an overwhelming victory for William Howard Taft, but it actually led to the victory of Woodrow Wilson. He predicted an earthquake in the heart of Paris that would topple the Eiffel Tower. On the other hand, he did predict that a massive volcano would erupt “somewhere west of the Mississippi,” and when Mount Katmai conveniently erupted in Alaska, burying Kodiak Island a hundred miles away under three feet of ashes, Ho insisted editorially that this was the volcano he had been talking about. Alaska was west of the Mississippi, wasn’t it?
As circulation climbed, so did orders for advertising pages. One of his first important new advertisers was the Newark Light & Power Company, and it struck Ho as a nice irony that the company that was still unwittingly supplying him with free electricity should also be paying him handsomely to advertise in his pages. For his advertisers, Ho began employing a system he called “discounting.” The idea was simple. The more frequently a company advertised, the deeper was the discount that the company was given. This tactic is widely used today, but Ho was the first to come up with it.
In the back of Ho’s mind was already the notion that he would expand the Explorer from a weekly to a daily operation. But, prudently, he decided to take his time. Wisely, too, he decided to hold on to his job at Bamberger’s, where, instead of being fired for running off the job that April night, he now found himself being treated as the store’s fair-haired boy. His reporting exploit, after all, had generated a great deal of free publicity for the store. Now the suddenly benevolent Mr. Gossage invited Ho Rothman to be his assistant furniture buyer, at a salary of twenty-five dollars a week, and p
resently Ho was helping Mr. Gossage prepare the same ads for spurious furniture sales that would end up appearing on the back page of Ho’s newspaper.
Though the hours involved were grueling, there were many advantages to be had from holding down two jobs. For one thing, as assistant furniture buyer, Ho now had a desk and a typewriter. At his desk at the store, Ho was able to pound out stories for his paper. If Mr. Gossage objected to this use of the store’s time, he did not say so. For another, the store offered its employees discounts on its merchandise—thirty percent off on items of personal clothing, and twenty percent off on everything else. At his newspaper, all the furniture had been confiscated and sold at auction at the time of the city’s foreclosure. Gradually, Ho was able to refurnish his office there. He was also able to make private deals with some of the store’s suppliers, and to buy, at wholesale, certain items not sold at the store—filing cabinets, for instance, to hold his paper’s growing morgue. Suppliers also gave their buyers gifts—sometimes straight cash kickbacks for their orders, and sometimes merchandise that could be put right out on the floor and sold, for cash, which the buyer could simply pocket or, if he was like the kindly Eldridge Gossage, split with his assistant. Also, Ho was able to persuade Mr. Gossage to increase his advertising budget with the Explorer. In return, Ho was careful to make repeated favorable mentions of the store in his general copy. A racehorse, for example, was “as speedy as a Bamberger’s delivery to a customer,” and a hockey player was “as solidly built as a Bamberger’s credenza.” Later, Rothman newspapers would become famous for this sort of thing. It was called giving advertisers “editorial support.”
But, most of all, Ho’s Bamberger’s experience taught Ho Rothman that there was really no difference between selling advertising space and selling furniture. It was all a question of persuading the customer that he was getting a bargain. Like Mr. Gossage, Ho offered his advertisers periodic “sales,” and “one-day-only” special prices. By the end of May 1913, Ho Rothman had $7,145.84 in the bank. He began to think of himself as a rich man. Still, though he was always careful to see to it that his shirts were clean and his shoes were polished, he did not act or live as though he were a rich man. That came later.
It was an era of superlatives, of overstatement, of extravagance, exuberance, boastfulness, and baseless optimism, as the young century moved into its teens and early twenties. Everything that appeared was not only the newest but the biggest, the best, the tallest, the most opulent. Trains ran faster then, on rails of shining silver. Airplanes flew, but never crashed. Automobiles were replacing horses because they were easier to care for, cheaper to feed. Even the weather was better then, because the air was filled with hope and promise. Songs were more tuneful. Books and plays and films were more understandable, and even crimes were more perfect. You could get away with anything. The war in Europe was far away, and of little interest to Americans, and when America finally did become involved with it, the involvement was brief—just long enough to whip up a bit of excited patriotic fervor, and bring home a hero or two. Prohibition was exciting, because now Americans drank more than ever, and even women got roaring drunk in public places.
In this heady atmosphere, Ho Rothman floruit—Latin described it best: he flowered. People began to notice that, though Ho was small in stature, he was a damned good-looking fellow. There was a sparkle in his eyes as he strode down the street between his two places of business, and young women caught his eye and blushed from impure thoughts. What flowered was his self-confidence. He ruled the world, he straddled it like a Colossus, he could do no wrong, he was invincible, and the growing balance in his bank book proved it. He was master of all he surveyed, and by November of 1919 he was worth $29,176.42.
But that was when disaster struck. He received a letter from Newark’s City Hall advising him that due to “an unfortunate clerical error,” the city had been paying the electric bills on Ho’s commercial property for the past half-dozen years. The city enclosed its bill for $14,987.60 for Ho’s electric service. If he paid this, roughly half his savings would be wiped out in a single stroke. For the first time in his life, Ho found it necessary to consult a lawyer.
His lawyer, Mr. Waxman, took the position that; since the city admitted that it had committed an error, he saw no reason why his client, “a young immigrant, unfamiliar with the intricacies of the American property transferal process,” should be penalized for the city’s recordkeeping mistakes. It had been up to the city, Mr. Waxman maintained, to transfer the Newark Light & Power Company’s account from its own name to that of Mr. H. O. Rothman. Having failed to do so, claimed Mr. Waxman, was tantamount to the city’s acceptance of responsibility for the bill. To bolster his client’s case, Mr. Waxman pointed to “the obvious good faith and esteem” in which the power company held Mr. Rothman, which it demonstrated by advertising regularly in his newspaper. The city was fortunate, Mr. Waxman added, that Mr. Rothman had graciously agreed to assume any charges for future electric service, and was willing to dismiss the possibility of legal action against the city, claiming that the city, having established this lengthy precedent, owed Mr. Rothman electrical service in perpetuum, as well as for his heirs and assigns forever, in stirpes. For good measure, Mr. Waxman threw in the assertion that, since the statute of limitations had long passed, “no civil tort, in fact, exists.”
Back and forth the letters went between Mr. R. Jerome Waxman and Newark’s City Hall. Particularly embarrassing to the city’s case was the fact that it could not seem to pinpoint the identity of the clerk in its Records Office, one J. D. Sasser, who had initially issued the directive to the power company. Mr. Waxman responded that he hoped the laxness of the city’s record-keeping would not be published in the press, in particular in his client’s popular newspaper. “What would the taxpayers of Newark say if they learned that the elected officials of their City Government keep such shoddy records, and that the Government does not even know who its employees are?” asked Mr. Waxman, adding, “I can foresee a major scandal over this, with serious repercussions at the polls.”
And so, finally, begrudgingly, the city relented, though it continued its search through personnel records for the elusive J. D. Sasser. It finally settled on a certain H. E. Sisson who, though he denied any knowledge of the matter, was reprimanded and transferred to the Sanitation Department, with a dock in pay.
Mr. R. Jerome Waxman sent Ho Rothman a small bill. He was more than happy to be compensated with a front-page story in the Explorer, headlined:
WILL BRILLIANT NEWARK LAWYER
R. JEROME WAXMAN BE
PRESIDENT WILSON’S NOMINEE
FOR THE U.S. SUPREME COURT?
Ho Rothman often wondered what President Wilson must have thought if he had seen this story.
Buried in the back of the same issue was a small story with the headline:
J. D. SASSER,
RETIRED CITY AIDE,
DIES
That tied up, Mr. Waxman explained, the only loose end, and ever since that episode Ho Rothman had found it wise to employ the services of good lawyers.
He had also been impressed by the phrase “heirs and assigns forever, in stirpes.” He decided that it was high time that he began thinking about creating some heirs and assigns for his growing business. Sophie Litsky, sweet and hardworking though she was, did not appeal to him as the instrument through which to accomplish this mission. But someone would be found, and Ho began seriously looking around.
From Joel Rothman’s journal:
Sunday 6/24/90
3:00 P.M.
I knew there had to be an explanation for why Fiona broke our dinner date Friday night, and she has just telephoned me, very apologetic, to tell me what happened. It seems her sister Brenda, who lives in Connecticut, was rushed to the hospital on Friday afternoon with a kidney stone, and Fiona had to rush up to Greenwich to sit with Brenda’s kids. Of course she tried to call me, but I was out all afternoon doing dumb shopping errands! Anyway, her sister’s k
idney stone “passed,” and Fiona’s back in town, and she wants to see me tonight! Her place at 7:00 P.M., so I’ve made another reservation at Le Cirque for 9:30—same schedule I planned for Friday!… Meaningless phrases picked up from this A.M.’s Times, mostly in ads in the Real Estate section. Keep coming across the phrase “world class.” What does that mean? One apartment house has a “world class health club.” Another has a dining room that serves “world class cuisine.” Still another offers “round-the-clock world class doorman and concierge service.” How about a world class parking lot? “World class” seems to be replacing “state-of-the-art,” and means even less. Well, I’m getting a world class, state-of-the-art hard-on thinking about what Fiona and I will be doing about four hours from now!
Now they were both lying naked on her pale blue satin sheets where they had just made love, and her telephone was ringing. “I’d best get that,” she said, reaching one pale arm for the receiver. “It’ll likely be my sister. Hullo?” she said. “Oh, hullo, darling.… You’re back from San Francisco? But I didn’t expect you back until Tuesday.… It went well?… You’re downstairs? No, you can’t possibly come up now—I wish you’d rung me first, darling, to tell me you’d be getting back two days early.… No, I simply can’t. I’ve got the most bloody awful headache, and I’m running a fever. I do hope it’s not the flu.… No, I didn’t go to the Hamptons after all … my sister in Connecticut.… No, I’m most frightfully sorry, darling, not tonight … I’m feeling really so bloody punk, and I look a fright. In fact, the doctor’s with me now.” She winked at Joel. “He’s just given me a great big injection.” She winked at him again. “And in a most indelicate place.” Another wink. “Call me tomorrow, darling, and if I’m feeling a bit more fit we’ll get together. Kiss, kiss.… Bye-eeeee.” She replaced the phone. “My friend Georgina from London,” she said. “Most inconsiderate girl. Never calls in advance. Just appears, and expects you to drop everything.”
The Rothman Scandal Page 31