The Rothman Scandal

by Stephen Birmingham

  Joel started to say that it had sounded like a man’s voice, and as though she had read his thoughts, she said, “Georgina has this big, deep voice. Like this.” She imitated it, and then giggled. “Sometimes I wonder if Georgina is a Lesbian.” She was stroking his penis. “Oooh, look at Pinocchio!” she said. “He must have told another lie. His nose is getting bigger again.” Then she said, “I think we’re ready to try something a little different tonight.…”

  21

  “Buy ’em sick, make ’em healthy—and if they don’t get healthy quick enough, sell ’em!” That was the way Ho Rothman once described, to a journalist, how he had succeeded in amassing his communications empire, which, at the time, consisted of more than a hundred newspaper and magazine titles, along with radio and television stations, and was the third-largest in the nation. “And pipple don’t have to be there to run a newspaper,” he added, explaining how he acquired his reputation as “the absentee press lord.” “You get other pipple to do that.”

  A publication’s balance sheet told him all he needed to know, and otherwise his editors were permitted to print and publish pretty much whatever they chose. His was the Eldridge J. Gossage approach to journalism—if a story would sell papers, print it; if it wouldn’t, don’t. By then—this was the early 1970s—it was a well-known fact that Ho Rothman owned publications in cities where he never set foot, and ran everything from his huge thirtieth-floor office with its map of the United States covering one wall. By then, it mattered little to Ho whether his editors’ opinions and philosophies coincided with his own. The name of H. O. Rothman might decorate the boardroom of B’nai B’rith, of the United Jewish Appeal, but he voiced no objections when the editor of his Tampa Sentinel published a series of thinly veiled anti-Semitic articles on “the invasion of Mediterranean-looking Miami Beach types and rag-trade tycoons” coming to Florida’s “traditionally more selective West Coast.” A little anti-Semitism, it seemed, sold newspapers in Tampa.

  But it was all quite different, back in 1921, when Ho was still the one-man proprietor of the weekly Newark Explorer. He was now twenty-four years old, and had run the paper for nine years. He had quit his job at Bamberger’s two years earlier—retaining, naturally, Mr. Gossage’s advertising account—but he still resisted the notion of taking on any employees. His paid circulation was now about fifteen thousand, which seemed to him spectacular, and he saw no reason to tamper with what was turning out to be a very good thing. He was also resisting the increasingly pointed suggestions from Sophie Litsky’s father, the rabbi, that Ho could do worse things than taking young Sophie as his bride. In fact, Rabbi Litsky had lately been almost threatening, hinting that he, his wife, and his children could not be counted upon to toil for Ho’s newspaper without wages indefinitely, unless matrimony lay somewhere down the road. Ho was able to hold the Litskys off by offering the family a small “profit share” from each week’s receipts. But these pressures made Ho nervous. He had almost been forced into marriage once before, and he was handling his relationship with Sophie with extreme discretion, taking no chances and making no promises.

  Then, out of the blue, a savior appeared on Ho’s horizon who would remove him forever from the mounting pressures from the Litsky family.

  The savior’s name was Moe Markarian. Everyone knew who Moe Markarian was. Moe Markarian, they said, had made his entire fortune in fifteen minutes. That was the time it had taken him to recite his marriage vows to Mrs. Markarian. Mrs. Markarian was the daughter of wealthy Hymie Weiss, whose real name was Earl Wajchiechowski, who had gone out to Chicago a few years earlier and made his name, and millions, in the new and lucrative profession known as bootlegging. In fact, Midwest bootlegging was now controlled by four men—Hymie Weiss, Dion O’Banion, Johnny Torio, and another youthful Italian-American named Alphonse Capone. In time, of course, competition in the illegal liquor trade would eliminate all but one of the Four Horsemen, as they were called, but in 1921 the daughter of Hymie Weiss was considered quite a catch for Moe Markarian.

  Using his wife’s money, Moe Markarian had bought up several newspapers in Pennsylvania—in Wilkes-Barre, Pittsburgh, Lancaster, and Harrisburg, and a newspaper on Staten Island called the Advocate. The Advocate had become Markarian’s only loser. In those days, Staten Island was a remote and sleepy place, consisting mostly of small farms. It had become a favored retirement place for minor New York bureaucrats, retired firemen, policemen, and other civil servants. In 1921, the population of Staten Island appeared to be shrinking, as the retired bureaucrats died off, and their sons and grandsons departed for more promising boroughs of the city. Rumor had it that Moe Markarian might be putting the Advocate up for sale. Meanwhile, the Markarians had built themselves two opulent residences—in Southampton and in Palm Beach—and were putting the finishing touches on a third in Westchester County. Markarian had also been watching with interest what Ho Rothman was doing with the Explorer in Newark. Moe Markarian wrote to Ho Rothman, suggesting that they meet.

  Moe Markarian turned out to be a mountain of a man, built somewhat along the lines of President William Howard Taft, though where Taft sported handlebar mustaches, Mr. Markarian displayed luxuriant tufts of black hair in his nostrils. As he talked, he rolled an unlighted cigar between his massive fingers. He had brought his wife with him, and she, by contrast, was very skinny, with copper-colored hair, and was wearing many diamonds. Diamonds blazed icily from her throat, fingers, wrists, and ear lobes, and even, Ho noticed, from an ankle bracelet as she crossed her thin legs. Mrs. Markarian was the second rich woman Ho had met, the first being Mrs. Astor, and Ho was struck by the difference between them. Mrs. Astor had been pale and soft and almost childlike. Mrs. Markarian was all hard edges, and there was something about her that unsettled him.

  “To me, your face is familiar, Mrs. Markarian,” Ho said. “Is it possible we have mebbe met before?”

  “I very highly doubt it,” Mrs. Markarian said in her snooty, rich-person’s voice. “I very highly doubt I know anyone in Jersey.”

  Mr. Markarian got right down to business. He was interested, he said, in adding the Explorer to his “chain.”

  “How much you offer me?” Ho asked.

  Mr. Markarian glanced at his wife. “Fifty thousand,” she snapped.

  Both the Markarians must have noticed the gleam in Ho’s eyes when she mentioned this figure. It was more money than he had ever had, at any one time, in his entire life. But Ho knew enough about the ways of American business to understand that a man’s first offer was not necessarily his best. “I think about it,” he said. “I let you know.”

  A week later, he telephoned Moe Markarian. “My price—one hundred thousand,” he said.

  “I’ll have to consult certain business associates,” said Markarian, meaning his wife. A little later, he called back to say, “Ho Rothman, we have a deal.”

  But when Moe Markarian arrived at Ho Rothman’s office the next day and pushed a check across the top of Ho’s desk with his large hand, Ho saw that the check was only for $75,000. “That’s it,” Markarian said. “My final offer. Cash on the barrelhead. Take it or leave it.”

  Ho relit his cigar, studying the check that lay on his desk. Then he lifted the check by one corner, and touched his lighted match to another. The check blazed up, and when the flames neared his fingertips, he dropped the ashes into his spittoon.

  Moe Markarian pulled his huge frame out of the chair and marched angrily out of the room.

  “Some pipple have a lot of brains. Some pipple have a lot of luck. I have both,” Ho Rothman liked to say, years later, when he told of what happened next.

  What happened next was this:

  In Chicago, not many weeks later, Dion O’Banion—one of the Four Horsemen who controlled the Midwest bootleg trade, and who also ran a flower shop as a legitimate business—was working on a flower arrangement when two men walked into his shop. One shook O’Banion’s hand, and the other gunned him down.

  Now there were only th
ree horsemen in charge of Chicago’s liquor traffic, and none other than Hymie Weiss took over O’Banion’s mob to challenge Johnny Torio and Al Capone for control of the Chicago market. Eventually, of course, both Weiss and Torio would suffer fates like Dion O’Banion’s, and twenty-six-year-old Al Capone would rule supreme, adding gambling, prostitution, and the Chicago dance hall business to his list of profitable enterprises.

  Meanwhile, Dion O’Banion’s funeral was the talk of Chicago, and set new records for gaudy display. Ten thousand cymbidium orchids blanketed O’Banion’s coffin, and in his eulogy the archbishop wept openly for the loss of this fine young Irishman. Outside the cathedral, an estimated one hundred thousand of the curious thronged, straining to catch glimpses of the celebrities as they made their way up the steps to attend the by-ticket-only High Requiem Mass. Police barricades had to be thrown up to hold back the surging crowd. Hymie Weiss was spotted among the famous mourners, but his arch-rivals, Torio and Capone, were conspicuously absent, and their whereabouts were the subject of much speculation.

  An enterprising young reporter from the Tribune, however, had been able to track down Al Capone to a suite at the Palmer House. For five days, the reporter staked out the door to Capone’s hotel suite. For these five days, nothing much seemed to happen at the Capone suite, other than the arrival and departure of room service trays, which were accepted and returned by one or another of Capone’s henchmen through the partway opened door. Then, on the sixth day, Capone emerged with a young woman on his arm. The reporter snapped their picture.

  Now, for all this young reporter’s enterprise, a photograph of the babyfaced Al Capone, who looked nothing at all like anyone’s idea of a gangster, emerging from a doorway with an unidentified young woman did not represent great newsgathering, and the Tribune’s editor rejected it. So did other editors, when the reporter tried to peddle it elsewhere. “Who’s the broad? Where’s the story? Sorry,” they all said.

  But when the photograph reached Ho Rothman’s desk, he immediately saw a story. He quickly picked up the telephone and called Moe Markarian. “I am ready to make a deal,” he said.

  When Markarian arrived at Ho’s office, Ho slid the photograph across his desktop to him. Markarian looked at it, gasped, turned pale, and sat down hard in his chair. Then he grabbed the photograph as though to tear it up.

  “Keep it,” Ho said easily. “I have other copy.”

  “Would you publish this?”

  “Might have to,” Ho said.

  “What would you say about it?”

  “Say? Say that it seems very funny that, for Dion O’Banion’s funeral, and for five days after that, Hymie Weiss’s daughter, Mrs. Moe Markarian, spends living in hotel room with Hymie Weiss’s enemy, Al Capone.”

  “You wouldn’t dare!”

  “Yes I would.”

  “I’d do anything to save my Rachel’s honor!”

  “I thought so,” Ho said. And now of course he knew why Mrs. Markarian looked familiar. He did not say that he could also write that Mrs. Moe Markarian had once been a two-bit whore who had entertained her clients on a discarded mattress in a blind alley off Rivington Street, and that for some clients she had not even charged two bits. For him, she had done it for candy bars. He did not say any of this because, after all, Mrs. Markarian now had powerful friends and relatives, and Ho did not wish to push his luck too far.

  Ho then outlined his terms. For $100,000, he would sell Mr. Markarian a forty-nine percent interest in the Explorer. Ho himself would retain fifty-one percent. In addition, he would also accept Mr. Markarian’s Staten Island Advocate—a loser Markarian wouldn’t mind parting with, anyway.

  “And one more thing,” Ho said.

  “What’s that?” Moe Markarian said, looking ill.

  “You building house in Westchester.”

  “Yes …”

  “I take that too.”

  And that was how Moe Markarian’s spectacular house in Tarrytown became “Rothmere.” The huge double M’s that were emblazoned on the wrought-iron entrance gate were blow-torched off, and were replaced with graceful double R’s, reversed, as:

  From the New York Times of October 10, 1921:

  SOMNOLENT S.I. DAILY GETS

  ROTHMAN TREATMENT

  When sleepy residents of Staten Island collected their morning papers from their stoops today, they discovered that the newspaper not only had a new name, but also a new look and a new editorial slant.

  Under the stewardship of publisher H. O. Rothman of the Newark Explorer, the daily Staten Island Advocate today became officially the Staten Island Adventurer. And, in Mr. Rothman’s now-familiar flamboyant muckraking style, the redesigned daily features “screamer” headlines reporting lurid events from all over the world—an editorial approach that did much to increase circulation and advertising revenue for Rothman’s Explorer. The headline in today’s edition in the Adventurer, for instance, announced: “MOTHER GIVES BIRTH TO THREE-HEADED BABY, Then Sells It to Circus for $1!” Buried deep within the story is the fact that the bizarre event did not, in fact, occur on Staten Island, nor even in recent history, but that something of the sort may have happened in Rumania in the early 19th century. Readers’ reactions to the new format were mixed, ranging from “too ghoulish” to “makes for lively reading” and “Makes us Staten Islanders feel like we’re part of the big, outside world.”

  Mr. Rothman, it may be remembered, early in 1912 forewarned his Newark readers that the S.S. Titanic might not be as “unsinkable” as her builders claimed, and was the first journalist to report the maritime disaster.…

  After moving to Staten Island, Ho Rothman never saw the long-suffering Litsky family again. But, to his credit, when Sophie Litsky’s marriage was announced two years later, he sent her a $59.95 Queen Anne–type chest-on-chest from Bamberger’s as a wedding present. Even though Ho no longer worked for the store, Mr. Eldridge J. Gossage graciously gave him his employee’s twenty percent discount on the piece. It stood proudly in Sophie’s front hallway for many years, and her friends found it hard to believe her boast that it had been given to her by the great H. O. Rothman.

  With his new acquisition came a full-time staff of six people—an editor, two reporters, a production manager, an advertising director, and a tiny, pretty sixteen-year-old bookkeeper named Anna Lily Wise. Five years later, a staff of forty-seven would be required to put out the Staten Island Adventurer. By then, of course, Ho had acquired newspapers in Altoona, Bridgeport, Winston-Salem, Fort Wayne, Akron, and Chattanooga. By then, too, Anna Lily Wise had become Mrs. H. O. Rothman, and their son, Herbert Joseph Rothman, had been born. And the phrase “the Rothman Treatment” had entered the language of American publishing.

  From Joel Rothman’s journal:

  Sunday, 6/24/90

  10:00 P.M.

  (2nd entry today)

  “I think we’re ready to try something a little different tonight,” Fiona said and, Christ, I really blew it! Literally. We’d had a really great first f---, and were just warming up for another go-around, and she gave me something to sniff in an inhaler. I’ve heard and read a lot about “poppers,” of course, but I’ve never really tried one. Well, I guess I took too big a sniff, because I really blacked out—completely! And when I came to, I was suddenly really sick, couldn’t control myself, and puked all over her bed! Christ! She was furious. Her beautiful blue satin sheets and everything. They have to be specially cleaned and everything. I tried to tell her how sorry I was. I told her I’d pay to have the sheets cleaned and everything, and that even made her madder. She said something like, “Just like you Yanks—think you can fix everything with money!” Then she told me to get out, she never wanted to see me again. Christ! So I got dressed, and I kept telling her how sorry I was, and I just begged her to give me one more chance. And, just as I was leaving, she said, “Well, perhaps.” So maybe I’ll have one more chance. Keeee-rist, I really feel awful tonight! I love her so, I really do! Why did I have to do something stupid lik
e this? What’s the matter with me? This is really the low point of my life. So ashamed. Blowing the whole evening by puking all over her bed! She said—and this is really the hardest part to put down—she said, “I knew I shouldn’t have been fooling around with children.”

  I really feel like killing myself tonight.

  She found him in the kitchen early Monday morning, listlessly spooning cornflakes from a bowl.

  “Well, how was your weekend, darling?” she asked him. “Was it nice not having Otto around?”

  “It was okay.”

  She sat opposite him on a kitchen stool. “Care to tell me about it?”

  “Sure.”

  There was a silence. Then she said, “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “You said you were going to tell me about your weekend, Joel.”

  “What’s there to tell?”

  “I guess you’re not in the mood for talking,” she said.

  “Sure,” he said, taking another spoonful of cornflakes.

  “Well, I’m here, talking, and all I’m getting is monosyllables.”

  “I’m talking,” he said. “There. I just said three syllables.” His look was dark.

  “Do you feel all right, Joel? You look a little pale. Do you think you could be running a fever?” She reached out and covered his forehead with her palm.

  He threw down his spoon. “For Chrissakes, Mom, will you leave me alone?” he said. “Will you give me a little air, for Chrissakes? Will you give me a little space? First it was effing Otto, and now it’s effing you. I feel like I’m suffocating here. I feel like I’m being effing smothered. I feel like everybody’s trying to smother me, for Chrissakes, and if it’s not one damn person it’s another. And here’s another thing. When I get to Harvard, will you please not effing call me on the phone every effing day, the way you’ve been doing for the last four years? Do you know the way the guys in the dorm used to kid me about that?” He did a mincing imitation. “‘Buster—it’s Mommie calling!’ Because if you do that sort of thing to me at college, Mom, I swear to God I’ll kill myself. I swear to God I will!” He jumped out of his chair and strode out of the room.