Empire: A Novel Read online

  There was a mild stir in the bar as the former Democratic president Grover Cleveland, a near-perfect cube of flesh, as broad as he was tall, made a stately entrance, shook a number of hands absently, and then took the arm of the smooth Republican Chauncey Depew and together they vanished into an alcove.

  “Who’d think they were once mortal enemies?” Blaise turned and found himself looking into the handsome, if somewhat slant-eyed, face of his Yale classmate Payne Whitney. The young men shook hands. Blaise knew that although his classmates considered him somewhat scandalous for not bothering to graduate, he was thought to be highly enterprising—in a criminal sort of way—for having gone to work for William Randolph Hearst and the Morning Journal, a newspaper whose specialty, according to the newspapermen, was “crime and underwear,” an irresistible combination that had managed to bring, in two years, Pulitzer’s New York World to its knees. At thirty-five, Hearst was the most exciting figure in journalism, and Blaise, who craved excitement—American excitement—had got himself introduced to the Chief. When Blaise had said that he had left Yale, just as Hearst had left Harvard, in order to learn the newspaper business, the Chief had been noncommittal; but then, at best, he found it difficult to express himself in spoken words. Hearst preferred printed words and pictures; he was addicted to headlines, exclamation points, and nude female corpses found, preferably in exciting chunks all round the town. But when the Chief had learned that young Mr. Sanford was heir to a considerable fortune, he had smiled, boyishly, and welcomed him into the bosom of the Journal.

  Blaise sold advertising; rewrote stories; did a bit of everything, including expeditions into darkest Sixth Avenue, and Stygian Hell’s Kitchen. He had been bitterly disappointed when the Chief had not taken him to Cuba to enjoy Hearst’s victory over Spain. Theodore Roosevelt may have won a small battle but everyone conceded that Hearst had himself started and won a small war. Without Hearst’s relentlessly specious attacks on Spain, the American government would never have gone to war. Of course, the sinking of the Maine in Havana harbor had been decisive. The plot had been as crude as it was lurid: a ship of a friendly nation on a friendly visit to a restive Spanish colony sinks as the result of a mysterious explosion, with the loss of many American lives. Who—or what—was responsible? Hearst had managed to convince most Americans that the Spanish had deliberately done the deed. But those who knew something of the matter were reasonably certain that the Spanish had had nothing to do with the explosion. Why should they antagonize the United States? Either the ship had exploded from a spontaneous combustion in the coal-bins, or a floating mine had accidentally hit a bulkhead, or—and this was currently being whispered up and down Printing House Square—Hearst himself had caused the Maine to be blown up so that he could increase the Journal’s circulation with his exciting, on-the-spot, coverage of the war. Although Blaise rather doubted that the Chief would go so far as to blow up an American warship, he did think him perfectly capable of creating the sort of emotional climate in which an accident could trigger a war. Currently, Hearst was involved in an even more fascinating plot. At one-thirty, Blaise, a principal in the plot, was to report to the Chief at the Worth House, where Hearst lived in unlonely bachelor splendor.

  Payne Whitney wanted to know what Hearst’s next move might be. Blaise said that he was not at liberty to say, which caused a degree of satisfying annoyance. But then Blaise was now in the world while Whitney and his Yale roommate, Del Hay, were still boys, on the outside.

  “I heard from Del, in England. He said your sister …”

  “Half-sister,” Blaise always said, and did not himself know why. It was not as if anyone cared.

  “… was visiting the same house. I think Del likes her.” Whitney looked like a ruddy-faced Chinese boy; a very wealthy Chinese boy between his father, William Whitney, who had been involved in numerous streetcar and railroad ventures, many of them honest, and his doting uncle, Oliver Payne, known to Blaise’s father as one of the truly “filthy rich,” which always put Blaise, as a boy, in mind of a dark dirty man wearing a large diamond stickpin. Whitney ordered the Hoffman House special cocktail, the razzle-dazzle.

  “I think Caroline likes him, too. But she does not exactly share her heart with me.” At the thought of Caroline, Blaise had started to think in French, a bad habit, because he found himself translating automatically in his head from French to often-stilted English. He wanted to be entirely, perfectly, indistinguishably American.

  “I suppose they are all coming back, now Mr. Hay’s secretary of state. Just as I was about to go over, and start my grand tour.”

  “Oh, this is the grand tour!” Blaise, perhaps too Gallically, used both hands to embrace the Hoffman House bar, a habit he must break, he reminded himself. American men never used their hands, except to make fists in order to punch one another. Once angered, Blaise’s own instinct was not to punch but to draw a knife, and kill.

  Payne Whitney laughed. “Well, you were born on the grand tour. I haven’t made mine yet.” He finished his cocktail; and said good-by. At exactly one-thirty Blaise left the Hoffman House by the Twenty-fifth Street entrance. The sky was an intense cloudless blue. The wind was like gusts of cool electricity, vitalizing everyone, including the old hack-horses. A solitary motor car cruised noiselessly along the street; then the reason for the absence of noise became evident—the engine had stopped. The hack-drivers were delighted and, as always, someone shouted, “Get a horse!” Meanwhile, on every side, men—women, too—could be seen, puffing hard as they succumbed to the latest fad, bicycling.

  Just opposite the huge marble Hoffman House was the small Worth House. Blaise was respectfully greeted by a chasseur in a splendid, for no reason, Magyar officer’s uniform. An ornate fretwork lift slowly lifted him to the third floor—the whole of it rented by Hearst; here he was greeted by George Thompson, a plump blond man in frock-coat and striped trousers. George had been the Chief’s favorite waiter at the Hoffman House. When the Chief had decided to set up housekeeping, he had asked George to keep house for him, which George was happy to do, regulating the traffic so that the Chief’s mother on one of her impromptu visits from Washington never actually met any of the ladies who were apt to be visiting her son at unconventional hours.

  “Mr. Hearst is in the dining room, sir. He says you’re to join them, for coffee.”

  “Who’s them?”

  “He’s with Senator Platt, sir. Just the two of them.”

  “Not much talk?”

  “Conversation flagged, sir, after the fish. There has been mostly silence since, I fear.”

  Blaise knew that he would be needed as a conversational buffer. Although Hearst was not particularly shy, he gave that appearance because no one had ever explained to him just how conversation worked. He had a good deal to say in his office; and even more to say in the composing room. But that was that. For Hearst the ideal evening would be a show, preferably one starring Weber and Fields, who would tell jokes that made Hearst laugh until he wept with delight. He also liked minstrel shows, chorus girls, late nights. Yet he neither drank nor smoked.

  The dining room was panelled with dark walnut. Italian paintings hung over the sideboard and the mantelpiece; several leaned against the walls, as they waited their turn to be hung. Hearst bought objects with the same boyish greed that he bought writers and artists for his two newspapers.

  Hearst was six feet two inches tall, heavily built and not very well put together, to Blaise’s critical eye; but then Blaise was a natural athlete, and though only five feet nine inches tall, he carried himself like a circus acrobat, according to Caroline. The muscular body balanced, often as not, on his toes, as if he were about to make a double somersault in the air. Blaise also knew that with his blue eyes and dark blond hair he was definitely, perhaps even permanently, handsome, unlike Hearst, whose pale face with its long thin straight nose and wide thin straight mouth was seriously uninteresting except for the close-set eyes, which were very difficult to look into, more lik
e an eagle’s than a man’s—the palest blue irises rimmed black pupils that seemed to be forever acquiring whatever he looked at, the brain within a camera obscura in which, given time, he would have the whole world’s image fixed and filed. Hearst’s clothes were definitely “Broadway.” Today he wore a plaid suit in which there was a bit too much green and yellow; while the necktie was, simply, a sunset.

  On Hearst’s right sat the white-haired benign Senator Platt, the Republican boss of New York State. Although Hearst himself was nominally a Democrat, he dealt even-handedly with politicians of every sort. They needed him, he needed them. But the Chief was not to be taken for granted. To everyone’s amazement, in the election of ’96, he had not supported his father’s friend the Major. Instead, Hearst attacked the Major as a puppet of the archetype Ohio boss Mark Hanna; he also tried to get Payne Whitney’s father to be the Democratic candidate. But when it was plain that William Whitney could not be nominated, the young William Jennings Bryan took the convention by storm. Bryan was a formidable populist orator who had but one speech, “the cross of gold,” on which the wealthy had crucified the American people, and the only way to get them down from the cross would be to increase the money supply by coining silver at a rate of sixteen silver units to one of gold.

  Although every businessman in the country regarded Bryan as not only mad but potentially revolutionary, Hearst’s Journal had been the only major paper in New York to support the Democrats. Personally, Hearst thought that Bryan’s silver policy was absurd. But Hearst was a Democrat, with populist tendencies. He enjoyed supporting the party of the people against the rich. He also enjoyed Bryan’s marvellous oratory. But then who did not? Despite McKinley’s election, Bryan was still a great force in the country, and Hearst was his high priest in Babylon, as New York was known to the South and the West where Bryan’s strength lay. As George pulled out a chair for Blaise to sit at Hearst’s left, Senator Platt said, “I knew your father.”

  “I heard him speak of you many times, Senator,” said Blaise, whose father had never mentioned Platt, or any senator for that matter, except one named Sprague who had married Kate Chase, to his father’s fury.

  After Senator Platt’s confession and Blaise’s lie, the room was silent except for the sound of George, filling coffee cups. Plainly, the Chief and the Republican boss had exhausted their small talk while their big talk could never be shared with someone as junior as Blaise. The Senator took a cigar from a box that George offered him; then he asked, “Are you a Methodist, Mr. Sanford?”

  Blaise felt his cheeks grow warm, and knew that they were now bright red. “No, sir. We are—my half-sister and I—Catholic.”

  “Ah.” There was a world of regret and contempt in that single exhalation. “France, I suppose. All those years. Explains why you’re a Democrat, like Mr. Hearst.”

  “Oh, Blaise and I aren’t what you’d call good party men.” Hearst’s voice was high and slightly quavery. “If we were, we wouldn’t be breaking bread with the Republican czar of New York.”

  “There are times when serious men must unite. You know what Scripture says.” They did not know. He told them. Blaise was much amused to learn that New York’s great lord of corruption was also a deeply committed Christian, active in the Methodist church, and an enemy of all vice that was not directly profitable.

  “That’s why I thought you’d cotton on to Theodore.” Platt blew not smoke rings but cloudy globes of impressive diameter.

  “Well, we invented him.” Hearst was sour. But then Theodore Roosevelt was the only man that the Chief ever showed signs of envying. Theodore was only six years older than Hearst; yet he was now being given credit for Admiral Dewey’s conquest of the Philippines, while his own victory in the field at Kettle Hill—renamed San Juan in the interest of euphony and dignity—had been played up by Hearst himself as a battle equal to Yorktown or Gettysburg, and all for the sake of increasing the Journal’s circulation in the real war, which was against not Spain but the World.

  “Yes, you invented him, all right, and I had to take him.”

  “Didn’t you want him to run for governor?” Blaise did his best to appear innocent. Everyone knew that Platt had only taken the “reformer” because thanks to a series of scandals involving the Erie Canal, the Republican Party was in danger of a serious defeat. “We’re always open to the better element.” Platt was serene. “We welcome reformers.”

  “Better to have them inside the tent than out,” Hearst agreed.

  “I’m just sorry you don’t see your way to helping out.”

  “We’re committed to the Democrats this time. We’re for Judge Van Wyck all the way.” The Chief made an effort to sound enthusiastic. “I hate those pink shirts.”

  “What pink shirts?” Blaise was intrigued.

  “Roosevelt’s. I also saw him once with this silk … thing,” the Chief’s vocabulary was not rich, “around his waist instead of a waistcoat.”

  “He wears statesman’s black now,” said Platt, moodily eyeing Hearst’s sunset cravat and riotous plaid.

  “I don’t like the way he talks either.” The Chief’s voice quavered, his own accent was Western, modified by Harvard, while Roosevelt’s accent was all Harvard. Worse, Roosevelt’s voice became falsetto when he orated. Over the years, sensitive to charges of effeminacy, Roosevelt had learned to box and to shoot; had written popular books about his heroic exploits as a rancher in the Badlands, equalled now by his hour of immortal glory in Cuba, charging, ever charging amongst the flying bullets—and the writing journalists—up Kettle Hill.

  After another long silence—Platt’s defense of his candidate stopped short of a defense of the voice—the Senator rose to go. He made a few cryptic remarks, which the Chief understood; and Blaise did not. Then the long smooth papery hand shook Blaise’s somewhat sweaty youthful paw. “You can find me most afternoons at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. I like to sit there in the long corridor, and watch the world go by.”

  “You sit there and you tell it where to go!” The Chief laughed at his own marvellous acuity. Then the Senator departed; and Blaise followed Hearst into his study, which looked onto the marble façade of the Hoffman House. Hearst sat at an Empire table, all gold eagles and honey-bees, beneath a portrait of Napoleon, one of his heroes; the others were all equally heroic heroes, world conquerors. Blaise found himself vacillating between amazement at the Chief’s simplicity and absence of even the sort of culture that Harvard might have given him had he bothered to notice that such a thing existed and the marvellous energy and inventiveness that he demonstrated when it came to publishing a newspaper. Hearst alone had discovered a truth so obvious that Blaise, a fascinated newcomer to the American world, was amazed that no one else had grasped it: if there is no exciting news to report, create some. When the artist Remington had cabled Hearst that he wanted to come home from Cuba as there was nothing happening for him to draw, Hearst had replied, “You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.” Whether or not Hearst had literally sunk the Maine was irrelevant, because he, far more than Roosevelt, had made war not only inevitable but desirable. Now the Chief had a new project, and Blaise was at its center because, among other things, he knew French.

  “You bring the latest dispatches from Paris?”

  Blaise gave the Chief a series of cables which had arrived that morning from France; a number were written in a code of his own excited devising. Since January, the Chief had had his heart set on what Blaise thought of as “the French Caper.” But the war with Spain had intervened and all other projects were suspended, as Hearst orchestrated public opinion with the magical reverberant phrase “Remember the Maine! And buy the Journal!” When Hearst’s war was declared, he had offered to finance and command a regiment. McKinley had said no; he had not forgotten those cartoons of him on Hanna’s knee. Ever the gracious patriot, Hearst then made the Navy a present of his yacht, aptly named the Buccaneer; with his own military services included. The Navy took the ship but refused the services. So Hea
rst commandeered another ship and went to war on his own and in style, accompanied by Journal writers, artists and photographers.

  The Chief’s dispatches from the front, including his personal capture of twenty-nine Spanish sailors, had caused great distress to Mr. Pulitzer at the World. The Chief was also obliged to play up Colonel Roosevelt’s derring-do; and he did so conscientiously but without relish. Instinctively, the dashing politician knew almost as much about publicity as the Chief himself. Certainly, from the Chief’s occasional remarks about the Colonel, it was plain to Blaise that each had seen the war as his war and that each had wanted to capitalize politically on the subsequent victory, not to mention imperium. But of the two, the Colonel, if elected governor, seemed to be in the better position. On the other hand, Hearst had now decreed that Judge Van Wyck be governor; and the fact that Senator Platt had come to the Chief to cut, as the politicians would say, a deal was proof that the Democrats were comfortably in the lead. But if Hearst’s next coup were to succeed, the election might easily be obscured by William Randolph Hearst’s daring.

  The plan was nothing less than the removal from Devil’s Island, in the Safety Islands off Guiana on the South American coast, of the world’s most celebrated prisoner, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew, who had been accused, falsely according to Hearst and half the world (but not Blaise’s half), of giving French military secrets to the Germans. Although the case had been reopened in Paris, and the actual spy supposedly identified, the French General Staff would not admit that justice, no matter how skewed by fashionable anti-Semitism, had miscarried. They acquitted the actual spy; and kept Dreyfus in solitary confinement on Devil’s Island. At that moment, in January, the Chief had said to Blaise, “You work this one out. You’re French. Make the case for what’s-his-name. We’ll pour it on. Every day. Then if the French don’t let him go, I’ll outfit the Buccaneer, and we’ll go down there and shoot our way in and bring that Jew back to civilization, and if the French want to take us on in a war, we’ll knock those frogs to bits.”