Big Money (61 page)

and stepping into the limelight

wearing a black frockcoat and a tengallon hat,

presidential timber,

the millionaire candidate of the common man.

 

Bryan made him president of the National Association of Democratic Clubs and advised him to start a paper in Chicago.

After Bryan's second defeat Hearst lined up with Charles F. Murphy in New York and was elected to Congress.

His headquarters were at the Holland House; the night of his election he gave a big free show of fireworks in Madison Square Garden; a mortar exploded and killed or wounded something like a hundred people; that was one piece of news the Hearst men made that wasn't spread on the front pages of the Hearst papers.

In the House of Representatives he was unpopular; it was schooldays over again. The limp handshake, the solemn eyes set close
to the long nose, the small flabby scornful smile were out of place among the Washington backslappers. He was ill at ease without his hired gang around him.

 

He was happier entertaining firstnighters and footlight favorites at the Holland House. In those years when Broadway still stopped at Fortysecond Street,

Millicent Willson was a dancer in
The Girl from Paris;
she and her sister did a sister act together; she won a popularity contest in the
Morning Telegraph

and the hand of

William Randolph Hearst.

 

In nineteen four he spent a lot of money putting his name up in electric lights at the Chicago Convention to land the Democratic nomination but Judge Parker and Wall Street got it away from him.

In nineteen five he ran for Mayor of New York on a municipal-ownership ticket.

In nineteen six he very nearly got the governorship away from the solemnwhiskered Hughes. There were Hearst for President clubs all over the country. He was making his way in politics spending millions to the tune of
Waltz Me Around Again, Willie
.

He managed to get his competitor James Gordon Bennett up in court for running indecent ads in the New York
Herald
and fined $25,000, a feat which hardly contributed to his popularity in certain quarters.

In nineteen eight he was running revelations about Standard Oil, the Archbold letters that proved that the trusts were greasing the palms of the politicians in a big way. He was the candidate of the Independence party made up almost exclusively, so his enemies claimed, of Hearst employees.

(His fellowmillionaires felt he was a traitor to his class but when he was taxed with his treason he answered:

You know I believe in property, and you know where I stand on personal fortunes, but isn't it better that I should represent in this country the dissatisfied than have somebody else do it who might not have the same real property relations that I may have?)

 

By nineteen fourteen, although he was the greatest newspaper-owner in the country, the proprietor of hundreds of square miles of ranching and mining country in California and Mexico,

his affairs were in such a scramble he had trouble borrowing a million dollars,

and politically he was ratpoison.

 

All the millions he signed away

all his skill at putting his own thoughts

into the skull of the straphanger

failed to bridge the tiny Rubicon between amateur and professional politics (perhaps he could too easily forget a disappointment buying a firstrate writer or an embroidered slipper attributed to Charlemagne or the gilded bed a king's mistress was supposed to have slept in).

Sometimes he was high enough above the battle to see clear. He threw all the power of his papers, all his brilliance as a publisher into an effort to keep the country sane and neutral during the first world war;

he opposed loans to the Allies, seconded Bryan in his lonely fight to keep the interests of the United States as a whole paramount over the interests of the Morgan banks and the anglophile businessmen of the East;

for his pains he was razzed as a pro-German,

and when war was declared had detectives placed among his butlers,

secretserviceagents ransacking his private papers, gumshoeing round his diningroom on Riverside Drive to investigate rumors of strange colored lights seen in his windows.

He opposed the peace of Versailles and the league of victorious nations

and ended by proving that he was as patriotic as anybody

by coming out for conscription

and printing his papers with red white and blue borders and with little American flags at either end of the dateline and continually trying to stir up trouble across the Rio Grande

and inflating the Yankee Doodle bogey,

the biggest navy in the world.

 

The people of New York City backed him up by electing Hearst's candidate for Mayor, Honest John Hylan,

but Al Smith while he was still the sidewalks' hero rapped Hearst's knuckles when he tried to climb back onto the Democratic soundtruck.

 

In spite of enormous expenditures on forged documents he failed to bring about war with Mexico.

In spite of spraying hundreds of thousands of dollars into moviestudios he failed to put over his favorite moviestar as America's sweetheart.

And more and more the emperor of newsprint retired to his fief of San Simeon on the Pacific Coast, where he assembled a zoo, continued to dabble in movingpictures, collected warehouses full of tapestries, Mexican saddles, bricabrac, china, brocade, embroidery, old chests of drawers, tables and chairs, the loot of dead Europe,

built an Andalusian palace and a Moorish banquethall and there spends his last years amid the relaxing adulations of screenstars, admen, screenwriters, publicitymen, columnists, millionaire editors,

a monarch of that new El Dorado

where the warmedover daydreams of all the ghettos

are churned into an opiate haze

more scarily blinding to the moneyless man

more fruitful of millions

than all the clinking multitude of double eagles

the older Hearst minted out of El Dorado County in the old days (the empire of the printed word continues powerful by the inertia of bigness; but this power over the dreams

of the adolescents of the world

grows and poisons like a cancer),

and out of the westcoast haze comes now and then an old man's querulous voice

advocating the salestax,

hissing dirty names at the defenders of civil liberties for the workingman;

jail the reds,

praising the comforts of Baden-Baden under the blood and bludgeon rule of Handsome Adolph (Hearst's own loved invention, the lowest common denominator come to power

out of the rot of democracy)

complaining about the California incometaxes,

shrilling about the dangers of thought in the colleges.

Deport; jail.

 

Until he dies

the magnificent endlesslyrolling presses will pour out print for him, the whirring everywhere projectors will spit images for him,

a spent Caesar grown old with spending

never man enough to cross the Rubicon.

Dick Savage walked down Lexington to the office in the Graybar Building. The December morning was sharp as steel, bright glints cut into his eyes, splintering from storewindows, from the glasses of people he passed on the street, from the chromium rims of the headlights of automobiles. He wasn't quite sure whether he had a hangover or not. In a jeweler's window he caught sight of his face in the glass against the black velvet backing, there was a puffy boiled look under the eyes like in the photographs of the Prince of Wales. He felt sour and gone in the middle like a rotten pear. He stepped into a drugstore and ordered a bromoseltzer. At the sodafountain he stood looking at himself in the mirror behind the glass shelf with the gingeralebottles on it; his new darkblue broadcloth coat looked well anyway. The black eyes of the sodajerker were seeking his eyes out. “A heavy evening, eh?” Dick nodded and grinned. The sodajerker passed a thin red-knuckled hand over his patentleather hair. “I didn't get off till one thirty an' it takes me an hour to get home on the subway. A whale of a chance I got to . . .” “I'm late at the office now,” said Dick and paid and walked out, belching a little, into the sparkling morning street. He walked fast, taking deep breaths. By the time he was standing in the elevator with a sprinkling of stoutish fortyish welldressed men, executives like himself getting to their offices late, he had a definite sharp headache.

He'd hardly stretched his legs out under his desk when the interoffice phone clicked. It was Miss Williams' voice: “Good morning, Mr.
Savage. We've been waiting for you . . . Mr. Moorehouse says please step into his office, he wants to speak with you a minute before the staff conference.” Dick got up and stood a second with his lips pursed rocking on the balls of his feet looking out the window over the ashcolored blocks that stretched in a series of castiron molds east to the chimneys of powerplants, the bridge, the streak of river flashing back steel at the steelblue sky. Riveters shrilly clattered in the new huge construction that was jutting up girder by girder at the corner of Fortysecond. They all seemed inside his head like a dentist's drill. He shuddered, belched and hurried along the corridor into the large corner office.

J.W. was staring at the ceiling with his big jowly face as expressionless as a cow's. He turned his pale eyes on Dick without a smile. “Do you realize there are seventyfive million people in this country unwilling or unable to go to a physician in time of sickness?” Dick twisted his face into a look of lively interest. He's been talking to Ed Griscolm, he said to himself. “Those are the people the Bingham products have got to serve. He's touched only the fringes of this great potential market.” “His business would be to make them feel they're smarter than the bigbugs who go to Battle Creek,” said Dick. J.W. frowned thoughtfully.

Ed Griscolm had come in. He was a sallow long man with an enthusiastic flash in his eye that flickered on and off like an electriclight sign. He had a way of carrying his arms like a cheerleader about to lead a college yell. Dick said “Hello” without warmth. “Top of the morning, Dick . . . a bit over hung I see. . . . Too bad, old man, too bad.”

“I was just saying, Ed,” J.W. went on in his slow even voice, “that our talkingpoints should be first that they haven't scratched the top of their potential market of seventyfive million people and second that a properlyconducted campaign can eradicate the prejudice many people feel against proprietary medicines and substitute a feeling of pride in their use.”

“It's smart to be thrifty . . . that sort of thing,” shouted Ed.

“Selfmedication,” said Dick. “Tell them the average sodajerker knows more about medicine today than the family physician did twentyfive years ago.”

“They think there's something hick about patent medicines,” yelled
Ed Griscolm. “We got to put patent medicines on Park Avenue.” “Proprietary medicines,” said J.W. reprovingly.

Dick managed to wipe the smile off his face. “We've got to break the whole idea,” he said, “into its component parts.”

“Exactly.” J.W. picked up a carvedivory papercutter and looked at it in different angles in front of his face. The office was so silent they could hear the traffic roaring outside and the wind whistling between the steel windowframe and the steel window. Dick and Ed Griscolm held their breath. J.W. began to talk. “The American public has become sophisticated . . . when I was a boy in Pittsburgh all we thought of was display advertising, the appeal to the eye. Now with the growth of sophistication we must think of the other types of appeal, and the eradication of prejudice. . . . Bingo . . . the name is out of date, it's all wrong. A man would be ashamed to lunch at the Metropolitan Club with a bottle of Bingo at his table . . . that must be the talkingpoint. . . . Yesterday Mr. Bingham seemed inclined to go ahead. He was balking a little at the cost of the campaign. . . .”

“Never mind,” screeched Ed Griscolm, “we'll nail the old buzzard's feet down yet.”

“I guess he has to be brought around gently just as you were saying last night, J.W.,” said Dick in a low bland voice. “They tell me Halsey of Halsey O'Connor's gone to bed with a nervous breakdown tryin' to get old Bingham to make up his mind.” Ed Griscolm broke into a tittering laugh.

J.W. got to his feet with a faint smile. When J.W. smiled Dick smiled too. “I think he can be brought to appreciate the advantages connected with the name . . . dignity . . . established connections. . . .” Still talking J.W. led the way down the hall into the large room with a long oval mahogany table in the middle of it where the whole office was gathered. J.W. went first with his considerable belly waggling a little from side to side as he walked, and Dick and Ed Griscolm, each with an armful of typewritten projects in paleblue covers, followed a step behind him. Just as they were settling down after a certain amount of coughing and honking and J.W. was beginning about how there were seventyfive million people, Ed Griscolm ran out and came back with a neatlydrawn chart in blue and red and yellow lettering showing the layout of the proposed campaign. An admiring murmur ran round the table.

Dick caught a triumphant glance in his direction from Ed Griscolm. He looked at J.W. out of the corner of his eye. J.W. was looking at the chart with an expressionless face. Dick walked over to Ed Griscolm and patted him on the shoulder. “A swell job, Ed old man,” he whispered. Ed Griscolm's tense lips loosened into a smile. “Well, gentlemen, what I'd like now is a snappy discussion,” said J.W. with a mean twinkle in his paleblue eye that matched for a second the twinkle of the small diamonds in his cufflinks.

While the others talked Dick sat staring at J.W.'s hands spread out on the sheaf of typewritten papers on the table in front of him. Oldfashioned starched cuffs protruded from the sleeves of the perfectlyfitting doublebreasted grey jacket and out of them hung two pudgy strangely hicklooking hands with liverspots on them. All through the discussion Dick stared at the hands, all the time writing down phrases on his scratchpad and scratching them out. He couldn't think of anything. His brains felt boiled. He went on scratching away with his pencil at phrases that made no sense at all. On the fritz at the Ritz . . . Bingham's products cure the fits.