The Rothman Scandal (28 page)

He had befriended a young copywriter named Chris, and he asked Chris about this. “Remember that buyer rhymes with liar,” was his friend's reply. “The ‘z' key on my typewriter is worn out from typing the word
amazing
.”

Other things went on. In the Basement Store, during a sale of misses' blouses that had been advertised as “One Day Only—All Sales Final—No Returns,” he had watched as the frantic misses' blouse buyer and her assistants changed the size labels on a stack of shirtwaists. The small sizes had all sold out, it seemed, and so they were relabeling the large and extra-large sizes “small.”

The store's Giant Midwinter Furniture Sale was coming up. For some time, Ho had rather wistfully been eyeing, as he passed it, a Queen Anne-type chest-on-chest on the furniture floor. Someday, he thought, if he were able to afford a home of his own, he would like to have a chest-on-chest just like that one standing proudly in his front hall. (Later, when he became rich, Ho Rothman would not have put a piece like that in his maid's room!) Its price was $59.95, far beyond his humble reach, even if he used his employee's ten percent discount and the store's Lay-Away Plan, and even if he had a place to put it. On the opening day of the great sale, Ho made a special trip to the chest-on-chest, to see how much it had been marked down. Sure enough, there it was with a new price tag that read: “Sale priced just $59.95—formerly $259.95!”

He had occasion to encounter Mr. Eldridge J. Gossage that day, as the latter marched down the grand
allée
between his highboys and his breakfronts, looking important and pleased with himself, and Ho took the liberty of mentioning the matter of the Queen Anne chest-on-chest. Mr. Gossage looked pained, and mumbled something about comparable prices at other retailers. But, Ho wanted to know, what would happen if word of this sort of activity leaked out to the press—even to the humble newcomer, the
Newark Explorer
, that he himself was publishing? Would not the confidence of Bamberger's customers be eroded if they learned that Newark's leading department store was advertising phony sale prices? Particularly if the
Explorer
should decide to publish the news on its front page?

Eldridge J. Gossage looked very angry. “Why, you little kike whippersnapper,” he said, “I'm going to see that you get exactly what you deserve!”

And Mr. Gossage was as good as his word. From that week onward, a full-page ad for Bamberger's furniture department appeared on the back page of Ho's tabloid. Bamberger's furniture department became his first regular paid advertiser.

And Ho was quick to show his gratitude, and began what would be a lifetime practice of editorial quid pro quo. He saw to it that, whenever possible, Bamberger's furniture got favorable mention in his paper. In a story on troglodyte witches in fifteenth-century Spain, for example, he wrote:

The witches' caves of Andalusia were dank, unhealthy holes—a far cry from what they might have been had they been furnished with the kind of taste and elegance shoppers are accustomed to finding at Bamberger's excellent furniture department, where quality at amazingly low prices is the rule.…

Whether or not Mr. Gossage noticed these editorial pats on the back, Mr. Gossage never deigned to say. But Ho was fairly sure he did.

In 1912, radio was something very new—a novelty, a plaything, a toy. It had occurred to no one that radio could ever become a medium for transmitting news, music, sporting events, or other entertainment. It was just a gadget. Ham operators used radio sets to gossip back and forth with one another. But such was the public interest in Mr. Marconi's invention that Bamberger's had decided to install a small, glass-enclosed radio studio on the store's top floor. Ostensibly, the purpose of the radio station was to transmit information between Bamberger's and its “sister” stores—Macy's in Manhattan, and Abraham & Straus in Brooklyn—without paying long-distance telephone rates. It was also used to broadcast news throughout the store: “Attention, Bamberger's shoppers … right now, in our third-floor lingerie department, and for a short time only, you will find luxurious stays and camisoles, marked down to
unbelievably
low prices.…” But its real purpose was to lure curious customers up through the store's upper floors, where shopping traffic was always lightest. Customers crowded around the little booth, their faces pressed against the glass, watching and listening to the operator sending and receiving messages over the miraculous new medium of the airwaves.

On the night of April 14, 1912, Ho Rothman was asked to man the radio station while the regular operator went down to the cafeteria to have his dinner. There was not much to it. It just meant putting on a headset, setting up the microphone, and operating a simple set of keys, buttons, and switches. It was in this glass booth that Ho Rothman was sitting when, by accident as he experimented with his switches and buttons, he picked up a faint but distinct signal from the North Atlantic: “S.S.
Titanic …
ran into iceberg … Sinking fast.…”

He then did something he never in his life had done before. He walked off his job—walked, ran,
flew!
—to his newspaper printing press where the tray of type was already set up. Within twenty minutes, he had his cover story written and, within an hour, he was running down the streets of Newark, hawking his Extra edition, shouting, “Extra! Extra!
Titanic
sinks!”

Ho Rothman was always proud of the lead he wrote for that story in such record time:

As THE EXPLORER predicted three weeks ago, the S.S.
Titanic
has gone down, with great loss of lives, a victim of what the Greeks call
hubris
, or the sin of pride. Tonight's disaster, in which thousands have gone down to a watery end, proves that mere man, or any of the creations of man, dare not defy the mighty forces of Mother Nature, nor the cruel vengeance of a punishing ocean. The
Titanic
had the supreme audacity to proclaim herself “unsinkable.” For this insult to Nature, she has paid at the cost of untold human suffering and agonizing death.…

Of course the details of the disaster that followed were wildly inaccurate—Ho simply made them up. But it didn't matter. In the weeks that followed, all the published reports of the tragedy were confused and garbled, full of errors, misinterpretations, guesswork, and Monday-morning quarterbacking. Even to this day, many details of what happened that night at sea are open to debate and speculation, and there are many questions that may never be answered properly.

Ho was always proud, too, of the last two lines of his story:

The officers and directors of White Star did not listen to THE EXPLORER'S warnings then. Perhaps—too late—they will listen now.

What mattered most was that Ho Rothman's little weekly tabloid had been the first newspaper in the world to report the sinking of the S.S.
Titanic
. What had really been only a warning very quickly became a “prediction” that the disaster would happen. And, in the days that followed, seventeen-year-old H. O. Rothman found himself the most famous newspaperman in the United States.

15

Actually, her day had gone better than she had thought it would, considering its somewhat rocky start. Plans for the picnic issue had been roughed out, and it had been generally decided that all the fashion pages would be shot out of doors. It was the kind of subtle touch most readers wouldn't even notice, but it would add a certain continuity of texture and feel to the issue, as readers turned the pages. In terms of graphics, there would be conventional picnics—a picnic on the beach, a picnic on the deck of a sailboat, a tailgate picnic at a polo match—and also unconventional ones: a picnic in a greenhouse, an after-theater picnic in the back seat of a stretch limousine. In other words, the issue would have as its subtheme Getting Out of the House, Getting Away.…

“I want it to be our prettiest issue ever,” she had said. “I want everything to be just—pretty. I want views. Views of oceans, views of mountains. What about a picnic in the warm-up hut at a ski resort?”

Yes, it had gone well. And from her father-in-law's office on the thirtieth floor, there had been not a word.

At four o'clock, Bob Shaw came by, flopped on her sofa, and said, “Well, believe it or not, I've found out what makes bees swarm. It's very simple, it turns out. They swarm when the hive is overcrowded. They swarm to found a new colony, and select a new queen, like Gregory said. All we got to do is find a beekeeper with an overcrowded hive, and we've got a potential swarm. Now
where
the bees will decide to swarm is another matter. Beekeepers can control this to some extent, but whether we can make the bees swarm in a model's hair is something I don't know yet, but I've got the library working on it. The bees that swarmed in Gregory's mom's hair were wild bees, and there's always a lead bee that guides the others to the swarming spot. Since Gregory's mom had been swimming in a river, there may have been some mineral in the river water that attracted that lead bee.”

“Fascinating,” she said. “Good work, Bob.”

“Now all we have to do is find a model with nerves of steel who'll let a bunch of bees swarm in her hair.”

“I'll take care of that,” she said. “It's amazing what a girl will do to get herself on the cover of
Mode
.”

“So much for bees,” he said. “But speaking of those little critters, what are we all supposed to make of this new queen bee that's going to be joining you at the top of the masthead? A lot of people would sure like to know, Alex.”

She winked at him. “No comment,” she said.

He shook his head and stared at the backs of his hands. “I don't like it,” he said. “I don't like it one bit. We've all been a team here, and now—”

“Don't get any more gray hairs about it,” she said. “Promise me.”

Four thirty passed, and there was still no word from the thirtieth floor. Obviously, Herb Rothman was expecting the next move to come from her, but she wasn't ready to make that move. Let him wonder what I'm up to, she thought. Let him sweat it out a bit.

Then she had taken a call from Mark Rinsky.

“This is just a prelim report,” he said. “About the Brit broad.”

“I'm not supposed to let you use words like broad,” she said. “But in her case, perhaps I will.”

“Yeah, well, here's what I've found out so far. She lives at the Westbury Hotel, in one of their fancier suites with a woodburning fireplace. She wanted a piano in her sitting room, and so the hotel moved in a Baldwin grand. She rented the place in May, on a two-year lease, first and last month paid, and this spread rents for twelve thou a month, so obviously the broad's got dough.”

“Either that, or a rich sponsor.”

“Yeah, I'll be looking into that. But meanwhile she seems to live very quietly. The hotel was a little worried about the piano—late-night parties, and all. But as far as they're concerned, so far she's been the perfect guest. No big demands. Hotel staff likes her, which I guess means she tips well. Oh, just one demand, besides the piano. She likes her bed made up with her own sheets—blue satin—but, what the hell, I guess a lot of rich broads do that. She doesn't go out much—coupla times. Sticks to herself. Not too many visitors.”

“No particular—romantic life?”

“Not that anybody knows about. Young man brought her home last night, and went up with her. Night bell captain saw them. But then he went off duty, so he doesn't know how long the young man stayed. Nobody remembers seeing him leave.”

“A
young
man?”

“Yeah. Her age or younger. Guy with glasses, the bell captain
thinks
. Obviously, we'll be keeping a closer watch on her from now on.”

“It wasn't Herbert Rothman?”

“Herb Rothman's in his late sixties, isn't he? This guy was her age or younger, and she's—”

“The
Times
gave her age as twenty-eight.”

“Yeah, but it's hard to judge a woman's age these days, isn't it? Particularly behind those big shades she wears. Let's see—what else? Like I say, she appears to be something of a loner. She hardly ever eats in the hotel dining room, and has most of her meals sent up by room service. She has the hotel screen her phone calls, but the switchboard says she doesn't get that many. Oh, and here's a kind of funny thing. She's also had a couple of private lines run in, both of them unlisted. But one line's for residential service, and the other's for business. She has an answering machine on the residential line, but not on the business one. Doesn't that strike you as funny?”

“I dunno, darlin'. Why?”

“If you were running a business of some kind, wouldn't you put your answering machine on your business line, and not on your residential one? Well, maybe it's nothing.”

“What about England? Have you found out anything there?”

“It's nearly ten at night in London now. But I have an associate there, and I'll try to reach him early Monday morning. Be back to you as soon as I have anything.”

“Thank you, Mark.…”

Now it was a little after five o'clock, and Alex was packing her briefcase with a few manuscripts she planned to read over the weekend. In the morning, she and Mel were driving out to the Island to spend the weekend at his house in Sagaponack. From the outer office, she heard the telephone ring as, indeed, it had been ringing all day long, and presently Gregory was standing at her door. His look was apprehensive. “It's Mr. Herbert Rothman,” he said. “He wants to see you.”

She started to say, “Tell him it'll have to wait till Monday.” But then she thought: Well, if there's going to be a confrontation, it might as well be now, and so, in the jauntiest manner she could affect, she said, “Okay. Tell him I'll be right up, darlin'.”