A Secret Life_ The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland - Charles Lachman [142]
Around this time, Rose was being recruited to serve as editor of the monthly magazine Literary Life. The publisher of Literary Life was Abram P. T. Elder, a colorful Chicago businessman who saw in Rose a way to reap attention for his publication. Elder wrote her effusive letters, offering her the position.
“Your reception in Chicago would be the greatest literary and social event that has ever taken place in this country,” he told her. Elder’s overbearing language should have alerted Rose that something was amiss with this fellow, but she continued to negotiate the terms of the position.
Rose drove a hard bargain. She insisted on approving all advertisements and refused to allow her name to appear on the title page or the masthead. Literary Life, she informed Elder, should stand or fall on its merits and not her celebrity. Elder agreed to all her conditions, but he put his foot down when Rose sought to hire her twenty-five-year-old nephew—Reverend William Cleveland’s boy—as her deputy editor. He found young Cleveland to be a “callow youth,” so Rose backed off then finally signed a five-year contract at a good salary—$350 a month.
Rose and Elder butted heads from day one. When she was sent page proofs for her first issue, she banned all “quack” advertisements for wrinkle removers, beautifying elixirs, and patent medicines. Elder could not believe it; some of those ads ran a full page. He had granted her full control over the editorial content of Literary Life, but he had never imagined she would shrink his bottom line. “I am not publishing the magazine exclusively for the editor’s benefit,” he complained. Elder designed a new title page with the words “Edited by Ms. Cleveland” and sent it to Rose, hoping the classy illustration would appeal to her artistic sensibilities. By return mail came this tart response: “My name shall not appear—this is final.” Then Elder had an inspired notion. He got the idea from seeing Frances Folsom Cleveland’s image adorning so many storefront windows in Chicago. Elder hired an artist to sketch an engraving of Rose for the magazine’s cover. Rose was appalled and again said no.
“The difference between us is this—I mean what I say—you do not,” she wrote him.
It didn’t help that Rose lived in an inaccessible village in the interior of New York State. They disagreed on everything, even the little things. Elder considered the Weeds a preposterous name for a residence. It vexed him to be addressing his correspondence to Rose Elizabeth Cleveland, The Weeds, Holland Patent, New York. He made the silly suggestion that perhaps she should consider changing the name.
“The Weeds it will remain,” Rose responded.
Then Rose’s attempts to commission works from the most famous writers in America sometimes backfired. In terms of popularity, the poet John Boyle O’Reilly was Longfellow’s successor, and Rose suggested a fee of twenty dollars for him to write two thousand words. O’Reilly’s blood boiled. He found her offer to be disgraceful and a “humiliation,” even though a cent a word was the going rate for writers working for Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated, two popular magazines of the era.
In November 1886, Elder went to Holland Patent to work things out. He rang the doorbell at The Weeds, but Rose instructed her maid to refuse him entry. Four months into the job, with both sides weary of the endless hostility, Rose and Elder parted company. Stirring things up right to the end, Elder asserted that Rose was on the verge of a physical and mental collapse.
“Ms. Cleveland has been in poor health and really unable to attend to the demands made upon her. Then her home at the Weeds was burned and that affected her in a depressing way.”
He publicly questioned her competence in business and claimed her editorial leadership had plunged his once-profitable magazine into debt. Quoting Tennyson, Rose countered that Elder’s blatherings were half-truths, which were “the