Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [144]
While the ceremony continued, an American con man took advantage of the moment. He hid behind a tree and emerged to stand behind Gladstone and Pulitzer when all the dignitaries gathered for a photograph. Later he would imply to others that he was an intimate friend of the Prince of Wales, who he claimed had once taken his picture. When the mark expressed doubts, the American operator would say he thought he might even have the picture with him and would produce a photo, trimmed to show him standing with Gladstone and Pulitzer.
Unaware of the shady operator, Pulitzer relished the moment. He sent instructions to the World to play up the ceremony. Smith gave it two columns on the front page. British newspapers were less thrilled and questioned the delegation’s claim of speaking for the American people. “In point of fact,” said the Evening Standard, “they had no more right to such a position than the three tailors of Tooley Street, who addressed the Emperor of Russia, had to represent the people of Great Britain.” The last word, however, belonged to Gladstone’s daughter Mary. That night she penned a few short lines in her diary about the ceremony. “Sat. A garden party the American presentation to [father], an object of surprising hideousness.”
By August the Pulitzers were back in New York. They stayed only briefly, though long enough for Pulitzer to consider yet another proposal to buy a paper. He had given up on acquiring a London newspaper, but he listened attentively to a pitch from William Henry Smith, the AP’s director, to acquire the Chicago Times. After all, Smith had been one of the men who had guided him to buy the World. But reason again prevailed, and Pulitzer declined the opportunity.
Abandoning business and the heat, the Pulitzers spent the remainder of the summer in Lenox, where they rented one of the town’s many mansions, referred to by the wealthy as “cottages.” Despite the fresh country air, their daughter Lucille fell gravely ill. Three years after losing one daughter, Joseph and Kate faced the horrible possibility again. Joseph was convinced that the plumbing was the culprit, as he had been at their Fifth Avenue house. This time, he may not have been wrong. After Lucille recovered, two doctors discovered that the pipes leading to the cesspool were not properly installed and permitted gases to work their way into the bathroom Lucille had used.
The Pulitzers returned to New York, in time for Joseph to witness, from the officiating yacht, the final race of the 1887 defense of America’s Cup. The race had become immensely popular. In fact, during the prior year’s race, the World had mounted movable miniature yachts on a track across the first floor of its building. As dispatches arrived by telegram every ten minutes, the yachts were drawn across the painted scene by hidden strings. The display attracted crowds so immense that all traffic was blocked from Park Row from morning until night.
Pulitzer finally ended his family’s migration from rented house to rented house. He purchased a mansion at 10 East Fifty-Fifth Street, just off Fifth Avenue, from the banker Charles Barney, brother-in-law of Pulitzer’s friend Whitney. The house was almost new and had been designed by McKim, Mead, and White, architects to the rich and famous such as the Astors, the Vanderbilts, and other plutocrats who were madly building châteaus on Fifth Avenue. The targets of the World’s editorial venom would now be Pulitzer’s neighbors.
It was, indeed, quite a neighborhood. A few blocks to the south, William Henry Vanderbilt had bought an entire block and built enormous brownstone houses for his family and two married daughters. His sons soon built their own mansions nearby. Henry Villard, who had taken Pulitzer across the country four years earlier to witness the completion of his cross-country railroad, erected an even more enormous palace comprising six linked brownstones with a