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if they can be satisfied that it will be right and safe to do so. Will you not try to convince them?” But it was really Pulitzer who needed convincing. He strongly opposed McKinley’s candidacy but could not bring himself to support Bryan. In hopes of resolving this quandary, he lured Creelman back to the paper to take on a special assignment. Creelman was to follow Bryan’s campaign tour. But he was to write for two audiences: the World’s readers and its publisher. Each day he sent long reports to Bar Harbor, where they were read to Pulitzer, who immediately dictated questions that were wired back. At the end of the campaign, although it had been Creelman who logged thousands of miles as Pulitzer’s political eyes and ears, it was the boss who complained of exhaustion.

For his part, Hearst had no reservations in supporting Bryan. He published a free weekly campaign edition and covered the nominee’s every move, speech, and utterance. His support was so unquestionable that the candidate himself sent a telegram on election eve to Hearst, thanking him for it.

Bryan went down to defeat but the Journal did not. Hearst had beaten Pulitzer at his own game. On the basis of his battle with the Sun in 1884, Pulitzer had anticipated that Bryan’s defeat would be a crippling blow to the Journal, which had been the only major Park Row newspaper to support the insurgent Democrat in the decidedly anti-silver New York. But Pulitzer was wrong. Hearst’s alliance with the Bryan campaign gave the Journal exactly what it needed. Its vigorous support for a champion of the underdog established the Journal as the city’s brash newspaper for the masses and an entertaining jester of established politics while the World equivocated. In thirteen years, Pulitzer’s World had gone from being the bad boy of Park Row to being a stodgy defender of the political establishment.

As he had done after other setbacks, Pulitzer reacted to this one by leaving New York. Taking his old friend and editor John Dillon with him, he sailed for the Riviera, leaving his family to celebrate Christmas without him. His first stop, Monte Carlo, proved to be a nightmare. The bells of ships in the harbor rang incessantly. Two decades earlier, he had defended a church in St. Louis that rang its bells at night. Now such tolling tormented him. Scrambling, his assistants located a more suitable refuge at Hotel Cap Martin on a peninsula to the east, bathed in sea air perfumed by tangerines, lemons, and orange groves.

The beauty of the setting did little to lighten Pulitzer’s mood. “I have never seen him so steadily and persistently gloomy or in so deep a gloom,” Alfred Butes, an English secretary who had joined Pulitzer’s retinue, wrote to Kate back in New York. “His health is worse than at any time in years,” Butes said. Pulitzer moped behind closed shutters, bored, and fretting about the children. “He needs more gaiety around him. And, unfortunately, that must always be accompanied by noise. Dear! Oh Dear! It’s a big problem. And we haven’t solved it yet.”

Efforts to relieve Pulitzer’s ills continued, though with a touch of the comic. Dr. Ernst Schweninger, famous for helping the hefty German chancellor Bismarck lose weight, was brought to the hotel for two days of treatments. To Pulitzer, the bearded, beady-eyed doctor looked like a wild anarchist and also seemed to act like one. “He says Mr. P. can be practically cured,” Butes told Kate. “Probably could, I think, if he could survive the remedies which seem too almost drastic. I hear he laid Mr. P. down on the floor and knelt on his stomach! This is the latest, most scientific way of forcing a man to take a deep breath—and it is humorous too!”

Pulitzer gave up claret and cigars, but these New Year’s resolutions were soon broken. “I am, in fact, kept busy from morning to night with massages and exercises,” he reported to Kate. “But I have been so miserable yet in spite of, or perhaps, on account of this, I am more miserable in some respects (physical) than I have been in years.” As soon as the Atlantic weather reports became encouraging,