Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [190]
Jones grew tired of his struggles with the obstinate publisher and sought terms of surrender. In June, Pulitzer agreed to pay Jones $100,000 to resign and return the stock he held. The agreement stipulated that no announcement of the change would be made. The paper, Pulitzer instructed, would make Jones’s departure known only by its return to Pulitzer’s editorial positions. “Don’t want a word of national politics except against tariff, trusts, monopoly, plutocracy, corruption…not one word about Chicago platform and free silver this year.”
With the Jones episode at an end and no elections of importance in sight, Pulitzer turned to his own personal wants. Even though he already owned a palace in Maine, with its “tower of silence” a house on Fifty-Fifth Street in New York; and a hideaway on Jekyll Island, Pulitzer suddenly had a hankering to acquire William Rockefeller’s Rockwood Hall, on the Hudson River. Rockefeller’s public complaint about the taxes on this estate gave the impression he might sell it. Pulitzer sent Dillon and Seitz, who were well used to running personal errands for their boss, to investigate—under strict instructions of secrecy, especially about whom they represented. The men telegraphed Pulitzer a full report on the house, furniture, riding trails, and cost of maintaining the grounds, and even on whether trains could be heard from inside the house. In the end, though, the secret mission was a waste of time. As a phone call might have determined, Rockefeller had no interest in selling Rockwood.
Investing in the Rockefeller mansion would have been fiscal folly that wiser heads would have counseled Pulitzer to abandon anyway. Aside from Dumont Clarke, who managed his personal fortune, Pulitzer trusted J. Angus Shaw, who watched over the finances of the World. The news from Shaw was terrifying. The nearly $1 million income that Pulitzer had drawn from the World each year had fallen to less than $350,000. Pulitzer ordered budget cuts and payroll reductions. But he knew that he could not economize his way out of the financial free fall the World had taken since Hearst’s arrival in New York. Unless he, or his editors, came up with a solution, Pulitzer’s fate would be like that of Dana and the Sun in 1884. The World would recede into history as an interesting episode in American journalism.
No one was exempt from the reductions—not even Kate, who did not take kindly to the idea. Several years before, she and Joseph had worked out an agreement that she was to receive $6,000 a month to run the household and to cover her personal expenses and those of the children. But Kate continued to accumulate debts in Europe and New York. She told Butes the bills had to be paid. “I count, as I always do, upon you,” she wrote, “to make things as little disagreeable as possible.
“Money is such a contemptible thing to so constantly fight about,” Kate told Butes, whom she had come to treat as a confidant. “I do not ask it for myself for I can do without money, the things I should love to do—the charities, the enumerable helpful things I could do for the openly poor and for the poor too proud and too well born to make their wants known. This is one of my crosses.”
In August 1897, Kate and Joseph were with their children at Chatwold in Maine. It was a rare moment of togetherness for the family, which had spread itself across two continents. Though Joseph and Kate often bickered about money, Kate had reconciled herself to her marriage. She had terminated her amorous relationship with Brisbane the previous year. “Separate you from me, if you think you must for your own peace of mind,” Brisbane wrote upon receiving Kate’s Dear John letter. “I am what I am, and I think you have seen and known the best of me.
“You know that I admire you, and you know my other feelings. I do not write freely about such things, even on an anonymous machine,” Brisbane typed. Yet, he offered a frank assessment of their differences.