Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [206]
Kate jumped from her bed and ran into the adjacent bedrooms, where eleven-year-old Constance and thirteen-year-old Edith were sleeping. Draping them with blankets, she led the children down the smoke-filled stairs to safety on the street, where she consigned them to a neighbor.
Joseph was in Lakewood, New Jersey, where he had gone shortly after the new year with his son Joe. Ralph was back at Harvard. But three-year-old Herbert, the baby of the family, was still inside. Barefooted and clad only in her sleeping garment, Kate ran back into the burning house. Through the thickening smoke from flaming curtains, wall hangings, and paintings, she inched her way up the stairs to the third floor. There she found Herbert in the arms of his panicked nurse, who was standing on the windowsill preparing to jump. Kate held her back. Then, by alternately pushing and pulling them through blinding smoke down the hall and stairs, she guided them to safety on the first floor. The footman, who had sounded the alarm, tore a curtain off a rod and draped it over Kate’s shoulders. With Herbert in her arms, she rejoined her two girls, who were safe in the house next door.
It took the firemen a full hour to contain the flames. The enclosed outside staircase, which Pulitzer had built at the suggestion of the fire marshal, had worked like a chimney in spreading the fire. As Kate and the children huddled in a neighboring house, the servants frantically tried to determine whether anyone was missing. Many of the staff members had fled from their top-floor bedrooms by climbing onto the roof and crossing over to adjacent houses.
One of the men said he had seen Morgan Jellett, Kate’s personal secretary, turn back when she reached the roof, to retrieve from her room a satchel containing her Christmas presents. When firemen entered the house, they found Jellett’s body on the third floor, the satchel in her hand. Near her lay the body of Elizabeth Montgomery, one of the governesses, dressed in her bathrobe and slippers. Also presumed dead was Rickey, a King Charles spaniel that had been a favorite of Lucille’s.
A telephone call was placed to Lakewood. Pulitzer was told of the fire and that his family was safe. News of the deaths was initially kept from him, out of fear that it might upset him. When he learned of it, he paid for the funeral expenses and sent donations to the fire and police departments. The flames destroyed three portraits of Kate, one of Joseph, and a vast collection of other paintings, as well as bronzes—including a Buddha brought back from the Orient by James Creelman when he covered the Chinese-Japanese War—and four large antique Gobelin tapestries. Kate’s diamond necklace from the French crown jewel collection and her famous $150,000 pearl necklace were never found. In all, the losses amounted to more than $500,000.
Kate and the children took rooms at the Hotel Netherland, while the servants were put up in a nearby rooming house. In the afternoon, Kate dispatched someone to obtain the measurements of all the servants so as to order new clothes for them. From Lakewood, Joseph arranged to rent the Henry T. Sloane mansion on East Seventy-Second Street for $17,500 a year. Built in French Renaissance style with a light granite exterior and white marble trim, it was, according to one newspaper, “considered to be one of the handsomest of all the newer New York residences.”
As Pulitzer’s fifty-third birthday neared, on April 10, 1900, he was hardly in a celebratory mood. He was bogged down in protracted negotiations with McKim, Mead, and White, the architectural firm he hired to design his new house on East Seventy-Third Street, where he had purchased a lot for $240,000. Like his neighbors, he wanted a mansion, but “an American home for comfort and use not for show or entertainment.” It was to be without a ballroom, music room, or picture gallery, and he especially wanted it to be free of French design and furniture. He also set a limit of $250,000, including decorations, a low figure that no one around him