Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [212]
All the income from his newspapers and investments was put to use. Pulitzer was now spending almost $250,000 a year for household expenses and travel. This was more than 1,000 times what the average American earned. Though his newspaper made money by attacking wealth and privilege, Pulitzer’s lifestyle had become indistinct from that of his neighbors on Fifth Avenue, in Bar Harbor, or at Jekyll Island who earned their fortunes on the backs of workers. When Pulitzer smoked cigars, they were Travita, among the finest made in Havana; when he drank, it was Perrier-Jouët Brut or Rüdesheimer Berg Orlean, which he imported by the hundreds of bottles; and when he ate, it was quail, duck, or goose.
The new mansion on the Upper East Side was taking shape on the drawing boards of McKim, Mead, and White and was the equal of those the firm had designed for its other wealthy clients. It included an indoor swimming pool and even the previously prohibited ballroom. It is doubtful, though, that the firm ever had a more demanding or difficult client. The partners made their artist work on Sundays, and then another artist would redraw the plans with large black lines, in hopes that Pulitzer could discern the shape. Additionally, scale models were built so he could feel the contours of the house. Frequently the work had to be rushed so as to catch a ship bound for Germany or England or wherever else Pulitzer might be at the time.
Just when matters seemed settled, Pulitzer would drive the architects to the end of their patience. “I was in despair when I got your letter,” said Stanford White, in a typical moment of exasperation after receiving yet more alterations when construction was under way. “I will do whatever I can, but I do not see how it will be possible to have all you want done by Saturday,” he warned. “I know one thing, and that is we have certainly made twice as many studies, and done twice as much work on this as we have ever done on any interior work before, and it is pretty hard where so many contrary orders are given, and so many changes made to know where we stand or what to do.”
On September 6, 1901, the anarchist Leon Czolgosz shot two bullets into President William McKinley, who had been touring the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. For six days McKinley lingered close to death as Americans feared that an assassin had taken a president’s life for the third time in less than four decades. Pulitzer was so anxious that even though the World had reporters on the scene, he sent Hosmer, who was a medical doctor, to Buffalo to provide him with up-to-date reports. Hosmer’s telegrams back to Chatwold forecast the worst. Indeed, on September 14, McKinley died, and Pulitzer’s archenemy Theodore Roosevelt became president.
In the circulation war between the World and the Journal, McKinley’s death provided an unexpected boon for Pulitzer’s paper. Among the raft of anti-McKinley articles that had appeared in the Journal, there had been two unfortunate ones that appeared to suggest an assassination was in order. An outcry erupted against Hearst. He was hanged in effigy in a number of cities, and boycotts of the Journal were undertaken. “Large piles remain unsold on the stands and it is being execrated popularly,” Seitz told Pulitzer a few days after McKinley’s death. “You hear little groups discussing it and offensive remarks being made in cars about people who have it in their possession.”
For the first time since his arrival in New York, Pulitzer’s competitor was on the ropes. Hearst changed the name of his paper to the American and Journal, later dropping “Journal,” and lay low. His circulation dropped calamitously and fell 75,000 behind that of the World. Pulitzer’s editors wanted to join the lynch mob. “For the first time in five years, we now have the chance to part company with the Journal in the public mind,” Seitz told Pulitzer. But Pulitzer