Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [218]
In fact, not long after arriving in London, the man was propositioned in a Piccadilly restaurant by Grenadier Guardsmen who, according to Tuohy, “have a reputation, by the way, of augmenting their pay considerably by this avocation.” It seemed unlikely that Pulitzer’s solution for the man would work. “I am afraid that———’s fatal attraction will get him into trouble, in spite of himself, before long.”
From Bad Homburg, Pulitzer migrated to Étretat on the northern coast of France, and then to London for the fall. He had little interest in the mayoral race back in New York. In fact, his passion for politics was diminishing. The change was evident to careful readers of the editorial page.
One reader in particular was Pulitzer’s editor James W. Clarke. In preparation for the paper’s twentieth anniversary earlier in the year, he had examined the state of the editorial page. Clarke’s report read like a nonfiction version of Phillips’s novel. He found that over the years since Pulitzer had ceased being present at the paper, the page had lost its soul and the fires of reform had dimmed to a flicker. In its first years, when Pulitzer himself wrote the editorials, “politics, politics, politics dominated the page,” Clarke said. “They were hot, partisan politics, too. The tone was radical and at times violent. The masses were steadily championed, the millionaires and money power constantly denounced.
“There was no mincing of words in denouncing Republican Presidents and statesmen,” Clarke continued. “The page was sprinkled liberally with attacks upon other papers and upon men…. Plenty of epithets and personalities. Plenty of first-class invectives, some good satire—but humor very light. It was mostly hard pounding and expounding.”
This was a grim verdict for Pulitzer. His cherished editorial page had become like him, old and stodgy. He was bereft of friends, and the companions with whom he spent his days were paid to be with him. His most important connections to his beginnings in St. Louis—Davidson and Dillon—were dead. He was estranged from his only living sibling, who was also his last tie to his childhood in Hungary. Since their fights in 1883, Albert had gone to Europe, and neither man had written to the other after that. Joseph’s children were a disappointment and his family provided no comfort, broken up as it was on two continents. His stoic wife, Kate, remained willing at all times to fill the void, but Joseph had spurned her offers of companionship so frequently that she ceased to ask.
Writing to Joseph from Aix-les-Bains, Kate marked the moment. “Twenty-five years married, how strange it seems,” she said. “When we think that, a hundred years hence, not one of us now living will be alive to care or to know, to enjoy or to suffer, what does it all amount to? To a puff of smoke which makes a few rings and then disappears into nothingness and yet we make tragedies of our lives, most of us not even making them serious comedies.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
CAPTURED FOR THE AGES
In early 1904, the New York World’s writer Samuel L. Williams stepped down from a train in Detroit, Michigan. Williams, who had been afforded a rare honor for a staffer—riding and swimming with Pulitzer at Chatwold—was on a secret scouting mission. William Merrill, the dean of the World’s editorial page, was getting old, and his editorials were getting stale. Pulitzer wanted a young man in the shop who could write with a passion and verve equal to those of Phillips before he abandoned his editorial cubbyhole for fiction.
“I knew pretty well what JP wanted,” Williams recalled. “His young men had to know history, biography, have keen perception, and a concise, direct, simple, forceful style. In editorials he especially wanted clarity, brevity, and a punch in the last paragraph.” To find the right man, Williams had traveled from city to city, reading yards and yards of ponderous editorials.