Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [228]
On the fourth visit to the studio, the painting neared completion. When Thwaites studied it, he thought it showed a genial, aging man with a beneficent countenance. But on this day Pulitzer was followed into the studio by a man who wanted an appointment with him. “Tell him to go away,” Pulitzer shouted. “A look of fury and impatience entirely changed the face of the subject, and Sargent contemplated the scene with keen interest, while making a dab or two on the canvas.”
In the end, with his final brushstrokes, Sargent captured the dual personalities of Pulitzer. “Hide, with a sheet of paper, one-half the face and you have a benevolent middle-aged gentleman,” said Thwaites. “Observe, now, the other half, and you have the malevolent, sinister and cruel expression of a Mephisto. Unconsciously, the painter had presented what he saw.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
FOREVER UNSATISFIED
His image preserved for posterity by one of the great portrait artists of the era, Pulitzer boarded the homebound Cedric on July 5, 1905. As he crossed the Atlantic, his secretaries read to him from stacks of accumulated copies of the World, a habit he rarely shed. The paper was dominated by front-page stories about an insurance scandal rocking New York.
The story had surfaced several months earlier, when twenty-nine-year-old James Hazen Hyde, heir to a vast insurance fortune, put on a costume ball for the cream of New York society. The event was held at Sherry’s, in a building on Fifth Avenue designed by Stanford White, with dining and reception rooms resembling those of French palaces. Actors, dancers, and musicians were hired. Waiters were costumed and wore makeup applied by the staff of the Metropolitan Opera. And even though it was the dead of winter, the rooms were decorated with wisteria, rosebushes, and heather to replicate the gardens of Versailles.
Many of Pulitzer’s friends and acquaintances attended the ball, as well as his son Ralph. Katherine Mackay was dressed as Phèdre, a queen of ancient Greece whose love affair and its murderous consequences were a popular subject in French theater. Her silvery costume had a train carried by two black children. The press feasted on every aspect of the event, providing readers with pages of details and illustrations. The party, Town Topics said, “rivaled in splendor all the celebrated fancy dress affairs that have been given in the history of New York.”
Under normal circumstance, the event would have receded from the front pages after a few days, and into New York lore. But the outlandish cost of the event—said to be around $50,000—provided Hyde’s business opponents with evidence they sought to prove his unsuitability to run his father’s Equitable Life Insurance Society. The ensuing corporate battle, which eventually embroiled all three of the nation’s largest life insurance firms, lifted a veil of secrecy hiding extensive corruption and misuse of funds. The revelations were milked for all they were worth by the press. They shocked readers because the money had been entrusted to the firms to protect working-class families from destitution in the event their provider died.
The World aggressively followed every lead in the scandal, and by the time Pulitzer boarded the Cedric it had run 122 front-page stories. As the ship’s engines drove the liner across the ocean, his secretaries droned on about the Equitable affair. He grew unhappy. When he first heard of the scandal, he had urged his staff to pursue the story. Now he thought the paper had gone too far, and