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By Root 2464 0

1907, Kate’s trunks stood packed in her bedroom in New York. Joseph had admitted that he could use her company, and Kate had booked passage to France. But then a telegram arrived. It announced that he was out of his depression and had no need for her care. Although she was pleased that he was better, Kate’s anger flared. “There is one thing you must never in your life do again,” Kate told him, “that is complain that your family has neglected and deserted you. For I have kept copies of my telegrams urging and telling you to let me join you and also urging you to let the children join you, both of whom were only too willing to go. So you must get that morbidly false idea out of your mind.” It was advice he would continue to ignore.

“You would be so much happier, dear,” Kate insisted, having regained her composure, “if you would only give people the benefit of the doubt and not assume they must necessarily be always in the wrong and that they intend either way to hurt or to injure you.”

To her pleasure, the World’s bureau chief in Paris, Stephen MacKenna, persuaded Rodin to travel to Menton in southern France, where Joseph was staying, to execute a bust for the princely sum of 35,000 francs. Joseph, who had taken to the idea, wanted the finished work to be displayed in the Pulitzer Building in New York. But he remained his prickly self as the day neared for the sculptor’s arrival. “I can’t adapt myself to his pleasure, he must adapt himself to mine, come with me on my ride, not touch me in the afternoon,” Pulitzer demanded. “Also, he should definitely have some idea of my character and moods and should make allowances for them. I don’t care a damn how ugly he makes me, but he shouldn’t misrepresent me. There are elements of romance and tragedy.

“As to the sittings,” Pulitzer informed MacKenna, “I cannot possibly give him more than one sitting a day as I am an invalid suffering from insomnia, usually tired.” When Rodin arrived in mid-March, Pulitzer found him charming—until the artist asked him to remove his shirt, as he did with every male subject. Pulitzer, who possessed an exaggerated Victorian prudishness, refused. Rodin threatened to leave. He said he could not even begin to do a bust without studying the neck and torso of a subject. With the room cleared of everyone save Rodin’s assistant, the sitting began with a shirtless Pulitzer.

Pulitzer’s French had grown rusty and Rodin spoke no English, so the two conversed through an interpreter. “But his great personality was easily seen,” said Rodin. “His head was that of a master of destiny who by sheer will had risen from a humble beginning to the level of more fortunate fellowmen; then by same force had [reached] one still higher beyond them, where they could not follow because they lacked his character.”

Pulitzer asked Rodin to show him as a sighted person. “What I see in your face I will show, and not what you see,” Rodin curtly replied. “Blind though he was,” the sculptor recalled years later, “he was a great dominant force, and this characteristic I tried to express in my bust of him.” Rodin returned to Paris, after three weeks in Menton, convinced that Pulitzer did not have long to live. He told his atelier to lose no time in making the marble bust and the bronze casts.

The sittings with Rodin were the final personal service that MacKenna, who had run the Paris bureau since 1903, rendered for his boss. Unlike Tuohy in London, MacKenna resented doing errands for Pulitzer. Back in Paris, he received a telegram from Pulitzer ordering him to buy six chickens and six ducklings and deliver them to the Gare de Lyon for shipment to Menton. “Refuse de vous acheter six poulets et six canetons; ceci est ma demission,” MacKenna wired back. “Refuse to buy you six chickens and six ducklings; this is my resignation.”

On April 10, 1907, Pulitzer turned sixty. From southern France, he sent orders for his staff in New York and St. Louis to celebrate the occasion. Sixty editors from the World and sixty from the Post-Dispatch came together for sumptuous meals at Delmonico’s restaurant