Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [235]
There still was no truce between the father and his son in exile, despite Joe’s endless apologies for any unintended slights. The exile would continue. “There is not one scintilla of a shadow of a shadow, or one shade of a scintilla of a shadow of reason for the thought that I even contemplated your coming to New York last year, this year or next year,” Joseph wrote Joe a month after the dinner.
“I do not expect perfection and Lord knows I am indulgent enough and affectionate enough and weak enough in my children,” he continued. “But I leave you under no delusion; I must say that if you should work ten times as hard with a hundred times the talent you possess, it would still be no equivalent or recompense for the constant pain and suffering and distress, mental, moral and consequently physical, by day and by night, and almost every waking hour of the night and day, you have caused me this winter before and certainly one winter before that.”
Joseph’s somber mood had worsened by the time he reached Maine in July. After giving thirteen years of selfless service to an impossible boss, Alfred Butes told Pulitzer he had accepted an offer to work for the British newspaper magnate Alfred Harmsworth, who recently had been given the title Baron Northcliffe. Pulitzer had known the British publisher since first renting houses in England in the 1890s. The two had much in common. Northcliffe, like Pulitzer, had begun his working life as a reporter. By his thirties, he had become his nation’s preeminent newspaper publisher. Also, they both discovered that gaining power took a toll on friendships. “I am the loneliest man in the world,” Pulitzer once told Northcliffe. “I cannot afford to have friends. People who dine at my table one night find themselves arraigned in my newspaper the next morning.”
That Butes went to work for Northcliffe made the desertion all the more painful. Pulitzer had assumed Butes would always remain with him, but signs of trouble had been long evident and might have been noticed by a boss who was sensitive to the feelings of those surrounding him. Butes, who was English, had a wife and child he hardly ever saw. Instead, he accompanied Pulitzer to Europe in the spring, Chatwold in the summer, Jekyll Island in the winter, and New York for occasional stays. “I am a miserable alien,” he had told Seitz several years before.
The break cost Butes an inheritance his boss had intended for him, and it destroyed Northcliffe’s friendship with Pulitzer. Norman Thwaites was given the unfortunate task of consoling Pulitzer. The two went for a horseback ride in the woods at Bar Harbor. “I sought to keep his mind engaged by bits of news from the day’s papers,” Thwaites said. But Pulitzer didn’t respond, so Thwaites became silent.
“Well, why don’t you talk?” Pulitzer suddenly said, swinging at Thwaites with his riding crop. “Is there no news in the paper? Dammit, man, talk, talk!”
When Thwaites explained that he had been talking for an hour, Pulitzer “relented at once and, after apologizing, he bade me to tell him why he was treated so cruelly.”
In the fall, Harold Stanley Pollard, who had joined Pulitzer’s cadre of assistants in 1905 after a brief tenure at the New York Times, went to Paris on a mission to determine what progress Rodin had made on the bust. At first he was turned away from the studio because Rodin was not there, but Pollard persuaded the