Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [236]
“He had neither made the eyes perfect nor sightless. He has given one the slight dropping difference we notice in comparison with the other,” Pollard said. The concierge slowly turned the white marble bust. “I caught a sudden view, half profile, half full front. It was you as I have seen you in the quiet of the study when everything around you was quiet and peaceful, when you were thinking and planning those things that have made both history and success.”
At last, the attendant threw the cover back over the bust.
“Is it finished?” asked Pollard.
“Yes, it is finished,” he replied.
Pollard was not the only man on a mission for Pulitzer. In early December, the London bureau chief James Tuohy and his family traveled to Leith—in Scotland, north of Edinburgh—to join Arthur Billings for the launch of Pulitzer’s new yacht. For more than a year, Billings, who had taken leave from his post at the World, had supervised the building of the yacht at the famous Ramage and Ferguson shipyard. Painted white, and christened the Liberty, the 300-hundred-foot yacht lacked only its engines, funnels, and mast. With a bottle of champagne, Tuohy’s daughter Jane launched the ship down the ramp of its dry dock and into the water.
The $1.5 million Liberty was the culmination of a long search for a suitable oceangoing vessel. Pulitzer had wanted to own a yacht ever since his days on Jay Gould’s in 1883. After he became blind and infirm, Kate had pressed him to find one. His earlier discouraging episode as a yacht owner almost cured him of his desire. But in 1905, at Kate’s urging, he began the search in earnest. He considered half a dozen yachts but none seemed suitable. “The great difficulty is that a vessel which would seem very silent to others may be very noisy to me—because of my excessive sensibility to noise,” Pulitzer wrote to one seller.
As a result, the Liberty had been specially designed to minimize noise, from its bulkhead to its every door and porthole. Once it passed its sea trials, Pulitzer anticipated being able to travel around the globe in a cocoon of silence, served by a forty-five-man crew and a twelve-man staff of personal assistants to read aloud, play music, or provide conversation. “I certainly expect to spend a large part of life-remains I have on the sea,” Pulitzer wrote to Hosmer, who had logged more miserable nautical miles traveling with him than any other man. “You know Pulitzer’s sea-ways are very far from safe,” he joked about himself.
On a Sunday morning in July 1908, the New York World’s editor Arthur Clarke was silently sorting papers at his desk on the dais in the twelfth-floor newsroom when the telegraph editor came running in.
“Arthur, Joseph Pulitzer is in the reception room!” he exclaimed.
Clarke smiled but said nothing. Since the opening of the Pulitzer Building in 1890, its owner had been there only twice. If there was to be an apparition, Sunday morning was an unlikely time.
“Arthur, I’m not kidding you,” the editor begged. “Joseph Pulitzer is outside. I saw him when I got off the elevator. He’s resting on the couch. Seitz, Lyman, Arthur Billings, and a swarm of secretaries are with him. In one minute the whole crowd will be in here.”
Clarke remained unmoved, ignoring the frantic excitement of the editor. Then he heard Pulitzer’s unmistakable voice. “I’ll go to Van Hamm’s office, if you say so, but I won’t go any damned roundabout way.