Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [253]
During the years after he gave up journalism, Albert wrote a romantic novel about a Napoleonic prince, Eugène de Beauharnais; toyed briefly with starting another newspaper in New York; and eventually settled down in Vienna, taking as a companion a young woman with whom he had a son. Like his brother, Albert suffered intensively from insomnia and depression—which doctors treating the wealthy called “neurasthenia”—and from other, undiagnosed ailments. For Joseph, it was sound that caused him great suffering. For Albert, it was changes in temperature and light.
Over time, Albert’s behavior grew increasingly odd and unpredictable. Earlier in the year, he had abruptly left Vienna and taken up residence in San Francisco, at the Fairmont Hotel. His demands on its staff and his unusual eating habits were the talk of the town. A newspaper in San Francisco published on its front page a one-day sample of what the Fairmont’s kitchen fed its eccentric guest. Rising before dawn, the corpulent gourmand consumed shredded wheat and two to eight baked apples with cream. A midday plate of Corinth raisins and vegetables would hold him over until a five-o’clock glass of lemon squash, effervescent with bicarbonate of soda. At seven, he sat down for a dinner of San Francisco oysters, clam chowder, veal, chicken, and sweet russet pears, all washed down with a bottle of Moselle wine.
While he was in San Francisco, Albert worked feverishly on his memoirs. He left the Fairmont and hid himself away in the remote Tavern Resort on the top of nearby Mount Tamalpais. There he drew the ire of other guests by rising before the sun to begin typing, knocking over chairs in his room, and requesting special trains when the scheduled ones had ceased running up the mountain. The novelist Gertrude Atherton claimed that at one point he burst uninvited into her rooms while showing friends around.
By fall, his memoir complete, Albert returned to Vienna. He was despondent. He called on Dr. Max Neuda, his physician and friend. The two discussed the works of Baruch Spinoza, Albert’s favorite philosopher. On the morning of October 4, as was his practice, his companion read to Albert from the morning newspapers. Among the stories was one of a man afflicted with insomnia who had committed suicide. “Wenn ich nur Mut dazu hätte,” Albert said. “If only I had the courage.” He asked his companion to leave him alone. When she departed, he went to the druggist and purchased a poisonous substance, probably a diluted form of prussic acid then used for the treatment of neuralgia.
There are two kinds of suicides: one in which the person is crying for help; the other in which death is sought. Albert wanted the latter. After drinking the potion, he took up his revolver, pressed the barrel to his right temple, and pulled the trigger.
Joseph learned of his brother’s death from a reporter who called on him at his house in Berlin. Though only a 325-mile train ride separated him from where his brother lay in a morgue in Vienna, Joseph did not go. Instead he sent Thwaites, with several thousand German marks.
Reaching Vienna, Thwaites drove out to the Zentralfriedhof, the final resting place for many of the city’s most famous residents. There, in the mortuary of the Old Jewish section, he found Albert, covered with a white cloth, in a cheap wooden box. “No money having been traced, the millionaire was about to be buried as a pauper,” Thwaites said. “The face was quite unmarred. The bullet had ranged upward through the temple, making the exit at the back of the head on the left side. A terrible wound.”
Using Joseph’s money, Thwaites purchased a better casket and paid for flowers. The following day, led in song by a Jewish male chorus, a small group accompanied the casket in a long procession to the burial plot that Neuda had purchased for Albert. At the graveside, it was left to the doctor to provide a eulogy. Recalling Albert’s visit to him and their philosophical chat a few days prior, he said, “It little occurred to me then, that this visit and this discussion