Gore Vidal - Empire

Payne Whitney wanted to know what Hearst’s next move might be. Blaise said that he was not at liberty to say, which caused a degree of satisfying annoyance. But then Blaise was now in the world while Whitney and his Yale roommate, Del Hay, were still boys, on the outside.

“I heard from Del, in England. He said your sister…”

“Half-sister,” Blaise always said, and did not himself know why. It was not as if anyone cared.

“… was visiting the same house. I think Del likes her.” Whitney looked like a ruddy-faced Chinese boy; a very wealthy Chinese boy between his father, William Whitney, who had been involved in numerous streetcar and railroad ventures, many of them honest, and his doting uncle, Oliver Payne, known to Blaise’s father as one of the truly “filthy rich,” which always put Blaise, as a boy, in mind of a dark dirty man wearing a large diamond stickpin. Whitney ordered the Hoffman House special cocktail, the razzle-dazzle.

“I think Caroline likes him, too. But she does not exactly share her heart with me.” At the thought of Caroline, Blaise had started to think in French, a bad habit, because he found himself translating automatically in his head from French to often-stilted English. He wanted to be entirely, perfectly, indistinguishably American.

“I suppose they are all coming back, now Mr. Hay’s secretary of state. Just as I was about to go over, and start my grand tour.”

“Oh, this is the grand tour!” Blaise, perhaps too Gallically, used both hands to embrace the Hoffman House bar, a habit he must break, he reminded himself. American men never used their hands, except to make fists in order to punch one another. Once angered, Blaise’s own instinct was not to punch but to draw a knife, and kill.

Payne Whitney laughed. “Well, you were born on the grand tour. I haven’t made mine yet.” He finished his cocktail; and said good-by. At exactly one-thirty Blaise left the Hoffman House by the Twenty-fifth Street entrance. The sky was an intense cloudless blue. The wind was like gusts of cool electricity, vitalizing everyone, including the old hack-horses. A solitary motor car cruised noiselessly along the street; then the reason for the absence of noise became evident-the engine had stopped. The hack-drivers were delighted and, as always, someone shouted, “Get a horse!” Meanwhile, on every side, men-women, too-could be seen, puffing hard as they succumbed to the latest fad, bicycling.

Just opposite the huge marble Hoffman House was the small Worth House. Blaise was respectfully greeted by a chasseur in a splendid, for no reason, Magyar officer’s uniform. An ornate fretwork lift slowly lifted him to the third floor-the whole of it rented by Hearst; here he was greeted by George Thompson, a plump blond man in frock-coat and striped trousers. George had been the Chief’s favorite waiter at the Hoffman House. When the Chief had decided to set up housekeeping, he had asked George to keep house for him, which George was happy to do, regulating the traffic so that the Chief’s mother on one of her impromptu visits from Washington never actually met any of the ladies who were apt to be visiting her son at unconventional hours.

“Mr. Hearst is in the dining room, sir. He says you’re to join them, for coffee.”

“Who’s them?”

“He’s with Senator Platt, sir. Just the two of them.”

“Not much talk?”

“Conversation flagged, sir, after the fish. There has been mostly silence since, I fear.”

Blaise knew that he would be needed as a conversational buffer. Although Hearst was not particularly shy, he gave that appearance because no one had ever explained to him just how conversation worked. He had a good deal to say in his office; and even more to say in the composing room. But that was that. For Hearst the ideal evening would be a show, preferably one starring Weber and Fields, who would tell jokes that made Hearst laugh until he wept with delight. He also liked minstrel shows, chorus girls, late nights. Yet he neither drank nor smoked.

The dining room was panelled with dark walnut. Italian paintings hung over the sideboard and the mantelpiece; several leaned against the walls, as they waited their turn to be hung. Hearst bought objects with the same boyish greed that he bought writers and artists for his two newspapers.

Hearst was six feet two inches tall, heavily built and not very well put together, to Blaise’s critical eye; but then Blaise was a natural athlete, and though only five feet nine inches tall, he carried himself like a circus acrobat, according to Caroline. The muscular body balanced, often as not, on his toes, as if he were about to make a double somersault in the air. Blaise also knew that with his blue eyes and dark blond hair he was definitely, perhaps even permanently, handsome, unlike Hearst, whose pale face with its long thin straight nose and wide thin straight mouth was seriously uninteresting except for the close-set eyes, which were very difficult to look into, more like an eagle’s than a man’s-the palest blue irises rimmed black pupils that seemed to be forever acquiring whatever he looked at, the brain within a camera obscura in which, given time, he would have the whole world’s image fixed and filed. Hearst’s clothes were definitely “Broadway.” Today he wore a plaid suit in which there was a bit too much green and yellow; while the necktie was, simply, a sunset.

On Hearst’s right sat the white-haired benign Senator Platt, the Republican boss of New York State. Although Hearst himself was nominally a Democrat, he dealt even-handedly with politicians of every sort. They needed him, he needed them. But the Chief was not to be taken for granted. To everyone’s amazement, in the election of ’96, he had not supported his father’s friend the Major. Instead, Hearst attacked the Major as a puppet of the archetype Ohio boss Mark Hanna; he also tried to get Payne Whitney’s father to be the Democratic candidate. But when it was plain that William Whitney could not be nominated, the young William Jennings Bryan took the convention by storm. Bryan was a formidable populist orator who had but one speech, “the cross of gold,” on which the wealthy had crucified the American people, and the only way to get them down from the cross would be to increase the money supply by coining silver at a rate of sixteen silver units to one of gold.

Although every businessman in the country regarded Bryan as not only mad but potentially revolutionary, Hearst’s Journal had been the only major paper in New York to support the Democrats. Personally, Hearst thought that Bryan’s silver policy was absurd. But Hearst was a Democrat, with populist tendencies. He enjoyed supporting the party of the people against the rich. He also enjoyed Bryan’s marvellous oratory. But then who did not? Despite McKinley’s election, Bryan was still a great force in the country, and Hearst was his high priest in Babylon, as New York was known to the South and the West where Bryan’s strength lay. As George pulled out a chair for Blaise to sit at Hearst’s left, Senator Platt said, “I knew your father.”

“I heard him speak of you many times, Senator,” said Blaise, whose father had never mentioned Platt, or any senator for that matter, except one named Sprague who had married Kate Chase, to his father’s fury.

After Senator Platt’s confession and Blaise’s lie, the room was silent except for the sound of George, filling coffee cups. Plainly, the Chief and the Republican boss had exhausted their small talk while their big talk could never be shared with someone as junior as Blaise. The Senator took a cigar from a box that George offered him; then he asked, “Are you a Methodist, Mr. Sanford?”

Blaise felt his cheeks grow warm, and knew that they were now bright red. “No, sir. We are-my half-sister and I-Catholic.”