Gore Vidal - Empire

“That’s what I like!” They were seated in the Chief’s office, overlooking Park Row. Hearst had rented the second and third floors of the Tribune Building, that monument to the honest founder of all that was best-if hectoring-in modern journalism, Horace Greeley. From Hearst’s window the domed City Hall was visible while the magnificent new Pulitzer Building was not visible, unless you put your head as far as you could out the window and looked up the block and so saw the skyscraper headquarters of “the enemy” World .

“Well, the other end of putting out a paper depends partly on how much money you’ve got to spend and partly on how good you are at keeping the folks interested in… in…”

“In Crime and Underwear?” Blaise was brash.

The Chief frowned uncomfortably. “I don’t use words like that,” he said, somewhat primly. “But the folks like scandal. That’s true. They also need to be looked out for because there’s no one in a city like this who will take the side of the average citizen.”

“Not even the politicians?”

“ They are what you have to save the folks from, if you can. I suppose you’ll want to invest in a paper.” Hearst looked at a number of random tear-sheets on the floor; they would, once he’d arranged them in order, become the Sunday Journal .

“As soon as I know what I’m doing, if I’ll ever know, of course. You don’t learn much at Yale, I’m afraid.”

“I was kicked out of Harvard, and glad to go. Well, you can start in here anytime; and we’ll see what happens.” Not long after this exchange, Hearst had declared war on Spain and won it. Now he would free Captain Dreyfus. Defeat Colonel Roosevelt. Start a dozen new papers. Everything seemed possible except, and the Chief looked Blaise in the eye, the face as tense as that of Bonaparte behind him, “I’ve used up all the money Mother gave me, and we’re still in the red.”

“Ask her for more.” Blaise was brisk; he saw what was coming.

“I don’t like to. Because…” The high voice gave out. The Chief scratched his chin; then his ear. “I saw Houghteling yesterday. At the Fifth Avenue Hotel.”

“He’s a good Republican .” Blaise braced himself for the assault.

“I suppose so. But he don’t like pink shirts any more than I do. He tells me your father’s will is coming up for probate.”

“Well, it’s a slow process.” The Colonel had been killed in February; now it was September. The process of the law had stopped during the summer. “It might not be before the first of the year.”

“Houghteling says next week.” The Chief’s voice was flat. “There’s a lot of money there.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Blaise was beginning to feel clammy. “Anyway there are two of us, my sister-half-sister-and me.”

“Now is the time to get in on the ground floor,” said Hearst. “Now’s your chance. I’ve got my eye on Chicago, Washington, Boston. I want a paper in every big city. You…” The voice trailed off.

“Aren’t I sort of young to be… a partner?” Blaise suddenly went on the offensive. Why, after all, should he be nervous with Hearst when he had-or would soon have-the money that Hearst needed?

“Well, no one said anything about you being a partner.” Hearst might have laughed if he had thought of it. But he did not; he continued to frown. “I guess you could certainly buy an interest.”

“Well, yes. I guess I could.” But Blaise had spent enough time with the Journal’s dispensers of red ink to know that everything belonged to Hearst, personally; and there was, thus far, no sort of “interest” that could be sold. Blaise chose not to press the matter. He had his own plan, which might, or might not, include the Chief. More to the point, “I really don’t know how much I’m going to end up with, or for how long,” he added cryptically.

“Well, that’s your affair.”

George was at the door. “Miss Anita Willson and Miss Millicent Willson to see you, sir.” George kept the straightest of faces.

“Tell them to wait in the parlor.” Hearst rose.

“Get on to Decker.”

“Yes, sir.”

As Blaise walked down the hall, he saw the Willson sisters, staring at themselves in a mirrored screen in the parlor. They were plump, pretty, blond. At the paper there were those who thought that the Chief favored Millicent, who was only sixteen; others thought that he preferred the older Anita; a few thought that he enjoyed each of them, either separately or together, according to what degree the imagination of the speculating journalist had been depraved. All agreed that the two girls were very effective as part of a dancing group called the Merry Maidens, currently appearing at the Herald Square Theater in The Girl from Paris . As George opened the front door for Blaise, the Chief must have entered the parlor, because there were delighted cries. “Oh, Mr. Hearst! Mr. Hearst! We never dreamed there was that much chocolate in the world!” The voices were tough Hell’s Kitchen Irish. Hearst’s response was not audible. George’s eyes became slightly more round. Blaise stepped into the elevator.

Park Row was crowded with end-of-day traffic. Streetcars rattled down the center of the street while smart and less smart carriages stopped at City Hall. Blaise made his way, tentatively, from street corner to curb, careful to avoid as best he could the mounds of horse manure that the Mayor had promised would be removed at least twice a day. Blaise tried to envisage a city without horses; in fact, he had already tried his hand at fantasy. In the Sunday Journal , he had described a future world of horseless carriages. As it was, the Chief himself drove a flashy French automobile, fuelled by gasoline. Unfortunately, the only vivid difference between a horseless future and the present would be the necessary and un-mourned absence of something that Blaise and the Sunday editor, the young indecorous Merrill Goddard, spent a whole morning trying to find euphemisms for. At the end, Goddard had shrieked, “Sanford, call it shit!”

Blaise smiled at the memory, and started unconsciously to mouth the word as he crossed the coupolaed hall at whose center a number of Tammany types had gathered about His Honor the Mayor, Robert Van Wyck, brother to the gubernatorial candidate.

But Blaise was doomed never to know what wisdom the Mayor was dispensing in the rotunda, because a tall old man with silver hair and rose-tinted side-whiskers, Dennis Houghteling, the Sanford family lawyer, signalled him from the marble staircase. “I have been with the Clerk of Wills,” he said in a low conspiratorial voice, the only voice that he had. Because the Colonel refused even to visit, much less live, in the United States, Mr. Houghteling had been, in effect, the Sanford viceroy at New York, and once a month he reported in careful detail the state of the Sanford holdings to its absent lord. Since Blaise had known Mr. Houghteling all his life, it was only natural that when it came time to probate the last of his father’s many wills, the matter would be entrusted to the senior partner of Redpath, Houghteling and Parker, attorneys-at-law.

“All is well,” whispered Houghteling, putting his arm through Blaise’s, and steering him to an empty marble bench beneath a statue of De Witt Clinton. “All is well as far as the law is concerned.” Houghteling began to modify; and Blaise waited, with assumed patience, for the lawyer to tell him what the problem was. Meanwhile, the Mayor was making a speech beneath the cupola. The vowels echoed like thunder while the consonants were like rifle shot. Blaise understood not a word.

“As we know, the problem is one of interpretation. Of cyphers; or of a single cypher to be precise-and its ambiguity.”