The Phantom of Manhattan (13 page)

15

THE REPORT OF AMY FONTAINE

SOCIETY COLUMN,
NEW YORK WORLD
, 4 DECEMBER 1906

WELL, THERE ARE PARTIES AND THERE ARE PARTIES, but surely the one held last night at the new Manhattan Opera House following the triumphal rendition of
The Angel of Shiloh
must rank as the party of this decade.

Attending as I do on behalf of
World
readers nearly a thousand social events a year, I can still truly say I have never seen so many celebrated Americans under one roof.

When the last and final curtain came down after ovations and curtain-calls too numerous to count, the glittering audience began to drift towards the great West 34th Street portico where a jam of carriages awaited them. These were the unfortunates not coming to the party itself. Those in the audience with invitations tarried until the curtain went up again, then walked up the hastily erected ramp over the orchestra pit and up to the stage. Others who had not been able to make the performance came in through the stage door.

Our host for the evening was tobacco magnate Mr Oscar Hammerstein, who has designed, built and owns the Manhattan Opera House. He took centre stage and personally welcomed each guest coming from the auditorium. Among them were surely every name even remotely associated with New York, prominent among them the
World
‘s proprietor Mr Joseph Pulitzer.

The stage itself formed a magnificent backdrop to the party, for Mr Hammerstein had retained the Southern mansion that features in the opera, so that we were gathering under its very walls. Round the perimeter, stage-hands had quickly placed a range of genuine antique tables which groaned with food and drink, with a lively bar and six tenders to ensure no-one went thirsty.

Mayor George McClellan was quickly there, mingling with Rockefellers and Vanderbilts as the crowd swelled and swelled. The whole party was in honour of the young prima donna Vicomtesse Christine de Chagny who had just established such a magnificent triumph on that very stage, and the most notable people of New York could hardly wait to meet her. At the start she was resting in her dressing-room, bombarded with messages of congratulation, bouquets of flowers so numerous that they had to be sent down to the Bellevue Hospital at her personal request, and invitations to the greatest houses in the city.

Moving through the growing crowd I sought out people whose exploits might fascinate readers of the
New York World
and came across two young actors, D. W. Griffith and Mr Douglas Fairbanks, in earnest conversation. Mr Griffith, fresh from playing in Boston, informed me that he was toying with the notion of leaving New England for a sunny village outside Los Angeles, where he was interested in a (crazy-sounding) new form of entertainment called biographs. Apparently these involve moving images on a strip of celluloid. I heard Mr Fairbanks laughingly tell his fellow thespian that when he became a star on Broadway he might follow him to Hollywood, but only if anything ever became of the biographs. At this point a tall marine emerged from the portico of the mansion and announced in a loud voice: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, the President of the United States.’

I could hardly believe my ears, but it was true, and in seconds there he was, President Teddy Roosevelt, eyeglasses perched on his nose, beaming his cheery grin and moving through the crowd shaking hands with everyone. Nor had he come alone, for he has a deserved reputation for surrounding himself with the most colourful characters from our society. Within minutes I found my poor hand gripped in the giant fist of former heavyweight champion of the world Bob Fitzsimmons, while standing a few yards away were another former champion, Sailor Tom Sharkey, and the reigning champ, Canadian Tommy Burns. I felt a midget among these towering men.

At that moment there appeared in the doorway of the mansion the star herself. She descended to a rapturous round of applause led by the President, who advanced to be introduced by Mr Hammerstein. With old-world gallantry Mr Roosevelt took her hand and kissed it, to a cheer from the assembled throng. Then he greeted chief tenor Signor Gonci and the rest of the cast as Mr Hammerstein introduced them.

With the formalities over our roguish Chief Executive took the lovely young French aristocrat on his arm and escorted her round the room to introduce her to those he knew. She was especially delighted to meet Colonel Bill Cody, Buffalo Bill himself, whose Wild West Show is entrancing crowds across the river in Brooklyn. With him was none other than Sitting Bull, whom I had never seen before. Like many of us I recall as a small girl hearing with horror what the Sioux had done to our poor boys at the Little Big Horn, and yet here was this gentle old man, looking as old as the Black Hills themselves, giving the open-handed sign of peace to our President and his French guest.

Moving closer to the presidential entourage I heard Teddy Roosevelt introduce Mme de Chagny to his niece’s new husband and soon found a chance to have a few words with this startlingly handsome young man. He is just down from Harvard and studying at the Columbia Law School in New York. Of course, I asked him if he contemplated a career in politics like his famous uncle by marriage and he conceded that he might one day. So perhaps we will hear of Franklin Delano Roosevelt again.

With the party livening up, the food and drink circulating merrily, I noted that a piano had been positioned in one corner with a young man at the keyboard producing light-hearted music of our era in contrast to the more serious classical arias of the opera. He turned out to be a young Russian immigrant, still with a strong accent, who told me he had composed some of the airs he was playing himself and wished to become an established composer. Well, good luck, Irving Berlin.

In the early part of the festivities there seemed to be one person missing whom many would have liked to meet and congratulate - the unknown understudy who had taken over the role of the hospitalized David Melrose as the tragic Captain Regan. At first one thought his absence could be explained by the difficulty of removing the considerable make-up that covered most of his face. The rest of the cast was circulating freely, a pageant of dark blue and gold Union uniforms with the dove-grey coats of the Confederate soldiers. But even those who had been playing the ‘wounded’ soldiers of the hospital scenes had speedily removed their bandages and thrown away their rough crutches. And still the mysterious tenor was missing.

His appearance, when he came, was in the main doorway of the plantation house, atop the double stairway leading down to the stage where we were all enjoying the party. And what a brief appearance it was! Is this extraordinarily talented singer really that shy? Many of those below the portico missed him completely. But there was one who did not.

As he came through the doorway I saw that he had still retained his heavy make-up, the bandage that covered most of his face in the opera, allowing only his eyes to show, and a line of the jaw. He had his hand on the shoulder of the young treble who had so entranced us with his singing, Pierre, the son of Mme de Chagny. He seemed to be whispering in the boy’s ear and the child was nodding in understanding.

Mme de Chagny saw them at once and it seemed to me a shadow of fear passed over her face. Her eyes locked on those behind the mask, she went very pale, noticed her son beside the tenor in the Union blue and her hand flew to her mouth. Then she was running up the staircase towards the strange apparition, while the music played on and the crowd roared in conversation and laughter.

I saw the two speak intently to each other for several moments. Mme de Chagny took the tenor’s hand off her son’s shoulder and gestured to the boy to run down the stairs, which he did, no doubt seeking a well-deserved soda-pop. Only then did the diva suddenly laugh and smile, as if in relief. Was he complimenting her on the performance of a lifetime or did she seem to fear for the boy?

Finally I noticed him pass her a message, a slip of paper which she palmed and put inside her bodice. Then he was gone, back through the mansion door, and the prima donna descended the stairwell alone to rejoin the party. I do not think anyone else noticed this most strange incident.

It was well after midnight when the revellers, tired but extremely happy, departed for their carriages, their hotels and their homes. I, of course, hurried back to the offices of the
New York World
to ensure that you, my dear readers, would be the first to know what happened last night at the Manhattan Opera House.

16

THE TUTORIAL OF PROF. CHARLES BLOOM

FACULTY OF JOURNALISM, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK, MARCH 1947

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, YOUNG AMERICANS STRIVING one day to be great journalists, since we have never met before let me introduce myself. My name is Charles Bloom. I have been a working journalist, mainly in this city, for almost fifty years.

I began around the turn of the century as a copy-boy in the offices of the old
New York American
and by 1903 had persuaded the paper to raise me to the lofty status, or so it seemed to me, of general reporter on the City Desk, covering all the newsworthy events of this city on a daily basis.

Over the years I have witnessed and covered many, many news stories; some heroic, some momentous, some which changed the course of our and the world’s history, some simply tragic. I was there to cover the lonely departure of Charles Lindbergh from a mist-shrouded field when he set off across the Atlantic and I was there to welcome back a global hero. I covered the inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the news of his death two years ago. I never went to Europe in the First World War but saw off the Doughboys when they left this harbour for the fields of Flanders.

I moved from the
American
, where I had intimately known a colleague called Damon Runyon, to the
Herald Tribune
and finally the
Times
.

I have covered murders and suicides, Mafia gang wars and mayoral elections, wars and the treaties that ended them, visiting celebrities and the denizens of Skid Row. I have lived with the high and the mighty, the poor and the destitute, covered the doings of the great and the good and those of the mean and the vicious. And all in this one single city which never dies and never sleeps.

During the last war, though a bit long in the tooth, I arranged to be sent to Europe, flew with our B17s over Germany - which I have to tell you scared the hell out of me - witnessed the German surrender almost two years ago and as my final assignment covered the Potsdam Conference in the summer of ‘45. There I met the British leader Winston Churchill, to be voted out of office right in mid-conference and replaced by their new premier Clement Attlee; and our own President Truman, of course, and even Marshal Stalin, a man who I fear will soon cease to be our friend and become very much our enemy.

On my return I was due for retirement, elected to go before I was pushed, and received a kind offer from the principal of this faculty to join as a visiting professor and try to impart to you some of the things I have learned the hard way.

If anyone were to ask me what qualities make a good journalist, I would say there are four. First, you should always try not simply to see, to witness and to report, but to understand. Try to understand the people you are meeting, the events you are seeing. There is an old saying: to understand everything is to forgive everything. Man cannot understand everything because he is flawed, but he can try. So we seek to report back what really happened to those who were not there but wish to know. For in future time history will record that we were the witnesses; that we saw more of it than the politicians, civil servants, bankers, financiers, tycoons and generals. Because they were locked in their separate worlds, but we were everywhere. And if we witnessed badly, without understanding what we were seeing and hearing, we will only notate a series of facts and figures, giving as great credence to the lies we are always being told as to the truth and thus creating a false picture.

Secondly, never stop learning. There is no end to the process. Be like a squirrel. Store pieces of information and insight that come your way; you never know when that tiny piece of intelligence will be the clinching explanation to a jigsaw of the otherwise unexplainable.

Thirdly, you have to develop a ‘nose’ for a story. Meaning a kind of sixth sense, an awareness that something is not quite right, that there is something odd going on and no-one else can see it. If you never develop this nose, you will perhaps be competent and conscientious, a credit to the job. But stories will pass you by unsuspected; you will attend the official briefings and be told what the powers that be want you to know. You will report faithfully what they said, false or true. You will take your salary cheque and go home, a good job well done. But you will not, without the nose, ever stroll into the bar on an adrenalin high knowing that you have just blown apart the biggest scandal of the year because you noticed something odd in a chance remark, a column of doctored figures, an unjustified acquittal, a suddenly dropped charge and all your colleagues failed to spot it. There is in our job nothing quite like that adrenalin high; it is like winning a Grand Prix, to know that you have just filed a major exclusive and blown the competing media to hell.

We journalists are never destined to be loved. Like cops, this is something we just have to accept if we want to take up our strange career. But, though they may not like us, the high and the mighty need us.

The movie star may push us aside as he stalks to his limousine, but if the Press fails to mention him or his movies, fails to print his picture or monitor his comings and goings for a couple of months, his agent is soon screaming for attention.

The politician may denounce us when he is in power, but try ignoring him totally when he is running for election or has some self-praising triumph to announce and he will plead for some coverage.

It pleases the high and the mighty to look down on the Press but, boy, do they need us. For they live on and off the publicity that only we can give them. The sports stars want their performances to be reported, as the sports fans want to know. The society hostesses direct us to the tradesman’s entrance but if we ignore their charity balls and their social conquests they are distraught.

Journalism is a form of power. Badly used, power is a tryanny; well and carefully used it is a requirement without which no society can survive and prosper. But that brings us to rule four: it is not our job ever to join the Establishment, to pretend that we have, by close juxtaposition, actually joined the high and the mighty. Our job in a democracy is to probe, to uncover, to check, to expose, to unveil, to question, to interrogate. Our job is to disbelieve, until that which we are being told can be proved to be true. Because we have power, we are besieged by the mountebanks, the phoneys, the charlatans, the snake-oil salesmen - in finance, commerce, industry, showbiz, and above all politics.

Your masters must be Truth and the reader, no-one else. Never fawn, never cower, never be bullied into submission and never forget that the reader with his dime has as much right to your effort and your respect, as much right to hear the truth as the Senate. Remain therefore sceptical in the face of power and privilege and you will do us all credit.

And now, because the hour is late and you are no doubt tired of study, I will fill what remains of this period by telling a story. A story about a story. And no, it is not a story in which I was the triumphant hero, but just the opposite. It was a story that I failed to see unravelling all around me because I was young and brash and I failed to understand what I was really witnessing.

It was also a story, the only one in my life, that I never wrote up. I never filed it though the archives do retain the basic outlines that were released eventually to the Press by the Police Department. But I was there; I saw it all, I ought to have known but I failed to spot it. That was partly why I never filed it. But also partly because there are somethings that happen to people which, if exposed to the world, will destroy them. Some deserve it and I have met them: Nazi generals, Mafia bosses, corrupt labour chiefs and venal politicians. But most people do not deserve to be destroyed and the lives of some are already so tragic that exposure of their misery would only double their pain. All this for a few column inches to wrap tomorrow’s fish? Maybe, but even though I then worked for Randolph Hearst’s yellow press and would have been fired if the editor had ever found out, what I saw was too sad for me to file and I let it go. Now, forty years on, it matters not much any more.

It was in the winter of 1906. I was twenty-four, a New York street kid proud to be a reporter on the
American
and loving it. When I look back at what I was I stand amazed at my own impudence. I was brash, full of myself but understood very little.

That December the city was playing host to one of the most famous opera singers in the world, a certain Christine de Chagny. She had come to star in the opening week of a new opera house, the Manhattan Opera, which went out of business three years later. She was thirty-two, beautiful and very charming. She had brought her twelve-year-old son, Pierre, along with a maid and the boy’s tutor, an Irish priest called Father Joseph Kilfoyle. Plus two male secretaries. She arrived without her husband six days before her inaugural appearance at the opera house on 3 December and her husband joined her on a later ship on the 2nd, having been detained by the affairs of his estates in Normandy.

I know nothing of opera, but her appearance caused a major stir because no singer of her eminence had till then crossed the Atlantic to star in New York. She was the toast of the town. By a combination of luck and good old-fashioned chutzpah I had managed to persuade her to allow me to be her guide to New York and its various sights and spectacles. It was a dream of an assignment. She was so hounded by the Press that her host, the opera impresario Oscar Hammerstein, had forbidden all access to her before the gala opening. Yet here was I, with access to her suite at the Waldorf-Astoria, able to file daily bulletins on her itinerary and engagements. Thanks to this my career on the
American
City Desk was taking off in leaps and bounds.

Yet there was something mysterious and strange going on all around us and I failed to spot it. The ‘something’ involved a bizarre and elusive figure who seemed to appear and disappear at will and who clearly was playing some kind of role behind the scenes.

First there had been a letter, brought personally by the hand of a lawyer from Paris, France. By a complete coincidence I had helped deliver that letter to the headquarters of one of the richest and most powerful corporations in New York. There, in the boardroom, I caught a fleeting glimpse of the man behind the corporation, the one to whom the letter was addressed. He was staring straight at me from a spyhole in the wall, a terrifying face covered in a mask. I thought little more about it, and no-one believed me anyway.

Within four weeks the prima donna scheduled for the inaugural gala of the Manhattan Opera had been cancelled and the French diva invited over at an astronomical fee. From Paris, France. Rumours also started that Oscar Hammerstein had a secret and even richer backer, an invisible financier/partner who had ordered him to make the change. I should have suspected the connection, but did not.

On the day the lady arrived at the quayside on the Hudson, the strange phantom appeared again. This time I did not see him, but a colleague did. The description was identical: a lone figure in a mask, standing atop a warehouse watching the prima donna from Paris arrive in New York. Again I failed to see the connection. Later it was obvious that he had sent for her, overruling Hammerstein. But why? I found out eventually but by then it was too late.

As I said, I met the lady, she seemed to like me and allowed me into her suite for an exclusive interview. There her son unwrapped an anonymous present, a musical box in the form of a monkey. When Mme de Chagny heard the tune it played she looked as if she had been struck by lightning. She whispered, ‘“Masquerade”. Twelve years ago. He must be here,’ and still for me the light refused to go on.

She was desperate to trace the source of the monkey-doll, and I figured it must have come from a toyshop at Coney Island. Two days later we all went there, with me acting as guide to the party. Again, something very strange happened and once again no alarm bells rang.

The party consisted of me, the prima donna, her son Pierre and his tutor, Father Joe Kilfoyle.

Because I had no interest in the toys, I handed Mme de Chagny and her son over to the care of the Funmaster, who was in overall charge of the fair. I did not bother to enter the toyshop myself. I should have done, for I learned later that the man showing the child and his mother around was none other than a most sinister figure calling himself Malta, whom I had seen weeks earlier while delivering the letter from Paris, but then he had gone by the name of Darius. Later I learned from the Funmaster, who was present throughout, that this man had offered his services as an expert on toys, but in truth spent his time quietly interrogating the boy about his parentage.

Anyway, I walked by the sea’s edge with the Catholic priest while the boy and his mother examined the toys inside the shop. It seems there were racks of these monkey toys, but not one played the strange tune I had heard the first one play in her suite at the Waldorf-Astoria.

Then she went off with the Funmaster to examine a place called the Hall of Mirrors. Again, I did not go in. Anyway, I was not invited. Finally I returned to the funfair to see if the party was ready to leave and return to Manhattan.

I saw the Irish priest escorting the boy back to the coach we had hired at the train station and noticed but only vaguely that another coach was almost beside it. That was odd because the place was deserted.