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In the first week in August, 1914, I was casting for bass across the lily pads of a stretch of placid waters in southern Quebec where, with Mrs. Cobb and our little daughter, I had been spending the summer. Up the lake from our rented camp at the lower end came a French-Canadian rowing a guide boat. Having first collected his fee for acting as courier, he handed me a telegram.

It was dated at Philadelphia. It was made up of two sentences—a paraphrase from an old darky joke which was in my own repertoire of old darky jokes; that and the tag line of an ancient and honorable wheeze lately resuscitated by the comedian, Frank Tinney.

It read as follows:

“Seems like this here war has done busted right in our face. Your ship sails Thursday.”

That was all but for me that was enough. Because it was signed, George Horace Lorimer, and by then, having served him for upwards of two years, I was fairly well acquainted with Lorimer’s style of doing things.

The same evening I caught a local train for Montreal and that night caught a through train for the States. In the morning, at New York, I was met by one of Lorimer’s deputies who had brought along an emergency passport, a sheaf of credentials vouching for me as correspondent of the Saturday Evening Post, passage to Liverpool on the American liner St. Paul sailing the following day which, sure enough, was a Thursday; also one of those “To-whom-it-may-concern” letters from Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan commending me to the good graces of all representatives of our government in Europe; likewise an automatic revolver, a letter of credit, a sheaf of travelers’ checks and a little black handbag containing six thousand dollars in double eagles and weighing nearly forty pounds, this for expense money in case letters of credit and checks were not being honored abroad when I arrived.

Inside of ten days, after various small vicissitudes and adventurings, I found myself bouncing via chartered taxicab into the back edges of a spirited brush between German Uhlans and Belgian cavalry amongst the trampled poppies of a wayside wheat field on the road from Brussels to Louvain. I aimed to show this laconic chief of mine that, in a crisis, he couldn’t move much faster than I could; and by a combination of an amateur’s fool luck with main strength and awkwardness, I had made out, up to this point anyhow.

Lorimer was like that. He had a tremendous flair for restrained and under-played dramatics. This sense of theatricalism was his by honest inheritance. His father before him was a promising boy tragedian newly come from Scotland who, getting himself converted at a revival meeting in Louisville, studied for the ministry and became the most brilliant pulpit orator of the Baptist church in America. His first charge was at Paducah; the son missed being born there by a scant margin of months. It takes a great actor to be a great preacher. Here was offered testimony that a great natural actor could be a very great editor. Lorimer never had to rehearse his scenes or plot his discreet histrionics beforehand. They came along, just so. But they neither clogged up his judgments nor retarded his functions. He could go to a decision more speedily than any chief I ever had and always that decision was an unqualified “yes” or a flat-out “no,” never an “I’m not sure” or a “Let’s think it over.” Often enough then, if the answer had been yes, he would squint those chilled-steel eyes of his and rear back and patiently, painstakingly prove to the fellow who’d brought it to him that, as it stood now, the idea was only part of an idea and here, jumping full-grown and full-fleshed out of Lorimer’s darting mind would be the rest of the notion, the meatiness which rounded it out and made of it a project complete. For that merit I have yet to meet his equal. In the same breath he’d be warmly affectionate in his personal attitude for an associate or a contributor, and coldly, almost brutally severe in his professional dictum on that same individual. It was as though sundered lobes of his brain were operating independently—like the average Frenchman in the Great War who simultaneously could dedicate half of his being to gallant service and unstinted sacrifice for a beleaguered country and the other half to keeping books on what the Allies were going to owe him for the use of his land and his property whilst they were engaged in helping to save that land and that property from the invader. I’d say the French are the most logical patriots that ever lived. They never let heroism interfere with profits. All of which, I claim, helps to explain why we paid the debt to Lafayette with compound interest within two weeks after the first contingent of the A.E.F. landed on French soil in ’17 and the boys started exchanging dollars for local money. There was the time when the national slogan should have been pronounced “Vive la Francs.”

First and last and one way or another, I worked with or for a good many outstanding editorial alcaldes during my more active days as a newspaperman and as a writer for magazines and syndicates and book publishers—but still, I hope, remaining in essence a newspaperman. Let’s see?—there’s a long string of them stretching away:

There was Lorimer, the benevolent satrap, delighting in his deliberately cultivated trick of assigning a man to an important commission with a casual and seemingly an indifferent gesture; his other trick of showing—or rather not showing—his satisfaction for an assignment well done, by a quickly canceled-out grin on his lean shrewd face and in due season, a substantial reward which seemingly never came through his suggestion but on the publishers’ initiative. Lorimer was the one who first realized that in a country dedicated to business, fiction with a business background—in other words the romance of business—would make popular reading and capitalized that invention to the agreeable tune of millions of circulation.

There was—and haply still is—roly-poly Bob Davis, formerly Frank A. Munsey’s Man Friday (and all the rest of Munsey’s work-a-day week too, if the truth only were known) and now, spry as a ferret at seventy-odd, the globe-trotting columnist for the New York Sun. In his prolonged career as the imperator of divers popular periodicals, Bob Davis yielded plots as the roe shad yields her roe, only Bob spawned close to shore and the sprat all lived and swam off as novels or short stories or pertly up-to-date articles, usually with some other fellow’s name on them as author. Whether Lorimer, with his curtly expressed, outwardly careless teachings, developed more new writers and perhaps discovered more in the first place than Davis brought along by his nursing and mothering technique, was for years a subject for discussion when writing people got together, and possibly the cause for some mild jealousy between the two men. On Lorimer’s side was the advantage of a generous budget. He loved to pay and pay well, provided the notion of better pay came from Lorimer and not from some chap seeking to dicker for a higher wage. Whereas Davis, who under the niggardly, cheese-paring Munsey system, was sorely circumscribed, had to use blandishments for money and bestow encouraging words in place of fat checks.

Likewise Davis steered his craft, double shifts, with a mighty meager crew, while Lorimer could hire such subalterns as he needed at high prices and moreover he had for his first aide—that’s no pun—Adelaide Neall whose name as associate editor still flies at the Post’s masthead. To my way of thinking she rates with another yet active veteran, Mrs. William Brown Meloney, as a splendidly capable force among women editors. Be all this as it may, Lorimer and Davis, in the matter of spying out fresh talent, were the Christopher Columbuses of their day. And they were twin Burbanks when it came to the nurturing and cultivation of the same.

Then there was the smiling gentle little giant, Ray Long—may the good saints rest his troubled soul!—who, finding life had snarled up on him, looked about for the nearest exit, which was suicide, and took it. I treasure the memory of this dwarfish friend of mine, whose brain was as sharp as his heart was kindly; who could, with a wired message inspire a struggling wight or revive a despairing one, could with a deft hand soothe the ruffled plumage of some successful—and therefore nine times out of ten, temperamental—writer. It was Long who worked such wizardry with type faces that he made captions to tell tales and by-lines to illustrate the text. Here he stood alone. Often I’ve watched him while he balanced the blurbs and shifted the display letterings until they fairly jumped out of the printed page and said “Boo!” in the reader’s face.

There was quiet, shy Harry Burton, with a sense of news values as timely as today’s stop press bulletins, who succeeded Long on the Cosmopolitan; Arthur Vance who could in advance come as near to interpreting the shifting, fickle intangible thing called public taste as any of his contemporaries; Roy Howard, that grinning small Buddha of journalism who for all his consequence as head of one of our biggest newspaper chains and one of our greatest press services, will never quit being a reporter and a corking good one; Lord Northcliffe,^[1] the most egotistical man I ever met and with a thousand excellent reasons for being the most egotistical man anybody ever met; Colonel Joe Patterson of the Medill-Patterson-McCormick tribe and he having, as the late General Nathan Bedford Forrest likewise had it, the faculty of being able to figure “Whar hell is goin’ to bust loose next and git thar fust with the mostest men”—including staff photographers; Will Lengel, the best first mate that ever stood watch on an editorial bridge, and if some publishing mogul but had the wit to sign him on, what a skipper he’d make, bringing the ship into port laden with rich cargoes!

Next I think of another, one who was as companionable and as simple and gallant and gracious as any human being could be—John Siddell of the American Magazine. With a malignant growth gnawing at his vitals, he gave no sign of his agony and his despair to a living soul and carried on until, like a valiant true soldier, he literally fell down and died at his post among the front line trenches. It was Siddell who discovered, for magazine purposes, what Charles Dickens before him discovered—that common people are interested in reading about common people.

In the gallery, I must insert a miniature vignette of Sam Blythe, the sage of Pebble Beach and the grand old man of Pelican Camp in the Bohemian Club’s famous redwood grove above San Francisco. Because Sam Blythe later became the biggest Washington correspondent of his day and the keenest commentator on the Washington scene and on national politics (What a nose to smell out shams and what a rapier to puncture gas balloons with!) a good many in our game seemingly have forgotten that, while still a very young man, he was the successful city editor of a daily and the equally successful managing editor of a monthly.

Nor should I overlook the three most notable city editors, barring only the inimitable “Boss” Clarke of the Sun’s morning edition, who were active in the New York that I learned to love when I went there in 1904. It was O. Henry’s New York then, and Richard Harding Davis’ and “Chimmie” Fadden’s. It was beginning to be the New York of Frank O’Malley and Frank Case and “Bugs” Baer. Odd McIntyre hadn’t come along yet but was due any minute. And Will Rogers was being delayed en route.^[2]

One of this trio of top-hands was gnome-like Tommy Dieuaide of the Evening Sun with his perpetual Monna Lisa smile, and one was that lanky rawboned Kentuckian, Keats Speed of the Evening Journal, two men much alike in temperament and method and both blessed with the gift of being able to grow calmer and calmer whilst everybody about them became more and more excited over some whopping news break. And of course the third would just naturally have to be Charley Chapin of the Evening World who, for his cruelties, his uncanny discernment, his generalship, his arrogance and his freakishness, is rapidly becoming a sort of Aryan myth in journalistic mythology. Chapin walked alone, a tremendously competent, sometimes an almost inspired tyrant with a kind of occult instinct for detecting an unsuspected or craftily hidden sensation. In him was combined something of Caligula, something of Don Juan, a touch of Barnum, a dash of Narcissus, a spicing of Machiavelli. Features, specials, comics, supplements and all such circulation-getting side issues he despised. By his estimates these merely cluttered up the space which should be devoted to what was immediate, what was exciting or distressing or funny in the day’s grist. His idol, and the only one he worshiped except his own conceitful image, was the inky-nosed, nine-eyed, clay-footed god called News. He walked within the shadow of tragedy. You felt it even while you were torn between admiration for his craftsmanship and hatred for his city room meannesses. And when this lurking nemesis caught up with him and he went to Sing Sing under sentence for wife murder and died there, few of the sweated oarsmen who manned Chapin’s galleys were surprised, since some such outcome was for such a man inevitable, and I’m afraid not all of them felt compassion for him.

Each one of all these with whom I had direct contacts exhibited certain admirable traits—traits which, I’d say, invariably mark your real editor. If the script turned in by a man who has been assigned to a particular job or who had volunteered to handle it, measurably approximated what had been expected of him, he sent it to the typesetters substantially as it was written, making as few changes in the text as possible and preferably making none at all. To be sure this applied more to the leisurely editing of magazine material than to the chopping-box method of a newspaper shop where the corps work always against that relentless enemy, the clock; where there are trains to be caught and dead lines to be met and a harassed make-up man roaring in to announce that already tons of overset encumber the imposing stones, and stories are spilling out between the column rules. Then, of course, good stuff must be slashed to the quick and the adorable little brain children of the rewrite staff die in windrows on the city room floor.

Especially in the magazine offices the betraying sign of an editor who isn’t sure of himself and so can’t be sure of anyone else, is that he worries to a lather and drives competent contributors half crazy by futile, meaching little suggestions. Doesn’t Mr. Soft Lead agree with him that it would strengthen the introduction were the second paragraph shifted to where the third paragraph now is? He has been fretting over it all night and his poor head is fit to split. Would Miss Fountain Penn consent to the substitution on Page 24 of the word “pale” for her choice “pallid”? With the context, “pale” is stronger, somehow, more emphatic. At least so it seems to him.

Or, on his own daredevil initiative this poor overwrought little Jack Horner boldly takes the plunge and changes a comma into a semicolon and then rears back and puts his thumbs into the armholes of his vest and twiddles his fingers. In other words, to demonstrate that he is an honest-to-God expert with a blue pencil and a throbbing intellect and everything, he must do his daily dozen of footling stunts. Gehenna is paved with good intentions and full of fuss-budget editors.

There were a thousand things about Chapin I didn’t like but one thing about him—and most other authentic newspaper editors—I did like. No matter how big the story might be, or with how many ramifications and on-piling developments, Chapin, having set this man and that on the stint, thereafter left them to their several devices. For him was no harassing of the legmen over the telephone, no shouted demands that all concerned make sure every possible pump was being siphoned, every possible rat hole being watched; and, what would have been the worst pesterment of all, no nervous hovering over some hard-pressed rewrite man who, with his fingers askitter on the typewriter’s chattering keys, was trying to co-ordinate a dozen angles into his new “Lead All! Love Nest Slaying! Must!” Having assigned to this undertaking the lieutenants and the skirmishers whom he felt were best equipped for it, Chapin plainly figured that it would be a reflection upon his own judgment were he to display uneasiness regarding either the chore or the outcome. There might be brutal rebukes for whosoever failed in his share of the consolidated operations. But that would come after the battle was ended. To a greater or lesser degree all the real commanders-in-chief of daily journalism known to me by direct affiliation used Chapin’s stand-offish methods—Charley Lincoln and Bill Thayer and Foster Coates and Jack Spurgeon, for conspicuous examples.

Lorimer though was the master hand at manifesting this quality of restraint. He had no concern for details; results were what he craved. So, like a wise field marshal, he bided calmly at G.H.Q. and didn’t pester himself—or them—about what his shock troops were doing. First in ’14 and again in ’17 and ’18, I rambled at random for upwards of a year along the Western Front or immediately behind it, and in all that time I’m sure he didn’t send me in excess of half a dozen cable messages and not a single letter; and these cabled messages were invariably notifications that such and such a batch of articles had come safely to his desk. The second time I went across, almost the only thing he added when he called up by long distance to give me sailing orders ran something like this:

“Our boys are in it now, over there. So you better dust along to France and try to get where things are going on and garner some pieces for us to print in the Post. Pieces about the Americans preferably but anyhow, pieces.”

Without exception, all the men I have listed expressed, each in his separate way, these characteristics: First and foremost, a never-flagging, infectious enthusiasm for the job underway or the job just ahead, and second, an unappeasable hunger of curiosity about people and things; about what was happening and was likely to happen; about causes and effects; about the whole haphazard machinery of life. To them a human being was the most interesting thing on this earth. In sequence, money might come next, then perhaps love, then crime, then, in order, dogs and elephants and snakes and bugs and the likes of those, but foremost, human beings. And therein, I maintain, largely lay the secret of their success at the tricky trade they followed after.

I figure the same rule might be said to apply to the two biggest journalistic mastodons of their own saffron-tinted era, William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. In fact, I’m sure it might be said. As firsthand witness I couldn’t qualify, though, to give the evidence. True, I labored more than six years for Pulitzer on his Evening World and under covenant I spent nine years with Hearst’s organization, working on various of his monthly publications. But I never beheld Mr. Pulitzer, never heard his voice save once. I’ll come to that a chapter or so along. And while, during my term of indenture to him, I had frequent and cordial and altogether pleasant social contacts with Mr. Hearst, I never felt that I’d met the real Hearst.

Mainly I beheld only his outer shell, the protective film behind which lurked a secretive, aloof being whose personal convictions were not to be fathomed, whose private viewpoints were only to be guessed at.

Once in a while the mask would lift for just long enough to reveal, in one quickly eclipsed flash, the prodigious figure who, like a miraculous juggler, could keep a dozen spheres in the air at once—newspapers, radio stations, magazines, syndicates, press bureaus, mines, ranches, real estate, moving pictures, book-publishing, policies, political ambitions, what-all; and yet find time for building fabulous palaces and gorgeous playhouses; for collecting the finest and the largest collection of antiques and art treasures ever assembled by any individual since Lorenzo the Magnificent, which is going a long distance back; for knowing the why and the how and the wherefore of thousands on thousands of separate items among his voluminous possessions, he being an acknowledged authority on such diversified subjects as armor and Old Masters, Spanish glass and Navaho rugs, first editions and Mexican saddles, Frederic Remington’s Westerns and Gobelin tapestries. He was powerfully proud of his grasp on his fads; he had excuse for being so.

Or, on occasion, he might offer another facet of his many-flanged personality, an attribute which so many among his biographers, hostile or friendly as the case might be, seem somehow to have overlooked or slurred. William Randolph Hearst has a redeeming sense of humor—not the spurious brand which sees what is ridiculous in other people—but genuine drollery. He can laugh at himself. The joke which is aimed at him or the one which he actually aimed on that target is the one over which he laughs the heartiest and remembers the longest and repeats the oftenest. A million things have been said for or against Hearst, mainly against, I’d guess. Yet not the most rabid of his enemies or the nastiest of his critics has accused this man, who gets fat on denunciations and chuckles under defamations, of having a false dignity or an exaggerated idea of his own sanctity. Hearst may have thought of himself in the agreeable role of the Major Prophets, all melded together, but he has no fetish of infallibility—at least not yet, and he is pretty far along in years now to be taking on the Messiah complex, although, on occasion, he does seem to fancy himself as chosen to be God Almighty’s ghostwriter.

However and to the contrary notwithstanding, in his moments of relaxation when temporarily he shifts the burden of a perverse and, generally speaking, an ungrateful world from his galled shoulders, he presents himself as a thoughtful host, and an appreciative employer—provided you deliver the particular brand of goods he hankers for; and a gracious companion abounding in witty, pungent comments on what’s transpiring about him and what’s happening to him, personally. His manner of speaking enhances the comedy asset. Within a towering, broad-shouldered frame which age hasn’t greatly caved in yet, he has a voice that bleats thinly and flatly forth like notes on a child’s toy flute. The effect is startling until the hearer gets used to it; as though a steam locomotive hauled off to whistle for the crossing and then gave out in the puny trebles of a penny fife.^[3]

At the top of his success Mr. Hearst spent money, not as some tremendously affluent brother capitalist might, nor yet as the unhampered monarch of a barbaric despotism might, but like a wildly extravagant government. In 1926 he took seventy of us, mostly motion-picture folk, by special train replete with refreshment booths and musicians, from Hollywood to his unbelievable barony up the coast at San Simeon—a night’s travel—there to spend the Fourth of July. On the eve of the holiday he announced at dinner in his ninety-foot-long banquet hall—solid silver service but paper napkins and all the known condiments on dress parade down the priceless refectory table—that some of the party had shown a willingness to stay over until the evening of the fifth. He asked a show of hands to divide these guests from those who felt they must adhere to the original schedule, so that suitable plans for return transportation might be arranged. About thirty of us raised our hands. The big man turned to one of the pack of docile soothsayers who trailed him about like so many trained Pomeranians.

“Son,” he said, “run, please, down to the dispatcher [there was a private telegraph office on the domain], and tell him to notify the railroad that instead of one train back tomorrow night we’ll need two trains—one with accommodations for thirty or thereabouts tomorrow and one for about forty of us, including myself, the night after.”

Most of those present seemingly took this as a matter-of-course. They’d been at San Simeon before. But it was my first experience. As I recall, I perspired, but in what I trust was a restrained manner.

At a convenient lull to draw him aside, I said, “Mr. Hearst, far be it from me, a comparative stranger here, to pry into a kindly taskmaster’s mental processes but, purely by hearsay, I’ve gathered that hiring private trains runs into money, what with locomotives and conductors and Pullman drawing rooms and free ice water and all. What’s more, a good many of this bunch came west riding brake-beams; they should be grateful for berths to stretch out on. Private cars for us, if you will have it so—I feel I could acquire the private car habit easily—so long as somebody else foots the bill. But why, if I might be so bold as to ask, why a whole private train for our batch?”

“Well, I tell you, Cobb,” he said and so far as I could tell spoke in dead seriousness, “if your group had only private cars they’d be parked on a siding at San Luis Obispo station until the regular train came through and you’d be jerked about while they were hitching you on and getting under way again. I used to use a private car going down from here and just about the time I got to sleep that infernal train would come along and bump into us and wake me up. I hate to be bumped around that way. And I figure any friends I’m entertaining hate to be bumped, too.”

I still ponder sometimes the problem of how many thousands of dollars it cost him to keep a mixed lot of actors and writers and social climbers and bogus princelings and British remittance men from being bumped.

Now that his vast kingdom somewhat has crumpled through sheer top-heaviness above and the burrowing termites of debt beneath, his detractors have increased to a host, ringing him in like jackals that snap at the flanks of a sick lion. Paradoxically, I’ve noticed that frequently the author of one of these screeds interrupts the embittered flow to offer Hearst begrudged praise for a virtue to which he is not in the least entitled. He is credited with having jacked up the average of newspaper salaries in America. Outsiders have been saying this from the long-ago hour when he broke into the business as an audacious and headstrong fledgling, with the wise-acres all predicting that not even old Senator George Hearst’s massed millions would keep this wastrel son of his afloat for long in the troubled journalistic waters. It is a fact that all along Hearst had paid his hand-picked favorites more than any opposing publisher ever before had paid anybody; more than his fierce and ruthless competition could induce them to pay now.

It was by dint of this seemingly extravagant but really wise strategy that he raided rival hen roosts for such shrill-crowing editorial roosters as Arthur Brisbane and Morrill Goddard; for Tom Powers and George Luks and other popular illustrators; for petted columnists and coddled comic artists; for paragraphers, for commentators, specialists in all conspicuous lines. But inside our guild he always had been notorious for paying his run-of-the-mill employees as poor wages as any of the metropolitan plants paid, poorer wages than some of them customarily paid in the past. That has been his schedule—game pies and rich pastry for the pampered and widely-publicized stars, and the top union scale for the technical squads—the unions saw to that. But as for the mute inglorious sub-editors and copy-desk hounds and plain legmen, their portions were those of Lazarus in the parable—the crumbs that fell from the rich man’s table.

Still and all, Hearst has done but little more sinning in this respect than many have. Even if the pay for the anonymous groups generally is better than it used to be, the truth remains that, considered what they give in ability and energy and devotion, such newspapermen are as overworked and as poorly paid as any like class in the whole economic frame.

Saying this, I’m not dipping my pen into a font of staled rancor, vintaged out of my own experiences as a toiler in vanished vineyards. My case was a favored and a fortunate one when compared with most of my confreres of three decades back. Before I quit the daily grind to browse in the less hectic and more succulent pastures of magazine work, I had by painful degrees forced my stipend to a peak where the Pulitzer shop was paying me $150 weekly. These figures wouldn’t startle creation today but thirty-odd years ago they constituted a breath-taking salary for one who neither was a departmental head nor an executive. Whether it was true or not, I was called the highest paid reporter in this country and perhaps in the world. In addition I regularly harvested smaller sums for signed contributions to the special pages of the Evening World and the magazine section of the Sunday World. Moreover, the World permitted me to market my contributions in outlying cities through the McClure syndicate. Frequently my income for a single month was upwards of a thousand dollars—and did I count myself a darling of prime luck!

Now, in those times the World, on payday, had a way of dividing the sheep from the goats. If a man drew as much as a hundred dollars a week he went to a certain window of the cashier’s corridor downstairs and personally was handed a check by old Mr. Angus Shaw, the demure and dapper little Scotch auditor. The check was a symbol of herd importance, proof of high standing on the roster. If he drew a lesser sum he took his humble place in the queue of the common flock and at a second window received an envelope containing his due—in cash.

To keep down heartburnings among compatriots who were not supposed to know how much I earned, my wages were apportioned to three separate payrolls—exactly $99 from the Evening World, $51 from the Sunday World, and various lesser dribs for my side endeavors. So that, come Saturday afternoon, instead of joining the aristocrats and the gentry at the main wicket, I marched in line to the other wicket and acquired three or more envelopes containing currency and silver bits. This utterly transparent little farce was played out fifty-two times a year during at least two years, everyone concerned keeping a straight face.

It was at the tag end of this profitable period that I met Lorimer. Already I had sold him, by mail, my first efforts at out-and-out fiction. Coming up to New York for an annual banquet of the American Publishers’ Association, he asked me to be a guest at his table. After the dinner, which was quite moist, an exhilarated coterie of us took a drive through Central Park in a squadron of chartered hansom cabs. By invitation I was riding with Lorimer. All of a sudden he broke off his plaintive singing of “Glow, Little Glowworm, Glitter” which was, as would develop, his favored song and his only one for festive occasions, and he said:

“How about hooking up with the Post when your time’s up at that treadmill down in Park Row?”

“I’d like it,” I said and expanded inwardly, the words being sweet music to my ears.

“Well, then, first chance you get, run down to Philadelphia and we’ll talk it over.”

But when I did run down to Philadelphia, there didn’t seem to be much talking-over to be done.

“I’d like to have the call on your time for such suitable stunts as may come along,” he stated, “and the refusal of the stuff you turn out on your own hook. I shan’t mind you doing a little free-lancing on the side for other shops, but if your output gets by here, I figure we’ll be keeping you so busy you won’t want to be doing much of that.” (And so he did keep me busy, for eleven years.)

“Suits me,” I said, “when do I sign up?”

“You don’t sign up,” he said. “I don’t hold with contracts, exclusive or otherwise. Haven’t any contract myself with Cyrus H. K. Curtis and never put anybody else under contract. Just verbal understandings—gentlemen’s agreements, as they call them. But I reckon that’s a joke.”

The doubtful lease-hold of a contract, after these six years with the World, had gotten into my blood. Perhaps I wasn’t cut out to be a maverick ranging the great open spaces? Perhaps I’d worn the brand of a corral boss too long?

“I know what’s ailing you,” diagnosed Lorimer, seeing how I hesitated. “You’re suffering from an occupational disease which is very catching and sometimes becomes incurable. It’s brought on by exposure at stated intervals to a salary envelope. It makes a coward of a man—makes him afraid to swap a dubious security for a better chance where he can be more or less independent.”

I admitted the impeachment.

“All right then,” he said, “I’ve got a treatment to last till you’re restored to health. Every other week, unless in the meantime you’ve sent in enough acceptable copy to off-balance the sum I have in mind, the cashier will mail you a check for that figure as advance payment against future performances.” His face cracked in the reticent Lorimer grin. “And, son, any time two whole weeks go by and you don’t beat that guarantee, you’re automatically fired.”

I went back to Yonkers, where we lived then, and metaphorically spat on my hands and proceeded to beat the haslets out of an already maltreated L. C. Smith machine. And to this hour I don’t know what contingent amount, if any, Lorimer had calculated out in his brain on that long-ago afternoon.

[1]

I never worked for Lord Northcliffe. I could have, though. He made me a proposition to sign up with his Daily Mail before I ever met him—made it through Charley Hand, his American correspondent, on the strength of Hand’s gracious words for my coverage of the first Thaw trial. In 1914, in London, he went out of his way to be kind. He procured for me what I’m sure no other man in the British Empire could have procured—interviews with the supposedly uninterviewable Lord Kitchener and dear, doddery, little old Lord Roberts, and he publicly backed the authenticity of Kitchener’s words as quoted by me when they were questioned; and twice he reminded me he still had a vacant place waiting in his organization. Again in 1918, during my second journey to the war zone, he mentioned the proposition as a matter for negotiation when the war came to an end. But it never got any further than that.Some months before, while directing England’s propaganda in America he had rusticated for a few weeks in Westchester County, New York—if so restless a creature could be said ever to rusticate? For proof of his inquisitiveness, his almost maniacal passion for prying under lids, he knew infinitely more and had found time to read more and remember more about Westchester County, its history, its topography, its population and its resources than I who, off and on, lived there for fifteen years had picked up. Northcliffe was interested in all things and forgot never anything and sooner or later made use of what was stored away in the smoothly indexed filing-cabinet which functioned inside his bulging skull.Like Hearst, he dispensed a perfect hospitality. But the satellites kept getting underfoot, the lackeys and lickspittles, the courtiers and court jesters that crowded the Yes Man’s Land of Lord Northcliffe’s inner defenses.

[2]

With his scalp intact, Will Rogers had escaped from a small Wild West show and, with an educated cow pony and his lariat and his wad of gum and his yearning eyes fixed on the far distant bright lights, had progressed as far eastward as the Corn Belt. It was no longer a “dumb act” as the booking agents say. He was venturing some ad-libbed lines. He wasn’t sure though that they were funny. It took the laughter of a continent to convince him.After Will reached the peak of his fame, I acted as toastmaster one night at a big theatrical dinner that was given for him. In introducing the guest of honor I shot him amidships by reading a squib which Drury Underwood, the Chicago critic, aided and abetted by Nellie Revelle, the pioneer of all women press agents, had dug out of the dusty files of some second-string reviewer’s comments upon a third-rate vaudeville show on a Chicago side street. It was probably the first authentic press notice Will got in a big city paper. As I remember it went like this:“Spot two on an otherwise fairish program is assigned to an alleged cowboy from Oklahoma calling himself Bill Rogers. He is supporting a trick horse. He puts the horse through a routine, meanwhile doing some roping stunts and spilling a line of loose chatter. This turn would go better if the cowboy shut up and gave the horse a chance.”

[3]

“Jimmy” Swinnerton who for forty-odd years has been drawing comic pictures that really are comic for the Hearst issues, tells a yarn illustrative of all this:One day when Park Row was perhaps more inclined than at present to do its saloon shopping early—and oftener—Mr. Hearst entered the editorial conference room of the New York American and saw a number of vacant chairs.“Where’s So-and-So?” he inquired softly.“His wife telephoned he wouldn’t be down today—under the weather, she says. Well, when I saw him last night in Lipton’s bar he was pretty weather-beaten and getting more so, drink by drink.”“Hem. I see Mr. Whosis is absent, too?”“He’s at St. Vincent’s—on Newspaper Row.” (Newspaper Row was a hospital ward frequently patronized by overtaken journalists. It was suitably named.)“And how about Thingumbob?” The big chief’s bland falsetto was taking on a saddened tone.“They just telephoned up from Andy Horn’s asking where we wanted the remains sent. He’s passed out speechless.”“Dear me!” said Hearst. “For a man who’s practically a total abstainer, I probably suffer more from alcoholism than any human being on the Western Hemisphere.”