The Kingdom and the Power (31 page)

Whether it would be Arthur Hays Sulzberger or Julius Ochs Adler who would one day succeed Ochs at the top, however, was still an open question. Ochs himself was not sure which of the two would make the better publisher. They were very different—Sulzberger
seemed more modest and sensitive, more cautious, an adherent of tradition; Adler, a broad-shouldered, chesty young man with a small brush moustache, was aggressive and direct. Ochs was proud of Adler, particularly of his war record and his image as a patriot, but there was some doubt as to Adler’s adaptability or desire to fit into Ochs’s scheme as a shrine keeper. Ochs finally decided to leave the matter of his succession up to his daughter and the two men themselves. He gave to each a single vote that would enable them to select his successor upon his death. As long as his daughter was happily married, the odds would be with Sulzberger 2 to 1.

In the interim, Ochs watched both men’s performance, with Sulzberger’s duties being primarily on the editorial side, Adler’s on the business side. Iphigene, whom Ochs had reared as a Victorian lady, was to remain at home and produce grandchildren, which she did rather quickly. In December of 1918, thirteen months after her marriage, she had a daughter, Marian. Iphigene had a second daughter, Ruth, in 1921 on Ochs’s birthday, March 12; then a third daughter, Judith, in 1923, and finally a son, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, in 1926. Adler, who in 1922 married Barbara Stettheimer of San Francisco, had a son, Julius Ochs Adler, Jr., in 1924, and later two daughters, Barbara and Nancy, in 1928 and 1930. By the Nineteen-fifties, all of the Sulzberger and Adler children (with the exception of Judith Sulzberger, who became a doctor) were working in the family business; and by the Nineteen-sixties, the first member of the fourth generation was working for
The Times
, a nineteen-year-old reporter, Stephen Arthur Ochs Golden, Ruth Sulzberger’s first son.

If it is true that a deeply depressed person is more likely to feel at odds with the world on holidays, sunny days, or periods of general contentment than he is on rainy days or times when the world seems dark, then there is possibly some explanation for Adolph Ochs’s mysterious personality change in the final years of his life, in the early Nineteen-thirties, during the Great Depression. Ochs was suddenly a man of vitality again, an optimist. He was reading the paper each morning, writing memos, giving orders. Carr Van Anda was now in semiretirement, and Charles R. Miller was dead, meaning that Ochs had no other major egos to consider before responding to each impulse. He was now letting his white hair grow and he was combing it back along the sides of his head in imitation of George Washington, having been told by someone in Europe
that he seemed to resemble the portraits of America’s first President. Ochs had sold his house at 308 West Seventy-fifth Street—which had become overcrowded with the white marble busts of great artists and musicians, with trinkets from overseas trips, with endless photographs of the Ochs family and relatives, including pictures of his daughter, Iphigene, through every stage of her development—and he was now living with his wife and a retinue of servants and sometimes (at his insistence) with the entire Sulzberger family, in the White Plains columned mansion, with its great ballroom and sprawling lawns. For the first time in his life, Ochs was living in grandeur. From his paneled study he could peer through a big window and see part of his 57-acre estate, called Hillandale, which included a private lake and boat house, a gardener’s cottage and green house, other small buildings and animal pens. He kept domestic pets as well as pigs, turkeys, and steer; all the animals, except the steer, which would be slaughtered, were given names. Mrs. Ochs, now a small plump cheerful pixie with long white hair, had a servant who did little else but cater to the dogs, and Mrs. Ochs herself occasionally gave parties for the pets, inviting her grandchildren and their friends, serving dog biscuits and hotdogs indiscriminately to all.

After the Lindbergh kidnapping, Ochs hired a guard to protect the estate against possible harm to the grandchildren, and at one point he insisted that they be taken to Europe for a while as a further precaution, and they were. Ochs was determined to preserve the Ochsian future, meanwhile enjoying what was left of the present. The Depression had little effect on him mentally, except that it seemed to make him feel better, or it possibly provided him with a new challenge, and it did not hurt him financially to any degree. After his one horrible experience with land speculation in Chattanooga more than forty years before, he had not invested in anything that was not concerned with his own business. He did cut his employees’ salaries by 10 percent for a while in the Thirties, but this was a mere token of the austerity that existed elsewhere, and no
Times
employee was laid off either in Chattanooga or New York. He was nevertheless angered by the economic condition of the country, and he abandoned his lifelong Democratic conservatism to become a liberal, endorsing Roosevelt before the 1932 election. At this time Ochs was also irritated when the Pulitzer family sold the
World
to Scripps-Howard. He did not want the various editions of the
World
for himself, but he had hoped that they
would remain independent in one form or other. When he heard that the
Morning World
and Sunday edition were to be discontinued and that the
Evening World
was to be consolidated with Scripps-Howard’s
Telegram
, Ochs cut short his vacation in Honolulu and returned as quickly as he could to New York, but not before the transaction had been completed. Ochs spent much of the next week telling his editors how the
World
might have been saved had
he
been in charge.

Ochs’s vanity and optimism at this time, which in another man might have been seen as a sign of senility, was also evident at the racetrack. He would take groups of important people to the track at Saratoga, never betting on the favorite, nor did he ever permit his guests to lose a bet—Ochs paid for everybody’s bets. He also picked everybody’s horses. Before each race, after consulting with
The Times’
racing writer, a debonair young man named Bryan Field, Ochs would place a five-dollar bet to win on certain horses and then assign a horse to each of his guests. Should a guest object to the assigned horse because of its name, color, number, or for other reasons, Ochs would attempt to rearrange things. He wanted his guests to be happy. If a guest’s horse won, the guest kept all the money. The guest could only win, never lose. Since the Saratoga track was known as a graveyard for favorites, there usually was a winner in Ochs’s box after each race, and the Ochs party was invariably a happy, cheering crowd except for Mrs. Ochs, who did not like racing because the jockeys hit the horses.

One of Bryan Field’s many jobs as
The Times’
racing expert was to assure Mrs. Ochs that the horses were not being cruelly treated. He explained repeatedly that the jockey’s whips were only “poppers,” a bat made so loosely and in such a way that it made a loud noise,
pop
, but it did not cut into the horse’s flank. Mrs. Ochs remained unconvinced. Field’s other tasks included the keeping of a record of each guest’s horse, the buying of tickets before each race, and the collection of any winning money. It was a difficult and confusing job at times, particularly when the guests decided to switch horses after Ochs’s initial assignment, but Field was consoled by the fact that he was becoming good friends with the big boss of
The New York Times
, an individual whom
The Times’
sports editor never saw.

On one Saturday afternoon at Saratoga, Ochs arrived with six guests and was seated in a box next to that of John D. Hertz of Chicago, the multimillionaire investor in films and banking, taxicabs
and race horses. Field knew Hertz quite well, and Hertz was appreciative of Field’s efforts a few years before in influencing William Woodward to send his champion, Gallant Fox, to race in Hertz’s Arlington Park in Chicago. After Field had introduced Hertz to Ochs and had listened to their friendly conversation for a while, Hertz asked Ochs which horse he was betting in the next race. Ochs turned to Field, who had already placed the bets. Field knew that the next race, which featured two-year-old fillies, had such a large entry that some horses, Hertz’s horse among them, had not been covered by any of Ochs’s seven bets.

“Well,” Hertz said, softly, “I think my horse has a chance here.”

Ochs did not grasp the significance of Hertz’s remark, but Bryan Field, who knew Hertz to be a very conservative man who rarely gave tips on his own horses, became excited. He whispered his feelings to Ochs, but the publisher was hesitant. Then one of the guests noticed that Hertz’s horse was a 30-to-1 longshot, and Ochs, wishing to please the guest, turned to Bryan Field and told him to put five dollars on the Hertz filly.

Field ran up the aisle through the crowds toward the ticket window. It was seconds before the race was to begin. But before he could work his way to the window he heard the clang of the bell—the race had begun, and the bookmakers’ slates snapped shut over their windows. Field headed slowly back toward the box, watching the horses galloping around the turn. As Field rejoined Ochs, the Hertz filly was breezing across the finish line ahead of the rest, and Ochs and his guests were applauding hilariously. At 30-to-1, the five-dollar bet had earned $150, and Ochs announced that since the bet had been an afterthought made in no particular person’s name, the $150 would be divided equally among them.

John D. Hertz looked sharply at Field, sensing that something was not quite right, and he asked, “Did you get down?”

“Yes, sir,” Field said cheerfully, as Ochs turned to listen for the answer.

After the excitement had subsided and the guests were seated again, Hertz, still sensing something disquieting in Field’s manner, asked him what price he had gotten. Field quoted 30 to 1.

“You should have done better than that,” Hertz said. “She drifted up in the betting and closed at 40 or 50 to 1.”

Ochs missed this exchange, for which Field was thankful. But he was also upset by the idea that, despite his having to hand out $150 of his own money, Hertz did not think he had done well enough.
And on the following Monday when things were quieter at the track, and Ochs was absent, Field approached Hertz. He explained that his horseplayer’s pride was piqued by Hertz’s insinuation that he had been a fool to take 30-to-1 odds when he might have gotten 40 to 1 or better; and then Field proceeded to tell Hertz the whole story. Hertz was very amused, and he said, finally, “Field, I’d have done the same thing. Mr. Ochs is a great man, and he likes you.”

In February of 1933, in Palm Beach, Ochs and his wife celebrated their golden wedding anniversary, and a month later Ochs was seventy-five, and various newspapers contacted him and asked if he had any comments to make about himself or about the condition of the world as he saw it. Ochs decided to sit down and write a statement for the press, which he did in his own rather shaky handwriting, and it began:

Two years later, on the day before he died, Adolph Ochs was on a train bound for Chattanooga. He was accompanied by a nurse and by his sixteen-year-old granddaughter Marian, who six years later married Orvil Dryfoos. Ochs had insisted that he had business to attend to in Chattanooga, and he refused to let Sulzberger or Adler go in his place. The dogwoods would be flowering on Lookout Mountain, he said, and he wanted to see them again, and he also wanted to revisit some old familiar places, friends, and relatives.

In Chattanooga, Ochs spent the night in the big rambling brick house that he had bought in 1882 when he was the rising young publisher of the
Chattanooga Times
. Now the house was occupied by his sister, Mrs. Harry Adler, and her family. Many visitors called on Ochs during the afternoon and evening, invariably remarking on how well he looked. Early the next morning he walked through the
Chattanooga Times’
plant, shaking hands with the staff in the newsroom and the printers in the composing room. Ochs sat for a while with the newspaper’s general manager, Adolph Shelby Ochs, son of his younger brother Milton, and then Ochs went to have lunch at a nearby restaurant with Milton, a few editors, and the nurse. There was jovial conversation around the table for a few moments, then the waiter brought menus, and the men studied them.