Colonel Robert Rutherford McCormick was the absolute monarch who ruled over the wage slaves of the Chicago Tribune. Even the staff of the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune, which otherwise feared neither God nor man, cringed before the colonel, who partook of the nature of both. Like other lordly figures, he was never referred to by name but by his title.
I met him for the first time only a year or two later, when I was the lowliest of the four correspondents then maintained in the Chicago Tribune`s London bureau. The ominous tidings that the colonel was en route to London threw the office into a state of apprehension that persisted for the two weeks that elapsed before the failure of Jon Steele, the bureau chief, to show up at the office informed us that the colonel had landed and Steele was waiting attendance on him. Nobody dared leave the premises; the colonel might appear at any moment, and when he entered one of his outlying bureaus, he expected to find all his minions there to welcome him.
There was no news of the colonel until the middle of the afternoon, when Steele telephoned to say that the colonel had invited the staff to have dinner with him. This touched off a debate on whether we should dress formally; it was finally decided not to do so, which turned out later to have been the correct choice. The hour of the colonel`s rendezvous turned up, but the colonel did not. We sat waiting, chatting inconsequentially in an attempt to master the nervous stomachs we were working up to digest the colonel`s cheer. Only our English cable editor, Sidney Cave, an imperturbable character who looked like John Bull and thought like him, maintained full composure. Cave, who was something of a gourmet, filled in the time by speculating on where the colonel would take us (Simpson`s, probably) and running over an imaginary wine list in his mind, on the assumption that as the office expert on such matters he would be asked to select the vintages.
The colonel, escorted by Steele, arrived an hour and a half late, and we were duly presented. The ceremony had about it the air of a military inspection. The formalities over, the colonel announced, ”I passed a little place around the corner that doesn`t look bad. Let`s eat there.” Cave`s face fell an Imperial British foot. The colonel led us to the little place around the corner, no treat for any of us since we ate there almost daily, and after we had ordered from its all-too-familiar menu, the colonel demanded, ”What would you like to drink?” Cave brightened and cleared his throat in prepration for speech, but Steele beat him to the punch. ”What are you drinking, Colonel?” he inquired. ”Beer,” said the colonel. Everybody wanted beer.
I arrived at the office the next morning to find the staff in a state of collective hysteria. The colonel had sent word that he planned to take a walk through London and I was to accompany him. Since I was on my way to the office, it had naturally been impossible to reach me, and nobody dared envisage what might happen if I could not be found. When the colonel ordered a body delivered he wanted the body, not an explanation of why it could not be produced.
It was for me, though not for the colonel, an agitated morning. He measured six feet four inches and walked with a long stride, at military parade cadence. I am not short myself, but I had to shout upward to communicate with him, and to develop a sort of lope to keep up. To add to my difficulties, I had to act as his personal disbursing officer, a role for which I was ill-fitted, for I have always been a fumbler of money and a slow- witted calculator of change. The colonel never carried money. In Chicago he didn`t need to: he popped into a shop, rattled off an order, and popped out again. The shop knew where to send the bill. In London the colonel refused to compromise with the possiblity that there might be shops where he would not immediately be recognized. The office had armed me with an impressive wad of bills, and as he ducked into one shop after another and out again, strewing orders behind him, I had to sprint to the cashier`s desk, pay, and get out on the double in pursuit of the colonel`s receding back.
From time to time, the colonel tossed me a word of wisdon: ”Best hatter in London, Root. Buy all my hats here. Advise you to do the same.” The words sprang to my tongue: ”Colonel, do you happen to know how much you are paying me?” I swallowed them.
The approach of lunchtime put an end to the footrace. I piloted the colonel back to his hotel, where Steele was waiting uneasily for the pleasure of eating with the boss. To my dismay the colonel invited me to stay to lunch too. He liked to eat surrounded by underlings.
The conversation consisted of a monologue by the colonel, punctuated at discreet intervals by assorted monosyllabic noises signifying approval from Steele or myself. We were just reaching dessert when the colonel pulled out his watch and consulted it. ”Root,” he said. ”I understand things are pretty bad in the Welsh coal mines.” He was right; practically nobody worked there for two or three years. ”There`s a train for Cardiff at three o`clock.” He must have been studying the timetables. ”I want you to hop aboard it and give us seven or eight good stories on the situation there.”
”Cable, Colonel?” I asked.
”No, no” he said. ”Mail will do.”
Those were preplane days. It would take a week or more for my stories to reach Chicago. There seemed to be no great hurry, so I ventured to suggest that if I took a later train, that would at least give me time to warn my wife, who was out for the afternoon and not immediately reachable, that I was off on a trip.
”I think,” the colonel said firmly, ”that you should take the first train available.”
I had about forty-five minutes to get home, pack, and catch my train. I rushed off, leaving Steele and the colonel to their dessert, of which, like a naughty child, I had been deprived. As I tossed clothes into a suitcase, it occurred to me that I could take a later train and nobody would be the wiser. An alert guardian angel intervened and got me onto the colonel`s choice by the skin of my teeth. Fifteen minutes after I had checked into my hotel in Cardiff the phone rang. It was the colonel`s secretary, with supplementary and superfluous instructions. It was obvious that the real reason for the call was to find out if I had obeyed orders.
One of the first people I met when I moved onto the night staff of the Paris Edition was a man who should not have been there at all. He had been fired long before I came on the paper, yet there he was, padding about the city room, short, potbellied, in vest and shirtsleeves–these embellished by the elastic armbands that, in the days before it occured to shirt
manufacturers to makes sleeves of different lengths, enabled short men to keep their cuffs out of the soup. His name was Spencer Bull.
Spencer walked with a slight limp, and I was informed at the same time about his limp and his legend. He had acquired the limp by wrenching open an elevator door, theoretically immovable since the elevator was not at the same floor, a feat he could never have performed sober. He reached the bottom of the shaft without benefit of elevator and got off lightly with only the limp. Drunken men, it appears, fall gently, like flowers.
His legend concerned the story that caused him to be fired, which made his presence when I arrived so difficult to explain. I do not remember that he was there long. Perhaps he had been taken back temporarily in an emergency to fill a gap, inscribed on the payroll under a nom de plume (we were paid in cash, not checks), perhaps even as a proofreader. The image I retain of him from those days always shows him with a clutch of proofs in his hand.
Spencer Bull was a good reporter, but he had one failing. He lost the ability to distinguish between fact and fantasy when he had a snootful, and he had a snootful not infrequently. He had already lost a couple of jobs before he came to us from the Paris Herald. He had turned in there one day a story that he represented as being an exclusive interview with the president of the Republic, and exclusivity was indeed one of its qualities, although not the most striking. The city editor of the Herald, a relatively sober paper, read the story as far as the passage in which Spencer depicted himself as entering the courtyard of the Elysee Palace, to be hailed from a window with, ”Come on up, Spencer,” by the president, who received him in his bedroom, dressed in robin`s egg blue pajamas. At this point the story went into the wastebasket and Spencer went to the cashier`s window.
We hired him all the same, for he was quite an asset when sober, and he did his best to stay that way. He was unhorsed when the Prince of Wales made an official visit to Paris and Spencer was assigned to cover it.
It was an assignment of exquisite boredom–layings of cornerstornes, visits to British hospitals, receptions of war veterans, garden parties for women in large floppy hats, and the like. On the first day Spencer trotted dutifully in the footprints of the prince, and discovered at the end that his exertions had been unnecessary. The British Embassy distrubited to the press a mimeographed account of every gesture made by His Royal Highness, every word he had uttered, and evey word that had been launched at him.
The Prince of Wales was known not to enjoy this sort of performance, but it was his job and he could not get out of it. Spencer did not enjoy it either, but though it was his job to report it, he saw in the embassy handout a means of getting out of most of it. Reconnaissance of the neighborhood disclosed a pleasant cafe where he might while away the time until the embassy press service had its report ready. On the second day, he abstained from personal duplication of the prince`s wanderings, but repaired to his observation post in ample time to collect the official bulletin when it appeared. He had to wait a little longer than he had expected, and the inevitable ensued in his time at the cafe. Nevertheless he was in sufficiently good condition to collect his official information, return with it to the office, and address himself firmly to his typewriter. He pecked away at the keys slowly and with caution, for he wanted to remain in control of the situation, but when he reached the report of the prince`s review of the British Boy Scout troop of Paris, creativity got the better of him. As it was reported to me, his story then ran on something like this:
”Stopping before one manly youth, the prince inquired, `What is your name, my lad?` `None of your God-damned business, sir,` the youngster replied. At this, the prince snatched a riding crop from his equerry`s hand and beat the boy`s brains out.”
It was to the credit of the Chicago Tribune night staff that this work of art was processed with the utmost efficiency. The copyreader conscientiously corrected the placement of commas, rectified a few misspelled words, revised awkward phraseology, and handed the story to the night editor. Realizing its news value, this worthy marked it for a two-column head on page one. The headline writer found a happy formula: PRINCE OF WALES BASHES BOY`S BRAINS OUT WITH BLUDGEON. The linotype operators, who were French and read no English, set it up, and the proofreaders corrected the typographical errors. The makeup editor fitted the story into the prominent position on the front page that it merited. The page was converted in the stereotyping room into papier-mache and then reconverted into a curved metal plate that was bolted onto the press cylinder. The press began to roll, and the staff went home, content in the consciousness of duty well done. Everything, indeed, had been well done. The execution was perfect. The only flaw in the operation was that not one of the half-dozen people who had read the story was sufficiently sober to realize that it couldn`t possibly be true.
The British Embassy was on the phone early next morning–very early next morning–and shortly thereafter a staff routed from bed scurried about Paris buying up every copy that could be found on the newsstands. They succeeded in rounding up most of the copies in Paris before they could stupefy the public, but nothing could be done about the papers that had been mailed to subscribers, or those sent to other cities in France or to other countries, including the British Isles. The Paris Edition did not appear on English newsstands for the next six months.
Spencer was of course out of a job again, but he lived happily on free booze and occasional samples of food offered to him by admirers who wanted to meet the man who had accused the Prince of Wales of murder.
Although I heard ths tale from a good many witnesses, including Spencer himself, the more I thought about it, the more unbelievable it seemed. One day I set out to track it down. By hunting through the files of Le Temps, then the best paper in Paris, I was able to determine the time of the prince`s visit to Paris and the exact day when he had reviewed the Boy Scouts. Armed with this information, I slipped into the publisher`s office at night, when I knew it would be empty, and looked for the paper from the fatal date among the bound volumes containing every issue of the Paris Edition since its founding. The paper was missing from the file.
Waverley Root rose through the ranks of the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune and was temporarily in charge of the editorial operation when it was sold in 1934 to the Paris Herald, a precursor of the International Herald-Tribune read by Americans who visit Europe today.
