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 liv
ed 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.