Great Big Beautiful Life(34)

For the first time in Gerald’s life, he was in control. He decided when and how and by whom he would be seen. What was more, he shaped the world around his readers, told them whom to rage against, what to fear.

His writers could come in late, come in drunk, not come in at all, so long as they performed their duties to his liking. Which meant even those he hadn’t poached in his first wave of domination came running soon enough.

Talent was his silver. It called out to him, and he needed to possess it.

One of his writers, in particular, had a knack for penning headlines. His articles were shit, but it didn’t matter, and Gerald saw that. The headline was enough.

The headline told the story, and then a person’s eyes simply glazed over as they wandered down the ink-ridden page.

Who are you angry with?

What do you fear?

What do you love most in the world, and how could it be taken from you?

These were the things he drilled into his staff. The truth was king, but emotion was the truth’s most valuable adviser.

Soon, San Francisco wasn’t enough. Then, not even California. The true seat of power, he understood, was in New York.

Only once he had both states, both cities, unified in the press could he rest.

At the turn of the twentieth century, he crossed the country and began his second wave of domination.

The first paper he bought in New York City was a bust. The second folded too. People on the East Coast regarded him with distrust.

But once again his nose for talent did him right when he met Rosalind Goodlett. She was plain faced and petite, almost childlike in appearance, and mostly concerned herself with charity for the poor and sick.

She was also the daughter of a senator.

Yes, Gerald had fashioned himself as the purveyor of truth, but somehow that hadn’t added up to personal trust in him. After all, his own newspapers spent the bulk of their time and space calling to the public’s attention the many moral failings of the wealthiest and most powerful, and at a certain point, there was no avoiding the fact that Gerald himself had entered this stratum.

People trusted Rosalind. Perhaps because she wasn’t beautiful, or because of the innocence in her eyes, or maybe it was a game whose rules she’d figured out, but in any case, Gerald watched her and he knew—knew—she had a rare talent.

The way Gerald saw it, though, her father was a man who’d merely gotten lucky and tripped into a position of authority.

Which made him corruptible.

Gerald didn’t ask Rosalind to marry him. He showered Senator Goodlett with gifts, then suggested an alliance. When the senator arranged Gerald’s marriage to Rosalind, he more or less passed Gerald Ives the key to New York.

Within three months of their wedding, he’d purchased two powerful papers in the city, filled them with his people, covered them with his fingerprints. Then he took his young wife and went back to California. He wasn’t a cruel man: He didn’t take her money as his own.

She gave him what he most dearly wanted; why shouldn’t he let her have her own wish?

And all she really wanted, like him, was to do her work.

And yes, her work consisted primarily of spending money, but every penny she spent on her philanthropy came back to him in the form of goodwill. Another kind of investment, though not one his father understood or approved of. Not yet anyway.

Rosalind did not love Gerald. He knew that. But she respected him, and he respected her too, more than he could have guessed at the beginning. They became something more than husband and wife. They were partners.

He did not bed his wife for the first three years of their marriage. He waited for her to come to him. Afterward, they lay in bed and talked for hours, dreamed of everything they might someday have.

He ran one hand over her mousy blond hair, and he looked at her closely for the first time and saw that she could be beautiful. That all it took was looking long enough, close enough, and he was ashamed that he hadn’t.

In 1904, they produced a son, Frederick Ives, followed by a daughter, Francine, and he was determined to be good to them, both of them.

It was—like his marriage, like poaching Pulitzer’s people, like buying the newest printing press, like Rosalind’s philanthropy—an investment.

Twice a week, Gerald took his wife and children to dine with his parents in their tasteful Victorian manse. Gigi had married an Englishman and moved to Europe, but even in his sister’s absence, Gerald received no more of their father’s attention.

That all went to Freddy.

Little Freddy, whom Gerald had let run wild. Who flailed in his studies. Who had plenty of his warm, good-hearted mother in him and very little Ives, except his looks.

Gerald didn’t understand it—how both of his parents were all too happy to dote on his own silly, playful, unambitious son when Gerald himself still hadn’t managed to glean an ounce of his father’s approval.

Maybe that was why he pursued the California State Senate. If the money and business acumen weren’t enough to put him in the black, then perhaps political power might.

Back then, senators were elected by state legislatures rather than popular votes, and with all the connections he’d accumulated, Gerald more or less walked into the position. In 1909, he was sworn in, and he and Rosalind began planning for an eventual ascent to the White House.

Even with the full force of the press behind him, though, when the presidential election came around, the caucus chose someone else.