Real Lace (9 page)

For weeks beforehand, the newspapers were filled with details of the upcoming Farrell-Murray nuptials. The wedding was to take place at St. Joseph's Church in South Norwalk, Connecticut, with a huge breakfast reception following at the Farrells' nearby estate, “Rock Ledge.” There were to be sixty people in the bridal party alone, plus hundreds of guests including all the “top” New York Irish Catholic names—Nicholas Brady, Judge Morgan O'Brien, and assorted Gormans. A special train would depart from Grand Central Station for South Norwalk on the morning of the wedding, just to transport the guests. The wedding pages would wear white knee-stockings and patent-leather pumps with colonial cut-steel buckles. Meanwhile, three large rooms of the Farrell mansion were filling up with wedding presents—”The silverware especially was remarkable!” the press gushed—and James Francis McDonnell's gift to his future sister-in-law was a rope of pearls reported, with some degree of exaggeration, to be “the size of hens' eggs.” The honeymoon couple would take a six weeks' automobile trip around the United States, and would then make their home, of course, on Park Avenue.

But on the day of the wedding, June 19, 1916, the deluge of publicity took a decidedly unpleasant turn. After the throng of guests had left the church, and had gathered in the garden of “Rock Ledge” and the festivities had begun, a sudden puff of smoke burst from the roof of the big house, followed by a column of flame. Almost before the guests' eyes, the entire Farrell house seemed to explode into fire. “Save the wedding presents!” was suddenly the cry, as the men tried vainly to push their way into the burning house and attempted to douse the flames with bottles of champagne, and the women clutched at their rosary beads. But it was no use. The combined fire departments of South Norwalk and Rowayton could not extinguish the blaze, and the great house burned to the ground, taking with it $100,000 worth of furnishings and all the wedding gifts, valued at $30,000, the remarkable silver pieces melted into lumps. Repeated attempts were made to save the presents, but when the walls of the house began to crumble the bride's father refused to let either firemen or guests go inside, crying gallantly, “Don't worry! It's all insured!”

Later, it was concluded that the fire was the result of “the extraordinary amount of cooking being done” in the Farrell kitchens. But there were some who wondered worriedly: Was the fire the doing of a stern Deity who was punishing the Farrells and the Murrays for the sin of pride? In any case, the press commented that the fire left the couple's honeymoon plans “somewhat up in the air.”

But two more rich Irish-American families were now joined in marriage, in what would become an increasingly complicated interfamily linkage. Mr. Farrell later commemorated this union by adding “Braised Breast of Lamb à la Murray” to his Farrell Line menus, which already offered such quaintly designated dishes as “Farrell's Dublin City Prime Ribs of Beef” and something called “O'Camembert.” And Farrell-Murray family accounts were gradually added to the list of those handled by McDonnell & Company.

The firm's business continued to burgeon. Soon there would be McDonnell & Company offices in twenty-six different American cities, in every major money capital in the United States, with three separate offices in New York alone, and another in Paris. Throughout all this, no one seemed to worry about the fact that this was a business founded on a single gimmick that happened to work well. No one seemed to think it surprising, either, that what might have seemed an excessive amount of money was being spent on decorating McDonnell & Company's offices, which were lavishly furnished with imported chandeliers, thick carpets, and French and English antiques. Along with this went an increasing sense of the family's social importance. In the early 1930's, one of the Murray children heard one of his parents remark that Mrs. So-and-so was “from the wrong side of the tracks.” What, the child wanted to know, did this expression mean? “New Jersey” was the reply.

Chapter 6

THE GREATEST NOSE COUNT OF THEM ALL

A singular fact about the Irish in America has been that they have been able to succeed in a wide variety of fields. There is a “difference,” again, between the Irish and the Jews—the latter having tended to distinguish themselves in retailing, investment banking, and, later on, in dress manufacturing and show business. The Irish, on the other hand, have managed to be successful not only in politics (with a concentration on elective offices, while the Jews have seemed to prefer appointive ones) but also in banking, insurance, engineering, industry, and show business, as doctors and lawyers and stockbrokers and advertising men—a whole spectrum of endeavor. Proud and scrappy and ambitious, the Irish quickly got into everything. Joseph P. Kennedy, for example, made money not only in finance but in whiskey and the motion picture industry. In the case of New York's Cuddihy family—which would soon ally itself, through marriage, to the ubiquitous Murrays—the money was made in publishing.

Isaac Kauffman Funk, the founder of the
Literary Digest
, was a Lutheran clergyman who had retired from the ministry in 1872 to become a publisher of religious tracts and sermons, and a magazine called
Metropolitan Pulpit
. In 1877, Funk was joined by a former schoolmate named Adam Willis Wagnalls, who had been a lawyer in Atchison, Kansas, and in 1884 Funk & Wagnalls began publishing a Prohibition journal called
Voice
. In 1888 the firm took over another religious periodical called
Missionary Review of the World
.

From the beginning, a kind of missionary zeal marked all the new publishers' ventures, even though neither Mr. Funk nor Mr. Wagnalls had any qualms about lifting and republishing previously published matter—material that had been printed in England, for example, or that had gone into public domain. Since this was before the advent of an international copyright law, this sort of thing was, though perhaps deceptive to readers, more or less legal, and when Funk & Wagnalls was attacked by a reporter from the New York
Evening Post
for highhandedly reprinting the entire
Encyclopaedia Britannica
in a cheap edition, Funk sued the reporter for his story and won his case. In 1890 Funk & Wagnalls brought out a new magazine called the
Literary Digest
, but only the title of the publication was really new. In line with Mr. Funk's policy of borrowing freely from the work of others, the
Literary Digest
, in the beginning, was nothing more than a compilation of stories and articles that had been published before by others. Even the format of the magazine was stolen from the then popular Washington magazine
Current Opinion
. At the outset, the magazine was only a moderate success and sold only a few thousand copies at ten cents each, or three dollars a year, and consisted of unstimulating columns of gray type, no illustrations, and three or four pages of advertising per issue.

Robert Joseph Cuddihy had gone to work for Funk & Wagnalls as an office boy at age sixteen, several years before the
Literary
Digest
came into existence. Cuddihy was poor and an Irish Catholic, and both Mr. Funk and Mr. Wagnalls were wealthy Protestants. At the same time, Cuddihy's devoutness and sense of moral rectitude were very much in line with Isaac Funk's ethical Lutheranism, and the older man took the younger one under his wing. Cuddihy was also tough, aggressive, and fiercely ambitious, and his rise in the firm was rapid. Wagnalls, meanwhile, was showing only a dilatory interest in the company, and Funk was spending more and more time investigating psychic phenomena and spiritualism. In 1905, Robert Cuddihy was named publisher of the
Literary Digest
and, though Funk made occasional appearances in the office, Cuddihy was in charge of things.

Robert Cuddihy's two main drives for the fledgling magazine were to maintain a high moral tone and to build circulation through advertising promotion. To establish the former, Mr. Cuddihy dictated that male and female personnel could not occupy the same offices, nor were men and women editors permitted to lunch out with one another or be seen together after hours. Both smoking and drinking were rigidly banned, and divorce was punished with quick dismissal. To achieve his second goal, Cuddihy believed in spending money, and in 1906 he bought the magazine
Public Opinion
, merged it with the
Digest
, and embarked upon an advertising campaign so expensive that it is said to have “terrified” his partners—but it boosted the
Digest's
circulation to 200,000 by 1909, and to double that figure seven years later.

The
Digest's
coverage of the events of World War I perhaps did more than anything else to establish it among the front-runners of American magazines. Its maps, prepared by professional cartographers and printed in two or three colors, were marvels of clarity and precision, and brought the details of overseas battles stunningly home to American readers. With this grew the
Digest's
reputation for absolute and strict impartiality; if it quoted a Republican newspaper editorial on any issue, it was always careful to
give an equal and balancing amount of space to a Democratic source, and the same to an Independent voice. At Robert Cuddihy's—or “R.J.” as they called him in the office—insistence, no trace of bias or prejudice was ever to be discernible in the
Digest's
pages, whether the subject at hand was politics, religion, economics, history, or literature, and by the 1920's hundreds of thousands of Americans had learned to believe that if you saw it in the
Digest
it was not only so, but fair.

By the end of the war the
Literary Digest's
circulation had climbed to 900,000, and, under the Cuddihy aegis, it continued to climb until, by 1927, it had reached 1,500,000, when it was topped only by the mighty
Saturday Evening Post
. Its success at garnering advertising pages was one of the wonders of the era, and in a single issue in 1920 it contained 174 pages, with many issues of 150 or more pages following, while the weekly price for the magazine—out of Mr. Cuddihy's staunch respect for his readers' pocketbooks—remained at ten cents. By the late 1920's the
Literary Digest
had become a publishing phenomenon, and its boss a legend and a rich man. At one point during this great success Robert Cuddihy offered Mr. Funk $5 million to buy out Funk's 40 percent interest in the publication. Funk turned the offer down. He would live to regret his cavalier decision. But then, at the time, the
Digest
was making a profit of $2 million a year.

One reason for the
Digest's
enormous popularity was Robert Cuddihy's innovative idea, in 1916, of conducting “straw votes.” Voters in key areas were polled by mail as to their stands on various political issues; their individual responses to the questionnaires were then tallied, analyzed, and a “prediction” of the political outcome was reached. The first poll was of members of state legislatures on their choices of party nominees for President. Charles Evans Hughes and Woodrow Wilson would be the two candidates, the
Digest
announced—and they were. Next, in the autumn of that year, the
Digest
polled labor-union officials as to
the outcome of the impending election, and followed this with a pole of fifty thousand
Digest
readers in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, New Jersey, and New York—on the basis of which the
Digest
was able to announce that Wilson would be the winner. When the election results were in, the figures were astonishingly close to the
Digest's
projection, with Wilson, of course, the winner. It began to seem that the
Digest
was an infallible barometer of public opinion.

Nothing at all like the
Literary Digest
polls had ever been done before in publishing, and from the outset the polls were hugely successful for at least three different reasons. They were, to begin with, highly interesting to
Digest
readers, who enjoyed looking into the magazine's crystal ball, and they increased circulation. Also, the results of each
Digest
poll were published in newspapers across the country, and thus provided a vast amount of free publicity for the magazine. Furthermore, every ballot that went out was accompanied by a
Digest
subscription blank, making the polls a gimmick through which to gain subscribers.

In 1920 the
Digest
predicted Harding over James M. Cox—again correctly—and in 1924 picked Coolidge over Davis. The
Digest
continued to be right in 1928 with Hoover over Alfred E. Smith (interestingly enough, R. J. Cuddihy himself, though normally nonpartisan, went to the Republican convention in Kansas City that summer to help nominate Hoover, instead of supporting Smith, the first Catholic candidate for President in American history). And in 1932 the
Digest
correctly stated that Hoover would be defeated by Franklin D. Roosevelt. The
Digest's
winning streak at picking winners and losers was extended into other areas besides Presidential elections. In 1922, 1930, and 1932, from eight to twenty million ballots went out to car owners and telephone subscribers on the issue of Prohibition. The results showed an eventual victory for the “wets”—again an ironic contrast to the magazine's Prohibitionist management, but it underscored Robert Cuddihy's policy of editorial impartiality.

R. J. Cuddihy himself was a small-boned, fine-looking man who dressed conservatively and shunned publicity. He hated to be photographed, and only four pictures are known to have been taken of him in his lifetime. In 1886, still a rising young man at Funk & Wagnalls, he had married a Miss Emma Frances Bennett. When their son, Herbert Lester Cuddihy, was born, Mr. Cuddihy again showed the independent and impartial side of his nature by deciding that, when the time came, his son would not be sent to a Catholic school or college. His son Lester was sent to Lawrenceville and Princeton. When the boy left college, he went to work for an advertising tycoon, Baron Collier. Anxious to have his son join him at the
Digest
, R. J. Cuddihy told the young man that he would double his Collier salary if he would come over. Explaining this situation to Mr. Collier, Herbert Lester Cuddihy suggested that Collier double his salary. Collier did, and then, to lure his son away, R. J. had to double the double. But it hardly mattered. The Cuddihys were by now quite rich. R. J. Cuddihy had acquired a yacht, and Lester soon owned a town house in East Seventy-third Street that had its own elevator—very much a novelty in private houses in those days.