The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars (39 page)
Authors: Paul Collins
Tags: #True Crime, #U.S.A., #Retail, #Criminology
Those who knew better couldn’t quite shake off the chill of seeing Mrs. Nack walk free. She had never really left her old streets—the place where she’d considered herself to be the beloved “Nanty Nack” of young mothers and their families alike. There, Chief Inspector Van Wagner wrote in 1938, she could
still be found, covered under the cloak of passing decades.
“
I last saw her a few years ago,” the old detective wrote, “smilingly selling cheap candy in her little store to the unsuspecting and innocent children of her neighborhood.”
REPORTERS RECALLED
the Nack and Thorn case for years to come, but by the time Walter Winchell hailed it in 1948 as “
the first of the great newspaper trials,” he was already speaking of events from his own infancy. The star reporters were long gone: George Arnold, who traced the famed red-and-gold oilcloth for the
Journal
, had one of the more peaceful retirements by capping off his long newspaper career with
a venture into writing novelty songs. The
World
’s crack reporter,
Ike White, went on to expose dozens of Wall Street fraud operations, and courthouse correspondent Julian
Hawthorne landed in prison himself for promoting a nonexistent silver mine.
The yellow-journalism era had taken a toll, though, on Joseph Pulitzer. At the end of the mighty battles over Guldensuppe and Cuba, his advisors estimated that the
Journal
had burned through about $4 million in Hearst’s family coffers—but that another $5 million was left. That was more than enough to throw knockout blows at the
World
. The blind and ailing Pulitzer wavered, and finally emerged from the soundproofed mansion where he had ruled by the dictates of a telegraph.
He and Hearst met quietly—their one face-to-face meeting—and negotiated a deal. What if they split up the market? The
Journal
could become the carnivalesque one-cent paper of the masses, and the
World
would return to being a more respectable two-cent paper, bent once again on bloodying the
Sun
and the
Herald
.
Just as important, the two papers would band together to fight labor unrest in their ranks.
The
World
and the
Journal
, famed for their crusades against cartels, were now secretly plotting one of their own.
After a year of delicate maneuvering,
their resulting agreement went unsigned. Ultimately, though, the
World
inched away from sensationalism of its own accord. Joseph Pulitzer never was very happy playing against Hearst’s one-upmanship; in his final years, he quietly
came to admire the sober reliability of the
New York Times
. After Pulitzer’s death in 1911, the
World
’s
proprietor was rehabilitated in historical memory; the yellow-journalism wars faded away, replaced by the rosy glow of bequests to Columbia University and to the writing awards that still bear his name.
Hearst, though, remained unrepentant. He had always delighted in the blockbuster Sunday editions that the yellow revolution fostered—“
a Coney Island of ink and wood pulp,” as one contemporary put it—and he relished the sensational headlines that made them sell. But just as he challenged his spiritual godfather in Pulitzer, and Pulitzer had turned on James Bennett, so too was Hearst attacked. Now it was by Joseph Patterson, a young Chicagoan that Hearst had once hired as a China correspondent.
Patterson’s founding in 1919 of the New York
Daily News
upped the stakes in newspaper journalism once again; printed in a bold tabloid format, the paper made its fame by sneaking a shoe-mounted camera into the electrocution of murderess Ruth Snyder and snapping a picture at the moment the switch was thrown. And like Pulitzer and Bennett before him, Hearst seemed rather appalled by his own journalistic progeny. He tried buying out Patterson, and when that didn’t work, he launched his own version—the
New York Daily Mirror
. The tabloid war long fomented by Hearst had now truly begun, with square front pages and fist-high headlines socking New Yorkers as they stepped out of the subway.
William Randolph Hearst had always cut a bigger figure than just his newspapers, though. Yet even after parlaying his populism and grandstanding into
runs for mayor, then governor, and
inevitably for president—he finally settled for a couple of terms in Congress—he
never quite recaptured the youthful excitement of his Murder Squad. As the media baron’s holdings expanded into dozens of newspapers, and his persona grew to the mythical proportions immortalized in
Citizen Kane
, one contemporary mused that the Guldensuppe case remained “
a lark and a triumph which he enjoyed more keenly” than any party nomination.
“
Ah well, we were young,” he later reminisced. “It was an adventure.”
IT SEEMED AS IF
that final word on the Guldensuppe case might remain with Hearst himself. But when the media baron died in 1951, there was still another man who hadn’t forgotten about the case—one man still standing.
That man was Ned Brown.
The cub reporter who first found Mrs. Nack’s apartment rose in time to write the
World
’s “Pardon My Glove” boxing column. He outlasted the newspaper itself; Ned worked in its newsroom until its final hours in 1931, then graduated to a long career handling publicity for Jack Dempsey and editing
Boxing
magazine. But he never stopped filing ringside newspaper reports, and when his fellow boxing writer A. J. Liebling profiled him in 1955, it was as much in admiration of an era as of a man: Ned was the last Victorian holdout in the New York sports pens.
“
Being a newspaperman gave you stature then,” the old man fondly recalled. “Everywhere except in society. It didn’t cut any ice there.”
Ned then went on to outlive Liebling, too. In fact, he also outlived nearly every New York newspaper. After the
World
went under, it combined with the
Evening Telegram
to become the
New York World-Telegram
. Then it swallowed the
Sun
to become the
New York World-Telegram and Sun
. Then it was mashed together with the remnants of the
Journal
, the
Herald
, and the
Tribune
to become the
New York World Journal Tribune
. And then it died.
But Ned Brown lived on.
Nothing could knock Ned to the mat; the same inquisitive blue eyes that searched Mrs. Nack’s mantelpiece for a picture of
Guldensuppe would go on to witness the Manson trial and Watergate. In an age of
Kojak
and
Dirty Harry
, he still recalled the days when
journalists
carried badges. Yet although news evolved from carrier-pigeon dispatches to satellite broadcasts, the business remained curiously familiar; when Rupert Murdoch started his chains, and Ted Turner bought his first TV stations, it was already old news to Ned Brown. He’d seen it all before. Hearst’s saturation coverage of sensational local crime—creating a suspenseful narrative out of endless news updates from every angle, whether there was anything substantive to cover or not—had already anticipated the round-the-clock cycle of broadcast news.
When Ned Brown died in 1976, he was well into his nineties—nobody was quite sure how old he was anymore. It wasn’t long since he’d made a final bow to the public;
evicted from his apartment by the Hudson River, the one possession the old man had bothered to retrieve was his tuxedo.
“I need that suit for my social life,” he explained to a
reporter.
With him ended the living memory of Augusta Nack and Martin Thorn. Even
the case files had been destroyed years earlier by the Queens County Courthouse in a fit of housekeeping. As they were on their way to the incinerator, though, one curious reporter picked out a yellowed evidence envelope and opened it up.
It held little inside—just six duck feathers and a mystery.
Newspapers may be the first draft of history, but most of what they cover never gets a second draft. This book is the first on the entire Guldensuppe affair, and it’s indebted to the several thousand newspaper articles about this case that I gathered by examining each day’s reporting from more than a dozen daily newspapers:
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
(BE)
New York Commercial Advertiser
(NYCA)
New York Evening Post
(NYEP)
New York Evening Telegram
(NYET)
New York Herald
(NYH)
New York Journal
(NYJ)
New York Evening Journal
(NYEJ)
New York Journal and Advertiser
(NYJA)
New York Mail and Express
(NYME)
New York Press
(NYP)
New York Sun
(NYS)
New York Evening Sun
(NYES)
New York Times
(NYT)
New York Tribune
(NYTR)
New York World
(NYW)
New Yorker Staats Zeitung
(NYSZ)
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