The Story
Their version: Gerald Ives created modern journalism. He was also a failed politician, a lavish partier, and a womanizer who abandoned his family without batting an eye.
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Her version: Gerald Ives never spoke an ill word of his father, but he never once heard his father say a kind word about him .
Gerald was raised to be a businessman, and was hardly eight years old when he first realized he’d been born in the red . In debt. At a loss.
He came out with his father’s face and an expectation he could never live up to, no matter how many tutors his parents locked him in a room with. He was supposed to do great things. That was the contract Lawrence thought he’d entered into with the universe, and thus every second Gerald didn’t , he was failing.
He was disappointing.
He was falling short.
Things were different for his younger sister.
Eight years after Gerald was born, Georgiana “Gigi” Ives arrived, firmly in the black . Beautiful like her mother, quiet like her father, quick witted like both of them. And she was naturally content, which only earned her more adoration.
Gigi went where she pleased. She did as she wished. She studied painting and dance and piano, and played out in the grass with the nanny on sunny days.
And Gerald watched through the window, his tutor barking at him, “Again, again,” until every math problem was solved, every Italian verb correctly conjugated, every important mining-related fact memorized and recited back.
Their house in San Francisco was large and opulent, but to him, it felt like a cage he paced, searching for weak points.
He tried—at so many points in his life, he tried—to codify what it was that made his father detest him. Or what exactly about Gigi and his mother drew out that small, soft smile on his father’s lips.
Why they could drift, light as sunbeams, across the house and he would watch them go, more than approvingly, when only Gerald’s rage could ever turn his father’s eye.
Once, after they’d fought, Gerald had gone into an outbuilding on their property and punched a hole clean through the wall. His mother had found him there, still shaking with unspent energy even as blood dripped down the back of his hand to the cold dirt floor.
Gently, she’d touched his shoulders. “He’s afraid, you know,” she told him. “That’s why he’s so hard on you.”
Gerald had nodded, and later wished he hadn’t. He didn’t know. He’d never seen any evidence at all that Lawrence Ives was afraid of anything, and even on his deathbed, Gerald would wonder what his mother had meant that day.
But instead of asking, he’d tucked away his anger, tamped it down—it did no good anyway—and did only and exactly what his father asked, until he was twenty-five and, finally, Lawrence deemed him responsible enough to join the family business.
Sort of.
He gave him a newspaper. One.
“A trial,” Lawrence had said, without even meeting his son’s eyes, simply scribbling his signature to make the change official.
Look at me , Gerald remembered thinking. Just look at me, for once.
He didn’t.
One week after Gerald took charge of the San Francisco Daily Dispatch , he changed the motto to “Where Truth Is King.”
One week after that, he cleaned house.
He and his father didn’t fight about it. They didn’t talk about it. But for the first time, Gerald knew Lawrence was watching him.
Gerald didn’t understand mining. He had no natural talent for prospecting. He’d never feel the silver calling out to him from deep within the earth.
But he had something his father didn’t. A fearlessness. If everything fell apart, Gerald thought, who cared? This was his chance, and he’d never get another one.
He had to keep his father’s eye on him, and that meant taking big swings.
He bet everything he had on talent. He poached the best writers, the best cartoonists, the best editors from the Pulitzer family’s papers and the Hearsts’ presses too. He nearly doubled his new staff’s pay, and with the money he had left, he bought the newest and best equipment.
Gerald Ives never spoke ill of his father.
But he ran his newspaper with a vengeance.
Lawrence had raised him to be a businessman, but his mother had raised him to be a populist, and he took all of her ideals and fed them back to the people, for a price.
He attacked corruption. He pointed out hypocrisy.
The truth is king , he told his staff again and again, and his readers too, who began to have the sense that maybe all the other newspapers of record weren’t quite telling the truth.
Some of his competitors folded. Others, he acquired.
He ran two of his father’s papers into the ground, then bought them out from under him, and still the two men sat across the dinner table from each other in silence, Lawrence’s eyes discreetly lifting off his soup to take inventory of his only son.
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.
Four years later, he tried again. Again, they chose someone else.
And while Gerald was still smarting from the failure, Lawrence abruptly fell ill.
Gerald rushed to be at his father’s side, but even on his deathbed, Lawrence had nothing to say to his son. Instead, for several days, he raged and wept and apologized to people who weren’t there. He begged a faceless specter to come home, and then finally seemed to get the answer he wanted. In 1919, at eighty-nine years old, Lawrence found his first shred of peace.
Then he closed his eyes, smiled softly, and took his last breath.
It was as if all the hunger that had lived trapped inside his body slipped out on that last exhale, then snaked its way into Gerald’s lungs, where it writhed and snapped like a viper.
To Gerald, that bottomless pit of a nameless want felt less like hunger and more like rage. An anger so violent he thought it might— would —destroy anything it touched.
For the first time since his teenage years, he stormed into his childhood bedroom and punched the wall. Then he punched it again, and again, until the blood from his knuckles was smeared across the wallpaper.
When Rosalind came to him, he shoved his wife from the room and locked the door, letting the rage consume him. He destroyed his cherrywood dresser. He ripped the drapes from the window. He battered the bedpost until he was too tired to fight anymore, to think anymore, and that was a relief.
He left San Francisco a week after that. He couldn’t stand to be there any longer. Couldn’t stand to be seen, by his wife or his children, or to watch his mother mourn the father who’d never loved him.
He left them, all of them, and went somewhere new, unfamiliar and without ghosts. He was convinced that in Hollywood, he could sweat his fury out like a fever.
But that wasn’t what happened.
His first night in town, at forty-four years old, Gerald Ives fell in love.
He sat in a lounge, sipping a martini, and he looked up at the stage and saw her, lit up like an angel. Untamable red-gold hair. Strange green eyes. A voice like a flame singeing paper.
She was no more beautiful than Rosalind, but she was striking . Her presence not only invited but demanded attention, and it was such a relief to give it, to feel that, instead of a bottomless pit of rage. His want was an ocean he could drown in. Not a lack of something but an excess of it. When she finished her performance, she walked straight off the stage to his table and introduced herself.
Nina Gill had been trying to break into film with about as much luck as Gerald with national politics. Films were still silent then, and half of Nina’s power was in the sound of her voice.
Unlike Gerald, or even Gerald’s wife, Nina didn’t hunger for wealth, power, or change. It wasn’t stardom she was after.
She wanted only beauty and pleasure. And lucky for Gerald, he was an undeniably beautiful man, more so in middle age than he had been in his youth.
As for the pleasure piece of things, he lost himself in his pursuit of it with her. Drinking, dancing, music, sex.
All day long, every minute that she wasn’t with him, he missed her. But when she fell asleep at night—before him, always—his thoughts wandered to Rosalind, which made him think about San Francisco and his old life, and the anger would rise through him again, shapeless and aimless but white hot.
This went on for months. It might’ve gone on much longer if Rosalind hadn’t sent him word that his mother had died.
He knew as soon as he read the telegram that that was the end of it. He’d never go back to San Francisco. Again, his anger rose, but this time there was nowhere to run. So he threw himself back into work.
The First World War was two years over by then and there was talent to be found, money to be made. He needed more than to be drunk and in love. He needed to be busy, worn out.
He bought a burgeoning film studio, Royal Pictures, and put Nina under contract. When her first film came out, a comedy, he filled his newspapers with rapturous reviews of her performance, but it took two more for her star to truly rise.
As the money came back to him—it always did—he began to do something new and novel for Gerald, for any Ives .
He spent it. Not invested, not gambled. Spent. Vengefully.
He couldn’t have the White House? Fine! He built himself a fortress on the California coast and filled it with beautiful, pleasurable things.
He covered the grounds with gardens and citrus trees, threw lavish parties most Saturday nights.
On Nina’s birthday, he brought in elephants and tigers. He invited her Hollywood friends to stay for weeks on end, and they swam drunk and naked in the indoor pool together, beneath a ceiling draped in gauzy fabric.
And they fought. God, did they fight.
Rosalind had never so much as raised her voice to him.
Nina did. Every time she learned of one of his infidelities (of which there were many), she screamed at him, and whenever he suspected one of hers (likely there were none), he screamed back.
They’d fight in front of their friends, throw things at walls, storm onto the grounds and spit at each other. But it never made it to the gossip rags, because by then he owned them all.
So long as his family didn’t have to read about him, about his boundless rage, then it would be as if he no longer existed.
All his fury would burn itself out, without ever touching them.
But of course that wasn’t what happened. Because Nina fell sick.