Hunger of the Wolf (11 page)

As the profit margins crept up, he could leverage higher sums against the properties, with which he could buy more papers, more radio stations. In 1935, he took over
The Rainsview Sentinel
and KMPS in Bracebridge. In 1936,
The Fargo Herald
and
The Callister Standard
. At that time, the purchase value of a newspaper was calculated by taking the annual profit and multiplying it by ten. Working out the annual profits, especially during the years of turbulence, was a problem. The owner always wanted to pick 1927 as the year to establish the business's profitability because that year combined high commodity prices with a fast-growing global economy. Dale accepted that assumption, which made his opponents believe they'd pulled one over on him, then he would apply the incurred debt obligations of that year over ten years, too.
The sellers always believed they were realizing a huge bargain—the 1927 price for a paper in the middle of the thirties—but Dale knew that the optimism of 1927 had incurred its own costs.

Once he owned a newspaper, Dale cut costs in half. Cut everything. In half. Since the purchase price had been based on ten times the profit margin of a single year, the key was to double that profit margin immediately. “A penny saved is a penny earned” is a mistaken aphorism. A penny saved exponentially improves the ratio of profit to investment. Among his junior executives, Carnegie was famous for never asking the profit, only the cost of things. The work of the owner is not to create or to add value but to make desirable things cheaper. That's it. That's the entire trick. Everything else is an accident or a by-product. Dale understood.

His ideal newsroom, he claimed in a later interview, consisted of three people: One to write the articles, one to sell the ads, and one to make sure the writer and the salesman were spending the least possible amount of money. Dale Wylie converted his cheapness into a spectacle, an object lesson for the employees. It is true—and not merely legend—that at
The Atkinson Register
every reporter had to hand in a pencil stub before receiving a new pencil. Dale banned notebooks. Reporters used scrap paper for their interviews. At
The Fargo Herald
, Dale discovered the model that he would apply later to his newspapers across the world: the 20/2 system. He demanded a twenty-percent profit margin and expenses worked out to both decimal points.

Even at this early stage, Dale didn't bother his editors about anything other than money. The political positions of his papers were irrelevant. If he bought a paper with a strong left-wing sensibility, it kept that sensibility. He never bothered his editors with calls to support one or another of his friends in a local political battle; he had no political
friends. Even later, when he controlled some of the most influential press outlets in the world, he never imposed his own view. Other proprietors used newspapers as playthings of their opinions. Dale used them to make money.

Dale's acquisitiveness quickly transcended the obviousness of cash. Money was just a means to borrow more money. The Liberty Bell Bank lent him so much that they couldn't stop themselves from lending him more. Each business plan promised to fulfill the debt he already owed them, and so they ran deeper and deeper into funding his business. Those bets, in the end, turned out to be among the most profitable the Liberty Bell Bank ever made.

Larchmount Crescent was the distant, shadowy home he returned to if he ever needed to reassure himself that there was a purpose to the leap of number into number. The upgazing boy. The unhappy women who had nothing to complain about. The house admired from the street. The car admired on the street. Respectability.

*  *  *

Wading through the thick grasses of the backyard that ran longer and wilder toward the ravine, George heard his father's voice calling him. His father was the world. What did the world want with him? At the milkman's door, a smiling gray-flannel colossus, all glasses, waving a heavy arm.

“Come inside, Georgie, let's get you dressed.”

“I am dressed,” George answered.

“You are dressed but you're not properly dressed. Now come on in.” Dad smelled of cigarettes and gasoline and alcohol, talk and money. He brought talk and money into the silent, drab house.

A whole suit of strange clothes had been arranged on George's
bed, a burgundy blazer, gray flannel trousers, a starched white shirt, a burgundy-and-gray striped tie. They were a strange dress-up. His father helped gently, clumsily, tucking him into the uniform, smoothing the creases with a butcher's palm, each article of clothing more uncomfortable than the last.

“Are we going to church?” George asked.

“Even better. We're going to Hamilton College,” his father answered.

“Dad?”

“Yes, son.”

“Why can't I go to school at home?”

His father's pause, perhaps to concentrate on the ribbon architecture of the tie, perhaps to contemplate thoughts deeper than ties, bloomed into petals of nothing. “Georgie, you are the first in the family to go to Hamilton College. It's one of the most expensive schools in the country. You should be proud.”

“Dad?”

“Yes, son.”

“Why do I have to wear these clothes?”

“Because they're respectable.”

George thought while his father lassoed the tie over his neck. “Dad?”

“Yes.”

“Is respectable the same as uncomfortable?”

Dale's laughter, somewhere in between a peal and a cackle, had the caramel warmth of a man who smokes and drinks with all walks and all stations in life, and the creamy ease of the father's happiness spread deliciously under George's skin, though he didn't get the joke.

They rode the black car to the school. Outside the pressed iron gates of Hamilton College, where the wealthiest coal and steel families from Pittsburgh bought their children's placement at Harvard and Yale,
Dale and George scrutinized the other boys, all in the school burgundy and gray, bright, clean-cropped, shouting and larking as the jaws of the school swallowed them, a portal to a grand digesting future.

“They seem friendly,” Dale said.

“They're friendly with each other because they're friends,” George said.

“Go make them your friends.”

George pecked his father's sandpapery cheek. The distant and unpredictable gods are the ones we must obey without fail. In the photographs of his childhood, George Wylie always wears the same dumb smile on his half-pleased face. This smile he placed on his face for his father.

Dale watched his son dissolve into the crowd of the uniformed elite, drifting into the school's gates before driving away. He had won. He had a son in Hamilton. No one would be able to say he wasn't respectable again.

*  *  *

In November 1937 a stranger arrived at the office in the belly of the
Atkinson Register
building on Mott Street without an appointment.

The stranger, dapper in double-breasted Harris tweed, assiduously brushing snowflakes from his shoulder and stomping fine brown leather shoes on the mat, entered smiling like a high school football star sharing the credit for a winning touchdown. Ms. Ricci, Dale's secretary, who was later to marry into the Stanfield family and become, for 1958, the best-dressed woman in Cleveland, Ohio, noticed that he wasn't wearing boots or a jacket. He wouldn't give a name either. He wouldn't listen when she told him that Mr. Wylie was very busy and had no time for peddlers. He said he would stay in the waiting room until Mr. Wylie
was ready. They had business to discuss. No, he wouldn't say what kind of business.

A few minutes later, Ms. Ricci, hearing the sound of soft scuffling and scraping, peeked into the waiting room where the stranger was hefting the chestnut leather sofa to an angle more available to the door.

“What do you think you're doing?” Ms. Ricci asked.

“See, with the chairs like this, when the occupant of the office comes out, he can see who's waiting for him right away.”

“I think Mr. Wylie knows how he likes his chairs.”

“I'm sure that's true, Ms. Ricci,” said the stranger, “but, you see, soon his office will be mine and the waiting room can't look so shabby when people are here to see me.”

When Dale finally allowed the stranger into his office, the man who stood before him was in many ways his opposite. Having lived on the road, separated from his family, Dale had grown rotund and sloppy, waddling around in his cheap suits. The stranger strode into every room with the glamour of predation. He had his shoes shipped in from New York, his suits from London; he arrived everywhere freshly barbered and manicured with his smooth charm that mimicked a small town's idea of a movie star.

“What's your business?” Dale asked, affectedly uninterested.

The stranger placed a book of signed contracts on the desk. Straight from the train station, the man had marched down Robinson Street and sold half the stores sectional ads for the newspaper and the other half-minute spots for the radio station. In 1937, to wrest a book of advertising contracts from small-town businesses was as miraculous as slapping down a grasped ray of sunshine, and Dale's initial disbelief lessened only when he saw the signature of Saul Levman, the owner of the Second Moon, the movie house, on one of the tickets. That could not be a fraud.
Saul never screwed up. Dale's skepticism faded to a dull, inexplicable dread. Who was this guy?

“That's an impressive piece of salesmanship,” he said.

“I'm an impressive guy.”

“I guess I ought to thank you for the business. Thank you.”

“Oh, I wouldn't thank me yet. I haven't given you those contracts. I'm trading them.”

Dale leaned back, tucking the stage pen into the properties closet of his suit jacket. “What's your price?”

“I want the job of head of sales, either for
The Atkinson Register
or KCUV, I don't care which.”

“Take both,” Dale said instantly. “But you'll have to fire the other guys.”

Firing people was never a problem for Dale's new lieutenant, whose handshake was a silken garrote and whose name, Dale learned only after he'd hired the man, was Jack Taggart.

*  *  *

Dale had little time or inclination to investigate Jack's abilities or origins. The sales grew. Growth was enough. With Jack managing Atkinson, Dale returned to the trains, sieving the prairie for any glints of despair he could buy up. There were plenty of papers for sale in the Depression, plenty of once-big men willing to cash out for a survivable sum. Dale ran his luck through a surging mass of hopelessness, men who couldn't find work or who had given up hoping for work, men who absented themselves from the quest for material advantage as surely as any monk out of legend, drifting into steamy camps with nothing but their bellies and a general fear, a fear of themselves and other men, of their memory and of the changing of the seasons. Among all those
sunken faces, in all those irrelevant towns, smelling of stale sweat and unswept horse stalls, Dale couldn't tell whether he was disappointed or relieved never to catch Max's face staring back.

Dale quickly realized that he could save the expense of telegrams to Atkinson while he was on the hustle—any ideas he had for the business, any opportunities he could imagine or any savings he could reckon to squeeze from the already reamed business had already been reckoned up by the time he returned. “Jack, come in here,” he would say.

“It's done,” Jack would holler, from the back office.

“What do you mean, it's done? I haven't even told you what to do.”

“Dale, there's two things you can ask me. One is an idea that's good, that I've already thought of. The other is an idea that's no good, that I'll talk you out of. So either way it's done.”

More than once, Jack's mannerisms, the unconsidered turning of his cheek to greet a stranger at the door, the thrust of his eyes through the window down to some disturbance on the street, or the cup of his hand to hold a lit match against the wind, filled Dale with old memories of Max. The warmth. The trickiness. The confidence that comes from being knocked down and standing up again and again. The gamble in both men. You could say that Jack was Max with polish. The irresistible aroma of worldliness swept over their bodies, and gathered love wherever they passed. How long would Dale be able to keep him? How long until the man's talent carried him away from small-time Atkinson?

They took to the road together: the charmer and the cheapskate, twin pistons firing, tight finance and loose credit, investment and salesmanship, determination and
sprezzatura
buying up every newspaper and station they could with other people's money. They never spoke, or rather they spoke about baseball, or the business, or the bright future of
media and where they should position themselves to catch the fullest light of its glittering treasure dawn, or they performed racist impersonations of the indistinguishable proprietors of the indistinguishable Chinese restaurants in the indistinguishable prairie towns, or they talked about when the Depression would end and how the poor really had only themselves to blame, and they traded rumors and gossip, but they never spoke. After working, they would drink together in the cigarette fog of a random tavern, stumbling out into the snow with new women and old songs, on their way to a track or the movies or a traveling burlesque show—whirling sequined pasties over shelf hips and the indifferent eyes of the women who floated superciliously over their bodily commodification. At the end of the evening, their paths would diverge. Dale would head to a detective novel in the bath at the hotel, and Jack out for more. And Dale never asked what more or how much more or what kind of more Jack preferred.

The war was a big score for the business. Americans devoured news of parliamentary debates in languages they did not speak and the harvests of farmers halfway across the surface of the earth and battles on faraway oceans as if the information were as succulent as local gossip.