(2 of 3)
Real estate has produced Abe Hirschfeld, 78, who made his fortune building parking garages. With his millions, he has tried--and failed--to win a variety of elective offices, ranging from lieutenant governor of New York to U.S. Senator as a member of, variously, the Republican, Democratic and Independent parties. Recently, he interposed himself into the Clinton sex scandal, when, uninvited, he offered to pay Paula Jones $1 million if she would drop her sexual-harassment suit against the President. A few years ago, a headline in the New York Post asked WHO IS THIS NUT? At the time, Hirschfeld owned the newspaper. Asked if he was crazy, he replied, with great good grace, "I am. Any person that achieves things and accomplishes things is a little crazy."
Which brings us now to publishing. If ever there was a happy hunting ground for eccentrics, publishing is it. The industry produced more rare blooms than any other, ranging from Joseph Pulitzer (1874-1911), publisher of the New York World, to the very much alive Richard Mellon Scaife, 66, publisher of Pittsburgh's Tribune Review. Pulitzer suffered from nervousness so acute that he lived out his later years in double-insulated, soundproof rooms. As for Scaife, he spent some of his Mellon family megabucks (Alcoa, Mellon Bank) to buy a suburban newspaper, give it a Steel City moniker and publish an unending string of kooky conspiracy theories centered on the Clintons.
Robert McCormick (1880-1955), owner of the Chicago Tribune, cultivated presidential enemies the way other men do orchids, winning Franklin Roosevelt's special hatred for publishing, on the eve of World War II, secret War Department plans that put the lie to F.D.R.'s professed neutrality. McCormick traveled the world aboard his own luxuriously outfitted B-17 bomber that included a swivel chair mounted in the plane's picture-window nose. From this vantage point, he offered readers his judgments of the nations of the earth, finding most of them filthy, lazy and wanting in Midwestern virtue. From Libya he once wrote, "No water in river, and country full of Wops." The British he regarded as "pink-coated, horn-blowing, supercilious bankrupts." The Blessed Isles were to him just one big "chalk-cliffed hell." McCormick ably reinforced the trait of editorial looniness so eagerly deployed by William Randolph Hearst, whose career reached its zenith in fomenting the Spanish-American War of 1898.
Closing out our portfolio of publishers: health nut Bernarr Macfadden (1868-1955), who used his first magazine, Physical Culture, as a vehicle for promulgating his views on carrot eating, cold-water bathing and frequent, vigorous sex. (He was for all three.) Largely for his fulminations on the last, his racy tabloid, the New York Evening Graphic, which specialized in covering violence and sex, became known as the "PornoGraphic." His legacy is with us even now: it was Macfadden who invented the "composograph" or composite photo, in which the heads of real people in the news are superimposed on the bodies of models posed in compromising positions. He owned magazines, restaurants, resorts--an empire worth $30 million that critics claimed was built on nothing more than "sex and carrots." At age 45, he met, hired and later married a comely 19-year-old swimming champion with whom he toured Europe in an act whose climax was her jumping from a 7-ft. platform onto his flexed, trampoline-like stomach.