The Heat of the Sun

 
    In Havana before the revolution, I sat one afternoon on a hotel terrace, playing chess with an elderly gentleman who had struck up my acquaintance.
Something about him was familiar. He was the type of American who seems almost British: leisured, with a patrician voice and perfect manners. A cravat, red as blood, burgeoned at his neck; his suit
was crisp, immaculately white, and he studied the board with eyes blue and gleaming as the tropical sea. He said he had lived in the hotel for ten years. He called himself an exile. Fondly, he
spoke of New York City and asked me what had changed. Imagining some sorrow of the heart had compelled him to leave, I hoped to hear his story, but he would not be drawn. Only later did I realize
he was a financier, known in his glory days as the Emperor of Wall Street, who had perpetrated a fraud that had ruined thousands of investors. I wondered if he really thought he could never go
home. He had served his sentence, paid his debts: the face that had sold a million newspapers would be anonymous now. Only a species of vanity kept him in his Cuban fastness, dreaming of Carnegie
Hall and the Palm Court at the Plaza.
    Some years ago in San Francisco I attended a production of Puccini’s Tartarin . The opera, you will recall, is based on a novel by Alphonse Daudet. In the figure of Tartarin, the
provincial braggart who is Don Quixote and Sancho Panza united in a single man, there is an allegory of the clash between fantasy and reality and the comedy that results from their irreconcilable
claims. In a neighbouring box sat a divorcée (long neck nobly poised) who had been notorious not so long before. She caused no sensation; those around her were blithe, as was she, while the
young man who accompanied her might never have known that her name had been a byword for womanly corruption.
    Scandal seldom endures. In the days when I still took on journalism, I covered a trial in Hong Kong. A Chinese houseboy had murdered his lover, but this was no commonplace affair, given that the
lover had been male, English, a nephew of the Assistant Colonial Secretary and betrothed to the Governor’s daughter. Inevitably, the boy was condemned to hang. Flashbulbs blazed; the
judge’s gavel pounded; the governor’s daughter broke into hysterical execration; but even this crime of passion, I reflected, would soon mean little to the world at large. Ours is an
age of amnesia. This is a mercy. Yet certain scandals refuse to vanish.
    For a time I believed that the Pinkerton affair would be forgotten. Its day had been dazzling: I had illumined it myself. Perhaps in used bookstores you may still turn up Benjamin Franklin
Pinkerton: A Life by Woodley A. Sharpless (New York: Harper & Row, 1947). It is not a good book. That my first essay in the biographer’s art should have been so rushed and dishonest a
production has been a source of regret to me, although, of course, in those days the full story could never have been told. Whitewash was wanted, and whitewash I provided: I was too good a
publicist to be a good writer.
    Unfortunately, my distortions found their way into subsequent accounts. With Pinkerton: Enigma and Truth by Marius Brander (London: Gollancz, 1953), we need not concern ourselves.
Promising much and delivering little, the book is a cut-and-paste from contemporary press reports, not to mention the work of a certain Woodley A. Sharpless.
    Miriam Riley Vetch’s biography of Kate Pinkerton, Senator’s Wife (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), caused outrage in Democrat circles. That Kate Pinkerton encouraged the
suicide of her husband’s Japanese lover seems unlikely to me, nor can I believe that she acted as procuress for her admittedly promiscuous husband. The case against Mrs Vetch may be stated
succinctly if I declare that she would never have been permitted to set foot in Kate Pinkerton’s drawing room. Mrs Vetch, however, was fortunate in her publicists. For a year she lectured
coast to coast on the woman she insisted on calling, appallingly, ‘Kate’; there was talk of a movie (Yardley Urban was to play the lead), but the danger was averted, the public lost
interest, and Mrs Vetch moved on to her next project, a life of Julia Ward Howe that promised startling revelations.
    No threat came from Webster M. Cullen’s Pinkerton, Japan, and the War in the Pacific (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968). Cullen is the college professor par
excellence,