chicken and went for seconds on the tart. As we ate, Wolfe held forth on why he thought the constitutional amendment limiting a President to two terms should be repealed, while Lon—bless his heart!—took the opposite view. I scored Wolfe the winner, but just barely.
We left the table strewn with polished plates for Fritz to clear and crossed the hall to the office. Lon settled back in the red leather chair, with a snifter of the long-awaited Remisier at his elbow. It looked so good I treated myself to some, too, instead of Scotch. Wolfe, of course, had beer.
“Mr. Cohen, you know from Archie that I’ve become very curious about Ian MacLaren,” he began, switching to business.
“So I gathered when he phoned and said you wanted to see some of his papers. Naturally I’m curious as to why you’re curious. By the way, did you read any of the rags?”
“Enough to confirm my opinion of the man’s journalistic standards. I have several questions about him, sir, but you proceed, please. You said earlier that his bid for the Gazette is now public knowledge?”
“Well, not quite yet,” Lon replied, looking at his watch. “We learned that the Times will break a piece in tomorrow’s editions, so our management finally got up off their collective duffs and decided to run something, if just to keep from getting scooped on our own story. But it’ll only make the Late City Edition, which is less than ten percent of our circulation. It will be on the street in about half an hour.”
“How serious is MacLaren’s bid?”
“Damn serious,” Lon said. “The Gazette is very closely held. Private ownership. And that ownership is in the hands of a small number of people, most of them members of the Haverhill family. All MacLaren has to do is win a few of them over.”
“I want to get to the family later,” Wolfe said. “First, what is your own opinion of Mr. MacLaren?”
Lon savored the Remisier. He might have been too beat to notice all this curiosity on Wolfe’s part was out of the ordinary, but I wasn’t. Something unusual was afoot, so I paid close attention. “As far as I’m concerned, MacLaren is the worst thing that’s happened to journalism in decades. You’ve seen his papers. He’s in the business for the cash. Rather, I should say the cash and the power.”
“Has he ever started a newspaper?”
“Nope, in every case he grabbed an existing one by throwing money around. He’s made a profit on just about all of them, so you can’t knock his business success. But what he does when he gets a paper . . .” Lon scowled. “He gives it his stamp—if you want to call it that. He usually turns them into tabloids, fills the front page with shrill headlines, slices stories in half, throws in girlie pictures, and cuts loose with an editorial policy that’s about twenty degrees to the right of Jesse Helms. As far as I’m concerned, he combines the worst of the original William Randolph Hearst and Rupert Murdoch.”
“How long has he owned his papers, at least the ones in this country?”
“I happen to know the answer to that one,” Lon said, “if only because I’ve been reading up on the guy. He bought the L.A. paper in ‘74, that was his first one. Then he swallowed Detroit in ‘75 and Denver a year later. You might be interested to know that in all those years, none of the three papers has ever endorsed any Democrat for President, the Senate, or the House. They’ve always backed the Republican candidate.”
Wolfe shuddered. “What does he want with the Gazette?”
“One of his goals—he’s been quoted on this several times—is to control a paper in the largest city in every English-speaking country. He’s already done that in Canada, Australia, England, Scotland, Ireland, New Zealand, even South Africa. That leaves only the U.S.— New York. The Gazette just happens to be the only possible target here. The other dailies in town all are held by big media companies that aren’t about to sell.” Lon drained his snifter and I gave him a refill.
“And the owners of the Gazette are prepared to sell?”
“That’s a Question,” Lon said, turning to salute me for keeping the Remisier flowing. “A few apparently are, from the talk I hear around the building, but whether or not MacLaren can finagle a majority of the stock remains to be seen.”
“How many owners does the Gazette have?” Wolfe demanded. “And how hard would