Real Lace (10 page)

One of his son's first notions for the
Literary Digest
was to reduce the size of its pages by one-eighth of an inch. Even such a tiny reduction would, the younger Cuddihy pointed out, lower the
Digest's
bulk weight in the mails and would result in a substantial saving in postage. The senior Cuddihy was reluctant to tamper, even in so slight a way, with a successful product, and was certain that the move would bring a storm of protest from readers. But he let his son have his way and the reduction was made—and no one noticed it. Only one reader, in fact, wrote in to complain. Another hugely successful Funk & Wagnalls venture was the publication, in 1922, of a volume titled
Etiquette
by a socially prominent New York divorcee named Emily Price Post. Mrs. Post's book went into hundreds of printings and new editions, and made Emily Post a rich woman and Funk & Wagnalls an even richer company. The
Cuddihys found Mrs. Post a somewhat prickly author to deal with. She was intensely jealous of her name and her product, and when she spotted an advertisement for a deodorant cream called Etiquet, she clipped the ad and wrote indignantly across the face of it, “Dear Mr. Cuddihy—is there no way to check this association with ‘Etiquette'? Few things could be more revolting! At least could the illustration—” it showed a young woman stroking her underarm—”be forbidden? Certainly it is a
revolting
offense against ‘Etiquette.' As a matter of fact, I was asked to go on a radio program by these manufacturers …” (The rest of her angry scribble is indecipherable.)

R. J. Cuddihy's favorite philanthropy was a center for cancer patients run by a Catholic order which had been started by Rose Hawthorne, daughter of Nathaniel, herself a convert and thus “more Catholic than the Catholics.” Mr. Cuddihy approved of Miss Hawthorne's zeal, and to aid her cause he regularly carried about on his person a hefty wad of large bills. Whenever he encountered a rich Catholic friend, Mr. Cuddihy would produce the wad, tap it significantly with his finger, and suggest that the friend fatten the pile with a few big bills of his own. Among Mr. Cuddihy's well-heeled friends were members of Chicago's Cudahy family, including Michael Cudahy himself, who had gone to work as a butcher at the age of fourteen, and later revolutionized the meatpacking industry by developing the process for summer curing of meat under refrigeration; the result was the Cudahy Packing Company. Cudahy once dropped in on Cuddihy in New York just to ask him for a semantic explanation of the different spellings of their name—clearly the field of Mr. Cuddihy, the publisher, and not Mr. Cudahy, the butcher. R. J. Cuddihy told his Chicago kin Cudahy, “Both our families came over in the forties from the same county, Kilkenny, and the same town. Only there was this difference between our two sets of forebears:
ours
knew how to spell. The officials at Ellis Island thus recorded your name phonetically
—that is, incorrectly—as
Cudahy
. Our name we ourselves wrote—to wit,
Cuddihy.”
After imparting this information, Mr. Cuddihy took Mr. Cudahy to lunch. Meanwhile, back in Kilkenny, the name turns up in various guises, from Cuddy to McGillicuddy.

Mr. Cuddihy was equally precise in other matters. His grandson Jack recalls bringing a schoolmate home one weekend from Portsmouth Priory. At lunch, Grandpa Cuddihy asked the friend, “Where are you from, George?” The young man replied, “Manchester, New Hampshire, sir.” “Ah,” said Mr. Cuddihy, “Manchester, New Hampshire—population 78,563,” or whatever it was at the time. The young man was dumfounded that Mr. Cuddihy had the figure right to the last digit.

At the same time, Mr. Cuddihy was consistently reserved in respect to his religion, and was careful never to discuss his faith with his non-Catholic friends and business acquaintances, nor to proselytize in any way, nor to get into religious arguments. This was not so much a matter of conscience as it was in line with the
Digest's
editorial policy of strict neutrality in all matters. Few non-Catholics who knew him suspected Mr. Cuddihy's affiliation with the Church, and, in fact, one of his best friends was a Baptist minister named Justin D. Fulton, D.D. Obviously, Dr. Fulton did not realize that his friend was a devout Catholic because, on one occasion, Dr. Fulton presented Mr. Cuddihy with a little book he had written, and which had been published in 1893 by something called the Pauline Propaganda Company. The book, warmly inscribed to Cuddihy by Fulton, was called
How to Win Romanists
, and was dedicated:

To

The Youth of America

confronted by

Lost and undone Romanists journeying

To an endless death, to whom

few speak and for whom

few pray …

in the hope and with the prayer

that it may show them

how to win Romanists to Christ

Fulton's little book, a polemic of anti-Catholic bigotry, was filled with lurid tales of human sacrifice, of nuns being violated by priests in convents, of onanism among monks in monasteries, of the fallibility of the Pope, and blamed the Catholic Church for everything from slavery to the labor movement. Quite typically, R. J. Cuddihy accepted the gift and thanked his friend, and never let Fulton know the considerable gaffe he had committed.

Under Mr. Cuddihy's stern and proper exterior he, too, was a sentimental Irishman. Like his partner, Mr. Funk, Cuddihy was quick to instigate lawsuits against any detractors of either Funk & Wagnalls or its precious
Literary Digest
. But when he won his cases, he inevitably paid the damages for which his opponents were assessed. In his strictly run offices, he would call errant employees into his chamber, dress them down thoroughly for their misdeeds, and then follow the scolding with an apology and an invitation to lunch. There is a persistent Funk & Wagnalls tale that one afternoon Mr. Cuddihy happened upon two of his
Digest
editors merrily fornicating among the
Digest
files or, as he discreetly put it later, “going at it.” Mr. Cuddihy muttered a confused apology, retreated from the scene, and then, after a decent interval had elapsed, summoned the fellow whom he had caught
in flagrante
to his office. “Young man,” he announced sternly, “you are going to have to accept a reduction in salary!” And it was done.

A Father Wynne, a Jesuit priest, once said of him, “Catholics in New York as elsewhere are crushed under the burden of their churches and schools, but there is in this town one Catholic who has never said ‘No' to anybody.… I mean Mr. Robert Cuddihy. His
Literary Digest
has an extraordinary influence in the United States.”

And so indeed it did. After the
Digest's
correct forecast of the outcome of the 1932 Presidential election, the editors of the Kansas City
Journal-Post
trumpeted, “Not even Franklin D. Roosevelt can feel more triumphant than the editors of the
Literary Digest.”
And the
Digest
editors themselves, in a rare moment of pride and self-congratulation, added a paean of their own to their magazine, saying, “When better polls are built, the
Digest
will build them!”

In the early spring of 1936, the Robert J. Cuddihys celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary with a special Nuptial Mass in the Lady Chapel of St. Patrick's Cathedral, which was then at 460 Madison Avenue. There was a big family party afterward, with relatives gathered from all corners of America. R. J. Cuddihy was seventy-three years old, and the Great Depression had affected his great fortune, and his great magazine, very little. The three Cuddihy sons, Paul, Lester, and Arthur, were now all connected with the
Digest
, and had made brilliant marriages to prominent (and rich) Irish Catholic women—Lester Cuddihy to Grandpa Thomas Murray's daughter Julia. (At the time of the courtship, when Grandpa Murray was told that the Cuddihys were big in publishing, the great inventor said, puzzled, “Publishing? What is publishing exactly?”) The Cuddihys' four daughters had also made good Catholic marriages—Mabel to T. Burt McGuire, Helen to William J. Ryan, Alice to Thomas Guerin, and Emma to Kenrick Gillespie. Grandpa Cuddihy's money had built the elegant apartment house at 1088 Park Avenue, and his son Lester had had the idea of adding the large and fountain-filled central garden-courtyard, which makes 1088 Park one of the singularly pleasant addresses in New York today. (At first, it looked as though the building would be a financial failure, and so it became inhabited largely by other Cuddihys, McGuires, and Gillespies.) There were summers in Water Mill and cruises on Grandpa Cuddihy's yacht, the
Polly
, and trips back to boarding school on the boat for the grandsons, when Father Diman himself, head of Portsmouth
Priory, would come out and stand on the bluff to greet and bless the boys as the Cuddihy yacht sailed into Portsmouth Harbor. Meanwhile, the
Literary Digest's
pollsters were busily at work on the upcoming November election, a contest between Alfred Landon and Roosevelt for a second term. And presently the results of the poll were out: It would be a landslide victory for Landon, with Landon carrying all the big states—New York, California, Ohio, Illinois, New Jersey, and so on. The result of twenty million
Digest
ballots showed that Landon would win four votes out of every seven.

What went wrong? Was it the sin of pride again? Because when the results were in, Landon had carried exactly two states, Maine and Vermont. It was an overwhelming victory for Roosevelt.
Time
magazine printed a picture of Grandpa Cuddihy with the caption, “Is Our Face Red!” And in its wisecracking style,
Time
noted that “The
Digest
mispredicted a Landonslide.” A solemn American political maxim used to be “As Maine goes, so goes the nation.” The joke became “As Maine goes, so goes Vermont.”

Prior to 1936 the
Digest
had sent out the ballots for its polls to telephone subscribers, automobile registration owners, and to its own subscription list. In the 1936 poll, however, the telephone lists were largely abandoned, since it was felt that telephone books went quickly out of date. Perhaps that was the reason for the gigantic error. But some
Digest
people felt that there were other, more subtle, reasons. One editor commented that he felt that the
Digest
had become “punch-drunk,” and had begun to believe too completely in the myth of
Digest
infallibility which it had sponsored. (“When better polls are built …”) Others said that the
Digest
had gone wrong by failing to reach “the lower economic brackets” of the voting population. There had been other ominous notes. During the early Depression years,
Digest
circulation had dropped more than the
Digest
cared to admit, and profits were down accordingly. The
Digest
had also begun to feel the competition of newer, sprightlier weeklies such as
Time, Newsweek
, and
The New Yorker
. The
Digest's
own explanation was a somewhat mysterious one: Republicans, it said, answered questionnaires more readily than Democrats. This left the reason in the realm of the occult. But one thing was absolutely certain: The
Literary Digest
, which had a few days earlier been a great and trusted American institution, was suddenly a national laughingstock, and all over the world
“Literary Digest
jokes” proliferated, rather the way Polish jokes spread in the early 1970's. On the day of the debacle, Mr. Funk and the three Cuddihy sons either avoided the office altogether or else put in only momentary appearances. Mr. Robert J. Cuddihy, however, came into the office at the usual hour and went about his business as though nothing had happened.

H. Lester Cuddihy, who had been for Landon, wired his young son Jack at Portsmouth Priory, saying simply, “Ha ha.” But Lester Cuddihy's wife, Julia, sent another telegram to Jack, saying, “Don't write anything fresh to Grandpa. He feels very badly. Mom.”

By the issue of July 17, 1937, things at the
Digest
were in such dire shape that Funk & Wagnalls actually gave the
Digest
away—to the publisher of
Review of Reviews
, and the combined result was called by the unwieldy title of
The Digest: Review of Reviews Incorporating the Literary Digest
. It did not do well. By October of the same year, this amalgam was sold, and the name
Literary Digest
was reapplied to the new result. This attempt at a resuscitation was also a failure, and with the issue of February 19, 1938, publication was suspended—temporarily, it was hoped—and a pathetic letter was sent out to ten thousand subscribers which begged:

Literary Digest
is not just another magazine; it is an American Institution of major importance.
It cannot be allowed to die
.… We ask you to put a dollar in the enclosed return envelope.… Your dollar will be credited to your subscription as an increase in rate.

Quite a number of dollars floated in, along with several outright gifts. But for soliciting and accepting this sort of charity, and tampering in an irregular way with rates and circulation methods, the
Digest
attracted the attention of the newly created Audit Bureau of Circulations. Funk and Cuddihy had fought against the creation of the Bureau, and its goal to create a standard and uniform method of tabulating magazine circulations, throughout their entire professional lives. Now it was the ABC that would administer the
coup de grâce
to the
Digest
. The ABC demanded that the cash gifts be returned, and petitioned the court to reorganize the magazine under the Bankruptcy Act.
Time
gleefully reported the death statistics:

Against liabilities of $1,492,056 (including a $60,000 demand note to Funk & Wagnalls—original
Literary Digest
publishers—$63,000 for paper, $30,000 for printing, $612,000 to readers for paid up subscriptions), the
Digest
listed assets of $850,923: cash on hand, $222,293; mailing lists, furniture, machinery, $377,794; deferred charges, $160,821; goodwill, $90,015.