Newscaster apologizes on air after using racial slur

H ere in Aspen , the air is thin, the snow is perfect, and money is everywhere. This is a singular American town in many respects. Among them is this: Aspen had, until very recently, two legitimate daily newspapers, The Aspen Times and the Aspen Daily News . At a moment when local newspapers face manifold threats to their existence and more and more American cities become news deserts, Aspen was the opposite: a news geyser. The town’s corps of reporters covers small-town tropes like high-school musicals and the Fourth of July parade. But Aspen’s journalists are also the watchdogs and chroniclers of one of the richest towns in America and a site of extreme economic inequality, the exemplar of the phenomenon that academics call “super-gentrification,” where—as the locals often say—“the billionaires are forcing out the millionaires.”

I joined The Aspen Times as an editor in 2014, after a seven-year tenure at the Aspen Daily News . The Times has published since 1881 , when Aspen was a silver-mining boomtown, through its postwar rebirth as a ski resort, and now as the home of ideas festivals, wine festivals, $50 entrees, and an awe-inspiring collection of private jets, many owned by billionaires deeply concerned about climate change. The paper, which was based for much of its history in a purple-painted building between a drugstore and the Hotel Jerome, developed a reputation for shoe-leather reporting and accountability journalism.

On Thanksgiving 2021, the start of ski season, the Times editorial team numbered 13 , including four reporters who had been covering our town since at least the 1990s. We were treated well by our parent company, Swift Communications. Our paper was profitable, owing largely to real-estate advertising. We seemed to be a safe harbor for small-town journalists.

We were wrong.

My story is populated by blue bloods and thin-skinned billionaires, including the owners of the Pittsburgh Pirates, a litigious Soviet-born developer, and the wealthy cousin of a U.S. Supreme Court justice. Its drama unfolds in a superficially idyllic mountain community where a 1969 mayoral candidate’s slogan, “Sell Aspen or Save It,” still sums up its core conflict. (The following year, Hunter S. Thompson mounted his “Freak Power” campaign for sheriff; upon losing, he gave a concession speech at the Hotel Jerome in a Founding Father–style wig. “I proved what I set out to prove,” he said, “that the American Dream really is fucked.”)

Aspen is strange, but this is a story that could actually take place anywhere. It’s about what happens to the public interest when billionaires collide, and when newsrooms are bullied into suppressing coverage by people with great mountains of money and battalions of lawyers. And it speaks to a deepening crisis for the free press, which has been comprehensively betrayed in Aspen.

I first saw Bob Nutting’s grinning face in a Zoom square on the morning of Tuesday, November 30, 2021, when I was summoned to a surprise all-company meeting for Swift, which operated The Aspen Times and its sister papers across ski country. I was there because Nutting’s company, Ogden Newspapers, had just bought us.

The West Virginia company traced its origins to H. C. Ogden’s founding of The Wheeling News in 1890 and now included 54 daily papers from Hawaii to North Dakota to New Hampshire. It was a fifth-generation family-owned-and-operated company, as Nutting told us, and as just about everybody from Ogden repeated at every opportunity after the announcement. These days, it is run by Bob Nutting and his brother, Bill, as CEO and vice president, respectively, with their father—the elderly and little-seen patriarch G. Ogden Nutting—still titled publisher, and Bob’s 33-year-old daughter, Cameron Nutting Williams, ascendant as chief revenue officer. It is Williams who is behind the company’s acquisition strategy.

As Nutting spoke, I Googled his company. I learned that Nutting and his family also own the Pittsburgh Pirates, whose fans have nicknamed him “Bottom-Line Bob” for his habit of cutting loose the best ballplayers as soon as they got too expensive. But at least they aren’t a hedge fund , I thought. At least they aren’t Alden Global Capital , the vulture fund currently strip-mining so many American newspapers .

We didn’t have to wait long for the first sign of trouble. It came that very first day, when Ogden sent a press release about the change of ownership to David Krause, the editor, and instructed him to run it in the next day’s paper. This was an unusually heavy-handed step for management at a news organization: The staff had assumed we would report our own story, ask questions (like the sale price, which had not been disclosed), and apply the same standard of reporting we’d apply to any event. Instead, Ogden wrote its own story about acquiring the paper, and ran it with Krause’s byline on it. (Krause was unhappy about this, but felt that his hands were tied.)

In the days that followed, Ogden introduced our new leadership team. A corporate human-resources director, who had come to journalism after a career in coal mining, read us the employee handbook over Zoom. Allison Pattillo, a local I had hired in 2019 to serve as a contract editor on our seasonal tourist-focused magazines, and who had started full-time in the summer of 2021, would be our new publisher. She would report to Scott Stanford, who had been a newspaper president in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and whom Ogden had named to oversee its Colorado papers. Stanford had no answers when employees asked about basics like health insurance and what was going to happen to the corporate apartments Swift had rented to reporters at a heavy discount to keep them living in an ever more expensive Aspen. Ogden had not bought those apartments from Swift, nor had it bought any of the buildings housing newsrooms. (Months later, Ogden offered a salary adjustment to some employees who lost housing.) Stanford did tell us about how, when he worked at the Steamboat Pilot & Today , he had written a column about his experiences skiing that contained the line “powder sucks.” This anecdote did not endear him to our team.

To have a job in local journalism, though, is to tolerate some measure of indignity and upheaval. How bad could it be? we asked ourselves and one another during lunch-hour ski laps and over after-work drinks. Very very bad, we learned, when Vladislav Doronin came to town.

B efore March 2022 , if Aspen locals had noticed Vladislav Doronin at all, it was because he was just another of the wealthy men who come to town for a few weeks each winter to ski in designer clothes of questionable utilitarian value and create private-plane traffic jams at the airport. He was born in the U.S.S.R., amassed a fortune transforming Soviet industrial real estate into office space for Western companies like IBM and Philip Morris, expanded into developing international luxury resorts, and had also found time to date (and rather bitterly and publicly separate from) the supermodel Naomi Campbell . When visiting, he could often be spotted skiing the black-diamond steeps of Aspen Mountain.

And on March 4, 2022, Doronin bought a piece of it: nearly one acre on the mountain’s underdeveloped west side, for $76 million. The seller was a business entity led by Jeff Gorsuch, a former U.S. ski team downhill racer, a proprietor of a small chain of high-end retail ski shops, and a cousin of Supreme Court Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch.

The plot of land is one of the most sought-after patches of sloped dirt in ski country, the site of the 1950 FIS Alpine World Ski Championships, which helped put Aspen on the map. In a town where the developable land is finite and the wealth is seemingly limitless, the sale was big news. Just eight months earlier, Gorsuch and his partners had bought the plot from the Aspen Skiing Company for just $10 million. How this piece of dirt came to be worth $66 million more than it had been less than a year before was puzzling, as was the fact that Gorsuch had already marked the plot for a controversial and hard-won development project : the 81-room Gorsuch Haus hotel, along with 320,000 square feet of bars, restaurants, and shops, plus time-shares and a high-speed gondola. Because the development had required rezoning and had used a taxpayer subsidy, approval had been put to a highly contentious public vote that Gorsuch Haus won by just 26 votes.

The relationship between Aspen’s masses and its elites has been complicated since lifts started rumbling up the mountain eight decades ago. The CEOs, the mysterious tycoons, and figures like the former Starwood homeowner Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan live—usually very part-time—in compounds that employ a whole valley of service workers, and their six-figure property-tax bills fund good schools, public amenities, and subsidized employee housing for those of us in Aspen’s middle-class underclass. But in recent years, long-established mom-and-pop businesses around Aspen’s pedestrian mall have closed to make room for more luxury retail shops—“purse museums,” as they are known. Where the dive bar Cooper Street Pier once beckoned ski bums for pitchers and pool, the Italian designer Brunello Cucinelli now sells cashmere suits and $15,000 parkas. During the pandemic’s urban exodus, private-home development and real-estate sales have been supercharged to levels unheard of even here in Aspen. Property sales topped $4.6 billion last year, and the average single-family-home price hit $11 million. Locals and elected officials try to beat back the pace of development, but Aspen’s big money tends to do what it wants.

When Russia invaded Ukraine last winter and Russian oligarchs with real-estate holdings all over the world were sanctioned, Aspen (and its media) wondered how much of Aspen’s economy was tainted. Less than two weeks into the invasion, when Gorsuch flipped a piece of the town’s history to a Soviet-born billionaire, the town lit up. (Doronin has not been sanctioned and says he has no ties to Putin or Russia.) The Times had been covering the Gorsuch Haus plan for more than three years already, and we ran an editorial criticizing Gorsuch and his partners for trading on his family name and misleading voters. A city-council member speculated in our pages that the land had been “a nice safe place to park money.” Stickers were pasted around downtown with the word GORSUCKS emblazoned below a Soviet hammer and sickle. Shortly before midnight the day after the sale to Doronin, an Aspen-based affordable-housing developer named Peter Fornell took a can of red spray paint to the window of Gorsuch Ski Cafe and scrawled a most devastating slur: GO BACK TO VAIL .

W e at the Times jumped on all of this. It was the biggest story in town. Managing editor Rick Carroll began digging into Doronin’s Russian assets and his background as a developer, wading through public documents and questioning Doronin’s representatives. John Colson, a local newspaperman of more than four decades, opened his March 7 column by placing Aspen “among the growing number of worldwide high-end resort communities happily entertaining and enriching peripatetic Russian oligarchs, among its historic roster of immensely wealthy people who come here to play and get a little richer whenever the opportunity presents itself.” He then went on to refer to Doronin explicitly as an oligarch.

And then the pressure campaign began. Doronin’s PR reps soon contacted Krause, the Times’ editor, arguing that Colson’s use of the word oligarch and his implication about ties to Putin were defamatory. Though oligarch is not on its face a libelous term, Krause agreed to amend the article to read Russian billionaire instead of Russian oligarch and added an editor’s note saying, “Mr. Doronin’s spokesperson reached out Tuesday morning to The Aspen Times to threaten a lawsuit about the use of the term ‘oligarch’ — which the Times has amended — and pointed out that Doronin has publicly denounced Putin’s invasion.”

But letters to the editor kept pouring into the paper, and Carroll kept digging. The more we reported, the more the paper was inundated: a cascade of correction and retraction demands from Doronin’s people on nearly everything we published about him.

On April 13, Doronin filed a defamation lawsuit against the Times . He was represented by attorneys from the firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, based in Los Angeles. “ The Aspen Times has chosen to … sensationalize a false narrative that targets Mr. Doronin simply because he was born in what is today Russia in order to attack the development of a luxury resort in Aspen,” the 17-page court filing reads. The suit also took issue with a letter to the editor the Times published, claiming the letter falsely implied Doronin was using his Aspen investment to launder tainted money from Russia. The filing goes to great lengths to detail how Doronin “earned his wealth legitimately,” and argues a semantic fine point: “Oligarchs are not merely wealthy individuals of Russian origin; they are individuals who have amassed their wealth through the exploitation of Russian natural resources, corrupt direction of Russian state-owned enterprises, and close political affiliation with Vladimir Putin.” This description, the suit argues, does not fit Doronin.

Through a representative, Doronin said later that “his intention with the lawsuit was to address factual inaccuracies and false and defamatory statements that were having a negative impact, not to suppress ongoing coverage.”

But the newsroom worried this was an attempt to censor our journalism. We assumed the company would support its journalists, that we’d report a story about the lawsuit that day, and that we’d get back to work. Instead, Ogden officials ordered us to cease writing about anything remotely related to the lawsuit. Ogden was beginning settlement discussions with Doronin and, it said, any coverage of him, his suit, or Gorsuch Haus would disrupt those.

In the eight weeks that followed, The Times published nothing—no letters, columns, or news stories—about Doronin or the development. Not only did we stop calling him an oligarch; we stopped naming him at all. In the newsroom, we wondered how Ogden had so quickly and thoroughly abandoned the bedrock principle of editorial independence to let powerful forces dictate the terms of our reporting.

Krause was under orders to send any item mentioning Doronin up the chain to Stanford, the group publisher, in Gypsum, Colorado, and ultimately to Ogden headquarters in West Virginia for approval, which never came. Carroll had been putting together reporting based on court documents that showed that Doronin had transferred his one-third ownership of the Moscow-based Capital Group Development to his mother one day after filing the defamation lawsuit, despite claiming that he had long ceased conducting business in Russia. Carroll was instructed to not pursue the story further. The billionaires who ran our paper had capitulated to the billionaires who ran our town, and we couldn’t do anything about it.

D uring the last week of April , Krause asked me into his office. He told me he was resigning and encouraged me to apply for his job. Pattillo, the publisher, also urged me on. Bill Nutting soon made it known I was also his choice to be editor, according to Pattillo. On a Zoom call with her, I raised my concern about the restrictions and said I couldn’t take the job without editorial independence. I was concerned that Doronin would drag out settlement talks for months, or that when one did arrive, Ogden would allow for some kind of gag order on coverage. She said that a resolution should come quickly and that restrictions would be lifted after that.

I didn’t know it at the time, but that day Ogden spiked a column about Doronin by Roger Marolt. A 19-year veteran columnist at the Times and a fifth-generation Aspenite from an old mining and skiing family , Marolt had opposed the 2019 Gorsuch Haus campaign, but the new column was relatively innocuous. In it, he called out Doronin—though not by name—for failing to seek locals’ support for his development. “They don’t care what we think,” Marolt wrote of Doronin and his associates. “Maybe they don’t realize real people live here who depend on [development] for more than a boost in the Forbes 500 ranking.”

The day before the column was supposed to run—the day Pattillo assured me the restrictions would soon be lifted—Krause emailed Marolt telling him that even an oblique reference was too hot for Ogden. “Our lawyers are currently in negotiations with their people on a settlement,” Krause wrote. “This is all complete BS and bullying (my opinion).” The next day, he announced his departure to the staff.

The following Thursday, Ogden spiked a second Marolt column. The topic of this column was the spiking of his previous column. “Last week made me wonder if the foundation the hometown paper has stood solidly on for hundreds of years in this nation is finally cracking,” Marolt wrote. “In Aspen, anyway, the town papers seem no match for the insulted billionaire who can outspend them a thousandfold … People who don’t even live here can control the content of our papers.”

The next week, the people who now controlled the content of the Times traveled to Aspen for damage control and personnel management. Ogden’s brass had now been pursuing me for weeks to replace Krause, and now they were lobbying me in person; I had been told I was their only candidate. I also received a verbal offer for the open editor job at their paper in Park City, Utah, which came on the heels of a February conversation about becoming editor of the Summit Daily News . I hoped I could use the apparent trust the company had in me to get them to stop censoring our coverage. They reassured me that this was an unusual situation, that they would fight defamation and libel lawsuits, but that in this case they thought it could be resolved quickly in a settlement. The following day, when they gave me a formal offer, I told them I would wait to accept until the lawsuit settlement was done and restrictions were lifted.

Krause’s last day as editor was Tuesday, May 17, a month after the suit was filed. His farewell column was subtle but pointed: “Any ownership change in any business is tough, but I’ve been through a few in my nearly 40 years as a newspaper journalist, and I’m not up for another one at this point in my career,” he wrote. “There have been some bumps along the way the past four months, enough so that I am ready to take a different path.”

Carroll, who had been openly talking about quitting and taking his Doronin reporting elsewhere, stepped in as interim editor. And Ogden kept the pressure on me to sign. Cameron Nutting Williams was the next company representative to talk to me about taking the job. She complimented the epic messiness of my desk, and suggested that she’d actually flown commercial to Aspen. Then she asked me about Doronin. “How hot is this story?” she asked. I told her there was no bigger story in Aspen right now. “We could be writing a story every day and running columns every day about this and it would not be enough.” Of course, we weren’t even doing that.

Meanwhile, the Streisand effect was taking hold: Doronin’s apparent effort to muzzle the story was only drawing more attention to it. On May 20, The Denver Post ran a story on Doronin suing the Times for calling him an oligarch, one of several stories that would carry the magnate’s name and oligarch together and link them in Google searches for all time. A few days later, at a city-council meeting , Aspen’s mayor made a vague but provocative public comment about the situation: “It’s come to my attention recently that The Aspen Times , under duress, has been withholding and suppressing some news stories that are important to our community,” Torre, the one-named mayor, said. “I find that to be a real disservice to our community.”

A t 1:22 p.m. on May 25 , Allison Pattillo wrote to the staff with what initially seemed like good news: The settlement was signed. In all likelihood, she said, the suit would be officially dismissed in about five days. The terms of the agreement would remain confidential. After the case was resolved, the Times deleted a letter to the editor calling Doronin “a big fish in Putin’s polluted sea” from the website, and removed references to him being an oligarch from various pieces. A Carroll piece originally headlined “Oligarch or Not, New Aspen Investor Has Russian Ties” was brightened to “New Aspen Investor Has Luxury Hotelier Connections.” On each of these stories, a penitent editor’s note was appended, suggesting that the piece as originally published did “not meet The Aspen Times’ standards for accuracy, fairness and objectivity in its news reporting.” Apparently all that this self-proclaimed non-oligarch billionaire and his bulldog lawyers wanted out of their lawsuit was to change some text on AspenTimes.com. We’d never seen anything like this at the Times . We ran corrections regularly when we made factual mistakes, of course. But revision-by-lawsuit is not in the Associated Press stylebook or taught in any journalism-ethics class.

Pattillo had assured me there were no further restrictions on the Times covering Doronin. So I told the remaining eight people on the editorial team that I was going to accept the editorship and tried to lobby them out of quitting. I planned to let Roger Marolt tell his censorship story and run his spiked columns, bring in outside journalists to cover our internal tumult and the muzzling, be transparent with the public about this stain on the Times ’ history, and then get back to covering Doronin.

On June 3, Pattillo published a note that finally put the Times on the record about the lawsuit, the settlement, and the censorship, and assured readers that coverage restrictions had been lifted. The paper, she wrote, would now “continue with the journalistic integrity readers expect from the upstanding and award-winning editorial team at The Aspen Times.”

The day after the Times published Pattillo’s note, Jeff Gorsuch’s lawyer sent a letter threatening a defamation lawsuit arising from the paper’s coverage. Reporters had worried aloud that capitulating to Doronin’s demands would invite more defamation suits from the rich and litigious, more attempts to chill critical coverage, more suppression from Ogden. Though we didn’t learn of Gorsuch’s threat right away, he quickly confirmed those fears. (In response to a request for comment, a spokesperson for Gorsuch said that “There is a difference between suppressing accurate and balanced coverage and ensuring that libel does not occur.” The spokesperson also cited the fact that the paper had “quickly settled a libel claim brought against them” by Doronin and issued corrections and retractions as part of that legal agreement.)

W ith the restrictions on Doronin coverage ostensibly lifted, however, I finally signed my offer letter on Wednesday, June 8. The day before, Pattillo had directed me to reach out to Roger Marolt about how to tell readers why his column had been missing for those two weeks; Roger sent a draft and we planned to publish it, along with the two spiked columns as well as email correspondence about Ogden’s censorship in an extended online version. Pattillo approved in principle, though she didn’t read the column before it was published. On Friday, June 10, it ran under the headline “An Old, Small Newspaper No Match for New, Big Money.”

It was kicking up some conversations on the Times ’ Facebook page that morning, but I hadn’t gotten any calls or emails about publishing it. Then, at 11, Pattillo came to my desk. “Scott Stanford is coming here,” she said. “And he is pissed.”

Two hours later, I walked into the Times ’ conference room, Aspen Mountain framed in the window before me. Stanford was already seated at the table, laptop open. It was clear, he said, that I didn’t trust my new bosses. And—after two days on a job they’d spent more than a month recruiting me for—they no longer trusted me. “We think you are working against us, not for us, and we are going to let you go.” He paused. “You will receive a FedEx package at your house tomorrow with your final check. Get your things and leave the premises immediately. We will contact you with instructions for how to clean out your desk area.” I would not be receiving severance.

I had been fired before my title even changed on the masthead, for doing what I told my bosses I was going to do, after they had promised the restrictions had been lifted.

T he Marolt columns disappeared from the Times website on Saturday and took on a contraband cachet on social media. On Sunday, I met with the remaining editorial staff on Rick Carroll’s porch. Rick, who had broken the original news of the Doronin/Gorsuch deal and was now set to remain interim editor, told me he was the one who had hit “Delete” on the Marolt columns under Ogden’s orders. “I have blood on my hands,” he said with a tortured look on his face.

The team talked about what to do next. They discussed organizing a walkout, publishing a coordinated social-media post, starting a new media organization, making a statement to the Daily News . In the end, they decided to give compromise one last shot. On Monday morning, in a meeting with Pattillo and Stanford, they asked for me to be reinstated. Stanford told them he would send the request up the flagpole, but the staff never got an answer.

Meanwhile, word of my firing was spreading through town. The Daily News ran a story; for weeks, letters to the editor and columns about the situation would dominate its commentary pages . A paraglider-slash-limo driver wrote in calling for a boycott of the Times . One afternoon, a white guy with dreads to his waist was racking a mountain bike on his Jeep when he spotted me, raised a fist, and said, “First Amendment, bro. Thank you.”

And at the June 14 Aspen city-council meeting, Councilman Ward Hauenstein called on the good rich people of Aspen to take their newspaper back. “Now it appears as though we have an out-of-state business that controls the Aspen press,” he said. “If something is wrong, you all must do something to stop it …We’re blessed to have many people living in Aspen with great means—I’m appealing to them now. Help save Aspen by funding the purchase of freedom and truth by buying the Times or funding a new paper where truth, integrity, and honor have a home.” (Thus far, none of Aspen’s many billionaires has heeded the call.)

The day after Hauenstein’s cri de coeur, the Daily News ran a full story about it. The Times ran a short “ staff report ,” although it had a reporter in the room as always. She had turned in a full story about Hauenstein’s speech, but Pattillo and Stanford had edited it down to a few paragraphs.

The Denver Post published a story about my firing on Saturday, June 18. (The Times ’ production editor, the last person to touch the paper’s files before it goes to bed nightly, ran the story on Sunday and was prepared to get fired for it, appending an odd note at the end: “The decision to publish this Denver Post story was entirely at the discretion of production editor Benjamin Welch.” He wasn’t fired, but he later resigned.) The next week, 18 current and former Aspen-area elected officials wrote a letter to Bob Nutting denouncing Ogden’s muzzling of Doronin reporting, threatening to refuse interviews with the Times and calling for my reinstatement. Representative Steve Cohen of Tennessee, who has pushed legislation about frivolous journalism lawsuits, publicly denounced my firing.

At the Aspen Ideas Festival, which annually draws media figures, world leaders, and CEOs to the Aspen Institute’s Bauhaus-designed campus, the financier turned anti-Putin activist Bill Browder mentioned the Doronin lawsuit and my firing in a public panel . “The guy was born in St. Petersburg, became a billionaire in Moscow real estate, and for calling him a Russian oligarch, he sues and somehow the journalists are losing their jobs?” Browder told the crowd assembled in the Hotel Jerome ballroom, next door to the building where Aspen Times reporters had, for decades, kept the powerful accountable. “That’s happening [here] right now, this minute, as we speak.”

L ess than nine months ago , on that Tuesday after Thanksgiving when we first virtually met Bob Nutting, the Times editorial team consisted of 13 people. The week of July 4, it was five, including just two full-time reporters. One resigned after 35 years. After yet another column was spiked, Marolt quit in protest and went to the Daily News . Local businesses have pulled their ads in protest, and Pitkin County commissioners have taken their legal notices to the Daily News . (Having a second paper as an option, commissioners recognized, was an extraordinary privilege.) Although the Times eventually republished the Marolt column from June—this time with none of the internal emails—it went nearly four months without running any new reporting on Doronin. Finally, on August 9, the paper ran a version of the Rick Carroll story they’d killed back in April. In it, Carroll quotes a joint statement by Ogden and Doronin’s representatives claiming that Doronin “does not exercise, or seek to exercise, any control over The Aspen Times’ current or future coverage of him.” (In a statement to The Atlantic , Ogden emphasized that it “continues to support The AT newsroom,” Doronin “has no say over the paper’s reporting,” and “our editorial independence has not been sacrificed.”)

In Aspen, we have an engaged readership that made a lot of noise when the stewards of its journalism institution abnegated their responsibility, abandoning principles of press freedom in the name of business. We have other responsible news outlets that could cover what happened to me and to the Times . And by virtue of being Aspen, we have the eyes of the world on us.

But most towns don’t have an Aspen Daily News or an Aspen Public Radio. They don’t have an alternative platform for the letter writers and the angry elected officials. They don’t have global power brokers breezing in for conferences. Ogden owns more than 50 daily newspapers across the U.S. If it is suppressing news stories in other cities and firing editors for attempting to be transparent with the public, nobody would know. If there is a version of Vladislav Doronin bullying Ogden in Fort Wayne, Indiana, or Sandusky, Ohio, or Lawrence, Kansas, what would stop them? Suppression of news creates disinformation, and Ogden is the gatekeeper for communities in 18 states. If it did it here, the company could do it anywhere. Maybe it already has.

by JOSEPH WECHSBERG

1

THE claque at the Vienna Staatsopor was an exclusive group of forty innocent opera lovers with uncompromising ideas about good music and good singing. Joseph Schostal, the claque chef, a dignified man with black sideburns, high-toned principles, and great authority, who gave us free standing room admissions in the fourth gallery in return for applause, never failed to remind us of the claque’s “classical tradition.” I became a full-fledged member of the illustrious body in the twenties, when I studied music at the Vienna Conservatory. Every once in a while, Schostal called a meeting at his permanent headquarters, the back room of the Peterskeller, a traditionless beer cellar across from the Staatsoper, and over foam crowns of Gösserbräu reminisced about the history of the claque.

The founder of the noble institution was the Great Schoentag, who commanded a social position in Kaiser Franz Josef’s Vienna before the turn of the century. Schoentag went out riding in the Prater in the luxurious equipage of Ernest Marie Van Dyck, the great Belgian Wagnertenor — “best Parsifal they ever had in Bayreuth,” Schostal said; “studied the part under Mottl” — and played whist with Hans Richter, director of the Hofoper, as it was called in those feudal days. Once the Kronprinz Rudolf honored the claque chef by inviting him to supper at the Hotel Sacher and letting him pay the bill. The Kronprinz was a great patron of the claque before he became the Hero of the Mayerling Saga. Some lesser members of the imperial household exercised their cordial relations with the claque to promote subtly the artistic futures of the blue-eyed, slim-ankled coryphées of the ballet.

Schoentag’s successor was a man by the name of Wessely, who, like almost all prominent Viennese, hailed from the fertile plains of Moravia. Wessely lived the life of a grand seigneur, was called “my dear friend” by Lilli Lehmann, had a son in a Kaiserliches Husaren-Regiment, and owned a house in Hietzing, a swank suburban district. He died of a broken heart when Hofoperndirektor Gustav Mahler, in a temperamental whim, abolished the claque.

“Then came the horrible, the claqueless interregnum,” Schostal said. “ It was a wild, chaotic time, with several hand-clapping outlaws operating inside the Opera. Then there was Freudenberger.”

We knew the sad tale of old Freudenberger. We saw him in the fourth gallery every time Fidelio was given. He would slip in through a side door, carrying a half-torn, battered score of Beethoven’s opera. He shuffled along the wall, trying not to look at people, his lips silently moving the ghostly appearance of a white-bearded patriarch. As claque chef, he had been a close friend of the Austrian playwright and novelist Hermann Bahr and his wife, the great dramatic soprano Anna von Mildenburg. Later Freudenberger’s artistic judgment became somewhat dimmed by the demon alcohol. The claque operates ‘way up in the fourth gallery, and after too many seidels of Schwechater beer, Freudenberger was unable to climb up the two-hundred-odd stairs leading to the “Fourth.” He would spend the evening in a Beisel, the local equivalent of a beer joint, leaving the conduct of applause to his incapable underlings. Soon plain anarchy reigned in the fourth gallery, and the artists who had paid cash to Freudenberger and didn’t get the proper applause were in a rebellious frame of mind.

“This proves what lack of leadership will do,” Schostal would say. “I am a true democrat in my political convictions, but in the fourth gallery I firmly believe in the authoritative system.”

In the twilight era of Freudenberger, Schostal, then a youthful music student, all but slept at the Opera. He was there every evening and during the daytime hung around the stage doorsthere were separate entrances for singers (male), singers (female), orchestra members, chorus, ballet, stagehands, executives — and when one of his idols went by, he would take off his hat and meekly exclaim, “Hoch!” One night before a performance of Samson et Dalila, the prima ballerina, Jammerich, a temperamental lady, refused to go out on the stage unless the Freudenberger gang was silenced and “that nice young man Schostal” was called in to organize the applause for her. “I want him to come here right away,” she said to the horrified Hofoper executives. “ I zih mi net aus — I won’t undress.”And to prove that she really meant business, she didn’t undress.

A runner was dispatched to the fourth gallery and in no time Schostal, dumfounded and trembling, found himself sitting in the prim a ballerina’s private dressing room. The dancer explained that she wanted special applause after the ballet in the first, act, “something that makes their rear ends jerk up from their seats.”

“ I agreed to give all I had and the prima ballerina smiled and began to gel out of her many petticoats,”Schostal said. “I remember well, hirst a purple taffeta one with ruflles, then a light-purple one made of fine silk, with Brussels laces, then a pinkish one of tulle, sort of shirred, and then a beautiful petticoat of ethereal white batiste.”When he got to this point of his story, Schostal took out a handkerchief and mopped his brow in nostalgic exeit ement. “ She was a great dancer,” he said, with a deep sigh, and there was finality in his voice.

2

SCHOSTAL was an idealist and a businessman who managed to make a fortune out of his love of good opera. He refused to lake money from singers whom he didn’t consider worthy of the Staatsoper, and got infuriated when some Viennese newspapers, envious of the claque’s influence on matters operatic, called us eine amerikanische Gangstergruppe. Schostal had his own scientific theory of applause. “The driving power of the initial applause must overcome the inherent inertia of the audience,” he said. Many singers considered him their artistic father confessor and several times Franz Schalk, director of the Staatsoper, invited him to sit in on auditions of young artists, which Schostal rightly considered the high point of his career. Once Hans Liebstoeckl, the editor of the Extrablatt , offered him the job of music critic, but Schostal refused. It didn’t seem ethical to mix applause with criticism. Liebstoeckl said, “The claque chef of the Barcelona Opera is also the town’s leading music critic,” but Schostal said, “No, sorry.”

Schostal was anxious to keep up the high artistic standard of applause and devoted much effort to the training of new men. At the end of the 1925 season several claque members whose homes were in the “province” were called back from Vienna by their enraged families because the boys spent more time at the Staatsoper than in school. Schostal then decided to hold regular auditions for new candidates. They took place at the janitor’s box under the Karntnerstrasse arcades, in an area with walls and floors of large marble squares, where the acoustics came nearesl to applause conditions in the fourth gallery.

Schostal originally intended to hold his auditions in the “Fourth,” but the management of the Staatsoper failed to see his point. He would sit down on the large bench which was customarily reserved for Leo Slezak, Erik Schmedes, Richard Schubert, and other aging tenors, and the candidate, after a thorough examination in operatic airs, recitatives, leitmotifs, detailed knowledge of popular scores, and “general music understanding,”was ordered to produce some Probeapplaus — test applause. If a man wanted to make ihe grade, he had to produce what Schostal called den dunklen Klang — the deep, dark sound. High-pitched hand-clapping was considered girlish and strictly taboo.

Few men came up with the hollow-sounding, sepulchral applause that had the professional touch. Schostal would glance at Herr Nusterer, the janitor, a tall, mustachioed man in an admiral’s uniform, who looked on the gloomy side of things and had only two sorts of comment. A candidate would be either “bad” or “very bad.”If Schostal liked the candidate and Nusterer’s comment was “bad,”Schostal would accept the new man for a trial period. After the audition, Schostal and Nusterer would send to the Peterskeller for a Frühschoppen beer.

Schostal had a strange respect for Nusterer, who had been Portier at the Opera for over twenty-six years and had never been at a single performance. Once he had gone into the auditorium during the third act of Walküre, looking for Herr Dr. Richard Strauss, but the spectacle of eight full-bosomed ladies jumping all over the stage and screaming, “Hojotojo!! Heiaha-ha!!” had been too much of a shock. Nusterer lived in Mauer, a suburb mainly populated by grimly underpaid federal employees, and he hated Wagner because the interminable performances of Meisiersinger, Tristan, and Götterdämmerung usually made him miss the “last, blue” trolley car, which left the Operngasse at five minutes past eleven.

“If a man for twenty-six years has worked at the Opera and never heard a performance, he must be either an arch-moron or have character,” Schostal said. “Nusterer is no moron, so I have decided that he’s got character. That’s why I ask his opinion about our new candidates. Nusterer is the Voice of the People.”

Nusterer’s great ambition was to converse in the English language. The Staatsoper and the Burgtheater in Vienna were the only two theaters on earth which had no daytime box offices. The box offices were opened only half an hour before the beginning of the evening performance. There were a few agiotage peddlers, hiding behind the marble pillars and in the niches near the entrance, who had tickeix concealed in their pockets as though they were dirty postcards, but they charged innocent passers-by twice ihe official price. The only place where tickets were sold at regular prices between 9.00 A.M. and 3.00 P.M. was the Bundestheaterdirektion at the Briiunerstrasse, a ten-minute walk from the Opera.

Anglo-Saxon visitors staying at the Bristol, the Imperial, or other Ringslrasse hotels, who came to the Staatsoper for tickets, always got lost in search of the box office before they wound up at Nusterer’s lodge. It was always a great moment for the Portier when ho could tell those Valuta-Aristokraten from England and America how to get to the Braunerstrasse. He had learned English all by himself from a then popular book entitled Learning English — A Pleasure.

“Dös iss simpel,” Nusterer would say. “Jöst nomadize over the Operngasse and takens the firsht street for your lefft. Net right, net gradaus, böt lefft. Jöst promenade and follow your nose. Pörsue the August inerstrassen öntil the Josefsplatz. Dös iss a tulli platz, the Josefsplatz. Firsht for your right and firsht house for your lefft — and da sa ma. Seeing a blank expression on the faces of his customers, Nusterer continued, “Nachurell, today iss ausverkavft, bought out. Maybe tomorrow bought out. Böt keep smiling. Dös iss simpel. Go buy t ickets to Theater an der Wien. Gräfin Mariza, they give. Or the Ronacher girls. Gracefol and dèshabillée— bot iss all right for die gnädige Frau.”

3

NUSTERER entertained cordial relations with the claque chef. Schostal paid for the Frühschoppen and in return was given by Nusterer advance information on who would be on police duty at the evening performance. The Portier had his own channels to the Polizeipräsidium. Every night there were four Kriminalinspektoren, plain-clothes men, on duty inside the house, two in the parterre standing room, one in the fourth and one in the third gallery. We never understood why they had a man posted in the third gallery. No claqueur would be seen dead or alive in the “Third,” where the acoustics were deplorable; third gallery tickets were sold only to innocent travelers from the hillbilly districts of Styria, Sudetenland, the Hungarian bush, and the American Far West.

There were signs inside the Opera reading “ All e störenden Beiso wie M issfallsbezeugungen sind verboten — All Disturbing Manifestations of Apand Disap-proval Are Prohibited,” and the four Inspektoren on duty were always after offenders, most of whom naturally belonged to the claque. All policemen liked Staatsoper duty because they were paid an extra seven schilling per evening and besides received a Dienstsitz, a duty seat. They never used the seats for themselves but brought their Pupperln along. The girl friends sat down and the cops remained in the standing room. One Inspektor, an elderly man with four children, whom I’ll call Weber, brought as many as three different Pupperln in one week. I remember a Botticelli blonde who came always to Mozart and early Verdi operas, and a luscious redhead who preferred the more lascivious side of the repertoire — Thaïs, Salomé, Elektra, Schéhérazade, and the Venusberg scene from Tannhäuser.

The Botticelli blonde was on the Dienstsitz one evening when Emanuel List, today a Metropolitan Opera star, sang the Cardinal in Halevy’s La Juive. a part that in Vienna was associated with the great Richard Mayr. Mayr was one of the claque’s best clients, but List was an excellent man, and Schostal’s private ambition was to always give able people a break. He loved the challenge of a difficult assignment. Knowing what he was up against, Schostal alerted the Hohlposcher — Hollow Sound Men — a powerful task force of six master claqueurs who were alerted only on critical evenings. I remember three of them, Gold, Ritter, and Hofbauer, strong and fearless men. When they started to applaud, it was as though a regiment of heavy tanks were rumbling over a cobblestoned street at high speed.

List sang the air of the Cardinal in great style and Schostal from his command post under the first lamp on the extreme left gave his “cue,”a faint nod of his bald head. The Hollow Sound Men, strategically posted behind the marble pillars, broke into a deafening drumfire that shook the house and roused the audience into a “spontaneous” ovation. The din was so formidable that people sitting near-by put their fingers into their ears. An elderly, bald misanthrope with the face of an unhappy baboon turned around and shook his fists against us. The Hollow Sound Men ignored him coolly. They started another heavy barrage after the duet of the Cardinal and Leonora, which was even more earsplitting. All of a sudden the bald man jumped up and shouted, “ Polizei! Polizct! and ran out of the gallery. The Hohlposcher didn’t even bother to pull his leg as he ran out past them, and Schostal said, “Guess he wants to make the last train for Steinhof.” Stelnhof was Austria’s largest insane asylum.

After the second act, Kriminalinspektor Weber and his blonde Pupperl came up to our command post. Weber gave the girl ten groschen and told her to get him a glass of water, and when she had gone, he turned toward Schostal. “I’m afraid you’re in serious trouble, Herr Doktor ,” he said. Schostal’s influence was known among the Force, and many coppers called the claque chef Herr Professor or Herr Doktor. “A fellow just asked me to arrest you. He says he’ll get the District Attorney to prosecute you for serious bodily injury.”

We were stunned. According to paragraph 152 of the Austrian penal code, schwere korperlichc Bescluidigung meant busting in a man’s skull or breaking his shinbones, putting him out of action “for at least twenty days,” and none of us had as much as touched the madman. Weber said, “You see, he s got some trouble with his ears, and when you started that salvo, he got ill. Himmelherrgott , that was a blast! My Greterl almost fell down from my seat. He made me write down a protocol. You will have to see Hofrat Ritzberger tomorrow morning.”

The Hofrat, chef of the police Strafsektion and a great friend of the claque chef, was already well informed about the misadventure, when Schostal came to see him. lie got up from his chair and they shook hands. The Hofrat said, “Well, well, well — what now?”

“A man with ear trouble has no business coming up in the fourth gallery,”Schostal said. “The next time he will lile a claim against the Staatsoper, the Bundestheaterverwaltung, and the entire Republic of Austria, because the bass tubas in the second act of Walküre made him sick. You remember the bass tubas when Hunding gets killed by ‘Wolan, Herr Hofrat?”

Ritzberger offered Schostal a trabuco cigar and explained that legally there was a difference between the Walküre bass tubas and the salvo of our Hollow Sound Men. “A man who buys a ticket legally must anticipate the bass tubas because they are a fixture of the Opera, like curtains and lights. The claque isn’t — yet. However, I’ll add a postscript to the protocol when I send it over to the District Attorney. I hope he won’t press any charges which would get you before a jury.”Three bad weeks went by, during which the claque showed notable restraint and a certain lack of enthusiasm. Then Hofrat Ritzberger called up Schostal and told him that the D.A. had not bothered about the case. That night, at a performance of The Flying Dutchman with Friedrich Schorr, the claque was again in great form.

The Hollow Sound Men caused more trouble at a memorable evening of La Fanriulla del West , with Maria Jeritza as Minnie and Alfred Jerger as Sheriff Jack Ranee — both clients of the claque. In the second act Minnie plays her famous poker game with the Sheriff, cheats, and wins after using cards that she had hidden under the upper part of her stocking. It was a great scene and Jeritza made the best of it, and there was always a terrilic ovation for her. The girls of the Jeritza Club. an amateurish fan organization of thin-voiced sub-sub-debs under the leadership of one Herr Silberstein of the Bodenkreditanstalt, shouted like mad.

In the general bedlam, Mr. Jerger, the able baritone, was completely forgotten. Finally he couldn’t stand it any more. One evening he got in touch with Messrs. Gold and Hofbauer of the Hohlposcher and asked them, for the sake of artistic justice, to put in a few cries of “ Hoch Jerger! ” The Hollow Sound Men dutifully reported Jerger’s request to Schostal, during the roll call under the arcades, when Schostal gave out standing room admission, shortly before the performance. There was always a lot of noise and excitement during the roll call and Schostal didn’t give the matter much attention, but told the task force to go ahead on their own.

Too late the claque chef realized what he had let himself in for. At the end of the second act, the Hollow Sound Men raced down the stairs from the gallery, broke through the Parhett auditorium and ran up to the orchestra pit, where they started unisono to shout, “Hoch Jerger!” There was a magic about their booming basso profun do voices and the welldomesticated Viennese audience look up the hint immediately. Within a few seconds even old Jeritza admirers found themselves shouting, “Hoch Jerger!” many, as they later shamefacedly explained, against their better judgment. Things got so bad that Silberstein of t he Jerilza Club approached the I lollow Sound Men and meekly asked them to let his girls have “just one curtain call for Jeritza alone.” By that time a general reaction had set in; everybody was tired and hoarse, and the Jeritza ovation fell flat.

Up in the fourth gallery Schostal watched this major disaster with trembling hands. Madame Jeritza was one of the claque’s outstanding clients and there was no saying what she might do. “ Mea culpa!” the claque chef murmured. “I’ll have to take a walk to Canossa. The Hollow Sound Men were sorry for what they had done, and wanted to go with the chef to apologize to Madame Jeritza. Schostal was deeply moved. “I appreciate your loyalty, men, he said. “But it was my fault and I have to face her alone.”

He told us later what happened when he accompanied Madame Jeritza from the Staatsoper to her home at Si a 11 burggasse 4. “She was furious and I can’t blame her. ‘Have you heard those hooligans?’ she said. ‘I got so mad I couldn’t even look out for them. W ho were they — morons from the province who thought this was the Sunday afternoon football game on ihe Hohe Warte?’” Schostal breathed heavily. “I told her that 1 was beside myself that it won’t happen again. And it won’t,” he added, a Boris Godunov-like expression in his fierce eyes.

4

THE Hollow Sound Men displayed conspicuous bravery beyond and above the call of duty in what the annals of the Viennese police call the Battle of the Claque. This took place in 1925, one night after the premiere of Richard Strauss’s Intermezzo. It was a conflict among Vienna’s cab drivers that precipitated the Battle. There were two groups of taxicabs in Vienna, the 50-groschen taxis, dilapidated vehicles of proletarian domestic origin — Steyr, Wanderer, Tatra — and the 80-groschen de luxe conveyances — early vintage Studebakers, PanhardLevassors, Fords, Lancias, and other elegantly superannuated foreign-make limousines. The 50-groschlers and the 80-groschlers both parked at the Operngasse, but the more aristocratic 80-groschen cabbies seldom spoke to the 50-groschen hoi polloi, and there was quite a feeling of class consciousness.

Schostal, who at tended to t he I Vagenvertrieb around the Staatsoper, insisted that all prominent singers ride in the more dignified 80-groschen cars. After the evening performance, when the singers at the stage door were wailing for cabs, he would never let a humble 50-groschen man approach any of his clients.

“They’ve got broken windows, bad springs, and no heat,” he would say. “You can’t take a chance with them.”

Finally the 50-groschlers couldn’t stand it any longer. A deputation approached the claque chef at his Peterskeller headquarters. “We don’t care about the carfare,” the spokesman, a red-bearded exwrestler from Hernals, Vienna’s Third Avenue, said. “We’ll be happy to drive them home gratis but we want to go home and be able to tell our wives that we, too, are driving the Lehmann and the Jeritza. We are getting sick and tired of being heckled by our wives and children. ‘All day around the Opera and never one of them Kammersänger in your cab.’ they say.” The ex-wrestler paused for a last man-to-man appeal. “If you were married, Herr Doktor , you would know what a wife can do to you.

Schostal finished his beer and wiped his mouth. “I am very sorry, he said finally. “But I cannot possibly permit Frau Kammersängerin Lehmann to ride in a Steyr that may never reach her destination. She should forever ride in a Rolls-Royce, filled with Persian rugs and crystal mirrors,”he added poetically. The red-bearded spokesman muttered dark threats, and the deputation left in a rage.

A few nights later, after the sensational premiere of Intermezzo, Schostal saw to it that Madame Lehmann, who won a triumph as Christine, was taken home in the most luxurious 80-groschen car, a black Buick limousine that was called “der nobliche Booeek” around the Staatsoper. Then all members of the claque adjourned to the Peterskeller to discuss the Strauss premiere over Rindsgulasch and beer. All of a sudden the door was torn open and a mob of bloodthirsty 50-groschlers broke into the room. They were led by the red-bearded ex-wrestler, w ho seized a beer seidel — not his own, at that — and threw it against Schostal. If the claque chef hadn’t shielded his face with the brand-new score of Intermezzo, he would have been badly hit. The expensive score got wet all over with stale beer. It was this sight that infuriated us members of the claque more than the raging cabbies. Beer glasses and plates with goulash were thrown through the air, but the cab drivers outnumbered us five to one and they advanced steadily. Schostal jumped on a beer barrel, from where he directed the battle, proving that real leadership show s itself in moments of dire stress.

“We have to hold them until our 80-groschen reinforcements arrive.”he shouted. The Hollow Sound Men fought like lions. Gold took off his braces and whirled them around in a mad circle, hitting ’em right and left, while Hofbauer tore legs off a heavy table and bravely attacked the ex-wrestler. Meanwhile Immergluck, a gray-haired, fifty-year-old boy, crawled down under the tables on hands and knees, the way the Nibelungen do in the first act of Siegfried, and managed to get out on the Operngasse, where he hollered for the 80-groschen men to come to our support. Unfortunately most of the de luxe cabbies were out on rides, taking the singers home. One by one they returned, and there were also a few Nächtler, night chauffeurs, who took our side and heroically dived into the scramble, but there is no doubt that only the arrival of twenty-odd policemen saved the claque from complete annihilation.

We all, 50-groschlers, 80-groschlers, night chauffeurs, claque members, and three beer-drinking members of t he Philharmoniker, who had come to our support out of nowhere, were taken to the nearest police Wachtstube. The Hollow Sound Men looked badly beaten up, Gold’s pants were falling down because he couldn’t find his braces, and Schostal was holding the pitiful remains of the expensive Intermezzo score under his elbow. Another pitched battle Hared up in the police wagon when a 50-groschler spat at the man who had brought Madame Lehmann home in his “Booeek,” but the police officer on duty in the Wachtstube handled the matter efficiently. Schostal, well known on the police premises as a champion of Law and Order, was released at once. The members of the claque, the three Philharmoniker, the 80groschlers, and the night chauffeurs remained at the station for another hour, and were sent home with a few words of mild reprimand. The 50-groschen rowdies were held behind bars all night long and fined 20 schilling each for rioting and disturbing the peace.