The Pulitzers were once the leading media family in the US, but even with all of their power,
they weren't without their troubles. This is the tragic real-life story of the Pulitzer family.
Joseph Pulitzer was born in Hungary, to parents Phillip and Elizibeth Pulitzer. Philip Pulitzer
was a very successful grain merchant, so wealthy that he was able to retire early.
Growing up, Joseph and his brother were given many educational and economic advantages thanks
to their father's wealth. Both boys were educated in private schools and by tutors,
and learned to speak both French and German. However, this life of luxury didn't last forever.
After Philip passed away when Joseph was 11, the family business went bankrupt. After Joseph
turned 17, and with his mother remarried, he knew he had to make his own way in the world.
The teenage Joseph first tried to become a soldier and attempted to enlist in the Austrian Army,
Napoleon's Foreign Legion, and then the British Army. All of these nations' armies rejected him
due to Pulitzer having weak eyesight and overall fragile health. But he got his big chance when he
happened to meet a bounty recruiter for the United States' Union Army, as the U.S. was currently
right in the middle of the Civil War. Pulitzer decided to take the recruiter up on the offer
to head to the United States and join the Union Army — and legend has it that Pulitzer jumped
ship on the way to Boston and swam to shore so he could keep the recruitment bounty for himself.
Pulitzer did serve his time fighting on behalf of the Union Army in the American Civil War.
fighting in the Lincoln Cavalry with many other German recruits. He was in the Cavalry
for about a year before the war came to an end, and Pulitzer was honorably discharged.
All the same, his early years in the United States were hard-going. After leaving the U.S. Army,
Pulitzer was without money or a place to live. He often had to sleep on park benches
and scrambled to find work. When he didn't have any luck finding steady work in New York,
he decided to head west to St. Louis, Missouri. Pulitzer managed to catch a train to Illinois
but ran out of money and couldn't afford a ferry across the Mississippi River.
He ended up striking a deal to shovel coal on the ferry in exchange for passage.
Pulitzer continued to get odd jobs in St. Louis, but he finally got his
first big career opportunity while studying English at the library.
As noted by The State Historical Society of Missouri, Pulitzer made the acquaintance of Carl
Schurz, the co-editor and part-owner of the German newspaper The Westliche Post. Schurz was impressed
with Pulitzer's intelligence and command of the German language and hired him as a reporter.
Besides being a newspaperman, Joseph Pulitzer also became a politician.
He was nominated in and won a special election as a Republican in the Fifth District in St.
Louis at only 22 years old. According to The State Historical Society of Missouri,
Pulitzer felt strongly about fighting against corruption as a representative of his district.
He deeply disliked the St. Louis County Court, which regularly practiced favoritism in hiring
county officials and the courts' friends for building contracts.
What Pulitzer wanted to do was abolish the court entirely and introduced a bill to do so.
One day, Pulitzer encountered a builder named Captain Edward Augustine, a friend of the court
who was known to be receiving political favoritism in the form of building contracts. Pulitzer
called him out, and Augustine retorted by calling Pulitzer a liar. Enraged, Pulitzer retaliated by
getting his Army gun from his home and returning to shoot Augustine in the leg. Pulitzer did plead
guilty for the shooting, but he got off by paying a hefty fine — which his friends helped him pay.
Pulitzer's bill that called for the abolishment of the St. Louis County Court eventually passed.
Joseph Pulitzer had struggled with poor eyesight since he was a young man, but after years
of working 16-hour-long days, he was almost completely blind by age 43. He also had other
health troubles that started in his youth and progressively became worse, including diabetes,
rheumatism, and asthma. According to The State Historical Society of Missouri, Pulitzer also
became so highly sensitive to noise that he had to soundproof his bedroom and his yacht completely.
However, despite his worsening health and his doctor's recommendations, Pulitzer wasn't deterred
from purchasing the almost-bankrupt New York World newspaper in 1883. And after moving to New York,
Pulitzer still got elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, representing New York's
9th District. He never returned to the newsroom again, but he still managed to run the paper by
communicating with his secretaries - using code in case anyone seized his messages.
Joseph Pulitzer and his wife Katherine Davis Pulitzer had seven children in total:
Ralph, Lucille, Katherine, Joseph Jr., Edith, Constance, and Herbert. However,
only five survived to adulthood — two of them died shockingly young. One of his daughters,
Katherine Ethel Pulitzer, contracted pneumonia and died at the age of two. His other daughter,
Lucille Pulitzer, died at the age of 17 from typhoid fever. According to Columbia University
Libraries, Lucille's death was a particularly nasty blow to Pulitzer, as she was said to be
his favorite child. Pulitzer would go on to establish the Lucille Pulitzer Scholarship at
Barnard College in her honor and later dedicated the Columbia School of Journalism to her memory.
After Pulitzer's death of heart failure at the age of 64, his sons would take over as
the managers and owners of the New York World and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
But things would prove to be difficult without the family patriarch in charge.
Herbert "Peter" Pulitzer was Joseph Pulitzer's grandson. Cocky, good-looking, and crazy rich,
Peter earned himself a reputation as a ladies' man. But surprisingly enough,
he fell hard for one Lillian McKim — 21 years old and from an equally wealthy Northeastern family.
Peter and Lilly astonished all of their friends and family by suddenly eloping in 1952.
The two reportedly had a fairly eccentric life,
throwing huge parties and accumulating a massive menagerie of cats, dogs, monkeys, and a calf.
Eventually, Lilly Pulitzer would be remembered best as a famous fashion
designer. But their marriage didn't last. In 1969,
she and Peter suddenly divorced after she fell for one of his business associates.
It wouldn't be Peter's last divorce, or his worst. He ended up remarrying,
this time to Roxanne Dixon, a woman nearly 21 years his junior. They had two children,
but in 1982 they had a terrible divorce that resulted in tabloid headlines across the country.
"If we did cocaine, we did them together. Menage a trois, there was not one person there,
there was three people there!"
Peter accused Roxanne of "gross marital conduct" by allegedly having affairs with a French baker,
a handyman, a Grand Prix race car driver, and the wife of another millionaire. Not to be outdone,
Roxanne shockingly accused Peter of incest with his daughter from his first marriage, Liza Leidy.
Leidy in turn testified that not only was that not true,
but that Roxanne was the one who had actually propositioned her.
Ultimately, the judge ruled in Peter's favor and awarded him custody of their twin boys,
while Roxanne was left with roughly $237,000 worth of property and cash - along with a story to tell.
And tell it she did.
There was no love lost between Roxanne Pulitzer and her ex's family.
According to The Washington Post, Peter's daughter Liza certainly
didn't mince words after the divorce proceedings came to an end, saying,
"I just hope she feels as terrible as she made all of us feel the past year. It has
been a nightmare. She is getting paid back for what she has done.
She has been a real wretch about it. I hope she has suffered as much as we have."
Roxanne left her marriage to Peter Pulitzer with a lot less money than she hoped,
and struggled to make ends meet. Ultimately, her two big paydays came first from doing a
spread for Playboy and second from writing her tell-all book called The Prize Pulitzer.
Roxanne described all the tawdry aspects of her life and marriage to Peter Pulitzer with
details of sex, drugs, and wild parties — none of it very flattering to Peter.
It sold. Her autobiography landed at number ten on The New York Times'
nonfiction bestseller list in 1988, and a year later, it was turned into a made-for-TV movie.
They had a nasty, public divorce, but Roxanne Pulitzer managed to help save her ex-husband,
Peter, from bankruptcy. Roxanne and Peter's twin sons, Mac and Zac, went into business
with their father running a citrus grove. When tens of thousands of trees had to be destroyed
due to infection, though, Peter was unable to pay the grove's $1.3 million mortgage.
Luckily, Roxanne had remarried well. After Mac and Zac appealed to her fifth husband,
Tim Boberg, for help, Boberg ended up guaranteeing the mortgage, while also
floating Pulitzer Groves a $400,000 credit line. Roxanne told The Palm Beach Daily News,
"I never thought Peter would run out of money. The pendulum swings. It's a different ending."
In 1986, the Pulitzer media family became bitterly divided regarding control of the St.
Louis Post-Dispatch and other media properties. Some family members wanted to sell the Dispatch
and maximize their wealth, while others wanted to hold onto the properties and
continue to pass them down to the next generation. When the family failed to
come to an agreement on their own, they ended up in court — against each other.
In a statement to The Washington Post, one Pulitzer family member,
David Moore, who wanted to keep the newspaper in the family,
expressed his regrets that the feud had turned into a court battle:
"It is a very sad thing. This is not a happy time,
I don't think, for any of us. There are not winners in a situation like this."
According to the Associated Press, the family eventually reached a
settlement and retained control of the Dispatch. In 2005, though, Pulitzer,
Inc. - which included the St. Louis Post-Dispatch - was finally sold off.
The Pulitzers were able to end their public family court dispute,
but in 1997, they found themselves in the middle of another media family's feud.
Pulitzer, Inc. had just purchased another old family media company,
Scripps League Newspapers, from Betty Knight Scripps. However, the sale of the family company
did not sit well with 51-year-old Barry, the son of Scripps family patriarch Edward W.
Scripps. Barry accused his mother, Betty, of taking advantage of his father's poor health to
sell Scripps League Newspapers to the Pulitzers — thereby depriving him of his inheritance.
Apparently, in 1976, Edward Scripps had given his wife half of his voting shares of stock,
giving her significant power in the company. But in 1995, Edward's health began to fail, and Barry
believed that Betty decided to seize control and use her voting right to sell off the company.
Barry claimed that he was supposed to run Scripps League Newspapers once his father
officially stepped down, but he was fired from the company shortly before its sale to the Pulitzers.
Barry ended up suing his own mother, but the lawsuit was ultimately tossed out.
Known as "Jay" to everyone, Joseph Pulitzer IV died of a heart attack at age 65
in 2015. It was a shock to his family and all who knew him. Jay was the great-grandchild of
the first Joseph Pulitzer and the only child of Joseph Pulitzer Jr., owner of the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch. All his life, he was primed to take over the family media company one day,
starting out as a reporter at the Dispatch, working his way up to correspondent,
taking over as night city editor, and finally earning the corporate vice president position.
Unfortunately, Jay never did rise to take his place as the next reigning Joseph Pulitzer.
After his father passed away in 1993, Jay's uncle, Michael Pulitzer, took over as head
of the company, and majority control of the stock went to Jay's stepmother, Emily Pulitzer.
Only two years later, Jay was forced out of the family business by the company's
controlling family members, who eventually sold the company.
A sad end to the Pulitzer publishing legacy.
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