Pulitzer's Pain

On the surface, Joe seemed every bit the devoted family man. Just 22 when he married Lynne Steinsieck, a woman he met as an undergraduate at Harvard, Joe returned to St. Louis in 1976 with two baby daughters, Elkhanah and Bianca. Friends recall Lynne as strikingly beautiful, and the daughters inherited her stunning looks. The couple bought a home in the Central West End, joining a wave of urban professionals returning to the once-neglected neighborhood.

But the Cleaver-family veneer wore thin when, within the first year of returning to St. Louis, Joe began a dalliance with a local artist, Jennifer Williams. The two met while Jennifer was working as a caterer at one of his father's parties. She was four years older than Joe and had a daughter from a previous marriage.

"It was a blatant affair," recalls a former acquaintance, describing the openness in which Joe and Jennifer carried on liaisons in Central West End bars and restaurants. "I don't know what the hell was going on in his head. It was weirdness."

In September of 1978, after seven years of marriage, Joe and Lynne divorced. His father and stepmother, Emily Pulitzer, took Lynne's side throughout the tumultuous split.

"They were horrified by the affair," recalls a family friend. "It was viewed as simply not proper and reflected poorly on the family. It was then that I think Joe's relationship with his father and stepmother seemed to really go off the road."

Joe and Jennifer married in 1982 when she was pregnant with their son, Joseph Pulitzer V, now 22 and an undergraduate at Colorado University in Boulder. Their eighteen-year-old daughter, Elinor, lives with Jennifer in Big Horn.

Though husband and wife for sixteen years, Joe and Jennifer were always a bit of an odd match, friends recall. Joe's vast family wealth afforded him the opportunity to portray himself as a sort-of hippie. Jennifer, on the other hand, was a full-fledged free spirit, living on a commune, working as a welfare caseworker and dabbling as an artist. Today she spends her time reintroducing native plants to Wyoming.

The couple's early years in St. Louis were happy times, say friends, even if Joe's father and stepmother never fully accepted the relationship.

Back at the Post, Joe went on to serve as a capital correspondent in the Jefferson City and Washington, D.C., bureaus; later, in the early 1980s, he became a news editor and editorial writer.

"He was an OK reporter," says his former editor Harry Levins. "He definitely wasn't the best writer, but I don't think anyone in the Pulitzer family was. They could run newspapers but weren't spectacular writers."

The highlight of Joe's newsroom career came in 1982, when he embarked on a seven-week tour of Africa with Post photographer Larry Williams. Joe's stories on the refugee crisis in the nations of Somalia, Chad and the Sudan won him honorable mention from the Overseas Press Club.

The first story, carrying a dateline from Qoryoley, Somalia, and titled "2 Million Homeless: An African Tragedy," began: "It was after the third night of artillery barrage that Mohammed Amin Nur decided to flee from his hometown of Dagahbur in the Ogaden region of Ethiopia.

"Ethiopian soldiers, backed by Soviet advisers, were advancing steadily on the town, reclaiming with a vengeance the desert territory they had yielded a year earlier to the surprise blitz of the Somali National Army. Nur's clansmen and friends from the outlying villages, fleeing before the advance, had told him of the ghastly destruction and pillage."

Ex-wife Jennifer says reporting was Joe's true passion. "I think it was genetic," she says. "It was in his blood. He loved reporting."

But if Joe were to take charge of the paper, he needed to learn the business side of the company. In 1984 he was promoted to an administrative role as the Post's marketing manager, and two years later he became vice president for administration, responsible for marketing, promotion, purchasing and specialty publications. From the outset, though, Joe's reputation as an executive was marred by ineptitude, according to sources at the newspaper.

Reporting conformed to Joe's nocturnal instincts. Until 1984 the Post was an afternoon paper and copy was filed late at night or early in the morning. Accustomed to staying up until 4 a.m. or 5 a.m. and rising around 11 or noon, Joe struggled to adjust to a managerial nine-to-five schedule.

"He was simply unable to do the job necessary to run the paper," says a former Post employee. "He was given the same training as his father working his way up the ranks, and he demonstrated at every level that he didn't have what it took."

Eliot Porter recalls one of Joe's first administrative blunders, when he ordered that the paper's telephone credit cards be canceled.

"After Joe saw the enormous telephone bills these cards were generating, he canceled them, without so much as a moment's notice," Porter remembers. "There was one guy, a sportswriter out covering a game somewhere, who found out he couldn't reach the office because his credit card was canceled.