White Rose
by Amy Ephron
List Price: $12.00
Pages: 259
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0345441109
Publisher: Ballantine
Q: How did you decide to write a novel about Evangelina Cisneros?
AE: When I first read about her, I felt as if I'd discovered someone. I was researching
Princess Kaiulani (the last Princess of Hawaii). In an obscure biography of Kaiulani, there was a chapter that described the week that Kaiulani
arrived in New York on her way to Washington to see President McKinley to make a plea, an unsuccessful plea, to save her country for her people.
It was, curiously, the same week that Karl Decker brought Evangelina Cisneros to New York. The two women were continually mistaken for each other by
the press and the public as they traveled through the city. There was a paragraph in the Kaiulani biography, where Kaiulani was quoted as having
said, "The week that I was in New York, a true princess arrived in New York..." She went on to tell Miss Cisneros' story in four sentences. And
I read it and realized that there was my next book. I am essentially a novelist and there were so many questions and contradictions in the accounts
of Miss Cisneros' rescue, that a novel seemed the best way to write about her.
She seemed a true heroine--someone who, through no fault of their own, was thrust into a
situation, the backdrop of the war, the fight for freedom for her country. She also struck me as being an oddly contemporary heroine since Hearst
used her in numerous newspaper accounts to manipulate the feelings of women in America and sway public opinion to concur with his political
sentiments that the Americans should help the Cubans obtain freedom from Spain. The subject intrigued me because it was about so many things--a
beautiful young woman, imprisoned, whose spirit could not be broken, the power of the press, a newspaper reporter who was largely acting like a
spy. And it seemed such an extraordinary story, that a young woman who had almost been lost in history, had been, in some way, the lynchpin that
began the Spanish-American War.
Q: How much research did you do for the novel and how did you do your research?
AE: It's always important to me that I understand the period I'm writing about, the detail
of the period: the clothes, the food, the politics of the times. You don't always research a thing directly, you sometimes go sideways of it. It
was an enormous period of colonization, farming interests, pineapple, sugar, tobacco, and, even then, some notion of strategic military interest.
It was during this period that the United States annexed Puerto Rico and Hawaii. It was also during this period that Marxist philosophy was becoming,
for many countries and societies, a viable alternative.
I read a number of historical accounts of the Cuban revolutionary party at the time--about
Maceo, Gomez, Betancourt, and the divisions within that party. I read Jose Marti's writings. I even went back to Samuel Morison's brilliant
historical account in The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages, which detailed Columbus' second voyage when he mistakenly arrived
in Cuba thinking it a limb of China, and spent months searching for gold and temples and returned home in disgrace. But it was then, in 1494, that
he set up a column and a cross on the beach and officially claimed Cuba for Spain.
I also read a number of biographies of Hearst. Evangelina Cisneros appears briefly in many
of them, as do accounts of "yellow journalism" and Hearst's attempts at the time to sway American opinion towards the possibility of a Spanish-American
War.
I did some research using the Internet and occasionally hit Cuban web sites that detailed
the revolutionary make-up of the party in Cuba at the time. And I unearthed a brief account that Evangelina Cisneros had written about her rescue,
which gave me an insight into her voice, her spirit, and her sensibility.
The original newspaper accounts that ran in The New York Journal of her imprisonment and subsequent
escape still exist, as does Pulitzer's debunking of those accounts. And I was fortunate to discover an extraordinary library, the Otto Richter
Library at Miami University, which has a Cuban Studies desk.
I always knew that male-female relationships hadn't changed very much in the last 100 years.
I was, however, startled to learn that Congress had twice turned down McKinley's request to send troops to Cuba (it wasn't until Evangelina
Cisneros testified, that they finally agreed to allow him to send troops and the U.S.S. Maine), and that Congress' relationship to the President
hasn't changed that much either in the last 100 years.
Q: Why do you think Evangelina was almost lost to history?
AE: I don't think Miss Cisneros' story was well reported, for obvious reasons, in Cuba--which was, at the time, officially under Spanish rule--although
she was well known in revolutionary circles. And though she was a cause celebre in New York, the Spanish weren't happy about her, so her story
was not well reported in Europe. We had no real global press then, there was no radio, no television, no CNN. And, I'm not sure why, but no one
had ever written a book about her before.
In a way she was an obscure character. She was simply a political prisoner and there were
many at the time, although her effect was extraordinary.
Q: You showed restraint in the development of Evangelina Cisneros and Karl Decker's romance. It is primarily a story of an emotional affair and we are not
given any overtly passionate scenes between them. It certainly adds to the elegance of the novel. However, do you think in the upcoming adaptation
to film, this relationship will be sexualized?
AE: I always think understated sexuality is more sensual in a novel. Their attraction,
I think, permeates the book. I've had a couple of male reporters tell me that they fell in love with her. Obviously, on film, certain things
will be more stated, but I still think understatement is more sensual than overt sexuality, even in a film.
Q: Yellow journalism and William Randolph Hearst's critical role in it is obviously a focal point of this novel. Do you think any newspaper chain is capable
of such influence today? Do you believe journalists of Karl Decker's ilk exist today? Why were journalists of this era so willing to "make" the
news and risk their lives doing it?
AE: What is classically termed "Yellow journalism" is really "making up" the news in order to sell newspapers. The slogan of The Journal was, "While others
talk, The Journal acts." There is some evidence that Hearst "embellished" or allowed his reporters to "embellish," and in some cases makeup certain
aspects of stories. His reporters also became involved in ways that would not necessarily be deemed ethical today. Not to propagate a conspiracy
theory, but there was no CIA at the time, and I've always believed that many of the men who worked for Hearst were operating with the full knowledge
of people in Washington and with instructions and permission to immerse themselves in their stories, as Karl Decker clearly did.
CNN certainly has enormous influence. We were all influenced by the images from Tiananmen Square. Journalists sway opinions in specific stories. Ruben Hurricane
Carter comes to mind.
The Hearst I wrote about was younger than the one often portrayed and, I believe, operated from political conviction as well as a desire to sell papers.
Q: The short vivid chapters of White Rose have a cinematic quality to them, almost like short takes, and a rapid cutting from place to place. Do you think
this stems from your film background?
AE: I don't write a novel thinking that it's a film. I think the best books are the ones you can get lost in, that you can picture as you read them. But essentially
as a stylist, I'm a minimalist. And the roots of minimalism go back to Virginia Woolf, Isak Dinesen, etc. I like to play with language as it
relates to place and time. And I spent a long time on Evangelina Cisneros' character, so that she would speak English, as she did, as a Spanish-speaking
person speaking English, with sometimes odd inflections and oddly constructed descriptions.
Q: You seem to have spent a lot of time on your secondary characters, particularly Katherine Decker. Many authors might have been content to relegate her
to the stereotypical bin of turn-of-the-century New York society women. Yet, you gave her grit and a story, which brought another profoundly interesting
dimension to the novel. Her own quiet brand of feminism acts as a subtle foil to Evangelina Cisneros. What does Katherine Decker represent to you?
AE: I never think a triangle is very interesting (or ultimately satisfying or complicated
enough) unless it's a fair fight between two women. Ultimately, a decision has to be made by someone, and if Evangelina Cisneros had not made it,
I wonder, really, what Karl Decker's decision would have been. Katherine needed to be a formidable opponent.
American society women at the time were generally outspoken. Katherine Decker's quiet version
of pacifism, her hesitance at embracing the notion of Manifest Destiny and Hearst's methods and motives, and her studied resistance to the notion
of the U.S. entering a war that may or may not have been their business, echoes, I feel, modern sentiments that women often feel about war, and
a political viewpoint that was certainly shared by some in 1897. In a way, she's the only one who had an overview, besides Eduardo Cortez. She
was a voice that possibly closest echoes my own political sentiments and ambivalence about war, any war.
Q: Do you think there are similarities between the Elian Gonzalez' case and Evangelina Cisneros?
AE: In the way that they both captured the hearts of America and polarized opinions on both sides of the Atlantic, yes. In the way that they were both insignificant
and yet wildly significant, yes. Do I think he ought to have been returned immediately? Yes. I was particularly struck by the children's march which
occurred in Havana about eight weeks into his stay with his great-uncle, where all the children in Havana wore t-shirts emblazoned with a line
that I believe is from a poem which said, "Who says a bird needs a gilded cage to sing?"
Q: You've spent time in Cuba. How were you affected by the country that you researched for so long?
AE: The Cuba that I wrote about is a Cuba that existed a hundred years ago--and yet a lot of it still remains. I spent a lot of time in Cuba retracing their
steps, the steps of their escape. The Hotel Inglaterra, where Karl Decker stayed, still exists, almost unchanged from the way it appeared in 1897.
I think it's an extraordinary country, a tiny island on which there is a confluence of perfect architecture
from the 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th century. Spanish forts are still intact. The Riviera looks exactly the way it did the day
Meyer Lansky walked out of it (except that the casino is now a dance floor). There are perfect Spanish palazzos, some of which have been converted
to hotels, and perfect Art Deco buildings. There is a huge architectural restoration project presently ongoing in old Havana. And yet the city
is largely unspoiled. It has held onto its character. There is also an extraordinary mixture of religions and culture. I love Cuba. I feel as
if it's in my blood, somehow. In a way, it reminds me of Israel, particularly Jerusalem, this tiny island, curiously spiritual, that people have been
fighting over for years.
Q: Do you have any idea what your next novel will be?
AE: I'm never sure what a book is until I'm deeply into it. But I think it will be a
love story, an illicit love story, told partly in letters, that takes place over a 20-year period, set mostly in New York. And even though it
has a vaguely historical backdrop, it's an original piece, not based on any real story
Courtesy of Random House, Inc.
© Copyright 2012 by Amy Ephron. Reprinted with permission by Ballantine. All rights reserved.
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