The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst (4 page)
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Authors: Kenneth Whyte
BOOK: The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst
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Discomfitting as this new arrangement may have been for Will, he was not entirely without means. His father had deeded him the
Examiner,
which now produced a solid return. If he needed cash or wanted to finance another venture, he had the options of improving the paper’s income or, presumably, selling it. His father had also previously made over to him the enormous Babicora ranch in Mexico, a property for which the Mormons were said to have offered a million dollars.
29
That, too, offered Will some flexibility. But there was no getting around the fact that the geysers of ready cash had been plugged. He was for the first time in his adult life operating under serious constraints.
Examiner,
which now produced a solid return. If he needed cash or wanted to finance another venture, he had the options of improving the paper’s income or, presumably, selling it. His father had also previously made over to him the enormous Babicora ranch in Mexico, a property for which the Mormons were said to have offered a million dollars.
29
That, too, offered Will some flexibility. But there was no getting around the fact that the geysers of ready cash had been plugged. He was for the first time in his adult life operating under serious constraints.
PHOEBE’S INTENTION WAS NOT SIMPLY to control Will’s spending but to direct his life. She had always been by far the more assertive parent. Throughout Will’s youth, she had been at pains to show him an ideal of manhood apart from the tobacco-spitting, hog-and-hominy-eating southern oaf, which was how she rated the senator’s example in her more exasperated moments. (Phoebe is in large part responsible for George’s reputation for vulgarity. She never forgave him for failing to keep pace with her social pretensions and left in her letters a long record of complaint that has been uncritically mined by historians and biographers.) She had known from the first exactly what kind of man her Will should become: “A good man,” she told a confidante. “They are scarce.”
30
Good men, in Phoebe’s books, were clean, carefully dressed, roundly educated, well traveled, reliable, and attentive to women, especially their mothers. She had been deeply impressed by the devastatingly well-bred gallants in the higher reaches of London society, men who resided in “perfect palaces,” kept a dozen or more servants, and held close to distinctions of class and formality of manner. Phoebe believed that this sort of behavior was “putting your right foot foremost,” something she adopted as a personal maxim.
31
30
Good men, in Phoebe’s books, were clean, carefully dressed, roundly educated, well traveled, reliable, and attentive to women, especially their mothers. She had been deeply impressed by the devastatingly well-bred gallants in the higher reaches of London society, men who resided in “perfect palaces,” kept a dozen or more servants, and held close to distinctions of class and formality of manner. Phoebe believed that this sort of behavior was “putting your right foot foremost,” something she adopted as a personal maxim.
31
To make of her son a proper English gentleman, Phoebe had surrounded him with tutors from an early age and had fussed over his dress and manners. When circumstances allowed, she had enrolled him in private schools and tried to protect him from rougher boys—this against the advice of George, who figured the sooner Will learned to handle himself, the better. Will took lessons in dance and fencing and drawing. He studied French and German, and he traveled a great deal. He saw Ireland, where scenes of poverty moved him to want to give away his clothes, and the Louvre, which he wanted his mother to buy. He attended the Vienna International Exhibition and a papal audience in Rome. He visited no end of galleries and auction houses, and with his mother’s encouragement spent vast sums at age eleven on Venetian glass. Eventually, Phoebe shipped him off to the prestigious St. Paul’s Episcopal School near Concord, New Hampshire, and afterward to Harvard, where she decorated his suite of rooms at Matthews Hall in crimson and equipped him with a library, a maid, and a valet.
Phoebe got some of what she wanted out of her boy. She took great pride and comfort in his precociousness and handsome looks, his curiosity and good nature. As he grew, he developed a quick intelligence and a strong memory. His sense of humor was lively (unlike his mother’s) and he displayed uncommon personal honesty. He did his lessons without too much complaint. He read Shakespeare and travel literature with Phoebe and he wrote his father at age fifteen of the thrill of reading Roman history at the exact locations where great events had occurred. Most importantly, so far as Phoebe was concerned, Will was openly affectionate toward his mother. “I want to see you so bad,” he wrote her while in his teens. “If I could only talk how much more I could say than I can write in a letter. . . . I was very sorry to hear you had been sick. I suppose it was the effect of the waters and Dr. Sarrand’s big bill.”
32
32
But other aspects of Will’s behavior were disconcerting. Phoebe’s early letters describe him, with a certain pride, as “very mischievous” and “full of pranks.”
33
Most of this activity was harmless enough—plying his pet rabbit with champagne, fishing for goldfish in the fountains of the Tuileries gardens. There was, however, a pyrotechnic bent to Will’s naughtiness. Visiting family friends over April Fool’s Day one year, he drew the fire department to their home by setting off Bengal rockets indoors. In Paris during a European tour in 1879, Will and a friend, Eugene Lent, were discovered shooting pigeons from the window of their lodgings with a toy brass cannon. On the same trip, an attempt to create a small-scale model of a fire at sea using a large bowl, a supply of alcohol, and a ship lifted from the mantle in their room resulted in a midscale blaze that brought the Parisian
pompiers.
An unceremonious eviction followed. At a more elegant hotel on the Champs Élysées, Will and Eugene got hold of an ancient hunting rifle with a black cartridge and ramrod. They managed to fire a shot into the plaster cherubs on the ceiling of their suite. In an effort to dislodge the ramrod, the concierge pulled the whole ceiling down, adding considerably to the Hearsts’ travel costs. Expensive as those stunts may have been, there was no malice in them. The malice was saved for Monsieur Gallivotti, proprietor of an
académie de danse
. Unhappy with his course of instruction, Will threw a stone through the establishment’s window.
34
33
Most of this activity was harmless enough—plying his pet rabbit with champagne, fishing for goldfish in the fountains of the Tuileries gardens. There was, however, a pyrotechnic bent to Will’s naughtiness. Visiting family friends over April Fool’s Day one year, he drew the fire department to their home by setting off Bengal rockets indoors. In Paris during a European tour in 1879, Will and a friend, Eugene Lent, were discovered shooting pigeons from the window of their lodgings with a toy brass cannon. On the same trip, an attempt to create a small-scale model of a fire at sea using a large bowl, a supply of alcohol, and a ship lifted from the mantle in their room resulted in a midscale blaze that brought the Parisian
pompiers.
An unceremonious eviction followed. At a more elegant hotel on the Champs Élysées, Will and Eugene got hold of an ancient hunting rifle with a black cartridge and ramrod. They managed to fire a shot into the plaster cherubs on the ceiling of their suite. In an effort to dislodge the ramrod, the concierge pulled the whole ceiling down, adding considerably to the Hearsts’ travel costs. Expensive as those stunts may have been, there was no malice in them. The malice was saved for Monsieur Gallivotti, proprietor of an
académie de danse
. Unhappy with his course of instruction, Will threw a stone through the establishment’s window.
34
Young Hearst attended St. Paul’s at his mother’s insistence, but its highly structured routine, with regular fasts and three high Episcopal services a day, was too solemn for his tastes: “There is never anything new to write about in this place. Every day is like another except now and then there is only substitution of Church for playtime and Sacred History for Latin, Greek, etc.” He wrote Phoebe with his complaints of the sermons:
I believe that every old minister in the country comes here to practice on us, and shove off old sermons that no one else will listen to, and I would not either if I did not have to. The Dr. preaches pretty well but hollers too much.
35
He returned home after a year at St. Paul’s and resumed studies with private tutors.
Harvard, where the demands were few and the freedom generous, was a better experience. Will was one of a minority of students from outside New England, yet he managed to accomplish all he desired socially. He was elected to the Porcellian Club and to Med Fac. The latter was “the most secret, most esteemed, and apparently, most criminal of the secret societies,” its chief occupation being to monkey with campus plaques and statuary.
36
He kept to a demanding schedule of beer parties and dinners, on and off campus. As often as possible, he would haunt the demimondes of Boston and New York, nurturing a taste for café life and musical comedy. Unlike many of the wealthier students at Harvard, who lived off campus to avoid mandatory chapel attendance, Will lived on campus and skipped the compulsories anyway. He grew a wispy mustache and dressed like a dude. He acquired a girlfriend named Tessie and a pet alligator named Champagne Charley after its favorite drink. His classmate, the philosopher and aesthete George Santayana, saw Hearst as a parvenu and later wrote that he was “little esteemed in the college.”
37
A reporter who interviewed other students about Hearst heard him described as quiet and reserved but “one of the best fellows in college,” “good-hearted,” a “whole-souled, generous” individual, and “the coolest and longest-headed man” on campus.
38
Although the academic requirements at Harvard were not rigorous, Hearst’s performance was poor enough to win him probation in his sophomore year, followed not long after by a rustication from which he would not return.
36
He kept to a demanding schedule of beer parties and dinners, on and off campus. As often as possible, he would haunt the demimondes of Boston and New York, nurturing a taste for café life and musical comedy. Unlike many of the wealthier students at Harvard, who lived off campus to avoid mandatory chapel attendance, Will lived on campus and skipped the compulsories anyway. He grew a wispy mustache and dressed like a dude. He acquired a girlfriend named Tessie and a pet alligator named Champagne Charley after its favorite drink. His classmate, the philosopher and aesthete George Santayana, saw Hearst as a parvenu and later wrote that he was “little esteemed in the college.”
37
A reporter who interviewed other students about Hearst heard him described as quiet and reserved but “one of the best fellows in college,” “good-hearted,” a “whole-souled, generous” individual, and “the coolest and longest-headed man” on campus.
38
Although the academic requirements at Harvard were not rigorous, Hearst’s performance was poor enough to win him probation in his sophomore year, followed not long after by a rustication from which he would not return.
Heart wrote the occasional “Dear Mummer” letter from college, boasting of his dinners and parties, complaining of eastern winters, wondering why his parents so seldom wrote, and alternately reassuring Phoebe about his studies and apologizing for the results. The odd letter was forlorn, as this one on his twenty-first birthday: “I have the dumps today and I feel rather homesick and I wish I could enjoy my birthday at home and with you and father instead of with a lot of fellows who don’t care whether I am twenty one or thirty so long as the dinner is good and the wine plenty.”
39
More commonly, he adopted a breezy, playful tone, as in this description of how he had killed a long train trip: “I found some consolation in thinking about the dear one I had left behind, of the sweet sweet pain of parting, of the tender eyes suffused with tears and the winsome smile that played around the back of the neck of my own my darling Charley.”
40
39
More commonly, he adopted a breezy, playful tone, as in this description of how he had killed a long train trip: “I found some consolation in thinking about the dear one I had left behind, of the sweet sweet pain of parting, of the tender eyes suffused with tears and the winsome smile that played around the back of the neck of my own my darling Charley.”
40
He would sometimes take breaks from campus to visit his mother in New York. He always had a great time. She was invariably distraught, writing George on one occasion:
Late hours and dissipation affect him. Of course, I don’t know how much he drank, but I do know he was not intoxicated at all, nor even
funny,
as they call it but even the amount he must have drunk did him
no good.
Theaters, horse shows, late suppers and
women
consumed the two hundred dollars quickly. . . .The day after the college fellows left, I was suffering dreadfully. [A friend] said she did not think I could possibly live through the year if that state of things went on, but I don’t believe heartaches kill and I am plucky if not strong.
41
When Will ran afoul of the university, Phoebe, the educational philanthropist, took it hard and personally. “It would almost kill me,” she wrote her son, “if you should not go through college in a creditable manner.”
42
The senator, never keen on Harvard, seems to have taken Will’s struggles in stride, although his name was invoked in a sensible letter of advice to Will from a family friend:
42
The senator, never keen on Harvard, seems to have taken Will’s struggles in stride, although his name was invoked in a sensible letter of advice to Will from a family friend:
Your father realizes, if you do not, the contemptuous estimate of a man (even in a money-making community like this) which is sure to stick to one who has failed in a contest that is distinctively a test of brains. . . . A Harvard degree, if it means nothing else, does mean that a man has made the beginning of a liberally intelligent life. . . . Whatever occupation you may choose as a business, I venture to say, unless I am greatly mistaken in you, you will never lose an interest in intellectual things, but will feel from year to year that they hold a place of growing importance in your life.
43
Neither parent (nor the family friend) was successful in urging Will to resume his education. Harvard had set what he considered to be intolerable conditions for his return: no suppers or parties in his rooms, no leaving campus during the semester. “I assured the gentlemen of the Faculty of Harvard College that I didn’t regret so much having lost my degree as having given them an opportunity to refuse it to me,” he wrote Phoebe.
44
She counted his refusal to accept the stated terms a disgrace and one of the great disappointments of her life.
44
She counted his refusal to accept the stated terms a disgrace and one of the great disappointments of her life.
Although his failure brought no credit to him, Harvard was hardly a waste of time for Will Hearst. While neglecting his studies, he had discovered two of the great passions of his life. He began to follow national politics. Lockstep with his father, then emerging as a power among California Democrats, he took up the party’s cause on campus. He rallied “all the Democratic dudes in college”—a mere twenty-eight in a class of over two hundred—on behalf of Cleveland in 1884. He organized a raucous bonfire and flag-raising in the center of Harvard Yard, with plenty of fireworks, already something of a Hearst signature. “There were three cheers for Grover,” he wrote his mother, “and as the crowd howled in response, the band played, rockets shot up into the night and the glorious flag unfurled and waved acknowledgment.” At the end of the evening there were three cheers for the Hearsts, father and son, working at both ends of the continent in the same cause. Will was “quite overcome and ran away and hid” so that he wouldn’t have to speak.
45
45
However reticent at that moment, Hearst was already nurturing political ambitions. He worked hard at the organization of his Democratic club, and prepared as part of his studies an analysis of the 1884 election that displayed what biographer David Nasaw has called “a grasp of national politics remarkable for a college student.”
46
Will wrote his father an amusing letter on the accommodations they would require when united as senior senator and junior congressman in one Washington household. He suggested something “imposing, that it may seem to appreciate the importance of its position in sheltering two such immortals,” yet “unassuming, as if it were at the same time sensible of the views of the occupants towards the people.”
47
46
Will wrote his father an amusing letter on the accommodations they would require when united as senior senator and junior congressman in one Washington household. He suggested something “imposing, that it may seem to appreciate the importance of its position in sheltering two such immortals,” yet “unassuming, as if it were at the same time sensible of the views of the occupants towards the people.”
47
The senator does not appear to have answered the letter, not being in the practice of answering personal mail. “I was pleasantly surprised by a letter from you,” his son wrote him on another occasion, “and I suppose it was for me although you signed yourself, ‘Your loving husband. ’”
48
George Hearst’s absentmindedness—like his absence—was fundamental to his parenting style. His son frequently reminded him to write and to send gifts on special occasions, not always to good effect. “Well, goodbye,” Will signed off in another letter. “I have given up all hope of having you write to me, so I suppose I must just scratch along and trust to hearing of you through the newspapers.”
49
Nevertheless, the senator supplanted his wife as the dominant parent while Will was at Harvard. He represented a masculine ideal far more attractive to any red-blooded American youth than the English model proffered by Phoebe. Strong, shrewd, self-reliant, and undomesticated, George was the epitome of the self-made frontiersman, a type worshipped by college-educated easterners as diverse as Stephen Crane, Frederic Remington, and Theodore Roosevelt. He influenced not only Will’s interest in politics, but his embrace of a second passion: publishing.
48
George Hearst’s absentmindedness—like his absence—was fundamental to his parenting style. His son frequently reminded him to write and to send gifts on special occasions, not always to good effect. “Well, goodbye,” Will signed off in another letter. “I have given up all hope of having you write to me, so I suppose I must just scratch along and trust to hearing of you through the newspapers.”
49
Nevertheless, the senator supplanted his wife as the dominant parent while Will was at Harvard. He represented a masculine ideal far more attractive to any red-blooded American youth than the English model proffered by Phoebe. Strong, shrewd, self-reliant, and undomesticated, George was the epitome of the self-made frontiersman, a type worshipped by college-educated easterners as diverse as Stephen Crane, Frederic Remington, and Theodore Roosevelt. He influenced not only Will’s interest in politics, but his embrace of a second passion: publishing.
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