The Chief

by David Nasaw

  With the departure of Eliza Pike, the only person besides her parents whom Phoebe trusted entirely with her son, Phoebe assumed full-time care of the boy. Willie responded to his mother’s attention as children often do: by being absolutely charming, like a puppy wagging his tail. He learned his letters, showered his mother with kisses, and grew jealous of the time she spent with her brother Elbert, who had joined the rest of the family in California. Willie—or Billy Buster, as his father had taken to calling him now—was a handsome boy, tall for his age, with light brown, almost blond hair, and clear blue eyes. Though he seldom saw his father, he quickly adjusted to life in a household filled with women—family, friends, and servants—all of whom participated in superintending his childhood. Their new home on Chestnut Street was located on top of an embankment that looked down on the Bay. Willie grew up in the sunshine, surrounded by lots of land, pets, and a beautiful hanging garden. From a distance, it seemed to be an idyllic childhood and as an adult William Randolph Hearst would describe it as such to his chosen biographer, Cora Older. But there were tensions, most of them having to do with George’s extended absences and his enveloping financial problems.16

  Like most miners, even the most successful, George Hearst’s fortunes fluctuated wildly. Since it was virtually impossible to determine accurately where one claim ended and another began, mining entrepreneurs could spend half their lives—and hundreds of thousands of dollars in the courts—protecting their claims, bribing judges, hiring experts, and keeping armies of lawyers on retainer. Claim dispute cases took years to come to judgment—and until they did, it was difficult, if not impossible, to raise money by selling stock.

  As a mining entrepreneur, George made his money not from getting ore out of the ground, but from buying and selling stock in mines. This all took capital—and connections to capital. When silver prices were high, he had no difficulty raising money to finance new ventures and pay off his old debts. But when prices fell, as they inevitably did, opportunities vanished and debts accumulated. George was a gambler, firmly convinced that in the long run everything would come out all right. He refused to plan with any other outcome in mind.

  In the middle 1860s, he extended his investments—and his debts—from mines and mining stock to real estate. He bought commercial real estate in San Francisco in anticipation of the completion of the transcontinental railroad and purchased, for $30, 000, forty thousand acres of ranch land two hundred miles to the south, near San Simeon Bay in the Santa Lucia Mountains. The land was in a coastal region rich with mineral deposits. It was also valuable for agriculture.

  In 1865, George Hearst was in his mid-forties, past the age when most successful miners return to civilization to enjoy the fruits of their labor. In the fall, he returned to San Francisco to accept the Democratic nomination for the state assembly. He had a young wife, a young son, sufficient business dealings and court cases in San Francisco to keep him busy, and close ties to the local Democratic party clubs which he had been supporting for several years. It is unlikely that he had intended to retire from mining entirely. The state legislature was in session only a few months a year, which left him with long stretches of time to return to the digging fields.

  The Democratic party in 1865 was in the midst of a revival brought about by the arrival of large numbers of German and Irish immigrants and Southerners from border states like Missouri who, like Hearst, were Democrats and opposed the Civil War. It was their votes that elected George Hearst in November.

  Though Sacramento, the state capital, was closer to San Francisco than the digging fields of Nevada and Idaho, Phoebe and George still lived apart most of the time. “Mr. Hearst is at home now,” Phoebe confided to her diary on New Year’s Day, 1866, but “he will return to Sacramento on Wednesday. I will be lonely again. He is absent so much.... Times are hard. My husband has lost a great deal of money lately. He is feeling low spirited and I feel like encouraging all I possibly can. This is the beginning of a new year. May God help me to do my duty in all things.”17

  When George was unable to come home to San Francisco for the weekend—which was most of the time—Phoebe and Willie were left with no choice but to take the overnight steamer to Sacramento. They stayed with George at the Brannan House on Front and J Streets. “He misses his big playroom and many toys,” Phoebe wrote in her diary on January 9. She was every bit as miserable as Willie in Sacramento. She felt out of place among the politicians’ wives and lost in the whirl of social events. She was also worried about her “perfect” son’s increasingly imperfect behavior.

  On January 4, Willie, almost three years old now, had put castor oil on her handsome moiré antique dress “so I had to dress twice.” On January 10, when Governor Stanford’s wife and her sister came calling, he misbehaved again. On February 11, he was “very full of mischief and I always feel anxious for fear he will act badly and disturb someone.” On February 15, he misbehaved so badly that she had to remove him from the table. On February 16, back home again, she confided to her diary that she was no longer “comfortable anywhere else. When Willie is with more children he is so much harder to control.”18

  Many years later, Phoebe would confess to her grandson, Bill Hearst, Jr. that his father hadn’t been “easy to discipline” as a child. “His forte was an irrepressible imagination.”19

  In adulthood, Hearst would take pride in his boyish misbehavior. In 1941, at the age of 78, he devoted several of his “In the News” columns to stories of childhood pranks—setting his room on fire, hurling a cobblestone through his dancing instructor’s window, tying a string tight around the tail of a neighbor’s cat, shooting at pigeons out of a hotel window with a toy cannon loaded with real gunpowder. Though he wrote these articles to recapture a lost childhood and to show his readers that he was much more of a “regular” guy than the tyrant and tycoon he had been portrayed as for half a century, what is most striking is that each of these vignettes tells the same tale of a small boy trying desperately to call attention to himself.

  In one of the stories, little Willie sets off fireworks in his bedroom after the grownups have gone to bed. “Then he opened the door and shrieked down the silent halls of the sleeping house: ‘Fire! Fire! Fire!’ Then he shut the door, locked it and awaited events.” As smoke filled the hallway, his parents tried to break down the door to his room, while the cook called firemen who pried open his window and “turned the hose on Willie and his fireworks.” The story ends with Willie being “warmed” good-naturedly by his father. “But, with all his pretense of severity, Willie’s pap never did warm Willie as he deserved. If he had done so Willie might have grown up to be a better—columnist.” What comes across is the story of a little boy trying to establish some connection with his parents. The joke at the end covers the child’s astonishment—and perhaps disappointment—at not being severely reprimanded and thereby taken seriously.

  In another column on youth and child-rearing, Hearst cited a Professor Shaler who “once told his class at Harvard that he did not mind boys being bad as long as they were not wicked.” Hearst concluded with a veiled retroactive explanation of his childhood misbehavior. “Sometimes boys are bad just because they do not want to be considered sissies.”

  Did Willie worry, as a child, that he was a sissy? Probably. It must not have been easy living up to the image of his tobacco-chewing, millionaire miner father. Though Willie was big and, despite Phoebe’s constant worries, healthy, he was neither athletic nor particularly rugged. When Willie’s father questioned whether the small private school he attended was doing him any good and suggested that he might instead go to the public schools, Phoebe asked if the public schools were not “rather rough-and-tumble for a delicate child like Willie?”

  “‘I do not see anything particularly delicate about Willie,’ replied Willie’s father...‘If the public schools are rough-and-tumble they will do him good. So is the world rough-and-tumble. Willie might as well learn to face it.’”

  Before ending this part
icular story, Hearst paused to correct his mother’s characterization. “Willie was not delicate at all, but he was something of a ‘mother’s boy’—and has always been mighty glad of it.”

  What are we to make of these stories? They are a strange amalgam of apology and pride, a plea for understanding combined with an arrogant self-defense. They are, as well, an attempt by an old man to make sense of his history by mythologizing his less than idyllic childhood.20

  Phoebe Apperson had married a rich man and had expected to live as a rich man’s wife, but by early 1866, only three and a half years into her marriage, she was forced to retrench. The Ophir mine in the Comstock region had played itself out sooner than expected, George had suffered a disastrous loss in the courts, and, as he later told an interviewer, “lost all the loose money I had” in San Francisco real estate ventures. Nothing was hidden from Phoebe. Though his investments would eventually pay out, he did not know when. Nor could he predict when friends and partners like William Lent—whose son Gene was Willie Hearst’s best friend—would pay back the money they owed him.

  “I feel that we must live more quietly and be economical,” Phoebe wrote in the diary she kept in early 1866. “I have sent the horses to Pa’s.... We have sold the Rockaway [carriage] for two hundred dollars. The coachman goes away tomorrow. By doing this we will save $100 every month.” That Sunday, she was forced to miss church. “Have no carriage and the mud is terrible.” Two weeks later, after waiting nearly an hour for her hired carriage to arrive, she complained in her diary that she missed her “own team very much, but I must not complain for we must live according to our means.”21

  Had financial woes been the only family problems in the Hearst household, young Willie might have been less affected by them. But Phoebe and George were in the midst of what appeared to be an extended argument. Though George was now far from the mining camps, he continued to live as though he were a single man. He may have been seeing other women. He drank and smoked too much, paid little attention to dress and deportment, did not even keep his boots clean. He refused, for one reason or another, sickness or weariness or simple stubbornness, to accompany her to church. “My husband is not a member of any church, and comes so near to being an infidel it makes me shudder” she had written on February 4. “It is hard for me to contend against this influence on my boy. He will soon be large enough to notice these things.”22

  There were other difficulties as well. George wanted to stay out late at social occasions, but Phoebe worried too much about Willie to have a good time. After the Legislative Ball in Sacramento in 1866, she wrote, “Instead of enjoying myself I cried until I was almost sick. I felt uneasy about Baby and wanted to go home before Geo. was really ready. He was angry etc., etc.... Oh! I wish I never had to go to another party.”23

  In the spring of 1866, after the assembly session had recessed, Phoebe took a vacation from her troubles—and her three-year-old child. She sailed away to the Hawaiian Islands for a month with her brother Elbert, who was sixteen. George spent the spring and summer in Idaho investigating new mining properties. Willie was shipped off to his grandparents’ farm in Santa Clara.

  In June, Phoebe returned to California, but then left Willie again in September to visit George in Idaho. This time, she was gone for over a month. She wrote a letter to Eliza Pike after she got back to San Francisco:

  I went on up the country to Walla Walla and from there took the stage and went to a valley on the Lewiston road. There I waited three days until Geo. came. He was so glad to see me. It repaid me fully for the long trip. He had been sick and looked worse than I ever saw him, he was not ready to come home, was obliged to return to the mountains away out on the clear water above the Columbia River. So after staying there about twelve days I left for home. I could not go with him to the mines or be near him, but I was glad I went to see him. I enjoyed the trip very much, saw some of finest scenery in the world.... I was gone just a month ... I was glad to get home again to see Willie. He was well and fat. He has grown tall too.... Willie is sound asleep. I wish you could see him—he is a great comfort to me. He talks to me sometimes when we are alone like an old man, he understands so much. He does not want to go to his grandma’s again, seems to be afraid all the time that I will go away and leave him again. He says he likes this home best, and loves me as big as the house and sky and everything.24

  Phoebe accepted the burden of being a miner’s wife and went out of her way to visit and spend time with her husband in the mining camps, but he never quite reciprocated. His visits to San Francisco were always abbreviated, often unannounced, usually stopovers on longer journeys from one mining camp to another. She learned to live without him and to concentrate her attention and affection on her son. George arrived in San Francisco in November 1866, then left for a new mining camp almost as soon as he had arrived. “He was absent from the City a long while, his trip was by no means profitable,” Phoebe wrote Eliza, and went on:

  I don't think of going there this year with him—you know he can't stay at home long—I have made up my mind to not fret about it. I cannot help feeling lonely but may as well take things quietly. I am so well and fleshy you would be quite surprised. I was obliged to alter two or three of my closest fitting dresses, isn't that funny? But no signs of a little sister yet ... Willie is not so fond of [Elbert] as he used to be. I scarcely ever leave Willie with anyone now—he can't bear to stay when I go down town and he is very good usually when he goes visiting with me. I don't think Alice [the new nanny] is cross to him, but she is very careless and I dislike for him to learn any of her habits. He being with me so constantly has made him perfectly devoted to me. He is a real little calf about me, he never wants anyone else to do anything for him, as I think I love him better than ever before, some days I do very little but amuse him. He knows several of his letters and will soon learn them all. He is very wise and sweet. I have wanted to have his picture taken, but he has had a small ringworm on his face and I have been waiting for that to disappear entirely which will soon be the case.25

  Phoebe’s disappearances (two of them, each a month long, in a four-month period), coupled with George’s extended absences, may have taken a toll on their son. Phoebe confided to Eliza that Willie had been “very much put out when his father came home because he could not sleep with me. I talked to him and told him when his Papa went away again, he could sleep with me. He said, well, he wished he would go.”26

  Willie took sick early in 1867—he was a few months shy of his fourth birthday—and Phoebe put aside everything to nurse him back to health. “Being with me so constantly, he became very babyish, and wanted his Mama on all occasions, when he was sick,” she wrote Eliza. “He would say so often day and nights ‘Mama I want to tell you something.’ I would say—‘What Willie.’ His answer would be, ‘I love you.’ His Papa laughed at me a great deal about it, saying Willie waked me up in the night to tell me he loved me, bless his little heart. I delighted to have him well again.... Willie talks a great deal and in that manly way. He asks reasons for everything and when he tells anything he gives his reasons. He has improved very much. Has fine ideas. Thinks a great deal. I have taught him most of his letters. He loves books and play both.... I have taken him with me when I go out, so that he thinks I can’t go without him and it is almost the case.... He is a great comfort to me, and I hope he will be a good man, they are scarce.... Mr. Hearst has been home all this winter. Has been very well. We begin to feel more like married people than before, we have been very quiet, have not attended a single party and only been to the theatre once and to see the Japanese jugglers once. Took Willie both times those jugglers are splendid....Willie tried to turn summersetts, climb poles.”

  George’s continuing financial problems had brought an end to their social life. “The finest party ever given in California will be at the Lick House ... the dining room so surpasses anything I have ever seen ... We have an invitation,” Phoebe wrote Eliza, “but are not going. I would have to get a handsome
dress. It would be both troublesome and expensive and often after all would not pay. I don’t care about all the furbelows and vanity.... We have a good home and enough to live on. That is much to be thankful for. If our little man is spared to us we will try to give him a fine education if nothing more.... I am still studying French, one lesson per week. Will soon be through. I can speak very well now ... A great many are going to the world’s fair [in Paris]. I wish I could go, but I can’t, and it does no good to think about it.”27

  In 1867, after one two-year term, George retired from the state assembly. His financial problems were more serious than ever. While they were able to hold on to their home in San Francisco, their land at San Simeon, and some of their stocks, there was very little left over. George returned to the digging fields, this time as adviser or partner in mines up and down the West Coast, from Idaho to Mexico. He and Phoebe renewed their separate lives. There was no talk of his returning home to stay now. He was a fulltime consultant and entrepreneur, on the road twelve months a year.

  Phoebe’s and George’s correspondence was marked by a strange competition as each tried to convince the other that he or she led the more difficult life, Phoebe particularly, because George’s extended absences made it difficult for her to have the second child she so fervently wished for. In her letters to Eliza, she reported regularly that there were “no signs” yet of a little sister for Willie, but that she kept hoping next month might be different.28 George’s letters were filled with worries about his health, his homesickness, and the trustworthiness of his companions. Each insisted that the other did not visit often enough or, having visited, did not stay long enough.