by David Nasaw
In the spring of 1867, with George in Idaho—and money still very much an issue—Phoebe decided to rent out her San Francisco house and move south to her parents’ farm for the summer. Everything was so uncertain, she wrote Eliza. She didn’t see a bright future. The following summer, she rented her house again, but this time for six months, and with Willie, who was now five, traveled East on free railroad passes which George had secured during his tenure in the state assembly. Worried that during her absence George would abandon all the “civilizing” she had brought to the marriage, she wrote him constantly with reminders to change his clothing regularly.
“I do hope you will have respect enough for yourself and me to keep yourself well dressed and clean” she wrote him in mid-July. “Nothing can make me feel worse than to think you are going about shabby and dirty ... Please write me if you have any new clothes and if you have your washing done and be sure not to forget to pay for it. I know how care[less] and forgetful you are, though you don’t intend to be so.”29
It was not easy for anyone to travel across the country in the late 1860s, especially a young woman and a five-year-old boy without family or servants to assist them. Phoebe was undaunted. After visiting her relatives in Missouri, she traveled to Reading, Pennsylvania, where she deposited Willie with Eliza Pike, then set off with family friends to tour the East Coast. Phoebe and Willie’s great adventure did not go entirely as planned. In her letters, Phoebe complained about Willie’s wildness when they were together and about missing him when they were apart. Their first extended separation was so painful that she wrote Eliza an urgent letter from Baltimore where she was visiting, begging her to bring Willie on the next train south for a short visit.30
In September, while she was enjoying one of her side trips without her son, he came down with a serious case of food poisoning and she had to return to Reading to be with him. Willie begged to be taken home. Phoebe instead took him back to Missouri for another visit with his cousins. Unwilling to ride the railways again without a male escort, Phoebe asked George to come and fetch them. When he refused, citing the demands of his Idaho mines, she booked passage on steamers from New York to California via Panama.
On the second steamer leg of their long journey home, just outside Acapulco, Willie fell ill again, this time with typhoid fever. George met their ship in San Francisco and stayed with Phoebe and Willie at the Lick House until the boy was healthy. When he had recovered from his illness, Phoebe, worried not only about his health but about her own, took him to Santa Clara for the rest of the winter. Though she had been vaccinated more than thirteen times, she was particularly fearful of contracting smallpox in the city. Willie did not return home to Chestnut Street until March 1, 1869. He was nearly six years old now and had been away for almost a year.31
Willie should have begun school in the fall of 1868 when he was five and a half, but Phoebe had instead taken him with her on their Eastern tour. The following September, she kept him at home again. Finally, when he was seven and a half, she enrolled him in a small private school on Vallejo Street, only to withdraw him two months later to accompany her on an extended visit to her parents’ ranch in Santa Clara. “I did not like to have him out of school even for such a short time,” she wrote to Eliza Pike, “but the weather is or has been so lovely I thought it best to come down here before the rain commenced. I have heard Willie’s lessons every day so he will be able to go on with his class.” Early in the new year, Phoebe let Willie return to school to complete the grade.32
When Willie switched to a public school the following year, Phoebe instructed the servants to keep steady watch on the boy’s whereabouts and companions. According to Cora Older, who was later chosen by Hearst to write his biography and given access to family papers, Phoebe was so worried about the “toughs” in his class that she sent her coachman to fetch him after school. Only after Willie pleaded with her for permission to walk home like the other boys did she relent.33
“I take great pleasure in amusing and interesting him at home,” Phoebe informed Eliza Pike in May of 1871, just after Willie’s eighth birthday, “so that he may be kept as much as possible from bad children. Of course, I must allow him to have company often but I manage to watch them closely. So far he is a very innocent child and I mean to keep him so just as long as I can.... He is a great comfort to us. Mr. Hearst is so proud of him and too indulgent to try to keep from spoiling him.... Mr. Hearst often says he would not like to have Willie on a jury if his Mama was concerned, for whether it was justice or not, he would decide in my favor.... I am so sorry we have no other children. We love babies so dearly, why we are not blessed I cannot understand ... I have had the dressing room adjoining my bedroom all fixed up for Willie, a nice bed put up. It is a pretty little room and so near me, he is very much pleased.”34
At age nine, after he had had only two years of classes, Phoebe removed Willie from school once more, probably so that he could spend all his time with her. The following spring, she rented out the Chestnut Street house for a year, secured from George a ten-thousand-dollar bill of credit, and deputized her ten-year-old son to take her on the grand tour of Europe she had dreamed of since her marriage.
For the next eighteen months, mother and son visited every important museum, gallery, palace, and church in Ireland, Scotland, England, France, Italy, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, Austria, and Germany, most of them more than once; they perfected their French and Willie learned German; they met the pope in Rome and had dinner with the American consul; they read Shakespeare in the evening and travel books all day long; and together they acquired an education in European art, culture, and history.
Phoebe had originally planned to return to California in the fall of 1873, but soon after arriving began talking about extending her stay. “If you are fully decided you cannot come, I shall not feel contented to remain away many months longer,” Phoebe wrote to George in August of 1873, still early in their tour, “though as we are here, and never likely to come again, we ought to see all that it is possible to see and try not to be homesick. I want you to write me what you think. I am sure you are lonely and need us to cheer you. I feel conscience stricken about having so much enjoyment with you at home worrying and working. Does my love and my society when with you compensate for all? I hope we will yet have many happy years together. Willie certainly will have great benefit by this trip. It is in many respects better than school.”35
Phoebe had long planned for this trip, though she had envisioned traveling with her husband George at her side, not ten-year-old Willie. Left to her own devices, she booked trains, hired carriages, located and negotiated the fee for room and boarding in appropriately priced and respectable hotels, found interesting people to travel with, arranged for Willie to have drawing, French, German, arithmetic, and English lessons, organized guided tours and day trips, and found time every evening to write several dense but legible twenty-page letters without errors, ink smudges, or spelling mistakes—and all this on relatively modest resources.
Their trip unfolded into a journey of epic proportions. While George complained of being “ill” and “blue” and missing his wife “and the Boy” more than ever, he never hesitated to send Phoebe the letters of credit she requested with permission to extend her stay. Unlike most American tourists who traveled straight to Florence or Rome, Phoebe began her trip in Scotland, Ireland, and England, toured Germany and the low countries, wintered in Italy, and then traveled north to Paris where Willie temporarily attended school with Eugene Lent, his friend from San Francisco.36
Willie, Phoebe reported, had been a bit homesick early on, but he was as energetic and enthusiastic a tourist as she was. From Florence, where they spent much of November and December, Phoebe wrote Eliza with a description of their daily activities. Willie had three hours of lessons in the morning and then went out with his mother “to the galleries, palaces, churches, etc.” In the evenings, while Willie prepared the next day’s lessons and read books on Italy, Phoebe wro
te her letters or studied. She had, in mid-December, “just finished reading ‘Notes on Italy’ by Hawthorne.” On the weekends, mother and son went on “excursions to the various places a little in the suburbs or on the surrounding hills where we have grand views of the city and surroundings. Sundays we go to church, in the afternoon, take a delightful drive around the city or in the beautiful park. So we are always busy.... I wish we could stay another year.”37
The financial news from home continued to be bad. The bankruptcy of the Northern Pacific Railroad and the failure of Jay Cooke and Company, one of the nation’s largest investment houses, had turned the American economy upside down. Businessmen like George Hearst, already heavily in debt, were squeezed even tighter in the Panic of 1873 as 1800 American banks folded and those still solvent scrambled to call in outstanding loans. Though George managed to hold on to his real estate, he was forced to dispose of most of his remaining assets.38
Phoebe suggested that they sell their Chestnut Street house. “We can board in Oakland and live much cheaper,” she wrote her husband from Paris in April of 1874. “Let the money for the place be invested or put at interest for Willie and I. It may be all we will have to educate him.”39
When Willie Hearst returned to San Francisco in October of 1874, he found that his childhood home and all that was in it had been sold to pay his father’s debts, as Phoebe had suggested. Willie and his mother were forced to board with family friends and then move into rented quarters.
Willie Hearst would spend the rest of his boyhood moving from school to school and from rented quarters to rented quarters. He had, however, already begun to find an antidote to the continued disruptions in his daily life. While in Europe, Phoebe had written George that their son was becoming a collector. He was intent on surrounding himself with objects that belonged to him and could not be taken away. “He wants all sorts of things,” she wrote on July 28, and then, a week later, added that he had developed “a mania for antiquities, poor old boy” and enjoyed, above all else, talking about all the wonderful things he and his mother were going to bring back home. In London, he tried to convince his mother to buy him the four specially bred white horses that pulled the English royal carriages. In Germany, he collected the colorful comic books the Germans called Bilderbücher, and coins, stamps, beer steins, pictures of actors and actresses, and porcelains. In Venice, he bought glass objects. Phoebe tried to persuade him that they could not buy everything they saw, but, as she confessed to George, the boy “gets so fascinated, his reason and judgement forsake him.”40
Werner Muensterberger, the author of Collecting: An Unruly Passion, has observed that many great collectors suffer as children from the sudden and unexplained absence of their parents. To alleviate feelings of vulnerability, “aloneness and anxiety,” he says, they invest their favorite objects with magical qualities; those objects, in turn, provide them with the sense of permanence, affirmation, and security that is missing from their lives. Young Willie Hearst at age ten had already begun to invest an inordinate amount of energy in accumulating and possessing “objects,” in some part, we might suspect, because, in Muensterberger’s words, they could “be relied upon to satisfy a demand instantly. Their essential function [was] to be there always.”41
Hearst’s childhood was defined by impermanence. He had, by the time he was ten years old, lived many different lives: the rich boy in the mansion at the top of the hill, the new kid forced to attend public school because his father had run out of money, the pampered child who toured Europe, the boy who boarded with his mother. There was no center, no place that he could call his own. His parents and grandparents were transplants from Missouri. He himself had been born and raised in San Francisco, but had lived almost as much of his life on the road. School had provided no continuity, not even from grade to grade. He was shifted and shunted, withdrawn and newly enrolled in school after school, without rhyme or reason. It was hard to keep friends or feel that you belonged to a place—or it to you—when you were always being pulled away.
His father he seldom saw and never knew. The one fixed point in his life was his mother, to whom he was devoted. But she too had disappointed him, disappearing too often and too early. And it was she who was always uprooting him from Chestnut Street, the only home he had ever known: to Sacramento and Santa Clara, to the East for six months, and Europe for eighteen.
2. To Europe Again and on to Harvard
FROM 1874 TO 1880, between ages eleven and seventeen, Willie Hearst continued to live a nomadic existence. He was a clever boy, rather well-read, able to speak and read German and French, and quite knowledgeable about history and art. Still, he had yet to distinguish himself academically, perhaps because he was continually changing schools. In 1876, when he was thirteen and should have been preparing for high school, Phoebe pulled him out of the classroom again to accompany her on an extended visit East. They attended the Philadelphia Exposition, then traveled to Boston and New York where they called on Samuel Tilden, who was running for president on the Democratic ticket.
These were critical years for the Hearst family. After selling his Comstock stock in the middle 1860s, George Hearst had become a partner in a number of mining ventures, some successful, some less so, before he and his partners at last struck it rich in the Eureka and Pioche silver mines in eastern Nevada and the Ontario thirty-five miles outside of Salt Lake City, Utah. The Ontario, which had been bought for $30,000, would in George Hearst’s lifetime yield the partners, net, about $14 million.
In the spring of 1877, Hearst visited the Black Hills in the Dakota territory to investigate rumors of a lode of gold ore which, though low-grade, was so huge it might never run out. After seeing the property for himself, he contacted his partners in San Francisco to urge them to buy as much land as they could, as quickly as they could. The Homestake Mining Company was incorporated almost immediately, as Hearst and his partners continued to buy up land and water rights in the area and build their own railroad. Homestake alone would make the Hearst family wealthy beyond imagination. But it was only one of the several major finds which would begin to pay off for the Hearst family in the late 70s and early 80s. After Homestake came Anaconda in Butte, Montana. Local miners had known that the region held valuable silver and copper deposits, but they had not had the capital to find out how valuable. Hearst and his partners did. They dug and timbered hundreds of feet under the ground, constructed an enormous smelter to reduce the ore, bought up all the water rights in the region, built a railroad link to get their ore to market, and erected their own town where they housed, provisioned, and entertained their workers.1
Hearst’s share of the Ontario, Homestake, and Anaconda mines, as well as a number of smaller but profitable mines elsewhere in the West and in Mexico propelled him and his family into the front rank of the fabulously wealthy. Never again would they have to worry about recessions, depressions, panics, or selloffs. They could live like royalty—if they chose—with more money than they could spend in their lifetimes. But they did not.
While Phoebe harbored dreams of climbing higher in San Francisco society—and pulling her son along with her—George Hearst was content to remain on the outer fringes. Though returned from the mining camps—for good—he indulged himself in an almost visceral disdain for the amenities of upper-class life: clean shirtfronts, sculpted whiskers, shined boots. His wife ignored him as best she could, when she wasn’t trying to reform him. She concentrated her attention on their son. Though Will Hearst, unlike his father, dressed and had the manners of a young gentleman, he too existed on the margins of San Francisco society. He did not regularly attend any school in San Francisco, much less any elite one, nor was he a member of any youth or church groups. His friends were the children of his father’s business associates or his mother’s social acquaintances.
Phoebe had done little about her son’s formal education, but now, in the late 1870s, the family’s fortunes secured, she made up her mind to send the boy to Harvard, the Eastern col
lege that wealthy San Franciscans had adopted as their own. To prepare him for college, Phoebe enrolled Will in St. Paul’s Episcopal School near Concord, New Hampshire, where Will Tevis, the son of one of George’s mining partners, was already a student.
Distressed at the thought that Will would be leaving home without her, Phoebe arranged for a farewell tour of Europe, and brought along Philip Barry, a tutor from Berkeley, to prepare Will for St. Paul’s. Will’s friend, Eugene Lent, and his mother made up the rest of the party. They arrived in Paris in the spring of 1879 and remained there through August. The boys spent part of every day sightseeing and acquainting themselves with the city’s finer restaurants and theaters. In the mornings and before and after dinner, Will worked with Mr. Barry on geography, Greek, Latin, history, algebra, and arithmetic, all subjects he would need at St. Paul’s and Harvard.2
Phoebe was not nearly as energetic on this tour as she had been on their first one. In July, she left Paris to take a “rest cure” at the Capterets, an exclusive resort in the Pyrenees known for its treatment of infertile women. She remained there for the rest of the summer. Barry accompanied the boy back to New York. In late August or early September, Will was taken to St. Paul’s, either by Barry or family friends, and then left on his own, at sixteen years of age, three thousand miles from home and an ocean away from his mother. Seventy years later, Hearst reminisced in his newspaper column that he had been sent away to New Hampshire because it was “thought desirable to untie him from his mother’s apron strings.” He was, at the time, much less sanguine about the separation.3