by David Nasaw
Will was miserable from the moment he arrived in New Hampshire, and he let his parents know exactly how he felt. He had never before been away from home or from his mother for an extended period of time, nor in the company of young men who were destined for “society.” He did not fit in—and did not want to. “This is the best place to get homesick that I ever saw,” he wrote his mother. “Everything is so dull, I am just homesick all the time.”4
With Phoebe away in Europe, George Hearst tried his best to take up the role of parent and console his son by mail. Unfortunately, he had little to offer except barely literate homilies: “I hope you will stand in like a man and take it as it comes good and bad until I see you and we will talk it over and we may be able to lift out some of objectionable parts.”5
Though Will may have been cheered to get mail from his father, it was his mother he missed. In letter after letter he reminded her how much he suffered from her absence:
“I want to see you so bad. If I could only talk how much more I could say than I can write in a letter.”6
“I have settled into a state of perpetual homesickness, which although not quite so bad as when I first came, is pretty bad and I think it will continue until I see you again. I never knew how much time there was in two months before and how long it could be strung out.”7
“I feel very despondent and lonely all the time and wish for you to come awful bad. It has been over a week since I received a letter, and I feel very anxious for fear you are sick. If you are I would rather know. It is the next thing to speaking with you to write and receive a letter. It is all I can do to keep from crying sometimes when how much alone I am and how far away you are. I often think of the last morning at Carterets and the only thing that comforts me is that the time is getting shorter every day till you will be here.”8
Will hated everything about St. Paul’s—the food, the fasting on Friday, the lessons, the daily regimen and rituals, and the cold. What bothered him most was the loss of the unstructured, almost carefree life he had enjoyed in San Francisco. He was incensed that the school authorities allowed the boys to “only go into town once a month, and only have four dollars a month to spend and out of that have to come bats and balls and all such things.”9
Seventy years later, in his newspaper column, he still remembered how “thoroughly unhappy” he had been at St. Paul’s where they tried so hard to make him into a gentleman, where, instead of playing “baseball on a vacant lot,” as he had in San Francisco, he was supposed to play cricket on a “spic-and-span and much-mowed lawn.”10
Like his father, Will Hearst was deeply uncomfortable with the rituals of upper-class life, with cricket and unsmiling headmasters, with Latin and Greek, and compulsory chapel led by pompous preachers who reminded him of the African-American vaudevillian Gus Williams. “It is almost like a catholic church,” he wrote his mother of school chapel. “We have to bow whenever we come to Jesus Christ in the creed, and Dr. spoke the other day of the holy virgin. I think he is an old hypocrite and I know you will think so when you see him.”
Will was the new boy in a school where his classmates had been together for several years. While he was able to room with “little Tevis,” his friend from San Francisco, he complained to his mother that his roommate “always wants to go to bed at about nine o’clock while I have to stay up and study.”11
In November, when Phoebe finally returned from her rest cure to visit her boy at St. Paul’s, he begged her to take him with her back to San Francisco. She refused. He finished out the year at St. Paul’s, but did not return the following September. “His retirement was voluntary,” a classmate remembered. “He was not happy there.”12
Formal photographs taken at around this time picture Will as a young aristocrat of the West, a handsome lad, tall, thin, his sandy hair cut short and parted to the left. What the formal portraits can’t show is the shy smile and the awkward stance of a young man a bit unsure of himself in social situations.13
We don’t know much about the two years Will spent in San Francisco after leaving St. Paul’s. No doubt bowing to her son’s wishes, Phoebe did not enroll him in another secondary school, but instead hired tutors to prepare him for his Harvard entrance examinations. He lived with his parents in a mansion on “millionaires’ row” on Van Ness Avenue and spent more time than ever with his father, who had now permanently retired from the mines to devote himself to politics.
Young Will’s major preoccupation appears to have been the theater. It was here, he tells us, that he fell in love for the first time, with the teenage actress Lillian Russell, who was performing “in a light comedy called ‘Fun in a Photograph Gallery.’ Your columnist was about sixteen or seventeen too, and after having become such a frequent visitor to the theater that the ushers began to call him by his first name, decided that the tense, dramatic and ecstatic situation could only be solved by an honorable and impassioned proposal offered the young lady.” At the last minute, his nerve failed him.14
In December of 1881, Will traveled East again with his mother, who had decided to tour Europe with a young protégé, Eleanor Calhoun, an aspiring actress who claimed to be the great-niece of the renowned South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun. Eleanor visited the Hearsts at the Hotel Buckingham in New York and traveled with them to Boston and Cambridge where Phoebe, in anticipation of Will’s passing his entrance examinations, shopped for furniture her son might need for his suite of rooms at Harvard. Eleanor and Will spent a few evenings at the theater before returning, with Phoebe, to New York.
On January 18, Will saw his mother and Eleanor off to Europe. “What a hard day this has been leaving my dear boy,” Phoebe wrote in her diary. “Going so far away. We sailed at 3 P.M. Dear Will was brave and kept trying to make us laugh.” “How I miss my dear Will,” she added the following day. “He is indeed a part of my life.” She had nothing to say about her husband whom she was also leaving behind.15
Will returned to San Francisco to prepare for his Harvard entrance examinations. There is no evidence that he gave any further thought to Eleanor Calhoun. A few years older and much more mature than he, she was, in any event, out of reach for the gangly young man who, while she was traveling in Europe, would be studying for his college entrance examinations. Prospective students were examined over a three-day period in Latin, Greek, Ancient History and Geography, Mathematics, Physics, English Composition, French or German, and two electives. As tutors were given advance notice of the texts their charges would be tested on, 90 percent of those who took the entrance examinations were admitted for the fall 1882 term, Will Hearst among them.16
Nineteen-year-old Will Hearst spent his last summer in California—as he had the previous two years—at leisure. With other wealthy San Franciscans, he joined the seasonal exodus to Monterey—the Newport of northern California—where he resided in the luxurious Hotel Del Monte. It was here, according to his chosen biographer, Cora Older, that he met and was “enthralled” by Sybil Sanderson, the daughter of a San Francisco judge. Sybil was also spending her last summer on the West Coast before moving to Paris to continue her operatic studies. A soprano with enormous range, she was already at age seventeen being compared to Adelina Patti, the most famous opera singer in the world.17
According to Cora Older, who learned much of what she included in her book from Hearst himself, young Will fell head over heels in love with Sybil—and she with him: “It was a time when the beauty of Monterey, the old Spanish Capital of California, was most glamorous.... Will Hearst and Sybil Sanderson strolled up and down these streets of romance. They boated, they swam, they rode, they wandered on the white sands by day, and under the pale moon they were betrothed.”18
Their romance lasted only as long as the season. At summer’s end, Sybil’s mother and sister, with her consent, whisked her away to Paris. Though according to Cora Older, Will thought seriously about following Sybil to Paris, in the end he decided instead to board the train to Cambridge with his mother and begin his fres
hman year at Harvard College.
Will could well have afforded to live in the luxurious, centrally heated private dormitories that had been built for Harvard’s young millionaires on the “Gold Coast”—a quarter mile away from campus so that residents would not be subject to compulsory chapel regulations—but he did not, probably because he had not been invited to. He moved instead into 46 Matthews Hall, a suite of rooms in a monstrously large, ten-year-old Gothic building in Harvard Yard. Phoebe redecorated his rooms in Harvard crimson, equipped him with a library, and hired a maid and valet to look after her boy.19
While Harvard was less parochial than it had been, fully two thirds of the class came from within a hundred-mile radius of Cambridge. Only eight members of Hearst’s class were from California.20 Fortunately for Will, Gene Lent, his childhood friend, and Jack Follansbee, also from San Francisco, had preceded him to Cambridge. Both were well-connected sophomores, eager to show him around campus. Follansbee, tall, stylishly dressed, with dark black hair and a red mustache, assumed the role of prime mentor and friend. “He is in the class above me but has been very kind—giving me good advice and the benefit of his experience,” Will wrote his parents. “In fact, he has been the best friend I have had in College so far, and I shall be sadder to see him go than I would have been at the departure of any number of fellow freshmen.” Jack had, according to Will, done quite well in his first year—his “college course has been very successful and his habits and deportment have been such as to make him a favorite not only with the fellows but with the professors as well”—but he and Will overlapped for less than a year in Cambridge. Jack had to leave in the spring of his sophomore year, while Will was still a freshman. According to Will, Jack had to “go into business” when his uncle, who had been paying his way, ran into financial difficulties.
Will implored his father to find a position for Jack Follansbee, not simply to repay him for his kindness, but because “he is a splendid fellow, Papa, and in aiding him you will be aiding yourself, for I don’t know where you can find a young man with the brightness, the sound sense and the pluck that Jack Follansbee has. He is a tall, strong fellow with an honest, attractive countenance and he is highly honorable and proud.... Now, what I want you to do is to get him a good position and one where he will have a chance to rise—as he surely will if the opportunity offers.” He expected, he wrote his mother, that Jack would, in future, become “to me what Chambers and McMasters [George Hearst’s chief advisers] have been to papa. Men who have grown up in the business and have a knowledge and an interest in it as well as a friendship for me; for I know I have few better friends than Jack and there is no one that I am fonder of.” His prediction was only partially borne out. Though Jack may have done odd jobs for George, he was not given a full-time position in George’s real estate or mining businesses. Jack Follansbee had spent a pampered childhood, drank far too much, and, though intensely loyal to Will, was not prepared to become anyone’s fulltime assistant or adviser. He would, nonetheless, become a permanent fixture in the Hearst family. In the years to come, he would correspond regularly with Phoebe, keeping her up to date on her son’s activities and reassuring her when she was most worried about her boy. Jack remained Will’s loyal friend as well, always willing to drop what he was doing to help out in an emergency. Will repaid that loyalty by providing for him for the rest of his life.21
There were several ways of making one’s mark at Harvard. Hearst chose the most difficult: election to the top social clubs. Each spring, the sophomore class surveyed the new class of freshmen and divided them by social criteria—they had no other available—into hierarchically ranked groups of ten. The social clubs, also in hierarchical order, chose their members from the top “tens.” D.K.E., or “Dickey,” took the highest ranking “ten.”
As a Californian whose parents had neither the social skills nor the connections necessary to open doors in Cambridge or Boston, Hearst was at something of a disadvantage. What he did have on his side was the handsome set of rooms Phoebe had furnished for him, a winning though slightly diffident personality, perhaps the largest allowance on campus—$150 a month, equal to $2,500 a month in 1990s currency—and an enormous capacity to mobilize others on his behalf. In a long letter to his mother in which he itemized all the money he had spent on doctor bills and dinners and the photographs of his room which she had requested, he added “a few lines of explanation to Papa,” who he feared might misunderstand when he asked for more money “to get on”: “When I said ‘get on,’ I meant—as I supposed you knew—get on the D.K.E. and, although I am conceited enough to suppose that I am fully capable of advancing myself as far as studies go, I recognize that it is impossible to be a successful college politician and to reach the highest point without having members of your own class to push you up and upper classmen to pull.”22
Will scheduled a full round of dinners, punches, beer parties, and receptions in his Matthews Hall suite and in restaurants in Cambridge and Boston, with the implicit promise that he would continue such royal entertainments for his fellow club members. He was elected to D.K.E. in the spring of his freshman year.23
Harvard under President Charles W. Eliot had removed many of the regulations and restrictions that had made life so miserable for Will at St. Paul’s. Aside from chapel, which was compulsory for those who lived on campus—though Will refused to attend—students had a rather remarkable degree of freedom at Harvard to “elect” their courses and attend if and when they chose. Grades were determined by end-of-the-term examinations on which 50 percent was considered passing. “To prepare these you spend as much time as you consider necessary,” Hearst wrote his father, “so, you see, a fellow can study or loaf just as he pleases and if he manages to skim through his examinations all right, nothing is said....I think a fellow ought to get an average of 70% and that is what I shall try for.”24
Aside from the most promising students, who were early taken under the wing of their instructors, faculty had little to do with students besides giving three hours’ worth of lectures a week and conducting examinations at the end of the semester. According to George Santayana, also a member of the class of 1886, “Teachers and pupils seemed animals of different species, useful and well disposed towards each other, like a cow and a milkmaid; periodic contributions could pass between them, but not conversation.”25
In December, as Will finished his first semester, Phoebe came East to entertain him for the holidays. George had promised to join them, but, as usual, he backed out at the last minute. “I was pleasantly surprised by a letter from you,” Will wrote him from Phoebe’s hotel suite in New York. “I suppose it was for me although you signed yourself ‘Your loving husband.’...I have been spending a week’s vacation in New York with Mama and have had a splendid time.... Don’t you remember that you said you were coming to New York to spend Xmas with your Billy Buster? Well, I did not much believe it then, but I wish you would come on and see the College.”26
With some help from tutors, Will got through his first year at Harvard with some surprisingly high grades, 93% in Chemistry, 80% in Greek, 78% in Latin, 74% in Classical Lectures, 77% in German, and a barely passing 55% in Physics. Though he had done well in Analytic Geometry, for some reason he never took the final. For his second year, Will chose to take Political Economy, Mathematics, and Philosophy; he quickly dropped Philosophy because, as he wrote his mother, it was “too dry and learned and full of big words and generally incomprehensible for me.” He also registered for Fine Arts with Professor Charles Eliot Norton.27
Professor Norton, already a legend in Boston and at Harvard, was precisely the kind of educated gentleman Phoebe had hoped would teach her son. Norton had corresponded with Ruskin, translated Dante, and wrote regularly for the best literary magazines. He had taken on himself the task of cultivating the taste of Harvard gentlemen, steering them away from the vulgarity of the American present to the treasures of the distant European past. Fine art, Norton taught, civilized men and made the
m moral. To live among beautiful things was, he believed, to open oneself up to their restorative powers. A well-ordered, well-decorated, and artfully furnished residence was an antidote to the disorder in the world outside. It soothed the soul, mended the spirit, and improved the character.28
Though Hearst enjoyed Norton’s lectures, it is clear from his letters home that the high point of his second year was his election as business manager of the Harvard Lampoon, replacing Eugene Lent who had not been able to raise the funds necessary to keep the magazine afloat. Business managers were traditionally chosen for the size of their allowances, but Hearst, instead of subsidizing the Lampoon out of his own or his parents’ pockets, engaged in a full-scale advertising and marketing campaign to make the journal self-sufficient. He solicited local merchants to buy ads, wrote to advertisers in other Ivy League publications, and enlisted his mother to sell subscriptions to members of the San Francisco Harvard Club: “The Lampoon is peculiarly Harvard, beginning with its red cover, and all the way through and it ought to be supported by Harvard men with contributions and subscriptions.”29
In an effort to bring a modicum of order to the magazine which, according to George Santayana, was “always late and not always funny,” Hearst rented a room for the writers in Brattle Street, “with a carpet and a genuinely American stove,” and bought subscriptions to all the French comic papers. The writers, for their part, “turned a cold shoulder on Hearst’s munificence” and continued to meet in their dormitory rooms and dining hall instead.30
Hearst didn’t much care, as he had accomplished his purpose. In his first experience in publishing, he had expanded the Lampoon’s circulation by 50 percent, increased advertising revenue by 300 percent, and converted the bottom line from a deficit of $200 to a surplus of $650. Though he wrote his mother that he intended “as soon as the rush of business is over [to] attempt to write a few serious chronic articles,” he was at present, he informed her, “wholly business” and enormously successful at it.31