by David Nasaw
In the spring of his sophomore year, Will was elected to Porcellian, a rather patrician club that had numbered both Oliver Wendell Holmeses and Theodore Roosevelt among its members, and Med. Facs., the most secret, most esteemed, and apparently, most criminal, of all the secret societies, its only major activity being the theft and defacement of prominent Harvard statues, plaques, and markers. Though its membership included the most prominent of Harvard students and admission bestowed great honor, the society’s misdeeds were so notorious that when, in 1905, initiates were discovered stealing yet another statue and local papers ran stories about it, the society’s alumni voted to disband it and seal its papers until 1976.32
Though Will never ceased complaining about the unforgiving New England climate and the colds, sore throats, and tonsillitis it inflicted on him, he was clearly having the time of his life. In less than two years, he had accomplished a small miracle. He had gotten himself elected to the top clubs on campus, earned a reputation as a first-class dandy, grown an impressive mustache, found a splendid tailor, and acquired a pet alligator named Charlie, who lived with him in his suite. He had also been invited to join the Hasty Pudding Club and was cast in a featured role in one of its infamous blackface burlesques. He would, he wrote his mother, have been cast in the next had the fellows not discovered “in the last play a certain tendency of mine to cut rehearsals and make myself generally scarce at a time when I was most needed.”33
Part of the secret to his social success was his adept use of an ever-expanding allowance. His rooms at Matthews Hall had become a social center of sorts and free pub for his California friends, Lampoon associates, and influential players and backers of the Harvard baseball club. As was expected of campus politicians and men of wealth, he backed all the Harvard teams, donating over $100 a year in dues to the crew, baseball, and football associations. When, in his sophomore year, the Harvard baseball team did well enough to advance to the intercollegiate championship, Will wrote his mother for extra money to host a dinner for the players, “first, because they have done so well and deserve it, and secondly, because I should like to be Vice President of the Inter-Collegiate Base Ball Association and I don’t see why I shouldn’t. Do you?”34
Though he had reached the pinnacle of Harvard society, Hearst did not take the next step forward from the college’s clubhouses into Boston’s drawing rooms. From the 1880s on, the better Harvard social clubs—such as those Hearst had joined—had served as recruiting grounds for Boston society, providing a well-stocked reservoir of eligible young men for coming-out balls, sociables, and weekend house parties. But Hearst, though his election to the better clubs should have certified him as eligible, was never invited to spend his summers at Newport or Bar Harbor or to escort anyone’s sister to a coming-out dance on the South Shore.
There hung about him the aura of the outsider, of the arriviste who spent too freely and too openly to buy himself a position in society he was not entitled to by birth. As Santayana would later put it rather bluntly, “He was little esteemed in the college.”35
Hearst didn’t appear to care. Instead of attempting to ingratiate himself with Boston society, for which he had no use whatsoever, he gravitated toward the demimonde, spending more and more time at Boston’s and New York’s musical comedy theaters and after-hours clubs and restaurants. In his freshman year, Jack Follansbee had introduced Will to Tessie Powers, a waitress from Cambridge, whom Jack was “keeping.” Most of what we know about Tessie comes from Anne Apperson Flint, Will’s cousin. Anne, who was raised by Phoebe and became her confidante, was interviewed by W. A. Swanberg in 1960. Unfortunately, much of her recollection appears to have been colored by personal animus against her cousin, who, she implied, had robbed her of Phoebe’s estate.
In her interview, Apperson claimed that Jack’s uncle, who paid his way at Harvard, “clamped down on him [in his second year there]; Jack wasn’t able to continue keeping her. So he asked W. R. [as Will Hearst would be called in adult life] to take her over. She was said to be a very nice girl, well behaved, quiet, everyone said that about her, very ladylike. She had trouble in her background—small-town country girl who became a waitress. She was very devoted to W. R.”
There was nothing peculiar in a Harvard boy keeping a Cambridge girl. Will was not the first or last of his class to have a mistress in town. The problem was not that he was enjoying a sexual liaison with a Cambridge working girl, but that he was consorting with her in public. Where other Harvard men had casual relationships with a variety of pick-ups and kept women, Tessie quickly became Will’s steady companion. They spent time together in Cambridge and Boston and he took her with him when he traveled to New York on vacations and to New Haven to cheer on Harvard teams against Yale.
“He didn’t care what the world thought,” Anne Apperson recalled. As he was doing nothing wrong, he had nothing to hide, even from his mother. “He evidently talked perfectly frankly with his mother—shocked her to death. She was very stiff-laced, very proper, very disapproving of anything that wasn’t perfectly straight and above board. But he evidently told her, from Harvard right on, or else someone else told her, and she would speak to him about it, and he would say yes—he never denied any of it.”
Though Phoebe had tried her best to make her boy into a gentleman, he was his father’s son as well as hers and preferred, like George Hearst, to do as he pleased when it came to women. At age twenty, he already carried about him the sense of invulnerability that would remain with him for the rest of his life. He was charming, gifted, wealthy, and, though thin, handsome, tall, and quite good-looking. With the exception of the one horrid year at prep school in New Hampshire, he had led a charmed life and always had his way. He could not imagine that any harm might come from a relationship with a Cambridge girl he cared for. He was devoted to Tessie from the very beginning, and had no desire—nor, he thought, any need—to hide her away. He “took her everywhere—and that was a constant fight with his mother, who simply could not stand it.”36
Phoebe, beside herself with fear that her boy was going to do himself irreparable harm, corresponded directly with Will’s friends. She was worried more about Will’s indiscretions than the fact that he was having an affair. Though, according to Anne Apperson, she knew that Jack Follansbee had introduced Will to Tessie, she did not hold this against him. It was not Jack’s fault that Will did not know how to behave. Her major concern in early 1884, as Will entered the second semester of his sophomore year, was the anonymous letters she had been receiving. The letters themselves have not survived, but the accusations made in them were so offensive that Phoebe asked Jack to burn the correspondence in which she referred to them. She was, she told Jack, mortally afraid that copies of these letters had also been forwarded to officials at Harvard.37
She also shared her fears in letters to Orrin Peck who was, with Gene Lent, Will’s oldest friend. Phoebe had, in 1862, met two-year-old Orrin and his parents on the Panama steamer that took her and her husband to San Francisco. She had remained close to the Pecks ever since. She provided Mrs. Peck with a monthly allowance, Janet, Orrin’s sister, with music lessons in Europe, and Orrin with an allowance large enough to support him in Munich where he studied painting. In return for her friendship—and patronage—Phoebe expected Orrin and Janet, as she did Jack Follansbee, to report back to her on Will.
Orrin, as he would all his life, tried his best to reassure Phoebe that she “had no reason to cry over what dear Will does. He will never do anything to disgrace himself or his friends.... Nastiness is not born in him and I would hate him if he didn’t possess a mixture of boyishness and devilishness—neatly spiced with a college wittiness surging here and there on to wickedness.”38
“Nastiness,” the word Peck used in his letters defending his friend, had a particular connotation one hundred years ago, “denoting something disgusting in point of smell, taste, or even moral character.” It was “not considered a proper word to be used in the presence of ladies.”39 Peck us
ed it no doubt because Phoebe had already raised the issue of Will’s immorality. She was frightened that despite her best precautions her son was following in the footsteps of his rough-hewn, Forty-Niner father. While his Harvard classmates had learned from their fathers how to behave in society, she feared that all Will had learned from his was a healthy contempt for society and its rules of deportment.
Though he was never much of a drinker, Will’s behavior in Cambridge, like his father’s in San Francisco, remained on the outer edge of respectability. He kept his shirtfronts clean and his boots polished, but his entertainments in his rooms were too frequent and too boisterous, his cigars too large, and his spending habits excessive even by Harvard standards. When, in the fall of his junior year, he was elected vice president of the Intercollegiate Base Ball Association, he attributed his victory entirely to his having hosted a steady succession of drinking parties in his rooms. As he wrote his mother, “My long swiping [slang for drinking] has at last received its reward.”40 Gene Lent had had to take a leave of absence from the college to gain control of his own drinking. Ostensibly to help his friend, but perhaps because he too was drinking too much, Will told his mother that he too had “signed the pledge—total abstinence ... I think it will be the saving of Gene if he sticks it out and I think he will. Ginger ale is good enough for me nowadays, and I’m not too high for plain cold water.”41
To stop drinking in college—or even to learn to drink moderately—was a rare accomplishment for a man of Hearst’s social position and one he was proud of. His father was a heavy drinker and had been all his life, as were most of his friends at Harvard. Will’s decision, made in college and adhered to the rest of his life, to give up drinking himself but host social gatherings at which liquor was abundant, put him at an enormous advantage. Sober, he was able to control events while those around him lost their bearings.
Will and his mother corresponded regularly during his years at Harvard. Will complained about the weather, gossiped about his friends, and asked for money. Phoebe grumbled about his profligate ways and sent him exactly what he had asked for.
Will’s letters were carefully crafted, filled with irony bordering on sarcasm, and lengthy descriptions of the New England landscape and the weather he heartily despised. “I am beginning to get awfully tired of this place,” he wrote early in his first year, “and I long to get out West somewhere where I can stretch myself without coming in contact with the narrow walls with which the prejudice of the beaneaters has surrounded us. I long to get out in the woods and breathe the fresh mountain air and listen to the moaning of the pines. It makes me almost crazy with homesickness when I think of it and I hate this weak, pretty New England scenery with its gentle rolling hills, its pea green foliage, its vistas, tame enough to begin with but totally disfigured by houses and parts which could not be told apart save for the respective inhabitants. I hate it as I do a weak, pretty face without force or character. I long to see our own woods, the jagged rocks and towering mountains, the majestic pines, the grand impressive scenery of the ‘far west.’ I shall never live anywhere but in California and I like to be away for a while only to appreciate the more when I return.”
All this complaining was, as it usually was in his letters to his mother, prelude to complaints about the state of his finances. He regularly confessed to managing his allowance poorly and as regularly pledged to do better next time. “I think I shall take a Political Economy course in hopes that it will teach me to regulate my money affairs better. I have a good deal of money lent, without any interest, and I fear with very little thanks.” There proceeded a long explanation of what had happened to the extra $50 that Phoebe had sent him, the gist of which was that he had nothing left. “Oh my,” he concluded, “Harvard is no place for a poor boy.”42
William Randolph Hearst was not a poor boy, but he felt strapped nonetheless because his expenses were so extraordinary. In response to another letter from his mother asking him to account for the $150 monthly allowance and the $500 extra she had sent him, he explained that he had paid $200 for room and board and over $100 on “dues” for Harvard’s crew, baseball, and football clubs. He had also taken a trip to New York to order some clothes, paid $30 to subscribe to “a German, a French and two English papers,” probably for the Lampoon reading room. His D.K.E. fee was $50; he and Eugene had given “a punch down in his room, which cost us about $20 a piece”; he had spent $15 for “provisions for my room,” $14 for “a loving cup,” and “had two or three dinners in town and several things which I can’t remember now but will write about when I come across.”43
There was a lightness of tone in these letters; Will’s pleas were insistent, yet gentle. He did not demand money as his due, nor, if his letters are to be trusted, did he regard unlimited funding as his birthright. Each letter painstakingly offers an elaborate accounting of prior spending before establishing the need for new funds. The arguments are presented clearly and forcibly, but with reluctance. As he told his mother in the spring of his sophomore year, he “hated to talk about money in my letters. You think I’m so mercenary,” but then proceeded to explain how his allowance had been eaten up by doctor’s bills for the chronic sore throat that had been bothering him since he got to Cambridge: “My doctor’s bills! oh! those doctor’s bills! Oliver [his Boston doctor] I owe $50. The Springfield doctor $30. And the Cambridge doctor marks at present $18, but is steadily rising. Every sneeze costs somewhere between fifty cents and one dollar.”44
Will was never without a sense of humor in this correspondence, in stark contrast to his mother who displayed no levity at all. Though her son was now a Harvard man—and a rather successful one at that—Phoebe refused to let go. The more buoyantly self-confident and independent he became, the more she complained about his callous disregard for those who loved him. Her boy had been her best friend, her confidant, her traveling companion. She was not prepared to let too much distance get between them. She worried most of all that her son would not be able to cope without his mother watching over him. He had a tendency, she feared, to let things slide. He was forever putting off important tasks. In one particularly revealing letter, she chastised him for not writing his father to remind him of his upcoming twenty-first birthday. Had he written that letter, she suggested, he would have gotten a better present than the $200 he received. (He had received another $100 from Phoebe for a total of $300, a huge sum of money for a college sophomore’s birthday in 1884, when a year’s tuition at Harvard cost $150 and full board in Memorial Hall, where the freshmen dined, $200.)
Will’s failure to write his father was the least of his sins. He had failed to visit her dear old friends in Cambridge, Mr. and Mrs. Anthony, whom he had promised to call on. He was not writing home often enough, and when he did, forgot to answer the questions his mother had asked. “It grieves me deeply that you never regard any promises made to your mother. If you ever realize how I feel about it, I cannot understand how it is possible for you to be so utterly indifferent to my wishes. I am mortified and grieved beyond your comprehension.” Her letter continues, growing shriller and shriller. “I wish you to let me know when you will start home. I insist that Rachel [his maid at Harvard] is to do your packing, for she knows my wishes about things you are to bring. When will you start and what route do you intend coming? Answer. There is so much I am anxious to know about you but would only be wasting time and strength to ask. I hope you will remember about not needing thin summer clothing here. You know last year you could not wear your very light suits. Did you find your overcoat? Of course I know you will never answer this question, but it may remind you that you need it and must find it. I shall be happy when we hear from you.”45
She did hear from him soon—in a conciliatory apologetic letter he mailed two days before his twenty-first birthday: “You must know that my intentions are good and that I mean to write regularly. But if, as it is said, the road to a certain place is paved with good intentions, I think I must have contributed largely to the i
mprovement of the paths in that region.
“The days slip by so easily. When the recitations are over the base ball begins and so between work and play the good intentions are neglected and never bear fruit....
“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....
“I won’t write any further or I will relapse into a funereal strain inconsistent with the rejoicing and hilarity which is supposed to accompany ones twenty first birthday.
“I for my part don’t see why anyone should rejoice on entering the duties and responsibilities which are supposed to attend the age of manhood? I should prefer to be nineteen again and be twenty one only when it is necessary to leave College and begin the work of life in earnest.
“Well goodbye and expect to hear from your reformed child almost constantly.”46
3. “Something Where I Could Make a Name”
WILL ENTERED HARVARD with only the vaguest idea of why he was there or what he would do after graduation. College had been his mother’s idea and he and his father had gone along in large part because they had nothing better to offer as an alternative. George was not enamored of the idea of higher education, but in this as in so many other matters concerning their boy, he deferred to his wife. Having attended only a few years of common school in Missouri, he had little advice to offer Will in Cambridge, other than to warn him against taking philosophy and to instead study something practical like Spanish or engineering. Harvard was, he feared, preparing his son only for a life of leisure. Will tried to reassure his father that this was not the case. “I hope Papa will understand that I know that I may have to work my way in the world and that I do not feel terrified at the prospect,” he wrote his mother during his first year, “although, of course, I should prefer to have enough money to be able to turn my time to politics or science or something where I could make a name.”1