by David Nasaw
For a youth of twenty-three, with no experience in the business world, this was a remarkable proposal of partnership, displaying a rare combination of vision, pragmatism, and cold ambition. Never before, with the possible exception of his fundraising for the Lampoon, had Will displayed anything approaching the determination he now exhibited to his father. He deployed humor, flattery, and what on the surface looked like real business acumen to convince the senator to front him the $40-$50,000 he needed, recognizing full well that a good deal of the money to be made would be generated by depriving Mexicans of their own lands and selling it at a premium to American “nincompoops.” But that was not his or his father’s concern. All that mattered was the end product.
His father did not enter into the partnership his son had proposed. But he was impressed enough by Will’s newfound business sense to reward him and Jack Follansbee with 100,000 acres of land adjoining the family ranch in Chihuahua. When Will returned to California, Follansbee remained behind to manage their new ranch.
Will ended his letter to his father with a reminder that he still intended to marry Eleanor. “If, as you say, in a few years I could pick the girl of all the girls I wanted in the world, I would not change my mind. Nay, my Pop. There has been time to give my love a chance to cool were it so inclined but it obstinately refuses so to do. If I were serious before, I am desperately in earnest now.” He closed with advice for his father on the upcoming election campaign. “Have you arranged it so you are sure to get elected? Have you got that Map and have you marked out the ... Republican districts ... that may be persuaded [to vote Democratic]? Have you decided how many of these doubtful ones are essential and have you dispensed the lubricator where it will do the most good?”53
As expected, the Democrats won a majority of the seats in the California state senate in the November 1886 elections and in January would elect George Hearst to the United States Senate, though not without being severely attacked in the press for choosing a semiliterate miner, who, critics charged, had paid for the votes that sent him to Washington. Will, of course, was delighted at this turn of events. The new senator would need someone to manage his political affairs—and his newspaper—in San Francisco. Who better than his Harvard-educated son? Will had proved to his father that he had a head for business and demonstrated, at the same time, that he had no desire to manage his real estate or mining properties. As there was no question any longer of his returning to Harvard and he had no preparation, training, or inclination for any other line of work, the only option remaining was for George to let him take over the Examiner.
Will returned from Mexico in time to celebrate the Christmas holidays—and his father’s election to the Senate. It should have been a time for rejoicing as both father and son were only weeks away from assuming the positions they had coveted for some time: George in the U.S. Senate, Will at the Examiner. But the Eleanor Calhoun problem would not go away. Will was determined on marriage; Phoebe was every bit as determined to prevent him from ruining his life by marrying the actress she considered a fortune hunter. She was, she wrote Orrin Peck three days before Christmas, literally sick with worry about her boy:
You well know all that I have been to him, the devotion lavished upon him. You also know he is selfish, indifferent and undemonstrative as his father. Both have their good qualities, but the other sides of their natures are most trying. Will is a brilliant fellow, has improved wonderfully in many respects, has not bad habits, given up the foolishness and carelessness of a great part of his college life, and is immensely interested in business. You would be greatly surprised to see how he works and how very capable he is. Mr. H. is very much pleased with Will’s business abilities. You will wonder how it is with all this that I am so unhappy about my boy. You will understand when I tell you that he is desperately in love with Miss Calhoun, the actress. He has simply gone mad about her, and she is quite willing for she wants to marry a man who has money.... Oh! Dear! if I could tell you half of all I have gone through in connection with this affair, you would be astonished. We oppose the marriage but may not be able to prevent it. I feel that it will ruin my boy’s life to marry such a designing woman.... All she cares for is to spend money, enjoy luxury, and receive admiration. Will would be disillusioned in a few years and when just in his prime be burdened with an old invalid wife.... Now you know a little of my anxiety. Miss C. knows that we oppose their plans and has made Will so ugly and cruel to me, I can never forgive her. Don’t on any account let Will know that I have told you a word of this he would only be more determined and disagreeable.54
Phoebe and George, who believed that Will was too young to marry (George, after all, had waited until he was in his forties), bided their time, hoping that Eleanor would in the end return to London to pursue her acting career. In January, Will took the train East to see her in Washington and stopped over briefly in St. Louis to interview a possible business manager for the Examiner. The tone of the letter he sent to his father suggests that he was putting together his own management team in preparation for taking over the Examiner. H. H. Small, the man he interviewed, was “a bright, clever man,” but Will was not convinced he was the best possible man for the job and did not engage him. “The paper must start out under the new management with every advantage,” he warned his father. “Another failure would be an end to the Examiner I think. It has made so many efforts to get on its feet and has failed so many times that people are beginning to despair of its ever amounting to anything, and now if with all the prestige that will accrue to it through the illustrations, names to be connected with it, it should hesitate, it would be lost.”55
Will arrived in Washington in mid-January. Soon afterward, Eleanor Calhoun announced to the press that she and Will were engaged. Phoebe was furious, both with her son for not listening to reason—hers—and with Eleanor and her mother who had tried to force the issue by announcing the engagement. “I may just as well be frank with you,” she wrote Janet Peck from Washington, “and admit that it is impossible for me to write a letter to anyone. I am so distressed about Will that I don’t really know how I can live if he marries Eleanor Calhoun. She is determined to marry him and it seems as if he must be in the toils of the Devil fish. I cannot write more about it now. We are trying to delay matters....I am so heartbroken I have no pleasure or pride in anything. Hope to feel better when I write again.”56
Phoebe may have been “heartbroken,” but not to the point where she was immobilized. By mid-February, she wrote George in San Francisco that she had accomplished her task with the help of Lloyd Tevis, the “cold, hard man” who had been George’s business partner and now acted as her intermediary. She had let Miss Calhoun know that Will would be disinherited if he married without his parents’ approval. If the engagement were broken off, however, Eleanor would be protected and placed “right before the world.” Phoebe may also have offered Eleanor and her mother a cash settlement to move to London.
“Will and I had a talk tonight,” she wrote George, “and he has regained his reason, and wants to do all that is right and best.... We both feel most positive that this marriage could result in nothing but misery. He has behaved well and is manly and honorable.” The plan was for Will to leave Washington at once for California, ostensibly to see his father. From San Francisco, he would then, according to Phoebe, write Eleanor “a blue letter, telling her that ... he would not be willing to marry her unless he could place her well” which he could not because his father had promised to cut him off if he married. “This would give her an opportunity to break the engagement, which I think she will do when she finds there is no money in it.”
“We must be firm and kind and help him get out of this,” Phoebe advised George. “He will talk freely with you but will feel sensitive about any comments from others.” The boy was distressed, but he was also “so deeply interested in the paper that,” she was convinced, “he will be all right. He worried a great deal for two or three days, but he eats and sleeps well, and has too
much strength of character to be seriously affected by this.”57
Phoebe understood her son well. There was no further discussion of Eleanor, except for a note from Will to his mother insisting that “Eleanor [be] treated with all the consideration possible.” As he left Washington for San Francisco, Will assured his father that he was now “anxious to begin work on the Examiner. I have all my pipes laid, and it only remains to turn on the gas. One year from the day I take hold of the thing our circulation will have increased ten thousand.... We must be alarmingly enterprising, and we must be startlingly original. We must be honest and fearless. We must have greater variety than we have ever had.... There are some things that I intend to do new and striking which will constitute a revolution in the sleepy journalism of the Pacific slope and will focus the eyes of all that section on the Examiner. I am not going to write you what these are, for the letter might get lost, or you might leak. You would be telling people about the big things that Billy Buster was proposing to bring out in the paper, and the first thing I knew somebody else would have it.”58
Will returned to San Francisco alone. He never did get a chance to talk to his father, who had already left for the East Coast. Their trains had crossed somewhere between San Francisco and Washington.
George Hearst took his oath of office as a United States senator in Washington on March 4, 1887. That same day, in San Francisco, the name “W. R. Hearst, Proprietor” appeared for the first time on the masthead of the San Francisco Examiner.
II. Proprietor and Editor
4. At the Examiner
THE SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER had been losing money for so long that no one, including George Hearst, believed it possible that an inexperienced twenty-four-year-old Harvard dropout would be able to accomplish much with it. Will had won his prize—after two years of lobbying and the sacrifice of his fiancée. He was now the proud “proprietor” of the third largest daily in the nation’s ninth largest city.
In early 1887, he moved back to California, after an absence of over four years. Instead of settling in San Francisco, however, he relocated across the Bay in Sausalito where he leased what a Chicago newspaper referred to in 1894 as “one of the finest villas that can be found fronting the San Francisco Bay.” He did not live alone.1
According to his son Bill Hearst, Jr., Will was accompanied to California by Tessie Powers, the waitress he had met in Cambridge: “She had been his mistress at Harvard, and apparently in Washington and New York....By all accounts, Tessie was pretty and fun, and adored Willie. Pop never hid his living with Tessie.”2
Though Tessie would remain a fixture in Will’s life for more than a decade, we know very little about her. There are no surviving photographs or descriptions; no biographical information; we don’t know where she was born or where she died. Bill, Jr. believed that his father and Tessie saw each other in New York and Washington, but we do not know whether Will visited her during his courtship of Eleanor Calhoun or resumed their relationship only after Eleanor returned to London.
To call Tessie Powers a “mistress” is to misrepresent the nature of her relationship with Hearst. She was his primary companion during his years in San Francisco. They lived together in his home in Sausalito, traveled together, and entertained his friends and associates from the Examiner. Like other men of his class, Hearst could have lived in two worlds, following a night with Tessie with one at a society cotillion. But he chose not to. Like his father, he avoided polite San Francisco society and his mother’s friends and acquaintances. He neither courted nor appeared in public with respectable, eligible women; he did not join any men’s clubs or lodges or associations.
His mother and father, of course, knew everything that was going on, but they were powerless, it seemed, to do much about it. They may also have believed that Tessie Powers was no more than a youthful indiscretion that Will would grow out of.
Though twenty-four years of age, Will Hearst looked and some would say behaved even younger. Florence Finch Kelly, who met him for the first time in the summer of 1887 when she moved to San Francisco with her husband, who had been appointed city editor of the Examiner, remembered him as “tall, slender, good-looking, very blond, with a pink and white complexion and a little golden mustache, boyish and slightly diffident in manner and still a bit under the influence of the impish high spirits of youth.”3 Hearst spent most of his waking hours at the Examiner and commuted back and forth across the Bay in his fifty-foot speed boat, the Aquila, reportedly the fastest boat on the Pacific Coast, which he had persuaded his parents to build for him, perhaps as another consolation prize for breaking off his engagement to Eleanor Calhoun. Whatever free time he had—and there wasn’t much of it—was spent with Tessie and a mixed and shifting assortment of Examiner reporters and editors.
As at Harvard, Will quickly made himself the center of his own party. He had brought with him not only Tessie but several Lampoon colleagues from Cambridge, including his boyhood friend Gene Lent, the cartoonist Fred Briggs, the humorist “Phinny” E. L. Thayer, and “Cosy” Noble, who would edit his Sunday paper. According to John Winkler, the author of a multipart New Yorker profile in 1927 and two biographies—the second under the supervision of Hearst’s son—“He’d take some of the staff out to help him fly kites, set off firecrackers and balloons, sail boats and steam launches at Sausalito and over San Francisco Bay.” Or they would go down to his father’s ranch at San Simeon along the central coast, “to ride after cattle, catch trout or shoot at quail.” With Tessie and his friends from the paper, he went out regularly to the theater and the vaudeville hall and hosted sailing parties up and down the Bay and, on one occasion at least, as far as Hawaii.4
For a man who didn’t like society, as his mother had described him in a letter to Orrin Peck, the newsroom was a perfect work site. There was no trace of “society,” no hint of gentility or deference of any sort. Will Hearst, though one of the youngest and most inexperienced men in the office, was the boss, and beloved, according to Ambrose Bierce, a future employee, for the generous salaries he gave his new hires, a full 50 percent more than most of them had been making elsewhere.5
Jimmy Swinnerton, who worked for Hearst as a cartoonist in San Francisco and then in New York, recalled that Will was as “common as an old shoe.” He remained shy among strangers though quick to laugh, in a remarkably adolescent high-pitched voice. According to his cousin Anne Apperson Flint, he also had the “flabbiest handshake of anyone.” She remembered being astonished “every time my hand touched his. He just took your hand and dropped it.”6
While the Examiner, which Will took over in the spring of 1887, had improved under his father’s ownership, its circulation of 15,000 was significantly less than that of the San Francisco Call and the San Francisco Chronicle, its major competitors. The Call had been losing circulation for some time, but the Chronicle, owned and managed by Michel de Young after the death of his brother Charles, had increased its sales by 50 percent, to 37,500, between 1880 and 1886.7
Both the Call and the Chronicle specialized in political news, most of it local, both were tied to the Republican party, and both were run by experienced editors. Hearst was not in the least bit awed. In an article in the Overland Monthly, a San Francisco magazine, he criticized the competition for never having caught up with the “change in the character of the people and in their needs.” San Francisco, he argued, was no longer a backwater frontier town. It had in recent years “shown itself to possess all the characteristics of a cosmopolitan city,” including a large and growing immigrant population hungry for commercial amusements, and it had become a thriving center of national and international commerce.8
Will Hearst had not returned to his hometown—after living in Boston, New York, and Washington and traveling extensively in Europe—to publish a provincial newspaper that filled its front pages, as the Examiner did, with stories of saloon fights and advertisements for “Winter Dress Goods” and “Sneezing Catarrh” patent medicines. He intended, as he had pro
mised his father, to work a “revolution in the sleepy journalism of the Pacific slope” by importing the journalistic techniques, strategies, and innovations that Pulitzer had pioneered in New York City. His first step, taken even before he was officially in charge, was to make the Examiner a cosmopolitan newspaper by contracting with the New York Herald for the exclusive San Francisco franchise to publish its cabled articles, including those written in Paris by the paper’s editor, James Gordon Bennett, Jr. As the Journalist, the newspaper publishers’ chief trade journal, reported in February 1887, news of this “masterstroke of enterprise ... falls like a bombshell on the other morning papers.”9
With the cables from the Herald, the new Examiner carried so much national and international news that it was expanded from six to ten pages. In a flash, Will Hearst had changed the face of the Examiner and journalism on the West Coast. “The Examiners enterprise has awakened a sleepless activity in the Call and Chronicle,” the Journalist reported in mid-March. “They have too much at stake to allow the Examiner to find them asleep in the future.” The Call, limited in resources, dropped out of the competition, but de Young at the Chronicle trumped Hearst by signing an exclusive cable agreement with Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, the leading newspaper in New York and the nation.10
“We are having a hard fight with the Examiner against the other papers out here ... Right now is a crisis in the history of our paper,” Will wrote his father in Washington soon after taking over the Examiner. “If we hesitate a moment or fall back a step we are lost and we can never hope to make anything out of the Examiner while it remains in our hands.... Papa you must do your best for us and you must do it immediately. Delay would be as fatal as neglect.” Will wanted his father to go immediately to New York to meet with the top editors of the World and “make friends with these powerful eastern newspaper men. They would appreciate a visit from a U.S. Senator, they would feel flattered. Make yourself agreeable to them. Tell them how you admire the newspaper business and how you determined your son should be a newspaper man—if you found he possessed talent enough. That you were determined that he should not be simply a newspaper proprietor, but should be an editor, a newspaper man, etc. etc. Tickle them a little. Say that I told you what a great paper the World was and you wanted to see it, etc, etc. Then the first thing you know they will do anything they can for us.”