by David Nasaw
Unwilling to leave the matter to George—whom she had never trusted to rein in their boy—Phoebe met several times with Will and Townsend, and together they agreed on a plan to reduce spending, “but of course not to the extent of injuring the paper.” Phoebe was enormously relieved that she had, in the end, been able to reason with her grown son. “It has been such a comfort to be with him so much and to have him talk, not grunt and be ugly,” she wrote George in Washington. “He has been kind, thoughtful and considerate and has shown me so much affection that I scarcely know how to express my happiness. I feel ten years younger. Tenderness and love, is more to a mother than all else.”6
The Hearsts had locked themselves into a cage with no way out. Phoebe and George treated their son like a wayward child who could not be trusted with money of his own; he fulfilled their every expectation by overspending whatever allowance they provided him. To make matters worse, while they scolded Will for his bad habits, George and Phoebe exercised no restraint over their own spending. George was expanding his West Coast horse-racing stable, trying in this as in other fields to outdo his colleague and rival, Senator Leland Stanford. Phoebe was spending a fortune to provide for needy friends and their children, including the Pecks. She also supported three free kindergartens for poor children in San Francisco, was an officer of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association of the Union which raised money to restore George Washington’s home, and was a president and contributor to the Century Club of California, a San Francisco organization of wealthy, activist women, which, with her financial assistance, campaigned for the election of women to the San Francisco School Board.7
She was also, at enormous expense, becoming the premier hostess in Washington, D.C. She and George had bought the thirty-room mansion built in 1870 by President Cleveland’s secretary of the treasury, Charles Fairchild, and remodeled it from top to bottom. The finished product, opened to Washington society with a colonial costume ball in February 1889, was in the words of Judith Robinson, Phoebe’s biographer, “high Victorian in style ... with exotic oriental touches that showed Phoebe’s desire to stand out from the crowd.... There was a plethora of cupids, satin and romantic marble statues, including busts of Phoebe and Will by the Italian sculptor Ansiglioni. The rooms were in rose, blue, or ivory, and the fireplaces had black onyx Mexican mantelpieces. It was a house dominated by the tastes of a ‘refined and cultivated’ woman and always fragrant with the aroma of fresh flowers.” There were separate living suites for Phoebe and George and sumptuously ornate public rooms, including a music room, salon, reception hall, library, dining room, supper room, and huge ballroom lined with tapestries that ran one-half the length of the ground floor.8
Like the miner and railroad baron families who had arrived on the East Coast before them, Phoebe and George Hearst spent prodigiously to erase all signs of their parvenu status. If the newspapers and local Washington society gave Phoebe relatively high marks for taste, her son who had studied with Charles Eliot Norton, the nation’s foremost art historian, at Harvard, was not so sure. Just as he had taken it upon himself to advise his father on business in Mexico and at the Examiner, he appointed himself as art adviser to his mother. If he and his mother were at constant loggerheads on his relationships with other women, they thought alike when it came to the importance of filling their homes with decorative arts.
In early 1889, as Phoebe completed the remodeling of her Washington mansion, her son, exhausted by the strain of editing and publishing a daily paper, left California for his first trip to Europe without his mother. From Rome, he wrote that he had, as he put it, been struck by the “art fever terribly. Queer, isn’t it? I never thought I would get it this way. I never miss a gallery now and I go and mosey about the pictures and statuary and admire them and wish they were mine. My artistic longings are not altogether distinct from avarice, I am afraid....I want some of these fine things and I want you to have some of these fine things and do you know, my beloved mother, there is a way in which you might get them. If, instead of buying a half a dozen fairly nice things, you would wait and buy one fine thing, all would be well. As it is at present we have things scattered from New York to Washington to San Francisco, more than a house could hold and yet not among them a half a dozen things that are really superb.”
It was, Will advised his mother, a great time to buy fine art in Italy because the people were heavily taxed and the government “nearly bankrupt.... Some wealthy American or Englishman will soon step in and ... will have a collection almost equal to that of some of these national galleries. I wish I could be the rich American. I wish you could be. How nice it would be if we could exchange all our alleged pictures for two or three masterpieces....In price, they are the same but in value how different. Well I for my small part am not going to buy any more trinkets....Go thou and do likewise, mama, dear, if you don’t you will be mad at yourself next time you come abroad. What’s the good of more trinkets when we haven’t room for those we have? Save your money, momey, and wait. All things come to him who waits (and saves his money) even Van Dykes.”9
The jocular tone of Will’s letter may well have been an attempt to win back the affections of his mother, who was furious with him once again. Phoebe had learned through her informants in San Francisco that Tessie had returned to Sausalito soon after she, Phoebe, had left the city for Washington in late fall 1888. The truth, which Phoebe could not accept, was that Tessie filled a void in Will’s emotional life that he dared not leave empty. His attachment to her was more than that of rich man and mistress. Had it only been that he could have avoided his mother's censure by patronizing prostitutes like other men of his class.
Will did not attempt to lie to his mother about Tessie. When she questioned his excessive expenditures, he forwarded to her a list of the bills he had paid: “You have often asked of me what I could do with my money and that I must squander it on the girl.... Doubtless some of these things (but look over them yourself) I could have got along without, but a fellow does like to live a little and be interested in something. I don't like to beg and I wish more than anything in the world that I had paying property enough to cover all my reasonable expenses.”10
What is most remarkable about this letter is that Will does not deny that he is living with or spending money on “the girl”; he says only that he is not squandering his allowance on her. As this letter to his mother demonstrates so vividly, Hearst's life, in all its aspects, remained an open book to his parents. He was always under surveillance, never left alone. Irwin Stump, George's treasurer, monitored his finances, Edward Townsend reported on his expenditures at the newspaper, and Phoebe, through her spies, watched over his personal life.
In June of 1889, Phoebe set off on her own tour of Europe with her friend and mentor in the kindergarten movement, Mary Kinkaid. Though the purpose of her trip was educational—she visited kindergartens and archeological museums across the continent—she also took time out to go to the Bayreuth Wagner festival and tour the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. Her letters to George were filled with news of her travels and her traveling companions and complaints about her ingrate of a son. She did not plan, she wrote from Moscow in August, to return to the States before October “unless there is some serious trouble that you feel I ought to be home. I cannot think of anything excepting about Will and he does not recognize the fact that I am in existence, therefore I fail to see how it matters to him.” The following month, she wrote again, from Munich, to ask if George had induced “Will to change his manner of living. I suppose you hear from him occasionally. I never do. How is it possible for him to devote his time and attention to a prostitute and utterly ignore his mother? He will surely have his punishment.” In October, from London, she criticized George again for his failure to do anything about his only son's increasingly outrageous behavior: “Do you intend to continue your indulgence? The paper still draws heavily upon you and it will never pay expenses while you supply funds. You will purchase the place at Sausalito and you will pay fo
r it, thereby encouraging his present shameful manner of living. I try not to be utterly crushed by this sorrow, but it is hard to bear.”11
Will’s only response to his mother’s complaints—when he was not attempting to change the subject by discussing art—was to complain about how hard he was working and how tired he was of living in San Francisco. After the first year at the Examiner in which he was rooted to the office, he had begun to spend more and more time away. In a letter to his mother, written from New York City during one of his frequent and lengthy stays there, he made it clear that he was not looking forward to returning to San Francisco:
I am on my way now and what a fearfully stupid trip it is. I wish I had stayed in Washington and my paper would behave itself. The best thing would be to have our home in Washington and a paper in New York and then I wouldn’t have to go three thousand miles every time I wanted to brace up the office.
I wish I knew whether you were going to stay in Washington long and what you were going to do after your stay there is over. Between you and me I am getting so I do hate San Francisco. They say San Francisco is all right for men but I can’t see how it is unless one wants to get full every night. There are plenty of saloons. I shall have some hard work and that will occupy me until things are running smoothly but after that you have got to come out or I have got to go East. I can’t do San Francisco alone. Write me about it.
No doubt sensing that he had gone too far in expressing his melancholy, Will closed his letter with a warning about his father’s drinking and a promise that he would, on returning to San Francisco, turn over a new leaf. “Tell the governor to go slow on that toddy business. It has knocked out many a good man.... Don’t worry about me in San Francisco a bit. I’m not going to be giddy. I am going to be a highly respectable citizen and a credit to my family.”12
Will was right to worry about his father. A lifetime of hard work and hard drinking was finally catching up with the senator. In December of 1890, he took ill, and traveled to New York to visit a specialist who diagnosed his problem as a “serious derangement of the bowel,” but prescribed no treatment. A month later, Will was summoned to Washington, D.C., to sit at his father’s deathbed. Jack Follansbee met him there. The senator remained alive far longer than the doctors had expected, but died on February 28. After a Washington funeral service, the body was shipped West, accompanied by family, friends, and eighteen congressmen, nine from each party—who, if we are to believe the front-page story published in the New York Times, enjoyed themselves immensely on the train ride West. In an article headlined, “No Water in Their Tanks. Nothing But Liquor On the Hearst Funeral Train,” the paper reported that the train that carried the senator home to San Francisco was the site of a weeklong drinking party fueled by generous donations of California wine. “They were opening bottles every minute night and day, and at many stopping places invited people into the baggage car to drink,” reported an outraged temperance leader whose own train was stuck behind the Hearst train for the five-day trip across the country.13
The Examiner covered the death and the San Francisco funeral (but not the funeral train) in enormous detail. The funeral was held at Grace Episcopal Church. In front of the casket was a floral arrangement in the shape of the Examiner's front page with a portrait of the senator. George Hearst was eulogized as a humble but wise champion of the people, a self-made American hero, and a man beloved by thousands. The Examiner's front page, bordered in black, recounted the story of the man who had “started mining with a pick and shovel on his shoulder” and ended up a millionaire and United States senator.
The assumption had been that the senator ’s only son and heir would inherit everything, but when the will was read, Will learned that his father had left him not one penny, not one acre of land, not one share of mining stock. The entire estate, all the land, all the stocks, and the San Francisco Examiner went to Phoebe, with a clause directing her to “make suitable provisions” for William Randolph Hearst. The New York Times estimated the value of the estate at between $15 and $20 million, the bulk of it in real estate and mining stocks. Phoebe was also left with the senator’s extensive debts, mortgages, and outstanding loans and obligations. The year before his death, Irwin Stump had warned the senator against allowing his friends to lead him “into new adventures.” He had apparently been investing or loaning money to business colleagues whom Stump, like Phoebe, regarded as less than reliable. “You are spending money at the rate of near one million dollars per year, more than your income,” Stump had warned him. “You must go slow in your expenditures or you must commence selling property to keep up.”14
The fact that George left less money and more debt than had been expected did not bother Will as much as the fact that he was given nothing. All his life he had tried to prove to his father that he was worthy of his respect. If he had failed at Harvard, he had succeeded magnificently at the Examiner, turning a moribund, bankrupt daily into a profitable enterprise. But it had been in vain. George's will clearly demonstrated that up until his dying day he regarded his son—or had been convinced by Phoebe—that Will was so lacking in judgment that he could not be trusted with his own patrimony. Instead of attaining financial independence, Will Hearst was placed in an even more precarious situation. No longer able to petition both parents for help in the hope that one or the other would support his case, he would now have to go begging to his mother when he needed money.
Mother and son had a difficult time coming to terms with their new relationship. Will made matters worse, much worse, by continuing to hold on to Tessie. From Munich, Orrin Peck wrote to console Phoebe and support Will. “Poor Will. It has been a most hard blow for him—You have the courage of a General and can battle through anything. Still you must show signs of the great strain and if you are obliged to remain in San Francisco will be obliged to be burdened with——. I wrote Will I wished you could get away from all of those painful scenes.” The three dashes in Peck’s letter stood for Tessie, whose very name Peck was afraid to mention.
Peck tried as best he could to lessen the tensions between mother and son. “I never heard of a man showing more confidence and respect—in a will—for his wife than did he. At the same time he knew what is yours is Will’s—and this is right—Your only child and a pretty plagued good boy at that—Just think for a moment. Since Will’s birth he has had more advantages than some Princes—and has never known the lack of money and I don’t think should be made to feel it—when we consider how other boys with a quarter of his means carry on?”15
Five months after his father’s death, in the summer of 1891, Will Hearst went shopping for a New York City newspaper. He had lived in Sausalito and worked in San Francisco for four years now. Though not yet thirty years of age, he had achieved everything he had hoped for as publisher of the Examiner. It was time to look beyond San Francisco to the larger world. For Hearst, just as it had been for Joseph Pulitzer a decade earlier, New York City was the logical next stop.
As he wrote his mother, he had “seen every newspaperman in New York—had a long talk with Cockerill,” the St. Louis editor whom Pulitzer had brought to New York to edit the World after his acquittal on murder charges. Cockerill had done yeoman work at the World and was, in the view of many insiders, the man most responsible for its success. In 1890 after years of working with Pulitzer who, as his health deteriorated, became more tyrannical and less accessible, Cockerill had resigned and bought a share of a new penny morning paper, the Morning Advertiser. When he offered Hearst a share of his paper, Will considered it carefully but declined: “I really don’t care as much for a one-cent paper as for a two or three-cent paper [like the World and Herald, the premier papers in the city] so I am not crazy to go in with him. I think there is another way to get into New York perhaps even better than through Mr. Cockerill. I dined with Ballard Smith the other night and we talked newspaper till we were black in the face. He is now in full charge of the World. ... He says Pulitzer is going to give him an interest in th
e paper.”16
Will, it appears, was considering the possibility of buying into the World. Pulitzer, who had had a total breakdown and given up day-to-day management of his newspapers in 1888, had taken ill again during a world cruise in the summer of 1890, lost most of his remaining eyesight, and come close to death. Given these facts, it was not outlandish for Hearst to believe that Pulitzer would, in the near future, be prepared to entertain an offer for his New York newspaper. Still, he and Ballard Smith were mistaken if they believed there was any possibility of Pulitzer giving up control. He would hold on to the World until his death and pass it on, in his will, to his heirs.
Will Hearst turned thirty in 1893, no closer to financial independence than he had been six years earlier when he returned to San Francisco to take over the Examiner. He was spending more and more time away from San Francisco on extended tours of Europe and business trips to the East. His life was in a holding pattern. He had again, in 1892, tried to buy a second newspaper and dispatched his new business manager, Charles Palmer, to Chicago and New York. But nothing had come of it. Even had Palmer found a suitable property, it is not clear how Will could have paid for it. He had no money of his own and it was unlikely that Phoebe would give him any as long as he “kept” Tessie.
According to his cousin Anne Apperson Flint, Will was not only living with Tessie but had taken her with him on his 1892 tour of Europe. Since his mother was touring the same European cities that summer and was likely to stay in the same hotels, eat in the same restaurants, and visit the same museums and galleries, Will carefully planned his travels so as not to overlap with Phoebe’s. The two met up only in Munich, where they visited Orrin Peck together. Tessie was left behind with George Pancoast, Hearst’s friend, consultant on printing presses, and for the moment his private secretary.