by David Nasaw
The attack on Hearst’s character struck a chord with New York’s voters. Had Hearst been able to distinguish his position on political corruption from Gaynor’s, he might have stood a chance, but Boss Murphy had chosen the perfect candidate to run against him, a white-haired judge with a sterling reputation for integrity. Still, Hearst’s attack on Tammany was so effective that when, on November 2, 1909, New York City’s voters went to the polls, they elected every anti-Tammany, reform candidate on the ballot, with one exception. They chose William Gaynor over William Hearst by a margin of almost 100,000 votes. Hearst polled 75,000 fewer votes than he had in 1905 and came in third, behind Gaynor and Otto Bannard, the Republican candidate for mayor. Hearst claimed victory anyway, congratulating himself on having swept Tammany’s candidates for every office except mayor. He had indeed played an indisputable and indispensable role in defeating Tammany, as even the New York Times recognized in a November 6 editorial.
In mid-December, the city’s reformers, led by Charles Sprague Smith, the Columbia professor who headed the People’s Institute, recognized as much and honored William Randolph Hearst at a dinner in the ballroom of the Astor Hotel. Hearst soaked up the praise and delivered yet another in his repertoire of thunderous anti-Tammany speeches. But the appearance of vigor was deceiving. He was worn out by campaigning, unhealthy, and dangerously overweight. Millie and Phoebe agreed that he needed a complete rest cure or as close to one as he would permit.27
Late that winter, W. R., Millicent, five-and-a-half-year-old George, two-year-old Bill, Jr., and John Randolph, the latest addition to the family, who had been born during the campaign, boarded a private railroad car for an extended California vacation. After depositing the children in Pleasanton, W. R. and Millicent took the train south to Los Angeles where the Examiner was sponsoring an international aviation exhibition. Hearst, invited to fly with a French pilot, squeezed his huge two hundred plus pounds into the monoplane, which miraculously took off without difficulty. He was so impressed by his flight that he offered a prize of $50,000 to the first person to fly a plane from one coast to another.28
In Los Angeles, Hearst visited a doctor who, he wrote Phoebe, advised him to take a rest cure: “I tried to joke him about it but he refused to be funny. He said American businessmen had no sense—that they knew how to take care of their money but not of their health. I told him that I didn’t know how to do either but he declined to smile. He said very solemnly, ‘Either rest and get well or work and be a chronic invalid.’ I began to have creepy feelings up my back so I said I guessed I would rest.”29
From California, Hearst and Millicent traveled south to Mexico and then, after retrieving the children in Northern California, returned briefly to New York. On May 11, 1910, they sailed for Europe on the R.M.S. Mauretania. From the ship Hearst wrote Phoebe a long, newsy letter about her grandchildren, who, he claimed, were the delight of the ship. “All these people like the children. I don’t know what they think of us.” The Hearsts remained abroad for five months.30
After an absence from New York of more than eight months, W. R. returned from Europe in August of 1910, in time for another campaign season. The remnants of his Independence party had nominated him to run for lieutenant-governor and he had accepted, no doubt because without his name on the ticket, there was no hope whatsoever of his party getting any press coverage outside his own papers. On arriving in New York, he announced that he had a new set of secret documents with him that “he intended to read as the campaign went on.” Independence party officials promised that it was going to be a “hot campaign.” It was not. Hearst had no secret documents. He tried to keep up appearances, made a few speeches in New York City, and used his newspapers to denounce both major parties and their candidates for being corrupt, boss-ridden, and beholden to the trusts.31
Unfortunately, no one was listening anymore. Hearst and his Independence party running mates were soundly defeated. In New York City, Hearst polled under 50,000 votes for lieutenant-governor, less than half what he had polled in his unsuccessful race for mayor against Judge Gaynor the year before.32 Such was the inglorious end of Hearst’s electoral career, his “last hurrah” as an independent. In his concession statement, he said little about his future or that of his Independence party, but graciously congratulated the Democrats on their electoral sweep and expressed his “hope that the Democratic party will fully realize the expectations of its supporters and fully respond to the requirements of the citizens.” He closed his statement with his customary declaration of victory: “I feel that I am the victor in this campaign ... I carried on a campaign for which I need not be ashamed.”33
13. Hearst at Fifty: Some Calm Before the Storms
WITHOUT SHAME OR REMORSE or a hint of contrition at having spent five of the last six years maligning the Democratic party, its leaders, and its candidates, Hearst declared in the fall of 1911 that he was a Democrat again. His announcement was timed to serve notice that he intended to play a role in the selection of the party’s nominee for president in 1912. Though he recognized that there was little chance that he would be nominated by the Democrats for anything—at least for the foreseeable future—he allowed himself to dream of possible scenarios, like a deadlocked convention, in which the party’s leaders would turn to him. He was, in fact, considered by many, including Congressman Cordell Hull of Tennessee, to be a strong possibility for the nomination. While making it clear that he would, if called, accept, Hearst did all he could to advance the candidacy of his old ally, Congressman Champ Clark of Missouri, and to block that of the governor of New Jersey, Woodrow Wilson. Clark was a Western-style progressive on issues like railroad regulation and the trusts; Wilson a stiff-necked patrician who wrote books and gave lectures on the superiority of British political institutions.1
In 1912, perhaps in preparation for the presidential campaign, Hearst had added a Southern newspaper to his political arsenal. With the acquisition of the Atlanta Georgian, he owned daily newspapers in every region of the nation and six of its largest cities. His magazine empire was growing even faster. The circulation of Cosmopolitan, which had been around 400,000 when he bought it, had grown by 1912 to three-quarters of a million. He had, in 1911, acquired Good Housekeeping and the World Today, which he renamed Hearst’s Magazine. In 1912, he bought Harper’s Bazar. While neither Good Housekeeping nor Harper’s Bazar were employed in the attack on Wilson, Hearst’s Magazine published “The Real Woodrow Wilson,” a scathing “exposé” by Alfred Henry Lewis, who had made his name attacking robber barons for Hearst’s Cosmopolitan.
Wilson was not particularly thin-skinned for a politician, but even he was overwhelmed by the barrage in Hearst’s newspapers and magazines. “William R. Hearst has ‘decided’ I am not to be nominated,” Wilson told his audience at a campaign stop in Chicago on April 6. “What an exhibition of audacity. What a contempt he must feel for the judgment and integrity of the American people. But it is delightful to realize the people of Illinois on next Tuesday will decide who is to be nominated and Mr. Hearst—a nonresident—can only have his say in his newspapers.”2
Unfortunately for Governor Wilson, that “say” was a significant one. Wilson lost the Illinois primary to Clark by almost three to one. When the Democratic nominating convention convened in Baltimore in July, Hearst’s candidate, Champ Clark, led Wilson by more than one hundred votes on the first ballot. Only as it became apparent that Clark could not muster the two-thirds vote required for the nomination did the convention turn to Woodrow Wilson, who was nominated on the forty-sixth ballot and elected the following November.
Though Hearst had, in the end, endorsed Wilson for the presidency, he wasted little time before going on the attack again. Less than a month after the inauguration, in a letter to the editor of the Washington Post which was reprinted the next day on his editorial pages, Hearst assailed Wilson for delivering his message to Congress in person, like a Federalist or, worse yet, a British prime minister; for getting “his degree of doctor
of philosophy by an essay which contended flagrantly in the face of fact that the English parliamentary form of government was superior to the American Congressional system”; for admitting that he got “his information on world events from the columns of the London Weekly ‘Times’” instead of an American newspaper; and for being “an English free-trader.”3
While Hearst sniped at Wilson on a continual basis, his first substantive disagreement with the president was over Mexico, where the Hearst family owned several huge estates, the largest of which was Babicora in the state of Chihuahua in the northwest. Since the 1880s, the Hearst family—with other American businessmen and landowners—had enjoyed a cordial and profitable relationship with President Porfirio Díaz of Mexico, who had made sure that boundary and title disputes over their Babicora ranch were adjudicated in the Hearsts’ favor.4 When in 1911 it became clear that Díaz, after thirty-four years of dictatorial rule, was no longer able to protect American business interests, Hearst called for American intervention.
Díaz was overthrown and succeeded by Francesco Madero. Unfortunately for Hearst, Madero, whom Hearst hoped would be able to restore order and protect American investments, proved unable to control the revolutionary forces he had helped unleash. In July and then again in October of 1912, the Hearst ranch was placed under siege by Mexican peasant revolutionists and only rescued, at the last minute, by the Mexican army. Madero himself was overthrown by General Victoriano Huerta in February of 1913. The following month Wilson was inaugurated and Hearst began editorially petitioning him to intervene in Mexico. “There is only one course [to] pursue,” he wrote in a November 1913 editorial. “That course is to occupy Mexico and restore it to a state of civilization by means of American MEN and American METHODS.”5
As in so many other matters, W. R. in his Mexican policy enjoyed the luxury of believing that what was good for the Hearsts was good for the nation. As Parker H. Sercombe, the former president of an American bank in Mexico City, confidentially wrote William Jennings Bryan, now Wilson’s secretary of state, in 1913, “The activity of the Hearst papers to foment war between this government and Mexico can be easily understood, for in the event of a protectorate or annexation, the value of the Hearst properties would be so much enhanced as to make a profit to the estate of not less than 10 million dollars.”6
With the self-confidence of a Westerner who knew more about Mexico and Mexicans than Wilson would be able to learn in a lifetime, Hearst criticized the president’s every action. When Wilson sent American marines to the port of Veracruz in April of 1914, the Hearst papers attacked him because the landing was not a prelude to full-scale intervention. When Wilson accepted a proposal from neutral Latin American countries to arbitrate the dispute with Mexico, Hearst accused him of humiliating the nation and making “the ruling power on this continent ... the plaything of cunning, unscrupulous Mexicans and their South American sympathizers.” Only armed intervention would “compel peace and enforce order,” Hearst explained in a June 1914 interview with a German newspaper which was reprinted in all his newspapers. “I think that the Mexicans are far enough advanced to govern themselves under ordinary conditions, but not far enough advanced to give themselves as good a government as the United States could give them.... Our citizens have great interests there, and a great number live, or did live, and conduct business in Mexico. The complete anarchy there, lasting for several years, has been injurious to the interests of our country as a whole and disastrous and destructive to the lives and property of our citizens in Mexico. General Sherman said: ‘War is hell.’ But anarchy is also hell.”7
On April 29, 1913, the Hearsts celebrated the Chief’s fiftieth birthday and their tenth, “tin” anniversary with a luxurious dinner served on tin plates. The menus were engraved on a thin scroll of tin and the drawing rooms decorated with orchids and spring flowers. Having been excluded or having excluded himself from New York society, Hearst established his own social world by bringing together in the Clarendon old family friends, publishing and political associates, and overachievers from industry, politics, and show business. Their guests, the New York Times reported on April 29, included a wide social swath of Hearst employees, Democratic politicians, corporate leaders like Elbert Gary, the chairman of U.S. Steel, along with the art dealer Sir Joseph Duveen, the Broadway actress Nell Brinkley, the vaudevillian Elsie Janis, the radical suffragist Inez Milholland, and a large number of unaccompanied women.
As Orrin Peck, W. R.’s oldest friend, who stayed with the Hearsts often, confided to his sister in 1913, he was astounded at Hearst’s continual motion: “My but Will is a busy one here—telephone rings about every minute. People trying to make appointments, [New York Governor William Sulzer] is in the drawing room with him now.... Tomorrow night Will and Milly give a big reception after dinner and serve a fine supper. After the theater last night—Will took his mother home and then [took his guests] out to Shanley’s and then to Martin’s—for supper and entertainment—my such crowds—and heat and smoke—and it was gay.”8
When, in the early 1910s, New York went dance mad, with men and women of all ages and on every step of the social ladder doing the turkey trot, grizzly bear, bunny hug, and other dances to ragtime, W. R. invited the city’s most popular dance team, Irene and Vernon Castle, to the Clarendon for dinner and dancing. After dinner, Irene Castle recalled in her autobiography, the Hearst butler “rolled up the rugs in the drawing room and turned on the gramophone. Vernon danced with Millicent Hearst while I danced with W. R. He had a very keen mind and if I showed him a step once, he remembered it. He also had that spring in his knees that is vital to a good dancer, and we thoroughly enjoyed the evenings we spent at his house.” Castle, who was at the time regularly visiting the homes of New York’s social elites, was impressed not only by the Chief’s dancing, but by his refusal to dress his servants in uniforms. In “a day when everybody’s chauffeur wore uniforms, very dressy, noticeable uniforms with frogs and braid and fur collars,” Hearst’s chauffeur wore a brown business suit.9
Retired from the campaign trail, Hearst spent more time than ever at the Clarendon on 86th Street and Riverside Drive. It was here that he held his business meetings, entertained friends, family, and publishing colleagues, and exhibited his favorite artworks. Hearst had originally leased the top three floors of the building and the roof garden, but as his family and art collection expanded, so did his need for additional space. In 1913, he asked his landlord for permission to lease the eighth and ninth floors and make extensive renovations throughout, including raising the ceiling on the top floors to accommodate a new oversized tapestry he had brought back from Europe. When the landlord refused Hearst permission to make these changes, he bought the building from him. The price was reportedly close to $1 million; Hearst borrowed $525,000 of it from the Mutual Life Insurance Company.10
Hearst, now free to do as he pleased, redid the top five floors. “The renovation,” according to Andrew Alpern, author of Historic Manhattan Apartment Houses, “included replacing a large portion of the building’s roof with a giant raised skylight room to illuminate the rooms below, and destroying all traces of the original two-apartments-per-floor room configurations. The two-storied living room he created was a cavernous affair with heavily carved woodwork, a huge stained-glass window and recessed cabinets to house a collection of oversized silver salvers. There was a Georgian dining room, a French Empire bedroom and bits and pieces of almost every other architectural and decorating style that ever existed. Perhaps the most archetypal ‘Hearstian’ room, however, was the triple-height vaulted stone hall.” The massive gallery housed pieces from his medieval armor collection.11
For Bill, Jr., the Clarendon “was like a royal palace ... The top two floors were made into a banquet hall for parties and a ballroom for dancing. The ballroom had a balcony at each end.... Our parents weren’t home very much. When they did entertain, they didn’t want five noisy boys roughhousing underfoot. They also were concerned about all the valuable paint
ings, statuary, and armor in the place. So we boys lived downstairs.... We had governesses, nannies, and private tutors.... We saw Mom virtually every day during our grade-school years. My father, like many other parents, would step in when we had study or deportment problems, but, for the most part, we came under the direction of others. We were really a type of American aristocracy, styled along the lines of the British upper class. In those days, many wealthy American parents allocated time to their children only when there was good reason and available time.”12
The Clarendon had something for everyone in the family: lots of playing room for the boys, exhibition space and a private office for Hearst, a ballroom and formal dining room for Millicent’s entertaining. The only problem with the property was the proximity of the New York Central railroad tracks on the other side of Riverside Park. Complaining that the noise made when freight cars were shunted from one track to another was so loud he could not sleep, even with double windows, and that the stench from the cars that carried livestock was unbearable, Hearst demanded that the New York Central stop using the tracks north of 72nd Street as a railroad yard. When the railroad refused to bow to the adverse publicity Hearst showered on it in his newspapers, he took the company to court. It would take years, but Hearst, in the end, won his war and forced the New York Central to stop switching or storing freight cars north of its yard, above 72nd Street.13
Although there was as yet almost no mention of Hearst’s art holdings in the press, by the time he moved into the Clarendon, he had already assembled one of the most impressive collections in the country. Collecting was a passion that ranked for him just below journalism and politics. Part of every day was devoted to visiting galleries, attending auctions, or corresponding with his dealers and representatives in New York, London, and the major European art capitals. As one of their best customers, he was given advance notice of every auction and sale and bombarded with mailings, catalogues, and brochures, which he somehow found time to study. When in the spring of 1907, to cite but one example, the American Art Association auctioned off the contents of architect Stanford White’s New York City residence after White had been shot and killed by Harry Thaw, the husband of the actress Evelyn Nesbit, with whom he had had an affair, Hearst was one of the chosen few invited to attend and bid. According to Wesley Towner, author of The Elegant Auctioneers, he spent a good deal of the time bidding against John D. Rockefeller, Jr. The two millionaires fought “like schoolboys over everything in sight. Hearst got most of the stained-glass windows and the Venetian weather vanes to supply San Simeon, but Rockefeller refused to be outbid on the Spanish oil jars. They divided the Renaissance doorways and sarcophagi and came out even on the Caen stone well curbs, acquiring about a dozen or so each. Hearst paid the highest price—$320—for the only one capable of drawing water, a medieval contraption complete with windlass and a leaky bucket.” Before the auction was over, Hearst had also outbid the producer David Belasco for an immense sixteenth-century celestial globe and paid $8,000 for a “ceiling with personages identified as ‘Angels Bringing Tidings of Christ’s Birth.’” The ceiling can be seen today in the Doge’s Suite sitting room at San Simeon.14