Fingy Conners & The New Century

by Richard Sullivan

  “Someday I want to bring in a few lions,” he said matter-of-factly.

  Fingy was too preoccupied by the struggle to remain sitting upright on his donkey to listen raptly.

  “It helps to push down on the stirrups with your feet, as if you’re ready to stand up. And don’t fight the motion. Rock that big ass of yours back and forth in the same direction your other ass moves,” he chuckled.

  Fingy tried it and suddenly found himself more or less in rhythm with the animal. Just over the ridge appeared a series of fenced areas, each containing specimens Conners had only seen previously at the zoo or in pictures. There were zebras and ostriches, giraffes and ant eaters. The donkeys halted.

  “Would you like to feed them?” Hearst asked.

  “Nah. I mean, they’re interestin’ creatures ’n’ all, but…don’t they bite?”

  “Sometimes,” Hearst said. “You have to open your hand real wide and let them take the food, keeping your fingers well out of the way of those big teeth.”

  “Maybe some other time,” Fingy demurred. What he was really thinking was that if he ever got down off this donkey he’d never get back up again, stool or no stool.

  “My father purchased this spread back in ’57, before I was born,” said Hearst. “He was State senator from California, did you know that? Yep. He used to call me Billy Buster.”

  “Nope, didn’t know that,” answered the impressed dock walloper.

  “Indeed. And this was our vacation home. He built the house some thirty-odd years ago, and we came up here every chance we got. God, I loved this place! All my best memories were here. Still are. I had a great childhood. The best. We’d all pack a big picnic and ride up to the highest vista point on the ranch, where the views are spectacular in all directions, and it’s about 1600 feet clear down to the deep blue sea. The cool breezes manage to get caught right there at that exact spot and it is the most pleasant, the most idyllic location. Look,” he said, pointing. “There it is, right up there. See? That’s where we’re headed next. Just wait, you’ll love it.”

  Conners was feeling something akin to storm-tossed from the jolting and rocking of the donkey. He didn’t relish riding all the way up to the top of the ridge currently being indicated at the tip of Hearst’s finger.

  They rode onward nonetheless. Soon the overpowering stench of chicken manure floated on the air currents and the murmur of thousands of hens created a combined sound something like an audience in a theater right before a performance.

  “I have six thousand hens, Fingy,” stated the tour guide. “We supply eggs and stewing chickens to markets all up and down the coast from Los Angeles to San Francisco. And we’re expanding. You see, cattle eat a hell of a lot, and you need all this room that you see out there to raise ‘em,” he said, with a wide sweep of his long arms as if blessing all the distant hills and arroyos. The merciful fog had evaporated and the sun was now beating down full heat.

  “But chickens, they don’t take up much space at all, and pound for pound they can be just about as profitable as the beef. I know you couldn’t raise cattle to this extent in New York, but chickens you could. Chickens make money, Conners. Chickens are good eating and they also produce eggs. The chicken earns a good profit. While you’re fattening them up they’re laying eggs to help pay their rent. Everybody likes chicken and everybody eats eggs. Think about it. People have to eat.”

  Hearst’s business tip struck a nerve. Fingy had always fancied the idea of someday becoming a gentleman farmer. That was the reason he’d bought that 350 acre lake front property back in Angola in New York. He just hadn’t known exactly what to do with it until now.

  They halted under the dappled shade of a Coast Live Oak with its rough bark and prickly leaves, the fallen litter crunching sweetly under the donkeys’ hooves. It smelled lovely in the dry air and its shade was more than welcome. Fingy surveyed the chicken compound, a hamlet of neat coop houses furnished with nesting boxes arranged in tiers, the birds all nested in cozily. Hmm. Tenement houses for chickens, he thought to himself. He may have been looking at hens, but Fingy was suddenly seeing dollar bills.

  “Hungry? Me too,” said Hearst without waiting for an answer. “Let’s head back to the house. Ever eaten tamales?”

  Fingy held his breath. He might not have to endure the cruel journey all that way up to the Enchanted Hill after all.

  “I’m pretty sure I had them things at the Pan American Exposition, at the Streets of Mexico village. Them was the mushy things wrapped in corn…corn paper?”

  “Husks. You’re thinking of corn husks. Yep. That’s them. Maria makes marvelous tamales, all kinds. Wait ‘til you taste ‘em. And pasilla peppers, stuffed with queso. Delicioso!”

  Fingy had no idea what the heck the man was talking about and didn’t much care at this point. Arriving back at the house he was having as much a difficult time dismounting the donkey as he’d had climbing onto it. When his feet finally hit solid ground he winced at the stiffness in his inner thighs.

  “That’s a sure sign you’re not spreadin’ your legs apart often enough,” Hearst guffawed.

  Fingy was getting a little tired of the homo jokes.

  “Don’t be surprised if your shins are sore in the morning too,” Hearst added, “and maybe your knees as well. Riding takes some getting used to. Let’s have us an iced tea. Lunch is almost ready.”

  “Got nothin’ stronger than tea or lemonade round here, Randy?” groused Fingy with a pained look.

  “Certainly, Fingy. How’s a Mexican beer sound?”

  “Mexican? Can’t you get no American brew out this way?”

  Fingy Conners worshiped William Randolph Hearst—idolized him in fact. It was Hearst’s template Fingy had adopted to chart the course of his own life. He’d hitched his wagon to Hearst and fully intended on riding the man’s coattails into the White House.

  When he’d first met W.R. in Chicago at the Fair of ’93, Conners was immediately impressed with the thirty-year-old’s boasting of his San Francisco newspaper. Hearst had revealed to him that he planned to soon purchase another in New York just as soon as he could find a suitable seller. Hearst planted a seed in Fingy that day, relating how through the ownership of newspapers he could mold public opinion and provide himself enormous political influence. Since then, Hearst also impressed upon Conners how he purchased the finest printing equipment to achieve the best reproduction, hired the best illustrators and photographers, and more importantly, the most popular writers of the day: Twain, London, Kipling and Creelman.

  Fingy, anxious to make an impression, had chimed in, “Oh, one o’ me best lads from me younger days worked for Mark Twain for a few years when Twain was the owner of the Buffalo Express.”

  “The Express. Yes. That is an interesting paper,” Hearst said. Fingy took note.

  Jim Sullivan would have had a damn good laugh knowing Fingy had elevated his status from “that crooked flat-foot” to “one o’ me best lads.”

  What Fingy Conners had in common with William Randolph Hearst was a complete lack of interest in anyone’s opinion of him or what he did, except for one example. Hearst had always openly conducted reckless dalliances with actresses and show girls beginning back in his teens. Unlike other men occupying his station in society who discreetly hid their mistresses, Hearst paraded his ladies around in public much to the horror of his family. For Willie-boy Hearst there was no need for the pretense of private dining rooms secreted away from prying eyes, nor covert bachelor apartments in lesser neighborhoods in which to engage in sexual dalliances. He lived openly with his girls and dined with them publicly at Delmonico’s in New York or the American Dining Room at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, which could accommodate 600 witnesses.

  The thirty-five year old Hearst had up until recently been the gossip of New York for his very public five-year relationship with two underage chorus girls, sisters Millie and Anita Wilson, known on the naughty stage as the Sassafras Sisters.

  It was said that t
he sisters’ mother, Hannah Wilson, operated a New York brothel that was both Tammany-frequented and Tammany-protected. Worse, in 1903 Hearst married the then twenty-one-year-old Millie. Hearst’s mother Phoebe, after waiting her son’s entire life for him to grow up and come to his senses and take a suitable society bride, couldn’t make it to the wedding; she forevermore shunned “Mrs. W.” Millie’s madame-mother. Fingy Conners was fascinated and envious, because this was the one example of Hearst’s brazenness he dared not imitate.

  William Randolph Hearst was credited with inflaming public opinion to explosiveness with his newspapers’ false claim that the USS Maine had been blown up in Havana harbor by Spanish insurgents, giving birth to the battle cry, “Remember The Maine!”

  Hearst in his newspapers called for war, but since he was not President, and the man who happened to be president at the time, William McKinley, was of a less impulsive sort than Hearst, McKinley did not act in response to Hearst’s urgings. Hearst was infuriated and continued to mock, insult and rail against McKinley daily in his New York Journal.

  The Maine falsehood greatly influenced the country into ultimately entering into War With Spain in 1898, a war from which both Hearst and Fingy Conners had profited handsomely. The terrible explosion on the Maine that claimed 250 lives was in truth accidental, but for Hearst’s political and financial goals, his version of the story made for much more profitable copy.

  The adventurer Teddy Roosevelt had sought and accepted a commission as lieutenant colonel in the U.S. First Volunteer Cavalry. His request accepted, he resigned his powerful position as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. As Assistant Secretary he had in fact conducted the office, and made startling strategic decisions on his own, just as the Secretary himself may have—had the Secretary not so much of the time been feeling ill or distracted or just plain disinterested. Why Teddy would leave such a powerful position to seek a military commission was not quite understood. Perhaps he had spent too much time commanding from behind a desk and longed to get his hands dirty.

  Not to be outdone, Hearst wrote to President McKinley, the very same man Hearst had viciously denigrated in his newspapers, and offered at his own expense to equip a cavalry regiment of his own with which to enter into battle. When McKinley turned him down, Hearst then approached the Department of the Navy and offered his yacht Buccaneer fully armed and equipped at his own—or rather his mother’s—expense, with himself as Commander.

  Growing impatient as the Navy Department mulled over his offer, Hearst, without consulting the Department of the Navy or Congress or the President, took it upon himself to arrange to purchase a tramp steamer to sail through the Suez Canal where he would blow up the ship and sink it in place, effectively blocking further passage of the advancing Spanish fleet. Despite this being a violation of International law, the rogue warlord called off the plan when the Spanish armada was recalled and the plan for its intended passage through the canal canceled.

  Willie Hearst was as obsessed with Teddy Roosevelt as Fingy Conners was with Willie Hearst. The difference was that Hearst hated Roosevelt for besting him at every turn and for continually being in his way politically. Teddy Roosevelt had graduated from Harvard with honors, whereas Hearst was kicked out for his failing grades due to his non-stop party-making and pranks. Roosevelt was just four years older than Hearst, yet by 1902 Teddy had already made himself a battle hero, the Governor of New York State, and now was President of the United States of America. Roosevelt had at present accomplished all that Willie ever wanted to, yet had none of it, and that made Hearst livid.

  After Roosevelt had heroically charged up San Juan Hill with his colored Buffalo Soldiers, becoming a national icon in the process, Hearst sailed his yachts to Cuba, taking with him an Edison film crew, some close friends, and a gaggle of newsmen to engage in war irrespective of the fact the United States military did not sanction any such action.

  An advance party sent earlier by Hearst and headed by famed journalist James Creelman had improbably rescued an eighteen year old beauty named Evangelina Cosio y Cisneros from a Cuban prison. She was the blameless daughter of an imprisoned insurgent, thrown into the dungeon, it was claimed, for rejecting the sexual advances of a licentious Spanish colonel. Hearst in his newspapers had made her a cause célèbre, bringing her to New York following her rescue to parade the freed captive through Manhattan’s streets as she made her way to a huge Hearst-arranged rally at Madison Square Garden and a ball in the Waldorf Hotel’s Red Room, followed by a reception with President McKinley at the White House. Hearst wanted people to know that W.R. Hearst didn’t just publish the news; W.R. Hearst created the news.

  Perhaps had Fingy Conners known the complete story of James Creelman, he might have not invested so heavily his own trust and aspirations in Hearst.

  Hearst was quoted as saying of his world-famous journalist, “The beauty about Creelman is the fact that whatever you give him to do instantly becomes in his mind the most important assignment ever given any writer. He thinks that the very fact of the job being given him means that it’s a task of surpassing importance or else it would not have been given to so great a man as he.”

  Creelman was said to have, upon meeting with him, lectured Pope Leo XIII on relations between Protestants and Catholics.

  Hearst, preparing to personally head into war in Cuba as a soldier/journalist, wired Creelman in England to head for the embattled island to meet him there. He had sent his right-hand man Mr. Follinsbee ahead from New York, along with a dozen or so other Journal newsmen. Upon arrival in Cuba in his private yacht, Hearst connected with Creelman and Follinsbee and together they sought out a contingent of American soldiers advancing toward El Caney where the Spanish invaders held command over a stone fort, and joined them.

  As they approached the fort, U.S. troops lay splayed on the ground so as to avoid the enemy’s smokeless bullets. However, the less cautious Creelman, followed at a cautious distance by Hearst, decided on his own to forge ahead. It was told that Creelman was obsessed with capturing the Spanish flag.

  “It was the thing I had come to get,” Creelman stated afterwards. “I wanted it for the Journal. The Journal had provoked the war, and it was only fair that the Journal should have the first flag captured in the greatest land battle of the war. I looked up at the flag staff and found that the flag was not there. I rushed up to the Spanish officer and demanded the flag. He shrugged his shoulders and told me that a bomb had just carried it away. I was in terror lest someone else should get the precious emblem of victory first, so I hurried out the door to the verge of the hill, and there lay the red and yellow banner. Picking up the flag, I waved it viciously at the village and a volley from the main breast-works was the only reply.”

  Feeling an entitlement that Hearst’s Journal, having been responsible for helping to incite the war to begin with, should be the first to capture the battle flag, Creelman waved it around in premature victory attracting considerable attention from the Spanish troops who promptly shot him. The bullet entered his shoulder and exited his back.

  Hearst was thrilled.

  Creelman wrote of the incident, saying that as he lay on the ground seriously wounded, bleeding, and in great pain, Hearst, wearing a “straw hat with a bright ribbon on his head, a revolver at his belt and a pencil and a notebook in his hand,” leaned over him, face beaming, and said, “I’m sorry you’re hurt but wasn’t it a splendid fight? We must beat every paper in the world!”

  Hearst then opened his notebook and took an interview with the grievously wounded Creelman. He scribbled his story into his notebook as Creelman moaned in torment waiting unavailingly for medical ministration. Then Hearst promptly abandoned him where he fell and boarded his yacht and set sail for Jamaica to telegraph his story to New York, deserting both Creelman and Fossinbee in the deadly chaos to fend for themselves.

  On July 5, 1898 Creelman, not knowing where Hearst was or even if his letter might reach him, wrote,

  “Dear Mr. Hearst,
<
br />   After being abandoned without shelter or medicine and practically without food for nearly two days — most of the time being under constant fire — you can judge my condition. My shoulder was as you know. That I am here and alive is due simply to my own efforts. I had to rise from my litter and stagger seven miles through the hills and the mud without an attendant…Mr. Follinsbee stayed one night with me and got a fever. We are both here without clothes. I must get to the United States in order to get well. I expect no gratitude but I do expect a chance for my life.

  Faithfully yours,

  James Creelman

  Later that year, in a very lengthy and lavishly illustrated feature in the Review of Reviews Volume XVII in which Creelman was hailed as a world-conquering adventurer, subtitled The Hero As Journalist, Creelman neglected completely to mention any bit of Hearst’s abandonment of him and Mr. Fossinbee in Cuba. Feeling perhaps that continuing in the employ of the famously generous and well-paying Hearst was the more expedient goal, he thought better of revealing to the world what a capricious and fickle manchild Willie Hearst really was.

  In the sixteen-page article, Creelman’s description of the battle of El Caney and its personal outcome for him read vividly. Although most of his account of the harrowing aftermath rings true, Creelman’s claim of the journalist himself valorously commanding the U.S. forces at the forefront of the battle, his tale accompanied by an elaborate illustration rendered in the epic heroic style depicting his aggressively leading the charge of the American army up the hill toward El Caney, reeked of pure hogwash.

  Fingy Conners might have been provided a clue as to what he might personally expect from Hearst—if indeed he wanted one—by considering Hearst’s vicious and virulent treatment of President McKinley, a man Conners admired. But Conners rather obviously chose to ignore the fact that Hearst had evaded a lynching at the hands of any number of mobs who held Hearst accountable for complicity in the President’s assassination, not the least prominent of whom was President Theodore Roosevelt himself.