The Chief
Page 14
The ostensible purpose of Will’s visit to Munich was, as his mother wrote a friend, to get his portrait painted by Orrin Peck early in his trip “before he became too brown from his tramping life.”17
The portrait, which hangs today in the Gothic Study at San Simeon, is the best likeness we have of the young Hearst. He sits back comfortably on a wooden chair or bench, one arm resting on the edge of the bench, the other on a side table. He is dressed formally in a dark vested suit, his immaculate white shirtfront topped by a red bow tie. Hearst's eyes are a steely blue-green; his hair a sandy brown, cut short and parted in the middle; his handlebar mustache perfectly curled at each end. The facial features are those of a youth; the gaze and pose that of an established businessman very much at home in the world. The portrait radiates self-confidence, power, control. His friend did him the singular honor of painting him as he wanted to be seen.
Like all portraits, it tells only a half-truth. Will Hearst was not, at age twenty-nine, in control of his life. With no property of his own, he remained entirely dependent on his mother for his position at the Examiner and his livelihood. He desperately wanted to leave San Francisco for New York, but could not do so without a sizable loan or gift from Phoebe, which, he knew, would not be forthcoming as long as he lived with Tessie.
In 1893, after a decade of living together, Will and Tessie parted, this time forever. As with every aspect of his life with Tessie, we know almost nothing about their final days together or why Tessie left San Francisco. Anne Apperson Flint told W. A. Swanberg in a 1960 interview that the final straw for Phoebe was her son’s decision to take Tessie with him to Europe. All summer long, Phoebe worried that she and Tessie might run into one another in London or Paris. According to Flint, Phoebe returned from Europe determined to break up their relationship, threatened Tessie with criminal action if she did not leave San Francisco, and offered her money if she did. Tessie accepted the offer and left Will and San Francisco.
“That was when we all went to live at the Palace Hotel,” his cousin recalled, “and he gave up Sausalito, and he lived at the Palace with his mother; and she sent for Orrin Peck. The four of us were there, going out every night to some French restaurant, doing something every night to keep him entertained, because he was so unhappy—and he was unhappy. He was furious at his mother. He was missing Tessie.”
Still, in the end, instead of fighting to get Tessie back, Will took her departure as a fait accompli. As he had with Eleanor Calhoun, he accepted the implicit bargain that Phoebe offered him. He gave up his girl and expected something in return. His first request was for a change in the terms under which he received his allowance and salary from the Examiner. He was not, he made it clear, requesting “an increase of my salary so much as a change of the manner of delivering it. ... I think I might properly have now what was doubtless too much for me three years ago.” Instead of having to go to Irwin Stump for money to pay his bills, Will wanted his mother to deposit to his “credit at any bank on the first of each month a definite sum of $2,500” which he could then spend or save as he saw fit. “As long as I come to ask him for an extra thousand dollars here and there, he will treat me as a child, asking 10 cents for soda water. ‘Can’t you get along with five cents! Soda water isn’t very good for you anyhow. Well, come around next month and I will talk to you about it.’ There is mixed with this parental patronage an air of business mistrustfulness such as you might meet at a bank where you were overdrawing your account. This is annoying but it is unavoidable I think under the present system.”
There was something almost pathetic in thirty-year-old Will Hearst’s asking his mother for a regular salary. He promised her that if she paid him one, he would not only “get into the habit of laying something away [but would] invest one half of all income from the paper, the ranch and all property that I may have or acquire.” He would, he assured her, continue to report on his business dealings to Irwin Stump: “My books will be at his command so that he can see that I am faithfully carrying out my part of the plan.” He also guaranteed her—in writing—that if she agreed to the new arrangement, he would cease demanding or desiring “any extra money. I will not be asking you for a thousand dollars on Christmas, a thousand on my birthday ... a few thousand now and then for unforeseen expenses. I give you my word to this.... You have always been most kind and generous to me and given me extra money whenever I asked for it but don’t you think it would be better for me if I didn’t ask for it so often, if I were put now on a more independent and manly footing?”18
The “manly” was critical here. Real men didn’t have to go begging to their mothers—or their mothers’ accountants—for spending money. Nor did they allow themselves to be spied on. Will could not endure his mother’s suspicions or her surveillance. Despite Will’s remonstrances, Phoebe did nothing to remove the constraints on his independence. The tension between the two continued to grow, until it became almost unbearable. In 1894, Phoebe “caught” Will with a lease on a New York City apartment and accused him of renting it for Tessie. Will explained that he had indeed leased rooms in Manhattan, but only because he planned to spend more time there and wanted to save money on hotel bills. He was not, he emphasized, “fitting up any girl’s rooms as might be inferred.”19
With no money or property of his own and his mother watching over his every move in San Francisco, Will felt trapped. He considered buying property in Mendocino County for a home, but the land was too expensive and too far from San Francisco. “It takes three days to get to the redwoods and as many to get back so I would have to take a regular vacation every time I made the trip, and I can’t afford the time when I am working on the paper. What I could get the most fun and rest out of would be a yacht. It would be right here in the bay ready whenever wanted and I could take a two hours' trip or a two days’ trip as the opportunity offered.” Although he had been spending more and more time away from San Francisco and his paper, he wrote his mother that he had “made up my mind to work very hard on the paper from now on. I must positively build myself papers in Chicago and New York and if I have the ability in London, too. I am beginning to get old and if this great plan is to be carried out I have no time to lose, and I am going to devote myself to business, first putting the Examiner on so satisfactory a basis that it will get along without much attention from me and will produce enough to enable me to buy my first paper elsewhere.”20
With no vacation retreat of his own—and no money to buy or build one—Will was constrained to use his father's horse ranch in Pleasanton. Phoebe, ever vigilant, instructed her cousin Edward Clark to find out if he was “taking queer people” there. While the term “queer” did not in the 1890s have the sexual connotations it has today, it was a decidedly uncomplimentary and unfriendly way for a mother to refer to her son's weekend guests. Clark reassured Phoebe that while he could not “say positively” that Will was not inviting “queer people” to the Pleasanton ranch, “I can say truthfully that I do not believe it. He goes there quite often and has taken young men on several occasions but I have never heard of anything different and do not believe it to be the case.” When Will tried to build a home for himself on the Pleasanton property, Phoebe forbade him to do so and hired his architect, A. C. Schweinfurth, to design a house for her instead.21
6. Hearst in New York: “Staging a Spectacle”
AT THIRTY-TWO YEARS OF AGE, Will felt he could no longer wait to start up a second paper in New York City. Nor was Phoebe, now that Tessie had gone, inclined to deny him his wish.
In the summer of 1895, while Will toured Europe, Phoebe instructed Edward Clark, her new financial adviser, to consult with a lawyer on the advisability of either giving Will half of the income from George’s estate or making him her partner in the mines and real estate she had inherited. She had hired Clark, her second cousin from Missouri, to help her sort out her finances.
Clark responded cautiously to Phoebe’s plan to transfer half of her estate to her son. “A full and complete pa
rtnership makes each partner liable for the acts of the other and should [Will] enter into obligations to enable him to publish a paper in New York it would add to your debt.” Ten days later, Clark reported that Mr. Eels, the New York attorney whom he had contacted on Phoebe's behalf, was unalterably opposed to her dividing the senator's estate with her son or entering into any sort of partnership arrangement with him. “It would be unwise and dangerous to sign an agreement to give Mr. Hearst half of any part of your income for the reason that if in the course of time Mr. Hearst should die and any one make claim (lawfully or unlawfully) of relationship to him it would cause you much trouble ... If such person could establish such claim you could be sued for an accounting for the period of such agreement and it would be possible to annoy you in many ways.”
Clark had, on Phoebe's instructions, told the lawyer “only what was necessary ... so he could give the legal advice you wish.” But that “necessary” information had to have included Will's illicit relationship with Tessie and the possibility that he had had similar relationships with other women who might, after his death, make claims against his estate. The only way to protect the family’s assets from such claims or from paternity suits should Will predecease his mother was to keep everything in Phoebe’s name. “It would be much better,” the lawyer advised, “to arrange with Mr. Hearst to give him a stated amount, each month, than to give him an agreement that he is to receive one half.... Regarding what you say about your right to use money during your life and to will it to whom you choose, Mr. Eels [says] you have the right, absolutely, to do as you wish in all things. That Mr. Hearst hasn’t the slightest legal claim in any way.”1
Given Mr. Eels’s advice and her own suspicions about her son’s trustworthiness with money, Phoebe refused to bestow on him a share of George’s estate or enter into any sort of partnership with him. “Wm ... will probably be unpleasant,” she wrote Orrin Peck in late September, “but no partnership for me under existing state of things.”2
When Will returned from Europe in August, he was informed by Clark that Phoebe had decided not to divide George’s estate with him. Though we do not know the content of their conversations, it is probable that Clark, with whom Will would maintain a business relationship for the rest of his life, explained to him precisely why Eels had advised Phoebe not to make him her partner.
The issue of Will’s inheritance had resurfaced both because he was in need of funds to buy a newspaper in New York and because Phoebe was entering into negotiations to sell a major share of her Anaconda stock. George had, at his death, owned 39 percent of the Anaconda shares. Since his death, his partner James Ben Ali Haggin (a Kentuckian whose maternal grandfather had been Turkish) had bought up much of the remaining stock. Phoebe had never trusted Haggin nor, for that matter, any of George’s other partners. When the Rothschild interests made an offer for 25 percent of the Anaconda shares for $7.5 million, Phoebe agreed to sell. Her share of the proceeds amounted to $2,925,000.3
While Phoebe was negotiating to sell her Anaconda shares, Will was shopping for his newspaper. There were three for sale: the New York Recorder, which had been founded in early 1891 by James B. Duke, the tobacco millionaire, but had never made a dent in the crowded morning field; the New York Times, a once prosperous morning paper which, at an asking price of $300,000, was outrageously overpriced given its circulation of less than 10,000; and the Morning Journal, which had been founded by Joseph Pulitzer’s brother Albert in 1882 as a one-cent morning paper. Though the Morning Journal was regarded as nothing more than a scandal sheet, it had done well until 1894 when in the midst of a severe depression, Albert Pulitzer doubled its price to two cents in an attempt to compete with his brother’s World. Circulation plummeted and in early 1895, Albert Pulitzer sold the paper at an enormous profit to John McLean, the publisher of the Cincinnati Enquirer.
McLean, like Pulitzer and Hearst before him, and like Adolph Ochs, who would come to New York from Chattanooga the next year, was convinced that he would succeed in New York because he had succeeded elsewhere. He quickly discovered that to do so he had to find a niche for his paper in the overcrowded New York morning field. After little more than a year of losing money without gaining circulation or advertisers, McLean, in a last-ditch rescue effort, dropped the price of his daily back down to a penny, only to discover that potential readers were no more willing to buy it at that price than they had been at two cents. By the fall of 1895, he was ready to unload his newspaper for whatever he could get for it.
According to The Fourth Estate, a publishers’ trade journal, the last week of September 1895 was “one of the wildest in the history of metropolitan newspaper gossip.” Ever since Hearst had returned from Europe, the town had been buzzing with rumors that he had put bids on the Journal, the Recorder, the Times, and Pulitzer’s World. The last rumor was effectively squelched in the October 3 issue of The Fourth Estate, which reported that “a gentleman in a position to speak authoritatively of Mr. Hearst’s plans [no doubt Hearst himself speaking off the record] said yesterday that while it may be true that he wants a metropolitan property, and that it may not be long before he gets it, Mr. Hearst would not buy the World if it were for sale ... because he is too young and ambitious a man to accept the fruit of another man’s labors, and if he enters New York journalism will do so in a way to win his own spurs.”4
Irwin Stump, whom Phoebe had sent to New York to watch over the prodigal son, reported to her that McLean had offered to sell Will a piece of the Morning Journal and run it in partnership with him. Will had turned down the proposal because he wanted full control of his New York daily. “He is acting with deliberation and caution on the newspaper proposition in New York, and does not feel disposed to jump until he sees where he is going to land.”5
One of Will’s problems in closing a deal was that he did not yet know how much money his mother was going to provide him for his New York paper. William, Stump wrote Phoebe, had agreed not “to do anything definite until the Anaconda business is settled, as the purchase of either journal means considerable ready money.” In late September, Hearst imported Sam Chamberlain, the managing editor of his San Francisco Examiner, to join the final negotiations. He had narrowed his choices to the Recorder, which was for sale for $400,000, and the Morning Journal, which was priced at $200,000. After another round of negotiations in which he got McLean to lower his price, Will bought the Morning Journal and McLean’s German-language daily, the Morgen Journal, for $150,000.6
While Hearst's biographers—with Cora Older the sole exception—have asserted that Phoebe gave Will the $7.5 million she received from the sale of Anaconda stock to spend on his newspaper, the truth, as we have seen, was that her share of the proceeds was less than $3 million and Will got no more than $150,000 of that to buy McLean’s papers, along with an additional $250,000 that Stump estimated would be necessary to bring the paper “up to Will’s standard.”7
There was every expectation in New York's newspaper community that Hearst would fail as miserably as John McLean, his much more experienced predecessor. New York City already had eight other established morning newspapers. Joseph Pulitzer’s World, a two-cent paper, reigned supreme with a circulation of around 250,000. Its major competitor was James Gordon Bennett, Jr.’s Herald, also priced at two cents, with a circulation of just under 200,000 and an absentee owner who lived full-time in Paris and was paying less and less attention to his paper. Charles Dana’s venerable Sun, now at two cents, remained a lively, well-written paper, though its circulation languished at under 100,000. The Sun, the original “penny paper,” had been a mainstay of metropolitan journalism until Dana in 1888 inexplicably refused to endorse the New Yorker Grover Cleveland for the presidency and lost a large part of his core Democratic readership. The remaining morning dailies drew on a more established, solidly Republican, middle- and upper-class audience. Whitelaw Reid’s Tribune, still the most literary of New York's papers, had never regained the stature it had enjoyed under Horace Greeley; it
s circulation remained close to 75,000. The New York Times, as we have seen, continued to languish. While it looked for new owners, its circulation hovered around 10,000. The three other morning newspapers, the Morning Advertiser, Press, and Recorder, made up the rest of the morning market.8
Given the competition, Hearst's most difficult task would be getting New Yorkers just to look at his paper. He wasted no time letting them know what he had in store for them. Like a circus promoter, he knew how important it was to create an aura of excitement before the big show came to town. A genius at self-promotion, he allowed himself to be interviewed, off the record, by the editors of The Fourth Estate, who published their story on the front page under the headline, “W. R. Hearst Here. Has Come To Stay as Proprietor of the Journal ... The Young Californian Has Both Money and Brains—The Combination May Mean a Metropolitan Revolution.” Accompanying the article was a photograph of “William R. Hearst” as he wanted to be seen: unsmiling, solemn and mature beyond his years, with a full walrus mustache, well-starched collar, closely cropped hair still parted in the middle, and a fixed stare that made him look more like a Western bandit than a newspaper publisher.
“To intimate personal friends he has stated that he has entered a finish fight for metropolitan honors, and that he has no thought of a limited number of rounds,” The Fourth Estate reported:
He means to make the Journal a great journal with a big G and J.... New York is the field of his ambitions and with the resources of almost unlimited capital and absolutely exhausting courage he has entered the fight.... Mr. Hearst is not over thirty-four years old. He is a bachelor with twenty-five millions at his back and a big bold heart inside of him. He does not wear a sombrero or carry a pistol, but he has the courage that is usually associated with the two. He is shrewd without being cunning, rich and yet not riotous, kindly and without weakness, fair but far from foolish. He knows that he is hunting big game, but does not hesitate to tackle it.... He shows no suggestion of boastfulness when he speaks of spending millions as if they were mills.9