The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst

By David Nasaw

The definitive and “utterly absorbing” biography of America’s first news media baron based on newly released private and business documents (Vanity Fair).

William Randolph Hearst, known to his staff as the Chief, was a brilliant business strategist and a man of prodigious appetites. By the 1930s, he controlled the largest publishing empire in the United States, including twenty-eight newspapers, the Cosmopolitan Picture Studio, radio stations, and thirteen magazines. He quickly learned how to use this media stronghold to achieve unprecedented political power.

The son of a gold miner, Hearst underwent a public metamorphosis from Harvard dropout to political kingmaker; from outspoken populist to opponent of the New Deal; and from citizen to congressman. In The Chief, David Nasaw presents an intimate portrait of the man famously characterized in the classic film Citizen Kane.

With unprecedented access to Hearst’s personal and business papers, Nasaw details Heart’s relationship with his wife Millicent and his romance with Marion Davies; his interactions with Hitler, Mussolini, Churchill, and every American president from Grover Cleveland to Franklin Roosevelt; and his acquaintance with movie giants such as Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, and Irving Thalberg. An “absorbing, sympathetic portrait of an American original,” The Chief sheds light on the private life of a very public man (Chicago Tribune).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 12, 2013
• ISBN: 9780547524726

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Contents

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Title Page

Contents

Photo

Copyright

Acknowledgments

Preface

I. Great Expectations

1. A Son of the West

2. To Europe Again and on to Harvard

3. Something Where I Could Make a Name

II. Proprietor and Editor

4. At the Examiner

5. I Can’t Do San Francisco Alone

6. Hearst in New York: Staging a Spectacle

7. How Do You Like the Journal’s War?

III. Publisher, Politician, Candidate, and Congressman

8. Representing the People

9. Candidate of a Class

10. A Force to Be Reckoned With

11. Man of Mystery

12. Party Leader

13. Hearst at Fifty: Some Calm Before the Storms

IV. Of War and Peace

14. A War of Kings

15. Hearst, Hylan, the Hohenzollerns, and the Habsburgs

V. A Master Builder

16. Building a Studio

17. Builder and Collector

18. Marion, Millicent, and the Movies

19. A Return to Normalcy

20. Another Last Hurrah

VI. The King and Queen of Hollywood

21. Do You Know Miss Marion Davies, the Movie Actress?

22. Family Man

23. Dream Houses

24. Businesses as Usual

25. A New Crusade: Europe

26. The Talkies and Marion

VII. The Depression

27. Pretty Much Flattened Out

28. An Incorrigible Optimist

29. The Chief Chooses a President

VIII. New Deals and Raw Deals

30. Hearst at Seventy

31. Hearst and Hitler

32. The Last Crusade

IX. The Fall

33. The Fall

34. All Very Sad, But We Cannot Kick Now

35. Citizen Kane

36. Old Age

Epilogue

Back Matter

Index

About the Author

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Copyright © 2000 by David Nasaw

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

www.hmhco.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Nasaw, David.

The chief: the life of William Randolph Hearst / David Nasaw.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-395-82759-0

1. Hearst, William Randolph, 1863–1951. 2. Publishers and publishing—United States—Biography. 3. Newspaper publishing—United States—History—19th century. 4. Newspaper publishing—United States—History—20th century. I. Title.

Z473.H4 N37 2000

070.5'092—dc21 [B] 99-462122

eISBN 978-0-547-52472-6

v3.0516

Frontispiece: William Randolph Hearst, May 1922

(Marc Wanamaker/Bison Archives)

Photographs follow pages 112, 272, and 464

Acknowledgments

I wish to express my appreciation to Randolph A. Hearst, who took time to speak with me about his father, and to Frank A. Bennack, Jr., president and chief executive officer of the Hearst Corporation, who arranged for me to examine material, previously unavailable to researchers, in William Randolph Hearst’s Bronx warehouse and in the bunkhouse at the San Simeon Ranch. Hearst’s grandsons, John (Bunky) Hearst, Jr. and Austin Hearst, and Austin’s wife Kathryn and John’s wife Barbara also shared valuable information with me about the Chief.

Steve Fraser first suggested that I write a biography of Hearst and helped me conceive the project. Virginia Barber, my agent, provided me with encouragement and a thoughtful reading of an early draft. Patricia Strachan, my editor at Houghton Mifflin, has—with good humor and consummate skill—seen the project through to completion. Sarah Goodrum, also at Houghton Mifflin, has assisted me with photo research and permissions.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and Amanda Smith gave me entrée to Joseph P. Kennedy’s papers, which helped unlock the mystery of Hearst’s finances. I have profited from my many conversations with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. on Hearst, Franklin Roosevelt, and the New Deal.

I am enormously grateful to those who work at the Hearst San Simeon State Historical Monument for the kindness they have shown me on every occasion. John Horn, the historian at the Hearst Castle, has been of invaluable assistance through every stage of the research and writing, promptly answering every query sent his way. Hoyt Fields, chief curator, arranged for me to examine the oral history collection that is housed in the Tour Guides Library. Vicki Kastner guided me through the grounds and buildings on the hillside and has been a steady source of information on the Hearst collections. Horn and Kastner also read the final manuscript and offered their suggestions. John Blades and Sandra Barghini graciously assisted me during their tenures at the Castle. Sandra Heinemann read and generously commented on the San Simeon sections of my manuscript.

Nancy Loe was an early guide to the sources and a valued tutor on Julia Morgan and her papers. I am appreciative of the efforts of Mike Line in Special Collections at the California Polytechnic State University library which houses the Morgan papers. The librarians and archivists at the Bancroft Library at Berkeley have been uniformly helpful. I wish particularly to thank Bonnie Hardwick and Peter Hanff. Dace Taube at the Regional History Collection at the University of Southern California guided me through the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner archives. Ned Comstock helped me with material at the Warner Bros. Archives, also at the University of Southern California. I am also appreciative of the help provided me by the curators and archivists at the Huntington Library, the National Archives, the Hoover Institution Archives, the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, the Columbia University Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, the Harvard University Archives, the New York Times Company Archives, the Syracuse University Library Department of Special Collections, the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, the Manuscripts and Archives Division and the Billy Rose Theater Collection of the New York Public Library, and the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress.

I have been assisted throughout by a small army of research assistants led by my mother, Beatrice Nasaw, who has worked almost full-time on this project since its inception, and read and helped to copyedit the final manuscript. I was also fortunate in having the assistance of a number of wonderful graduate students from the History program at the City University of New York Graduate Center, among them Dorothy Browne, David Barber, Tracy Morgan, Hilary Hallett, Carol Quirke, Terence Kissack, Shawn Savage, and Steven Naftzger.

I am grateful to all my colleagues at the Graduate Center for their encouragement and assistance. Blanche Wiesen Cook shared her insights and research on the Roosevelts with me; Phil Cannistraro, his knowledge of Hearst’s relationship with Mussolini. I benefited as well from discussions with Tom Kessner, George Custen, Jack Diggins, David Rosner, Richard Powers, Mike Wallace, James Oakes, Josh Freeman, and Abe Ascher. Dana Frank offered me her research on Hearst’s Buy American campaign. I’ve had some wonderful discussions about biography with Jean Strouse, Patricia Bosworth, and with Alan Brinkley who was also kind enough to read and comment on my final draft. Arthur Goren helped me with information on Hearst’s efforts to create a Jewish homeland. Nora Jaffee did invaluable research in Mexico. John Creelman introduced me to the Creelman papers at Ohio State. Bob Board met with me in Los Angeles and shared his remarkable collection of Marion Davies films and memorabilia. My dear friend Bob Edelman has been encouraging throughout.

I owe special thanks to Jon Wiener, Ann Fabian, Tom Leonard, and Beth Rashbaum for reading all 1, 400 pages of my next-to-last draft and offering their suggestions for revision.

My greatest debt of gratitude is to Dinitia Smith, who has been my partner in this as in everything else I have done in the past two decades. With good humor and infinite patience, she has listened to my every Hearst story, carefully read every word of every draft—from proposal to bound galley—corrected my syntax and improved my prose. I thank her for her kindness, her love, and her unflagging support.

I wish to acknowledge the financial support of the City University of New York through the PSC-CUNY research award program.

COPYRIGHT AND PERMISSIONS INFORMATION

Much of the material cited in this work is protected by copyright.

Excerpts from the Hearst San Simeon State Historical Monument Oral History Project interviews and other materials held by the Hearst San Simeon State Historical Monument are used by permission of the San Simeon District, State of California, Department of Parks and Recreation.

Excerpts from unpublished material by and to William Randolph Hearst and all other sources for which the Hearst Corporation owns copyright are used by permission of the Hearst Corporation.

Excerpts from the letters of Winston S. Churchill are used by permission of Curtis Brown Ltd., London, on behalf of the Estate of Sir Winston S. Churchill, copyright © Winston S. Churchill.

Excerpts from The Times We Had: Life with William Randolph Hearst by Marion Davies, edited by Pamela Pfau and Kenneth Marx, are reprinted by permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, from The Times We Had: Life with William Randolph Hearst by Marion Davies, edited by Pamela Pfau and Kenneth Marz. Copyright © 1975 by the Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc.

Excerpts from The Hearsts: Father and Son by William Randolph Hearst, Jr., with Jack Casserly, are used by permission of Roberts Rinehart Publishers.

Excerpts from Carl Laemmle’s letter are used with the permission of Stanley Bergerman, Jr.

Additional sources are cited in the notes, pages 609–56.

Preface

WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST was a huge man with a tiny voice; a shy man who was most comfortable in crowds; a war hawk in Cuba and Mexico but a pacifist in Europe; an autocratic boss who could not fire people; a devoted husband who lived with his mistress; a Californian who spent half his life in the East. The son of a Forty-Niner emigrant from Missouri who had made millions by digging in the earth, Hearst did not identify with those who had inherited wealth or social position. He considered himself a selfmade man, because, like his father and his mother, he invented himself: as art collector, builder, journalist, publisher, and politician. His ambitions were limitless, but so too were his talents and resources. He was in all things defined by contradiction, larger than life.

When Hearst was in college, he wrote his father that he intended to do something in publishing and politics—and he did, becoming San Francisco’s, then New York’s, and finally the nation’s most powerful publisher. He served two terms in Congress, came in second in the balloting for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1904, and was, for half a century, a major force in American politics—at the national, state, and local levels. He was also one of the twentieth century’s greatest spenders. Fortune magazine, in 1935, reported that his art collections were worth at least $20 million (a quarter of a billion dollars in today’s currency) and his ranches, mines, orchards, and packing plants, another $30 million. His real estate holdings in New York City were assessed at $41 million. He was, according to Fortune, the city’s number one realtor.

There has never been—nor, most likely, will there ever again be—a publisher like William Randolph Hearst. The Chief, as he was known by those who worked for him, built the nation’s first media conglomerate by extending his newspaper empire horizontally into syndicated feature, photo, and wire services; magazines; newsreels; serial, feature, and animated films; and radio. With each triumph, his sense of omnipotence swelled. The opportunities were limitless for expanding his empire—and his audiences—and he capitalized on every one of them.

Decades before synergy became a corporate cliché, Hearst put the concept into practice. His magazine editors were directed to buy only stories which could be rewritten into screenplays to be produced by his film studio and serialized, reviewed, and publicized in his newspapers and magazines. He broadcast the news from his papers over the radio and pictured it in his newsreels. He was as dominant and pioneering a figure in the twentieth-century communications and entertainment industries as Andrew Carnegie had been in steel, J. Pierpont Morgan in banking, John D. Rockefeller in oil, and Thomas Alva Edison in electricity. At the peak of his power in the middle 1930s, Time magazine estimated his newspaper audience alone at 20 million of the 120 plus million men, women, and children in the nation. His daily and Sunday papers were so powerful as vehicles of public opinion in the United States that Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Winston Churchill all wrote for him.

In the great tradition of nineteenth-century orator-editors like Horace Greeley, Charles Dana, William Cullen Bryant, and Joseph Pulitzer, Hearst took upon himself the role of tribune of the people. Through the first decades of the twentieth century, as older press lords died off and were replaced by a new breed of editors who, like Adolph S. Ochs of the New York Times, shunned publicity and made sure their names appeared only on their mastheads, Hearst employed the power of the media to set the national political agenda, first as a muckraking, progressive trustbuster, then, in his seventies, as an opponent of the New Deal and a stalwart anti-Communist. He set the topics, dictated the tone, and edited all the editorials in his papers—the major ones he wrote himself and displayed prominently on his front pages; he endorsed candidates for office and condemned them when they betrayed their promises; he emblazoned his name on his magazines, his newsreels, and his radio outlets; he proudly proclaimed that while other newspapers merely reported the news, his newspapers made it.

I did not set out to write a biography of William Randolph Hearst, but to use him as a focal point from which to discuss the interpenetration of culture and politics in the twentieth century. Only as I began my research did I come to realize that the story of William Randolph Hearst was yet to be told. There were some fine biographies dating from the 1950s and 1960s, but none had been able to call upon the vast archival resources that have become available since then. I was able to start fresh, to detour around the anecdotal information that my predecessors had had to rely on, and to base my study on hundreds of thousands of letters, telegrams, memoranda, transcripts of phone messages, articles, and editorials that Hearst had written or that had been written to or about him.

I began at the Bancroft Library in Berkeley, California, which held collections of Hearst correspondence dating back to the 1860s, when Hearst’s mother Phoebe arrived in San Francisco from Missouri with her husband, the millionaire miner and future United States senator George Hearst. I moved on from there to dozens of manuscript collections scattered across the country: the papers of every president from William McKinley to Franklin Delano Roosevelt; those of Hearst’s editors, friends, political advisers and adversaries, and of his architect at San Simeon, Julia Morgan. At the Hearst San Simeon Historical Monument, I was given access to an extensive unpublished oral history collection that contained dozens of interviews with friends, family, servants, and business associates. At the end of my research, I was able to fill in some of the missing pieces by consulting private and business papers that had been stored in a warehouse in the Bronx since the early 1920s and at a bunkhouse at one of the Hearst Corporation ranches in San Simeon.

The Hearst I discovered was infinitely more fascinating than the one I had expected to find. This was also Winston Churchill’s experience during his visit with Hearst at San Simeon and Los Angeles in 1929. Hearst was most interesting to meet, Churchill wrote his wife Clementine, who had remained in England. I got to like him—a grave simple child—with no doubt a nasty temper—playing with the most costly toys. A vast income always overspent: ceaseless building and collecting ... two magnificent establishments, two charming wives; complete indifference to public opinion, a strong liberal and democratic outlook, a 15 million daily circulation, oriental hospitalities, extreme personal courtesy (to us at any rate) and the appearance of a Quaker elder—or perhaps better Mormon elder. After a long weekend at San Simeon, Churchill was driven to Los Angeles where he stayed at the Biltmore Hotel—which is the last word in hotels.... I met all the leading people.... These Californian swells do not of course know Hearst, Churchill wrote his wife. He dwells apart.... They regard him as the Devil.¹

I. Great Expectations

1. A Son of the West

WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST did not speak often of his father. He preferred to think of himself as sui generis and self-created, which in many ways he was. Only in his late seventies, when he began writing a daily column in his newspapers, did he remind his readers—and himself—that he was the son of a pioneer. In a column about the song Oh Susannah, which he claimed his father had sung to him, Hearst recounted the hardships George Hearst had endured on his thousand-mile trek from Missouri to California in 1850. There was a pride in the telling and in the story. His father had been one of the lucky ones, one of the stronger ones. While others had died of cholera or were drowned by the floods or were killed by the Indians [or] tarried by the wayside under crude crosses and little hasty heaps of stone, his father had stayed the course, braved the difficulties and dangers and at length ... reached California in safety.¹

The moral of the story was a simple one. Nothing had been given the Hearsts. There were no silver spoons in this family. They had scrapped and fought and suffered and, in the end, won what was rightfully theirs.

William Randolph Hearst grew to manhood in the city of great expectations on the edge of the continent. He was a son of the West, or, more particularly, of Gold Rush San Francisco. The child and the city grew up together in the second half of the nineteenth century. San Francisco’s population in 1870 was nearly three times what it had been in 1860. By 1880, San Francisco had a quarter of a million residents, was the ninth largest city in the nation and the premier metropolis of the West. The city’s riches expanded even faster than its population. California’s gold boom of the late 1840s and early 1850s had been followed by Nevada’s silver boom in the early 1860s, and wherever riches were mined west of the Mississippi, they found their way into San Francisco. Money from the mines went into San Francisco’s stock markets or real estate; it was deposited in its banks, and spent in its brothels, hotels, theaters, saloons, and gambling halls.²

With the constant influx of new people and capital, the city on the hills never had a chance to grow old. The Gold Rush mentality, permanently fixed in narrative form by storytellers, historians, and mythmaking adventurers, would dominate the culture and sensibility of San Franciscans for generations to come. There was gold in the hills—and silver and the richest agricultural land the world had ever seen—but that wealth did not sit on the surface ready for picking. It took sweat and savvy and years of labor to pull it up out of the earth.

George Hearst was one of the tens of thousands of adventurers lured to California by the promise of gold. He had been born in 1820 or 1821 —he wasn’t quite sure when—to a relatively prosperous Scotch-Irish family with American roots reaching back to the seventeenth century. George grew to manhood the only healthy son (he had a crippled brother and a younger sister) of the richest farmer in Meramec Township, Franklin County, Missouri. He was virtually unschooled, having acquired no more than a bit of arithmetic and the rudiments of literacy in classrooms.

Franklin County, Missouri, was rich in copper and lead deposits. George’s father, William Hearst, owned at least one mine and was friendly with a nearby group of French miners and smelters. On his trips to their camp, which he supplied with pork, Hearst was often accompanied by his son George. I used to stay about there a good deal, George recalled later in life. I naturally saw that they had a good deal of money. I think that that was what induced me to go into mining. Farming was such a slow way to make money. You could make a living at it and that was about all.³

William Hearst died when George was about twenty-two years of age. George took over the family farm, did some mining, for a time even ran a little store out on the public road, and then, as he recalls, this fever broke out in California. Rumors of gold strikes near San Francisco had begun to drift east in the winter of 1848. In his December 1848 message to Congress, President James Polk confirmed that the stories, though of such extraordinary character as would scarcely command belief, [had been] corroborated by authentic reports of officers in the public service. By January of 1849, every newspaper in the country was carrying front-page stories about the gold rush. Poets, philosophers, lawyers, brokers, bankers, merchants, farmers, clergymen, reported the New York Herald on January 11, 1849, all are feeling the impulse and are preparing to go and dig for gold and swell the number of adventurers to the new El Dorado.⁴

George Hearst read the newspapers and dissected the rumors. He almost went West in 1849, but was deterred—temporarily—by mining colleagues who warned him that there was nothing new in stories of Western gold. Next year, however, I made up my mind sure to go.... I recollect talking over California with my mother. She did not like it at all, but when I told her they were making $40 and $50 a day there and that it seemed to me it was by far the best thing to do, as it was pretty hard pulling here, she said that if they were doing that, she had no doubts I would make something, too, and she agreed for me to go.

In the spring of 1850, George Hearst left Missouri for California with a party of fifteen, including several of his cousins. His mother and sister rode with him for the first few days, said their final farewells, and turned back. He would be gone for ten years.

Like many who traveled to the gold fields, George caught a case of cholera. He recovered with the help of a little bit of brandy which I gave $16 a gallon for in St. Louis ... and some pills which a man in St. Louis gave me. He was still shaking with fever when, in October, he crossed over the Sierra Nevada mountains through Carson Pass south of Lake Tahoe.⁵

By the time he reached California, the earliest strikes had been played out, the richest claims bought and registered. George Hearst and his companions spent their first California winter within miles of John Sutter’s original strike on the American River. After months of shoveling wet gravel, living in leaky cabins, eating salt pork and beans, and finding little or no gold, they moved north to Grass Valley and Nevada City where a new lode had been discovered.⁶

There are two different ways to mine for gold. Placer miners look for it in riverbeds or streams, collect it in pans or sluices, wash away the sand, and sell the gold dust left behind. Quartz miners dig shafts into the ground in search of rock formations that have gold embedded in them. George Hearst arrived in the digging fields too late to cash in on the early placer mining bonanza. He had, however, invaluable experience in quartz mining. In Missouri, he had taught himself to read rock formations and, more importantly, to estimate the cost of bringing ore to the surface and refining it. Within a year of his arrival in the Grass Valley/Nevada City region, he was locating, buying, and selling claims in quartz mines.

For the better part of the decade, George Hearst would remain in and around Nevada City. Although one of California’s largest—and most prosperous—mining towns, Nevada City was little more than an extended miners’ camp, with a primitive residential section, a few storefronts and churches, and dozens of saloons, brothels, and gambling halls. The vast majority of the town’s residents were male, most of them newly arrived. Hearst prospered in this environment. He was at home at the poker table, the saloon, and probably the brothel as well. He was not among the town’s merchant, mining, or professional elites, but after years of prospecting, buying, selling, and trading claims—and for a time, running a general store—he was making a decent living and building a reputation as a good judge of rock formations and a relatively honest businessman.⁷

In 1859, word reached Nevada City of a new strike in the Washoe district on the eastern ledge of the Sierra Nevada mountains, about 100 miles away. It was rumored that a group of placer miners had found an extraordinarily rich vein of gold mixed with heavy blue-black stuff on property owned by a crazy old miner named Henry Comstock. The first sample, secretly shipped across the mountains to Nevada City, had been found to be rich in silver as well as gold. A second sample was transported by mule over the mountains and assayed by Melville Atwood, a close friend and sometime partner of Hearst. It proved to be so rich in gold and silver that Atwood doubted the veracity of his tests. Though the Washoe district was a mule trip of four or five days, across the Sierra Nevada mountains, Atwood and Hearst with two other partners rode across the mountains to inspect the lode for themselves.⁸

By the time they arrived in the mining camp that would later be known as Virginia City, Nevada, the original claims had changed hands several times. The new owners, like the old ones, still had no idea of the value of their holdings. Hearst did. He contracted to buy as large a portion of the available claims as he could and then rode back across the mountains to raise funds to pay for them.

Proceeding at a feverish pace, Hearst and his hired hands dug forty-five tons of ore out of the ground that spring of 1859, loaded it on pack mules, and trekked across the mountains to smelt and sell it in San Francisco. The ore appeared so worthless that it took days to find a smelter. But it was, as Hearst had believed, the find that every miner dreams of.⁹

While most of his colleagues in Virginia City had, in the first flush of excitement, sold their claims outright, Hearst not only held on to his, but poured every penny he earned back into his mines. He invested in new hoisting and pumping equipment, in underground timbering, and in a small private army of toughs to protect his property from claim bandits. By the spring of 1860, when the last obstacle to fortune was removed with the arrival of the U.S. Army and the defeat and removal of the local Paiute Indians, George Hearst was on his way to becoming a millionaire.

After ten years in the digging fields, George Hearst returned to Missouri in the fall of 1860 to comfort his sick mother and display his newfound fortune. His mother died soon after his return, but George remained in Missouri for two more years, taking care of family business and looking for a wife.

It was not uncommon for miners to marry late in life after they had made their fortunes. Hearst had already proposed to a woman in Virginia City, but been turned down by her family who considered him a poor match. He was forty years old—much older than the women he courted, but he was in perfect health, which was rare for a miner, stood tall and straight, with a muscular build and a full blond beard.

The woman he chose to court in Missouri was Phoebe Apperson, a schoolteacher twenty years his junior. Like George, she came from a Scotch-Irish family of small farmers with American roots stretching back over a hundred years. It is quite possible that Phoebe and George had known each other earlier—though she had been only eight when he left Missouri for California. They were both from the same township and were in fact distantly related. Still, these similarities notwithstanding, they made a rather odd couple. Phoebe was small and delicate, with grayish blue eyes, fair skin, an oval face. She was a plain-looking woman but not unattractive, a Southern lady in bearing, and a church-going Presbyterian. George stood a foot taller and weighed twice what she did. He was uncouth, loud, and semiliterate, seldom changed his shirtfront, wore his beard long, bushy, and ragged at the edges, spit tobacco juice, liked nothing better for dinner than what he called hog and hominy, and had not seen the inside of a church in decades.

Though, like her beau, Phoebe Hearst had begun her formal education in a one-room schoolhouse, she had actually graduated and gone on to a seminary in the next county. She had worked as a primary school teacher of factory children at the Meramec Ironworks in nearby Phelps County and as a tutor and governess in the home of a successful miner and smelter.

The marriage took place in June 1862, in the midst of the Civil War. The couple had planned to leave at once for California, but because Missouri was a Union state, and George was not only not in the army but so outspoken a supporter of the Confederacy that he had already been jailed once for uttering seditious remarks about secession, it took him almost three months to get the passport he needed to cross the Union lines. Finally, in late September he and his now pregnant bride boarded a train for New York City, where they met a steamer bound for Panama. In early November 1862 they arrived in San Francisco and moved into a suite at the Lick House, the newest and most luxurious hotel in the city.¹⁰

In his absence, George’s mines had been incorporated and stock offered on the San Francisco exchange established to handle the Comstock claims. Although a frenzy of silver speculation had driven share prices to astronomical heights and made Hearst a millionaire, the legal challenges to his claims had multiplied as rapidly as the price of his stocks. Mining law gave the owners of a claim property rights to the entire ledge of ore that branched out from it. But because only the courts could determine if bodies of ore at a distance from the original claim were pieces of it or separate lodes, Hearst, like every other mine owner in the Comstock, found himself embroiled in one suit after another.¹¹

George Hearst could have remained with his wife in San Francisco while his associates ran his mines, his lawyers fought his legal battles, and the exchanges traded his mining stocks. But he chose not to. Within weeks of arriving in San Francisco, he sent and paid for Phoebe’s parents to come west to be nearer their daughter, moved his bride of six months into new quarters in the Stevenson House, a hotel with accommodations for permanent guests, and left San Francisco for his mining camp across the mountains.¹²

Six months later, on April 29, 1863—with George still away—Phoebe gave birth to William Randolph Hearst, a robust baby boy named for his deceased grandfathers. Sonny, as his absentee father referred to him, was doted on by his mother, his grandmother, and Eliza Pike, his Irish-Catholic wet nurse, who, according to Hearst’s first biographer, worried so much about his immortal soul that she took him to be baptized.

"‘But Eliza,’ protested the mother, ‘I am a Presbyterian.’

‘No matter, madam, the baby is a Christian.’¹³

Soon after the birth, Phoebe, the baby, and Eliza Pike moved into a solid brick home on Rincon Hill. George remained hundreds of miles away, in a region of the West still not connected with San Francisco by railroad. Husband and wife communicated with letters hand-delivered across the mountains by George’s business associates.

For the next twenty years, George and Phoebe Hearst would be apart far more than they would be together. Both, if we can believe their letters, suffered from the arrangement, but Phoebe had the more difficult time, at least at first. George was at home in the West and had become accustomed to the predominantly male world of the mining camps. Phoebe was new to the West, new to city life, and a young mother—she had been eight months shy of her twenty-first birthday when her son was born.

Perhaps to compensate his wife for his absence, in the spring of 1864, as their son celebrated his first birthday, George bought Phoebe an elegant new home on Chestnut Street, north of Russian Hill, overlooking San Francisco Bay. With her husband hundreds of miles away and her parents preparing to depart for the new farm in Santa Clara which George had bought for them, Phoebe was left to make the move on her own. In early June, she sent Willie away with Eliza Pike to the baths at Santa Cruz so that she could devote her attention to the move.

It seems a month since you left, she wrote Eliza in mid-June. "I am terribly lonely, I miss Baby every minute. I think and dream about him. We all feel lost.... I have had another letter from Mr. Hearst ... he expects to be home soon, but don’t say what he means by soon, a week, or a month ... Kiss Willie for me and write me how he is. I hope you will wean him.... I am going to telegraph Mr. Hearst to know what to do about moving up on the hill, we have only two weeks more. I don’t think I can come down to see you I will be so very busy. Write often. I feel anxious to hear from you. Oh dear what am I going to do."¹⁴

Left on her own by her husband and by her parents who had moved south to their new farm, Phoebe adjusted to life as a single mother. She learned to make decisions by herself, run the household, and raise Willie. She was assisted of course by her husband’s wealth, which provided her with a household filled with servants and the incentive and leisure to educate herself—and her boy. She visited San Francisco’s art museums, studied French, prepared herself for her first grand tour of Europe, and made the acquaintance of Bay Area artists and writers, inviting many of them to tea.

Her major project was her son. As he grew up, she taught him to read and write and ride a horse. He became her escort and her cultural partner. Together they learned French, visited the museums, attended the operetta, and traveled up and down the California coast. All of this was communicated over the years in long, carefully handwritten letters to Eliza Pike, who by now had left the Hearst household but for years remained Phoebe’s close friend.

In the summer of 1865, Phoebe took her two-year-old son for an extended trip to visit her parents at Santa Clara, then to resort hotels in Santa Cruz and San Jose. Phoebe wrote Eliza Pike a long letter from San Jose:

I have been out of town four weeks. We are having our house made much larger, it will be yet a month before it is finished. You know me well enough, to know that I will be glad to get home again, although I have been having a very nice time. The first week I was at Ma’s ... I enjoyed the drive over the mountains to Santa Cruz. The scenery is beautiful. I think it is a lovely place. I only stayed two days. The fare at the hotel was so wretched that I could not stand it, baby ate little or nothing, if we had not taken some chicken and crackers with us I don’t know what the child would have done. I felt so uneasy about him for they have colera-morbus so badly in San Francisco and in fact everywhere that we hear of. I was so afraid he would take it, I thought it best for me to leave. I went to stay there three or four weeks, the place is crowded with people from the City ... You will wonder where Mr. Hearst is all this time. He has been on several little trips and the rest of the time in the City. He did not go to Santa Cruz but comes to see us once a week when he is in the City. I am very well this summer. Willie keeps well and fat though he grows tall. He is as brown as a berry and so active and mischievous, he is a very good boy—you have no idea how much he talks. You would be astonished. He seems to understand everything. He often talks of you. He likes his books so much. Can tell you about Cocky Locky and Henny Penny, knows more of Mother Goose than ever ... Before I came away we had been going out a great deal, there was a splendid operetta troupe at the Academy of Music. We went six or eight nights (not in succession), saw the best operas. I enjoyed it very much....I think we will go to the Sandwich Islands [Hawaii] sometime. It must be a delightful climate, but you know how foolish I am about leaving Mr. Hearst....I have been doing splendidly in French, am sorry to lose all this time being away, but I read some every day so as to not forget. I have just finished a French novel which was very interesting. Willie knows several words in French. He is so cunning ... Accept my love and wishes for your success and happiness and a great many kisses from Willie, if he could see you, he would have marvelous things to tell you. He is such a chatterbox.¹⁵

With the departure of Eliza Pike, the only person besides her parents whom Phoebe trusted entirely with her son, Phoebe assumed full-time care of the boy. Willie responded to his mother’s attention as children often do: by being absolutely charming, like a puppy wagging his tail. He learned his letters, showered his mother with kisses, and grew jealous of the time she spent with her brother Elbert, who had joined the rest of the family in California. Willie—or Billy Buster, as his father had taken to calling him now—was a handsome boy, tall for his age, with light brown, almost blond hair, and clear blue eyes. Though he seldom saw his father, he quickly adjusted to life in a household filled with women—family, friends, and servants—all of whom participated in superintending his childhood. Their new home on Chestnut Street was located on top of an embankment that looked down on the Bay. Willie grew up in the sunshine, surrounded by lots of land, pets, and a beautiful hanging garden. From a distance, it seemed to be an idyllic childhood and as an adult William Randolph Hearst would describe it as such to his chosen biographer, Cora Older. But there were tensions, most of them having to do with George’s extended absences and his enveloping financial problems.¹⁶

Like most miners, even the most successful, George Hearst’s fortunes fluctuated wildly. Since it was virtually impossible to determine accurately where one claim ended and another began, mining entrepreneurs could spend half their lives—and hundreds of thousands of dollars in the courts—protecting their claims, bribing judges, hiring experts, and keeping armies of lawyers on retainer. Claim dispute cases took years to come to judgment—and until they did, it was difficult, if not impossible, to raise money by selling stock.

As a mining entrepreneur, George made his money not from getting ore out of the ground, but from buying and selling stock in mines. This all took capital—and connections to capital. When silver prices were high, he had no difficulty raising money to finance new ventures and pay off his old debts. But when prices fell, as they inevitably did, opportunities vanished and debts accumulated. George was a gambler, firmly convinced that in the long run everything would come out all right. He refused to plan with any other outcome in mind.

In the middle 1860s, he extended his investments—and his debts—from mines and mining stock to real estate. He bought commercial real estate in San Francisco in anticipation of the completion of the transcontinental railroad and purchased, for $30, 000, forty thousand acres of ranch land two hundred miles to the south, near San Simeon Bay in the Santa Lucia Mountains. The land was in a coastal region rich with mineral deposits. It was also valuable for agriculture.

In 1865, George Hearst was in his mid-forties, past the age when most successful miners return to civilization to enjoy the fruits of their labor. In the fall, he returned to San Francisco to accept the Democratic nomination for the state assembly. He had a young wife, a young son, sufficient business dealings and court cases in San Francisco to keep him busy, and close ties to the local Democratic party clubs which he had been supporting for several years. It is unlikely that he had intended to retire from mining entirely. The state legislature was in session only a few months a year, which left him with long stretches of time to return to the digging fields.

The Democratic party in 1865 was in the midst of a revival brought about by the arrival of large numbers of German and Irish immigrants and Southerners from border states like Missouri who, like Hearst, were Democrats and opposed the Civil War. It was their votes that elected George Hearst in November.

Though Sacramento, the state capital, was closer to San Francisco than the digging fields of Nevada and Idaho, Phoebe and George still lived apart most of the time. Mr. Hearst is at home now, Phoebe confided to her diary on New Year’s Day, 1866, but "he will return to Sacramento on Wednesday. I will be lonely again. He is absent so much.... Times are hard. My husband has lost a great deal of money lately. He is feeling low spirited and I feel like encouraging all I possibly can. This is the beginning of a new year. May God help me to do my duty in all things."¹⁷

When George was unable to come home to San Francisco for the weekend—which was most of the time—Phoebe and Willie were left with no choice but to take the overnight steamer to Sacramento. They stayed with George at the Brannan House on Front and J Streets. He misses his big playroom and many toys, Phoebe wrote in her diary on January 9. She was every bit as miserable as Willie in Sacramento. She felt out of place among the politicians’ wives and lost in the whirl of social events. She was also worried about her perfect son’s increasingly imperfect behavior.

On January 4, Willie, almost three years old now, had put castor oil on her handsome moiré antique dress so I had to dress twice. On January 10, when Governor Stanford’s wife and her sister came calling, he misbehaved again. On February 11, he was very full of mischief and I always feel anxious for fear he will act badly and disturb someone. On February 15, he misbehaved so badly that she had to remove him from the table. On February 16, back home again, she confided to her diary that she was no longer comfortable anywhere else. When Willie is with more children he is so much harder to control.¹⁸

Many years later, Phoebe would confess to her grandson, Bill Hearst, Jr. that his father hadn’t been easy to discipline as a child. His forte was an irrepressible imagination.¹⁹

In adulthood, Hearst would take pride in his boyish misbehavior. In 1941, at the age of 78, he devoted several of his In the News columns to stories of childhood pranks—setting his room on fire, hurling a cobblestone through his dancing instructor’s window, tying a string tight around the tail of a neighbor’s cat, shooting at pigeons out of a hotel window with a toy cannon loaded with real gunpowder. Though he wrote these articles to recapture a lost childhood and to show his readers that he was much more of a regular guy than the tyrant and tycoon he had been portrayed as for half a century, what is most striking is that each of these vignettes tells the same tale of a small boy trying desperately to call attention to himself.

In one of the stories, little Willie sets off fireworks in his bedroom after the grownups have gone to bed. Then he opened the door and shrieked down the silent halls of the sleeping house: ‘Fire! Fire! Fire!’ Then he shut the door, locked it and awaited events. As smoke filled the hallway, his parents tried to break down the door to his room, while the cook called firemen who pried open his window and turned the hose on Willie and his fireworks. The story ends with Willie being warmed good-naturedly by his father. But, with all his pretense of severity, Willie’s pap never did warm Willie as he deserved. If he had done so Willie might have grown up to be a better—columnist. What comes across is the story of a little boy trying to establish some connection with his parents. The joke at the end covers the child’s astonishment—and perhaps disappointment—at not being severely reprimanded and thereby taken seriously.

In another column on youth and child-rearing, Hearst cited a Professor Shaler who once told his class at Harvard that he did not mind boys being bad as long as they were not wicked. Hearst concluded with a veiled retroactive explanation of his childhood misbehavior. Sometimes boys are bad just because they do not want to be considered sissies.

Did Willie worry, as a child, that he was a sissy? Probably. It must not have been easy living up to the image of his tobacco-chewing, millionaire miner father. Though Willie was big and, despite Phoebe’s constant worries, healthy, he was neither athletic nor particularly rugged. When Willie’s father questioned whether the small private school he attended was doing him any good and suggested that he might instead go to the public schools, Phoebe asked if the public schools were not rather rough-and-tumble for a delicate child like Willie?

‘I do not see anything particularly delicate about Willie,’ replied Willie’s father...‘If the public schools are rough-and-tumble they will do him good. So is the world rough-and-tumble. Willie might as well learn to face it.’

Before ending this particular story, Hearst paused to correct his mother’s characterization. Willie was not delicate at all, but he was something of a ‘mother’s boy’—and has always been mighty glad of it.

What are we to make of these stories? They are a strange amalgam of apology and pride, a plea for understanding combined with an arrogant self-defense. They are, as well, an attempt by an old man to make sense of his history by mythologizing his less than idyllic childhood.²⁰

Phoebe Apperson had married a rich man and had expected to live as a rich man’s wife, but by early 1866, only three and a half years into her marriage, she was forced to retrench. The Ophir mine in the Comstock region had played itself out sooner than expected, George had suffered a disastrous loss in the courts, and, as he later told an interviewer, lost all the loose money I had in San Francisco real estate ventures. Nothing was hidden from Phoebe. Though his investments would eventually pay out, he did not know when. Nor could he predict when friends and partners like William Lent—whose son Gene was Willie Hearst’s best friend—would pay back the money they owed him.

I feel that we must live more quietly and be economical, Phoebe wrote in the diary she kept in early 1866. I have sent the horses to Pa’s.... We have sold the Rockaway [carriage] for two hundred dollars. The coachman goes away tomorrow. By doing this we will save $100 every month. That Sunday, she was forced to miss church. Have no carriage and the mud is terrible. Two weeks later, after waiting nearly an hour for her hired carriage to arrive, she complained in her diary that she missed her own team very much, but I must not complain for we must live according to our means.²¹

Had financial woes been the only family problems in the Hearst household, young Willie might have been less affected by them. But Phoebe and George were in the midst of what appeared to be an extended argument. Though George was now far from the mining camps, he continued to live as though he were a single man. He may have been seeing other women. He drank and smoked too much, paid little attention to dress and deportment, did not even keep his boots clean. He refused, for one reason or another, sickness or weariness or simple stubbornness, to accompany her to church. "My husband is not a member of any church, and comes so near to being an infidel it makes me shudder" she had written on February 4. It is hard for me to contend against this influence on my boy. He will soon be large enough to notice these things.²²

There were other difficulties as well. George wanted to stay out late at social occasions, but Phoebe worried too much about Willie to have a good time. After the Legislative Ball in Sacramento in 1866, she wrote, Instead of enjoying myself I cried until I was almost sick. I felt uneasy about Baby and wanted to go home before Geo. was really ready. He was angry etc., etc.... Oh! I wish I never had to go to another party.²³

In the spring of 1866, after the assembly session had recessed, Phoebe took a vacation from her troubles—and her three-year-old child. She sailed away to the Hawaiian Islands for a month with her brother Elbert, who was sixteen. George spent the spring and summer in Idaho investigating new mining properties. Willie was shipped off to his grandparents’ farm in Santa Clara.

In June, Phoebe returned to California, but then left Willie again in September to visit George in Idaho. This time, she was gone for over a month. She wrote a letter to Eliza Pike after she got back to San Francisco:

I went on up the country to Walla Walla and from there took the stage and went to a valley on the Lewiston road. There I waited three days until Geo. came. He was so glad to see me. It repaid me fully for the long trip. He had been sick and looked worse than I ever saw him, he was not ready to come home, was obliged to return to the mountains away out on the clear water above the Columbia River. So after staying there about twelve days I left for home. I could not go with him to the mines or be near him, but I was glad I went to see him. I enjoyed the trip very much, saw some of finest scenery in the world.... I was gone just a month ... I was glad to get home again to see Willie. He was well and fat. He has grown tall too.... Willie is sound asleep. I wish you could see him—he is a great comfort to me. He talks to me sometimes when we are alone like an old man, he understands so much. He does not want to go to his grandma’s again, seems to be afraid all the time that I will go away and leave him again. He says he likes this home best, and loves me as big as the house and sky and everything.²⁴

Phoebe accepted the burden of being a miner’s wife and went out of her way to visit and spend time with her husband in the mining camps, but he never quite reciprocated. His visits to San Francisco were always abbreviated, often unannounced, usually stopovers on longer journeys from one mining camp to another. She learned to live without him and to concentrate her attention and affection on her son. George arrived in San Francisco in November 1866, then left for a new mining camp almost as soon as he had arrived. He was absent from the City a long while, his trip was by no means profitable, Phoebe wrote Eliza, and went on:

I don't think of going there this year with him—you know he can't stay at home long—I have made up my mind to not fret about it. I cannot help feeling lonely but may as well take things quietly. I am so well and fleshy you would be quite surprised. I was obliged to alter two or three of my closest fitting dresses, isn't that funny? But no signs of a little sister yet ... Willie is not so fond of [Elbert] as he used to be. I scarcely ever leave Willie with anyone now—he can't bear to stay when I go down town and he is very good usually when he goes visiting with me. I don't think Alice [the new nanny] is cross to him, but she is very careless and I dislike for him to learn any of her habits. He being with me so constantly has made him perfectly devoted to me. He is a real little calf about me, he never wants anyone else to do anything for him, as I think I love him better than ever before, some days I do very little but amuse him. He knows several of his letters and will soon learn them all. He is very wise and sweet. I have wanted to have his picture taken, but he has had a small ringworm on his face and I have been waiting for that to disappear entirely which will soon be the case.²⁵

Phoebe’s disappearances (two of them, each a month long, in a four-month period), coupled with George’s extended absences, may have taken a toll on their son. Phoebe confided to Eliza that Willie had been very much put out when his father came home because he could not sleep with me. I talked to him and told him when his Papa went away again, he could sleep with me. He said, well, he wished he would go.²⁶

Willie took sick early in 1867—he was a few months shy of his fourth birthday—and Phoebe put aside everything to nurse him back to health. Being with me so constantly, he became very babyish, and wanted his Mama on all occasions, when he was sick, she wrote Eliza. "He would say so often day and nights ‘Mama I want to tell you something.’ I would say—‘What Willie.’ His answer would be, ‘I love you.’ His Papa laughed at me a great deal about it, saying Willie waked me up in the night to tell me he loved me, bless his little heart. I delighted to have him well again.... Willie talks a great deal and in that manly way. He asks reasons for everything and when he tells anything he gives his reasons. He has improved very much. Has fine ideas. Thinks a great deal. I have taught him most of his letters. He loves books and play both.... I have taken him with me when I go out, so that he thinks I can’t go without him and it is almost the case.... He is a great comfort to me, and I hope he will be a good man, they are scarce.... Mr. Hearst has been home all this winter. Has been very well. We begin to feel more like married people than before, we have been very quiet, have not attended a single party and only been to the theatre once and to see the Japanese jugglers once. Took Willie both times those jugglers are splendid....Willie tried to turn summersetts, climb poles."

George’s continuing financial problems had brought an end to their social life. The finest party ever given in California will be at the Lick House ... the dining room so surpasses anything I have ever seen ... We have an invitation, Phoebe wrote Eliza, but are not going. I would have to get a handsome dress. It would be both troublesome and expensive and often after all would not pay. I don’t care about all the furbelows and vanity.... We have a good home and enough to live on. That is much to be thankful for. If our little man is spared to us we will try to give him a fine education if nothing more.... I am still studying French, one lesson per week. Will soon be through. I can speak very well now ... A great many are going to the world’s fair [in Paris]. I wish I could go, but I can’t, and it does no good to think about it.²⁷

In 1867, after one two-year term, George retired from the state assembly. His financial problems were more serious than ever. While they were able to hold on to their home in San Francisco, their land at San Simeon, and some of their stocks, there was very little left over. George returned to the digging fields, this time as adviser or partner in mines up and down the West Coast, from Idaho to Mexico. He and Phoebe renewed their separate lives. There was no talk of his returning home to stay now. He was a fulltime consultant and entrepreneur, on the road twelve months a year.

Phoebe’s and George’s correspondence was marked by a strange competition as each tried to convince the other that he or she led the more difficult life, Phoebe particularly, because George’s extended absences made it difficult for her to have the second child she so fervently wished for. In her letters to Eliza, she reported regularly that there were no signs yet of a little sister for Willie, but that she kept hoping next month might be different.²⁸ George’s letters were filled with worries about his health, his homesickness, and the trustworthiness of his companions. Each insisted that the other did not visit often enough or, having visited, did not stay long enough.

In the spring of 1867, with George in Idaho—and money still very much an issue—Phoebe decided to rent out her San Francisco house and move south to her parents’ farm for the summer. Everything was so uncertain, she wrote Eliza. She didn’t see a bright future. The following summer, she rented her house again, but this time for six months, and with Willie, who was now five, traveled East on free railroad passes which George had secured during his tenure in the state assembly. Worried that during her absence George would abandon all the civilizing she had brought to the marriage, she wrote him constantly with reminders to change his clothing regularly.

"I do hope you will have respect enough for yourself and me to keep yourself well dressed and clean" she wrote him in mid-July. Nothing can make me feel worse than to think you are going about shabby and dirty ... Please write me if you have any new clothes and if you have your washing done and be sure not to forget to pay for it. I know how care[less] and forgetful you are, though you don’t intend to be so.²⁹

It was not easy for anyone to travel across the country in the late 1860s, especially