The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst (43 page)

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Authors: Kenneth Whyte

BOOK: The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst
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The one club that did hold Hearst’s interest was the American Yacht Club at Milton Point, a relatively new establishment founded by Jay Gould and friends, not for sailors but for steam craft owners. While it counted many wealthy and respectable gentlemen among its members, the AYC was regarded as a “rather ‘fast ’ place where the more conservative members hesitated to bring their families.” Hearst served as vice-commodore and berthed his new yacht at the club. His old boat, the
Vamoose
, might have been the fleetest thing on water but its builders had sacrificed everything in the way of comfort and stability to velocity, and Hearst had put it up for sale almost the moment it set its speed records. In 1896 he purchased the 138-foot
Unquowa
, “a large, powerful, and well-equipped yacht, and a very convenient passenger craft.” It afforded him the odd day of recreation when news was slow.
2
 
Another favorite pastime, and one that fit more easily into Hearst’s busy schedule, was shopping. A quick stroll west from his Lexington home brought him to Manhattan’s most opulent commercial strip. While still a rough stone road plied by horse-drawn omnibuses, Fifth above 23rd was lined at all hours of the day with the footmen, the toy dogs, and the gleaming lacquered carriages of New York’s grand dames. Hearst was always in and out of the stores, dropping impressive sums at galleries, book dealers, and the haberdashers who supplied his favorite striped shirts and circus ties. (He once carried home a wild collection of new cravats and asked his butler for an opinion. “I doubt these are any worse than your others,” Thompson replied.)
3
 
Much as he enjoyed Fifth, greater thrills awaited Hearst a few steps farther west. New York’s robust theater district was centered on a two-mile stretch of Broadway between 23rd and 42nd streets, spilling over onto Sixth and Seventh Avenues and assorted side streets. There were forty-one stages in total, more than in London’s West End. Establishments at the southern extreme of the strip competed with the Tenderloin’s cheap taverns and streetwalkers. Those in the middle and at the northern tip—Garrick’s Majestic, Daly’s, the Empire, the Casino, Weber and Fields’ Music Hall—were surrounded by lobster palaces and sumptuous hotels. Broadway was lit like no other street in the world. It had glittering marquees, billboards for Coney Island and Heinz pickles, and New York’s first electric street lamps. The boulevardier Diamond Jim Brady called it “the Street of the Midnight Sun.”
4
The name that stuck was the Great White Way.
 
The Broadway stage offered everything from crude burlesque to song-and-dance variety to Shakespeare and Ibsen. Men arrived for opening nights in horse-drawn carriages, wearing white tie and tails or dinner coats with white silk scarves and black silk hats. Women wore high collars under ermine and sable, piled their hair under big feathered hats, and trailed clouds of perfume. A hit show at the popular Casino might attract the socialites Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish and Mrs. Herman Oelrichs, the millionaires Jesse Lewisohn and James Keene, the impresario Oscar Hammerstein, the voluptuaries Stanford White and Jim Brady, Tammany’s Boss Croker, the author Richard Harding Davis, and the newspaper phenom William Randolph Hearst.
5
 
Hearst had been drawn to the stage as a boy in San Francisco, haunting the new California Theatre on Bush Street where Edwin Booth performed his famous Hamlet and the gorgeous Adelaide Neilson her equally renowned Juliet. He was also fond of the great black entertainer Billy Emerson, king of the city’s lively minstrel community. Hearst memorized Emerson’s comic songs and practiced his dance steps until he had them cold. He would perform for his friends on makeshift stages and became good enough that his mother worried he might want a stage career. At Harvard, Hearst impressed his friends with his vaudeville shuffles and banjo playing. He took the comic role of Pretzel, a German valet with “a penchant for legerdemain,” in the Hasty Pudding’s historical burlesque
Joan of Arc, The Old Maid of Orleans.
He considered himself a highlight of the show. Apart from family entertainments and the odd newsroom jig, his performing days ended in college, but his love of theater endured.
 
Hearst’s preferred Broadway fare was the musical comedy of Joe Weber and Lew Fields, a pair of East Side New Yorkers and one of the all-time top comedy teams. Weber and Fields had started on the vaudeville circuit and laughed their way up to an eponymous palace on the strip. Along the way, they gave the world the custard pie in the face and one of its most durable jokes: “Who was that lady I saw you with last night?”asked Weber. “She was no lady,” snorted Fields. “She was my wife.”
6
A typical Weber and Fields program opened with a flurry of song-and-dance numbers and comedy skits, and closed with a send-up of either a current Broadway hit or a dramatic masterwork—Molière, for instance, parodied as Cyrano de Bric-a-Brac.
 
Weber and Fields were no threat to Molière or any other serious playwright, but they were impressive in their own right—successful popular artists in the nascent world of American show business, forerunners of any number of Broadway, Vegas, and Hollywood acts. They forged a specialty in smart, funny, iconoclastic commentaries on New York life, drawing on class and ethnic conflict in the new urban jungle, exploring such topical phenomena as newspapers, bicycles, telephones, elevators, and Teddy Roosevelt. Their audiences were not as tony as those at established theatrical houses, but critics found them sharp: a wry social observation, a nimble physical comedian, or a catchy new tune would not pass unappreciated. Their patrons were also numerous and loyal enough that Weber and Fields were able to hire first-tier musical and dramatic talent. They signed Lillian Russell, the reigning queen of operetta and the highest-paid actress in America, at $40,000 a year.
7
They auctioned season seats to cover the cost, with Hearst among the buyers. (He would later confess that the teenage crush he had on Russell in San Francisco was so “tense, dramatic, and ecstatic” that he considered proposing.
8
) Weber and Fields presented their star in a spoof of Feydeau’s
The Girl from Maxim’s.
“You might bring me a demitasse,” she tells a waiter. “Bring me the same,” says her millionaire boyfriend, “and a cup of coffee.”
9
 
Hearst wasn’t especially interested in high culture, with the exception of the visual arts. Years of ambling through European museums and galleries with his mother, combined with an art history course at Harvard and further study on his own time, had trained his eye and made him an astute collector. He was reasonably well read. His letters to his mother show a familiarity with Dickens and Thackeray and a keenness for Greek and Roman history. But he dodged the symphony and the grand opera, and he did not belong to a salon or write essays in the quarterlies. There were more sensitive aesthetes and deeper intellects all over New York. Aside from his areas of specialized interest, Hearst’s tastes ran to popular American commercial entertainment, most of it clever and unapologetically middlebrow and entirely consistent with his “democratic tendencies” in social and political affairs. Hearst probably felt a kinship with Weber and Fields, who were in a sense the Hearsts of Broadway. By bringing new levels of talent and ambition to light musical entertainment, they expanded its appeal while raising its quality, much as Hearst was doing with one-cent papers.
 
Weber and Fields were experienced enough to know better than to trust their fortunes entirely to comedic timing and catchy tunes. They also had girls—nightly parades of comely singers, dancers, and bit players, collectively known as chorus girls. They were young, often teenagers, and the desired look was tall and athletic, with extra points for swan necks and pert noses. Physically, there was little to distinguish them from the new ideal of womanhood popularized by the magazine illustrator Charles Dana Gibson. But Gibson’s girls existed in parlors and opera boxes, bearing the unmistakable stamp of social privilege, and however spirited, they also respected prevailing notions of virtue and female subordination. The chorus girl, gainfully employed and relatively independent thanks to her talent and looks, represented a different sort of glamour—less for marrying, more for sport. “She was gay,” wrote Theodore Dreiser, “showy, sexy, youthful, of course—the type that had led the world to dancing and madness since the beginning of time.” She ran with a set of millionaires and celebrities in a shimmering world of “yacht parties, midnight suppers, dances and backstage scenes.” For many young men, Hearst included, her lack of social pedigree was either irrelevant or a bonus.
10
 
The quintessential Gilded Age chorines were the Florodora girls.
Florodora,
imported from London, book and lyrics by Owen Hall, was a forgettable musical comedy but for a single song and dance piece known as “Tell Me, Pretty Maiden.” This number, as staged at the Casino, featured six Gibsonesque darlings of impressive and equal height and fine identical figures. They were clad in matching black ostrich-plumed hats with long pink dresses and parasols. The girls strolled across the stage on the arms of handsome young men in evening attire. In response to a query from their escorts—“Tell me, Pretty Maiden, are there any more at home like you?”—they sang an unremarkable ditty answering in the affirmative. This pedestrian scene relied for its impact on the perfect similitude of the sextet and on a surprise ending: instead of smiling sweetly over the heads of their audience on the closing note, as was Broadway custom, the girls looked directly into the seats and winked. That cheeky twist brought the house down on opening night. The girls were called back for ten encores, and never for fewer than six through more than five hundred performances. The Florodora chorus was touted as the most attractive in the world and the girls were soon drawing salaries on par with newspaper editors. Every night they would exit the stage door to run a gauntlet of bachelors and sporting men offering flowers, pearls, furs, horses, stock tips, and real estate. All six would eventually marry millionaires, several of them titled.
11
 
Hearst, who usually attended the theater in the company of his close friends Jack Follansbee, George Pancoast, and Cosy Noble, regularly made his way backstage to meet the cast and the starlets. He had a thing for performing women, the more beautiful and talented the better. His boyhood infatuations with Adelaide Neilson and Lillian Russell hadn’t been passing fancies so much as the start of a pattern.
 
Sybil Sanderson, who had bewitched the teenaged Hearst in Monterey, was a gifted soprano. She had a pretty, round face, large dark eyes, porcelain skin, and an impressive figure. Like Hearst, she was the child of a successful California miner. They spent the summer in California swimming, riding horses, and walking on the beach, and might have married, had Phoebe not stepped in.
12
Hearst followed the same script a few years later in his affair with the dramatic actress Eleanor Calhoun, otherwise remembered as Phoebe’s “Devil fish.” Tall, slender, with brilliant blue eyes and a “thrilling” voice, she accepted his proposal only to have the engagement crushed under the heel of his mother.
13
 
Both of Hearst’s betrotheds would find success overseas. Sanderson, with her soaring vocal range, flourished in the Paris opera scene, becoming a favorite of the composer Jules Massenet and the most famous interpreter of his masterpiece,
Manon.
Calhoun distinguished herself as a fashion icon and actress in London. She received good notices as Dora in the play
Diplomacy
and enjoyed the company of Robert Browning, George Bernard Shaw, James McNeill Whistler, and Oscar Wilde. She would eventually marry Prince Stephen Lazar Eugene Lazarovich-Hrebelianovich of the royal house of Serbia.
 
The version of Will Hearst now presenting himself backstage on Broadway was more than a decade older than the youth known to Sanderson and Calhoun. Tall and slim, he had gained control of his gangly limbs, large hands, and feet, although he still tended to fidget. His face had settled into its mature form, with a little more flesh on his pale cheeks. His hair, parted in the middle, had begun its journey from blond to light brown and he remained clean-shaven. His tall forehead was unlined, and his close-set blue eyes were as striking as ever. His voice was unfortunate. It was said to bleat “thinly and flatly” like a toy flute, an odd sound from so large a man.
14
That was not the only incongruity. His rather loud wardrobe—checked suits, flashy neckwear, brightly colored bands on hard-brimmed straw hats, a long gold watch chain, and sporty high-laced shoes, light brown with fawn tops and mother-of-pearl buttons—was at odds with an otherwise reserved personality and his quiet good manners. The overall effect was not unpleasant, however, and his mother would not have been alone in thinking him a catch.
 
The showgirl who would win Hearst’s heart in New York was younger than any of her predecessors but perhaps the most fetching of the bunch. Millicent Willson was appearing with her sister Anita in the musical comedy
The Girl from Paris
at the Herald Square Theatre. Hearst biographers have represented the production as a “risqué” show, undisturbed by plot, featuring girls who showed “as much leg as possible without getting arrested.”
15
In fact, it was a rather decorous musical comedy by George Dance and Ivan Caryll, both of whom enjoyed enormous success on Broadway as well as in the West End. (Dance was knighted for his prodigious contributions to London theatre; Caryll collaborated with the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company when it wanted a break from Gilbert and Sullivan.)
The Girl from Paris
opened on December 6, 1896, and ran for the better part of a year. It was praised in the prudish
Times
for its “snap and vim.” The show’s “few suggestive hints” failed to shock the audience, according to the reviewer.
16
The Willson sisters performed in a dance number as “bicycle girls.” The audience would have been lucky to see their ankles.

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