The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst (45 page)

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Authors: Kenneth Whyte

BOOK: The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst
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The allegations of bribery were unfounded. Hearst had indeed accepted an advertising contract from the Southern Pacific, one the company expected would buy it preferential treatment in the
Examiner.
Hearst printed the ads, cashed the checks, and stepped up his attacks on Huntington. He had no qualms about taking money offered in ambiguous circumstances so long as his own actions were correct. The SP refused to pay the final $8,000 owed. The suggestion of venereal disease is without evidence but impossible to disprove. It would be repeated years later by other political enemies, along with the suggestion that Hannah Willson ran a brothel catering to John D. Rockefeller and his associates, and that Hannah and Millicent had worked as prostitutes.
30
 
All of the scandalous tales around Hearst make for juicy reading but they are invariably from second-hand or anonymous sources. There is nothing close to solid evidence to support any of them, despite years of digging by Hearst’s political and publishing enemies. He took up with Millicent in the midst of the morals campaign launched against him by the gray papers. Given the enmity toward him at that moment, any demonstrable connection between Hearst—the journalistic “procuress”—and real live prostitution would have been investigated, exposed, and exploited to the fullest. The New York dailies were not at all shy about covering transgressions, real or perceived, of prominent citizens. In fact, they were packed with tales of physical attacks, financial embezzlements, divorces, elopements, and exposed love nests among Manhattan’s elite. Hearst’s courtship of Millicent did not trouble the respectable press. Johnson’s accusations registered in Park Row only as a comment on the congressman’s scurrility.
31
 
That Phoebe Hearst and her niece, Anne Apperson Flint, considered Will’s behavior outrageous is, to a certain extent, understandable. Appearances mattered in their social circles, and Will did not play by their rules. Yet however much her friends clucked their tongues at her son’s antics, nothing he did impeded Phoebe’s movements through the highest reaches of Anglo-American society.
 
As a counterbalance to Phoebe’s perspective, Will’s “scandalous” personal conduct can be measured against that of his peers, particularly James Gordon Bennett Jr., Park Row’s virtuoso of debauchery. He is described in one reliable chronicle as a “swaggering, precociously dissolute lout who rarely stifled an impulse. He drank, wenched, yachted, and played polo with spectacular gusto, and when, late at night, he took it into his pickled brain to bound into the nearest Bennett coach and drive the team through the dark at a frothing pace, careening wildly around corners, thundering over bridges, bowling aside anything in his way, stripping off his clothing as the wayward vehicle flew along and caterwauling at the moon, no one afterward told him to behave.”
32
 
James Gordon Bennett Jr. was everything Hearst’s worst critics have supposed Hearst to be: a reckless, dissipated, cruel, selfish, erratic, temperamental, and ruinously insecure product of inherited wealth. Handed the
Herald
and its income of a million a year in his early twenties, Bennett displayed the contempt for working men often identified in heirs to fortune. He ruled his newspaper by “caprice and fear,” firing perfectly good employees if he didn’t like their haircuts or if his dogs didn’t take to them. He flew into furious rages when his reporters received more attention than he did. He used his letters columns to campaign against restaurants whose service had disappointed him. He would walk down the aisle of a world-class eatery, pulling the linen from each table just to hear the crockery smash on the floor. He rode his polo pony into the Newport Reading Room on a lark, and once threw a roll of banknotes into a fire because he did not like the way it was sitting in his pocket. Most famously, he celebrated New Year’s 1878 at the elegant home of his intended, Caroline May, by telling crude jokes in front of the ladies and relieving himself into either the fireplace or the grand piano (accounts vary). The next day, May’s brother, Fred, horsewhipped Bennett on the steps of the Union Club. The indignant publisher responded by challenging his assailant to a duel. Both men survived: May had aimed his pistol at the sky; Bennett shot to kill but missed. Suddenly unwelcome among New York’s elite, he headed for Europe and spent most of the rest of his life in exile. He remained, throughout all this, an excellent newspaperman.
 
Compared with Bennett, Hearst seems a bit of a square. Even in the more general context of Gay Nineties, Seeley-era New York, he comes up short. It is possible that he whiled away some hours in the Tenderloin but, as Sinclair acknowledges, there was nothing remarkable in that; it is difficult to build a case for Hearst as a womanizer when his principal lovemaking strategy had always been to hand his whole heart to a winsome young woman and cling desperately to her until his mother broke things up. His approach to Millicent was true to form. He fell deeply in love with the beautiful, talented, fun-loving teenager. He took her everywhere. “[It] was such a love affair,” said one acquaintance. “He was so terribly in love with her, you know. I mean, he wouldn’t let her leave his side. . . . [Millicent] couldn’t even go and buy a dress, he wanted to [go]. Sometimes it’s sort of fun: ‘Where are you going, Milly?’ ‘I want to go shopping.’ ‘You can’t go without me.’ And he went with her everywhere. Well, she was terribly in love with him so it was all right.”
33
Mrs. Flint, for all her criticism of her cousin, admitted that he was “a very straight-laced, clean-living man” and “not as promiscuous as the world said he was.”
 
Some aspects of Hearst’s behavior might have been racy or brazen, but he did not drink or smoke or gamble or run afoul of the law. He stayed out of the spotlight and clear of the law. As a willful, high-spirited son of privilege in a wide-open city, with a standing invitation to every conceivable personal indulgence, he was a poor excuse for a devil.
 
The public scrutiny and gossip never seemed to bother Hearst. He understood that personal and political attacks accompanied success in newspapers as in politics (which was one of the reasons Phoebe detested both professions). It would also have helped that he felt at least as much contempt for the social universe of
Town Topics
as it harbored for him. Mann’s mockery was a small price to pay for the freedom to disregard “the tiresome conventions of sedate society.” But, contrary to Anne Flint’s opinion, Hearst did worry about his mother’s feelings. In letters home, he routinely reassured her about his activities and urged her to ignore the rumor-mongers. He kept his picture and his social affairs out of his own and other dailies and he gave interviews only on business matters and politics. (Phoebe by contrast, earned press by showing up at parties “blazing with diamonds,” and by keeping company with elderly bachelors.)
34
Hearst did not end his romance with Millicent to please his mother, as he had ended previous relationships, but he was now in his thirties and Phoebe had not given the girl a chance.
 
One further blow to Hearst’s image as a sultanic sybarite is the fact that most of his nights on the town ended at the office. Millicent and Anita probably never guessed the first time they traipsed across the
Journal
’s wooden floors in evening slippers that they would be back again and again. Henry Klein, then a rewrite man at the paper, says the girls routinely arrived with his boss around midnight and stood around as Hearst spread the proposed layouts on the floor and got down on his knees to study them. Others nights Hearst would return to the paper alone. He would bust in, recalled Willis Abbot, “full of scintillating ideas and therewith rip my editorial page to pieces. Other pages were apt to suffer equally, and it was always an interesting spectacle to me to watch this young millionaire, usually in irreproachable evening dress, working over the forms.”
35
 
The fact is that while Hearst made time for recreation and romance, his overwhelming preoccupation was his newspapers. With his morning, evening, and Sunday editions, he had effectively launched three titles in close succession, without entirely removing himself from the newspaper war in San Francisco. He was up to his elbows in dozens of political controversies, some as local as a proposed new charter for New York City, some as large as Cuba. He did not write his own editorials, but he was the undisputed architect of his papers’ policies. He was guardian of the front page, living and dying by its relative strength against the competition each morning. He was the repository of what we would now call the “brand”—his newspapers’ vision, tone, and image—which made him crucial not only to editorial operations but also to marketing efforts, from posters to special events to promotional stunts. He was continually buying, installing, and upgrading his mechanical plant to accommodate a larger press run and enhanced color reproduction. Hearst delegated a lot of the
Journal
’s day-to-day business affairs, but he could not avoid monitoring its financial performance and cash flow, advertising bookings, ink and paper costs, and the distribution stream that daily delivered his wares to not only New York and its suburbs but as far away as Buffalo. He had a large staff to motivate, manage, and replenish. There were all manner of unscheduled problems that might interrupt his day: breaking news, attacks from rivals and wounded politicians, press failures. And then there were the unceasing, sleep-destroying pressures to always be fresh and lively, first and most compelling, to surprise and innovate and squeeze every ounce of competitive advantage out of available resources. It was a phenomenal workload and Hearst loved it. “To work hard, to study out intricate problems of newspaper detail . . . and to be anxious about many matters seems to be his ideal existence,” wrote Charles Edward Russell.
36
 
By the middle of 1897, with the election and the moral war behind him and with Millicent at his side, Hearst seems to have begun to relax and enjoy himself in New York. Charles Palmer was no longer writing Phoebe with concerns over Will’s health. His own letters to his mother were brief and upbeat, and relatively free of the panic he had often displayed in San Francisco. Morale in his newsroom was high and the
Journal
shone with exuberance and confidence. Hearst was clearly having fun making everyone else on Park Row miserable. “We did have fun really and that is the right word for it,” Hearst would say years later. “It was really fun, enjoyment. I don’t think [we] looked upon it as work at all. We couldn’t have been offered anything else that would have been as interesting as what we were doing, and as enjoyable as what we were doing.”
37
 
 
 
JOSEPH PULITZER, BY CONTRAST, was still not having fun. His problems started with his health. He spent the first few months of 1897 much as he had spent every other winter since his 1890 “retirement” announcement—in a futile search for relaxation and relief. Among his stops in the intervening years had been a sanitarium in Lucerne, a spa at Wiesbaden, and the mineral waters of Pfäfers-Bad. He’d consulted a long parade of medical specialists for his asthma, insomnia, nervous prostration, encroaching blindness, and general physical deterioration. The winter of 1897 took him to the German specialist Ernst Schweininger, who had made his reputation treating Bismarck. He examined Pulitzer at the Hotel Cap Martin, near Monaco, and for a gargantuan fee prescribed a new regimen of massage, baths, diet, and exercise. It did not help. If anything, his entourage believed, Pulitzer looked worse as a result. “I have never seen him so steadily and persistently gloomy,” wrote his secretary, Alfred Butes, to Kate Pulitzer, “or in so deep a gloom.” In his own letter to his wife, Pulitzer didn’t disagree: “I stopped smoking with the new year, have stopped drinking claret; have never been more careful in eating, have never taken so much exercise . . . as during the last six weeks . . . yet in spite of, or perhaps on account of this I am more miserable in some respects (physical)—than I have been in years.”
38
 
While Pulitzer still unburdened himself to Kate and complained incessantly that his seven young children did not write him regularly, as per his demands, he made little effort to be with them. He had decided that family was disruptive of his work routine and emotional equilibrium. He lived and traveled instead with a household of aides and secretaries, six or more at a time, all of them male, most of them single. (It is curious that Pulitzer’s sexuality has received far less attention than Hearst’s.) The young men were recruited through newspaper advertisements seeking intelligent, erudite, widely traveled individuals who were good sailors and prepared to live abroad. Candidates were subjected to extensive interviews on such matters as their ancestry, education, livelihood, political prejudices, musical preferences, magazine subscriptions, facility with languages, memory, health, temper, sense of humor, tact, and discretion. They were requested to submit a life history of around two thousand words. The most promising applicants finally met the great man himself. “I sat next to him,” wrote one in his diary, “and he pelted me with questions. Talk ranged from metaphysics to spiritualism, murder trials, and police reporting. A man with a most astonishing range of conversation. Tall, cadaverous, reddish beard . . . piercing but dead eyes, long bony hands; a fascinating yet terrifying figure. He is not quite blind, but cannot see to read even with the most powerful glasses.”
39
 
It was the combined job of successful applicants to minister to all of Pulitzer’s personal and professional needs, keeping him active, informed, and entertained, and to suffer without complaint his unpredictable rages and depressions. The pay was good. The accommodations were always first rate. The other men in Pulitzer’s service were capable and bright. It was nonetheless difficult work.

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