Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
I
Great Expectations
One
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 full-time 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 middle 1860s, especially a young woman and a five-year-old boy
without family or servants to assist them. Phoebe was undaunted.
After visiting her relatives in Missouri, she traveled to Reading,
Pennsylvania, where she deposited Willie with Eliza Pike, then set
off with family friends to tour the East Coast. Phoebe and Willie's
great adventure did not go entirely as planned. In her letters,
Phoebe complained about Willie's wildness when they were together and
about missing him when they were apart. Their first extended
separation was so painful that she wrote Eliza an urgent letter from
Baltimore where she was visiting, begging her to bring Willie on the
next train south for a short visit.30
In September, while she was enjoying one of her side trips
without her son, he came down with a serious case of food poisoning
and she had to return to Reading to be with him. Willie begged to be
taken home. Phoebe instead took him back to Missouri for another
visit with his cousins. Unwilling to ride the railways again without
a male escort, Phoebe asked George to come and fetch them. When he
refused, citing the demands of his Idaho mines, she booked passage on
steamers from New York to California via Panama.
On the second steamer leg of their long journey home, just
outside Acapulco, Willie fell ill again, this time with typhoid
fever. George met their ship in San Francisco and stayed with Phoebe
and Willie at the Lick House until the boy was healthy. When he had
recovered from his illness, Phoebe, worried not only about his health
but about her own, took him to Santa Clara for the rest of the
winter. Though she had been vaccinated more than thirteen times, she
was particularly fearful of contracting smallpox in the city. Willie
did not return home to Chestnut Street until March 1, 1869. He was
nearly six years old now and had been away for almost a year.31
Willie should have begun school in the fall of 1868 when he was five
and a half, but Phoebe had instead taken him with her on their
Eastern tour. The following September, she kept him at home again.
Finally, when he was seven and a half, she enrolled him in a small
private school on Vallejo Street, only to withdraw him two months
later to accompany her on an extended visit to her parents' ranch in
Santa Clara. "I did not like to have him out of school even for such
a short time," she wrote to Eliza Pike, "but the weather is or has
been so lovely I thought it best to come down here before the rain
commenced. I have heard Willie's lessons every day so he will be able
to go on with his class." Early in the new year, Phoebe let Willie
return to school to complete the grade.32
When Willie switched to a public school the following year,
Phoebe instructed the servants to keep steady watch on the boy's
whereabouts and companions. According to Cora Older, who was later
chosen by Hearst to write his biography and given access to family
papers, Phoebe was so worried about the "toughs" in his class that
she sent her coachman to fetch him after school. Only after Willie
pleaded with her for permission to walk home like the other boys did
she relent.33
"I take great pleasure in amusing and interesting him at
home," Phoebe informed Eliza Pike in May of 1871, just after Willie's
eighth birthday, "so that he may be kept as much as possible from bad
children. Of course, I must allow him to have company often but I
manage to watch them closely. So far he is a very innocent child and
I mean to keep him so just as long as I can. . . . He is a great
comfort to us. Mr. Hearst is so proud of him and too indulgent to try
to keep from spoiling him. . . . Mr. Hearst often says he would not
like to have Willie on a jury if his Mama was concerned, for whether
it was justice or not, he would decide in my favor. . . . I am so
sorry we have no other children. We love babies so dearly, why we are
not blessed I cannot understand . . . I have had the dressing room
adjoining my bedroom all fixed up for Willie, a nice bed put up. It
is a pretty little room and so near me, he is very much pleased."34
At age nine, after he had had only two years of classes,
Phoebe removed Willie from school once more, probably so that he
could spend all his time with her. The following spring, she rented
out the Chestnut Street house for a year, secured from George a ten-
thousand-dollar bill of credit, and deputized her ten-year-old son to
take her on the grand tour of Europe she had dreamed of since her
marriage.
For the next eighteen months, mother and son visited every
important museum, gallery, palace, and church in Ireland, Scotland,
England, France, Italy, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, Austria, and
Germany, most of them more than once; they perfected their French and
Willie learned German; they met the pope in Rome and had dinner with
the American consul; they read Shakespeare in the evening and travel
books all day long; and together they acquired an education in
European art, culture, and history.
Phoebe had originally planned to return to California in the
fall of 1873, but soon after arriving began talking about extending
her stay. "If you are fully decided you cannot come, I shall not feel
contented to remain away many months longer," Phoebe wrote to George
in August of 1873, still early in their tour, "though as we are here,
and never likely to come again, we ought to see all that it is
possible to see and try not to be homesick. I want you to write me
what you think. I am sure you are lonely and need us to cheer you. I
feel conscience stricken about having so much enjoyment with you at
home worrying and working. Does my love and my society when with you
compensate for all? I hope we will yet have many happy years
together. Willie certainly will have great benefit by this trip. It
is in many respects better than school."35
Phoebe had long planned for this trip, though she had
envisioned traveling with her husband George at her side, not ten-
year-old Willie. Left to her own devices, she booked trains, hired
carriages, located and negotiated the fee for room and boarding in
appropriately priced and respectable hotels, found interesting people
to travel with, arranged for Willie to have drawing, French, German,
arithmetic, and English lessons, organized guided tours and day
trips, and found time every evening to write several dense but
legible twenty-page letters without errors, ink smudges, or spelling
mistakes - and all this on relatively modest resources.
Their trip unfolded into a journey of epic proportions. While
George complained of being "ill" and "blue" and missing his wife "and
the Boy" more than ever, he never hesitated to send Phoebe the
letters of credit she requested with permission to extend her stay.
Unlike most American tourists who traveled straight to Florence or
Rome, Phoebe began her trip in Scotland, Ireland, and England, toured
Germany and the low countries, wintered in Italy, and then traveled
north to Paris where Willie temporarily attended school with Eugene
Lent, his friend from San Francisco.36
Willie, Phoebe reported, had been a bit homesick early on,
but he was as energetic and enthusiastic a tourist as she was. From
Florence, where they spent much of November and December, Phoebe
wrote Eliza with a description of their daily activities. Willie had
three hours of lessons in the morning and then went out with his
mother "to the galleries, palaces, churches, etc." In the evenings,
while Willie prepared the next day's lessons and read books on Italy,
Phoebe wrote her letters or studied. She had, in mid-December, "just
finished reading 'Notes on Italy' by Hawthorne." On the weekends,
mother and son went on "excursions to the various places a little in
the suburbs or on the surrounding hills where we have grand views of
the city and surroundings. Sundays we go to church, in the afternoon,
take a delightful drive around the city or in the beautiful park. So
we are always busy. . . . I wish we could stay another year."37
The financial news from home continued to be bad. The
bankruptcy of the Northern Pacific Railroad and the failure of Jay
Cooke and Company, one of the nation's largest investment houses, had
turned the American economy upside down. Businessmen like George
Hearst, already heavily in debt, were squeezed even tighter in the
Panic of 1873 as 1800 American banks folded and those still solvent
scrambled to call in outstanding loans. Though George managed to hold
on to his real estate, he was forced to dispose of most of his
remaining assets.38
Phoebe suggested that they sell their Chestnut Street
house. "We can board in Oakland and live much cheaper," she wrote her
husband from Paris in April of 1874. "Let the money for the place be
invested or put at interest for Willie and I. It may be all we will
have to educate him."39
When Willie Hearst returned to San Francisco in October of
1874, he found that his childhood home and all that was in it had
been sold to pay his father's debts, as Phoebe had suggested. Willie
and his mother were forced to board with family friends and then move
into rented quarters.
Willie Hearst would spend the rest of his boyhood moving from
school to school and from rented quarters to rented quarters. He had,
however, already begun to find an antidote to the continued
disruptions in his daily life. While in Europe, Phoebe had written
George that their son was becoming a collector. He was intent on
surrounding himself with objects that belonged to him and could not
be taken away. "He wants all sorts of things," she wrote on July 28,
and then, a week later, added that he had developed "a mania for
antiquities, poor old boy" and enjoyed, above all else, talking about
all the wonderful things he and his mother were going to bring back
home. In London, he tried to convince his mother to buy him the four
specially bred white horses that pulled the English royal carriages.
In Germany, he collected the colorful comic books the Germans called
Bilderbücher, and coins, stamps, beer steins, pictures of actors and
actresses, and porcelains. In Venice, he bought glass objects. Phoebe
tried to persuade him that they could not buy everything they saw,
but, as she confessed to George, the boy "gets so fascinated, his
reason and judgement forsake him."40
Werner Muensterberger, the author of Collecting: An Unruly
Passion, has observed that many great collectors suffer as children
from the sudden and unexplained absence of their parents. To
alleviate feelings of vulnerability, "aloneness and anxiety," he
says, they invest their favorite objects with magical qualities;
those objects, in turn, provide them with the sense of permanence,
affirmation, and security that is missing from their lives. Young
Willie Hearst at age ten had already begun to invest an inordinate
amount of energy in accumulating and possessing "objects," in some
part, we might suspect, because, in Muensterberger's words, they
could "be relied upon to satisfy a demand instantly. Their essential
function [was] to be there always."41
Hearst's childhood was defined by impermanence. He had, by
the time he was ten years old, lived many different lives: the rich
boy in the mansion at the top of the hill, the new kid forced to
attend public school because his father had run out of money, the
pampered child who toured Europe, the boy who boarded with his
mother. There was no center, no place that he could call his own. His
parents and grandparents were transplants from Missouri. He himself
had been born and raised in San Francisco, but had lived almost as
much of his life on the road. School had provided no continuity, not
even from grade to grade. He was shifted and shunted, withdrawn and
newly enrolled in school after school, without rhyme or reason. It
was hard to keep friends or feel that you belonged to a place - or it
to you - when you were always being pulled away.
His father he seldom saw and never knew. The one fixed point
in his life was his mother, to whom he was devoted. But she too had
disappointed him, disappearing too often and too early. And it was
she who was always uprooting him from Chestnut Street, the only home
he had ever known: to Sacramento and Santa Clara, to the East for six
months, and Europe for eighteen.
Copyright (c) 2000 by David Nasaw. All rights reserved. Reprinted by
permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.
