Big Money

Poor Little Rich Boy

William Randolph Hearst was an only son, the only chick in the richlyfeathered nest of George and Phebe Hearst.

In eighteen fifty George Hearst had left his folks and the farm in Franklin County, Missouri, and driven a team of oxen out to California. (In fortynine the sudden enormous flare of gold had filled the west;

the young men couldn’t keep their minds on their plowing, on feeding the swill to the pigs, on threshing the wheat

when the fires of gold were sweeping the Pacific Slope. Cholera followed in the ruts of the oxcarts, they died of cholera round the campfires, in hastilybuilt chinchinfested cabins, they were picked off by hostile Indians, they blew each other’s heads off in brawls.)

George Hearst was one of the few that made it;

he developed a knack for placermining;

as a prospector he had an accurate eye for picking a goldbearing vein of quartz;

after seven years in El Dorado County he was a millionaire, Anaconda was beginning, he owned onesixth of the Ophir Mine, he was in on Comstock Lode.

In sixtyone he went back home to Missouri with his pockets full of nuggets and married Phebe Apperson and took her back by boat and across Panama to San Francisco the new hilly capital of the millionaire miners and bought a mansion for her beside the Golden Gate on the huge fogbound coast of the Pacific.

He owned vast ranges and ranches, raised cattle, ran racehorses, prospected in Mexico, employed five thousand men in his mines, on his estates, lost and won fortunes in mining deals, played poker at a century a chip, never went out without a bag of clinkers to hand out to old friends down on their uppers,

and died in Washington

a senator,

a rough diamond, a lusty beloved whitebearded old man with the big beak and sparrowhawk eyes of a breaker of trails, the beetling brows under the black slouch hat

of an oldtimer.

Mrs. Hearst’s boy was born in sixtythree.

Nothing too good for the only son.

The Hearsts doted on their boy;

the big lanky youngster grew up solemneyed and selfwilled among servants and hired men, factotums, overseers, hangerson, old pensioners; his grandparents spoiled him; he always did everything he wanted. Mrs. Hearst’s boy must have everything of the best.

No lack of gold nuggets, twentydollar goldpieces, big silver cartwheels.

The boy had few playmates; he was too rich to get along with the others in the roughandtumble democracy of the boys growing up in San Francisco in those days. He was too timid and too arrogant; he wasn’t liked.

His mother could always rent playmates with icecream, imported candies, expensive toys, ponies, fireworks always ready to set off. The ones he could buy he despised, he hankered always after the others.

He was great on practical jokes and pulling the leg of the grownups; when the new Palace Hotel was opened with a reception for General Grant he and a friend had themselves a time throwing down handfuls of birdshot on the glass roof of the court to the consternation of the bigwigs and stuffedshirts below.

Wherever they went royally the Hearsts could buy their way,

up and down the California coast, through ranches and mining-towns

in Nevada and in Mexico,

in the palace of Porfirio Diaz;

the old man had lived in the world, had rubbed shoulders with rich and poor, had knocked around in miners’ hells, pushed his way through unblazed trails with a packmule. All his life Mrs. Hearst’s boy was to hanker after that world

hidden from him by a mist of millions;

the boy had a brain, appetites, an imperious will,

but he could never break away from the gilded apronstrings;

adventure became slumming.

He was sent to boardingschool at St. Paul’s, in Concord, New Hampshire. His pranks kept the school in an uproar. He was fired.

He tutored and went to Harvard

where he cut quite a swath as businessmanager of the Lampoon, a brilliant entertainer; he didn’t drink much himself, he was soft-spoken and silent; he got the other boys drunk and paid the bills, bought the fireworks to celebrate Cleveland’s election, hired the brassbands,

bought the creampies to throw at the actors from the box at the Old Howard,

the cannon crackers to blow out the lamps of herdic cabs with, the champagne for the chorines.

He was rusticated and finally fired from Harvard, so the story goes, for sending to each of a number of professors a chamberpot with the professor’s portrait tastefully engraved on it.

He went to New York. He was crazy about newspapers. Already he’d been hanging around the Boston newspaper-offices. In New York he was taken by Pulitzer’s newfangled journalism. He didn’t want to write; he wanted to be a newspaperman. (Newspapermen were part of that sharpcontoured world he wanted to see clear, the reallife world he saw distorted by a haze of millions, the ungraded lowlife world of American Democracy.)

Mrs. Hearst’s boy would be a newspaperman and a Democrat. (Newspapermen saw heard ate drank touched horsed kidded rubbed shoulders with real men, whored; that was life.)

He arrived home in California, a silent soft smiling solemneyed young man

dressed in the height of the London fashion.

When his father asked him what he wanted to do with his life,

he said he wanted to run the Examiner which was a moribund sheet in San Francisco which his father had taken over for a bad debt. It didn’t seem much to ask. The old man couldn’t imagine why Willie wanted the old rag instead of a mine or a ranch, but Mrs. Hearst’s boy always had his way.

Young Hearst went down to the Examiner one day and turned the office topsyturvy. He had a knack for finding and using bright young men, he had a knack for using his own prurient hanker after the lusts and envies of plain unmonied lowlife men and women (the slummer sees only the streetwalkers, the dopeparlors, the strip acts and goes back uptown saying he knows the workingclass districts); the lowest common denominator;

manure to grow a career in,

the rot of democracy. Out of it grew rankly an empire of print. (Perhaps he liked to think of himself as the young Caius Julius flinging his millions away, tearing down emblems and traditions, making faces at togaed privilege, monopoly, stuffedshirts in office;

Caesar’s life like his was a millionaire prank. Perhaps W.R. had read of republics ruined before;

Alcibiades, too, was a practical joker.)

The San Francisco Examiner grew in circulation, tickled the prurient hankers of the moneyless man

became The Monarch of the Dailies.

When the old man died Mrs. Hearst sold out of Anaconda for seven and a half millions of dollars. W.R. got the money from her to enter the New York field; he bought the Morning Journal

and started his race with the Pulitzers

as to who should cash in most on the geewhizz emotion.

In politics he was the people’s Democrat; he came out for Bryan in ninetysix; on the Coast he fought the Southern Pacific and the utilities and the railroad lawyers who were grabbing the state of California away from the first settlers; on election day in ninetysix his three papers in New York put out between them more than a million and a half copies, a record

that forced the World to cut its price to a penny.

When there’s no news make news.

“You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war,” he’s supposed to have wired Remington in Havana. The trouble in Cuba was a goldmine for circulation when Mark Hanna had settled national politics by planting McKinley in the White House.

Hearst had one of his bright young men engineer a jailbreak for Evangelina Cisneros, a fair Cuban revolutionist shoved into a dungeon by Weyler, and put on a big reception for her in Madison Square.

Remember the “Maine.”

When McKinley was forced to declare war on Spain W.R. had his plans all made to buy and sink a British steamer in the Suez Canal

but the Spanish fleet didn’t take that route.

He hired the Sylvia and the Buccaneer and went down to Cuba himself with a portable press and a fleet of tugs

and brandishing a sixshooter went in with the longboat through the surf and captured twentysix unarmed half-drowned Spanish sailors on the beach and forced them to kneel and kiss the American flag

in front of the camera.

Manila Bay raised the circulation of the Morning Journal to one million six hundred thousand.

When the Spaniards were licked there was nobody left to heckle but the Mormons. Polygamy titillated the straphangers, and the sexlife of the rich, and penandink drawings of women in underclothes and prehistoric monsters in four colors. He discovered the sobsister: Annie Laurie, Dorothy Dix, Beatrice Fairfax. He splurged on comics, the Katzenjammer Kids, Buster Brown, Krazy Kat. Get excited when the public is excited;

his editorials hammered at malefactors of great wealth, trusts, the G.O.P., Mark Hanna and McKinley so shrilly that when McKinley was assassinated most Republicans in some way considered Hearst responsible for his death.

Hearst retorted by renaming the Morning Journal the American

and stepping into the limelight

wearing a black frockcoat and a tengallon hat,

presidential timber,

the millionaire candidate of the common man.

Bryan made him president of the National Association of Democratic Clubs and advised him to start a paper in Chicago.

After Bryan’s second defeat Hearst lined up with Charles F. Murphy in New York and was elected to Congress.

His headquarters were at the Holland House; the night of his election he gave a big free show of fireworks in Madison Square Garden; a mortar exploded and killed or wounded something like a hundred people; that was one piece of news the Hearst men made that wasn’t spread on the front pages of the Hearst papers.

In the House of Representatives he was unpopular; it was schooldays over again. The limp handshake, the solemn eyes set close to the long nose, the small flabby scornful smile were out of place among the Washington backslappers. He was ill at ease without his hired gang around him.

He was happier entertaining firstnighters and footlight favorites at the Holland House. In those years when Broadway still stopped at Fortysecond Street,

Millicent Willson was a dancer in The Girl from Paris; she and her sister did a sister act together; she won a popularity contest in the Morning Telegraph

and the hand of

William Randolph Hearst.

In nineteen four he spent a lot of money putting his name up in electric lights at the Chicago Convention to land the Democratic nomination but Judge Parker and Wall Street got it away from him.

In nineteen five he ran for Mayor of New York on a municipal-ownership ticket.

In nineteen six he very nearly got the governorship away from the solemnwhiskered Hughes. There were Hearst for President clubs all over the country. He was making his way in politics spending millions to the tune of Waltz Me Around Again, Willie.

He managed to get his competitor James Gordon Bennett up in court for running indecent ads in the New York Herald and fined $25,000, a feat which hardly contributed to his popularity in certain quarters.

In nineteen eight he was running revelations about Standard Oil, the Archbold letters that proved that the trusts were greasing the palms of the politicians in a big way. He was the candidate of the Independence party made up almost exclusively, so his enemies claimed, of Hearst employees.

(His fellowmillionaires felt he was a traitor to his class but when he was taxed with his treason he answered:

You know I believe in property, and you know where I stand on personal fortunes, but isn’t it better that I should represent in this country the dissatisfied than have somebody else do it who might not have the same real property relations that I may have?)

By nineteen fourteen, although he was the greatest newspaper-owner in the country, the proprietor of hundreds of square miles of ranching and mining country in California and Mexico,

his affairs were in such a scramble he had trouble borrowing a million dollars,

and politically he was ratpoison.

All the millions he signed away

all his skill at putting his own thoughts

into the skull of the straphanger

failed to bridge the tiny Rubicon between amateur and professional politics (perhaps he could too easily forget a disappointment buying a firstrate writer or an embroidered slipper attributed to Charlemagne or the gilded bed a king's mistress was supposed to have slept in).

Sometimes he was high enough above the battle to see clear. He threw all the power of his papers, all his brilliance as a publisher into an effort to keep the country sane and neutral during the first world war;

he opposed loans to the Allies, seconded Bryan in his lonely fight to keep the interests of the United States as a whole paramount over the interests of the Morgan banks and the anglophile businessmen of the East;

for his pains he was razzed as a pro-German,

and when war was declared had detectives placed among his butlers,

secretserviceagents ransacking his private papers, gumshoeing round his diningroom on Riverside Drive to investigate rumors of strange colored lights seen in his windows.

He opposed the peace of Versailles and the league of victorious nations

and ended by proving that he was as patriotic as anybody

by coming out for conscription

and printing his papers with red white and blue borders and with little American flags at either end of the dateline and continually trying to stir up trouble across the Rio Grande

and inflating the Yankee Doodle bogey,

the biggest navy in the world.

The people of New York City backed him up by electing Hearst's candidate for Mayor, Honest John Hylan,

but Al Smith while he was still the sidewalks' hero rapped Hearst's knuckles when he tried to climb back onto the Democratic soundtruck.

In spite of enormous expenditures on forged documents he failed to bring about war with Mexico.

In spite of spraying hundreds of thousands of dollars into moviestudios he failed to put over his favorite moviestar as America's sweetheart.

And more and more the emperor of newsprint retired to his fief of San Simeon on the Pacific Coast, where he assembled a zoo, continued to dabble in movingpictures, collected warehouses full of tapestries, Mexican saddles, bricabrac, china, brocade, embroidery, old chests of drawers, tables and chairs, the loot of dead Europe,

built an Andalusian palace and a Moorish banquethall and there spends his last years amid the relaxing adulations of screenstars, admen, screenwriters, publicitymen, columnists, millionaire editors,

a monarch of that new El Dorado

where the warmedover daydreams of all the ghettos

are churned into an opiate haze

more scarily blinding to the moneyless man

more fruitful of millions

than all the clinking multitude of double eagles

the older Hearst minted out of El Dorado County in the old days (the empire of the printed word continues powerful by the inertia of bigness; but this power over the dreams

of the adolescents of the world

grows and poisons like a cancer),

and out of the westcoast haze comes now and then an old man's querulous voice

advocating the salestax,

hissing dirty names at the defenders of civil liberties for the workingman;

jail the reds,

praising the comforts of Baden-Baden under the blood and bludgeon rule of Handsome Adolph (Hearst's own loved invention, the lowest common denominator come to power

out of the rot of democracy)

complaining about the California incometaxes,

shrilling about the dangers of thought in the colleges.

Deport; jail.

Until he dies

the magnificent endlesslyrolling presses will pour out print for him, the whirring everywhere projectors will spit images for him,

a spent Caesar grown old with spending

never man enough to cross the Rubicon.