The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst (44 page)

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Authors: Kenneth Whyte

BOOK: The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst
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The review appears to have been the Willsons’ first professional work. They subsequently appeared in
The Telephone Girl
at the Casino, a successful musical comedy adapted by Hugh Morton from a French play by Maurice Desvallières, who wrote
Hotel Peccadillo
with Georges Feydeau. The score was by Gustave Kerker, who also did the music for
Yankee Doodle Dandy
and
The Belle of New York.
 
Theater was a Willson family business. The girls’ father was George Leslie Willson, the scion of a prominent Maine family who had run off to make his name as a clog dancer in vaudeville. Performing under the name George Leslie, “he would top his old white hat, swing his cane merrily and go into his famous medley of coon dances, the ‘Pasa-ma-la,’ ‘Mobile Buck’ and ‘Mule in the Sand.’”
17
He also gained modest fame singing the tune “I Met Her by the Fountain in the Park.”
 
Willson married an ambitious Irish-American girl who made her own contributions to the family coffers through real estate investments. Hannah Willson owned properties on some of the livelier streets in Harlem and the Tenderloin, including at least one building that might have been home to a brothel. There have been whispers by gossips and Hearst’s political enemies that Mrs. Willson was a madame or a prostitute, but there is no evidence to support the claims.
18
The Willson family lived on Gramercy Park, only a few blocks from the shanty. Millicent was sixteen at the time Hearst laid eyes on her; her sister, Anita, was eighteen.
 
At first it was not clear which of the Willson girls interested Hearst. He and George Pancoast caught the
The Girl from Paris
many nights from aisle seats at the Herald Square, after which they and the sisters would dine as a foursome somewhere along Broadway. Hearst was often spotted around town with a sister on each arm, ostentatious behavior even for a Manhattan newspaperman. Millicent would later tell a friendly reporter that Anita was along as her chaperone at their mother’s insistence: “When he asked me to go out with him . . . my mother was against it,” remembered Millicent. “I recall she said, ‘Who is he? Some young fellow from out West somewhere, isn’t he?’ She insisted Anita had to come or I couldn’t go. Well, he took us down to the
Journal
—the
New York Journal
—we ’d hardly heard of it, and he shows us over it,
all over it.
I hadn’t the foggiest notion what we were doing, walking miles on rough boards in thin, high-heeled evening slippers, and I thought my feet would kill me. Of course this wasn’t our idea of a good time. We wanted to go to Sherry’s or Bustanoby’s. More than that, Anita kept whispering to me, ‘We’re going to get thrown out of here, Milly, the way he behaves you’d think he owned it.’”
19
 
Even Hearst’s cousin, Anne Apperson Flint, who took an instant dislike to Millicent, admitted she was enchanting—“one of the prettiest creatures that you could imagine.”
20
Millicent had a small oval face with soft features and flawless skin. Her round brown eyes were frank and friendly, her lips a perfect bow. She wore her thick brown hair heaped high but still reached only to the chin of Hearst, who stood well over six feet. By all accounts, she was a vivacious girl, cheerful and gracious if not especially polished. Hearst was completely smitten. He would drop by the Willson home on his way to the office and stroll arm in arm with Millicent through Gramercy Park. He showered her with attention, notes, flowers, and gifts. According to his cousin, he presented her with a hansom cab drawn by a white horse; it became her calling card around town.
 
Hearst kept his mother informed of his relationship with Millicent. That was his way. She detested his choice, as was her way. Indeed, Will’s new Broadway baby probably rivaled “that prostitute” Tessie for least welcome of his girlfriends. Anne Apperson Flint claimed that Mrs. Hearst was in a near constant “state of fury” about the Willson sisters and could not bring herself to mention their names. Never mind the Missouri dirt yet clinging to their own finery, Phoebe and her niece refused to meet Millie and went out of their way to avoid her on the street. Flint was still wagging her finger at the match when she was interviewed by Swanberg more than sixty years later, although her only specific complaints were that Millicent was “common as anything,” and that the thirty-three-year-old Will showed poor judgment in not dating a girl his mother could love—“He didn’t care!”
21
 
The trade papers, which covered Hearst intently, would occasionally flick at his personal life. “Billy Hearst,” one noted in the summer of 1897, “is down the coast with a cottage, young friends and a yacht, sighing for the unattainable. . . . Fully occupied with what he believes to be Pleasure—with a capital P.”
22
Another trade gossip columnist, claiming to have worked for a spell at the
Journal,
described Hearst as “a very easy mark for girls who like yachting, good feeding and jolly times in general; for men with schemes and odd suggestions; for men about town, who can post him in the ways of the world; for sharks and sharps, especially those who were educated in what the
Sun
is pleased to call, ‘The Academy of Crime.’ He is good-natured, kindly disposed, slow to suspicion, and very proud of his father’s money.”
23
 
The only print outlets to aim directly at Hearst’s relationship with Millicent were a clutch of cheerfully vicious gossip sheets, ancestors of today’s celebrity tabloids.
The New-Yorker
referred to the Willson girls as the Sassafras Sisters, actresses who had “achieved immortal glory and annexed themselves to the Hearst leg—no, to the Hearst millions.”
24
 
Town Topics
was more aggressive in its taunts. Edited by the acid-tongued Colonel William D’Alton Mann,
Town Topics
was a weekly compendium of the social, financial, and sexual indiscretions of New York’s better families. It was unsourced, unreliable, and highly entertaining. Mann ran a sort of reputational protection racket on the side, raking in hundred of thousands of dollars in “loans” from the likes of J.P. Morgan and William C. Whitney on the understanding that their names would escape his magazine’s notice. (Mann was belittled in
Collier’s
for “printing scandal about people who are not cowardly enough to pay for silence.”)
25
Hearst appeared with some regularity in
Town Topics,
usually identified as “Willieboy” or “Willie the Worst.” It was noted that he had been “burning up Broadway with two warm babes and a hot hansom.” He was also accused of penning editorials while “resting in the laps of the lovely.”
26
The arch-conservative Mann also used imaginative descriptions of Hearst’s lifestyle to attack his anti-establishment politics:
My vague allusions to his ways of sultanic languor and sybaritish luxury, to his frantic imitations of Oriental schemes of festival, to his general and presumably enjoyable disregard of the tiresome conventions of sedate society, had no other object than the illumination of my comments on the inconsistency of his course in damning and slandering and cursing men and women for possibly wanting to do as he actually does. . . . I hold that if sloth, idleness, loose gayety, riotous extravagance and general demoralization of manners and morals are to be publicly pilloried, the editor and proprietor of the
Journal
is not the person appointed and anointed for the mission.
27
 
 
 
It is not difficult to imagine a jab like that driving Phoebe to her bed with acute embarrassment. Her friends would have read it—
Town Topics
was well thumbed in her set—and a lifetime of mortification over her husband’s personal habits had left her especially sensitive to loose talk around Will, even the teasing of professional mischief-makers. She desperately wanted him to enhance the respectability of the House of Hearst; instead, from her perspective, he was following in his father’s stubbornly shabby footsteps.
 
She was undoubtedly privy to other gossip about Will. He was a much-discussed young man and he never cared to disguise his behavior. He had trampled proprieties by living openly with Tessie Powers, and there are hints of other indiscretions. “I was told,” wrote Upton Sinclair years later, “that when he first came to New York, [Hearst] made himself a scandal in the ‘Tenderloin.’ I was perplexed about that, for the members of our [generation] are generally well known in the Tenderloin, and nobody calls it a scandal. But one young society man who had known Hearst well gave me the reason—and he spoke with real gravity: ‘It wasn’t what he did—we all do it: but it was the way he did it. He didn’t take the trouble to hide what he did.’”
28
 
Further allegations of indecency were made against Hearst in 1897 on the floor of Congress by a disgruntled California representative. Grove L. Johnson was one of the few remaining friends of the Southern Pacific Railroad in Washington at a time when the railway was begging for a long-term amortization of its debt to the federal government. Hearst’s
Examiner
was leading a campaign to hold the railroad to its obligations. Congressman Johnson made the matter personal in a speech so exquisitely vicious that it is worth quoting at length:
He is a young man, rich not by his own exertions, but by inheritance from his honored father and gifts from his honored mother. He became possessed of the idea that he wanted to run a newspaper. Like the child in the song, he wanted a bow-wow, and his indulgent parents gave him the
Examiner.
By the reckless expenditure of large sums of money he has built up a great paper.
 
The
Examiner
has a very large circulation. It did have a great influence in California.
 
It has done great good in California. It has exposed corruption, denounced villainy, unearthed wickedness, pursued criminals, and rewarded virtue.
 
At first, we Californians were suspicious of “Our Willie,” as Hearst is called on the Pacific Coast. We did not know what he meant. But we came to believe in him and his oft-repeated boasts of independence and honesty. Daily editorials, written by “Our Willie,” hired men praising his motives and proclaiming his honesty, had their effect. Besides, “Our Willie” through his paper was doing some good.
 
We knew him to be a debauchee, a dude in dress, an Anglomaniac in language and manners, but we thought he was honest.
 
We knew him to be licentious in his tastes, regal in his dissipations, unfit to associate with pure women or decent men, but we thought “Our Willie” was honest.
 
We knew he was erotic in his tastes, erratic in his moods, of small understanding and smaller views of men and measures, but we thought “Our Willie,” with his English plaids, his cockney accent, and his middle-parted hair, was honest.
 
We knew he had sought on the banks of the Nile relief from loathsome disease contracted only by contagion in the haunts of vice, and had rivaled the Khedive in the gorgeousness of his harem and in the joy of restored health, but we still believed him honest, though low and depraved.
 
We knew he was debarred from society in San Francisco because of his delight in flaunting his wickedness, but we believed him honest, though tattooed with sin.
 
We knew he was ungrateful to his friends, unkind to his employees, unfaithful to his business associates, but we believed he was trying to publish an honest paper. . . .
 
We thought he was running an independent newspaper on a plane far above the ordinary altitude of newspapers, with a sincere desire to do good to the world, with an honest wish to expose shams, to speak the truth, and to establish a paper that, while it might be a personal organ, would still be an honest one. We came finally to admire “Our Willie” and to speak well of him and his paper.
 
When William R. Hearst commenced his abusive tirades against C.P. Huntington and the Southern Pacific Company and the Central Pacific Railroad Company and all who were friendly to them, and to denounce the funding bill and all who favored it as thieves and robbers, we thought his course was wrong, his methods bad, and his attacks brutal, but we believed “Our Willie” to be honest.
 
When C.P. Huntington told the truth about “Our Willie” and showed that he was simply fighting the railroad funding bill because he could get no more blackmail from the Southern Pacific Company, we were dazed with the charges, and as Californians we were humiliated.
 
We looked eagerly for “Our Willie’s” denial, but it came not. On the contrary he admitted that he had blackmailed the Southern Pacific Company into a contract whereby they were to pay him $30,000 to let them alone, and that he had received $22,000 of his blackmail, and that C.P. Huntington had cut it off as soon as he knew of it, and that he was getting even now on Huntington and the railroad company because he had not received the other $8,000 of his bribe. He admitted by silence that the Southern Pacific Company was financially responsible, but that he dared not sue it for the $8,000 he claimed to be due because of fear that his blackmail would be exposed in court.
29
 
 

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