The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst (28 page)

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Authors: Kenneth Whyte

BOOK: The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst
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Florinda contracted smallpox and died before her son’s fourth birthday. Her last wish was that her husband, Thomas, encourage Homer’s gifts. Thomas Davenport had read just enough of the classics to have academic ambitions for his son, but as soon as it became clear that Homer was indifferent about his studies, Florinda got her way. When Homer turned seven, father and son left the farm for the metropolis of Silverton, Oregon, population 300. The idea, Homer later explained, was that the budding artist “might live in the Latin Quarter of that village, and inhale any artistic atmosphere that was going to waste.”
21
 
Homer grew to be a skinny kid with ridiculously long legs and a love of animals, particularly fast horses and fighting cocks. He continued to grind down his carpenter’s pencils, sometimes for ten hours a day, on paper, fences, barn doors, outbuildings, and rocks. He was well liked in Silverton, but the townsfolk considered him idle and vague; they doubted he would amount to much—drawing, after all, was not real work. Nor was jawing through long afternoons with the crowd at the shoemaker’s shop, “men of great learning and wide experience,” Davenport quipped, “who spent all their time playing marbles.”
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But ambition did finally stir in Davenport. One day, a one-ring circus arrived in Silverton, and when it pulled up stakes, Homer, now in his late teens, left with it. He worked as a clown and animal trainer and spent much of his spare time drawing the circus’s small menagerie of horses, a tiger, and an elephant. He liked it well enough until assigned the onerous task of brushing the elephant with linseed oil. The circus quickly lost its charm, although no one would ever draw a better Republican elephant.
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Davenport also tried jockeying, despite his long legs, and shoemaking, and he worked for spells as a store clerk and a railway fireman, but he did not last at any of these pursuits. His first attempt at professional illustrating also ended in failure. At his father’s urging, he took a position in the art department of the Portland
Oregonian.
Silvertonians were so impressed at this development that they decorated the streets with flowers and bunting and declared a half-day holiday. Davenport bade everyone farewell with a little speech and boarded a train for the big city. He was back in Silverton before the flowers had wilted, the
Oregonian
having found his talents dispensable.
24
 
Pushed by his father to give illustration another chance, Davenport eventually made his way to San Francisco and signed on with Hearst’s
Examiner
at $10 a week. At the outset, he was not a cartoonist but a newspaper artist, expected to provide illustrative accompaniment to news and commentary: diagrams and maps, “artist’s conceptions” of scenes described by reporters, and sketches from portraits and news photography (direct newspaper reproduction of photography was as yet a few years and a series of technological advances away). Newspaper artists were valued for how quickly and accurately they completed an assignment. Wit and originality were frowned upon. None of this played to Davenport’s strengths. Buildings, furniture, and other inanimate objects were beyond him. He was adept at living flesh, but even there his instincts ran against realistic portrayals and toward caricature. He also could not spell, which made him useless with maps and charts. (Davenport once asked the editor Arthur Brisbane if there were two
t
’s in water. Brisbane answered without looking up, “Only the wettest, Homer.”)
25
 
Whatever his shortcomings, Hearst appears to have been impressed with Davenport from the start. When a famous horse died and the
Examiner
was desperate for an image, Davenport, the former jockey, was able to draw it from memory—he had happened to have seen it run a year earlier. Hearst was so pleased he purchased the original. The formally trained artists on the
Examiner
staff were less impressed. They sneered at Davenport’s limits and his self-taught style. Feeling underappreciated, he skipped from the
Examiner
to the
Chronicle
to the
Chicago Daily Herald
and then back to the
Chronicle,
where his renderings of Democratic and Republican leaders became the talk of the 1894 state conventions. Hearst lured him back to the
Examiner
as a full-time cartoonist at a salary of $75 a week, double what the
Chronicle
was paying him.
26
 
Still in his twenties, Davenport took his new responsibilities seriously. He began to pay more attention to public affairs, traveling to Sacramento to watch the legislature, studying the process and its participants. He made his biggest splash at the paper with a portrait of San Francisco Democratic boss Sam Rainey, the man at the center of a web of municipal corruption routinely decried by the
Examiner.
 
Rainey had always refused to have his face in the papers. Like most everyone in America, he was aware of Thomas Nast’s devastating caricatures of Tammany’s Boss Tweed, and he wasn’t about to let West Coast cartoonists get a bead on him. Davenport sauntered down to Rainey’s office next to a stable on California Street and found the pudgy boss standing outside in his favorite pose—back to a wall, belly thrust forward, head thrown back, fat legs crossed at the ankle, stubby fingers working a thick cigar. Rainey’s henchmen spotted Davenport and chased him off, but not before his camera-like eye had captured what it needed. The finished sketch was remarkable for its simplicity. Davenport simply let Rainey lean against the wall in all his corpulent glory, radiating arrogance and vice from every pore. Hearst gave it an entire front page. San Franciscans were disgusted. Their first glimpse of Rainey’s self-satisfied mug is said to have hurried the end of the city’s old Democratic cabal, a legend that probably gives Davenport too much credit, but indeed Rainey and company were soon shipping out to Canada to avoid prosecution.
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Whatever his limits as a newspaper artist, Davenport the cartoonist seemed to get a new job offer with each piece he published. Not long after he had rejoined the
Examiner,
an eastern paper tried to hire him away at $100 a week. “My God, Davvy,” said Hearst. “That’s as much as the managing editor gets.”
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But Hearst matched the offer and, on purchasing the
Journal,
took Davenport to New York, where subsequent bids for his services would catapult his salary to $500 a week, far beyond what any other newspaper writer or artist was making. Hearst was happy to pay it. Nothing attracted readers and distinguished a newspaper from its competitors like a brilliant cartoonist, and while Hearst would assemble at the
Journal
the best team of illustrators any newspaper had ever seen—Davenport, Richard Outcault, M. de Lipman, T.E. Powers, Jimmy Swinnerton, Frederick Opper, among others—there was never any question as to his favorite.
 
Hearst not only paid Davenport generously, he took an active interest in making him a star, runnning interference with editors who wanted to bury his work in the back pages or waste his time sketching corpses at the morgue. Hearst understood the unique nature of Davenport’s talent. Inspiration wasn’t the illustrator’s strongest suit—in fact, he was “sadly destitute of ideas,” by Abbot’s reckoning. And while his pen was liveliest when indignant, Davenport wasn’t a naturally excitable personality. He fed off the ideas and outrage of others. Hearst instructed his top editorial people to meet regularly with the artist, and Hearst himself sometimes joined in as they talked through stories and the paper’s various crusades. All this coddling might have spoiled other talents, but it brought out the best in Davenport. His biographers say he did his finest work in Hearst’s employ.
29
 
Whether Hearst teamed Davenport with Alfred Henry Lewis or they found each other independently is impossible to say, but only a few months into the life of the new
Journal
the two men were close and happy collaborators
.
Lewis loved to talk and he loved an audience, and he was only too happy to share his abundant outrage with the laconic cartoonist. Davenport first drew McKinley and Hanna shortly after Lewis had conducted his initial interviews in Ohio. He worked from Lewis’s verbal and written descriptions and whatever photo-illustrations of the men that were then in circulation. The results were unpromising. Davenport published one cartoon depicting Hanna as an ogre protecting a tiny Napoleonic McKinley from a trio of Republican pygmies (the regional bosses). Another represented manager and candidate in the roles of Paul and Virginia, after the popular Victorian melodrama, with McKinley taking the feminine part. Davenport’s McKinley was reasonably convincing, but the face of his Hanna was dead on the page and the body beneath it wasn’t much better—an all-purpose body for overfed men of affairs, indistinguishable from the cartoonist’s treatment of Speaker Tom Reed.
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Davenport’s efforts did not improve until he got his own hard look at Hanna during the Republican convention in St. Louis.
 
Davenport began looking for Hanna from the moment he arrived in St. Louis, and once he found him he never let him out of his sights. He followed him around the convention floor and made surreptitious sketches from the corners of crowded hotel lobbies. He was thrilled by what he saw. Not only was Hanna the most imposing presence at the assembly, outclassing in political and personal strength the likes of regional bosses Platt and Quay, but his physiognomy was more interesting than that of any man Davenport had ever beheld. Whether talking, laughing, or just standing still, Hanna exuded great vitality and enormous force. He had the strong and vivid character lines that make a cartoon pop. Davenport knew exactly what to do with him.
 
Hanna was a tall man. Davenport made him taller, and he further exaggerated his stature by shrinking everyone around him. He doubled Hanna’s girth, giving him a thick bull’s neck and immense power in his arms, legs, and bulging torso. Hanna’s low forehead was drawn lower still. His thin hair was reduced to clumps. His short sideburns were extended and roughed up—“like an unplaned cedar board,” Davenport explained. The tip of Hanna’s stubby nose was raised a little more and his ears were made to stick out like a monkey’s. His grin grew apelike. His eyes were borrowed from all over the bestiary. “Hanna’s eye shifts like the eye of a parrot,” Davenport noted, “and you can’t make a move he does not follow.” He also compared Hanna’s eyes to those of a circus elephant in a parade scanning the street for peanuts.
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Davenport’s caricature yielded a large brute of some utterly new species. His Hanna was cheerful, vigorous, overpowering, and ruthless. He was keenly intelligent and aware of everything but himself. He came with a few props: his big clown’s feet liked to rest on bulging bags of money or the white skulls of laborers. And he had a sidekick, McKinley, who stood as tall as his own Napoleonic hat (a mere five foot six, McKinley was sensitive about his height).
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Davenport gave McKinley all the grace and good looks that Hanna lacked, and however ridiculous his situation—chained to the wall in Hanna’s office, begging for the core of an apple Hanna was about to eat whole—McKinley always carried himself with dignity.
 
Powerful as this new work was, Davenport still felt he hadn’t nailed Hanna. He brooded about him in the wake of the convention before adding a final touch. Davenport had been dressing Hanna as per Lewis’s reports in a plaid businessman’s suit and striped shirt. The only flourish had been a set of dollar-sign cufflinks. Now Davenport took the dollar signs from the cufflinks and placed one in each of the large checks on Hanna’s suit. This single device conveyed at a glance everything Lewis and Davenport wanted to say about the Republican manager’s social and political philosophies. Brazen greed and moneyed arrogance were now woven into the fabric of Hanna’s clothes. It was a brilliant stroke, but a night editor thought it overkill and pulled the cartoon; Hearst saw it and ordered it published. Davenport would later say the idea for the dollar signs came to him during his conversations with Lewis, but more likely it was suggested by his colleague, M. de Lipman, who in May had drawn McKinley as a mute Buddha in a loincloth with Hanna as his attendant wearing a polka-dot robe with dollar signs in each dot. Whatever its origins, Davenport’s “plutocratic plaid,” as it became known, was an instant hit.
33
 
Davenport depicted Hanna as a tailor attempting to draw a reluctant Uncle Sam into his shop for his own suit of plutocratic plaid. He portrayed Hanna as a woman in a bonnet and dress of plutocratic plaid; a childlike McKinley tugs at her skirts, pointing to a store window where the “labor vote” is for sale. These gags were moderately successful, but Davenport was not a natural comedian. A moralist at heart, his best pieces deal in darker emotions. They are simple in conception and somber in mood. In one, Hanna fills almost the whole frame, wearing his straw hat at a jaunty angle and the broadest of grins as he bounces down Wall Street with bags of money in each hand; far in the background, the personification of labor hangs from a street lamp. In another cartoon, you see only Hanna’s tree trunk of a wrist and his meaty fist with its rough skin and stubbly hair. A cufflink bearing his name peeks out from under a coat sleeve of plutocratic plaid. The fist clenches a fob chain, dangling from which is the tiny, dejected figure of McKinley, yoked at the neck, legs and arms shackled, still somehow dignified. Hanna appears to have just pulled the candidate from his pocket to show his friends.
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