The Chief Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Photo

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Preface

  I. Great Expectations

  1. A Son of the West

  2. To Europe Again and on to Harvard

  3. “Something Where I Could Make a Name”

  II. Proprietor and Editor

  4. At the Examiner

  5. “I Can’t Do San Francisco Alone”

  6. Hearst in New York: “Staging a Spectacle”

  7. “How Do You Like the Journal’s War?”

  III. Publisher, Politician, Candidate, and Congressman

  8. Representing the People

  9. “Candidate of a Class”

  10. “A Force to Be Reckoned With”

  11. Man of Mystery

  12. Party Leader

  13. Hearst at Fifty: Some Calm Before the Storms

  IV. Of War and Peace

  14. “A War of Kings”

  15. “Hearst, Hylan, the Hohenzollerns, and the Habsburgs”

  V. A Master Builder

  16. Building a Studio

  17. Builder and Collector

  18. Marion, Millicent, and the Movies

  19. A Return to Normalcy

  20. Another Last Hurrah

  VI. The King and Queen of Hollywood

  21. “Do You Know Miss Marion Davies, the Movie Actress?”

  22. Family Man

  23. Dream Houses

  24. Businesses as Usual

  25. A New Crusade: Europe

  26. The Talkies and Marion

  VII. The Depression

  27. “Pretty Much Flattened Out”

  28. “An Incorrigible Optimist”

  29. The Chief Chooses a President

  VIII. New Deals and Raw Deals

  30. Hearst at Seventy

  31. Hearst and Hitler

  32. The Last Crusade

  IX. The Fall

  33. The Fall

  34. “All Very Sad, But We Cannot Kick Now”

  35. Citizen Kane

  36. Old Age

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2000 by David Nasaw

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Nasaw, David.

  The chief: the life of William Randolph Hearst / David Nasaw.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 0-395-82759-0

  1. Hearst, William Randolph, 1863–1951. 2. Publishers and publishing—United States—Biography. 3. Newspaper publishing—United States—History—19th century. 4. Newspaper publishing—United States—History—20th century. I. Title.

  Z473.H4 N37 2000

  070.5'092—dc21 [B] 99-462122

  eISBN 978-0-547-52472-6

  v2.0813

  Frontispiece: William Randolph Hearst, May 1922

  (Marc Wanamaker/Bison Archives)

  Photographs follow [>], [>], and [>]

  Acknowledgments

  I wish to express my appreciation to Randolph A. Hearst, who took time to speak with me about his father, and to Frank A. Bennack, Jr., president and chief executive officer of the Hearst Corporation, who arranged for me to examine material, previously unavailable to researchers, in William Randolph Hearst’s Bronx warehouse and in the bunkhouse at the San Simeon Ranch. Hearst’s grandsons, John (Bunky) Hearst, Jr. and Austin Hearst, and Austin’s wife Kathryn and John’s wife Barbara also shared valuable information with me about the Chief.

  Steve Fraser first suggested that I write a biography of Hearst and helped me conceive the project. Virginia Barber, my agent, provided me with encouragement and a thoughtful reading of an early draft. Patricia Strachan, my editor at Houghton Mifflin, has—with good humor and consummate skill—seen the project through to completion. Sarah Goodrum, also at Houghton Mifflin, has assisted me with photo research and permissions.

  Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and Amanda Smith gave me entrée to Joseph P. Kennedy’s papers, which helped unlock the mystery of Hearst’s finances. I have profited from my many conversations with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. on Hearst, Franklin Roosevelt, and the New Deal.

  I am enormously grateful to those who work at the Hearst San Simeon State Historical Monument for the kindness they have shown me on every occasion. John Horn, the historian at the Hearst Castle, has been of invaluable assistance through every stage of the research and writing, promptly answering every query sent his way. Hoyt Fields, chief curator, arranged for me to examine the oral history collection that is housed in the Tour Guides Library. Vicki Kastner guided me through the grounds and buildings on the hillside and has been a steady source of information on the Hearst collections. Horn and Kastner also read the final manuscript and offered their suggestions. John Blades and Sandra Barghini graciously assisted me during their tenures at the Castle. Sandra Heinemann read and generously commented on the San Simeon sections of my manuscript.

  Nancy Loe was an early guide to the sources and a valued tutor on Julia Morgan and her papers. I am appreciative of the efforts of Mike Line in Special Collections at the California Polytechnic State University library which houses the Morgan papers. The librarians and archivists at the Bancroft Library at Berkeley have been uniformly helpful. I wish particularly to thank Bonnie Hardwick and Peter Hanff. Dace Taube at the Regional History Collection at the University of Southern California guided me through the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner archives. Ned Comstock helped me with material at the Warner Bros. Archives, also at the University of Southern California. I am also appreciative of the help provided me by the curators and archivists at the Huntington Library, the National Archives, the Hoover Institution Archives, the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, the Columbia University Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, the Harvard University Archives, the New York Times Company Archives, the Syracuse University Library Department of Special Collections, the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, the Manuscripts and Archives Division and the Billy Rose Theater Collection of the New York Public Library, and the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress.

  I have been assisted throughout by a small army of research assistants led by my mother, Beatrice Nasaw, who has worked almost full-time on this project since its inception, and read and helped to copyedit the final manuscript. I was also fortunate in having the assistance of a number of wonderful graduate students from the History program at the City University of New York Graduate Center, among them Dorothy Browne, David Barber, Tracy Morgan, Hilary Hallett, Carol Quirke, Terence Kissack, Shawn Savage, and Steven Naftzger.

  I am grateful to all my colleagues at the Graduate Center for their encouragement and assistance. Blanche Wiesen Cook shared her insights and research on the Roosevelts with me; Phil Cannistraro, his knowledge of Hearst’s relationship with Mussolini. I benefited as well from discussions with Tom Kessner, George Custen, Jack Diggins, David Rosner, Richard Powers, Mike Wallace, James Oakes, Josh Freeman, and Abe Ascher. Dana Frank offered me her research on Hearst’s Buy American campaign. I’ve had some wonderful discussions about biography with Jean Strouse, Patricia Bosworth, and with Alan Brinkley who was also kind enough to read and comment on my final draft. Arthur Goren helped me with information on Hearst’s efforts to create a Jewish homeland. Nora Jaffee did invaluable research in Mexico. John
Creelman introduced me to the Creelman papers at Ohio State. Bob Board met with me in Los Angeles and shared his remarkable collection of Marion Davies films and memorabilia. My dear friend Bob Edelman has been encouraging throughout.

  I owe special thanks to Jon Wiener, Ann Fabian, Tom Leonard, and Beth Rashbaum for reading all 1, 400 pages of my next-to-last draft and offering their suggestions for revision.

  My greatest debt of gratitude is to Dinitia Smith, who has been my partner in this as in everything else I have done in the past two decades. With good humor and infinite patience, she has listened to my every Hearst story, carefully read every word of every draft—from proposal to bound galley—corrected my syntax and improved my prose. I thank her for her kindness, her love, and her unflagging support.

  I wish to acknowledge the financial support of the City University of New York through the PSC-CUNY research award program.

  COPYRIGHT AND PERMISSIONS INFORMATION

  Much of the material cited in this work is protected by copyright.

  Excerpts from the Hearst San Simeon State Historical Monument Oral History Project interviews and other materials held by the Hearst San Simeon State Historical Monument are used by permission of the San Simeon District, State of California, Department of Parks and Recreation.

  Excerpts from unpublished material by and to William Randolph Hearst and all other sources for which the Hearst Corporation owns copyright are used by permission of the Hearst Corporation.

  Excerpts from the letters of Winston S. Churchill are used by permission of Curtis Brown Ltd., London, on behalf of the Estate of Sir Winston S. Churchill, copyright © Winston S. Churchill.

  Excerpts from The Times We Had: Life with William Randolph Hearst by Marion Davies, edited by Pamela Pfau and Kenneth Marx, are reprinted by permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, from The Times We Had: Life with William Randolph Hearst by Marion Davies, edited by Pamela Pfau and Kenneth Marz. Copyright © 1975 by the Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc.

  Excerpts from The Hearsts: Father and Son by William Randolph Hearst, Jr., with Jack Casserly, are used by permission of Roberts Rinehart Publishers.

  Excerpts from Carl Laemmle’s letter are used with the permission of Stanley Bergerman, Jr.

  Additional sources are cited in the notes, [>].

  Preface

  WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST was a huge man with a tiny voice; a shy man who was most comfortable in crowds; a war hawk in Cuba and Mexico but a pacifist in Europe; an autocratic boss who could not fire people; a devoted husband who lived with his mistress; a Californian who spent half his life in the East. The son of a Forty-Niner emigrant from Missouri who had made millions by digging in the earth, Hearst did not identify with those who had inherited wealth or social position. He considered himself a selfmade man, because, like his father and his mother, he invented himself: as art collector, builder, journalist, publisher, and politician. His ambitions were limitless, but so too were his talents and resources. He was in all things defined by contradiction, larger than life.

  When Hearst was in college, he wrote his father that he intended to do something in publishing and politics—and he did, becoming San Francisco’s, then New York’s, and finally the nation’s most powerful publisher. He served two terms in Congress, came in second in the balloting for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1904, and was, for half a century, a major force in American politics—at the national, state, and local levels. He was also one of the twentieth century’s greatest spenders. Fortune magazine, in 1935, reported that his art collections were worth at least $20 million (a quarter of a billion dollars in today’s currency) and his ranches, mines, orchards, and packing plants, another $30 million. His real estate holdings in New York City were assessed at $41 million. He was, according to Fortune, the city’s “number one realtor.”

  There has never been—nor, most likely, will there ever again be—a publisher like William Randolph Hearst. The Chief, as he was known by those who worked for him, built the nation’s first media conglomerate by extending his newspaper empire horizontally into syndicated feature, photo, and wire services; magazines; newsreels; serial, feature, and animated films; and radio. With each triumph, his sense of omnipotence swelled. The opportunities were limitless for expanding his empire—and his audiences—and he capitalized on every one of them.

  Decades before synergy became a corporate cliché, Hearst put the concept into practice. His magazine editors were directed to buy only stories which could be rewritten into screenplays to be produced by his film studio and serialized, reviewed, and publicized in his newspapers and magazines. He broadcast the news from his papers over the radio and pictured it in his newsreels. He was as dominant and pioneering a figure in the twentieth-century communications and entertainment industries as Andrew Carnegie had been in steel, J. Pierpont Morgan in banking, John D. Rockefeller in oil, and Thomas Alva Edison in electricity. At the peak of his power in the middle 1930s, Time magazine estimated his newspaper audience alone at 20 million of the 120 plus million men, women, and children in the nation. His daily and Sunday papers were so powerful as vehicles of public opinion in the United States that Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Winston Churchill all wrote for him.

  In the great tradition of nineteenth-century orator-editors like Horace Greeley, Charles Dana, William Cullen Bryant, and Joseph Pulitzer, Hearst took upon himself the role of tribune of the people. Through the first decades of the twentieth century, as older press lords died off and were replaced by a new breed of editors who, like Adolph S. Ochs of the New York Times, shunned publicity and made sure their names appeared only on their mastheads, Hearst employed the power of the media to set the national political agenda, first as a muckraking, progressive trustbuster, then, in his seventies, as an opponent of the New Deal and a stalwart anti-Communist. He set the topics, dictated the tone, and edited all the editorials in his papers—the major ones he wrote himself and displayed prominently on his front pages; he endorsed candidates for office and condemned them when they betrayed their promises; he emblazoned his name on his magazines, his newsreels, and his radio outlets; he proudly proclaimed that while other newspapers merely reported the news, his newspapers “made” it.

  I did not set out to write a biography of William Randolph Hearst, but to use him as a focal point from which to discuss the interpenetration of culture and politics in the twentieth century. Only as I beganmy research did I come to realize that the story of William Randolph Hearst was yet to be told. There were some fine biographies dating fromthe 1950s and 1960s, but none had been able to call upon the vast archival resources that have become available since then. I was able to start fresh, to detour around the anecdotal information that my predecessors had had to rely on, and to base my study on hundreds of thousands of letters, telegrams, memoranda, transcripts of phone messages, articles, and editorials that Hearst had written or that had been written to or about him.

  I began at the Bancroft Library in Berkeley, California, which held collections of Hearst correspondence dating back to the 1860s, when Hearst’s mother Phoebe arrived in San Francisco from Missouri with her husband, the millionaire miner and future United States senator George Hearst. I moved on from there to dozens of manuscript collections scattered across the country: the papers of every president from William McKinley to Franklin Delano Roosevelt; those of Hearst’s editors, friends, political advisers and adversaries, and of his architect at San Simeon, Julia Morgan. At the Hearst San Simeon Historical Monument, I was given access to an extensive unpublished oral history collection that contained dozens of interviews with friends, family, servants, and business associates. At the end of my research, I was able to fill in some of the missing pieces by consulting private and business papers that had been stored in a warehouse in the Bronx since the early 1920s and at a bunkhouse at one of the Hearst Corporation ranches in San Simeon.

  The Hearst I discovered was infinitely more fascinating than the one I had expected to find. This w
as also Winston Churchill’s experience during his visit with Hearst at San Simeon and Los Angeles in 1929. “Hearst was most interesting to meet,” Churchill wrote his wife Clementine, who had remained in England. “I got to like him—a grave simple child—with no doubt a nasty temper—playing with the most costly toys. A vast income always overspent: ceaseless building and collecting ... two magnificent establishments, two charming wives; complete indifference to public opinion, a strong liberal and democratic outlook, a 15 million daily circulation, oriental hospitalities, extreme personal courtesy (to us at any rate) and the appearance of a Quaker elder—or perhaps better Mormon elder.” After a long weekend at San Simeon, Churchill was driven to Los Angeles where he stayed “at the Biltmore Hotel—which is the last word in hotels.... I met all the leading people.... These Californian swells do not of course know Hearst,” Churchill wrote his wife. “He dwells apart.... They regard him as the Devil.”1

  I. Great Expectations

  1. 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