THE CHIEF: The Life of William Randolph Hearst
By David Nasaw
Houghton Mifflin, 687 pages, $35
In 1929, six months after his inauguration, President Herbert Hoover invited one of William Randolph Hearst’s top writers to the White House for a conversation he hoped would find its way back to the media tycoon. Hoover said he was “very much interested” in one of Hearst’s more outrageous ideas: annexing the California peninsula, the thick finger of land that belonged, then as now, to Mexico. Of course, the Mexicans were far too proud to sell part of their country to the U.S., Hoover told the writer, but they might be willing to exchange it for territory. If America could buy British Honduras from the English, and then offer to give it to the Mexicans, they just might consider making a deal.
In today’s world of faceless media conglomerates and cookie-cutter newspaper chains, it is hard to imagine a press baron with so much raw power that a president would actually entertain such a preposterous notion. But in matters journalistic and political, Hearst was “The Man Who Changed the Rules,” as the New Yorker’s press critic, A.J. Liebling, once called him. Hoover may not have seriously intended on following through on Hearst’s cockamamie suggestion, but “he was not prepared to dismiss it out of hand, for fear of angering the publisher,” David Nasaw tells us in this absorbing and sympathetic portrait of an American original, the first full-scale biography of the publishing giant and politician in nearly 40 years.
In tackling Hearst, Nasaw, chair of the doctoral history program at City University of New York, had the good fortune to have at his disposal family and business sources unavailable to his predecessors, most notably W.A. Swanberg, whose critical 1961 biography, “Citizen Hearst,” was allegedly denied a Pulitzer Prize because of Hearst family interference. Nasaw has used these new documents and interviews to make an enigmatic and elusive man almost knowable, puncturing some shopworn Hearstian myths along the way.
As important, Nasaw makes clear Hearst’s role, for better or worse, as a media visionary. Hearst’s insistence on shorter stories, eye-catching illustrations and human-interest angles anticipated by more than a half-century the “reader-friendly” papers of today. Long before synergy became a household word, “the Chief,” as he was called by subordinates, was practicing it, recycling Hearst news stories into newsreels, Hearst comics into animated cartoons, and fiction published in Hearst magazines into motion pictures. If Hearst was a geniusand Nasaw seems to make a case that he was–he was a flawed and distinctly odd one: a tall, pear-shaped autocrat with vivid blue eyes and a high-pitched, squeaky voice who wept at the death of his favorite dachshund yet unfeelingly fled when a fireworks display in his honor accidentally exploded, killing dozens of spectators. His political enemy, Theodore Roosevelt, considered him “the most potent single influence for evil we have in our life.” His longtime mistress, actress Marion Davies, thought him ” `a very lonesome man.’ “
Hearst was born into privilege in 1863, the only child of a semiliterate rancher and miner whose millions enabled him to buy the San Francisco Examiner and later a U.S. Senate seat, and a mother who compensated for her husband’s long absences by lavishing suffocating attention on “Willie.” When, at his mother’s insistence, he went to Harvard, she decorated his rooms, hired servants to look after him and wrote wounded letters scolding him for his chronic overspending. In a calculated affront to Brahmin sensibilities, young Will lived openly with a Cambridge waitress. At the same time he swore off alcohol, the better to “control events while those around him lost their bearings,” and single-handedly turned around the failing Harvard Lampoon. Hearst’s expulsion from Harvard, long assumed to be punishment for college pranks (he once delivered chamber pots to his professors with their names inscribed on the inside bottom), is here attributed to a defiant indifference to study and an eagerness to take control of the Examiner, which he did, sans Harvard degree, in 1887 at age 23.
The new proprietor wasted no time introducing the crusading, circulation-boosting, stunt-and-sensation conventions he had long admired in Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. In 1895 he set his sights on acquiring the New York Journal and petitioned his mother for funds. Hearst’s father had died four years earlier without leaving him an inheritance, making Will pathetically dependent on his mother for the loans and gifts that would facilitate the purchase of the Journal and, later, other media and real-estate properties. Indeed, it was not until his mother died in 1919 that Hearst, 56, finally came into his patrimony.
Nasaw hacks through the thicket of apocrypha surrounding Hearst’s incitement of the Spanish-American War, arguing that there is little documentary evidence (the famous telegram to artist Frederic Remington–” `You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war’ “–has never been found), and that Hearst’s real goal was self-promotion. The author is less persuasive when he tries to convince us that a man of such unbridled appetites “was not as obsessed with the presidency as some of his biographers have portrayed him.” Hearst’s electoral record–two terms in Congress, failed attempts to become New York governor and New York City mayor, and, in 1904, second place in balloting for the Democratic nomination for president–admittedly gives him the look of a political dabbler, but a lifetime of presidential kingmaking, policymaking and (there is no other word for it) harassment speaks otherwise.
Hearst’s career as a filmmaker began as he was nearing the apex of his journalistic power (in 1924 one in four American families regularly read a Hearst paper) and was fueled by his desire to create vehicles for Davies, a stuttering chorus girl 35 years his junior. While Hearst remained on “remarkably good terms” with his wife, Millicent, whom he never divorced, he lived openly–and apparently happily–with Davies from the early 1920s until he died. ” `I started out a g-g-gold digger and I ended up in love,’ ” Marion said of her relations with “Pops.” San Simeon, his extravagant mountaintop home near San Luis Obispo, became the focus of Hearst’s uncontrolled passion for collecting as well as the site of celebrity–studded weekends carefully arranged to conform to the overlord’s quirky rules (no more than two cocktails per person; meat served blood rare; no off-color jokes).
By the late 1930s, Hearst the onetime Democrat and populist had evolved into a big-business Republican and militant anti-internationalist whose beliefs blinded him to the corrupt ambitions of Adolf Hitler, a man he briefly employed as a paid columnist. His anti-Roosevelt rhetoric, hatred of unions and irresponsible red-baiting prompted a boycott of his papers. That, combined with corporate mismanagement and seven years of economic depression, brought the aging mogul to the point of near-bankruptcy, his cherished collectibles sold at the bargain counters of Saks and Gimbel’s. “Citizen Kane,” Orson Welles’ dark caricature of Hearst, came out during this humiliating interregnum; Nasaw effectively makes the case that its failure at the box office had less to do with Hearst’s efforts to kill it than with the film’s gloomy complexity.
By the time Hearst regained control of his media empire, he was isolated and ill with heart disease. He had shrunk to 128 pounds shortly before he died on Aug. 14, 1951. In old age, Hearst contended he had finally come to realize that ” `there is nothing so valuable in life as friendship.’ ” In life, the ruthless press baron had few genuine friends. In death he has at least one: David Nasaw, who in this exhaustively researched biography has allowed us finally to understand, if not entirely admire, the father of the modern media conglomerate.
