The Chief

by David Nasaw

  Hearst collected art not for investment purposes or because he felt any great need to show off for others or because, like J. Pierpont Morgan, he believed in a “gospel of wealth” and wanted to assemble an art collection to share with the less fortunate. Hearst collected because he took an enormous pleasure in possessing, accumulating, and living among things of beauty. The money he earned from his newspapers and magazines he regarded as his to spend as he saw fit. And spend it he did. He had still not learned—or perhaps refused to learn—the art of double-entry bookkeeping. When he saw an item he wanted, he bought it, regardless of whether he had the money in the bank to pay for it. His spending had always been extravagant, but as he approached the age of fifty, it ballooned out of all proportion to his income.

  Now that he had a number of extremely profitable publishing properties, he found it relatively easy to borrow on his own instead of going to Phoebe for money, though he did that as well. Convinced that his publishing revenues would grow faster than the interest on his debts, he bought whatever he wanted—real estate, art, newspapers, magazines—on credit, and delegated Edward Clark, who now looked after his as well as Phoebe’s funds, to find the money to meet his obligations. When he had exhausted his own credit, he borrowed more by getting his mother to cosign his loans and mortgages. “Will worries her—with his investments,” Orrin Peck wrote his sister in 1914, “too many of them that don’t pay—some of them at a loss of over $125,000 a month—Think of it if you can—I never knew there was so much money in the world—and always looking for her to sign for him—It is simply killing her.” In 1915, Hearst, who already owed his mother $722,000, borrowed an additional $556,000 from her. In 1916, he borrowed another $350,000, bringing his total debt to nearly $2 million. Phoebe’s response was to write off the old debt of $722,000.15

  Though Hearst was deeply in debt, it was not because his publishing empire was not earning a great deal of money. His newspapers, especially the older ones in New York and San Francisco, had finally been put on a paying basis. His magazines, particularly Good Housekeeping and Cosmopolitan, were doing quite well. The Hearst publishing empire had also discovered the benefits of syndication. To supply his newspapers with news, features, editorials, photographs, and the Sunday comics, Hearst had established his own rudimentary wire and feature services. By the mid-1900s, he had begun to sell those services to subscribers in cities without Hearst newspapers. In Washington, D.C., his representatives, operating out of the Munsey building, claimed that they gathered and distributed advance copies of speeches, reports, and “other documents of important character” to “two hundred morning and evening daily papers ... from Boston to San Francisco and Portland, Oregon.” By 1908 the Hearst Sunday comics were appearing in more than eighty newspapers in fifty cities. In the spring of 1909, Hearst formed the International News Service (I.N.S.) to coordinate these syndication services. In 1915, he directed Moses Koenigsberg, a man with an ego as large as his boss’s—and a girth even larger—to split off a separate feature service, which Koenigsberg, rearranging the letters of his own name, incorporated as the King Feature Service.16

  Eddie Hatrick, who was in charge of photo syndication for I.N.S., had purchased a moving-picture camera for himself in 1911 or 1912 to experiment with news pictures. Pathé, the French company which was at the time the world’s largest movie producer, had already introduced an American edition of its newsreel, the Pathé Weekly, in the summer of 1911; the Vitagraph company had followed almost immediately with the Vitagraph Monthly of Current Events. Neither Pathé nor Vitagraph nor any of their competitors succeeded in making money. It cost a great deal to gather quality location footage, and timely distribution remained a serious problem. Still, Hatrick was not discouraged. In 1913, he took moving pictures of Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration and sold them to Harry Warner, a future founder of Warner Brothers, who got them into the theaters the day after the inauguration. I.N.S. earned a profit of $2,000 from the venture, thereby demonstrating to W. R. that there existed a lucrative market for moving news pictures. Hatrick was authorized to enter into negotiations with Colonel William Selig, a small-time producer of fiction and topical films in Chicago, to produce Hearst-Selig “news reels.”17

  Hearst and his executives at I.N.S. had every expectation of succeeding where their predecessors had failed. The Hearst name had, by the early 1910s, achieved the status of a brand name signifying sharp, snappy, accessible, and entertaining news and features. Attaching “Hearst” to the title of a “news reel” and advertising that reel in the Hearst papers would introduce the new medium to millions of potential viewers who, it was hoped, would then pressure their local theaters to subscribe to the service. The advertising for the Hearst news pictures implied strongly that while other companies might fake their news pictures, the Hearst-Selig News Pictorial could be counted on to get the true story because it was “operated by the trained news gatherers of Hearst’s great International News Service which covers the entire globe.” “No such combination of the best trained newspapermen in the world, working hand in hand with a matchless producing company, has ever before been known,” read an advertisement in Motion Picture World. “No staging, no make-believe, no ‘play acting’—just the actual drama of life with its heroes, unconscious of their audience, snapped in the great crises of the world’s events and their every look, every gesture, every movement brought from the uttermost ends of the earth and flashed upon your theatre screen.”18

  With loyal newspaper and magazine readers in every section of the country, the Hearst publications controlled a national network capable of reaching more Americans on a regular basis than any other advertising medium, especially on Sundays, when circulation picked up and the paper, instead of being discarded, was kept around for the whole family to read during the following week. The fact that the Hearst papers were reaching millions of Americans every Sunday—not the ten million Hearst claimed, but a very substantial number—was not lost on the moving-picture industry. While Hearst was starting up his newsreel with Selig, Pathé entered into a partnership with him to publicize its films. We don’t know what the financial arrangements were, but it is likely that Pathé paid a premium to get the Hearst papers to run “novelizations” of its forthcoming films as Sunday features. “Pathé Pictures and the Hearst Papers,” read the doublepage ad in the February 28, 1914, issue of Moving Picture World. “The greatest combination ever effected in the Business, Pictures and real publicity. By an exclusive arrangement with the world’s greatest newspaper organization Pathé Pictures’ stories will be told in the Hearst papers the same day they are released. Let your patrons know you run these films.”

  The following month, Pathé and Hearst coproduced The Perils of Pauline, starring Pearl White as a young girl whose ambition is to become a serious writer. For twenty episodes, Pearl/Pauline literally chases her dream—and is chased by her departed father’s male secretary who is trying to steal her inheritance. The film was shot and edited by the Wharton Brothers in Ithaca, New York, an ideal location for filming “cliffhangers” because of its own steep cliffs, perilous waterfalls, and rushing rivers. Hearst took an interest in the project from its inception.19

  Morrill Goddard, his Sunday editor, who was asked to recommend a writer for the project, suggested his brother, Charles, a New York playwright. Charles prepared a 500-word synopsis which his brother edited. Then the two of them took it to Hearst at the Clarendon. Hearst had a number of questions and some suggestions, including, it seems, the title for the serial. On leaving Hearst, according to John Winkler, a Hearst biographer, “Charles Goddard remembered that a copy of the outline had not been left with Mr. Hearst. ‘Oh, he doesn’t need a copy,’ commented Morrill Goddard confidently. ‘He has one in his memory.’ Weeks later, after the entire script had been completed, Mr. Hearst reminded the author that he had never done anything about the spirit of an Egyptian Princess which, in an early episode, had emerged from a mummy case. Although of minor importance this was the only loos
e end the playwright had forgotten to tie up.” When the scripting was completed, Hearst turned his attention to the filming of the serial. In mid-April, a photograph of the Chief in his wide-brimmed black Stetson and long black overcoat “watching the making” of one of the episodes appeared in the New York Dramatic Mirror.20

  Though The Perils of Pauline was neither the first nor the most accomplished of the serials, it is still the best known, and established Pearl White, until then the almost anonymous heroine of dozens of Westerns, as a leading Hollywood star. The free publicity given it in Hearst’s newspapers had a great deal to do with the serial’s success. On the day before each serial episode was introduced in the theaters, the Hearst papers carried the illustrated story of that episode as a Sunday feature. When the entire serial had been released, Hearst’s International Publishers published the complete narrative as a hardcover book. Alan Dale, Hearst’s theater critic, “reviewed” the episodes in his newspapers. The reviews were then recycled as trade-journal advertisements, under the headline “More Than Ten Million People Read the Story Every Sunday.” As an added incentive to get his readers to see his serial, Hearst offered thousands of dollars in prize money to those who correctly answered questions about the episodes.21

  Like other Hearst products, the Hearst-Pathé serials were bigger, bolder, brighter, and more exaggerated than anything viewers had seen before—with more thrills, stunts, and chases, plus a spectacular cliffhanger ending every week. First as Pauline, then in three separate serials as Elaine (Exploits of Elaine, New Exploits of Elaine, and Romance of Elaine), Pearl White traveled across the world by every imaginable means of transportation, including airships, balloons, racing cars, and yachts, fighting off an assortment of pirates, gypsies, sailors, cowhands, renegade Indians, mad scientists, Clutching Hands, and poisonous snakes. In the final Elaine series, scripted while Europe was at war, Pearl White was pitted against Marius Del Mar, played by Lionel Barrymore, a villainous foreigner who was trying to destroy America’s coastal defenses and conquer the nation.22

  As soon as the series was completed, Hearst and his film executives began scripting their second “war” serial. Patria, starring Irene Castle, would be filmed in 1916 and distributed to the theaters in early 1917.

  The Hearst name was omnipresent in the nation’s movie theaters in the mid-1910s. He not only produced weekly newsreels and serial films, but had become a supplier of animated films, or cartoons, that were based on his Sunday comic characters. Winsor McCay, whom Hearst had hired away from the New York Herald in 1911, had earlier tried to make and distribute animated films based on the characters he drew for Hearst. When W. R. found out, he was enraged with McCay not only for moonlighting but for exploiting a product that Hearst had paid for and owned. In December 1915, when Hearst signed a new agreement with Vitagraph to coproduce and distribute his newsreels, he agreed to provide animated shorts to follow the news items and set up his own animation studio at 729 Seventh Avenue in New York City, with Gregory La Cava, the future director of My Man Godfrey and other feature films, to manage it. One by one, with the help of the best animators in the business, Hearst turned Maggie and Jiggs, the Katzenjammer Kids, Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse, Happy Hooligan, Maude the Mule, Parcel Post Pete, Judge Rummy, Joys and Glooms, Jerry on the Job, and Tad’s Daffydils into moving-picture stars.23

  IV. Of War and Peace

  14. “A War of Kings”

  THE WAR IN EUROPE seems to us in America one of the most terrible and one of the most unreasonable things that has ever happened in the world,” Hearst cabled Lord Northcliffe, publisher of the London Times, and Lord Nurnham, publisher of the London Daily Telegraph, in early September 1914.1

  “This is a war of kings,” he informed his countrymen in a signed editorial on September 3, “brought on by the assassination of a king’s nephew, who is of no more actual importance to modern society than the nephew of any other individual, citizen or subject, in all Europe....In the histories of more enlightened ages, the rulers responsible for this war will not be described as heroes, but as homicidal maniacs, as traitors to the sacred trust solemnly imposed upon them to promote the happiness and protect the lives of their people. There is no glory in murder and robbery, and war is but organized authorized piracy and manslaughter.”

  That the European powers had been unable to settle their differences short of war was proof positive that the Old World was mad. Neutrality was the only sane option for the United States. This was Hearst’s position, and, he was sure, that of the American people. “The allied newspapers, publications and news services controlled and directed by Mr. Hearst KNOW the sentiments and feelings and opinions of the American people, day by day, as no one else knows them,” his editorial pages would proclaim on January 5,1916. Hearst saw his role to be that of a clairvoyant, bringing to the surface, prearticulating, and giving voice to an often inchoate and unorganized public opinion. It was his responsibility to discern what the people thought and then to disseminate that thought back to the people and forward to their governments. To shirk such responsibility in the face of world crisis was unthinkable. He was the people’s tribune, their intermediary with Washington and the capitals of Europe.

  In early September, Hearst asked Lords Northcliffe and Nurnham in London to join with him in using the power of a united press to stop the European war while it was still in its infancy. The press, and only the press, could “end this war, and end all wars,” Hearst wrote his English counterparts in a letter he published on his own front pages on September 10, 1914. “I think the press can appeal to the people, to your people, to our people and to all other people, as no other influence can. I believe that if the appeal is made now to the press of all nations, and by the press of all nations, the war can be stopped and will be stopped.”

  There being no reply from London, Hearst went ahead and launched his own peace offensive with huge open-air rallies in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and at Grant’s Tomb in Manhattan. Attending the New York rally were clergymen, politicians, representatives of pacifist organizations, the Sixty-Ninth Regiment band, and three hundred girls from Washington Irving High School who sang “‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ ‘Angel of Peace,’ and other songs appropriate to the occasion....All the girls carried flowers, which they laid at the tomb,” the New York Times reported the next morning.2

  Though President Wilson had called for neutrality—and Hearst applauded him for it—no one opposed the war with Hearst’s fervor. As a transplanted Californian and a student of history, he possessed a unique perspective on global politics. The war in Europe was, he explained to his readers on September 3, “that most dreadful of all wars—a civil war.” No matter which side won, Western civilization would be the loser, and Japan and Asia the victors.

  Hearst feared no European power as much as he did Japan. Ever since the victory of the Japanese in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, Hearst and his newspapers had been warning their readers in San Francisco to beware of the “yellow menace.” In September of 1905, the Examiner had, according to the historian Roger Daniels, “printed a cartoon showing a Japanese soldier casting his shadow across the Pacific onto California.” A little more than a year later, on December 20,1906, the front page of the Examiner alerted San Franciscans to the presence of “Japanese spies” in their midst.

  JAPAN SOUNDS OUR COASTS

  BROWN MEN HAVE

  MAPS AND COULD

  LAND EASILY

  Now, in September of 1914, Hearst renewed his warnings and extended them to the rest of the nation. Japan, he reminded his readers over and over again, had a world-class navy, had established beachheads in the Pacific, in Hawaii, and on the American West Coast, and was poised to extend its sphere of influence west to Europe and east to North America. It was imperative, he warned his readers, that warfare among the Occidental nations cease before Europe was weakened to the point where it was no longer able to defend itself. It was even more imperative that the Americans remain neutral so as to conserve t
heir resources for the forthcoming battle with the Japanese for supremacy in the Pacific.3