The Chief

by David Nasaw

  “The question of getting good art objects in Austria, Hungary, and Russia is very important to me,” Hearst wrote von Wiegand in March of 1921, “and I think it would be well for you to employ or retain, with additional payment for each definite assignment, some experts on armor, pictures, tapestries, etc.” He had discovered quite by accident that the Vienna Hof Museum was selling off some of its pictures: “If things are to be sold, I suppose I might as well be a bidder for them as anyone else. So kindly take steps to get the fullest information and let me know in ample time.”21

  While American millionaires had for a generation been transporting European art across the Atlantic, never before had the contrast between European indebtedness and American prosperity been as great as it was in the 1920s. Not only individual works of art, but entire monasteries, castles, and country estates were being auctioned off by impoverished nobles and clerics who had been deprived of both wealth and standing in the aftermath of the Great War. “At the present time a good many things are being forced into the market by the money stringency among the former nobility and aristocracy,” von Wiegand wrote Hearst from Germany in the fall of 1921. “Every conceivable thing in the way of art, gold- and silverware, pearls and diamonds, is constantly being offered me or submitted to me with the request whether I know any Americans who would be interested in purchasing such things.”22

  No one, especially in Central Europe, had been spared the ravages of war, not even the man who was chancellor of Germany from 1900 to 1909. In October of 1922, von Wiegand informed Hearst that he had just had dinner with “Prince and Princess von Bulow....One time one of the world’s most famous statesmen, Bulow, like hundreds of other Germans is financially in a bad way, and is compelled to sell some of his priceless treasures.” The situation was much the same in Spain, where the Bynes reported to Julia Morgan in the fall of 1925 that there was no “question about the willingness of the Spanish Lords, Dukes, and Marqueses to sell their properties, nor is even the question of getting State permission so serious.” The only problem Hearst might encounter in removing artwork from Spain, the Bynes warned, was that “the villages or towns in which the edifices are situated [might] rise up and through the press carry on a campaign against you.”23

  Hearst was not concerned. He had no qualms whatsoever about stealing away European art treasures at bargain prices. Just as the Romans, two thousand years before, had signaled their ascendancy in the Mediterranean world by stripping the Greek isles of their treasures, so would twentieth-century Americans like Hearst celebrate their empire’s newfound prominence. From Hearst’s vantage point, the wholesale transmigration of art and antiquities to his New World was an act of creative rescue. Europe was dying or, more accurately, destroying itself through war, revolution, and financial irresponsibility. As it could no longer be counted on to protect its treasures, it was best they be carted away to San Simeon.

  Directly after the war, the Chief had, through the Bynes, purchased a derelict stone monastery in Burgos, Spain. “It was used as a storehouse for wine vats,” Hearst wrote Lawrence O’Reilly, his personal secretary in New York, “and was so dirty and reeking with bad smells that nobody could visit it. It is still, I understand, used for the same purpose. It is not being guarded or protected or preserved.” When word got out, however, that Hearst had bought the monastery, the Spanish authorities declared it “a public monument” and forbade its removal. Furious at the Spanish government’s interference, Hearst directed O’Reilly to “get Secretary [of State] Hughes to communicate to the Spanish Government about it and see if the matter could not be straightened out in some way. Please see what can be done? Suppose you go down to Washington and see Ned McLean [the owner of the Washington Post and a good friend of President Harding] to help you. He is very influential with the administration.” The Spanish government may have stood firm in this instance, as there is no known record of this particular monastery having been shipped or received.24

  Following the example set by the architect Stanford White, arguably the foremost American interior designer of his era, Hearst favored a generic European historicism that transcended spatial, temporal, and stylistic boundaries. He considered the European past as a resource to be plundered and rearranged, not a sacrament to be revered. To slavishly restore or recreate European designs was to diminish the significance of the American present.

  Like Bernard Berenson, the foremost art critic of that day, who had attended Harvard with him and also studied with Charles Eliot Norton, Hearst believed that “the end of art was delight.” He did not need the refracted glory of the art object to bestow on him the aura of culture. He had such faith in his own taste that he felt no compunction about improving upon the old masters, when he deemed it necessary to do so. After seeing a photograph of the sixteenth-century “Fountain of Venus” by Niccolo Tribolo, probably in Edith Wharton’s Italian Villas and Their Gardens, he directed Morgan to have two copies of the fountain carved in marble and installed on either side of the lower terrace of Casa del Mar. Tribolo’s fountain had been topped by a hefty Venus, posed rather awkwardly on one leg, wringing out her wet hair. Hearst improved upon it by substituting statues of svelte, athletic-looking, flapper-style nymphs sculpted by a contemporary German artist.25

  Like most collectors of his generation, Hearst bought regularly, though not exclusively, from the art dealer Sir Joseph Duveen, who maintained establishments in New York, London, and Paris. In May of 1926, Joseph Duveen wrote him an unctuous letter about some twelfth-century stained glass that was being sold by “Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont [Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont] who was, you know, W. K. Vanderbilt [Alva Vanderbilt]....Now my dear Friend, this is something stupendous and you are going to have it. If by chance you are in her neighborhood (as I know you travel about so much) before I return, I can arrange for you to see it because the house is for sale, and it is on that pretext that you can see the glass. I assure you you will be amazed. After all, forty years ago one could find such things, but they are becoming increasingly scarce.” Duveen, who was sailing to Europe with Mrs. Belmont, promised to negotiate with her for the stained glass. He assured Hearst that he was “not going to make any profit out of this matter. You will have the glass at the price I pay for it.”26

  We don’t know if Hearst ever bought Mrs. Belmont’s stained glass, but the following year he purchased her Sands Point estate for Millicent.

  Hearst was also a regular customer of the American Art Association and the Anderson galleries, which would later be merged into the ParkeBernet Galleries. One of his favorite pastimes was gallery shopping. Emile Gauvreau recalled in his memoirs that soon after being hired by Hearst to edit the Mirror in the late 1920s he accompanied him on a visit to a 57th Street gallery in Manhattan. Hearst spent the next few hours “immersed ... in hundreds of photographs of medieval fireplaces, castles in Scotland, interiors of paneled rooms, paintings and statuary. He bought that afternoon, apparently by looking at pictures, the rooms of an entire French cloister of the seventeenth century and asked my opinion of a sixteenth-century fireplace, every stone of which was to be transported from abroad.”27

  Though unfailingly cordial, the Chief was not an easy man to do business with. One of his least ingratiating habits was that of visiting dealers, reserving pieces, and then forgetting to pay for or release them, forcing the dealers to pester his subordinates to find out what he intended to do.28

  Besides buying directly from dealers, galleries, and auction houses in New York and during his European tours, Hearst was one of the world’s great catalogue shoppers. Every dealer and auction house, Duveen’s included, spent huge sums of money producing guides to their collections, which were sent to Hearst wherever he happened to be. Hearst put aside time from his other duties almost every day to review the piles of catalogues, brochures, memoranda, letters, and photographs sent to him. Those items he was interested in bidding on were marked in the catalogue with a red ring around the number of the lot. The catalogue was then forwarded to Chr
is MacGregor in New York, who was authorized to bid on the marked items. As Joe Willicombe, the imposing-looking former New York American reporter who had become Hearst’s personal secretary in the early 1920s, informed MacGregor, it was MacGregor’s job “to get all the things he has marked, unless they go to outrageously high prices ... Do not make the mistake I made the first day I attended of letting some get away from me under the impression that the prices were high ... Just get them, unless you are sure someone has rigged you up to rob you.”29

  When, as happened occasionally, Hearst or his surrogates were outbid, he directed MacGregor to find out who had bid against him. Though Hearst didn’t care much about the money involved, he had no desire to get into bidding wars with men as wealthy as he was. Duveen was occasionally called upon to mediate between the titans, most of whom were his customers. In June of 1927, Hearst wrote Duveen to apologize for having outbid Clarence Mackay, another multimillionaire who had inherited a mining fortune, at a recent auction. Both had bid up the price of a helmet which Hearst eventually purchased: “I did not have in mind any conflict with Mr. Mackay....I do not know whether it is possible or desirable to have an arrangement with Mr. Mackay on sales, but if it is desirable, we should have a little more definite understanding.”30

  No matter what the circumstances, Hearst never paid cash, offering personal “notes” instead. His patronage on these terms was a mixed blessing—especially as he delayed paying on his notes. The Bynes had such trouble getting paid that at one point Arthur Byne informed Julia Morgan that they had decided to do no more business with Mr. Hearst. He wrote her at some length:

  Since my first disastrous dealings with him I have found out a great deal about him from dealers in Paris. He makes a business (and incidentally considerable gain) of holding people off for years and then settling on his own terms....When I say all this I don’t mean that I am not willing to cooperate with you and Mr. Hearst; in fact nothing would give me greater pleasure. But my first experience ... proved to me that I must above all protect myself first in dealings with Mr. Hearst. I have never had a word from him though I have written innumerable letters. There is no use in sending me a cable “BUY ETC. ETC.” when the amount involves thousands and thousands of dollars; I have not the money and there is no reason why I should employ it if I had. Furthermore Mr. Hearst is utterly unknown in Spain for which reason he can’t buy here on credit as elsewhere.31

  In early 1927, the treasurer of the American Art Association turned down Hearst’s request to extend repayment of his bill for an additional year. At the time, Hearst owed the auction house a quarter of a million dollars and at least that much to consignors from whom he had purchased objects at A.A.A. auctions. The treasurer threatened to notify “these consignors that Mr. Hearst is not taking care of the obligations he assumed when he agreed to buy from them....If you will pardon my saying so,” he wrote Albert Kobler, Hearst’s New York editor who was also his intermediary with the galleries, “I do not believe that Mr. Hearst would like to have us put him in this position.” Hearst offered to return the pictures he had purchased. Unwilling to take back merchandise already sold, the auction house accepted the Chief’s terms for payment.32

  Hearst had, by the early 1920s, become so notorious a spender that he had to use aliases and agents to avoid the escalation in prices that occurred when it was known that he was bidding on an item. This need for subterfuge had unintended consequences for art historians. For decades, it had been known that Antonio Canova had sculpted three versions of his Venus. One was purchased by Lucien Bonaparte and then, in 1816, sold to Lord Landsdowne. It was later resold at auction in 1930 to a George Willson and thereafter “lost” forever. What was not known was that the George Willson who purchased it was Hearst’s father-in-law and the missing Venus was not lost but on view in the Assembly Room on the ground floor of Casa Grande.

  Hearst’s collecting tastes were widely eclectic. His collection ranged from the extraordinary to the ordinary and mediocre. It was probably weakest in paintings. Unlike other collectors of his day, Hearst had no special interest in paintings—except for Madonnas, which he seemed to buy by the dozens.33

  Dealers like Sir Joseph Duveen, while only too happy to take Hearst’s money, never considered the publisher a serious collector. Hearst, wrote S. N. Behrman, “was what Duveen termed an accumulator, rather than a collector....In Duveen’s opinion, Hearst’s collateral interest in ibexes, llamas, and Welsh castles kept him from attaining the rarefied heights on which he himself liked to operate.”34

  At any given auction or sale, he could be counted on to buy in numerous different categories. According to Wesley Towner, author of The Elegant Auctioneers, a history of the Parke-Bernet Galleries and the auction houses that preceded it, Hearst bought dozens of different items at the Stanford White auction in 1907; a knife and fork from the sale of the Chicago streetcar magnate Charles Tyson Yerkes’ collection in 1910; shoe buckles, snuff boxes, whist counters, and wine glasses from an auction of George Washington’s relics in 1917; a pair of paintings by minor sixteenth-century primitives at a 1926 estate sale of Viscount Leverhulme, the Lever Brothers soap king; and what seemed like carloads of bridal chests, slant-top writing desks, Sheraton canopy bedsteads, old New England wagon seats, silver, pewter, and a Chippendale mahogany highboy at the auction of Philadelphia wool merchant Howard Reifsnyder’s collection in 1929.35

  To receive, catalogue, and store his purchases from abroad, Hearst had leased a five-story warehouse in the Bronx, on 143rd Street near Southern Boulevard. He would purchase it outright in February of 1927. Lawrence O’Reilly, who had been his political secretary through the 1910s, was originally put in charge. When O’Reilly died in 1922, he was replaced by Chris MacGregor, a former reporter, who had proved himself trustworthy as the boys' chauffeur and babysitter. Miss Schrader, who had been Hearst's personal secretary at the Clarendon and still worked out of an office there, kept track of the accounts in New York City.36

  Hearst's art collecting operation had, by the early 1920s, become so extensive that he formed his own company, International Studio Arts Corporation, as a wholly owned subsidiary of his chief holding company, to purchase his art for him and, when necessary, clear customs. Though the bulk of Hearst’s collection was stored in the Bronx, where MacGregor and a staff of twenty, including clerks, photographers, bookkeepers, packers, handlers, and customs clearers, received artwork from Europe and stored, catalogued, and shipped it West, Hearst had items squirreled away in facilities all across the city, including a huge garage he owned around the corner from the Clarendon, at 325 West 85th Street, and space in commercial storage facilities on 42nd Street, opposite the Grand Central terminal, on 52nd Street and Seventh Avenue, and on East 61st and East 55th Streets. He owned additional warehouses and storage facilities in San Simeon, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.37

  With so many objects stored in so many different locations, it was often impossible for him to find what he was looking for. In July of 1921, Hearst decided that he wanted to ship West a “big painting of Napoleon in imperial robes” which he had bought twenty years before in Paris. He delegated O’Reilly in New York to track it down through Wells Fargo, which had shipped it, and “Daquin,” the French dealer “who used to buy for me.” We don’t know if it was ever found.38

  Record-keeping problems were complicated by the steady inflow of new materials. In June of 1921, Joe Willicombe was informed by George Thompson, the Chief’s valet, that Mr. Hearst wanted the things he bought at Anderson’s, a New York gallery and auction house, sent up to the Clarendon, and the things he bought at Clarke’s, another dealer, sent out West. Willicombe, confused because Hearst hadn't been at Anderson's in months, asked him what items he was referring to. The Chief drew a blank. Days later, he remembered that he had dropped into Anderson's months earlier —without Willicombe—and bought “a couple of Egyptian bronzes.”39

  18. Marion, Millicent, and the Movies

  HEARST SPENT ANOTHER SUMMER VACAT
ION in California in 1920. With two political conventions to cover, San Simeon under construction, five children, one wife, and one mistress, there was too much to keep him occupied in the States for him to resume his annual summer motor tours of Europe. He arrived at San Simeon, with the boys and Millicent, in late July for a family vacation on Camp Hill. Unwilling to be separated from Marion, however, even for the summer, he moved her to Los Angeles, installed her in the Hollywood Hotel—with mother and sisters as chaperones—and leased space at Brunton Studios so that she could complete her latest movie, Buried Treasure, a confused story of reincarnation, Spanish galleons, and pirates. To the despair of Joseph Moore, his corporate treasurer, who complained vociferously that he could not afford to pay for space in Los Angeles while carrying “an enormous studio overhead” in New York, the Chief also made arrangements for Marion to shoot her next film, The Love Piker, in Los Angeles.1

  Though Hearst had pushed Miss Morgan as hard as he could, she had not been able to complete any of the guesthouses. He, Millicent, and the boys were forced to spend another summer—he hoped their last one—in their Venetian-style tents. The hillside, Bill, Jr. remembered, was covered with “workmen and their little tents and their little wooden shacks....There was an administration tent where the Big House is. And it was three or four times the size of the other tents, but the same material. Very dark green, dark heavy canvas.” At one end of the big green tent was the dining table, at the other there were “a couple of projection machines” which threw film images onto a “big screen outside about thirty, fifty feet away ... or more, one hundred maybe.”2