by David Nasaw
This letter, from February 1924, closed rather ominously with the Chief informing Neylan that “Mr. Fleishhacker has been talking to me” in New York City: “Please get in touch with Mr. Fleishhacker when he returns and let him tell you what he has been telling me and then please write me as above suggested, and oblige.”9
Fleishhacker had traveled to New York to talk about the Hetch Hetchy project and to discuss a new financing strategy for the Hearst corporations. It was, ironically, Neylan, the progressive, who had first come up with the idea to raise money, much as the government had during World War I, by selling small-denomination bonds to the public. For this plan to work, Hearst required the services of bankers and brokers who would underwrite the issue and assist him in marketing his bonds.
The basis for a Hearst-Fleishhacker alliance was obvious. Hearst needed Fleishhacker to sell his bonds, while the banker needed the Hearst newspapers to promote his plans for Hetch Hetchy. After meeting with Hearst in New York, Fleishhacker returned to San Francisco and began negotiations with Neylan. Hearst urged Neylan to listen to Fleishhacker’s arguments, which Neylan did. In the end, however, Neylan was convinced that there was no way to reconcile Fleishhacker’s demands for privatization of Hetch Hetchy with the Hearst papers’ policy of municipal control. He promised Hearst that he would provide space for Fleishhacker’s views in his news columns, but reiterated his view that the Hearst newspapers should continue to press for municipal control of public utilities, as they had for the past forty years.10
On the bond issue, there was no disagreement between Fleishhacker and Neylan. With Fleishhacker as principal selling agent on the West Coast, Neylan launched a national campaign to sell Hearst’s bonds to the public. The opening salvo, on April 24,1924, was an article by B. C. Forbes, who had continued to write for the Hearst press after starting his own magazine, Forbes, in 1917. Under the intriguing headline “W. R. Hearst May Offer Securities to the Public,” Forbes reproduced the text of a purported interview he had conducted with Hearst.
“Our business has grown,” Hearst was reported to have told him. “We deal so directly with the public in our business that I have sometimes thought of giving the public an opportunity to become security holders. Something along this line is in mind, but I have no definite announcement to make, at least not yet.”
Forbes concluded his article with a decisive endorsement of the forthcoming bond issue: “It is a safe bet that if Mr. Hearst should decide to give the public a chance to acquire securities based on such gold mines there would be a stampede to buy them.”11
On April 26, a second article by Forbes appeared in the Hearst newspapers, again boosting the forthcoming bond issue. On April 29, the official offering statement appeared in newspapers across the country. That morning, in his front-page editorial column, Arthur Brisbane declared, “These bonds are SAFE. Buy them, if you have money that you would like to invest with absolute safety ... You can invest any amount from $100 to $100,000.” Brisbane confided to his readers that he had already contacted his friend Herbert Fleishhacker in San Francisco and bought $200,000 worth of bonds for himself. In a separate article on the financial pages, Fleishhacker told Hearst’s readers that the bonds were backed not only by “a security conservatively estimated by experts at more than $40 million,” but also by the personal guarantee of William Randolph Hearst, which means that “in addition to the properties ... all of his vast assets become part of the pledge that makes the issue gilt-edged.”12
Hearst’s strategy of selling bonds to his readers in small denominations was immediately successful. A week after the initial offering, the New York Times reported that “virtually all of the $12,000,000 bond issue had been sold ... Eighty percent of the Eastern sales were in lots of $1,000 or less, a half of this total having been lots of $500 each and less.”13
The growth of the Hearst publishing empire in the 1920s was extraordinary and unprecedented, as was the amount of debt accumulated to underwrite that expansion. With his financial problems temporarily solved by the infusion of new capital, Hearst returned to the marketplace to buy more newspapers. He had already purchased three newspapers in 1921, five more in 1922, and the Baltimore News in 1923. In 1924 he added another three, the Albany Times-Union, the San Antonio Light, and the Milwaukee Sentinel. It was more difficult now for Hearst to engage in the virulent populist trustbusting, anti-big business, anti-capital rhetoric that had defined his newspapers’ editorial policies since the 1880s. Without the cooperation of bankers in New York and San Francisco, the Hearst empire would long ago have collapsed and he knew it. The Chief did not temper his rhetoric merely to court favor with bankers to whom he was indebted, but because he had long before begun to identify the national interest with the Hearst interests. If the free flow of capital—from bankers to business—was good for the Hearst empire, then it was also good for the nation. The same logic applied to national politics. If, as seemed to be the case, the Republicans in Washington were pursuing policies that helped Hearst extend his publishing empire, then they were performing a national service and should be commended for it.
During the twelve years that the Republican presidents retained Andrew Mellon as secretary of the treasury Hearst would find it difficult to support a Democrat for the presidency. Mellon not only kept income tax rates low, but he and the other Republicans who occupied the center of power in Washington in the 1920s subscribed to the same laissez-faire economic theories that Hearst had begun to enunciate in his signed editorials. If, in years past, the Chief had been an opponent of the Republicans because they were too close to the business community, he now supported them for the very same reason and forbade his editors and reporters to criticize them for being too close to corporate leaders. In 1922, when Hearst’s Magazine ran a story criticizing Harding's secretary of the interior—Albert Fall, the architect of the Teapot Dome scandal—Hearst complained to Arthur Brisbane, who contacted the editor on the Chief’s behalf.
“There is an article in Hearst’s Magazine, much to Mr. Hearst’s displeasure, unfriendly to Secretary Fall,” Brisbane wrote. “I haven't seen it, but Mr. Hearst wires me that he objects to its publication, and asks me to obtain in Washington material for an article, illustrated, in all of our papers such as might please Secretary Fall, and at the same time let the public know of the good work that he is doing.”14
Eighteen months later, when Norman Hapgood, whom Hearst had hired as editor of Hearst’s International, attacked Andrew Mellon for not enforcing Prohibition laws more strictly, Hearst telegrammed Joseph Moore at 3:35 in the morning to ask him to rein Hapgood in.
“I think Mellon is an excellent Secretary of the Treasury and a fine man and that he is very earnestly trying to give good administration,” Hearst told Moore. “I think we are unfair to the man and I think the tone of article is truculent and unnecessarily offensive. It would be a great relief to me if Mr. Hapgood could accept my viewpoint that personal attacks of this kind are out of place in a monthly magazine of dignity and importance and literary character as [is] Hearst’s.”15
As part of his 1920s expansion, Hearst had, in 1924, reluctantly and belatedly, entered the tabloid market in New York City, starting up the New York Daily Mirror to compete with the New York Daily News, which Joseph Medill Patterson and Robert McCormick, the owners of the Chicago Tribune, had begun publishing in June of 1919. The term tabloid referred to a newspaper that was published in small-size pages. Most early nineteenth-century newspapers had, in fact, been tabloids out of necessity because it was difficult to get enough newsprint to publish larger papers. The tabloid format returned to prominence in England in the early 1900s when Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe, established the Daily Mirror as a women’s newspaper, then converted it into a fully illustrated, half-size newspaper. Harmsworth’s tabloid, filled with highly condensed, sensational stories about crime and scandal, was an enormous commercial success. By 1909, its circulation approached one million.
While insiders had long pre
dicted that Hearst would be the first American publisher to put out a tabloid-sized, illustrated newspaper, he had resisted doing so because he was not comfortable with the format. He had no interest in publishing a picture newspaper that had little room for the political coverage, columns, cartoons, and the editorials that he cared so much about. Newspaper publishing remained a calling as well as a business enterprise for Hearst. He was in it for the influence his papers brought him and the public service he still believed he was performing as a big-city publisher. As he wrote Arthur Brisbane in a 1928 telegram complaining about the New York newspapers’ lack of interest in the local public schools, “Artie, if we don't improve the schools in New York we don't deserve to publish successful newspapers there. There is nothing in just getting circulation if we don’t do anything with it.”16
Hearst delayed entering the tabloid market in New York as long as he could, though he did, in 1922, reduce one of his Boston papers to tabloid size. He tried at first to pay McCormick and Patterson to cease publication of their New York Daily News, because he did not want to have to compete with it. When they refused either to stop publishing or to sell the Daily News to him, he was left with no choice but to start up his own tabloid.17
It was already too late. By the time the first issue of the Mirror appeared, the News had been in operation for five years and had built a circulation base of more than three-quarters of a million readers. When Hearst and his New York editors tried to position the Mirror as the brash young tabloid on the make, they were trumped by Bernarr Macfadden, the millionaire body builder, promoter, and publisher of True Story, who three months after the Mirrors appearance established a tabloid of his own, the Evening Graphic. Macfadden's evening tabloid was so sensational, so heavy on sex and crime, and so light on news, that it barely qualified as a newspaper. Still, it stole circulation from Hearst’s Evening Journal as well as from the Mirror and his morning paper, the American.18
In 1924, in the midst of his newspaper buying spree, Hearst was asked by Editor and Publisher if it was his “intention....to possess one hundred newspapers in the United States.” He answered, quite truthfully, that he had no “plan to possess any more newspapers....But occasionally somebody wants to get rid of a paper and tries to sell it to me, and if I think I can see a way to make it a success, I am very likely to take over the job and try out my program.”19
Hearst’s empire had grown so rapidly that he could now claim, with only some exaggeration, that almost seven million American families, or one out of every four families in the entire United States, regularly read a Hearst publication. Millions more read Hearst syndicated features in their local newspapers. Like Rockefeller in oil and Zukor in moving pictures, Hearst had effectively used the threat of competition to force newspapers across the country to subscribe to his feature and news syndicates. According to Moses Koenigsberg, the head of King Features, publishers who declined to subscribe to the Hearst services were subtly warned that if they did not, Hearst might be compelled to establish a daily of his own in their home cities.20
At one time or another during the 1920s, the Hearst papers syndicated work by the fiction writers Fannie Hurst, Elinor Glyn, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Edith Wharton, and Rex Beach; the reporters Damon Runyon, Gene Fowler, and Lowell Thomas; the financial columnist B. C. Forbes; the society writer Cholly Knickerbocker; the Hollywood gossip columnist Louella Parsons; the tennis champion Helen Wills; and many internationally known writers, among them Gabriele d'Annunzio, Rabindranath Tagore, Oswald Spengler, Maxim Gorky, Vicente Blasco Ibanez, and Hendrik Willem Van Loon. In the middle 1920s alone, the Hearst papers serialized and syndicated Bruce Barton’s The Man Nobody Knows and Henry Ford’s The Great Today and Greater Tomorrow; the “letters” of Theodore Roosevelt, Queen Victoria, Joseph Conrad, Sarah Bernhardt, and Woodrow Wilson; the “life stories” of Mabel Normand, Rudolph Valentino, Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney, David Belasco, and Benito Mussolini; and “Batting Tips” by Ty Cobb. The cartoons by artists under contract to King Features included George McManus’s Bringing Up Father, Harry Hershfield’s Desperate Desmond, George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, the sports and dog cartoons of TAD, Billy De Beck’s Barney Google, Russ Westover’s Tillie the Toiler, E. C. Segar’s Casper and Popeye, Chic Young’s Blondie, together with the drawings of Rube Goldberg, Frederick Opper, and others.21
Though Cosmopolitan Productions, his film company, continued to lose money, Hearst had made true his boast to Adolph Zukor and was producing films that were winning acclaim from the critics and at the box office. His first big hit was When Knighthood Was in Flower, a fictional account of the life of Mary Tudor, based on the bestselling historical romance by Charles Major which had twenty years earlier been made into a Broadway play starring Julia Marlowe. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, among others, had tried to get the film rights to the property, but only Hearst was able to meet the price demanded by Major's widow.
Knighthood was the film Hearst had always wanted to make: a glossy, costumed extravaganza that showed off Marion Davies’ skills as an actress and his as producer and studio head. He had originally asked D. W. Griffith to produce it, but when he declined chose Robert Vignola, a veteran director who had worked on several of Marion’s earlier pictures. The film cost an unprecedented $1.5 million. Joseph Urban, with an unlimited budget, designed sets of operatic grandeur, including, according to Randolph Carter and Robert Reed Cole, his biographers, “two blocks of a street in old Paris, a Gothic cathedral, part of London’s Billingsgate district, and the tower of London. The set for the Paris scenes was at the time the largest indoor set ever built, consisting of thirty-two complete buildings, or at least their façades.” The scale of the production was such that it occupied no less than three different studios at the same time: Hearst’s 127th Street studio, Zukor’s facility in Astoria, and the Jackson studio in the Bronx. Three thousand extras were employed for the crowd scenes.22
Marion worked harder than she ever had to make Hearst proud. “I had to learn fencing,” she recalled in her recorded reminiscences. “I was supposed to be disguised as a boy, and I’m in an inn in England ... and they think I’m not quite a boy ... So I had a drink and ate the meat, with my hands, and then somebody said, ‘How about a duel?’ So then I had a duel—with five or six men....Well it took four months to rehearse that scene ... I was so stiff I couldn’t walk, but the director thought I walked just like a princess.”23
Hearst leased the Criterion Theater on Broadway for the opening and hired Victor Herbert to compose a “Marion Davies March” to be played as an overture. To make sure everyone on Broadway knew about the film, he bought space at the Times Square triangle at Broadway and 47th Street and erected a billboard with a painting of Marion so huge that Variety commented on it in its review of Knighthood.
The reviewers, as usual, lavished praise on Cosmopolitan’s publicity campaign and Urban’s designs, but this time they also singled out Miss Davies for special commendation. “While this is a fine picture for all concerned,” wrote the Variety critic, “it is a finer one for Marion Davies for When Knighthood Was in Flower implants this handsome girl right among the leading players, those who can act—something mighty few beautiful women of the screen ever accomplish....Cosmopolitan will gloat over this production....When Knighthood Was in Flower is a fine big and splendid mark on the not-so-long roadway of filmdom to date.”24
The film ran for months in the movie palaces—at two dollars for the better seats—before being put into general release in February 1923. Special booths were set up in theater lobbies and department stores to sell When Knighthood Was in Flower souvenir books, enlarged stills printed in sepia, and portraits of Miss Davies in full costume.25
Though it is impossible to know if the film ever recovered its $1.5 million costs, there was no doubt that Knighthood was a hit. Its success at the box office convinced Hearst that his instincts had been right, that the public would pay premium prices for costumed spectaculars produced by Cosmopolitan, designed by Jos
eph Urban, and starring Marion Davies. For years to come, whenever anyone expressed doubts about his producing skills or Marion's acting, he was able to point to Knighthood in rebuttal.26
Having triumphed with Knighthood, Hearst was determined to replicate that success with another historical costume drama, Little Old New York, also adapted from a Broadway show. Shooting began in late December of 1922 and was on track until a fire damaged Cosmopolitan Productions’ 127th Street studio. Hearst promptly relocated production to Fort Lee, where the sets were rebuilt and the costumes remade.27
Joseph Urban, once again given permission to do as he pleased, constructed what Moving Picture World called the largest and most remarkable indoor set ever used in a motion picture. A replica of the Clermont, Robert Fulton’s steamboat, was sailed down the East River to the studio, and fire wagons were reproduced from models at the New-York Historical Society. The artist Gustav Brock was hired to hand-color individual frames in two sequences—when Miss Davies blushed after hearing a risqué story and when the flag was hoisted over the Clermont. It took thirty hours of labor to color eight seconds of film.28
Marion again played a spunky, irrepressible, headstrong girl, this time poor and Irish. When her brother, who had somehow inherited a fortune, dies before he has had a chance to claim it, Marion disguises herself as a boy and invests money in Robert Fulton's steamboat. She falls in love with her American cousin, who learns at the end of the film that “Pat Day” is a girl, thereby legitimizing the affection he has felt for him/her.