by David Nasaw
“Marion Davies is to Little Old New York” Variety wrote, “what Times Square is to all of the country—the centre of attraction. Her performance will sell this film when it reaches the picture houses.” The only problem with the film was that Hearst, committed to producing a super-special that could be offered to the public at premium prices, made it much too long.29
The year 1923 was a banner one for Cosmopolitan Productions. In addition to Marion’s hits, Hearst’s studio produced Lionel Barrymore’s Enemies of Women; The Love Piker, with Ziegfeld star Anita Stewart and a screenplay by Frances Marion; and Pride of Palomar, based on an anti-Japanese novel, which did “wonderful business”—in great part, as a California theater owner told Moving Picture World, because it took “a nice slap at the Japs.” Even before Little Old New York opened, Hearst had made movie history by having three different pictures playing on Broadway at the same time.30
In August, Little Old New York premiered at the Criterion Theatre in Columbus Circle, which Hearst had leased, renamed the Cosmopolitan, and hired Joseph Urban to redesign for the opening of Marion’s new film. The opening was a grand success, though Marion worried throughout that the five-tiered chandelier Urban had finished installing just hours before the curtain might fall and kill audience members sitting beneath it. Mayor Hylan, a full contingent of Astors and Whitneys, and every important show business celebrity in the city attended the premiere. Hearst was discreetly absent, as he would be for all of Marion’s premieres. Arthur Brisbane presided in his place.31
Little Old New York was an even bigger hit than Knighthood. Screenland rated it the third biggest box-office success of 1923. With three big hits almost in succession and two of them starring Miss Davies, Hearst had finally entered the first rank of moving-picture producers. He cut loose at last from Adolph Zukor to start up his own distribution company, Goldwyn-Cosmopolitan, in partnership with Joe Godsol, the head of Goldwyn Pictures. In November, he announced that he was going to expand film production in New York City by building three new studios large enough to film super-special costume dramas.32
Although he had spent a good deal of time with Marion in 1923, Hearst had also been an attentive husband. In April, he and Millicent celebrated their twentieth wedding anniversary with a costume dance at the Clarendon. The guest list, crowded with titled foreigners and society folk, was Millicent’s. There were no publishing or show business people in attendance and only one or two politicians.33
Hearst and Millicent spent the summer of 1923 at San Simeon, probably with all five of their sons, and their winter vacation at The Breakers in Palm Beach. Hearst did what he could to make Marion’s life comfortable while he was out of town, instructing his private secretary, Joe Willicombe, to put his yacht at her and her sisters’ “service and call” during the summer: “Think they should live on it. Kindly see them and boat frequently to make sure everything going well.”34
With Marion in New York, Palm Beach was impossibly dull. Only days after his arrival, the Chief was telegramming Joseph Moore in New York to inquire “what [was] going on. It is terrible down here. Nothing to do. I want something to worry about.” Within a week, he had begun to complain about the Florida weather: “This is an awful burg—with all your snow and slush in New York, according to reports, you can believe me you are better off than we are in this balmy climate—for the climate is about all there is here—nothing else; there’s nothing else here.”35
Hearst occupied himself by working, as he did on every vacation. “Busy as a deuce since we got here and of course all the way down on train—and still at it,” Willicombe wrote Christy MacGregor in New York, on their arrival. “Haven’t been in for a swim once.” In Palm Beach, Hearst met with Joe Godsol, his partner at Goldwyn-Cosmopolitan, who was looking to sell Goldwyn Pictures to the highest bidder. Hearst entertained the idea of buying it, but he was short of cash and unable to consummate a deal. Godsol sold the company to Marcus Loew, who combined Goldwyn Pictures with Metro Pictures Corporation and hired Louis B. Mayer as vice president and general manager. The new company, Metro-Goldwyn (the Mayer would be added later), was incorporated in the spring of 1924, with Hearst’s and Godsol’s distribution company folded into it.36
Hearst and Marion had become valued commodities. With Joseph Urban providing the set designs, costumes, and lighting, and the Chief choosing the properties, directors, and screenwriters and supervising scripting, production, and publicity, Marion was on the verge of becoming a major picture star, and Hearst a respected producer of Davies’ super-specials and Cosmopolitan features. Marcus Loew, Louis B. Mayer, and Mayer’s new chief of production, Irving Thalberg, were delighted to welcome him, his star, and, of course, his nationwide publicity machine, to their new company.
20. Another Last Hurrah
IN APRIL OF 1922, Hearst was asked by the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle to comment on the rumors that he was going to run for governor of New York. He replied that he was now “a rancher, enjoying life on the high hills overlooking the broad Pacific. If you want to talk about Herefords, I will talk to you—but not about politics. I have no ambition to get into politics unless there be some special reason, and I don’t see any special reason.”1
He was a modern-day Cincinnatus who preferred his farm to the statehouse. If summoned, however, he would agree to answer the call to public service. While the Chief was not as obsessed with the presidency as some of his biographers have portrayed him, he had not entirely given up hope that the nation would one day call on him to serve as its chief executive. A lifetime of journalism had deepened his conviction that politicians were, with few exceptions, mendacious, corrupt, and incompetent. The country needed a leader who was not tainted by the political process and was not dependent on the largess of machine politicians or big businessmen.
While denying that he had any interest in the gubernatorial nomination, Hearst delegated William J. Conners, a Buffalo publisher, and Mayor John Hylan of New York to organize political support and Joseph Moore and Edward Clark to buy two upstate newspapers, the Syracuse Telegram and Rochester Journal.2 It was an opportune time to reenter the political arena. Former Governor Al Smith, the most popular Democrat in the state, had retired from politics in 1922 after being defeated for reelection. With no one else on the horizon as a possible gubernatorial candidate, Hearst considered the nomination his for the asking.
Perhaps because he had been spending more and more time in California —and as a gift to Millicent who much preferred Europe to San Simeon— Hearst took her and his three oldest boys to Europe in the spring of 1922. It was to be another Hearstian grand tour, the first since before the war, with a full entourage of servants, family members, friends, and business associates, included among them Guy Barham, the publisher of Hearst’s Los Angeles paper, and his wife. The Hearst party sailed for Europe on the Aquitania on May 23.3
Marion Davies, according to her biographer Fred Guiles, set off in the same direction a week later. Arriving in London, she was met by J. Y. McPeake, a white-haired Irishman with pince-nez glasses whom Hearst had hired to start up a British version of Good Housekeeping. McPeake put Marion in an elegant suite of rooms halfway across the city from the Savoy, where Hearst and his family were staying. While Hearst met with publishing associates and, with Millicent, visited Prime Minister David Lloyd George for luncheon at 10 Downing Street and Lord Beaverbrook at his country home, Marion was entertained by McPeake in London.4
Hearst’s—and Marion’s—vacations were interrupted in mid-June when Guy Barham was rushed to the hospital with stomach pains and died after an emergency operation. Hearst accompanied Barham’s body back to New York on the Olympic. His butler, George Thompson, and his sons John and Bill, Jr. sailed with him. Marion returned to New York at the same time—Fred Guiles tells us—on the same ship as the Hearsts. Millicent and George Hearst, the oldest son, remained in Europe to continue their vacation.5
On the Saturday after Marion’s return, her sister Reine gave her a welcome-hom
e party at her Freeport, Long Island, vacation home. The party ended abruptly just before midnight when Oscar Hirsch, identified in the newspapers as “a wealthy electrical manufacturer,” took a bullet in the mouth from his wife Hazel’s “pearl-handled revolver.” The wound was not serious. The next morning, according to the newspaper accounts, Oscar and Hazel not only kissed and made up, but, according to their attorney, “vehemently declared ... that they will never again taste a drop of intoxicating liquor.”6
The story would have merited no more than a back-page mention in the Long Island papers had the Davies sisters not been involved and had Marion, on Hearst’s advice, not had her attorney telephone the New York papers to say that she had not been at the party. On the Monday after the shooting, almost every non-Hearst newspaper in the city carried some version of the “Rich Man Strangely Shot” Oscar Hirsch story on their front pages, the Daily News with a photograph of “Miss Marion Davies, screen beauty.” When the Freeport story died a natural death without Marion being further implicated, Hearst had to have been enormously relieved. In the midst of his campaign for the gubernatorial nomination, he didn’t need a whiff of new scandal to set off the retelling of old ones.7
On returning to New York with Guy Barham’s body, Hearst announced that he would be staying for only three days before sailing to Europe to rejoin his wife. Five days later, the newspapers declared that he had changed his mind and would be traveling to California instead. He did neither, but stayed behind in New York until July 15 when Millicent returned from Europe on the Mauretania. Now in full campaign mode, Hearst met her on the gangway, accompanied by Grover Whalen, New York City’s Commissioner of Plant and Structures, a welcoming committee appointed by Mayor Hylan, and the Police and the Street Cleaning Department bands.8
The Chief never did get to San Simeon that summer. His nomination for governor was put in jeopardy when a convention of anti-Hearst Democrats assembled in Syracuse in July to publicly denounce him and ask Al Smith to run against him in the primary.9 Hearst’s candidacy posed as great a danger for political and business leaders in 1922 as it had in 1904 when he ran for president for the first time. He was still, from the podium at least, an uncompromising foe of corporate power, the trusts, and the corrupt politicians who refused to take them on. His candidacy threatened to reopen questions about the future of American capitalism and the role of the state which politicians and corporate leaders alike considered resolved.
After two decades of debate and agitation, the rise and fall of Populist, Progressive, and Socialist parties, and innumerable strikes and lockouts, a corporate-liberal consensus had finally been achieved. It was now the accepted wisdom—in the board rooms and in Washington—that the role of government was not to supersede or control the corporation, but to legalize and legitimize it by regulating its excesses.
Hearst was determined to rip apart this consensus by reviving the discourse of the 1890s, redefining the trusts as corrupt and un-American, and arguing that government officials had not only the right but the responsibility to replace them with municipally owned and operated utilities. On June 25, more than four months before the election, the New York Times warned its readers in an editorial to stand guard against the “wide open democracy which Mr. Hearst has been advocating in his newspapers for a generation.” To get himself elected, the Times predicted that Hearst would mobilize “the footloose in politics ... the ultra-progressives and semi-radicals.” Once elected he would make matters worse by providing voters with unwarranted and unnecessary new powers to oversee their elected officials: “direct primaries for the nomination of candidates to all offices, inauguration in this State of the initiative, referendum, and recall of public officials [and] the recall of judicial decisions.”10
Each of the initiatives would, not coincidentally, have the effect of weakening the political parties while enhancing the power of the press. With “initiative, referendum, and recall,” Hearst would be able to legislate through his newspapers by identifying issues, rousing public opinion, and organizing his own campaigns to pass laws, recall officials, and overturn judicial decisions. Control of the daily press—and a newsreel service—was, in the days before radio and television, tantamount to control of public and political discourse. And that control, combined with Hearst’s unquestioned ability to speak directly to the voters, posed a threat to the Republic. As William Church Osborn of Putnam County, a leader of the “Stop Hearst” forces, declared in early July, “There is a monopolist in this country who seeks to control the sources of information which are vital to the healthy life of our Republic. This man has driven his shafts throughout the country into the secret and abnormal strata of poor humanity, and has drawn from the shafts poisonous and sickening stuff, which he has distributed daily to the people of the United States for his own profit and his own power.”11
In the end, Hearst was done in by the leaders of his own party, who persuaded Al Smith to come out of retirement and run for governor. Hearst agreed to withdraw from the race if the party would nominate him instead for the open Senate seat. Though Boss Murphy was willing to consider this possibility, Smith vetoed it. He had been publicly feuding with Hearst since 1919 when the publisher, after supporting him for governor, turned on him immediately after his election and accused him of supporting the milk trust in its attempt to raise milk prices in New York City. Even his aged mother, Smith recalled in his autobiography, had been disturbed by “the most dastardly and infamous cartoons widely circulated through the city, depicting me as the fiend of the milk trust, willing to starve helpless women and children for the extra pennies wrung from the poor.”12
Smith got his revenge at the Democratic nominating convention in July of 1922. As the New York Times reported the morning after the delegates had chosen their nominees, the convention had struck “a death blow to the political hopes of William R. Hearst by eliminating him as a candidate for any place on the ticket and virtually reading him out of the party ... Most of the leaders believe that this will be the final attempt of the publisher to make forcible entry into the party ... The opinion most frequently expressed was that ‘Hearst is through’; that the party ‘is well rid of him and his meddling’ and that he ‘should be kept out.’”13
Everyone but Hearst himself had reached the same conclusion: that at age fifty-nine he was finished in politics and would peaceably retire to California or Palm Beach. But the Chief was not ready to concede defeat to Al Smith, who was elected to another term as governor in 1922, or to Boss Murphy and Tammany Hall, who had stood firmly with Smith against him. In 1923, the Chief ran his own independent slate of candidates for the State Supreme Court. They were soundly defeated. “Good-bye to Hearst Waved by Tammany ... Never, Never Is the Wigwam to Consider Him a Friend Again,” read the postelection headlines on the front page of the New York Times. The chairman of the Democratic state campaign committee declared that “Hearst’s usefulness to any party is a thing of the past”; Boss Murphy announced that he was barring all Hearst papers from his home and asked all New Yorkers to do likewise: “It is to be hoped that our decent, clean-thinking men and women will not hereafter tolerate in their homes the lying, filthy newspapers under the Hearst management.”14
Still, Hearst was not done. In June of 1924, he joined forces with his old foe, William Jennings Bryan, against his new foe, Al Smith, who was the leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. To demonstrate to the Democratic leadership that he was willing to play a major role in the upcoming election if his candidate, William McAdoo of California, was nominated, he hosted a gala reception for six hundred prominent Democrats at the Ritz-Carlton. “The entire first floor of the hotel was transformed into a conservatory by towering palms, orange trees, rambler roses and ferns,” the New York Times reported the morning after the event. “The Palm Court, the main dining room and the Japanese Garden were held for the reception, and two orchestras, Paul Whiteman’s and Eddie Elkin’s, provided the music....At midnight, a divertissement was given,
the performers including ... Clifton Webb and Will Rogers. Supper was served in the Japanese Garden.”15
The balloting for the presidential nomination began five days later on June 30. When after several days and forty-two ballots, Smith and McAdoo remained deadlocked, Bryan, fearing that the rural, anti-Smith delegates would run out of money and leave town, asked the Chief for funds to help out “the delegates that may be pressed for money.” Hearst agreed to pay room and board for one hundred of them, but informed Bryan, through Brisbane, that he wanted to keep the entire matter secret.16
After the ninety-ninth ballot, Smith and McAdoo withdrew and the convention nominated corporation lawyer John Davis on the 103rd ballot. Hearst condemned the nominee as a puppet of Wall Street and, with Millicent and the Hylans in tow, left for San Simeon.
Determined not to have anything to do with Davis and the Democrats but unwilling to switch to the Republicans, Hearst was consigned to political limbo. “There seems to be no special reason why we should be particularly partisan in the coming campaign,” he wrote his editors in a lengthy memo on July 10. “It should be possible to print a paper which Republicans and Democrats and LaFollette [the progressive governor of Wisconsin] followers would all not only be able to read, but would like to read on account of its fairness—a paper to which these various factions would turn to get the TRUTH of the political situation.” Hearst wanted his editorial writers to begin addressing their readers as they would friends in conversation. Cartoons should be “light and amusing and inoffensive. Avoid bitter personalities.”17