by David Nasaw
Raising his sons was important to Hearst, but never his first priority. Although he always sent them presents for their birthdays, he never chose them himself but asked Millicent or Joe Willicombe to do so. There were also long stretches of time in which he remained entirely out of reach. “His silences toward us were often difficult to understand and bear,” Bill, Jr. recalled. “The only reasonable explanation that I have been able to come to over the years was his far-flung company and other responsibilities....In not spending more time with his wife and children, my father made the biggest mistake of his life. It left an emptiness in all of us.”18
After extended silences, the Chief would fire off a long letter to one or the other of his boys, filled with advice and warnings to straighten up. Like his mother before him, W. R. interfered at a distance in every aspect of their private lives well into their adulthood. George, at age twenty-three, was lectured by “Pop” on his weight: “You are getting dangerously stout. Health is important, and if you do not take pains to keep from getting dangerously fat, you are going to pop out some time soon with fatty degeneration of the heart or kidneys or something of that kind.” Bill, Jr., at nineteen, was criticized for getting sick: “I am sorry that you are ill. Have you gone back to drinking and smoking.... Keep yourself in good condition. Do not drink. Do not smoke. You can have fun in LOTS of ways which will not injure your health.”19
All his life, he was terrified that his sons would grow up to be irresponsible. None of his boys, as Randolph Hearst explained in an interview years later, had “the talent or the drive of the old man”—and they all knew it. Nor, as Bill, Jr. wrote in his autobiography, did they ever come close to their father “in disciplined working habits.” He desperately wanted them to be able to take over the publishing empire he had built from the ground up. “Pop repeatedly warned us that he would not treat us like a rich man’s sons. Each of us was told he would have to prove himself to my father’s satisfaction.”20
Still, no matter what he might say or write, it became clear to the boys quite early that their father would give them what they wanted. “I expect something more of you than to be playboys,” he wrote the twins at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey. “You will have to work and work hard. You might as well be learning how to work now. You have got to get an education that will make you able to take care of yourselves....If you are not trained for the contest that is ahead of you, you are likely to bring up the rear of the procession.”21 But when the twins did poorly at school, Hearst excused their failures. “I have read the headmaster’s letter about Randolph, and I suppose David, too,” he wrote Millicent:
There is nothing very surprising in this. These boys are simply behaving as the others did. We may not approve of their behavior, but it is characteristic of the clan. They do not take kindly to education. This is probably a defect, but Brisbane says, “It takes a good mind to resist education.”...I wish they would learn something, but apparently they will not.... The school is probably too strict with them.... They are simply more or less untamed and untamable.... At any rate, I would not worry about them.... If they do not get along at that school, we will put them in another school and give them all the education they will consent to absorb.22
Having paid little attention to formal schooling in his own life, W. R. could not quite bring himself to demand that his boys do so. “None of us completed college,” Bill, Jr. wrote in his memoirs. “That did not seem to bother Pop, since he was not graduated from Harvard. George spent a year at UC Berkeley; John dropped out of Oglethorpe, Randy left Harvard; and David didn’t go to college at all. I left UC Berkeley after two and a half years.”23
As they left school, Hearst apprenticed them all to trusted executives in his publishing companies, who were expected to watch over them, teach them the ropes, and report on their progress to their father. When the boys made a decision he did not agree with or, worse yet, abdicated their responsibilities, he lashed out, showing little mercy. “Some of my brothers,” Bill, Jr. wrote in his memoir, “were surprised and, at times, shocked at what they perceived as a hard-nosed attitude on our father’s part when it came to work. Pop tested the ability of each of us to perform, independent of our being his sons. Coming of age was a very disturbing time for each of us. We had been sheltered from many of life’s cruelties, despite various warnings by Pop that making a living was no easy business. Most of us felt we needed more time and greater warning from him before facing the problem of a career. The working world came as a cold and perhaps even cruel blast of new air. My brothers felt that Pop treated us harshly.”24
George, the oldest, had the roughest time of all. At age nineteen, after leaving Berkeley, he was given his first position at the San Francisco Examiner. When he proved himself uninterested in or incapable of doing any work there, his father ordered Joseph Moore to fire him, in a fashion. “George can continue drawing his wages,” Hearst wrote Moore, “but do not want him around any more. He gets soused all time and is terribly sick after every drunk and useless for days. Besides being alcoholic disgrace, this last time he got drunk and missed train and I have nobody to do his work. Am awfully sorry but I must get reliable man.”25
George was given another chance. When he failed again, Hearst delegated John Neylan, his West Coast lieutenant, to take charge. “In regard to George Hearst,” Hearst wrote Neylan, “he is apparently too lazy to occupy a position by himself and do any work. So there is one of two things to be done with him; either put him in the Fleishhacker bank for a year or two, until he gets an acquaintance with business methods—and I think this is the best thing to do—or else put him back under your care and make him work.... Do as you think best.” After three years of failure on the West Coast, George was finally shipped East to New York City in 1926 to serve as president of the New York American. He was then twenty-two years of age.26
There was no way George or any of the other boys could possibly succeed. When they slacked off, they were criticized by their father for being bums. When they tried to take their work seriously, they were criticized for overreaching. “Sousa said anybody could conduct my band for a while,” W. R. wrote George in the fall of 1927, after he had been sent back West to take over the Examiner again. “What he meant was he had his band well trained but that it would soon begin deteriorating unless careful superintendence was kept up. I think Examiner is beginning to deteriorate.”27
Having failed to demonstrate any talent at all for the publishing business, George was quickly superseded as heir apparent by his younger brother Bill, Jr., who, after leaving college at age twenty, joined the New York American as a City Hall reporter. He soon worked his way up the hierarchy under the tutelage of editor Edmond Coblentz, until he was, while still in his twenties, named publisher of the American. Although W. R. complained about Bill’s playboy antics, his love of fast cars and planes, his drinking, and the time he spent in nightclubs, he was much gentler with him than with George. “Please keep out of airplanes, Bill,” he telegrammed him in 1927, when he was nineteen years old. “Am afraid you will break your neck just as you are getting to be useful newspaper man. Am serious about this.”28
This is not to say that Bill, Jr. was spared his father’s complaints. “There are two kinds of cartoons appearing ... that I find very objectionable,” W. R. wrote him at the American. “One is the kind reflecting on colored people and the other takes contemptuous attitude toward the poorer classes who do menial work. I wish you would kindly stop these absolutely both in the daily and in the Sunday papers.” The following week, Bill, Jr. received a second telegram from San Simeon: “Please try to understand instructions and advice that I give you. I may not always have time to explain them, but you can generally depend on the fact that my experience is greater than yours. Of course Victor [Watson] and all the others try to tell you that you are right. I try to tell you the TRUTH.”29
Hearst’s most vexed relationship was probably with John Hearst, his third oldest son. Perhaps the most gifted intell
ectually of all the boys, with movie-star good looks and a surfeit of charm, John was a constant disappointment to his father. After a checkered academic career in various prep schools, he enrolled in Berkeley, but was asked to leave when he failed to attend class. Though W. R. had accepted the other boys’ scholastic failures, he was furious with John:
Your failure to attend school makes it necessary for me to end your futile attempts at education. You will not go to college. You will resign from ... school and go to work on some newspaper in San Francisco immediately. You will surrender your automobile or sell it, because I will not give you any money to take care of it. You will probably be better able to get along on some other paper than any one of my papers, because I do not want you merely to be a dependent in journalism and be as big a failure in journalism as you have been in your studies.30
By the fall, Hearst had agreed to give John a second chance at college, this time at Oglethorpe University, near Atlanta, where Hearst had the previous May received an honorary degree. Though the Chief had not appeared to care much whether any of his other sons attended college, he did not know what else to do with John, who was not yet eighteen and much too young and immature to take a position at one of his father’s newspapers or magazines. “Well here I am Alabamy bound much to my disgust,” John telegraphed his father in San Simeon. “But as you say quote much must be sacrificed in the quest of knowledge unquote. Don’t forget it. Won’t be long before I am a year older and as a birthday gift to myself I became engaged to Dorothy. Love from your well meaning but blundering son John.”31
The woman John referred to was Dorothy Hart, “the belle of her social set in Los Angeles,” according to Irene Selznick, and “one of the most beautiful girls in Southern California.... She could stop traffic.” Both sets of parents objected to the marriage: the Harts, according to Sally Bedell Smith, the biographer of Dorothy’s second husband, William Paley, because John’s father lived openly with his mistress; the Hearsts because John was uneducated, unemployable, and barely eighteen years of age. After weeks of telegrams and letters back and forth from John, who wanted his father’s help, “Pop” gave in. John promised to delay his marriage and concentrate on his schoolwork. W. R. bought him a “lovely ring” to give to Dorothy and instructed the editor of his Atlanta newspaper to give him the money he needed to make his first and subsequent payments on a new car.32
Despite his promises, John dropped out of school to marry Dorothy Hart in December. After a lengthy and expensive honeymoon, he returned to New York, still only nineteen years of age, to take a position as president of the Hearst company which oversaw Town & Country, Harper’s Bazaar, and a few other magazines. The following fall, John tried to justify his new title and $100,000 salary by sending his father a lengthy memo with suggestions for the magazines. W. R. turned most of them down and corrected John’s spelling errors.33
While Millicent’s major complaint about her boys was that they didn’t write her often enough, W. R. could not countenance their spending habits. “These young people,” he wrote Millicent in the fall of 1930, “are all as mad as March Hares on the money question and seem to think there is no limit to the bankroll.... I am sure that if George had not had so much money he would not have got into the trouble he has got into. All work and no play may make Jim a dull boy, but no work and all play makes Jim all kinds of a jackass. I want you to get our youngsters together and tell them I am going to shut down on the money supply ... These nincompoops are never satisfied and are being ruined by living far beyond their means and mine. Please read them a lecture and make them keep their expenses down.”34
Try as he might to rein in his sons’ spending, the Hearst example spoke much louder than his threats. The boys, following in their father’s footsteps, continually ran into debt and called on their parents to bail them out. This they did, as had Phoebe before them, but never without complaining.
23. Dream Houses
“MARION DAVIES WILL SOON MOVE into her beach house at Santa Monica,” Louella Parsons wrote in her September 6, 1926, column. “It is the largest house on any southern California beach.... Even Marion doesn’t know how many ... rooms there are.”1
Four months earlier, on returning from New York City, where he and Millicent had celebrated their twenty-third wedding anniversary and his sixty-third birthday, W. R. picked Marion up at her Beverly Hills mansion for a drive to the Santa Monica beach. They stopped close to the spot where Aimee McPherson, the nationally known radio evangelist, had been seen for the very last time before she had vanished earlier in the week. A huge wave swept toward them and almost knocked Marion over. W. R. took her up to higher, safer ground. Did she like the spot she was now standing on? he asked her. When she replied that she did, he told her he would build a home for her there.2
The Santa Monica beach, far enough from Hollywood to shelter its residents but near enough to comfortably commute from, had become the favored home for the movie colony’s elite. Jesse Lasky, Louis B. Mayer, Sam and Frances Goldwyn, Norma Shearer and Irving Thalberg, Mildred and Harold Lloyd, and Doug Fairbanks and Mary Pickford already lived there in luxurious mansions that were emblematic, they hoped, of their royal stature in Hollywood. Marion’s beach house dwarfed them all.3
Irene Mayer, who lived with her parents down the strip, recalled in her memoir that, as Hearst’s and Marion’s “great mansion began to assume its overpowering position on the beach,” she became “increasingly fascinated, and ... constantly drawn to have a look at what was going on.” Her “Uncle William,” whom she was fond of because Hearst always found time to talk to her when he visited the Mayer house, invited her for a tour around the site. “My visits came to be almost definite appointments. As we parted, he would announce when he would be there next. He never said he expected me, but when I showed up, he’d say he’d been wondering where I was.”
Hearst, delighted to have someone to talk to about his new project, especially a smart and attractive twenty-year-old, lectured Irene “about Georgian paneling, original brasses, and a lot more about mantels and overmantels than I ever had need to know.” Irene became his “companion in his housebuilding, since Marion never bothered to come.... He had a passion for building.... We never discussed anything but details of the architecture, the imports, and what was to be done about the pool. The pool was begun several times; he increased its length, changed its depth.” When the pool was finally completed, Hearst invited Irene Mayer to baptize it with him. On the appointed day and time, Mayer appeared at Hearst’s mansion:
I didn’t get the welcome I expected because he was upset.... There was a problem which appeared minor (to me): Uncle William didn’t have a bathing suit. He covered all the rooms upstairs and I devoted myself to the basement, which was temporarily a supply depot. It was piled high with enormous cartons of bathing suits, every size except his.... Someone must have gotten hell, because even standing by the pool I could hear his high-pitched voice.... When he returned, he was quiet and frightening.... Coldly, he asked me to conduct the so-called ceremony by myself; he would observe. It was no fun to mount the big board, swim the length, and come up to an unsmiling Uncle William. I fled down the beach, pained for the poor man who had been so humiliated.4
By the time it was finished, Ocean House, according to Marion’s biographer Fred Guiles, had cost Hearst $7 million—$3 million in construction costs and $4 million more in furnishing and artworks. “It almost got to be as big as the White House,” Marion recalled. “Bigger, maybe. Just like you build with little blocks, he added on and on. But little blocks wouldn’t have cost the money.”5
Ocean House at Santa Monica (or the beach house, as it came to be called) consisted of a U-shaped three-story white Georgian colonial-style mansion, surrounded by four other buildings in the same style. Behind the central mansion was a 110-foot heated, saltwater swimming pool, lined with Italian marble and traversed by a Venetian marble bridge. To the right were the tennis courts. Hearst and Marion lived in the main house and d
id their entertaining there. The other four houses were occupied by Marion’s family, long-term guests, and thirty-two full-time servants. There were 110 bedrooms and 55 bathrooms in the complex. As at San Simeon, every bedroom was part of a suite, with a sitting room and private bathroom. Marion and W. R. had their own suites, connected by a hidden door.
Busy as he was with his own castle at San Simeon, Hearst supervised the construction, interior decoration, and furnishing of Marion’s new home. Though Julia Morgan did not design the structure, she was enlisted to help decorate and furnish the interior. “When we come to the decoration of the interior of the beach house,” Hearst wrote Morgan on June 15,1926, “in order to prevent too much similarity in the ten bedrooms [in the main house, which was built first] I think it might be well to have on the top floor for instance, one Dutch bedroom, one French bedroom, etcetera.... On the top floor we might want to let the beams show [something he had ruled out at San Simeon], and get a little different type of treatments, all in the 18th century period, however.... Do we use these vacuum cleaners on the Hill? I would like to provide means of using them at the beach. Also have house telephones, radio connections, etc.”6