The Chief

by David Nasaw

  A walk down the hillside to the zoo at feeding time was an obligatory part of every stay at the ranch. Zoo stories became an ingrained element in the San Simeon folklore. Marion herself told stories about Doris Duke being chased by a spider monkey, about the lion who clawed young David Hearst, and the bear that chewed off the tip of a guest’s finger—“and she had gloves on.”28

  Hearst had a warm spot in his heart for all his animals, the large and the small. He directed his staff to trap mice live and set them free on the grounds. When, in the spring of 1929, Hearst’s zookeeper informed him that a kangaroo had been killed, probably by a predatory yak, the Chief urged him not to condemn the yak out of hand. The kangaroo, he suggested, might have been killed by another animal or run over by an automobile. He did not, in any event, want the yaks punished or the kangaroos isolated from the rest of the animals: “Let us not do anything as yet until we have some further experience.”29

  If for the first six or seven years, the Hearst weekend guest list had been top-heavy with publishing associates, after 1926 it was reconfigured into something quite different. Marion, who loathed being alone, was accustomed to being surrounded by an entourage of family and friends. Because W. R. wanted her to enjoy herself at the ranch, he gave her carte blanche to invite whomever she wanted to spend the weekend with her there.

  W. R. and Marion were the oddest of Hollywood couples. Hearst, especially, was a complete enigma to some of his guests. Often the tallest man in the room, with vivid blue eyes and a life-long habit of staring unblinkingly at his interlocutor, he struck many visitors to San Simeon as cold and distant, even a bit frightening. “There was always a little aura of the mysterious and awe about him,” King Vidor remembered. “He seemed to be suspicious of strangers, and did not meet people very well,” Frances Marion recalled in her oral history.30

  Marion was as friendly and voluble as W. R. was distant and reserved. “She was a delightful hostess,” the Hearst newspaper reporter Adela Rogers St. Johns recalled in an oral history. “She wasn’t formal but very gay and very warm.”31 Every week, Marion and her secretary, Ella [Bill] Williams, whose office was at the MGM Culver City Studio, put together the next weekend’s guest list and made the phone calls. Hearst, of course, had his own names to add. Together he and Marion were assembling a new California aristocracy of the amusing, witty, beautiful, and accomplished that included Marion’s old friends from the Follies and her new friends from MGM, prominent studio executives, established and on-the-make stars and starlets, reporters, publishing tycoons, politicians, bankers, and writers. “We left the Southern Pacific station at 6:30 on Friday night,” the actress Colleen Moore recalled of her first visit to the ranch, in 1927. “With me on the train was Hedda Hopper (who was still playing bit parts in movies), Julanne Johnston [a silent-screen actress], Constance Talmadge, King Vidor and Eleanor Boardman, Adolph Menjou and his wife Katherine, Eileen Percy and her husband Eric Busch (of the Busch breweries), Bebe Daniels and Jack Pickford, Jack Gilbert, Irving Thalberg and Norma Shearer ... Arthur Brisbane and Damon Runyon.”32

  Though San Simeon was now W. R.’s business headquarters—and he invited his top executives to meet with him there—he much preferred to surround himself with people he found interesting. His favorite guests seemed to be his younger reporters. Adela Rogers St. Johns, who had begun writing for Hearst publications in 1913, was invited to the ranch for the first time in the middle 1920s, to meet with Ray Long, the head of Hearst’s magazine division. Joe Willicombe had called her directly in Los Angeles to say that the Chief was, that evening, driving north to the ranch and would be happy to take her with him.

  “He picked me up,” St. Johns wrote, “and we went along quietly beside the Pacific Ocean.... Mr. Hearst far in one corner of the big luxurious limousine, me in the other.” At Los Alamos, they stopped at a roadside diner “and sat on stools and Mr. Hearst said he recommended the ham and eggs or the chili.” At San Luis Obispo, the fog got so bad that Hearst took over from the chauffeur and drove the rest of the way north to San Simeon. They arrived early in the morning. “Mr. Hearst bowed and told me a courteous good night and thanked me for my company. A maid was waiting in my room, the blaze of a wood fire in the huge fireplace was at the moment more important than art treasures and the light gleaming from behind silent shades, and silver sconces gave the peaceful and comforting effect of candlelight....I thought to myself, This is a life I shall be glad to have known. I shall realize that people who have always had it and take it for granted are different from other people; they can be worthy and strong and accept their obligations, or they can be indulgent and selfish but they are different from people who scramble for money.”33

  In June of 1926, after a weekend filled with guests, most of them from Hollywood, Hearst sent Julia Morgan a handwritten note, apologizing because “all those wild movie people prevented me from talking to you as much as I wanted to.... Nevertheless the movie folk were immensely appreciative. They said it was the most wonderful place in the world and that the most extravagant dream of a moving-picture set fell far short of this reality. They all wanted to make a picture there but they are NOT going to be allowed to do it.”34

  Though most of the guestrooms in the castle would not be habitable until the late 1920s, the major public rooms—the Assembly Room, the Refectory or dining room, and the Morning Room—were in use by 1927. Then as now, Hearst’s castle—or Casa Grande as it was referred to at the time—was San Simeon’s front page, its billboard. It is difficult to find the right terms to describe this massive structure placed on the hillside where all sightlines led. In exterior design and interior layout, it resembles a cathedral much more than a castle. But unlike either, it is built of reinforced concrete covered with a veneer of Utah limestone so artfully applied that no one could guess that the structure was not made of stone.

  Castles are, in effect, enclosed military fortresses; Casa Grande is not. It had no parapets or moats. Instead of being closed off to the world, the entranceway offered access across a beautifully landscaped terrace with a small pool. In the final analysis, Casa Grande invites comparisons with medieval castles and Gothic cathedrals because it incorporates and projects both lay and ecclesiastic power. Hearst, at San Simeon, was building a monument to himself, a visual representation of his place in the world. In form and function, Hearst’s hillside village of guesthouses looking upward to Casa Grande resembled nothing quite so much as a medieval township. The villagers in their cottages were dependent on the lord of the castle for all services. There were no kitchens, refrigerators, or dining facilities outside the big house. It was not possible to get a cocktail before dinner, a midnight snack, or even a cup of coffee anywhere but in Casa Grande, as Adela Rogers St. Johns, who became a regular guest, discovered on her first visit. “This was almost the only thing I found difficult,” she recalled:

  All the years I went there, sometimes I spent weeks at a time, I had to get dressed, walk paths between white statues and flowering trees to the Castle for my coffee ... At home I had coffee the moment I opened my eyes. I once asked Marion Davies about this incongruous bit amid the luxury, the meticulous service, and extravagant indulgence by which guests were surrounded. She said W. R. did not approve of breakfast in bed. If people did not get up and get dressed they might frowst away hours that could better be spent outdoors. He thought, Marion said, that the wonderful walk through morning dew and freshness with the sparkle of the sea below and the mountain air blowing from above the Sierras was a good way to start the day. I’m sure it was but at the time I thought I could have appreciated it more with one cup of coffee.35

  Though a shy man, W. R. had never been comfortable with solitude. He was most at home in theaters, restaurants, and newsrooms, engulfed in crowds of strangers. At San Simeon, where there were no urban amusements, no public theaters or restaurants of any kind, Hearst had to engineer a social environment to meet his particular needs for controlled sociability. He did so by constructing a social setting whic
h directed all activity toward Casa Grande, over which he presided. The library, the movie theater and Billiard Room, the Assembly Room where cocktails were available before dinner, and the Refectory or dining room were all located there. Just beyond were the pools and the tennis courts.

  While Hearst and Julia Morgan often referred to the guesthouses as cottages, they were anything but. The smallest, Casa del Monte, had ten rooms; Casa del Sol had eighteen rooms on three levels surrounded by its own gardens; Casa del Mar had eighteen rooms. Only when compared to the looming four-story, 115-room, 38-bedroom castle/cathedral that dominated the hillside could these Mediterranean-style villas be characterized as cottages.

  Unlike Casa Grande, with its towers defiantly reaching beyond the highest point of the hillside to touch the sky, the villas were built into and became part of the sculpted landscape. Though they were all multilevel structures, the sides facing Casa Grande were only one story in depth, so as not to compete with the grandeur of the castle.

  Hearst designed his gardens and terraces as “outdoor” rooms for reading, chatting, even doing business. Alice Head, who managed Hearst’s magazines in England, visited San Simeon a few times in the 1920s and recalls having her meetings with the Chief in “a quiet spot in the garden [with] other Hearst executives lurking in the bushes, awaiting their turn.... One scribe, after his first visit to the Ranch, wrote as follows: ‘The place is full of worried editors dodging the kangaroos.’”36

  Because the exterior was to be as fully lived in as the interiors, Hearst made sure that every inch of ground on the hillside was carefully planned before it was planted. Plantings were color coordinated and designed so that something would be in bloom twelve months a year. “We would propagate from five hundred to seven hundred thousand annuals per year,” Norman Rotanzi recalled. “There was a complete change in the gardens at every season.”37

  Norman Rotanzi, one of Hearst’s orchard men, relished his meetings with the Chief. “You really felt at ease around him,” Rotanzi said. “He knew all the names of the plants and most of the pests we have to deal with. The gardeners were sort of his pets. He would like to come out and stroll around and talk to everybody. And it didn’t make any difference who he had with him—Winston Churchill, or the president of U.S. Steel, or whoever it was, he would always introduce you to these people.”38

  Hearst was like a little boy at San Simeon, happy with his new toys, but inconsolable and impossibly cranky when something broke. When, in February of 1927, he returned to his hillside after a month’s absence and was assaulted by a ferocious storm, he inundated Camille Rossi, Morgan’s construction supervisor, with a list of weather-proofing improvements he wanted made “promptly.” “Please realize Mr. Rossi that these are not merely things which ought to be done some time. They are things which we positively must do just as soon as possible.... Let’s have COMFORT AND HEALTH before so much art. The art won’t do us any good if we are all dead of pneumonia. Let’s make it possible to be warm and comfortable.”39

  When everything was not set right—immediately—the Chief dashed off a second letter to Rossi:

  We are drowned, blown and frozen out.... Everybody has a cold. All who could have left and the few who remain are eagerly waiting a chance to get out.... Of course the houses are wonderful to look at but one cannot live on looks alone. Living in them is like living in a palatial barn.... Let’s make what we have built practical, comfortable and beautiful. If we can’t do that we might as well change the names of the houses to pneumonia house, diphtheria house and influenza bungalow. The main house we can call the clinic. I am not coming back to the hill until we put the small houses at least on a livable basis.40

  His letters to Julia Morgan alternated between complaints about what had already been built and visionary plans for new construction. In February, in the midst of his torrent of complaints about leaky doors and windows, he forwarded to Morgan his friend Jimmy Swinnerton’s suggestion that they build an artist’s studio “between the towers of the third floor of the north wing.” Morgan warned that a studio on the third floor might “unbalance the Patio ... and bring the roof line” too high. She suggested instead that the studio be housed elsewhere.41

  Hearst agreed to leave the North Wing alone—for the moment—but he would never give up trying to improve the buildings and the landscape on what was now referred to as “La Cuesta Encantada,” the enchanted hill. Like the cathedral which can never be finished, San Simeon would remain a work in progress for as long as Hearst lived.

  24. Businesses as Usual

  WITH THE ARRIVAL of the New York City tabloids, the Evening Graphic and the Daily News, Hearst’s role as publishing’s bête noire was eclipsed. Not only were his papers no longer as outrageous as they had once been—and certainly not as lowbrow or spectacularly vulgar as the tabloids—they had, according to H. L. Mencken, become as staid and predictable as the Philadelphia Public Ledger. Instead of battling “the corruptions of wealth, whether political or social, with an immense fury and a superb technical virtuosity,” the Chief had become another Coolidge sycophant. “His present ignominious presence in the Coolidge band-wagon,” Mencken lamented, “is, in more than one way, a public calamity. For there was never a time in American history when the oldtime Hearst was more needed than he is needed today.... The American daily press, with Hearst leading it in a devil’s dance, was loud, vulgar, inordinate and preposterous—but it was not slimy and it was not dull. Today it is both.”1

  There were, for Hearst, no more dragons to slay—or at least none that he was interested in slaying. He was comfortable with Calvin Coolidge in the White House, Andrew Mellon at Treasury, and the brokers and bankers whose loans and bond issues had made it possible for him to expand his business empire. Though he had been accused of many things in his life, including anarchism, socialism, and rabid radicalism, Hearst was at bottom a classic liberal who believed, with Coolidge, that that government which governed least governed best. Hearst had never wanted to break up the large corporations; he had only wanted to force those that were cheating the public to behave, play fair, and stop buying politicians. He was now, in the 1920s, persuaded that they were doing so. He was not, of course, the only one who looked at big businessmen differently than he had thirty years before. The cartoon image of the business leader as an unscrupulous, predatory robber baron had been transmuted into a portrait of a benevolent corporate prince.

  Mencken had spoken precipitously when he accused the Hearst papers in 1927 of having lost “all their honest frenzy” and the Chief of growing “respectable, personally as well as professionally.” Hearst was actually between crusades. Though he was in agreement with the Republicans’ domestic policies, particularly on taxes, there was one point of friction. He found Presidents Harding and Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, their secretary of commerce and potential successor, too Wilsonian for his tastes.

  While the primary focus of the Republican administrations had been prosperity at home, Presidents Harding and Coolidge had recognized that domestic prosperity was dependent on prosperity in Europe, which required peace and political stability. Using economic leverage to the maximum, the Republican administrations had compelled European agreement to a series of disarmament treaties which, they hoped, would prevent a postwar arms race, ease financial strain, and encourage European nations to pursue peaceful means to resolve their conflicts.2

  Although he would not have been familiar or comfortable with the label, Hearst was very much an isolationist. This was not an unpopular position in the 1920s. As the Senate had repudiated both Wilson’s 1920 League of Nations initiative and bills put forward in 1923 and 1926 under which the United States would have joined the World Court, Hearst’s position on foreign affairs was very much in the mainstream.3

  Like the Western and Midwestern progressive senators William Borah of Idaho, George Norris of Nebraska, Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin, Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, Robert Taft of Ohio, and Hiram Johnson of California, Hearst’s isol
ationism was selective. He was opposed to political and military intervention in European affairs, but not in the Caribbean, Central or South America, or in the Pacific. He was also very much a unilateralist and against the United States entering into “entangling alliances” of any sort in any region of the world.4

  He opposed disarmament treaties because they limited America’s freedom to do as it pleased with its armed forces and navy; he was against international economic agreements like the Dawes Plan which reduced German reparations because they compromised American prosperity and independence by tying the American economy to Europe’s; he was against multinational diplomatic treaties like the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact because it pledged its signatories to avoid war by acting in concert with one another to settle international disputes. And he was unalterably opposed to American participation in the World Court. The Court was an organ of the League of Nations and membership in it, he argued, would bring the United States one giant step closer to membership in the League, involvement in European affairs, and another war, paid for by another income tax.5

  Although the coming of the tabloids in the middle 1920s made Hearstian yellow journalism look more respectable in hindsight, it had not done Hearst’s bottom line much good. As Time magazine had reported on August 15,1927, the American was “weakening. The terrible tabloids have out-Hearsted Hearst and the morning New York field in screams and scandals is dominated by the Daily News”

  Fully aware that the tabloids were eating into his circulation in New York City and might, in the near future, do so in other cities, Hearst cautioned his editors to condense their news stories: “The average man in the street wants to read all the news of importance ... presented to him briefly as well as brightly. There are so many things to occupy the time of every man, woman and child in America these days that no one ever has a great deal of time to give to any particular matter.”6 Still, while he wanted shorter news stories, he was not willing to follow the example of the tabloids and substitute photographs for text. “Pictures that do not have news value,” he warned his newspaper executives, “do more harm than good.... The mass of pictures in a newspaper should have definite news value or else they should not be in the newspaper” He was also uncomfortable with the tabloids’ penchant for attacking celebrities every bit as viciously, if not more so, than politicians. “Please, Phil,” he telegrammed Phil Payne, his editor at the New York Mirror, after a particularly scurrilous attack on Gloria Swanson, “be more kindly to people and try make friends of them. Nearly everybody I know is weeping on my shoulder because of way Mirror roasts them. Can you not get some good natured reporters on staff?”7