The Chief

by David Nasaw

  Thalberg apologized to Hearst for the confusion and confessed that he had had to replace Franklin because he “absolutely point blank refused to make college story of any kind.” He had mistakenly kept this information from Hearst and, on his own, reworked the screenplay and hired a new director “because I didn’t want to load you with all the worries of producing pictures that I thought you wanted to get away from....I don’t know of anyone I have tried to please more than you, including Louis [Mayer] or Marcus [Loew] or Nick [Schenck] and it hurts me to think that you felt like a little orphan when I have been trying to be both a father and a mother to you. Warmest regards.”47

  In the end, Hearst conceded defeat, though he never forgave Mayer or Thalberg for foisting Sam Wood on him and putting Marion in what he thought was a cheap-looking comedy. When Mayer asked him to provide The Fair Co-Ed with the same kind of publicity he had given Marion’s other MGM pictures, the Chief agreed, but only grudgingly:

  I will give good publicity to The Fair Co-Ed but I would prefer not to do anything very extraordinary, as I do not think it is an extraordinary picture.... I cannot see that it is necessary to have the star get hit in the face with a book, fall off a fast moving vehicle on her head, and get kicked in the pants, in order to get yap laughs.... I think slap-stick stuff is small town stuff, not worthy of your best star nor of your best pictures. I think a star who can do Little Old New York and Quality Street ought not to have to do Mack Sennett slap-stick stuff. I will put extraordinary publicity behind Quality Street because I am proud of it, and because that is the kind of pictures I want to make even if I have to make them myself.48

  Despite his complaints—and the difficulty he had working in partnership with anyone—Hearst got on well with Mayer and Thalberg and made sure all the MGM executives, stars, and pictures received positive publicity—and lots of it—in his newspapers. In February of 1927, when the Loew and Mayer families vacationed together in Palm Beach, Hearst directed Moses Koenigsberg, the head of King Features, to “please send out good pictures and pleasant stories about them to our papers, morning and evening, with instructions to print.” When Mayer was indicted for participating in a fraudulent stock deal, Hearst kept the news out of his papers until the indictment was dismissed and then directed his publishers to carry the announcement of the dismissal in “a conspicuous position ... and through all editions.”49

  Since MGM had no newsreels to distribute with its features, the Chief volunteered to start up an MGM newsreel, though he was already under contract to produce one for Universal. Make them “livelier and more entertaining,” he directed Eddie Hatrick, his chief film executive. “The news reels should be built on the same lines as tabloid newspapers: all stuff brief bright and newsy.”50

  The start-up costs associated with a second newsreel pushed Hearst’s film business further into debt. His share of Marion’s salary and the upkeep on her bungalow were already costing $10,000 a week against an income of $5,000 from his share of the profits. In the summer of 1927, Hatrick warned Hearst that he would have to either cut back expenses or shift money from his publications to cover the deficit incurred at the studio.51

  Alternating, as he always had when it came to the film business, between reckless optimism and despair, the Chief countered Hatrick’s downsizing proposal with one of his own. He proposed that Hatrick move to California, hire “several strictly first class men,” and build an “organization” to oversee Hearst’s moving-picture interests. To Hatrick’s suggestion that it might not be possible to make money producing the kind of expensive costume dramas the Chief wanted Marion to star in, Hearst reminded him, not for the first time, that before coming to MGM, he had, on his own, “tried to make notable pictures and was reasonably successful. Moreover, the idea that we constantly lost money was a mistake. Some years we made money, as I know from my income taxes ... So it is possible to make money on notable pictures, and furthermore, they are mainly the kind of pictures that I am interested in.”52

  Hearst’s optimism lasted no more than a month. “Am discouraged with moving picture situation,” he wrote Hatrick in October of 1927. “We are giving lot of attention and general promotion and absolute advertising and getting little or nothing. I do not care what arrangements you make but we have got to have some revenue if I am to continue interested in this business.”53

  The Fair Co-Ed, despite Hearst’s objections, made a profit of $131,000. Marion’s next two films, Tillie the Toiler, based on a Hearst comic strip, and Quality Street, lost a total of $252,000, not because they were not adequately promoted or well made, but because Hearst’s productions cost twice as much to make as MGM’s other features. Perhaps to wean Hearst from his expensive costume dramas, Louis B. Mayer asked King Vidor to direct Marion’s next film. Vidor’s previous film, The Crowd, was still “on the shelf,” because it was so unlike anything that MGM had ever produced or distributed that no one knew how to market it. Vidor recognized that if he wanted to continue to make innovative films like The Crowd, he would have to do the studio’s bidding. Besides, as he recalled in his memoirs, he did not consider “directing Miss Davies ... an unpleasant chore....I considered her to be a most accomplished comedienne.”54

  Hearst had been trying to get Vidor to work on Marion’s films ever since he had directed The Big Parade, a mildly anti-war film that had impressed the Chief and done well at the box office. Vidor was as likeable as he was talented and a regular at San Simeon and at Marion’s beach house, where he was married to his second wife, Eleanor Boardman. (It was to have been a double wedding, but Greta Garbo never showed up to marry John Gilbert.)55

  Vidor’s first film with Marion was The Patsy, a contemporary comedy of manners, in which Marion played Patsy Harrington, an oppressed younger sister with a brutish mother and an adoring “Pa,” who was Hearst’s age. The film, with Vidor in control, took only twenty-seven days to shoot, cost half as much as Marion’s previous film, got great reviews, and turned a profit of $155,000. Marion was, for the first time, given free rein to display her comedic skills and her talent for mimicry in brilliant parodies of the actresses Mae Murray, Lillian Gish, and Pola Negri.56

  Though Hearst gave Vidor more leeway than he usually allowed Marion’s directors, because he trusted him to refrain from any vulgar slapstick, he was, as always, omnipresent on the set. “W. R. sat on the set with a screen around him,” recalled Eleanor Boardman, “and he’d dictate to somebody for the Examiner, or one of his newspapers, and wait for her, hold her hand on the way home, take her hand the next morning, and drive to the studio. Spend all his time with her. Devoted.”57

  The Patsy did so well at the box office that Mayer asked Vidor to make another contemporary comedy with Marion, this one adapted from a stage play about an actress that MGM had purchased a few years earlier. With writer Lawrence Stallings, who had written The Big Parade and The Patsy, Vidor turned the “unreadable” script he had been handed into a brilliant Hollywood satire. Show People was based loosely but recognizably on the life of Gloria Swanson who had “started out as a Mack Sennett bathing-beauty ... and then become the Marquise de la Falaise de la Coudray.” The “gimmick” that Vidor intended to use to accompany his heroine from her humble beginnings “as she rose to the heights” was a custard pie. “In her early slapstick days Marion would be a target for custard pies,” Vidor wrote in his autobiography. “Later when she became the snooty countess and started to upstage all her old comrades, a lowly actor would bring her to her senses by hitting her in the kisser with an expertly tossed meringue. Here was our story, beginning, middle, and end. We were wildly enthusiastic. When we told it to Louis B. Mayer, who sort of mother-henned the Hearst activities, he looked rather dubious. He told us to go to San Simeon and see if we could sell it to W. R.”

  Vidor and Stallings drove through the night and arrived at the ranch in time for breakfast. “Later that afternoon we told W. R. and Marion our Hollywood story. At the end Marion cheerfully piped up in her best voice, ‘I like it.’ Bu
t the Chief was silent.” After dinner, Vidor tried to find out from Marion why Hearst had “frozen up and gone gray-faced at some point in the recitation of the scenario,” but Marion claimed she didn’t know. When Stallings and Vidor got back to the studio, Mayer informed them that Hearst was not going to allow Marion to take a pie in her face. When Vidor refused to write the pies out of the script, Mayer arranged an opportunity for him to convince Hearst of their importance. Vidor did his best, acting out all the parts in the film before a roomful of MGM executives and Hearst. When he had finished, everyone in the room applauded. “There followed several moments of silence as all eyes turned to Mr. Hearst. Presently the great man rose and in a high-pitched voice said, ‘King’s right. But I’m right, too—because I’m not going to let Marion be hit in the face with a pie.’ With this simple proclamation he walked out of the room, settling the issue for all time.” Vidor, unwilling to abandon the project entirely, was forced to come up with a “compromise symbol ... a forceful stream from a siphon bottle.” With reservations, Hearst allowed the film to go forward. Still uncertain as to how the Chief might react to the final scene, Marion arranged with the publisher of the Los Angeles Examiner for W. R. to be called away to a conference as the siphon scene was filmed. “As soon as his limousine had driven away, the prop man came forth with the fire hose.”58

  Show People was a huge success, grossing over a million dollars, and turning a profit of $176,000. Unfortunately, by the time it was released in November of 1928, the era of silent comedy was already over. Having achieved success in silent films, Marion—and Hearst—would have to start all over again in the talkies.59

  25. A New Crusade: Europe

  “HOOVER SAYS he cannot go to ranch on account of other engagement so I am having luncheon with him here tomorrow,” W. R. wrote Millicent from Los Angeles in September of 1926. “I think he is cautious gink, too cautious ever to be elected to anything.”1

  Herbert Hoover and his friend and chief advocate in Hollywood, Louis B. Mayer, had been trying for years to enlist Hearst’s support for a Hoover presidential bid. As secretary of commerce, Hoover had helped Hearst secure a satisfactory wavelength for a radio station he and Louis B. Mayer wanted to establish in Chicago. Despite his efforts, Hearst was unwilling to support him or any candidate for public office whom he associated with Wilsonian internationalism. Hoover had not only served in the Wilson administration, but had advocated American entry into the League of Nations and the World Court. To block Hoover’s nomination, which appeared assured when Coolidge declined to run for another term, Hearst, in the summer of 1927, directed his Washington correspondents “to consider [Secretary of the Treasury Andrew] Mellon as one of the most important presidential candidates and to so handle the news.”2

  Mellon had no chance, even with the support of the Hearst newspapers. In June, Hoover was nominated at the Republican National Convention in Kansas City, which Hearst attended. His opponent in November would be Al Smith who, in spite of Hearst’s opposition, had won the Democratic nomination.

  Although the Chief in the end supported Hoover for the Republican nomination, he did not immediately endorse him for the presidency, but, according to John Winkler whose 1955 biography of W. R. was written with the cooperation of the Hearst family, waited until Hoover visited him and pledged support for federal highway and development projects which the Hearst papers had been advocating for years.3

  Before sailing for Europe—with Marion and several of her friends whom he planned to escort on a motor tour of the continent—Hearst made clear the editorial position he wanted adhered to in the campaign to come. Although he had in late June directed Brisbane to have the cartoonist Winsor McCay draw several half-page cartoons showing Al Smith posed with Tammany Tigers and disreputable-looking New York barkeepers, bums, and machine politicians, he quickly thought better of it and instructed Brisbane to tread more carefully in the upcoming campaign. “Could we not maintain our independence,” he telegrammed him on July 4, 1928, “by satirizing some things in Democratic party and some things in Republican party, not making cartoons personal at all but merely satirizing conditions or policies.”4

  Hearst was attempting to construct a new political role for himself and his newspapers. Though he did not intend to follow the example of Adolph Ochs and keep his political opinions to himself, he was no longer content with the style of political partisanship that had characterized his advocacy journalism. “Think news services should be told that they should print all political news,” he instructed Frank Knox, the general manager of his newspaper division, on July 13, the week before he sailed to Europe. “Attitude of Hearst papers is one of general friendliness to Hoover, to a continuation of the administration’s policies under which country seems to be prosperous and people content. We are going to be just and fair and print all the news and make no violent campaign, but that is our attitude.”5

  Although he was unalterably opposed to Smith’s candidacy, Hearst refrained from joining the attack on him as a “wet” or a Catholic. When asked by a reporter about Smith’s Catholicism, Hearst reacted angrily that “religion has so little place in politics that I refuse to discuss it. I would not vote for or against a man because of his religion. I think we should have at least some regard for the framers of the Constitution, who believed in a spirit of tolerance and freedom of thought.”6

  On July 20,1928, Hearst and Marion left for Europe, Hearst on the Olympic, Marion on the He de France. To make sure that no luggage was misdirected, Joe Willicombe had Chris MacGregor meet their twenty-six trunks at Pennsylvania Station and guide them to the proper ship.7

  Marion’s sisters Rose and Ethel, her niece Pepi Lederer and nephew Charlie Lederer, and Papa Ben, who joined the group in Italy, were part of the entourage that summer, every penny of their expenses paid for by Hearst. According to Marion’s biographer, Fred Guiles, Hearst also brought with him to Europe two of Millicent’s relatives, Sadie Murray and her daughter Anita, Lloyd Pantages, whose family owned a chain of movie theaters, and society columnist Maury Paul, as well as Harry Crocker of the San Francisco banking family, who had taken on the role of court jester, crony, confidant, and traveling secretary.8

  On arriving at the Hotel Crillon in Paris, Hearst contacted Alice Head, the head of his English magazine division, and invited her to join the party. “I duly presented myself at the Crillon,” Head said in her memoirs, “with a small suit-case packed for the week-end only, but I did not see my home again for six weeks, which is but as a day to my esteemed Chief.” She went on:

  He told me at dinner that we were going to make a brief motor tour to some of the most interesting spots in France and that we should be starting about midday the next day. Four large touring cars were drawn up outside the hotel the following morning and we set forth, first to Versailles, and then to Rambouillet and Chartres. As we came out of the cathedral, Mr. Hearst remarked: “Well, children, shall we dine here or shall we go on to Tours?” One of the girls in the party replied, “We don’t care where we dine, but we must find the ladies’ room.” The ladies’ room in Chartres, when found, proved to be exceedingly primitive. So we went on to dine in Tours and we stayed there for two or three days while we visited the chateaux of the Loire.

  From Tours, the Hearst party went on to Vichy, Grenoble, the Riviera, Monte Carlo, and south into Italy. W. R. and Marion led the procession, sitting in the backseat of their car; Marion’s maid sat up front with the chauffeur. “As the party included some extremely beautiful and attractive girls from Hollywood dressed in the smartest of summer frocks from Magnin’s,” Miss Head recalled, “the arrival of our cars in French villages always caused something of a sensation. The whole countryside used to turn out to watch our arrival and departure, and there was much photography of the beautiful and attractive members of the party. On one of these occasions Mr. Hearst took my arm and said: ‘We’re much the most important people, but nobody wants to photograph us!’”9

  Most of the time on tour was spe
nt in cathedrals, chateaus, galleries, and art museums, where Hearst, trailed by his guests, joined his handpicked guides in explaining the wonders of the artwork on display. “At night, at dinner, Mr. Hearst examined us on what we had seen during the day. But he was,” Alice Head remembered, “very indulgent if we made mistakes.” Although she and Harry Crocker were enchanted by everything Hearst pointed out to them, Marion and her friends were bored by most of it and exhausted by W. R.’s pace. Sixty-five years of age and portly, the Chief was indefatigable. “He took the trips to Europe very seriously,” Marion remembered:

  W. R. always maintained that if people wanted to go to Cannes or Biarritz or places in Paris to have fun, they could just as well do it in New York or any restaurant. He thought that if you went to Europe, you had to see Europe and understand educationally what the history was. There was no time for anyjol-lities or frivolities in Europe. If anybody wanted to go to a nightclub, he’d say, “This is an educational tour. If you don’t appreciate it now, you never will.” So everybody would pretend to be on their toes, but I’d know they weren’t listening....I couldn’t blame him for being impatient with people. He was trying to teach us something, and we didn’t want to learn. He might as well have been hitting his head up against a stone wall.10

  While Hearst made the big decisions, Marion was in charge of room assignments. With Willicombe’s and Crocker’s help, she also arranged—and rearranged—the seating in the touring cars. “Some guests wouldn’t like each other, and they’d want to change cars; we had that all the time,” Marion remembered.11