by David Nasaw
All that spring, there were phone calls, meetings, and letters back and forth about Marion’s next film. The Chief alternately cajoled and threatened Mayer and Thalberg to find a suitable starring role for Marion—or else. “I think Marion is one of your greatest stars and one of your most loyal ones. She has, of course, considered going elsewhere; but she has never GONE, and almost EVERY company has tried to get her to go. Her loyalty and ability ENTITLE her to big pictures.... In fact, Louis, we are not interested in little pictures any more. If we cannot have big ones, we might just as well go abroad and have a good time.” Still smarting over Five and Ten, W. R. warned Mayer again that “Marion cannot do sex pictures. She does not look like a vampire. But she is marvelous in boy’s parts ... She is excellent as a waif ... She does a fine college girl ... She does inimitable characterizations ... She is good as just a fresh American girl ... and she is good in a sentimental story. Good Heavens, Louis, if this is so—and you know it is—she does not HAVE to do sex pictures; and your folks ought surely to find plenty of important stuff for a star of that ability and versatility to do. Do you not think so?”42
Marion was not without her champions at MGM, and, despite Hearst’s fears, Mayer and Thalberg were among them, as was Frances Marion, the top screenwriter in Hollywood at the time, with two gritty Depression-era dramas, The Big House and The Champ, both huge commercial and critical triumphs, to her credit. Frances Marion, who was well aware of Davies’ talents, had written a realistic, Depression-era, rags-to-riches drama for her about a chorus girl from the tenements. It was called Three Blondes. Hearst was so enthusiastic about the scenario that he wrote King Vidor to ask him to direct. Vidor liked the script, but had to turn down the project because of scheduling conflicts.
Three Blondes, Hearst was convinced, would establish Marion as the star of the 1930s. But changes were necessary. The script was too gritty, too hard-edged, with too many “rude awakenings.” While he had more respect for Frances Marion than anyone else in the business, Hearst would not let her script alone. She resisted as long as she could, then left the project, claiming illness. In her place, Thalberg hired a new set of writers, including Anita Loos, to punch up the dialogue for what would eventually be released as Blondie of the Follies.43
Film is a collaborative craft, but there were too many collaborators on this picture. Thalberg wanted a role for Jimmy Durante, Hearst wanted Marion to appear in every scene, Anita Loos wanted more humor, and Frances Marion had insisted her friend Zasu Pitts be given a part. The result was a hopelessly overplotted film. Marion again did a creditable job as Blondie, the slum girl who, with the help of a playboy admirer played by Robert Montgomery, gets a job with the Follies and then becomes the livein lover of a Hearst-aged millionaire. As in most of Marion’s recent films, the picture piled up such huge expenses it was impossible for it to make a profit, even if it had found an audience, which it did not.44
Unwilling to risk alienating Hearst and unable to think of any solution to the “Marion” problem, Thalberg and Mayer let him have his way on her next three films. In Peg o’ My Heart, the “star,” now in her middle thirties, played the teenaged daughter of a poor Irish fisherman in a Hearstian musical costume drama. The film, one of W. R.’s favorites, made a tiny profit.
To boost the box office for Marion’s next musical, Going Hollywood, MGM borrowed Bing Crosby from Paramount. In Crosby, Marion found an actor who liked to drink almost as much as she did. With Crosby and Marion drunk a good deal of the day and hung over every morning, the shooting dragged on interminably. The film took six months of studio time, after several weeks of rehearsal at San Simeon.
In his autobiography, Crosby claimed that although he showed up on the set every morning at 9 A.M., Marion seldom appeared before 11. With her came an “entourage of hairdressers, make-up ladies, secretary and—a holdover from the silent days—a five-piece orchestra ... to keep things lively and to entertain her between shots.” At noon, after no more than an hour’s work, Crosby and Davies repaired to her bungalow for a formal luncheon which “dawdled on until two-thirty. Then we went back to the set ... About three the orchestra would launch into a few more divertissements. At five, we’d be ready to shoot the scene when Marion would suggest something refreshing. Nobody was ever loath, so, thus restored, we’d get the scene shot and start thinking about the next scene.” According to Marion, W. R. not only permitted, but seemed to encourage such eccentricities. “He used to coax us not to work. I think he thought it was a waste of time.... W. R. didn’t worry about the budget. He’d even call the set about a quarter to five and say it was time to quit. He’d be lonesome. He’d say, ‘You’ve been working all day’—not knowing we’d done only one scene.”45
By the time Going Hollywood was booked into New York City’s Capitol Theater as the MGM Christmas special for 1933, it had run up costs of $914,000 to become one of the studio’s most expensive films. Even with Crosby as its co-star, Going Hollywood lost over a quarter of a million dollars. Time was running out on Marion’s career, as everyone except Hearst seemed to realize. Seven of her last nine films had lost an average of $175,000 each; her two hits had earned a total of $40,000.
Unwilling to put Marion into “sophisticated sex films” or light comedies, the Chief turned back to historical costume drama, the genre in which he and his star had originally made their mark. Marion’s next film—and her last at MGM—was Operator Thirteen, in which she played an actress who becomes a spy and disguises herself as a mulatto. Gary Cooper was borrowed from Paramount to co-star.
For the first time in her screen career, Marion, alternating between blond actress and “dark-face” mulatto, looked ridiculous. Aside from some exciting Civil War battle scenes, which Hearst supervised, the film had little to hold the attention of the audience. Operator Thirteen, which cost almost as much as Going Hollywood, also lost a quarter of a million dollars.46
This would be Marion’s and Hearst’s final film at MGM. They had resigned with MGM in 1929 because they trusted Irving Thalberg’s judgment more than that of anyone else in the business. But Thalberg was a sick man with a weak heart, as everyone in Hollywood knew. On Christmas Eve 1932, he suffered a serious heart attack, and in February sailed, probably on Hearst’s advice, to Bad Nauheim, to recuperate at the Chief’s favorite spa. When Thalberg returned to work, in July of 1933, it was as one of several “unit producers” at MGM. He would no longer supervise Marion’s films from scripting through production. Worse yet, Hearst, unwilling to accept any other explanation for Marion’s failures at the box office, suspected that with Mayer’s connivance, Thalberg had begun to devote his limited energies to promoting his wife Norma Shearer’s career, to the detriment of Marion and the other MGM stars. When Shearer was given the role of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the screen version of The Barretts of Wimpole Street and then, less than a year later, chosen to play Marie Antoinette in the screen version of Stefan Zweig’s biography, Hearst’s suspicions were confirmed.
On November 1, 1934, Louella Parsons broke the news of what she considered “by far the most important motion picture deal of the year, in fact in many years.” Hearst and Marion had left MGM for Warner Brothers. Jack Warner, in announcing the new arrangement between Warner Brothers and Cosmopolitan Productions, had praise for Marion Davies’ talents as an actress and for William Randolph Hearst whom he and his brothers regarded “as the most important and uplifting influence, not only in the journalistic field, but also in the motion picture industry.”47
The day after the contract signing Joe Willicombe telegrammed George Young, the publisher of the Los Angeles Examiner: “Chief says, the moving picture connection of the Hearst institution from now on is the Warner Brothers Studio. Anything that you can do to help Warner Brothers will be appreciated.”48
29. The Chief Chooses a President
ON THE EVENING OF JANUARY 2, 1932, the Chief drove from Marion’s beach house to Station KFI in Los Angeles to deliver a well-advertised national radio addres
s. The topic was “Who Will Be the Next President?”
It was a foregone conclusion that Hoover would not be reelected. The only question was which Democrat would succeed him. The party had united behind New York Governor Al Smith in 1928, but the liberal/conservative split that had divided the Democrats since William Jennings Bryan’s first run for the presidency in 1896 had not been entirely healed. The Bryanite/Progressive candidate with the most support in 1932 was Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt of New York. Among the stop-Roosevelt candidates were Al Smith, Governor Albert Ritchie of Maryland, Newton Baker, Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of war and now a successful corporate lawyer, and Owen D. Young, the chairman of the board of General Electric. Although Roosevelt represented the positions that Hearst had advocated all his life and had been promoted in the Hearst press as a potential presidential nominee after his reelection in 1930, neither Roosevelt nor anyone else knew whom Hearst was going to anoint as his candidate.1
Instead of speaking of the Depression or discussing the candidates’ programs or qualifications, Hearst began his radio address with a history lesson: “In 1912 Champ Clark, a distinguished and a genuine Democrat, came before the Democratic Convention at Baltimore with the support of a popular majority.” But the Democrats, Hearst went on, chose Woodrow Wilson instead. His politics not only led the nation into war, but cost the Democratic party its leadership in the nation. Hearst urged the Democratic party and the nation to learn something from history and in 1932 nominate a “sound and sincere” Democrat like Champ Clark instead of a visionary internationalist like Woodrow Wilson. His candidate was “John N. Garner, Speaker of the House of Representatives ... a loyal American citizen, a plain man of the plain people, a sound and sincere Democrat; in fact, another Champ Clark. His heart is with his OWN PEOPLE. His interest is in his OWN COUNTRY.... Unless we American citizens are willing to go on laboring indefinitely merely to provide loot for Europe, we should personally see to it that a man is elected to the presidency this year whose guiding motto is ‘America first.’...Seldom in the whole history of the nation has the selection of a good AMERICAN for president been so important to the people as it is today. God guide us to choose wisely, so that this year of grace 1932 may be a happy New Year for us all.”2
John Nance Garner, the congressman from Texas with the ruddy face and short-cropped white hair, must have been taken by surprise, like the rest of the nation, by Hearst’s endorsement. In his long tenure in the House, Garner had given few speeches and sponsored little legislation, but he was well respected among his colleagues, though generally unknown outside of Washington and Texas. As a “dry,” an unknown, and an uncommitted and unenthusiastic candidate to boot, he stood little chance of getting the nomination.
Before Hearst could even address these difficulties, he had to stop the Roosevelt bandwagon. Two days after his radio address, the Chief wrote Edmond Coblentz—the balding, bespectacled editor who had worked for him since the turn of the century and was now managing editor of the New York American —to gather evidence of Roosevelt’s past support for Wilsonianism. “Please put men on this work that are accustomed to going through library files.” Coblentz found what Hearst wanted and forwarded to San Simeon excerpts from Roosevelt’s acceptance speech for the Democratic vice-presidential nomination in 1920. Armed with Coblentz’s research, Hearst published a series of front-page editorials in January, citing Roosevelt’s 1920 advocacy of American entry into the League of Nations as proof of his “internationalism” and criticizing him for not using the word “AMERICAN” enough in his speeches.3
Hearst found it easier to attack Roosevelt than to elicit any enthusiasm for Garner—even, it appeared, among his own editors. “Chief is very much interested in Garner,” Willicombe reminded all Hearst editors and publishers in telephone messages delivered on January 23,1932. “It is not merely a personal interest. He feels that it would be a great thing for our country to have for president someone who was primarily interested in America. Chief says he would be very much obliged if you could find means of helping Garner among the politicians of your state and neighboring states. He says he would like you wherever you can to send correspondents or political friends into neighboring states to help Garner, and he says he would also welcome letters from you from time to time stating how matters are progressing in Garner’s interest, and what you are planning to do further.”4
Several of Roosevelt’s supporters, including Colonel Edward House, Wilson’s former chief adviser, James Farley, the leader of the New York State Democratic party, Mayor James Curley of Boston, and Joseph P. Kennedy, tried to convince Hearst that Roosevelt was not and had never been a Wilsonian, but the attempts backfired when Hearst demanded in an editorial published in his newspapers on January 22 that the governor stop playing political “shell games.” “I beg leave to say that if Mr. Roosevelt has any statement to make about his not now being an internationalist, he should make it to the public publicly and not to me privately. My experience has proved that a man who is running for office, and is not willing to make his honest opinions known to the public, either has no honest opinions or is not honest about them.”
Roosevelt was trapped. If he placated Hearst, he would offend the Wilsonians in the party; if he did not, he would lose the support of the nation’s most powerful Democratic publisher. On January 30, 1932, Louis Howe wrote to urge Roosevelt “to be sure and telephone Hearst.” Howe had heard from friends in Atlanta that the publisher had succeeded there in “making some trouble in his violent attacks on you on the international subject. You may have to make a public statement before we get through, if this thing gets any more violent.”5
Three days later, in a speech to the New York State Grange, Roosevelt publicly declared that he no longer favored “American participation” in the League of Nations and castigated “the European nations for indulging in an orgy of spending and not meeting their just obligations to the United States, the payment of war debts.”6 Roosevelt’s conversion to Hearst’s foreign policy came too late to satisfy the Chief. “Despite his rather feeble denial,” Hearst wrote one of his editors, he was convinced that Roosevelt was “at heart an internationalist and that keeps me from being for him ... I do not want anything except to see progressive democrat and good American named. I will not vote or work for reactionary or internationalist.”7
All through January and February, the Chief sent off a steady stream of telegrams to his editors urging them to do more for the Speaker. When it appeared that Garner was unprepared or unwilling to file for the Nebraska primary, Hearst’s operatives did it for him. The Chief’s task was complicated by Garner’s refusal to campaign on his own or cooperate with Hearst’s team. “I have to work in dark with little or no information from Washington,” Hearst telegrammed Victor Watson, an editor in New York. “The reason is that our friend refuses to talk politics or devote any attention to any campaign or allow any manager to be appointed to coordinate efforts being made in his behalf. Consequently if we want to accomplish anything for him we have got to do it ourselves and in our own way ... If Garner gets in the way he will be run over by his own boom. The people do not care what he wants. It is a question now of what they want.”8
As Garner refused to organize his own campaign, the Chief did it for him: “There is just one way to carry the situation for Garner and that is by radio. If you can have right kind of people talk over radio and over various radios if you can get them, it will have great political effect.”9
In the end, Hearst’s support—in print and on the radio—was enough to make Garner a credible candidate and secure victory for him in the California primary. Combined with delegate support in his home state of Texas, and in Illinois, where Hearst also exercised enormous political clout, Garner amassed over one hundred delegates.
The Roosevelt camp was not worried that Garner would take the nomination, but that with a hundred delegates he would be able to deny Roosevelt a two-thirds majority, stalemate the convention, and force the party to t
urn to a dark-horse candidate like Newton Baker. Joseph P. Kennedy, who had known Hearst since the early 1920s when he tried to enlist him in a joint film venture, visited San Simeon in April to plead the case for Roosevelt. Kennedy warned Hearst, as had Mayor Curley and Jim Farley before him, that “Wall Street interests” were plotting to repeat the strategy they had used in 1924. They intended to deny Roosevelt, who already had a majority of the delegate votes, the two-thirds needed for nomination and then impose their own conservative candidate, either Al Smith or Newton Baker, on the convention.10 Hearst listened but refused to commit himself to Roosevelt.
On June 30, at 4:28 in the morning, the roll of the delegates was called at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Roosevelt had a clear majority, but was one hundred votes short of the two-thirds he needed for nomination. Two more ballots were taken, but Roosevelt made up only eighteen of the votes he needed. Finally, after four hours of balloting, the convention adjourned. Their worst-case scenario unfolding before their eyes, Roosevelt’s advisers were close to panic, fearful that if the governor wasn’t nominated on the next ballot, the party would turn elsewhere.
All night long, the Roosevelt camp tried to reach Hearst by telephone. Joe Kennedy got through early in the morning, and was able to convince Hearst that if he did not release the delegates pledged to Garner, the conservative party leaders would succeed in using the threat of a deadlocked convention to thwart the role of the majority and nominate a candidate like Newton Baker. “I felt that there was nothing to do,” Hearst later wrote Millicent, “but communicate with Speaker Garner and tell him the truth about the whole situation. He responded nobly. So we threw California and Texas, and by means of Mayor Cermak [of Chicago], Illinois also into the Roosevelt column and Governor Roosevelt was nominated.” Few were surprised when Roosevelt chose Garner to be his running mate.11