The Chief

by David Nasaw

  Utilizing the members of your organization to sell stock in your company, rather than in the performance of the duties for which they are engaged, does not appear to be sound. Sending these people out to sell stock on the heels of a general salary cut seems to me to be inopportune. If they are good editors, reporters, circulation men, or advertising men, they are all the more likely to prove poor stock salesmen. If they are poor stock salesmen, they will not help your stock sales nor your credit.30

  We don’t know what, if anything, came of Neylan’s suggestion that Hearst’s employees be enlisted to sell stock. Whatever the outcome, Hearst remained in desperate need of cash to meet his debt payments. Neylan, convinced that the only way to raise this cash was by selling more Hearst Consolidated stock, proposed to advertise over the radio and asked for the Chief’s assistance in getting “some cooperation from Messrs. Brisbane, Forbes, Rukeyser, and other high-priced financial writers.... May I suggest that you write Cobbie [Edmond Coblentz] a letter suggesting to him that he interview these gentlemen and find out if there is anything in the rule book against an appropriate dignified reference to the securities of the institution from which they draw their salaries, particularly in view of the fact that these securities were honestly priced in the first place and have been earning and paying the interest or dividends for which the purchaser contracted.”31

  In the desperately long winter between the election and the inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in March, Hearst did all he could to prepare the president-elect and the nation for the task of recovery that lay before them. Shortly after the election, he was asked by MGM if he was interested in having his Cosmopolitan Productions unit produce a political parable about an activist president who rescues America from a devastating Depression. Hearst was no stranger to the political uses of moving pictures. Although the films he had produced for Marion were devoid of overt political messages, he had fifteen years earlier produced Patria, one of the first and most powerful American propaganda films. Moving pictures, he knew, could teach lessons while they told stories.

  The film he agreed to produce, Gabriel over the White House, was based on a novel by an adviser to Lloyd George. Brought to MGM by the producer Walter Wanger, it was the kind of uncompromising attack on American political institutions that only an English liberal could have written. It portrayed American politicians, without exception, as venal, dumb, and mendacious.

  The picture, as scripted by Wanger and his writers, with major input from Hearst, opened with Jud Hammond, a good-looking, good-natured party hack played by Walter Huston, taking the oath of office as president of the United States. By brilliantly incorporating documentary footage into the opening montage, Wanger alerted viewers that what they were about to see was more “real” than most moving pictures.

  Days after his inauguration, on a trip to the Naval Academy, President Hammond takes the wheel of his car, and playfully trying to outrun the press, pushes the speedometer toward 100, goes over an embankment, and is mortally injured. When he returns to consciousness—after the intervention of the angel Gabriel—Hammond has been transformed from a Warren Harding–like hack who speaks in Herbert Hoover–like platitudes to a man of Lincolnesque stature who sounds like a Hearst editorial. With Gabriel looking over him—and writing his Hearst-like speeches—the new president spurns his mistress, fires his cabinet, dismisses Congress, personally greets a Bonus Army that has marched to Washington looking for assistance, ends Prohibition, establishes a gigantic public works/employment program, threatens foreign governments with war if they will not pay their debts and disarm, declares martial law, launches a war on organized crime, and brings prosperity to the nation and peace to the world.

  The first draft of the script was completed in January of 1933 and forwarded to the Hays Office for approval. James Wingate, Hays’s primary censor, was stunned by its political audacity. Though the novel on which the film was based had placed the story in 1950, muting its political message, the script which Walter Wanger submitted was set in the present and clearly alluded to recent inflammatory political events and personalities. Wingate told Hays and Louis B. Mayer that there were problems with the script which had to be corrected before the film could be released. Mayer assured James Wingate that there was nothing to worry about because “neither he nor Mr. Hearst would want to do anything that would weaken the authority of government or cast reflection upon any national administration, present or incoming.” He invited Wingate to a preview scheduled “next week in a nearby town” to view the film with Mayer and Mr. Hearst and have a conference with them the following morning.32

  Wingate, in the meantime, forwarded his list of script changes to Irving Thalberg, who was still in charge of production at the studio. “The preliminary portrayal of distressing conditions,” Wingate wrote, “should be treated in such a way as not to overemphasize organized discontent. We, of course, feel nobody engaged in the industry would want to do anything that might foment violence against the better elements of established governments, particularly in these times of stress and unrest.” As currently written, he doubted “whether any censor board would permit such outspoken vilification of existing governments.”33

  Thalberg assured Wingate that the script would be revised according to his specifications. Within weeks, he delivered a new draft to Wingate, which was still problematic. President Hammond’s economic rehabilitation program, Wingate wrote Will Hays, still paralleled very closely the program laid down in the Hearst press.34

  By March, news of the film—and Hearst’s interest in it—had been leaked to the White House, where Roosevelt had the week before taken up residence. When Stephen Early, the president’s press secretary, called Hays to express his concern, Hays, “in strictest personal confidence,” assured the president that he was paying “personal preferred attention” to the matter and working closely with the studio.35

  With the White House now involved, the stakes for MGM and the Hays Office were that much higher. Nick Schenck, who ruled the studio from New York, assured Early, as Hays had, that MGM was revising the script and that Gabriel, in its final version, would not only be acceptable to the White House, “but affirmatively serviceable.... You may be very certain that before the picture is released it will be free from all objectionable features, and will be presented to you for screening. As to all of this I will be glad if you will assure the President.”36

  Though the revised script was approved by the Hays Office, Hearst was unhappy. MGM, he feared, had done more than was required to mute the film’s political message—perhaps, he hinted, because Mayer, a lifelong Republican, had tried to protect Hoover’s image. “Dear Louis,” he wrote Mayer on March 25, 1933:

  I want to recommend to you the words of the English prayer book with reference to the picture Gabriel, “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those things which we ought not to have done.” I can realize the necessity of complying with the President’s request and putting the naval scene [in which Hammond bullies the leaders of the foreign governments into paying their debts] on a yacht instead of on a battleship and perhaps even the desirability of having the unemployed army in Baltimore, although they would have been much more dramatic in Washington. Still there were a lot of alterations in the picture which were not requested by the government and which in my humble opinion were in no way necessary, and which detract from the story value and the dramatic value of the picture.... I think you have impaired the effectiveness of the President’s speech to the Congress because you have been afraid to say the things which I wrote and which I say daily in my newspapers and which you commend me for saying, but still do not sufficiently approve to put in your film....I believe the picture will still be considered a good picture and perhaps an unusually good picture. Nevertheless, I think it was a better picture.37

  Recognizing that the Gabriel film with its activist president the hero, and its Harding/Hoover hack the villain, had done him a great service, Roosev
elt congratulated Hearst personally. “I want,” the president wrote the publisher in San Simeon, “to send you this line to tell you how pleased I am with the changes which you made in Gabriel over the White House. I think it is an intensely interesting picture and should do much to help. Several people have seen it with us at the White House and to every one of them it was tremendously interesting. Some of these people said they never went to movies or cared for them but they think this a most unusual picture.”38

  The film opened in early April to mixed reviews. Political columnists, including Walter Lippmann, had a “merry time” criticizing it, “most likely,” the Motion Picture Herald noted, “to the profit of the box office.” Lippmann, in particular, found the film objectionable because it represented “the infantile world of irresistible wishes. More specifically, it is a dramatization of Mr. Hearst’s editorials.”39

  Gabriel did quite well. With a cost of only $200,000—a quarter of the average cost of Marion’s films—the picture turned a handsome profit. Even had it not, it would have accomplished Hearst’s goal of getting his message across in a new medium to those who might not have read it in his newspapers. Money had to be appropriated to start up a gigantic public works program; the European nations had to be compelled to repay their war debts.40

  VIII. New Deals and Raw Deals

  30. Hearst at Seventy

  TIME MAGAZINE MARKED the Chief’s seventieth birthday with a cover story. “The scandalous bad boy of only yesterday—the genius of a thousand melodramas” had outlived his sins. “Five years or so ago,” Time reported, “it was the fashion to regard Hearst as a ‘failure’ and a ‘tragic figure,’ but ... it is doubtful that so subtle a mind as Hearst’s is trapped in tragedy.” By returning to the mainstream, the Chief had enhanced his political powers. His positions on domestic and foreign policy appeared to be consonant with those of the newly elected president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Both supported increased funding for a big navy, opposed war debt cancellation, and favored spending on public works projects. Neither believed it a priority to balance the budget.1

  The Hearst papers were as effusive in their praise of Roosevelt as they had been damning in their criticisms of his predecessor. The president returned the favor by providing the publisher with access to the White House and the illusion that he was going to be an important adviser. Two days after the inauguration, Hearst telegrammed President Roosevelt with yet another recommendation for an appointment. The president not only personally thanked the Chief for his suggestion, but invited him to visit the White House on his next trip East.2

  On March 19, Hearst employed his favorite and most effective editorial device to bestow his blessing on Roosevelt. Winsor McCay’s editorial-page cartoon pictured a smiling Uncle Sam leaning over Roosevelt’s desk to shake hands as millions of Americans cheered. “Uncle Sam is delighted with his new Chief Executive, and well may be,” the caption read. “The people cheer as they recover confidence. There is a man in the White House who knows how to ACT, and realizes that he represents the 123,000,000 people that elected him, not a small handful of befuddled financiers that prayed for his defeat.”3

  The following month, the Hearst papers celebrated Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “bold and sustained action” by calling for a new holiday, President’s Day.4

  In politics and journalism, as Hearst knew only too well, access was power. By the early 1930s, he had secured access not only to the president of the United States, but to the principal leaders of Europe whom he paid handsomely—in dollars—to serve as foreign correspondents for his March of Events Sunday section.

  The Hearst newspapers had tried but failed to sign Benito Mussolini to a contract in 1927 and had, since that time, been purchasing his articles from the United Press syndicate. Millicent, who had visited with Mussolini in 1923 and 1927, arrived in Rome from Egypt, where she had been vacationing with two of her friends, in March of 1930. Hearst’s offices in Rome planned her itinerary, found her and her friends accommodations, and notified the Chief when she arrived. Wherever she traveled, Millicent assumed the role of roving ambassador for the Hearst empire. From Rome, she cabled her husband with the suggestion that he relocate his two news services and his magazine and newsreel headquarters which were “scattered over Rome in small poor offices” to office space she had located opposite the Hotel Excelsior in the American quarter. Hearst apparently agreed with her suggestion. At the bottom of her telegram, Willicombe noted, “Concerning this the chief said quote ‘I think I would like to do this. It gives us more dignity to have one big impressive establishment than to have a lot of little ones.’”5

  Millicent’s major task in Rome was to interview Mussolini for a feature article in Hearst’s Sunday papers and negotiate a contract with him to write exclusively for the Hearst newspapers. Mussolini met with her in the great hall of the Palazzo Venezia where popes had once greeted their guests. “When I expressed to him my admiration of his work for Italy he thanked me with a smile which impressed me with its sincerity and its kindliness...

  “‘Do you know Ostia?’ he asked me. On my replying in the negative, he seemed sorry and added: ‘If you will allow me, I will take you to see the new excavations and the city by the sea which is coming into existence.’”

  A few days later, Mussolini drove up to the Grand Hotel where Millicent was staying “in a four-seater Alfa-Romeo driven by himself.” He asked her to sit next to him for the drive to Ostia.

  After describing her tour of Ostia with Il Duce, Millicent concluded her article by informing Hearst’s readers that “Mussolini is a great executive, a true leader of men, and the great works he has accomplished are his genuine fortification to a high place in history and in the hearts of his people.”6 What she did not tell them was that she had offered him $1,500 an article (equivalent to about $15,000 in today’s currency) to write for the Hearst papers.

  Mussolini consulted with Madame Margherita Sarfatti, his mistress and ghostwriter, who was already negotiating a contract with Karl von Wiegand, Hearst’s German correspondent. They agreed to accept Millicent’s offer. “On April 24,” Philip Cannistraro and Brian Sullivan wrote in their biography of Sarfatti, “Margherita signed a contract guaranteeing that she would deliver twelve articles by Mussolini in 1931 for $1,500 each. On behalf of Mussolini, Margherita agreed to write only on topics approved by the Hearst organization, especially on newsworthy current events. Margherita promised an option on the same arrangement for 1932.”

  Mussolini and Sarfatti’s editor in New York was Than Vanneman Ranck, Hearst’s editorial manager. Ranck, according to Sarfatti’s biographers, did not have an easy time with the two, nor they with him: “Ranck upset Mussolini and Margherita by referring to them openly in telegrams sent to Rome. The Duce worried that informers or gossips might lurk among the employees of the Italian telegraph system.” It was finally agreed that Mussolini would be referred to by the code name Albis, and Sarfatti by the name Romis.7

  Though Hearst was proud to publish articles by the premier of Italy, dispatched from Rome “By Special Cable,” Ranck had a great deal of trouble with the copy Sarfatti and Mussolini delivered to him. The prose was ponderous, the subjects dull, the copy late. Worst of all, it was often difficult to know what the premier was writing about. “Dark forebodings had hovered over the face of Europe for many weeks, and even the bright summer days could not bring out a ray of hope for the economic situation. The year, coming upon us relentlessly, could only be seen as a critical year in which order and restoration were bound to hang in the balance.” So began his and Sarfatti’s July 12, 1931, front-page article on President Hoover’s war debt plan.

  Though a few of the articles were rejected and several had to be rewritten, Hearst was, for the most part, pleased with them. When it came time to renew the agreement for a second year, he and Ranck proposed that Sarfatti and Mussolini deliver twenty-six articles for $1,000 each in 1932. The parties compromised, in the end, on a contract for eighteen articles at $1,200
each, which, given the increase in the number of articles and the fall in price of the Italian lira, left Sarfatti and Mussolini with considerably more money than they had received in their first contract. The 1932 set of articles were, like the first year’s, consonant with Hearst’s own editorial policies. Il Duce and his ghostwriter argued that governments had a responsibility to assist the unemployed, blasted the Versailles Treaty, called on England and France to disarm, supported Germany’s demand for “equality of armaments,” and warned of “Danger from Far East Unless Disunity Among White Races Ends.”8

  Only toward the end of 1932 did Mussolini and Sarfarti begin to balk at the agreement they had signed to write only on subjects preapproved by Hearst and Ranck. In September, they turned down Hearst’s proposal that they write about the failed disarmament talks in Geneva. And then in December of 1932, they broke one of the cardinal rules of the Hearst organization when, in their economic forecast for the coming year, they called on the United States to cancel European war debts. “I would not print Mussolini’s article or any other propaganda for debt cancellation,” the Chief cabled Ranck in New York. “And you must be very careful to see that articles from all these foreigners do not contain such propaganda.”

  Ranck, disturbed at Hearst’s implying that he had not been careful enough in editing out propaganda, telegrammed the Chief the next day that “all foreign contributors have for years been instructed they must not write anything that could possibly be construed as debt-cancellation, pro—League of Nations, or any other kind of propaganda contrary to our policies and that if they did write such propaganda it would not be printed.”