The Chief

by David Nasaw

  Hearst had for twenty years succeeded in keeping his relationship with Marion out of the newspapers and magazines. As with most Hollywood secrets, however, the story of their relationship had become part of the large body of “pseudo knowledge” movie fans exchanged with one another. In 1932, a New York investigator studying the effects of moving pictures on juvenile behavior interviewed “street boys” who rattled off dozens of rumors that “if publicly stated would be just ground for libel suits.” Among them was the allegation that “Marion Davies is the mother of William Randolph Hearst’s natural children.”28

  Only in the middle 1930s, as Hearst’s opponents reinscribed his public image from rich, eccentric publisher to fascistic press baron, was his relationship to Marion reconfigured into something far more sinister than another item of Hollywood scandal. In November of 1934, Upton Sinclair began serializing what would become his book-length chronicle of his losing campaign for governor, and listed among the outrages that had compelled him to run for office, “our richest newspaper publisher keeping his movie mistress in a private city of palaces and cathedrals, furnished with shiploads of junk imported from Europe ... telling it as a jest that he had spent six million dollars to make this lady’s reputation, and using his newspapers to celebrate her changes of hats.”29

  Sinclair did not mention Marion by name in 1934. But by the following year, she was regularly identified in the left-wing press as Hearst’s mistress. In its devastating August 1935 critique of Louella Parsons as “Hearst’s Hollywood Stooge,” the popular-front journal New Theatre claimed that “Louella’s chief function is to ballyhoo Marion Davies, the blond girl friend of her boss.” In May of 1936, the New Republic claimed that Hearst had directed his newspapers to stop mentioning Mae West’s new movie because she “had spoken slightingly of Miss Marion Davies.” In December, the mainstream magazine Newsweek was referring to Marion Davies as Hearst’s friend.30

  Hearst, a pioneer in slash-and-burn journalism, had spent a lifetime ridiculing public figures in print and editorial cartoons, but he had always drawn a line between the private and the public, if only because with such a complicated private life, he had to. His enemies drew no such lines. The pamphlets, booklets, broadsides, and open letters that were issued with regularity—and circulated widely—by the Communist Party and its front groups indulged in elaborately contrived descriptions of Hearst’s sinful private lives. In “Hearst: Labor’s Enemy No. 1,” James Casey claimed that the Chief lived with Marion and their twin sons in Santa Monica. His “life record shows him to be, among other things, a liar, a thief, a blackmailer, a receiver of bribes and a swindler. Incidentally, his record as a pervert places him side by side with his companion in fascism, Adolf Hitler.”31

  The centerpiece of the attack on Hearst was not his adulterous relationship with Marion, but his political alliance with Hitler and Mussolini. As the New Masses explained to its readers in the spring of 1935, “even with today’s keen competition from the Huey Longs and Father Coughlins, [Hearst] remains the outstanding demagogue of America.” In the final volume of his U.S.A. trilogy, The Big Money, which he finished in early 1936, John Dos Passos referred to “Handsome Adolf ... as Hearst’s own loved invention.”32

  Hearst provided his opponents with continuing evidence of his Nazi sympathies by supporting Hitler’s policies, no matter how flagrantly they violated international law and the provisions of the Versailles Treaty. Publicly and privately, the Chief did all he could to convince the American public that Hitler was not a madman, but an elected leader who was pursuing the policy he thought best for his nation. When, in March of 1935, the Führer announced that Germany had established an air force and was going to build a half-million-man army in blatant violation of the Versailles Treaty, Hearst dictated the outline of an editorial and asked Ranck to forward it to “Goering or whoever is chief source of articles in Germany in defense of Hitler’s military program.... The idea is to get an article from Goering or somebody on these lines.” The editorial which Hearst wanted Hitler or Goering to publish under their own bylines would explain that Germany, in rearming, was not preparing for war, but “merely doing what the United States would do under similar circumstances, [maintaining] its independence, its equality with other nations and its opportunity for peaceful economic development.”33

  Hearst’s visit to Germany and Adolf Hitler in 1934 had quickly taken on major significance for his critics. A photo, purportedly of him leaving his interview with Hitler, flanked by Alfred Rosenberg and a line of storm troopers, became a staple of the Hearst literature. Oliver Carlson and Ernest Sutherland Bates claimed in their Hearst biography published in early 1936 that the Chief had “derived a new political vision from his Nazi contacts” in the summer of 1934. Ferdinand Lundberg, in Imperial Hearst, also published in 1936, claimed that Hearst had, on leaving Germany in 1934, “switched to the policy of praising the Hitler regime whenever possible and denouncing the Soviet Union in particular and communism in general” because Hitler had bribed him with a $400,000 contract to the International News Service to provide “news” of the world to the Nazi press offices.34

  The bribe story had been leaked by Ambassador Dodd to a New York Times correspondent, who published it in the early edition of the January 1, 1935, paper. Because the Times editors could not verify the story—and feared a libel suit from Hearst—they pulled it from later editions and removed all copies of the issue in which it appeared from their morgue. (The early edition of the Times in which the story was carried is also missing from the microfilm collection at the New York Public Library.) The bribe story was picked up by the Daily Worker and other Communist party and Popular Front publications and found its way into Ferdinand Lundberg’s biography, a 1938 Saturday Evening Post article, and a 1940 article in Liberty In 1941, Hearst executives discovered that United Press salesmen were stealing subscribers from Hearst’s International News Service by telling them about the Hitler bribe. The story was without foundation and on its face ludicrous, as Hearst needed no financial assistance to support Hitler. But it refused to go away.35

  Though the Chief had warmly congratulated the president on his electoral victories in the November 1934 elections, he had gone back on the attack in January 1935, when Roosevelt tried to get the Senate to approve American entry into the World Court. With Roosevelt’s harshest and most powerful opponents on the right, Senator Huey Long of Louisiana and Father Coughlin, the radio priest, Hearst organized a nationwide campaign against the Court and handed the president a rather humiliating defeat. Through the next few months, his attacks on the New Deal grew increasingly vicious, though he continued to criticize the president’s appointees rather than Roosevelt himself. Finally, in April of 1935, he notified Ed Coblentz, his senior editor in New York, that the time had come to “settle down to a consistent policy of opposition to this Administration.... President Roosevelt is responsible for his Administration.... If he is leading the country to disaster, we cannot oppose his policies and support him.... There is no knowing what may occur four years later. We could easily have a permanent dictatorship on this basis. We have practically a dictatorship now.”36

  Though Roosevelt was not privy to this memorandum, he would not have been surprised by it. On April 30, 1935, Harold Ickes, the secretary of the interior, suggested that the president appoint as his undersecretary of the interior a lawyer who had represented John Strachey, the British Marxist the Hearst papers in Chicago had “exposed” as a Communist. Roosevelt was “disturbed. He is anxious just now not to do anything to stir up William Randolph Hearst,” Ickes wrote in his diary. “He told me that he had had a talk with Arthur Brisbane [who] told him that Hearst was pretty erratic these days but that he believed that if he kept sending him friendly messages and didn’t do anything to disturb him unduly Hearst would support him next year in the campaign. The president remarked that, outside of Hearst and one or two other strings of newspapers, all the balance of the press of the country would be against him and naturall
y he wants all the support he can get. Therefore, he wants to watch his step on the Hearst matter.”37

  Fearful that he was about to lose the editorial support of the only Democratic press lord in the nation, Roosevelt requested an opportunity to clear the air. The Chief agreed and sent Edmond Coblentz to Washington. Coblentz was received like the emissary of a foreign potentate and invited to spend the night. After being shown to his room to dress for dinner, Coblentz would write later, he was “ushered to the Oval Room where cocktails were served [with] Beluga caviar—plenty of it—supplied by [William] Bullitt, who was then ambassador to Russia. At dinner we drank toasts in California wine ... Over cordials and highballs the President, in a session that lasted nearly four hours, attempted to explain away the misunderstandings which he said had plagued both our papers and himself.”

  Present for the discussion were Raymond Moley, one of the few New Dealers whom Hearst had not criticized by name, and Vincent Astor, who remained friendly with both the Chief and the president. The conversation was tense, but cordial. Roosevelt outlined his policy agenda and answered questions on a variety of items. In response to Hearst’s concerns about tariffs, the president poured forth facts and figures about Japanese textiles, Swedish matches, French perfume, Brazilian cotton, and Argentine beef and butter. According to the account of the meeting prepared by Coblentz, the discussion proceeded smoothly until the editor asked Roosevelt about his plans for combating Communism. Roosevelt replied that he was fighting not only “Communism,” but “Huey Longism, Coughlinism, Town-sendism. I want to save our system, the capitalistic system; to save it is to give some heed to world thought of today. To combat [Huey Long’s “Share the Wealth” plan] and similar crackpot ideas, it may be necessary to throw the forty-six men who are reported to have incomes in excess of $1,000,000 a year to the wolves. In other words, limit incomes through taxation to $1,000,000.... Further, it may be necessary to see to it that vast estates bequeathed to one person are limited in size.”

  This was not what Hearst would have wanted to hear, as he was one of those forty-six men with incomes over one million dollars a year. Roosevelt, sensing perhaps that he had gone too far, defended his proposals by claiming that such actions were necessary to halt the spread of Communism. “The thinking men, the young men, who are disciples of this new world idea of fairer distribution of wealth, they are demanding that something be done to equalize this distribution.... We do not want communism in this country, and the only way to fight communism is by—” As Roosevelt paused, looking for the right word, Coblentz interjected, “Neocommunism.” The president laughed. Vincent Astor interjected that the president’s tax plan, if enacted, would bankrupt Astor’s estate. “The attitude of the President to this remark seemed to be ‘well, that’s just too bad.’”

  Roosevelt had, it appeared, determined before his meeting with Coblentz that he was going to push forward with what historians would call his “second New Deal.” As he indicated to Coblentz, he had no other choice. He was threatened on the left by a revived labor movement and the Popular Front and on the right by “business and opposition papers” and crackpots like Long, Coughlin, and Townsend. Of the two, he feared the rightist crackpots much more and was determined to form an alliance on the left to block their advance.

  Immediately after the meeting, Roosevelt dispatched an “emissary” to San Simeon to correct what he feared might be Coblentz’s negative, if truthful, account. His solicitude had the desired effect. Instead of giving Coblentz the go-ahead to attack the president, Hearst sent his editor a “‘hold your fire’ admonition.” The détente lasted little more than a month. The truth was that there was no way for Roosevelt to build an alliance on the left without alienating Hearst.38

  In late June, Roosevelt effectively cut Hearst loose when he delivered his new tax message to Congress, “replete,” as Kenneth Davis has written, “with phrases which, in the process of ‘stealing thunder’ from Huey Long, were as lashes of lightning across the back of William Randolph Hearst and of every other scion of enormous wealth.” Harold Ickes was meeting with the president at the time his message was being introduced in Congress. Roosevelt read the text of his message out loud to Ickes. “He told me that he thought it was the best thing he had done as President....At one place in the message he looked up at me with a smile and said, ‘That is for Hearst.’ I can imagine the clamor that will go up from Hearst.”39

  “President’s taxation program is essentially Communism,” Hearst telegrammed Coblentz and Bainbridge Colby, his chief editorial writer, as soon as he read the tax message. “It is, to be sure, a bastard product of Communism and demagogic democracy, a mongrel creation which might accurately be called demo-communism, evolved by a composite personality which might be labeled Stalin Delano Roosevelt....It divides a harmonious and homogeneous nation into classes, and stimulates class distinction, class discrimination, class division, class resentment, and class antagonism.”40

  Hearst’s objections to increased income taxes were motivated as much by self-interest as by his political philosophy. He was already stretched to the limit by outstanding obligations. Worse yet, his corporate and personal finances were so hopelessly intertwined—and had been for half a century—that there was no way to separate his personal income from that of his corporations. He lived rent-free at San Simeon, Wyntoon, St. Donat’s, and in hotel suites in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, which were paid for by his corporations. His art was bought by an import-export firm which was a subsidiary of American Newspapers, Inc., his chief holding company. His personal servants were on Hearst company payrolls, as were Millicent, the boys, Marion, and members of Marion’s and Millicent’s families.

  “It is of vital importance to me that nothing shall be charged to me that is not necessary—so that I shall not have to pay any more income taxes than are necessary,” he directed the head of his newspaper division, Tom White—by telephone message followed up by written memo—in November of 1935:

  I have got to keep my actual net income under a million dollars. If it goes over a million dollars, they will practically confiscate the income. I want $30,000 a week instead of fifty or whatever it is, deposited in my account. Out of that account, which is approximately a million and a half a year, I will be able to charge off, I should say about one-half—such as construction at ranch and similar expenditures that can legitimately be borne by the corporations, and leave me an income on which I will have to pay taxes of from $500,000 to $700,000. That is all the income I can afford to have, and it is all I am going to have.41

  Following Roosevelt’s lead—at a healthy distance—Frank Merriam, the Republican governor of California whom Hearst had helped elect, instituted a steeply graduated state income tax for those who resided in California for at least six months a year. The Chief was outraged. He threatened, in an open letter to Variety, that he would leave the state—and encourage the Hollywood studios to do likewise—if the state income tax was not rescinded. “Heaven knows I do not want to leave California. No one does, least of all a native son, whose father was a pioneer; but it is utterly impossible for me to remain here and to occupy a place like San Simeon on account of the Federal and State tax laws.” For the next few years, until the residency requirements were changed from six to nine months for the benefit of Hearst and the movie moguls, the Chief evaded the state tax by spending more time in New York than in California.42

  On July 1, 1935, President Roosevelt sent a personal note to Robert Maynard Hutchins, the president of the University of Chicago, who had just been questioned by the Illinois state senate committee investigating the allegations presented in Hearst’s Chicago Herald-Examiner that the university was harboring known Communists. “Dear Bob,” the president wrote in a note that was marked on top with the notation “Private and Confidential,” “You must have had a vile time with that inquisition. I sometimes think that Hearst has done more harm to the cause of Democracy and civilization in America than any three other contemporaries
put together.”43

  Roosevelt had good reason to fear Hearst in 1935, as he began to prepare for his reelection campaign. When George Allen, a newspaperman and friend of Mrs. Roosevelt, returned to Washington on August 1, 1935, from five weeks of travel across the country, he wrote her that the only force that was “effectively combating the Administration” was the Hearst papers. A penciled note at the bottom of Allen’s letter indicated that Eleanor had forwarded it to her husband: “F.D.R. I’m sure this is true. E.R.”44

  Still, the president held his fire. While he continued to complain about Hearst in private, he said nothing in public. Then, in mid-August, he was presented with an opportunity to attack the publisher that was too good to ignore. The White House had intercepted a telegram from Ed Coblentz to Hearst wire service chiefs and editors, informing them that the Chief wanted the words RAW DEAL used instead of NEW DEAL in all editorials and news stories. Roosevelt, on reading the telegram, called in Raymond Moley, his speech writer and adviser, and asked him to draft a response to the telegram. On Thursday morning, the White House released the intercepted telegram with a statement from the president, based on Moley’s earlier draft:

  “The President believes that it is only fair to the American people to apprise them of certain information which has come to him.” After citing an unnamed “public-spirited owner of a great newspaper” who had instructed his staff that “facts must be presented as facts if the value of the news is to be saved” and congratulating the great majority of owners and editors of papers for conducting their papers in this spirit, Roosevelt criticized the minority of editors or owners who engaged “in what is known as the deliberate coloring of so-called news stories, in accordance with orders issued to those responsible for the writing of news.” He then reproduced Hearst’s telegram and reminded the public that the message referred “not to editorial expression but to news columns.”45