The Chief

by David Nasaw

  Humor remained his best weapon and shield against the losses and infirmities of old age. To the United Press, which congratulated him on his seventy-eighth birthday, he wrote, “Thank you, but I am not having any more birthdays. Or if I do, I will have them in reverse, beginning at seventy-eight and going back to twenty-one. I appreciate your courteous congratulations, but please save them until I get back to twenty-one. Congratulating a man on being seventy-eight is like felicitating him on being in an airplane accident. He may survive, but it is not exactly an enjoyment.”3

  Despite his complaints, the Chief looked remarkably fit. He was a little heavier, his face fuller, his neck thicker. His posture was still perfect, his hair white and a bit thinner. He had begun to wear glasses, but only for reading certain kinds of documents.

  He began to write more poetry. Some of it was published in his columns; some printed elsewhere in his paper, unsigned and unacknowledged, like this lullaby:

  Father serves his country Upon the raging main,

  Mother’s at a night club,

  And she’s paralyzed again.

  Baby’s lone and lonely,

  There’s none to hear its cry,

  “Tor-a lor-a lor-a,”

  That’s a modern lullaby.4

  In his longer-form verse, he made public display of the pastoral sentimentality that had been hidden away behind the long, stern face and the pompous stentorian prose. Marion thought one of his poems, “Song of the River,” in which he compared the course of a human life to a flowing river, “the most beautiful thing ever written.” He was quite proud of this poem and had it mounted on special stock and distributed to friends and business associates.5

  At Wyntoon, he sent Marion a small note or poem every night. “He would shove them under the door and wait until I woke up....I used to answer him back. He used to keep all my little notes in a drawer right next to his bed. But they were stolen from the house. I still have his

  Oh the night is blue and the stars are bright

  Like the eyes of the girl of whom I write....

  And the skies are soft and the clouds are white

  Like the limbs of the girl Of whom I write,

  But no beauty of earth is so fair a sight

  As the girl who lies by my side at night.6

  Hearst and Marion traveled less than before, though the old man, even in his eighties, was incapable of remaining in one place for very long. In the spring of 1941, he spent a month with Marion in Mexico and returned with praise for the Mexican government, which had recently expropriated some of his land at Babicora. “They were pretty decent about that,” he told reporters. “They didn’t take any more than was right. After all, it is their country.”7

  Hearst went out of his way now to express his newfound friendship for the Mexicans and their president, Manuel Ávila Camacho, who had protected the bulk of his extensive land holdings from expropriation. In early March, his advertising director sent the president a copy of a recent “In These Times” article: “You can feel the radiation of his friendship. I will send you personally these articles as they appear. I know your country will reap great benefits from these stories which will bring tourists into Mexico and at the same time cement a very wonderful friendship.” On his 1941 trip to Mexico, Hearst visited President Ávila Camacho and presented him with a Kerry Blue dog as a present. When the dog ran away, the Chief wrote a long personal note to the president to say how “distressed” he had been “to hear that the foolish animal had wandered away from its lovely home to lose itself in the great city.” This time, he was going to send the president a “Dachel”—a dachshund—which was “more of a home dog and less of a wanderer and adventurer.... If it once thinks you like it you will find it reciprocates affection most devotedly ... If you would prefer less of a house dog, please let me know. I want you to have the kind of dog that you really like. You have done so much for me and there is so little I can do in return.”8

  In April of 1943, Hearst quietly celebrated his eightieth birthday at Marion’s Santa Monica beach house. On being toasted by his sons, their wives, and a few friends, he rose to respond, “I shall not pretend that I’m happy about being eighty. I would happily exchange that marker for two lifetimes at forty. Just as a woman reaching forty would gladly exchange that milestone for two at twenty. Yet I am thankful and grateful that I find so much in life that is fresh, stimulating, and dear to me.”9

  Time magazine, which still monitored the Chief’s activities, reported that he had spent his birthday talking with friends, reading his congratulatory telegrams, and playing “his daily hour of tennis.... Despite his age, Tycoon Hearst has not shriveled. Grey, jowled like a coon dog, no longer nimble, he still stands impressively erect [and] is remarkably healthy. He still bubbles with new ideas for his publications, over which he maintains the vigilance of a whimsical despot.”10

  Hearstian journalism, as Time reminded its readers, was “still wild-eyed, red-inked, impulsive, dogmatic.” It was advocacy journalism at its most extreme. The Hearst papers took positions—and stood by them. There was no commitment to objective, both-sides-of-the-story journalism. In May of 1943, Jack Warner, under attack for having produced Mission to Moscow—which his critics claimed was no more than a big-screen paean to Stalin and the Soviet Communists—asked for Hearst’s help, “in view of our long friendship.” Hearst refused:

  You say our papers “should state the other side of the case”...Your film, Mr. Warner, gives “the other side of the case”—the Communist side—quite complete. My contention is that it is entirely essential, not only in the interests of fairness, but in the interests of freedom, for an American newspaper to print the anti-Communist—the Democratic side of the case....I am sorry that we disagree on the proper function of the press—and of the moving picture. But I am sure you will realize that our attitude toward your screen product (an attitude so frequently favorable, but in this case frankly critical) is guided by no personal unfriendliness, but merely by a sense of public duty.11

  To make sure that his editors across the country knew what he wanted on his front and editorial pages, the Chief wrote them daily from wherever he happened to be. In March 1944, he telegrammed instructions on Irene Castle’s campaign for prevention of cruelty to animals: “I am chiefly interested in the protection of dogs.” He criticized his editors for “boosting” George Patton—“that brutal ‘kick ’em in the pants’ General ... ought to be demoted.” He complained about “the lack of size and clearness in the lettering” of the “four column comics” that were being published on Sunday. And he took up the campaign for a Jewish homeland.12

  Hearst, who had been crusading for a Jewish homeland since 1937, had abandoned his earlier plan to establish it in Africa. He signed on now as a sponsor of the Emergency Conference to Save the Jewish People of Europe, which was organized by Palestinian Jews who were supporters of the right-wing revisionist Zionist, Vladimir Jabotinsky. According to David Wyman, the author of The Abandonment of the Jews, Hearst was more active than any other American newspaper publisher in his support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. He seemed “to have been genuinely concerned about the terrible plight of Europe’s Jews. In ... editorials, he repeatedly pointed out an essential truth that very many of America’s religious and secular leaders never grasped: ‘Remember, Americans, This Is Not a Jewish Problem. It Is a Human Problem.’”13

  In his ninth decade, Hearst regained control of his publishing empire. Ironically, it was America’s entry into the Second World War, which Hearst had done all he could to prevent, that saved his newspapers. With the coming of war, circulation grew and advertising kept pace with it. Newsprint rationing, at the same time, forced publishers to print fewer pages, which lowered their costs. Simultaneously with the increase in publishing revenues, the Hearst organization began reaping a new windfall by licensing its comics characters, especially Popeye and Blondie, for radio, animated cartoons, ten-cent children’s books, and dozens of different novelty items, inclu
ding pencil sharpeners, molded soap figures, glow lamps, pocket knives, and a wide assortment of foods, candies, and beverages.14

  Fortified by expanded revenues—and the promise of better times to come—John Hanes, his chief financial adviser, was able to raise enough money to buy back a large portion of the Hearst Consolidated stock and pay off Chase National and the other major creditors. In December of 1943, Judge Shearn retired as trustee. He was replaced by a corporate board of Hearst loyalists. After six very lean years, the Chief was in an expansive mood again. “I am very much interested in the Acapulco gold mining property for several reasons,” he wrote Edward Clark in January. “I like gold mines and I like Acapulco. Please do your utmost to press your plans to a successful conclusion. I would like a job in the mine.”15

  By early 1945, after almost eight years in exile, William Randolph Hearst, at eighty-two, was again in control of his finances. The empire that was returned, though reduced in size, remained formidable, with seventeen daily newspapers, four radio stations, nine American and three English magazines, a wire service, a feature service, and a Sunday supplement.

  Almost simultaneously with his victory over his creditors, Hearst celebrated the nation’s victory over Japan by returning from Wyntoon with Marion to take up residence at San Simeon. As if the previous eight years had never happened, construction began again on the unfinished North or New Wing. The top floor was to be Hearst’s and Marion’s. Camille Solon, who had painted the murals on the vaulted arches in Hearst’s Gothic Study twelve years earlier, returned to paint the arches in one of the sitting rooms; the lamps were sent up from Marion’s beach house; Charles Messer from Barker Brothers, the Los Angeles department store, set up his sewing machine on site and created all the draperies.16

  While construction was in progress in the North Wing, Hearst and Marion lived in House A, or Casa del Mar, which had been the Hearst family’s primary residence on the hilltop in the middle 1920s. Marion moved into Millicent’s room; Hearst reoccupied his old bedroom with the four-column bed he had bought in 1921. It was to this room that Hearst now returned every evening to work at his Spanish writing table or in his seventeenth-century French tapestry-upholstered chair. “Through the door lattice,” Marion remembered, “I could see that his lights were on, all night long. I’d walk in and say, ‘Are you going to bed or are you not?’ He’d say yes. I’d say, ‘Turn the lights off.’ Well, half an hour later he would still be writing or playing solitaire or thinking.”17

  As in the old days, family and friends appeared every weekend. Colleen Moore, one of the regulars at San Simeon in the late 1920s and 1930s, had expected that the ranch, once reopened, would be as it had been before the war. To her surprise, she discovered that where there had previously never been “less than thirty-five or forty people, always great crowds, this time there was only Marion, Mr. Hearst, his favorite grandson, Bunky, and Igor Cassini and Bootsie [Mrs. Cassini], who later married Bill [Jr.]...and Harry Crocker, who was in bed with the flu.” Hearst, Moore noted, was in fine spirits, though she could not help noticing that he had become quite old.18

  The routine at the castle was much the same as it had been, with cocktails daily in the Assembly Room followed by dinner in the Refectory and a film in the movie theater. The only difference was that, instead of descending by elevator from his Gothic Suite on the third floor, Hearst quietly greeted his guests from the sofa at the north end of the Assembly Room. Although less mobile than he was before the war, he remained involved in every detail of daily life. “He was very particular about the fringes on the rugs,” Ann Miller, the new housekeeper, recalled, “and he didn’t like spider webs.” When he and his guests were served beef that he did not think up to ranch standards, he fired off a note to his ranch manager and cousin, Randy Apperson: “I think beef ought to be hung from eight to twelve weeks. I suggest that you hang it eight weeks at the ranch and then send it up the hill. If you need more cold storage equipment I have no doubt it will be provided.”19

  There was a new generation of servants at the ranch now, all of whom had been instructed “to keep out of Mr. Hearst’s way, don’t bother him, don’t appear and be around when he is.” Ann Miller, the housekeeper, did as she was told and altered her route whenever she saw the old man approaching, only to be gently reprimanded for it: “His valet then came to me at a later date and said that Mr. Hearst likes to speak to and encounter and meet up with the employees.”20

  There is a photograph from this period of Hearst, at eighty-three, with his head gardener, Nigel Keep, who was seventy-two. The two stand side by side, Hearst in his three-piece suit, Keep in slacks and a light work shirt. The photograph is inscribed in Hearst’s handwriting, “Dear Mr. Keep—This is a good picture of two very handsome young men.”21

  Not every employee on the hillside got on as famously with the Chief. He had become more autocratic with age, less tolerant of those who broke his cardinal rules.

  Every evening, as the sun set, he and Marion took a long walk along the Esplanade, the pathway that connected the guesthouses to one another and to Casa Grande. “They got back from one of those strolls one night,” recalls Roland Dragon, who after Joe Willicombe’s retirement served as Hearst’s private secretary, “and he called me on the phone. ‘Mr. Dragon,’ he said, ‘somebody has picked a rose.’ [Hearst] described where it was on the back part of the Esplanade.... He said, ‘I want you to find out who did it and see that they’re removed from the hilltop.’ So I had to call each department head and set up a meeting....It had to be somebody that wasn’t familiar with the rules, or something like that....It was about 11:30 at night and I found out who did it.... Broke my heart to have to discharge this man.” The culprit was the young fellow who “used to drive the film back and forth every day from Hollywood.” He had picked a rose to take back that night to his sweetheart. John Horn, the historian at the San Simeon Historical Monument, speculates that as the young man was probably already on the payroll of one of Hearst’s Los Angeles papers, he may not have been fired, but rather reassigned to work in Los Angeles.22

  In the spring of 1945, Marion was struck ill again with a stomach ailment and was rushed by plane to St. Luke’s Hospital in San Francisco. When she was well enough to leave the hospital, she and W. R. moved into Huntington Hotel, as their regular hotel, the Fairmont, was filled with the delegates from the fifty nations who had convened in San Francisco to draft a United Nations charter. According to Marion, Hearst got a chance to meet Molotov, the Soviet representative at the conference, and “though there was a difference of opinion, W. R. thought that ... he had a sort of amenability towards being sensible.” Marion’s illness was not as bad as had been feared and two weeks after their emergency flight to San Francisco, she and W. R. were back at San Simeon again. Karl von Wiegand, who was visiting at the time, wrote Bill Curley, one of Hearst’s editors and a friend, that the Chief was “in splendid shape, physically and mentally, and just as active as ever. He was full of fun at his [eighty-second] birthday party which all of the boys and their wives, except Jack, attended.”23

  One of the rewards of old age, even for the Chief, is grandchildren. W. R. was blessed with several. His oldest son, George, had two children, the twins Phoebe and George, Jr., born in 1927; John had a son, John, Jr. or Bunky, born in 1933; five more grandchildren would be born in Hearst’s lifetime, though he would not get to know them as well as he did the three oldest. He wrote his older grandchildren often, offering gentle advice in a tone quite different from the one he had used with their parents. It was quite all right with Grandpa, he wrote George, Jr. in April 1944, that he was attending a school in the East that “prepares for Harvard if I remember rightly. I suppose you will go to Harvard and come out with a Boston accent like Roosevelt. Well, it has not done him any harm. But don’t let your heart be turned away from the West. The West is where the future of our country lies....Be glad you are a westerner. However, I did not mean this letter to be a thesis. I am just interested in your future. W
hat are you studying to be? Do not neglect your English literature. That is useful no matter what you intend to become.”24

  To Phoebe, George, Jr.’s sister, he wrote a charming note at the same time, thanking her and her brother for the birthday presents of ties and pine soap. “The pine soap is ... going to be very useful as I am digging in the garden right now and will have to have a lot of cleaning up every day to make me look smart and fit in with the ties.... I have a picture of you and George and your mother hanging in my room. And when I get cleaned up, and perfumed up, and dressed up in my new ties, I am going to look at it and say, ‘Gee! I’m glad I belong to such a nice family.’ And I am pretty proud about it.”25

  He was closest to John’s son, Bunky, who on his father’s divorce from his second wife, Gretchen Wilson, in 1937, was able to spend a great deal of time with his grandfather. “Have a good time on your various vacations,” he wrote Bunky in June of 1944 when he was eleven, “but do not forget to spend one of them with your grandpop. By the way, do you know why a duck comes out of the water? The answer is, for sundry reasons. And why does a duck go into the water? The answer is, for divers reasons. I have got another one I will tell you when you come here. But until you do, it is a secret.”26

  Bunky had such a good time with his grandfather that he moved in with him after his visit in the summer of 1946 and was enrolled in the local public school in Cambria. Each morning, he set off with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich specially made by the chef.27

  To Bunky, the Chief was simply “Grandpop ... There was nothing austere about him. When he was pleased, he liked to do a little dance, sort of a cross between a time step and a jig. Once a group of his executives came to San Simeon for his birthday and as he walked into the room they all began to sing ‘Happy Birthday.’ His face lighted up and when they had finished he did an ‘Off to Buffalo,’ winding up with hand outstretched like an old-time vaudeville hoofer. It broke the place up.” As if to signal to the world that he no longer cared a whit what was thought of him, W. R. had given up his dark, three-piece suits for “hand-painted ties and bright suits.” Bunky remembered one in particular, “a billiard-table green. Other men who wore clothes like that would have looked as though they were with the circus. But because Grandpop was so dignified, he made the clothes look dignified, too.” Bunky remembered also being enormously impressed with his grandpop’s whistle: “two fingers in the mouth ... you could have heard clear to San Luis Obispo, forty-three miles away. It was the shrillest sound I have ever heard any human being make.”28