by David Nasaw
There was one thing Bunky did not mention in his 1960 Reader’s Digest article, “Life with Grandfather.” At twelve years of age Bunky was, Bill Hearst, Jr. recalled, enlisted in the battle to keep Marion sober by finding out where she hid her liquor. It didn’t much matter by now. Her supplies were endless; her suppliers legion.29
In 1945 or 1946, Marion sold her Santa Monica beach house and bought a new home off Benedict Canyon at 1007 North Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills. The “Beverly house,” as she referred to it, was a modern-looking version of a Mediterranean villa. Built in 1927, it was shielded from the street by a row of hedges. In the rear were a swimming pool, a fish pond, formal gardens, and a large guesthouse.30
Bill Curley, the editor of the Journal-American, and his wife, Mary, who had been married at San Simeon in 1937, were among the first of Marion’s and W. R.’s friends to visit the Beverly house, in the fall of 1946. Bill had been with the Hearst organization for almost half a century; his wife, Mary, was the daughter of Marion’s cook. “A short part of the time,” Curley wrote Karl von Wiegand after the visit, “we spent in San Simeon and the rest of it at Miss Davies’ new home. The Boss has a new plane—a knock out. It’s a DC3 Douglas, appointed with a crew of two and a hostess. The Boss thinks nothing of going to Los Angeles and returning as the plane can make it in an hour.”
Curley had been both amazed and delighted at how well the boss was doing at age eighty-three. “You would get a chuckle,” he wrote von Wiegand, “out of seeing the Chief busily directing the alterations in the new home. He thinks nothing of putting up a new decorative door and then a few days later taking it down and putting up a different type of door. He is meticulously insistent on getting things done the way he wants them. Besides this he had us all out of breath shopping for furnishings for the new establishments. He raced around the department stores like a youngster. Mary and I were staggering behind him with our tongues hanging out.”31
In the spring of 1947, after years of avoidance, W. R. finally gave in to the demands of family and business associates and allowed John Hanes, working with teams of accountants and corporation executives, to draft a will for him. His principal objective was to preserve his empire after his death. To minimize the payment of estate taxes, which would have necessitated the sale of assets—there was little cash in the estate—Hanes and the lawyers created three different trusts. The first, for Millicent, contained $6 million of nonvoting Hearst preferred stock. Millicent was also granted a bequest of $1.5 million in cash to pay her tax liabilities. The second trust, the Hearst Family Trust, for his sons, received 30,000 shares of nonvoting preferred stock, enough to provide each of the boys with an annual income of $30,000. The remainder of the estate, and by far the largest portion, was left to two “charitable” trusts. All the trusts established by the will were to be controlled by the same board of directors. To prevent his sons from breaking apart his empire and dividing up its assets, Hearst gave them—and their heirs after them—only five of the seats on the thirteen-member board.32
Marion was not mentioned in the body of the will, though a codicil left her the Beverly Drive house and its contents. The codicil was later revoked when Hearst gave her the house as a gift.
In 1938, Joe Kennedy had warned W. R. that as his corporate executives “might not be especially kind to Marion,” he should take steps to protect her financial future. Hearst tried in 1938 and 1939 to get Marion’s $1 million loan repaid, but failed. Only in the early 1940s, as the war brought with it a circulation boom and increased publishing profits, was the corporation able to repay Marion’s debt in full. Through the middle 1940s, as John Hanes reorganized Hearst’s corporations, he began to pay closer attention to Marion’s finances as well. With the active assistance of Hearst and Hanes, Marion began to invest money in real estate again. By the time she and the Chief moved to their Beverly Drive house in 1947, she had become one of Hollywood’s wealthiest women.
The fact that Hearst had permitted a will to be drawn up and signed did not signify that he was ready for retirement. Though he no longer wrote signed editorials, he sent outlines of what he wanted said to his writers, and edited and approved every major editorial that appeared in his papers. After reading parts of The Memoirs of Hecate County, Edmund Wilson’s sexually charged collection of stories which someone had sent Marion, he picked up the phone and ordered Roland Dragon, his secretary, to call “our editorial writers in New York, San Francisco, and what not” and tell them to compose an editorial condemning the book. “So next day,” Dragon recalled, “you ... pick up his papers and [there was] the editorial commenting about the filthy literature. And it would kick off a campaign on this type of literature.”
The Chief’s daily routine, at age eighty-four, was much as it had always been. He and Marion arose around nine in the morning. Hearst’s valet, according to Dragon, would “alert the switchboard operator who then notified me as secretary, and then the head housekeeper, Joe the butler, and the chief chef, that Mr. Hearst was getting up now. So we’re all on alert now. And then this routine was repeated at various stages of his preparation. ‘They are now dressing,’ we’d get the word, all six of us.”
When they had finished their breakfast, somewhere between ten and eleven, Dragon would get a call from the butler and proceed to meet the Chief in the Assembly Room with “the clipboard and the day’s business things, and so forth.”
Joe Willicombe had years before set up the “clipboard” system, which Dragon maintained. He divided each day’s mail from San Luis Obispo into three stacks, “junk mail, quasi-important, and business mail.” Dragon took care of the first two stacks by himself and then condensed each business item “to not more than six lines, not six-and-a-half or seven, but six lines.” He presented the Chief with these items neatly arranged on his clipboard: “There’d be thirty-five to forty-five items, business things.”
Hearst and Dragon spent about an hour and a half each morning on a sofa in the Assembly Room. Hearst went through the items on the clipboard; dictated answers to Dragon who, like Willicombe, knew Gregg shorthand; read and edited the editorials that had been sent by teletype from his newspaper offices; and gave Dragon the art catalogues in which he had marked the items he wanted purchased.
Although his morning meeting with Hearst usually lasted only about an hour and a half, Dragon remained on call twenty-four hours a day, just as Willicombe had. The Chief, Dragon recalled in his oral history, “didn’t hire his people, he didn’t hire you, he bought you, which he did for me. However, at any time of the day I could use the pools and the tennis courts, and anything, so long as I was within hearing distance of a phone, and my pen and pad with me. Which became routine.”
Aside from Hearst’s morning meeting with Dragon, he spent most of his day with or close to Marion. “They were like two peas in a pod,” Virginia Dragon, the wife of Hearst’s secretary, remembered. “They were very close ... You’d see them walking ... arm-in-arm.”
Dinner was served at 10 P.M. They ate alone now, but always dressed for the occasion, as they had when the Assembly Room was filled with guests. “About 11:00 we’d go to the show,” Mrs. Dragon recalled. There was a new movie every evening. The 7:00 show was for the staff. “The 11:00 evening movie was just for the two of them in the first row. He had a telephone right next to him in the movie.” Virginia and Roland Dragon stayed in the back row.
After the movie, Dragon would return to his suite of rooms and wait for the phone to ring. Much of his business with Hearst was, he remembered, transacted between 2:00 and 3:00 in the morning. The Chief was a “nocturnal person ... He seemed to get most of his inspirations in the middle of the night ... He’d phone me habitually between 1:00, 2:00, 3:00 in the morning in our suite while we were in bed.”
One evening, a call was put through at 2 A.M. to Dragon “from Ben McPeake, Mr. Hearst’s buyer in London.... Obviously upset, he informed me that the Grecian vase item that Mr. Hearst had checked off for him to buy was being contested by
another buyer who wanted it too, who happened to be the buyer for Prince Aly Khan (who married Rita Hayworth as you recall).” McPeake was calling directly from the Parke-Bernet gallery. “He said the bid was getting completely out of hand, but he couldn’t shake the other bidder ... I told him to hold the phone ... I called Mr. Hearst and told him Ben McPeake was on the other line and wanted to know how high he should bid. I returned to McPeake’s line with the terse reply, ‘Dammit, I said I want that vase.”’
On call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, Dragon had little time to himself—and resigned after about a year of service. In his oral history, he remembered fondly one moment of relief which came when Hearst left San Simeon to spend a week in Los Angeles overseeing a restructuring of his newspapers there. With “his entourage carrying his food and supplies and everything else ... in a convoy of five or six cars,” Hearst drove down the winding road from the hilltop. “It looked like Patton was on the move, an army going down there. Anyhow, everybody, I can say, took a deep breath that Mr. Hearst was not on the hill. The phone wouldn’t ring. You lived by the phone.... Except about 12:00 it did ring—two bells. And it was Joe, the butler, phoning from the beach house, saying that Mr. Hearst forgot his eyeglasses. ‘You’ll have to drive them down, as fast as you can,’ he said ... So we hopped into changes of clothes and took off.” They drove all night to get the Chief’s glasses to him in time for his meetings the next day.33
In early 1947, the Chief developed a dangerously irregular heartbeat and may have had a mild heart attack as well. His doctors demanded that he cease working and leave San Simeon, which was hundreds of miles away from the specialized care required by an eighty-four-year-old man with a heart condition. Hearst agreed to move to the house Marion had purchased on Beverly Drive. She deeded it to him so that he could spend his final years in his own home.
On May 2, 1947, as Hearst and Marion were driven down the winding, five-mile roadway from San Simeon’s hilltop to the landing strip below for the flight to Los Angeles and the house on Beverly Drive, Marion noticed that tears were streaming down the Chief’s face. She leaned over to wipe them away. “We’ll come back, W. R., you’ll see.” They never did.34
On May 21 and 22, large shipments of beef were sent to Beverly Hills from San Simeon. It was clear that Hearst was not going to return to the ranch any time soon.35
In late August, an elevator was installed at Beverly Drive so that Hearst would not have to climb the stairs from the dining room to his second-floor office and bedroom. “I am glad your ticker is OK,” he wrote his old friend, Ed Coblentz, who was having heart trouble of his own. “Now mine is acting up something scandalous. But I guess I will come around all right—if I behave myself.”36
He tried to work in his new home, but was too weak to get much done. “Chief requests that you use your own judgement on editorials and articles about the editorial page. He is not able to take care of them,” Richard Stanley, his new secretary, informed his Los Angeles editor on October 5. Four days later, the Chief telegrammed Walt Disney in response to an invitation from Mickey Mouse to celebrate his twentieth birthday party, “I regret that I cannot accept your very kind invitation owing to a slight indisposition.”37
With the end of the war, and the break-up of the U.S.-Soviet alliance, the Hearst papers picked up where they had left off. In New York, Bill Hearst, Jr. and Richard Berlin, who had become president of the Hearst Corporation in 1943, had, in accordance with the Chief’s established policy, put together an impressive list of reporters, columnists, editorial writers, and commentators whose specialty was anti-Communist warnings, diatribes, and rumors. Howard Rushmore had come to the Journal-American in 1940; J. B. (Doc) Matthews became Bill Hearst, Jr.’s special assistant for subversive activity in 1944 and brought with him to the Hearst Corporation the files on Communists and Communist sympathizers he had assembled for the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1940; Westbrook Pegler joined the Hearst organization in 1945; George Sokolsky began his Hearst column in 1950. Other Hearst political columnists who specialized in left-wing witch-hunting included Walter Winchell, who had turned sharply anti-Communist after Roosevelt’s death, Fulton Lewis, Jr., and George Rothwell Brown.38
Though Hearst was not about to temper the crusade he himself had launched in 1934, he worried nonetheless that the reading public might be growing a bit weary of it. When his papers provided what he believed was overly extended coverage of the House Un-American Activities Committee visit to Hollywood in July of 1947, he warned his editors that there was “a little too much political stuff in our papers, and it is sometimes a little too partisan. Try to make political news readable for everybody, and please not only make it reasonably impartial, but take pains to make it clear and understandable.”39
His own attacks on corrupt politicians and corporate leaders had been vicious, but never, he thought, personal. The new generation of Hearst columnists had crossed that boundary. Westbrook Pegler was by far the most troublesome in this regard. His columns were considered so incendiary that they were sent to the Chief for final approval before publication. In April of 1947, Hearst asked that Pegler moderate a column on Charlie Chaplin that was “too violent.” He also tried to get him to cut back on the anti-Roosevelt columns that continued long after the president’s death in April of 1945.40
Marion recalled in her autobiography that when Pegler attacked Eleanor Roosevelt, W. R. “would wire the editor and say, ‘Would you kindly tell this gentleman not to write nasty things about a woman.’...They would think they had Pegler under control, and then, the next thing you’d know, there it was again.... Mr. Hearst got awfully tired of his attacks. I got tired, and I got mad, too.”41
As Hearst’s anti-Communist crusade entered into its second decade, the Chief pushed his editors to go a step further. The onset of the Cold War, as Richard Berlin wrote Karl von Wiegand, had proved to the American public that Hearst had been right all along about the dangers of Communism at home and abroad. “Indeed the Hearst newspaper can shout ‘hurrah.’ But then you know how the Boss is.... I cannot beat that fellow. He certainly is always thinking about the future and never wants to live in retrospections. Nevertheless, it must be a great satisfaction to him”—to know that the Cold War which he predicted had come to pass.42
On October 11, 1947, the Chief, looking ahead to what he believed was going to be the next war, sent his editors an editorial on “universal military service” which he wanted run on the front page:
Almost everybody knows the evils of Communism nowadays. Almost everybody knows the impudence and the insincerity of Russia. We no longer have to give so much space to Russia, to the danger of our free institutions from Communism, to the probable destructive attack upon our nation by Russia. The thing of importance now is the plan for the protection of our country, particularly the plan of universal military service. We must awaken the public and the government to the importance of this plan. Every American must be a soldier ready at a moment’s notice to defend his country and to defend it not merely from invasion but from annihilation. There will be no time to make soldiers when war comes.43
Two weeks later, his secretary cabled the editor of the Los Angeles Examiner: “Chief says, ‘Don’t you think it very singular that so many explosions of ships at docks and so many other various kinds of explosions have taken place of late at various parts of the country. Make a list of these explosions and let’s see if it is anything that would indicate sabotage.’” Only when the editor cabled back that there was no evidence of any such sabotage did Hearst let the matter drop.44
Karl von Wiegand was one of the few colleagues permitted to visit the Chief while he lived at Beverly Drive. On arriving in Los Angeles from Europe in mid-October, he contacted Hearst’s secretary to arrange an appointment. A few days later, he received a call from Marion, who put the Chief on the phone for a brief talk. After another two days, he received a second call from the Examiner office directing him to visit the Chief at six P.M. tha
t evening. He did as instructed, but was turned away at the door by Richard Stanley, who reported that “the Chief was not so well and that the doctor had given both him and Marion some sleeping medicine and that both were sleeping.” A few more days passed before von Wiegand received a second invitation to Beverly Drive.
“Marion, looking very lovely and happy that Mr. Hearst was better, took me upstairs,” Karl wrote Richard Berlin after his visit:
The Chief had just opened the door of his rooms and was calling “Marion, Marion.” “How are you, Karl,” greeted Mr. H. holding out his hand. I had expected to find him in bed. He was up and dressed but without a coat on as it was warm. He sat down and Marion drew a chair for me alongside his and then went into the next room. The Chief looked a little older than when last I saw him eighteen months ago but much better than I had expected. His one sign of being weak was his voice which often fell so low that I had difficulty in hearing what he said and I moved close up to him....He asked questions which revealed that he was giving much thought to foreign and domestic issues and that he was astonishingly vigorous mentally.... Everything he said was in short precise terse sentences as if he were conserving his strength.45