The Chief

by David Nasaw

  Six days after the letter was written, the old man celebrated his eighty-seventh birthday. Two days later, Hearst’s editors received a second letter from Van Ettisch, its object to “clarify” the Chief’s instructions: “The Chief says that he does not want articles on Communism stopped entirely, but not to go overboard on them. He doesn’t want to overdo it. After a conference with his father, W. R. Hearst, Jr. asked that I send you this letter and to say that no fundamental change in our news or editorial policy on Communism is intended or implied.”60

  The letter’s implication was clear: written second-hand and invoking the authority of his son, it was a signal that the old man had, voluntarily or not, ceded control of editorial policy. Though Hearst would remain in nominal control of his empire until the day he died, his reign had effectively come to an end.

  By late 1950, in his fourth year of illness, Hearst’s weight was down to 128 pounds. Although not bedridden, he found it more and more difficult, even with the assistance of an elevator and a wheelchair, to come downstairs to his office or to have dinner with Marion. He still saw friends and business associates, but the meetings never lasted very long. Louis B. Mayer visited once a week; his sons came frequently, as did Louella Parsons and his chief executives, Martin Huberth, William Murray, and Richard Berlin.61

  On New Year’s Eve, Marion hosted a small party at the Beverly Drive house, with Anita Loos, Louella, and Charlie Lederer. Before escorting the group upstairs to see Hearst in his bedroom, Marion warned her guests that W. R. could no longer speak, “so don’t ask h-h-how he is,” Anita Loos remembered her telling her guests. “Just m-m-make conversation as usual—you know, b-b-be idiotic.” “After a few pearls of thought we filed out, vastly shaken.”62 Hearst was dangerously thin, his hands shook badly, his voice so weak he could barely make himself understood.

  Four months later, Marion invited five of their closest women friends to celebrate W. R.’s eighty-eighth birthday. Not wanting to receive his guests in his bedroom but unable to get downstairs, Hearst greeted them in a small room on the second floor. A cake was wheeled in and the guests gave Hearst their presents, while Marion sat at his feet. When Marion presented her gift, an oil painting of Phoebe Hearst holding her only son, “his eyes began to fill with tears. Then sobs shook him and he covered his face, while Marion grabbed him behind the knees, pressing his legs to her body and saying, ‘It’s all right, W. R. It’s all right.’”

  Hearst was not the only invalid in the Beverly Drive house. According to Fred Guiles, Marion’s biographer, her drinking had become incapacitating. Three times a day, she would visit W. R. in his bedroom, “sometimes being given coffee to clear her stumbling tongue before going upstairs.” Desperate, W. R. asked Adela Rogers St. Johns to arrange for Alcoholics Anonymous counselors and doctors to come to the house. “I said, ‘Mr. Hearst, Marion has to take the first step herself.’”63

  The old man kept working, up to and beyond his eighty-eighth birthday. In April of 1951, he warned Bill, Jr. “not to let up on front-page publicity for General MacArthur” who had just been recalled from Korea by President Truman. To the general, he wrote a personal note, welcoming him back “to our country. My health has not been good so I have assigned my son, Mr. William Randolph Hearst, Jr., to try to make everything pleasant for you in the United States.”64 In July of 1951, he complained to Bill in New York that the comic strips Hopalong Cassidy and Bringing Up Father were being run vertically. He wanted them run horizontally. He was concerned that summer about the situation in Iran, where the government was threatening to nationalize oil production. Though he remained as resolutely anti-Soviet and anti-Communist as ever, he was opposed—as he had been all his life—to American military intervention. “The situation in Iran is inflammable enough. We do not want to get in it,” he telegrammed his son in mid-July 1951. “Let’s revive a sane American policy and keep out of foreign entanglements.”65

  Late in the summer, Warden Woolard, the editor of his Los Angeles newspaper, spoke with him for the last time. Hearst had asked him to write a story about the Pasadena Playhouse, which he did. Thirty-six hours later, Woolard got a call that the Chief was furious and wanted to see him at once. He found Hearst seated in his bedroom, in slippers and his plaid wool bathrobe, with Helena, the dachshund, Helen’s successor, at his side. He was shaking visibly and spoke very faintly.

  “Mr. Woolard, who owns the Examiner?”

  “Why, you do, Mr. Hearst.”

  “Well, if I own it, when I want something in it, why can’t I have it?”

  “I’ve tried to please you, Mr. Hearst.”

  “Didn’t I ask you for a story on Pasadena Playhouse?”

  “You did.”

  “Then why couldn’t I have it?”

  Woolard showed him the story that had been published in the newspaper exactly as he had ordered. The old man stared at it for a long time.

  “Mr. Woolard, forgive me. I’m sorry. You know I’m an old man, sick, and I don’t notice things as well as I used to.”66

  In August, the Chief’s top business executives and Bill, Jr. flew West for the final vigil. Millicent remained on Long Island, where she was spending the summer. According to family members, she had received a call from the Chief, asking her not to go to Europe that summer.67

  Bill, Jr., his brother David, and Richard Berlin moved into Beverly Drive and took over. They installed their own nurses, conferred with the doctors, made the guesthouse on the property into their headquarters. Marion didn’t help matters. For a quarter century, civility had reigned between her and the boys. But now, at the final moment of the old man’s life, everything fell to pieces. The boys, according to Bill Hearst, Jr., were furious at her drunkenness and at what they believed to be her meddling in affairs which didn’t concern her—like the newspapers. Marion claimed that she had done nothing more than convey the Chief’s wishes to his editors.

  There was truth to both sides of the argument. Marion was not “running” the newspapers, but she had been taking advantage of the situation to insert items of interest and importance to her. What rankled the boys was that the old man was not only letting her do this, but had come to trust her judgment as much or more than he did theirs.

  On August 13, at 2 P.M., the Chief dictated his last letter of the day to his secretary. The Beverly Hills house was now overflowing with doctors, nurses, Hearst executives, children, friends, and family. Marion, frantic that the noise and visitors were making it difficult for W. R. to get the sleep he needed, tried to retain some semblance of order: “There were blazing lights in the hall, and everybody was talking at the top of their lungs. He had no chance to rest. I was furious; I went out and asked them to go downstairs.” Another argument broke out. Distraught and out of control, Marion had to be sedated. While Marion slept, Hearst died—at 9:50 in the morning on August 14, 1951.

  Dick Berlin and Bill, Jr. had decided earlier that the funeral would be held in San Francisco. Pierce Brothers Undertakers in Beverly Hills arrived to take the body to the Burbank airport and then to San Francisco. It was accompanied on its last flight north by Bill, Jr. and David, who had been joined by George and Randolph.

  When Marion awoke, the house was empty. “I asked where he was and the nurse said he was dead. His body was gone, whoosh, like that. Old W. R. was gone, the boys were gone. I was alone. Do you realize what they did? They stole a possession of mine. He belonged to me. I loved him for thirty-two years and now he was gone. I couldn’t even say goodbye.” Bill, Jr. claimed that there had been no attempt at duplicity, that Marion knew all along about their plans.68

  That same day, company lawyers filed Hearst’s last will and testament. The only mention of Marion was a codicil giving her the Beverly Hills home. Marion said nothing until after the funeral. Then, through Hedda Hopper rather than Louella, who remained too much the corporation loyalist, Marion released news of the secret trust agreement that Hearst had signed in November of 1950, giving her control of the Hearst empire. The boy
s and company officials were incredulous until they examined the text of the agreement. “In death,” as Bill, Jr. put it with considerable understatement, “the old man had left us a dilemma: his concern for Marion, balanced by his responsibility to the company.”69

  There was no way in the world that Millicent, Hearst’s five sons, and his corporate executives were going to let Marion become their new “chief.” They were prepared to do everything necessary to overturn Marion’s trust agreement, including contesting the Chief’s “competency” when he signed it. Their most important weapon was California’s community property law, which provided that half of everything earned by a husband belonged to his wife. Because the beginnings of the Hearst fortune predated his marriage, it would have been difficult to invoke the community property law, had the Chief himself not thanked Marion in a codicil to his will for loaning him $1 million in 1937 when he was without resources. If Hearst had, in fact, been without resources in 1937, as he had attested in this codicil, then everything in his estate, as of August of 1951, had been earned since then and, under the laws of California, 50 percent belonged to Millicent.

  Marion could have stood her ground and might, in the end, have won her case. But in doing so, she risked everything. If the courts accepted the Hearst lawyers’ argument about community property, everything that Marion had received from Hearst since 1937 would be placed in jeopardy. And to what end? Neither family nor corporation disputed her claim to the 30,000 shares of preferred stock Hearst had given her or the $150,000 of annual income it generated. The only area of dispute was the voting rights for the corporate stock, which, in themselves, were worth nothing.

  Marion chose not to fight. On October 30, she signed an agreement prepared by her lawyers and lawyers representing the family and the corporation. For a token payment of $1, she relinquished her rights “as voting trustee for the stock of the Hearst Corporation.” The payment of the dollar was testimony to the fact that she may have had legitimate rights to relinquish. The joint statement announcing the settlement offered no opinion as to the legality of her claim. It said only that the questions required clarification “by long court proceedings which all parties deemed unnecessary and undesirable.”

  Marion publicly professed her “every faith in the intentions and abilities of Mr. Hearst’s sons and the other directors and executives of the Hearst enterprises to ensure the continuity of Mr. Hearst’s editorial policies, the furtherance of which would have been Miss Davies’ only purpose in serving as a trustee.” The statement also announced that Marion had agreed to serve “as official consultant and adviser to the Hearst Corporation,” her services to “include advice on motion picture and other amusement activities.”70

  The next day, October 31, 1951, Marion Davies married—for the first time. Though she gave her age as forty-five on the wedding license, she was fifty-four years of age. The marriage, according to the New York Times, had caught even the immediate household of Miss Davies by surprise.

  Her husband was Horace Gates Brown III, a forty-six-year-old captain in the Merchant Marine. Marion had met Brown the year before when he was courting her sister Rose. When Rose turned him down, Marion, to console him, invited him to dinner at Beverly Drive. He became a frequent visitor there, played cribbage with Hearst, and spent time with Marion. “Horace,” according to Marion’s biographer, “was a big man with the same long sloping nose that Hearst had, the same narrow-set blue eyes. His resemblance to Hearst was sufficient to make visitors to the Beverly house look twice following Hearst’s death.”

  The wedding took place at the El Rancho Vegas Hotel. Marion and Brown arrived by plane at 2:50 in the morning and got their license at Las Vegas’s twenty-four-hour marriage bureau. They were married in the hotel’s chapel, celebrated with a wedding breakfast of champagne, turkey sandwiches, coffeecake, and beer, then flew to Palm Springs for their honeymoon. Miss Davies told reporters that her husband was “Mr. Hearst’s cousin,” though according to the New York Times, this was news to both her family and Brown’s. “The ceremony was performed by Justice of the Peace James Down, who had to slow down the excited Miss Davies at one point. She got ahead of the Justice at the ‘love, honor and obey’ stage.”71

  The funeral for William Randolph Hearst had been held in San Francisco on August 16, 1951, presided over by Hearst’s sons, who had accompanied his body from Beverly Hills, and their mother, who had flown in from New York, with her son John. Davies remained in Beverly Hills. “I thought I might go to church,” she told a Time magazine reporter, “but I’ll just stay here. He knew how I felt about him, and I know how he felt about me. There’s no need for dramatics.”72

  Hearst’s sons and his executives made sure he was afforded the respects due a chief of state or Hollywood celebrity. His body lay in state for a day and a half at the Grace Episcopal Cathedral on Nob Hill. The funeral was ornate, overproduced, and spectacular, as it should have been. Some 1,500 people attended with many more gathered on the street outside. Among the honorary pallbearers were figures from politics, business, and journalism: former President Hoover, former Vice President John Nance Garner, Governor Earl Warren of California, Mayor Elmer Robinson of San Francisco, Mrs. Ogden Reid and Arthur Hays Sulzberger from New York, Colonel Robert McCormick from Chicago, and Roy Howard of the Scripps-Howard chain. Others in attendance included Louis B. Mayer, A. P. Giannini of the Bank of America, and Robert G. Sproul, president of the University of California. The service closed with a reading from Hearst’s poem “Song of the River,” composed ten years before at Wyntoon.73

  The snow melts on the mountain

  And the water runs down to the spring,

  And the spring in a turbulent fountain,

  With a song of youth to sing,

  Runs down to the riotous river,

  And the river flows to the sea,

  And the water again

  Goes back in rain

  To the hills where it used to be.

  And I wonder if life’s deep mystery

  Isn’t much like the rain and the snow

  Returning through all eternity

  To the place it used to know.74

  The Chief might have deserved a better sendoff, but these verses were fitting nonetheless. He was entombed with his parents at Cypress Lawn Cemetery outside San Francisco—the city where he was born and published his first newspaper, the place he used to know.

  Epilogue

  THE CHIEF, recognizing that San Simeon was too expensive for any individual to maintain, had hoped that the University of California would accept the castle, guesthouses, pools, and gardens as a gift. When the university’s regents declined the properties, the Hearst Corporation deeded them to the State of California, which placed them under the direction of the California Parks System. The Hearst Corporation retained control of the surrounding land, which it continues to operate as a cattle ranch. The Hearst San Simeon State Historical Monument was opened to the public in 1958.

  Wyntoon remains the property of the Hearst Corporation. St. Donat’s was requisitioned by the British government as a military training facility in 1938 and is today the campus of Atlantic College.1

  Millicent Hearst was seventy years old when her husband died in 1951. As she grew older, she traveled less, but continued to devote time to her charities and to her family, which had grown to include fifteen grandchildren, thirteen great-grandchildren, and two great-great-grandchildren. She died on December 4,1974, at her home on East 66th Street in New York City. She was ninety-three years of age and had outlived two of her sons, John, who died in 1958, and George, who died in 1972.

  Eight months after her marriage to Horace Brown, Marion Davies filed for a divorce. Horace was devoted to her, but he didn’t get along with her friends or family, was ill-tempered, and, she feared, a bit too eccentric. When he ripped out all thirteen phone lines in their home because he thought Marion was spending too much time on the phone, she decided to leave him. Days later she changed her mind and agreed to a
reconciliation. Though their marriage would never be a particularly stable one, Marion would remain with Horace for the rest of her life.

  In the years following the Chief’s death, Marion expanded her already considerable real estate holdings in New York and Los Angeles. In 1954, she erected a twenty-two-story office building in New York City, on Park Avenue at 57th Street. In 1955, she put up a second building, at Madison and 55th, and bought the Desert Inn in Palm Springs, which she sold in 1960 for a considerable profit.

  Marion did not entertain or go out much after Hearst died. Too many of her old friends from Hollywood were dead or dying. She was quite distressed when, in June of 1956, her former Santa Monica beach house—the scene of so many glorious parties—was torn down to make way for a motel. In October of 1957, Louis B. Mayer died of leukemia; in December, Norma Talmadge died after suffering a stroke; six months later, Harry Crocker died after a long illness. “There aren’t many of us left,” Marion confided to Mary Pickford at Crocker’s funeral.

  She stayed in touch with her nephew Charlie Lederer, and her sister Rose, with Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper, and with a few old friends like Billy Haines, Frances Goldwyn, and Mary Pickford. Hollywood celebrities, among them Frank Sinatra and Clark Gable, occasionally stopped by to pay their respects. Part of the void in her social life was filled by Joseph Kennedy, who made sure that Marion and Horace were invited to the weddings of Eunice Kennedy to Sargent Shriver, John Kennedy to Jacqueline Bouvier, and Pat Kennedy to Peter Lawford.