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The working life of William Randolph Hearst began after he
was expelled from Harvard College in 1885 for academic non-performance.
His active career spanned an incredible eight decades, not
coming to an end until his death in 1951 at the age of 88.
He never retired, working habitually for sixty-six years,
seven days a week, until in 1950-1951 his growing ill health
gradually forced him to scale down. Hearst was still dictating
business correspondence the day before he died. And even on
his numerous trips to Europe and voyages on his yacht Oneida,
he stayed in constant touch with his editors and worked while
the many guests who always came along for these trips amused
themselves at his expense.
Hearst was born into advantageous circumstances, the only
son of a former gold prospector who had risen to become owner
of the San Francisco Examiner and, later, U.S. Senator
for California. His childhood was a pampered and privileged
one, doted on by his mother Phoebe. Hearst grew to be a big
man, like his father before him, and he was good-looking and
personable to boot. Indeed, he was fortunate by birth; and,
except for using his time at Harvard as an extended social
outing, Hearst exercised all of his natural advantages in
birth and upbringing to blaze a trail across American journalism,
and society in general, like no one before or since. He was
an authentic American giant in every way.
It is impossible to describe his era concisely, inasmuch as
this encompassed multiple eras in American life; the Gilded
Age, the Progressive Era, World War I, the Roaring Twenties,
the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. He seized
his paints and brushes and painted across a vast tableau of
American civilization; equally with all the other great figures
of these times, the Roosevelts, Wilson, Pulitzer, Rockefeller,
J.P. Morgan, and others of this historical stature, Hearst
used all his power and privilege to imprint his own personality
and beliefs on the passing times. No one else was on the ramparts
for so long a period of time; no one had more readers, listeners,
admirers, and, indeed, critics and enemies; no other American
of the time ever lived so extravagantly; and no one else had
ever displayed such a wide range of interests as the Chief,
who pursued art, architecture, real estate, political office,
journalism, and filmmaking all virtually simultaneously. And,
of course, no other great figure of the time publicly kept
a mistress for thirty-eight years.
This is the story of one of America’s great romances,
the affair between W.R. Hearst and film actress Marion Davies,
a love that circumstance denied fruition into marriage, but
that nonetheless stood the tests of time, flourishing in the
midst of Hearst’s many challenges and sustaining both
Marion and WR until his death.
A Prospector’s Love
One hot evening in 1916, a weary gold prospector, the middle-aged
bachelor Clark Alvard, made the forty-mile trek from his mining
shack in the Nevada desert to see a film in Las Vegas. The
film being exhibited was, in fact, the first ever starring
young Marion Davies, The Romany Runaway. At Alvard’s
death in January 1938, the Ohio Chronicle-Telegram
recounted that Mr. Alvard had immediately fallen in love with
Marion and continued in his adoration and love until the day
he died. Mr. Alvard wrote her of his feelings after seeing
that first movie and continued to write to her, and to see
every one of her films, for the next twenty-two years; in
the early years, he received no replies at all but, once the
studios had adopted larger public relations programs, Alvard
did receive the standardized form of mimeographed reply to
his letters, these replies always reminding Marion’s
fans that, if they included twenty-five cents in a request
for a photo, the same would be duly sent. Alvard often did
request such photos.
The old prospector, never wavering in this unusual devotion,
made out his will in favor of Marion, who was allocated 55%
of the assets of his estate, this share amounting to some
$10,000, a rather large sum in the money of that time, especially
when in 1938 much of the nation was suffering extreme financial
distress at the height of the Great Depression. The will also
named Marion as one of the executors. She later issued a public
statement noting the long history of kind letters from Mr.
Alvard and stating her intention to make a gift to charity
in his name.
The Chronicle-Herald noted, in a whining tone, that
the $10,000 matched the weekly amount she was then being paid
by Warner Brothers for “doing nothing" while executives
at that studio were pondering her future in films. This kind
of back-handed swipe at Marion, and indeed at her long-time
lover William Randolph Hearst, had become commonplace by 1938
in the wake of Hearst’s national struggle with Franklin
Delano Roosevelt over the direction of America in its relations
with Europe and Asia. This struggle that had been carried
on with typical Hearstian iron-fistedness, on the one side,
and Rooseveltian cunning, on the other. This time Hearst came
off second though in his sixty-year career in newspapers and
magazines there were numerous triumphal moments. As for Marion,
by 1938, and despite the difficulties posed by the Depression
to her and Hearst’s finances, she was on her way to
becoming a very wealthy woman, thanks almost exclusively to
her long and storied affair with “The Chief."
She had made forty-five films and was by far the richest actress
of the times. She could well afford to gift over to charity
the money left to her by the undyingly devoted Clark Alvard.
The instant passion and life-long love conceived by Mr. Alvard
for Marion parallels the passion and life-long devotion that
Hearst himself first conceived for Marion when he saw her
perform in 1913 on Broadway in Stop! Look! Listen!,
a musical in which Marion appeared as a chorus girl. The great
newspaper man himself was the direct descendant of a very
successful gold miner; perhaps the native characteristics
of the miner type found their complement in a woman like Marion:
a miner is the ultimate optimist, rugged, independent, hard-working,
fired with ambition and singularly obsessed with wealth. That,
perhaps, was Mr. Alvard; it certainly was Mr. Hearst. Marion
must have been the kind of feminine symbol that men of this
type sacrificed their lives for.
Boy Meets Girl
By the time she first met Hearst, Marion Douras, barely sixteen
years old, was already a Broadway regular. The daughter of
a Brooklyn attorney, and later city magistrate, she had dropped
out of school altogether at age thirteen, being as she describes
in her memoir, nothing more than a constant dunce. Her mother,
broken-hearted with Marion’s academic failure, nevertheless
acceded to Marion’s wish to study dance. Soon, she would
follow her two older sisters onto Broadway. At the peak of
her stage career, she was a chorus girl in the Ziegfield Follies,
trouping from city to city, although it would not be very
long before Hearst signed her to a movie contract, putting
an end to the live performances and constant travel.
When Hearst first saw Marion dance in the chorus of Stop!
Look! Listen!, he was fifty-eight though his constitution,
outlook, and interests were those of a much younger man. His
journalism empire was at its peak of influence. He had fathered
five children with the former Millicent Nisbet, also a one-time
chorus girl, the most recent being twin sons that same year.
In the New York of that era, as in Stanford White’s
New York of decades earlier, the Broadway demimonde
offered wealthy men a venue simultaneously to act out their
fantasies and also maintain social and professional ties.
In the contemporary Western world, environments of this kind
have withered away, but in present day East Asian countries
like Korea and Japan, it is still customary for groups of
businessmen to visit so-called entertainment districts at
night for the dual purpose of conducting business and besotting
themselves with drink and women. Broadway once served this
purpose, a temporary byway leading away from the essential
puritanism of American culture.
Trustbusters, muckrakers, temperance ladies and gossip columnists
mixed it up with business leaders like Stanford White and
Hearst for decades and, at the end of the battle, a return
to puritanical practices for the men of American business
prevailed. While American society could tolerate, even occasionally
embrace, gossip sheets full of stories about celebrities from
show business, sports and related callings, such exposure
was a death sentence for corporate executives, government
officials and others who affected more serious careers. Today,
it would be one thing for a bachelor film star in Hollywood
to dabble with hookers, an entirely different matter for the
CEO of IBM or the Governor of New Jersey to similarly conduct
himself.
As a regular New York bon vivant of those looser
times, WR attended every play that came to Broadway and participated
fully in café society, the exciting nocturnal milieu
of theater types, artists, Social Register bloods, and journalists.
Like Stannie White before him, Hearst served time as a johnny
at stage entrances, did the rounds of post-theater dinners
and parties, and maintained his own hideaway apartments near
the theater district where he hosted late-night soirees.
His first approaches to Davies were indirect, gifts sent backstage
after her performances or given to her at the odd times when
they crossed paths at a theater-crowd party or event. Early
on, he gave her a $5,000 diamond-encrusted watch; she promptly
lost it or had it stolen away, but Hearst replaced it with
another, though slightly less extravagant, watch. He began
to call periodically at the Douras household and ask if he
could come to dinner; they would discuss Marion’s career,
have dinner, and play parlor games. He would come around,
usually on a weekly basis, always bringing an associate with
him. After Hearst signed Marion to a $500 per week movie contract,
he confessed to Marion’s father that he loved her. Neither
parent objected, their view being that, once Marion had gone
on stage to work for a living, she had earned her freedom
on questions like this. Hearst, according to Marion, assured
the family that he would seek a divorce from Millicent.
Having established himself with the Douras clan and captured
Marion financially, Hearst had a clear path and seized his
heart’s desire for good. Later years were to present
many challenges to Hearst’s complete possession of Marion,
and he would, as in these early stages, demonstrate the strategic
cunning appropriate to a lion of the media jungle.
An early example of Hearst’s long-term “trapping"
strategy vis-à-vis Marion occurred in the
first few years of their relationship. She had been invited
to come to a society party in New York honoring the Prince
of Wales and was excited about meeting the Prince. Hearst
picked her up after the matinee performance of her show and
drove up to Cartier’s, where he bought some expensive
jewelry. Getting back into the car, he offered Marion the
two beautiful pieces he had just purchased on condition that
she not go to the Prince’s party. Marion, a genuine
gold-digger at this stage of her life, took the bracelet and
ring, conceiving at the same time what she liked to characterize
as a “double double," that is, she decided to
go to the party as well. Later that night, as she was preparing
to leave Brooklyn for the party in Manhattan, she realized
that Hearst’s detectives were outside the Douras house.
She could not attend the party.
As ever in the older man/younger woman scenario, the age gap
between Hearst and Marion Davies is an interesting question.
The entire nation had been scandalized when it came out in
the press during the murder trial of Harry Thaw that Evelyn
Nesbit, who even five years later at the trial appeared in
schoolgirl attire, was actually but sixteen or seventeen when
she first had sexual relations with the almost fifty-year-old
Stanford White. Given the possibility that they themselves
could be touched by scandal, Marion and WR always publicly
maintained that she was eighteen when they met. This at least
legalized the situation without, however, entirely eliminating
the titillation that arose due to their age difference. In
fact, however, as Marion admitted in her own memoir, The
Times We Had, she was sixteen at the time, Hearst fifty-eight.
Not very long after young Marion and WR had become an item,
his newspapers began to run stories about Marion and her stage
exploits though at the time she was still a virtually unknown
showgirl. The Hearst campaign on Marion’s behalf appeared
primarily in the Sunday drama sections of his newspapers.
Hearst and his rival Joseph Pulitzer were pioneers in the
world of Sunday supplements. The elephantine Sunday papers
we buy today descend from these journalistic competitors’
creativity in the early twentieth century. Hearst, whose tastes
dominated his newspapers’ content, had made it a rule
early on not to engage in “traditional" drama
criticism, specifically issuing instructions to his editors
in 1915 not to engage in “old style dramatic criticism"
but rather to provide “kindly" and “considerate"
criticism of performances, eschewing the “perverse view
of a blasé dramatic critic."
Were Hearst’s opinions of proper drama reportage based
on his extensive, often intimate, connections with theater
people, actresses in particular, or on his reasoned sense
of good journalism? By throwing himself so fully into café
society, Hearst had essentially become a player in the theater
world; there could be no question of his being objective or
even-handed on matters affecting the stage and, later, the
screen. If Hearst’s custom had been to avoid public
confrontation and controversy, his stance on the proper role
of dramatic criticism in his newspapers might have been understandable,
even apart from his natural bias as an habitué
of Broadway nightlife. Hearst, however, was a ferocious partisan
in every other area of reporting, so the argument from personality
fails. WR’s reluctance to permit objective dramatic
criticism in his Sunday supplements, which would in truth
have done a journalistic service for his readers, flowed almost
automatically from his close involvement with theater personalities.
This same flaw, a too close mixing of the publisher’s
personal whims and preferences with journalistic practice, is what eventually
left the Hearst newspaper chain at something of a disadvantage. Whereas the
major surviving newspapers of the early twentieth century, such as the paradigmatic
New York Times, adopted increasingly “objective" news
formats, combined with separate, back-page editorial content, Hearst continued to mix up reporting
and opinion, according to the Chief’s tastes. Where Hearst’s
legacy is strongest, in the long list of surviving and successful magazines, journalistic principles
are less of a problem in serving up slanted material. A reader of Cosmopolitan
does not necessarily expect or want objective essays on feminism
or fashion. Magazines are all about bias, slant, and prejudice
while the modern newspaper pursues, at least on the surface,
a different agenda, professing to gather and report facts.
Though many claim the so-called liberal media of modern times
do not practice objectivity, no one disputes that newspapers
strive for at least the appearance of objectivity. Hearst
never bothered to set his newspapers up for objective reporting.
From the time his father first acquired The San Francisco
Examiner, blatantly used to support Hearst senior’s
run for Governor of California, right up to WR’s death,
the Hearst papers always had on prominent display the prejudices
and predilections of the Hearsts.
By moving from showgirl to showgirl/mistress, Marion’s
financial status materially improved. When she arrived for
a 1916 audition for the new Jerome Kern musical Oh, Boy,
she arrived by limousine, dripping diamonds and mink. Auditioning
would have been a formality in any event since no prudent
Broadway producer would reject Marion, knowing that the power
of the Hearst press would be for the show with Marion performing
in it and just as likely against the show were she to be turned
down for the part.
The New World of Hollywood
Even before his affair with Marion began, WR had involved
himself in the world of film production. In 1913, a partnership
between Hearst and a Chicago film producer was established
to create “Hearst-Selig" newsreels to be shown
in American movie houses, competing against American editions
of the popular French Pathé newsreels. The pioneering
film company Pathé itself became partners with Hearst
in a number of ventures, including a deal whereby WR’s
Sunday supplements ran novelizations of the plots of forthcoming
Pathé feature films. The most significant product of
this cooperation with the French firm was co-production of
the popular serial movie, The Perils of Pauline.
This well-liked series, which also made a star of the lead
actress Pearl White, enjoyed all the free publicity and promotion
the Hearst papers could provide, including, of course, “reviews"
by Hearst’s movie “critics."
To capitalize on his extensive and popular Sunday supplement
comic strips, Hearst also organized a subsidiary animation
studio in Manhattan to produce cartoons featuring such Hearst
comic strip characters as the “Katzenjammer Kids"
and “Maggie and Jiggs." With the successful newsreel
and animated cartoon businesses already in place, and having
tested the waters in co-production deals, Hearst was, by 1916,
primed to enter into the full-scale production of feature
films. WR lacked the accountant’s touch: he rarely,
if ever, performed profit-and-loss analysis before undertaking
new projects. Throughout his career, right up until virtual
bankruptcy late in the Great Depression, those he hired to
watch over his money often complained that the company was
over-extended and nearly insolvent. The film studios Hearst
was to construct and operate were especially frightening to
Hearst’s financial overseers – they involved huge
expenditures to maintain and generated uneven, unpredictable
revenue flows. In hindsight, it cannot be said that the Hearst
film studios were a success. They never actually covered their
costs, and no trace survives in the modern Hearst Foundation,
the closest contemporary interest being the Foundation’s
significant ownership interests in several television ventures.
Marion herself first entered the world of silent movies via
her brother-in-law George Lederer, who hired her to star in
his production of The Runaway Romany in 1916. As
stated earlier, Hearst, on seeing Marion’s performance,
signed her to a $500 per week acting contract. By doing so,
he secured himself the potential leading lady that every studio
needed to have; and, on the personal side, Marion Davies would
be working and living conveniently in New York rather than
touring the country in stage performances. His personal interest
in Marion required that she be accessible. For Marion, the
$500 was an order of magnitude better than the $50 weekly
that she earned on stage. The one thing that held her back
on Broadway, her stuttering habit, which WR himself found
charming, would not be an issue in making silent movies.
Hearst’s newsreel outfit, International Film Company,
released his first feature films in 1916. By 1917, controversy
enveloped the new company as the government sought to shut
down Hearst’s “war preparedness" picture
Patria. The issue was the film’s blatant anti-Mexican
and anti-Japanese message. Hearst’s personal view, which,
as always, found expression in his papers, magazines, and
films, was that it was Mexico and Japan that Americans should
fear rather than Germany. However, as war with Germany was
now declared, which also made Japan, as an enemy of Germany
at that time, an ally of America, U.S. government representatives
were demanding either withdrawal or substantial editing of
Patria. Hearst complied with the wartime government’s
wishes, having no desire to compound the public relations
problem he was already having to deal with opinions inflamed
by some pro-German reporting Hearst sponsored during the run-up
to World War I.
In 1918, Marion’s Cecilia of the Pink Roses
was released under the label of the Marion Davies Film Company
though financed by Hearst. For business, tax, and romantic
reasons, Hearst had established separate companies under the
technical control of Marion. By this time, WR and MD had become
committed lovers. As he would for the rest of his life, Hearst
maintained the fiction of his marriage to Millicent, but even
on Hearst family vacations, like the annual trips to Palm
Beach, Marion would be stationed nearby, kept busy, and amused
either by Hearst himself or by one of his minions.
After screening Marion’s Cecilia, Lewis Selznick
agreed to a multi-picture distribution deal under which his
company agreed to handle the next five Davies films. Even
more than Selznick’s appreciation for MD’s talent,
the inevitably strong Hearst media backing for her films persuaded
Selznick of the future profitability of his contract with
Hearst. By summer of 1918, Hearst’s relationship with
Marion was known to the major players in Hollywood. Even the
main New York gossip sheet of the time, Town Topics,
had begun to run articles with oblique references to the WR-MD
affair, prompting Hearst to instruct his publishing executives
to begin buying advertising space in Topics, a strategy
that effectively eliminated any further embarrassing revelations
in that journal. It is worth recalling in this connection
that Topics had also been one of Stannie White’s
banes, so much so that, after public revelations concerning
his famous “girl in the cake" party, White allegedly
took to making regular payments to the Topics’s
publisher, a Colonel Mann. Mann was later indicted in New
York City for perjury in connection with his testimony in
an extortion charge laid against one of his associates by
the Manhattan District Attorney. Colonel Mann ran a sophisticated,
widely read gossip sheet that fronted for a vile blackmail
ring – his agents searched out lapses among the elite,
presenting the offender with the options of public disclosure
or private compensation to Mann, either by way of advertising
or by buying some worthless stock. Mann ultimately beat the
perjury charge and kept publishing Topics though
it is said that afterwards the blackmail operation was much
compromised by the notoriety of the trials, which, not ironically,
fed the regular newspapers in New York with huge amounts of
titillating fodder.
Before Hearst could engage in hugely expensive film studio
production, he needed capital. While his mother Phoebe lived,
he had sufficient capital for the newspapers and magazines
but not for the movie business. However, in April 1919, Phoebe
Hearst fell victim to the post-WWI influenza pandemic; she
died and left WR an estate worth around $10 million, $115
million in today’s money. Now having what he needed
to pursue his and Marion’s careers in the movies, Hearst
formed Cosmopolitan Productions, named for his flagship magazine.
He also entered into a distribution agreement with the prominent
film industry figure Adolph Zukor and hired, among others,
Frances Marion, the leading scriptwriter of the time.
Both his chief financial advisor, Joseph Moore, and Zukor
himself, tried to persuade Hearst that running a major film
studio would be a colossal expense and that Hearst would be
better off partnering with an existing studio, like Paramount,
to develop scripts into films. Hearst, exhibiting his customary
air of over-confidence and hubris, refused to consider anything
less than full-scale, wholly-owned studio production. He also
declined to observe the Hollywood custom of sharing profits
with directors and other talent; consequently, he had to agree
to much higher than normal fees for artists’ services.
As was the case when Hearst had immersed himself unsuccessfully
in campaigns for political office, he went ahead in movies
full-steam, oblivious to cost, because he was obsessed with
the film business and with Marion, his lover and protégé.
WR aimed to produce lavish, high-end films. He collected the
best directors, actors, and actresses he could find, usually
over-paying for their services. He hired the world’s
most famous designer, Joseph Urban, who had been artistic
director of the Boston Opera Company, the Metropolitan Opera,
and the Ziegfield Follies, to become Cosmopolitan Pictures’
artistic director. As a genuine “amateur" in films,
using that term in its original sense of “lover,"
Hearst intended to create film art not just movies. This creative,
amateur impulse led Hearst, in the same year of 1919, to begin
planning what eventually became the most famous private residence
in America: San Simeon. For the next fifteen years, 1920 to
1935, Hearst would spend his family’s fortune wildly,
making movies and building San Simeon, supporting both his
wife Millicent’s hugely expensive life as high society
matron and WR’s own phenomenally costly life as Hollywood
royalty and voracious art collector. Much of the expense revolved
around Marion: keeping up the Hollywood whirl played to Marion’s
interests and desires, while lavishing money on Millicent’s
social climbing tempered her disappointment in Hearst’s
abandoning her bed for Marion’s. Had WR been able to
stick with wife and family and concentrate on what he did
so well, i.e., creating and managing newspapers and magazines,
there is no telling how much wealth he might have accumulated.
But the piling up of wealth per se was not Hearst’s
style: no miser he, money was for spending, and on the grandest
scale possible.
Let Us At Least Be Discreet
On virtually every occasion when Marion stayed near the official
Hearst family, her mother and sisters would accompany her.
What were the purposes of this arrangement: to occupy Marion’s
time, to support the Davies clan, to provide cover against
prying eyes? Probably all three factors played a part in the
chaperone system that Hearst and Marion developed over time.
When the Hearsts were at the ranch in San Simeon in the years
before Marion moved in permanently, Hearst would rent an estate
well outside Los Angeles and install Marion there rather than
in Los Angeles proper where the attentions that young Hollywood
swains paid to Marion caused WR pain.
Typical traveling arrangements for Hearst-plus were in evidence
during the family’s 1922 holiday in Britain. The main
party, sailing on the Aquitania, was comprised of
the usual entourage of Hearst family, friends, and business
associates, all of whom were put up in the Savoy hotel on
arrival in London. Marion herself set sail shortly after the
Aquitania departed and was lodged in a suite of rooms
some considerable distance from the Savoy.
To keep Marion amused, and out of trouble as much as possible,
Hearst detailed J.Y. McPeake, Hearst’s Good Housekeeping
publisher in England, to escort and serve her. What distinguished
this particular trip from many other similar Hearst-plus voyages
were the events that transpired when Marion returned home.
Her sister Reine made Marion the guest of honor at a welcome
home party in Freeport, Long Island; a guest at the party
was shot in the mouth by his jealous wife allegedly due to
attentions he was paying to Ms. Davies at the party. The incident
was closer to a drunken interspousal brawl than to a wronged-woman’s
revenge, as the man and woman involved more soberly admitted
in the days following the incident, but the non-Hearst papers
played the story prominently for a few days, especially after
Marion, evidently on the advice of counsel supplied by Hearst,
denied being at the party. Hearst must have been scared stiff
that continued delving into the party and into Marion’s
life would lead to public revelation of their private arrangements.
If anyone knew where investigative journalism could lead,
it was Hearst himself. Curious reporters might have learned
the whole affair had been a coming home party for Marion,
which in turn could easily have led to establishing her being
in London at the same time and nearly the exact place as the
Hearsts, the disclosure of which would have outraged Millicent
and their sons, who were on the trip as well.
Strangely, Marion never wavered from her “absent from
the scene" defense; even in her autobiography, The
Times We Had, she blithely asserts that she was at home
with other relatives engaged in some harmless domestic pursuits.
At the height of the Freeport affair, after unsuccessfully
demanding a retraction from the offending newspapers that
carried the story of her involvement in the brawl, she brought
actions for libel action against the papers. Her bluff was
called, however, and on the day she was scheduled to testify
in court she failed to appear, causing the trial judge to
dismiss her case. Marion later attributed her failure to testify
to her stammer, claiming that jurors always disbelieve a stammering
person. In all, however, it seems clear she failed to testify
out of fear of a perjury problem that would have arisen had
she sworn to being absent from the scene. Of course, her autobiographical
repetition of the original fib did not subject her to any
such penalty, especially since she did not allow publication
of the memoir until after her death. Unfortunately for one
who wishes to give an accurate historical account of the events
of the Hearst-Davies affair, such misstatements of fact cast
an unfortunate pall of mendacity over the rest of her book.
A tension in the early days of their affair was Hearst’s
preoccupation with maintaining discretion, keeping the affair
out of the limelight, a preoccupation that conflicted with
his eagerness to keep Marion sufficiently amused and entertained
that her more youthful and available admirers would not too
much succeed in their seductive intentions. Hearst devised
various solutions including, as mentioned, parking Marion
close by in more or less isolated rental mansions. Another
solution was a life filled with private parties. In one case
in 1921, Hearst took Marion, her family escorts, and a good-sized
contingent drawn from the Cosmopolitan staff on a
long cruise aboard his yacht Oneida. They cruised
from New York to New Orleans, Texas, and Mexico, all the while
elaborately catered to by Hearst.
Despite precautions, Millicent was becoming aware of the romance
between her husband and Marion Davies. Late in 1921, when
she was in New York and Hearst at San Simeon, she initiated
a contretemps concerning the advertising being run
in the Hearst papers for Davies’ upcoming movie Enchantment.
Millicent took it upon herself to complain directly to Joseph
Moore, Hearst’s manager in New York, to the effect that,
first, the advertising was too extensive for a film that had
not even opened at that point, and, second, there was too
much emphasis on the star of the film rather than the film
itself. No doubt Millicent’s unusual interference in
business resulted from her growing jealousy and anger. At
this early point, despite having knowledge of WR’s infidelity,
she could still hope that Marion was a passing fancy. By this
time in their marriage, other such passing fancies might very
well have already come and gone. The historical record is
ambiguous on this point but substantial rumors, for example,
surrounded Hearst’s relationship with the troubled actress
Alma Rubens. Even after Rubens had become too difficult to
work with due to heroin use, Hearst kept her on payroll, fueling
rumors of an affair between the two. In any event, by 1922
Millicent was fully aware of the Davies affair and had already
begun what was to become her largely separate life with the
boys and her pursuit of some very large social ambitions.
Naturally, as aggrieved wife, she expected compensation. Almost
like Hearst himself, she took to spending money on their homes,
travel and charities as if there were no limit to the Hearst
fortune.
Career and Life in Hollywood
Unfortunately, the movies Marion was starring in during the
early 1920s were not box office successes despite their expensive
production values. When he re-negotiated the distribution
agreement with Zukor, a difficult, extended process marked
by Hearst’s threats and bullying, he ended up conceding
important financial benefits in exchange for special treatment
by Zukor’s company for Marion’s films. Shrewd
businessmen, observing Hearst’s emotional situation,
could play on that to extract profitable concessions from
the old newspaperman. Nothing was more important in Hearst’s
hierarchy of values than the success of Marion’s film
career and this aspect of Hearst could be negotiated against.
By 1923, the combined costs of wild personal spending, movie
production, and an acquisition spree by WR had finally brought
his business to the edge of insolvency. What followed marked
another turning point in the journalistic career of William
Randolph Hearst, one of the first having been his decision
ten years earlier to handle plays and films with kid gloves
to accommodate his personal friendships and romantic interests
in the show business milieu.
This time, instead of indulging his emotional attachments
to theater folk at the expense of journalistic objectivity,
Hearst would effectively sell out his political and social
views in order to obtain financing for his collapsing media
empire.
In the summer of 1923, Moore advised the Chief that the president
of Chase National Bank, Hearst’s main bank, had summoned
Moore to his office and gone over the Hearst business accounts,
pointing out their overdrawn and ill-maintained condition,
and asking that Hearst find a new bank. Several days later,
Moore telegrammed the further bad news that almost two million
in loan repayments were coming due and that no refinancing
through Chase was possible. They were now up against the wall.
As a last resort, Moore requested that John Neylan, his West
Coast counterpart in the Hearst organization, look into obtaining
financing from banks in San Francisco. Neylan quickly learned,
first, that the Hearst companies’ loan-to-equity ratios
were so bad that normal financing was out of the question
from banks on the West Coast and, second, that help on the
basis of personal connections or relationships was also doubtful
given The San Francisco Examiner’s ongoing
public battle with local financial interests over the fate
of Hetch Hetchy, the crucial real estate involved in securing
additional needed water supplies for the growing population
of San Francisco. In short, the Hearst media were clamoring
for public ownership as a utility while San Francisco commercial
interests were maneuvering for private, for-profit control
of the valley. As usual, the Hearst papers were revved up
to all-out brawl mode against the bankers and businessmen.
With this public battle ongoing, the bankers were in no mood
to succor Hearst financially, even had his businesses been
in top-notch financial condition. Facing the downfall of all
he and his family had built, Hearst had little choice, or
so it must have seemed to him, but to change tack in the debate
over Hetchy Hetch. Hearst made clear to Neylan, who had been
leading the charge against the banks, that it had become necessary
to ameliorate the bare-knuckled nature of the editorial invective.
In the end, by toning down the editorial attacks and by adopting
a more equivocal position on the issue of municipal ownership
of the water supplies, Hearst was able to enlist the prominent
San Francisco banker, Herbert Fleishhacker, in sponsoring
a public financing scheme whereby small-denomination bonds
issued by Hearst companies were sold to the public in 1924,
thereby averting collapse.
Later, as the Hearst news organization as a whole mellowed
into a more business-friendly format, complaints were occasionally
voiced about the loss to America of the great crusading journalists
of days gone by. H.L. Mencken in particular, contemplating
Hearst’s later support for the hidebound Calvin Coolidge,
bewailed the virtual disappearance of the fiery, passionate
reportage of the old Hearst empire. Mencken wrote, “The
American daily press, with Hearst leading it in a devil’s
dance, was loud, vulgar, inordinate and preposterous –
but it was not slimy and it was not dull. Today it is both."
Although most of Hearst’s biographers excused, apologized,
or rationalized the new, pro-business Hearstian philosophy
as somehow consistent with his earlier set of beliefs and
not necessarily related to his chronic need for large sources
of revenue to support Marion, Millicent, at least four magnificent
estates and his unquenchable appetite for art, it seems a
reasonable conclusion that Hearst, having by the 1920s achieved
the empire and personal life he wished to keep and realizing
the enormity of its costs, simply abandoned any journalistic
goals inconsistent with making the maximum amount of money.
As his empire swayed in the balance in 1923, Hearst’s
adventures in films prospered. Two of Marion’s high-budget
spectaculars, When Knighthood Was In Flower and Little
Old New York, succeeded on all levels and drew critical
praise for Marion’s performances. Hearst came out of
his distribution agreement with Adolph Zukor and formed a
fully integrated studio in partnership with Joe Godsol, establishing
the new entity as Goldwyn Cosmopolitan. In turn, in 1924,
the newly established super-company of Metro-Goldwyn, soon
to become MGM, acquired Goldwyn-Cosmopolitan; Hearst’s
and Marion’s interests were now subsumed under the big
Hollywood company’s rubric. Hearst, with his vast publicity
machine, and his paramour Davies, with her personal box office
draw, were highly welcome in the world of Louis B. Mayer and
Irving Thalberg, general manager and production chief, respectively,
of MGM.
November 2005
From guest contributor Joe Leibowitz
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