The King Is Dead

Veiled in palm trees, atop one of the lushest Beverly Hills, the great cream-tinted house was heavily guarded against intruders. But one who trespassed there this week was not to be stopped by guards. By appointment, Death had come calling on a guest in the house--an old adversary, one whose stubbornness he could not help admiring. In his 89th year, the end had finally come for William Randolph Hearst, the capricious, inspired, ruthless and sentimental, sybaritic press lord.

The bulletin that came out of Los Angeles was, of all news stories, the one he had dreaded most. Because of this fear, no one ever dared mention Death in Hearst's presence. For four years he had suffered from heart disease and had been confined to the sprawling, overdressed stucco home of his great and good friend and companion, Marion Davies.*

Almost to the end, his fertile, facile brain kept tabs on all his outposts of empire. He still spread his papers on the floor before his bedroom chair, turning the pages with one slipper and bending down to scrawl his piercing critiques, giving his editors lessons in Hearstian journalism. Deskmen at the Los Angeles Examiner, nerve center of the chain, received small or great commands as late as 3 a.m. More frequently in later years they were relayed over the phone by Miss Davies, and whether they called for an editorial blast against Secretary of State Acheson or for a box of Kleenex, they got action. It would be a long time before his editors got used to doing business without the messages that began "The Chief suggests . . ."

The Collection. The gaunt, wasted old man with the haunted eyes had given journalism a whole new set of techniques. But, in the minds of many newsmen, he had often misused those techniques to sensationalize journalism, seduce its public and debauch its practitioners. Good or bad, he had left his brand on four generations of U.S. life, in a multiple career as politician, publisher and plutocrat that stretched back beyond the memory of all but the oldest living Americans. At the end of it all, his earthly holdings included:

P: 16 daily newspapers (total circ. 5,350,000); Sunday papers, including the supplement American Weekly, world's biggest (9,374,850) and eight monthly magazines in the U.S., ranging from Cosmopolitan and Good Housekeeping to American Druggist (total circ. 6 million).

P: Ranches, including San Simeon, Wyntoon, others in Texas and Mexico. Mines and oil fields in the U.S., Mexico and Peru, including the famed Homestake Mine, rich gold-producer at Lead, S.D.,and fountainhead of his fortune.

P: Incidentals: fabulous collections of armor, Georgian silver, paintings, sculptures, tapestries, antique furniture (all periods).

The whole collection added up to $200 million, maybe more. Even Mr. Hearst wasn't sure.

The Heirs. Who will get it all? Said Hearst's personal lawyer this week: "As will be shown by his last will and testament when it is filed for probate, he leaves the bulk of his estate for the benefit of his fellow Americans--for charitable, religious, educational, literary, scientific and public purposes." Other probable beneficiaries: his five sons; his widow, Mrs. Millicent Hearst of Manhattan, who never divorced W.R. though they were estranged for the last 29 years of his life.

Who will run the world's richest publishing empire? Among its top managers and likely to continue so: Richard E. Berlin, president of the Hearst Corp.; Richard A. Carrington Jr., publisher of the Chief's favorite paper, the Los Angeles Examiner; the Examiner's top editorial man, Editor Raymond T. Van Ettisch; Jacob D. Gortatowsky, 65, general manager of the Hearst newspapers; E. D. Coblentz, 68, of the San Francisco Call-Bulletin; Walter (Front Page) Howey, editor of American Weekly.

For the present, only one of the quintet of Hearst sons is regarded as likely to be entrusted with top management. He is the ablest and most responsible of the lot: balding William Randolph Hearst Jr., 43, now publisher of the Journal-American and the American Weekly.

Eldest son George, 47, is the fat, fun-loving treasurer of the San Francisco Examiner. David, 35, is publisher of the Los Angeles Herald; his twin brother Randolph is executive editor of the San Francisco Call-Bulletin; and John, 41, is assistant to "Gorty" Gortatowsky. Not one of the lavishly indulged sons has yet shown the spark with which their father, another lavishly indulged son, set the newspaper business on fire 64 years ago.

Silver Spoon. He was a complex child of simple, ambitious parents. "Phoebe Apperson Hearst," wrote Hearstling Winifred Black Bonfils in an official biography, "was born in an old-fashioned American home, on an old-fashioned American farm in the old-fashioned American State of Missouri. She died in a magnificent Spanish hacienda in California, surrounded with every exotic luxury that the brain of man could conceive, or the heart of woman desire." She married a rough & rowdy Missouri Argonaut named George Hearst, who lost two fortunes, but won three in gold & silver. In San Francisco, on April 29, 1863, she gave birth to a son.

Like his bustling, newly rich home town, Willie Hearst, an only child, grew up fast. He was ten when his energetic mother took him off to Europe for his first grand tour. From Londonderry Phoebe wrote her husband: "You know Willie is always interesting when well, and full of pranks. He talked so quietly and was very good, but I would have felt happier to have him well and a little bad."

The first newspaper that worldly Willie got interested in was, unaccountably, the austere London Times, to which he subscribed during his year at austere St. Paul's School. At Harvard, he studied Joseph Pulitzer's sensational New York World, sold ads for the Lampoon--and still had time for pranks. His most elaborate one was his last: he sent each of his professors a chamber pot for Christmas 1885, and was promptly expelled. He had lost interest in school anyway; he had his eye on the puny San Francisco Examiner, which his politicking father had taken over to get himself a Democratic party mouthpiece. One day Willie wrote his dad, newly appointed to the U.S. Senate, to ask for "our miserable little sheet."

"To tell the truth," he confided, "I am possessed of the weakness which at some time or other of their lives, pervades most men; I am convinced that I could run a newspaper successfully . . ."

Golden Boy. The lanky (6 ft. 1 in., 155 Ibs.), blond-mustached 23-year-old took over the Examiner on March 4, 1887. He subtitled his little sheet "Monarch of the Dailies," and set out, as one editor put it, "to arouse the 'gee whiz!' emotion." The Examiner's boss rushed special trains to cover out-of-town fires, ran up enormous cable tolls. He wrote boob-catching headlines like A SUNDAY SUICIDE OF A LOVESICK LOAFER. On the premise that "there is no substitute for circulation," he spent his father's money like a drunken prospector--then made it back, as circulation multiplied.

He gathered around him a brilliant, erratic crew of staffers and contributors (Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, Edwin Markham, Homer Davenport, et al.), entertained them by dancing jigs in the office, striding through the streets with a cane that whistled, and in more corruptive ways. He was great fun to work for; after a hard day in the newsroom he liked to gather the staff at his big house for lavish parties complete [said horrified gossips] with "abandoned dancing girls." After his father died (1891), someone complained to his mother that Willie was wasting the family fortune away at $1 million a year. "Too bad," said Phoebe Hearst sweetly. "Then he'll only last 30 years."

The Yellow Kid. By 1895, having perfected his techniques of carnival journalism, he felt ready to conquer Manhattan. He had $7 1/2-million with him, and he was ready to bet it all on his new paper, the Morning Journal. One day Hearst rocked Pulitzer by buying away the entire Sunday staff of his World--including Morrill Goddard, who was to steer the blatant American Weekly toward the world's biggest circulation with such stories as NAILED HER FATHER'S HEAD TO THE FRONT DOOR. From then on W.R.'s Journal outplayed the World at its own scare-head-hunting game. It was the Hearst-Pulitzer tug-of-war over Richard Outcault's forlorn Yellow Kid that brought on the day of the colored comic strip, and gave "yellow journalism" its name.

From there to jingo journalism was an easy step. To whip up U.S. sentiment against Spain, Hearst sent Reporter Richard Harding Davis and Artist Frederick Remington to Cuba to "document" Spanish atrocities. When the artist complained that there were no signs of strife and asked leave to return home, W.R. sent him a supremely cynical cable: PLEASE REMAIN. YOU FURNISH THE PICTURES AND I'LL FURNISH THE WAR.

The Gamut. The U.S. has largely forgotten (as Hearst apparently did in his latter days) that a half century ago, he was regarded by some as a Socialist radical, and by many as a friend of the people. He muckraked the trusts, exposed Standard Oil for bribing Senators, campaigned for the eight-hour day (which Hearst properties ignored), woman suffrage, public ownership--and, of course, for circulation. In 1901 he was hanged in effigy as an inciter of McKinley's assassination, but a year later he was elected to a seat (rarely to be occupied) in Congress, having run in a "safe" Tammany district. He celebrated by marrying Millicent Willson, from the chorus of The Girl From Paris. It was the snubs they suffered from stuffy upperclass Britons on their gala transatlantic honeymoon that helped turn him into an Anglophobe. (In 1930 it was France's turn. The French barred W.R. from their shores because a Hearstling had swiped the text of a secret Franco-British treaty. From then on, in the Hearst press, France was as perfidious as Albion.)

Enamored of politics, he began affecting frock coats in order to look like a politico. He poured out $1,500,000 in an unsuccessful try for the 1904 Democratic nomination for President. Next year he actually won the New York mayoralty in a bloody election, only to see Tammany rig the count and cheat him out of his victory. In 1906, he was defeated by Charles Evans Hughes for the governorship of New York. In 1922, still nursing a political ambition that reached all the way to the White House, he made his last cast for office, began a campaign for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senator from New York. Governor Al Smith, who had come to despise the great publisher, refused to run on the same ticket with him. It was a death blow to Hearst's candidacy. At last he knew that he would never be President.

Imperial Hearst. All the while, like Citizen Kane,* for whom he was the model, Hearst grew in wealth, if not in stature. The era of the Winsor McCay cartoons (against the yellow peril, the red peril, the dope peril, etc.) and the thundering Brisbanalities of the column Today, was also the era when Hearst's insatiable acquisitiveness reached its height. He added dozens of papers to his string, turned a score of U.S. cities into Hearst towns.

At 240,000-acre San Simeon, where he rode with his father as a boy, Hearst decreed stately pleasure domes that would have awed Kubla Khan. He equipped the place with everything from giraffes to Roman baths, spent millions to give its vistas a Maxfield Parrish unreality--and insisted on paper napkins and ketchup bottles at the long refectory table because San Simeon was still "the ranch."

He also acquired (from the Ziegfeld Follies) Miss Marion Davies, nee Douras. Blonde and bubbly daughter of a Brooklyn judge, she was a chorus girl when W.R. met her during World War I. Hearst presently took over her career. Soon Marion Davies was a star of Hearst's Cosmopolitan pictures (Little Old New York), and its $104,000-a-year president. She was to be the aging press lord's companion until his death.

Wrong Number. His political alliances were never so durable: it was his allergy to practical give-&-take that wrecked his relations with Al Smith, as well as with Hughes and Franklin Roosevelt. In 1932, Hearst cut the cards for the New Deal, assuring Roosevelt's nomination with the telephoned order from San Simeon that switched convention delegates of California and Texas from John Garner to F.D.R. But Roosevelt was against everything that Hearst now stood for. When he realized how things were, Hearst furiously reversed his editorial guns; his papers were ordered to print it "Raw Deal," even in reporting New Dealers' speeches. But it was an anachronistic war; the landslide against Alf Landon (1936), Hearst's personally blessed candidate, was a measure of the decline of the Hearstpapers' editorial force.

Hearst had greater troubles: for the first time in his life, he was desperately strapped for cash. The old man swallowed his pride, and turned over financial control of his overextended empire to a board of regents headed by Manhattan Lawyer Clarence Shearn and Broker John W. Hanes, former Under Secretary of the Treasury. For Hearst himself, it meant a cut in his reckless spending; for his crazy-quilt domain it meant consolidations, ruthless budget cuts. One night in Manhattan's Ritz Tower, Marion Davies did her bit: she calmly wrote out a check for $1,000,000 and handed it across a table to W.R. Choking, Hearst told her: "Some day, Marion, I'll make it up to you."

Songs at Twilight. Thanks to economies and the World War II boom, the empire was restored to health, and its emperor to some of the power he had wielded of old. In a sense, his kind of journalism had had its sensationalized thunder stolen as long ago as the '20s, with the rise of the tabloids.

Once he had summed up his credo: "Life is action. Sport, as well as work, is contention. All nature strives and vies, not to attain tranquillity but a more effective degree of activity. Nothing that is alive and vigorous is tranquil--not the birds nor the beasts nor the poor fish nor human beings nor nations. Whatever begins to be tranquil is gobbled up by something which is not tranquil."

At long last, contentious, vigorous William Randolph Hearst found tranquillity.

*Ironically, Hearst's doctor did advance heart research by experiments on dogs (TIME, March 28, 1949). But Antivivisectionist Hearst, whose fees helped pay for the project, was never told. *For producing, directing and starring in the motion picture of the same name, a satire on the life of The Chief, Orson Welles suffered the nearest thing to excommunication that Mr. Hearst could inflict. For years the offending genius could not be mentioned at all in Hearst-papers.

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