The Chief

by David Nasaw

  Hearst waited as long as he could before issuing a rather tepid endorsement of Wilson for reelection. No matter how much he despised him, he could not bring himself to openly support a Republican for the highest office in the land.22

  With the European countryside transected by trenches, Hearst was forced to cancel his annual motor tour of Europe. Though his mother had very much hoped he would spend the summer of 1915 at her Pleasanton Hacienda, he deposited the two youngest boys instead and with Millicent, eleven-year-old George, his friend Orrin Peck who was visiting from Munich, and a small army of friends and servants, took the train south to the family’s cattle ranch in the Santa Lucia mountains near the old whaling village of San Simeon.

  The Chief, as he was now referred to by those who worked for him—W. R. was used only by his closest friends and associates—took vacations seriously. Though he had never been willing or able to plan anything far in advance, that did not mean that any detail was left to chance. Every excursion was carefully planned, the motor routes laid out, the private railway cars leased, the rooms booked, the servants and chauffeurs retained before he and his party arrived. He never traveled alone, but only in the company of a full entourage of family and friends, whose way he paid and whose itinerary he chose.

  His Los Angeles editor, Dent Roberts, with Mrs. Roberts and her secretary, had been delegated to make the preparations for his trip to San Simeon. Though this was to be a camping vacation, Hearst did not expect anyone to have to rough it. On the contrary, he imported all the luxuries of the best European hotels to “Camp Hill,” the elongated ridge, 1,600 feet above sea level, where he intended to pitch his tents. The preparations for a Hearst camping vacation were so extensive that, according to his cousin Anne Apperson Flint, they “upset the whole running of the ranch. He’d call off the cowboys to bring horses and wait on him and to set up this establishment....When he came out there in the summer ... he arrived and commanded.”23

  By the time Hearst and his party arrived for their summer 1915 stay, the cowboys had erected a small village of Venetian-style canvas tents, the size of cottages, with brightly colored awnings. One of them was set aside for the dining room; the others, with living and sleeping quarters, were fully furnished. Oriental rugs were placed over the wooden floors. “The floored tents were all up and dining table set,” Orrin Peck wrote his sister in a letter describing their arrival at the top of the hill. “Mrs. Dent Roberts’s secretary had been here a week and got things in shape. Cooks and all....Our drinking water is brought up every morning also ice from the Ranch House....Dear old Will is very sweet and kind—looks about 35—(days when he’s not worried over telegrams or dunning bills).”24

  The more time Hearst spent at San Simeon—and he would vacation there through the war years—the more he grew to love the land. In 1917, he wrote Phoebe from Camp Hill,

  I am out here to jam as much health into my system as possible, and I really feel, Mother, that this is the place to do it. I can take long rides over these beautiful hills; I can camp out in the pretty spots beside the creeks, in the valley, or in the little hollows on the mountain tops; I can go fishing in the streams, or fishing and boating on the sea. It seems to me that anything that can be done anywhere is all assembled and ready to be done on the ranch. I get a great vacation here, and I need it, as you know. I get great enjoyment here, it is a relief to the mind, and I get further away from business than I would anywhere else....I feel so immensely better today than I have felt at any time for the past three months, or, indeed, for the past year, that I know I am going to be able to do everything in a few days and get the usual benefit from my vacation here....We like the all-outdoors part of it. We go to bed between 9 and 10 o’clock, get up between 6:30 and 7—6:30 this morning—and make the most of the long day and good solid sleep at night. It is great stuff, and I really feel that NY is like one big office building and that you do not really get out to breathe good air and get good sunshine until you get at least west of the Mississippi.25

  “I love this ranch,” W. R. continued, in another note to his mother, apologizing once again for taking Millicent to San Simeon instead of spending the summer with her at Pleasanton. Although the Hacienda was beautiful in its own way, it did not, he tried to explain to Phoebe, afford him the same kind of total escape that he found at San Simeon:

  I love the sea and I love the mountains and the hollows in the hills and the shady places in the creeks and the fine old oaks and even the hot brushy hillsides—full of quail—and the canyons full of deer. It’s a wonderful place. I would rather spend a month here than any place in the world. And as a sanitarium! Mother it has Nauheim, Carlsbad, Vichy, Wiesbaden, French Lick, Saratoga, and every other so-called health resort beaten a nautical mile.26

  At the age of fifty-two, W. R. was to be a father again, this time, he hoped, of a baby girl. “We think Phoebe or Elbert, we can’t tell which, will arrive about Christmas and we want you surely to be here for the festivities,” he wrote his mother on October 22,1915. Six weeks later, on December 1, he wrote again, “We cannot call them Phoebe because they are not of that persuasion but we could call them Phoebus and Apollo for just at sunrise two of the loveliest boys you have ever seen were born to Mr. and Mrs. William Randolph Hearst.”27

  The twins, Randolph and Elbert, whose name would later be changed to David, spent their first winter and spring in New York before being shipped out West to their grandmother for the summer and fall. As usual, Phoebe would not part with them as promised and Hearst had to take the train West in November to retrieve them. En route, he telegraphed mock instructions to the babies to prepare for his arrival:

  Get up early and eat your bacon and eggs with your lonesome front teeth and meet us at Oakland Friday morning. This is Thanksgiving Day and you ought to be thankful that you have such a dear devoted Grandma, such kind nurses, such nice noisy brothers, such a handsome father, and such a loving mother. Here is long life and much happiness to you and to all. Now rise up on your hind legs, drink a bumper of imperial granum, look embarrassed and make a proper speech in reply. Say as Tiny Tim said, God Bless us every one.

  The telegram was signed “Pop.”28

  Although his letters and telegrams were like this one, full of good cheer, there were problems in New York which Phoebe knew nothing of. Millicent Willson, the adoring, compliant sixteen-year-old chorus girl that W. R. had fallen in love with twenty years before, had matured into a formidable woman of thirty-five, with five children, the largest apartment on the West Side to preside over, and social aspirations of her own. As Bill, Jr. recalled years later, his father and mother were becoming “incompatible....She liked Society with a capital ‘S’ and he didn’t ... And he was bored with the kind of parties she liked.” While W. R. still held society in contempt and dressed his chauffeur in a plain business suit, Millicent had dismissed her male servants when they refused to wear liveries.29

  W. R. was very much a man about town, a habitué of what would later be known as café society, that promiscuous mixing of Broadway, society, and newspaper folk in the city’s nightclubs and after-hours joints. When in town, he never missed a night at the theater. “He always was a stage-door Johnny, just always,” his son Bill Jr. recalled in his oral history. “He always used to take us backstage at the Ziegfeld Follies.” After the theater and a visit backstage, there were dinners at Delmonico’s or Sherry’s or Rector’s and late-night parties in the theater district or West Side apartments like that of the actress Elsie Janis and her mother. Hearst attended many and hosted a few himself in the rooms he leased at the Bryant Park Studios at 40th Street and Sixth Avenue within walking distance of the Broadway theaters.30

  It was at these gatherings that men about town, like Hearst, met Broadway’s most eligible actresses and chorus girls. The girls of the chorus were fresh, young, all-American (no blacks or Jews), fun-loving, athletic. According to the historian Lewis Erenberg, they no longer embodied the “image of sinful womanhood,” but instead “combin
ed a sensuality with niceness.”31

  The attraction of such girl-women for middle-aged, overworked, overweight businessmen like Hearst was obvious. And vice versa. Though many of the girls lived with their parents, as Millicent and Anita Willson had, they sought the freedom that could only come with an income greater than their wages from the chorus line. It cost money to dress well, to go out—and to appear as glamorous offstage as you did onstage. The best solution for the girls who were not going to become headliners was to locate a suitable “patron” among the stage-door Johnnies that came calling and sent their cards and gifts backstage.32

  Sometime after Christmas of 1915, not many weeks after Millicent had given birth to the twins, W. R. Hearst came calling on Marion Davies, an eighteen-year-old chorus girl who was performing in the new Irving Berlin musical, Stop! Look! Listen!, at the Globe Theater on 46th Street and Broadway, six blocks from his bachelor studio.

  Marion, at eighteen, was already a veteran of the chorus line. The youngest daughter of a moderately successful Brooklyn lawyer, Bernard Douras, she had followed her older sisters Ethel and Reine into show business, borrowing the name Davies from Reine, who had adopted it first because it made for a much better stage name than Douras. In Stop! Look! Listen!, Marion was featured in the production number “The Girl on the Magazine Cover.” While the male lead sang in front of a giant reproduction of a Vogue magazine cover, Marion and three other girls from the chorus walked off the page to join him in an elaborately staged song and dance number.33

  The show opened in December of 1915. Hearst, who saw every musical comedy that played in the city, attended it with his friend and fellow publisher, Paul Bloch, who may have been dating Marion at the time. Bloch and Hearst sat in the second row of the orchestra section, Hearst’s favorite seats. “In later years, Marion chose to forget that she was featured in a revue as early as 1915,” her biographer, Fred Guiles, has written, “since it would have made her only fifteen years old by her calculations, but to a greater extent out of deference to Hearst. Their friendship was supposed to be secret that year of their meeting.”34

  “He sent me flowers and little gifts, like silver boxes or gloves or candy,” Marion recalled in the taped reminiscences that were later published as The Times We Had. “I wasn’t the only one he sent gifts to, but all the girls thought he was particularly looking at me ... The next thing that happened —I was asked to have some special photographs made at Campbell’s Studio.” The photographs were for Hearst’s Sunday theater section; Marion’s mother had accompanied her to the studio and fixed her hair for her. “I had two or three pictures taken before I saw Mr. Hearst,” Marion went on. “It was hard to see past the bright lights, and he was sitting right under the camera. He was dressed very conservatively, in a dark blue suit. If his suit had been in any other kind of color, I might have seen him sooner....When we got out in the studio, Mr. Hearst had left. He hadn’t meant any harm, and he owned Campbell’s Studio. But he had the most penetrating eyes—honest, but penetrating eyes. He didn’t have a harmful bone in his body. He just liked to be by himself and just look at the girls on the stage while they were dancing. I think he was a very lonesome man.”35

  There are other stories of Marion’s and Hearst’s first meeting, but in all of them, Hearst’s approach is circuitous, never direct. However they met, by the spring of 1916 they were seeing each other regularly, at parties, dinners, and gatherings at Hearst’s suite near the Broadway theaters.

  Though Hearst had never been particularly good at keeping secrets about his private life, he tried hard this time. He did not want to hurt Millicent, nor did he want rumors of his relationship with Marion to get back to his mother. Unwilling to give up Marion, he had no choice but to learn to lead a double life. Occasionally those lives intersected, as he must have known they would. Anita Loos, who would later write screenplays for Hearst and publish in his magazines the stories that would become the basis for her best-selling novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, was present at one of these occasions:

  It was during the early stages of his romance with Marion. She and I had been seated to W. R.’s right and left at dinner in a hideaway he kept at the old Beaux Arts [Bryant Park Studios] apartment building. Now it so happened that I’d been asked by W. R.’s wife, Millicent, to dine the very following evening at the legitimate Hearst home on Riverside Drive. When dinner was announced I was embarrassed to find myself again seated next to W. R. But as I took my place he observed with the first twinkle I ever saw in those pale eyes of his, “Well, Nita, we seem to be meeting under rather different circumstances, don’t we?”36

  Marion was at the time eighteen years old, though she looked younger, with strawberry blond hair, worn long, in flowing curls. She was not a classical beauty—her nose was a bit too big, her teeth not perfect. But her bright blue eyes, her perfect complexion, a girlish vitality, and a flirtatious smile more than made up for such minor imperfections. She was relatively tall—about five foot six—and willowy thin, which may also have appealed to Hearst, who at fifty-two was becoming increasingly pear-shaped. Marion spoke with a noticeable stammer; it only added to her charms.

  The first documentary evidence we have of their relationship is found in the theater pages of Hearst’s New York American, where photographs and news items about Marion Davies, still a relatively unknown chorus girl, began to appear in early 1916. On February 7, Marion’s photograph was published over a brief news item. “Rumor has it that Miss Marion Davies of the Stop! Look! Listen! company ... may soon join the ranks of film beauties. Miss Davies coyly denies that she is going to be a photoplay star, but her friends declare otherwise.” The following Sunday, the drama page included another photograph of “Miss Marion Davies of Stop! Look! Listen!” In May of 1916, a story in the New York American announced that because of Miss Davies’ beauty and talent, she had been “the first of the new Follies beauty crop to be selected by Mr. Ziegfeld” for his upcoming show. She had, the article continued, shown such promise that Mr. Ziegfeld had “commissioned the librettist to write a special part for her in the book of the new production.”37

  From this point on, interviews, news items, and photographs of Marion Davies appeared regularly in the Sunday drama sections of the Hearst papers. Though Hearst may have been trying to be discreet, his relationship with Marion had to have been known to his editors, photographers, and reporters, who took every opportunity to report on Marion’s blooming career.

  As W. R. had become something of an authority on chorus girls—he had married one—there was nothing unusual in his calling the attention of his editors to a “pretty” face on Broadway. Hearst’s drama pages were, in fact, crowded with photographs of actresses and chorus girls, puff pieces on their careers, and friendly reviews. In early 1915, before he ever met Marion Davies, he had directed his editors to publish only favorable dramatic reviews: “I am wholly averse to old style dramatic criticism and believe merely in dramatic reviews and interesting accounts of dramatic performances with only most kindly and considerate criticism of performances. In other words I don’t want dramatic critic. I want dramatic reporter who will give entertaining account of performance, quote bright lines and consider on the whole the viewpoint of public rather than perverse view of a blasé dramatic critic.”38

  Even with his papers’ penchant for photographing actresses and giving them favorable notices, the treatment afforded Miss Davies became remarkable. With the help of the favorable publicity she was receiving in the Hearst papers, Marion’s career blossomed through 1916. Her name was not yet in lights, but she was on her way to becoming one of Broadway’s better-known chorus girls. On October 8,1916, Hearst’s New York American carried a picture of Marion Davies while an item in the “Motion Picture Trade News and Studio Gossip” column listed her as one of the “fashion stars” who would be “posing in the latest creations for the Hearst International News Pictorial.” Later that winter, when Marion and her friend Justine Johnstone were invited to audition for roles in O
h, Boy, a musical comedy by Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse with a score by Jerome Kern, they arrived at the audition in a limousine, wearing mink coats and diamonds. When the show went on tour in the spring, Marion’s hotel suites grew larger and larger as the company moved farther west. On the last stop of the tour, in Cleveland, Marion threw an extravagant cast party with champagne, caviar, a full buffet, and a five-piece orchestra for dancing. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind as to who had paid for it.39

  Although Hearst did all he could to promote Marion’s career on Broadway and invited her to “pose” in his newsreels, he did not cast her in his serial films. She was too young, too inexperienced, and too unknown. As in his other businesses, he recruited experienced or “name” stars like Pearl White and Irene Castle.

  Hearst did not begin producing moving pictures because he wanted to make a star of Marion, but because it made good business sense. Decades before the word synergy entered corporate discourse, Hearst was putting the concept to work, exploiting his products in several different media forms. His news stories were recycled in newsreel form—and vice versa; his Sunday comics were turned into animated cartoons; each episode of his serial films was “novelized,” run serially as a Sunday newspaper feature, and then published in hardcover. The next step was to adapt the fiction he bought for his magazines for feature films and publicize those films in his newspapers and magazines.

  In the summer of 1916, his International Film Service, which was already making serial films and weekly episodes of the “Hearst International News Pictorial,” released its first feature film, Jaffery, under the Golden Eagle Feature label. The film had been produced by the Frohman Amusement Corporation. That fall, International Film Service released a second film, this one produced by the Superb Pictures Corporation.