by David Nasaw
With the energy and commitment of a man half his age, Hearst set out to create for himself a position in the moving-picture industry as exalted as the one he occupied in publishing. By late April, he was already in high gear. From California, where he had returned to settle his mother’s estate, he wrote Joseph Moore, who had been promoted again, this time to corporate treasurer and de facto head of his New York business office, that their paramount need was for “more directors ... Twenty-four pictures a year means five or six directors and as many stars....We need directors that we can depend upon and that belong to us. We have a big contract with Zuckor [sic] and we should organize to fill that. After we have done that and produced our twenty-four per year we can think about additional pictures with other companies.”11
He had suggestions to make about every aspect of the business, but was most concerned with Miss Davies’ pictures. In June of 1919, he wrote William LeBaron, the former magazine editor he had installed as general director of his film company, with his thoughts on the scenario for Marion’s next picture, Restless Sex, based on the Robert Chambers novel about a wealthy and restless New York society girl that had been serialized in Cosmopolitan magazine: “I think the scenario should not depart too far from the book, but I think Miss Davies should continue to represent the kind of admirable young girl parts for which she is establishing a reputation.”12
“He was very interested in her,” Allan Dwan, one of Marion’s early directors, recalled, “and he’d come around and see how things were going, invite us all to lunch—the whole afternoon would be gone before we’d get back to work—which didn’t bother him much....He was a nice guy.”13
To make sure Marion got the best possible scripts written for her, Hearst contacted screenwriter Frances Marion, who had written several films for Mary Pickford and become one of Hollywood’s busiest and most highly paid screenwriters: “Would you consider contract as writer and director at Cosmopolitan Studio, New York? Salary two thousand dollars a week.” The telegram was signed W. R. Hearst. Frances took the train east at once. She had expected that her meeting with Hearst would take place in his office and was surprised to be directed to meet him instead at the Bryant Park Studios:
A liveried doorman had been told of an expected guest and given my name. I was ushered into an apartment and left in the hall. From behind closed doors I could hear the wild throbbing of jazz. The door was opened suddenly by Marion Davies. “Hi, Frances, come in, we’re just t-teaching W. R. how to sh-shimmy!” Surrounded by girls, Mr. Hearst stood in the middle of the floor ... He was somewhat breathless. “Welcome,” he said. “They call this dancing! I feel as if I were riding a bucking horse without the horse.”14
Though Marion was a star of the first magnitude at Cosmopolitan Productions, she was not the only one. Because Hearst intended to establish a major studio of his own, he needed several female stars in his company. Marion would play the ingenue/Mary Pickford roles; Alma Rubens, whom he promoted almost as extensively as Marion, would be placed under contract to play the romantic heroines. In the fall of 1919, Hearst made several trips to Los Angeles to scout out the additional actresses needed to fill out the casts of the twenty-four pictures he intended to produce his first year. In a series of lengthy telegrams to Joseph A. Moore—who had become, by default, his chief adviser on the film industry—Hearst offered capsule summaries of the actresses whose work he had previewed, including Ethel Barrymore, who he declared was “too self-conscious for screen.” Elsie Ferguson, who had appeared in six different society melodramas in 1918, was, he thought, “tremendously expressive [and] absolutely best for Cosmopolitan stories.” Alice Joyce, a Vitagraph star since 1916, was a “competent, dignified star.” Phoebe Foster, he was “convinced will be good despite somewhat unsatisfactory test. All best screen people say tests are not conclusive. Personality in actual play is what counts....You must have something to make a star. You can’t make a silk purse unless you have the silk....Regarding directors,” he reminded Moore once again, “I want none but the best.”15
While the Chief appeared to be having the time of his life scouting actresses in Los Angeles, Joseph Moore was left behind in New York to try to find a way to pay for it all. Moore tried his best to warn the Chief that they were already seriously overextended, but Hearst paid him no heed. Though Phoebe’s will would not be probated until October, he no doubt counted on her assets to bail him out of whatever difficulties he got himself into. It was Moore’s job, in the meantime, to watch over the bottom line. In September of 1919, he warned the Chief that “the financial situation at the International Film Company [the parent company of Cosmopolitan Productions] is really in very bad shape.” If Hearst intended, as planned, to expand film production “on a large scale and build up an enormous payroll, I am afraid,” Moore wrote, “that we are going to have trouble financing it.” Moore agreed with Hearst that it was necessary to sign actresses and directors to long-term contracts. Directors capable of churning out several features a year were in short supply and receiving not only large salaries but a percentage of the profits as well.16 Since Hearst refused to share his profits, he had to pay extravagant per-picture fees to his directors. Fully aware that the Chief was spending too much money on his films, Adolph Zukor had written in August to suggest that Paramount, which already distributed Cosmopolitan films, produce them as well. This, Zukor wrote, would not only save the Chief money, but “very materially assist in the developing of [Marion Davies’] talent,” which Zukor knew meant a lot to Hearst.17
Hearst asked his chief film executive in New York to thank Zukor for his “kind offer,” but inform him that he preferred to run his studio by himself:
Making pictures is fundamentally like making publications. It is in each case an endeavor to entertain and interest, enlighten and uplift the public. In fact the same material is used more and more in both publications and pictures. If a man knows good material and knows the public all he has to learn is the technique of either profession. I think I have learned various things in the publishing business that will be of value in the motion picture business ... If I am right then I ought to be able to develop something good and something distinctive, something that expresses my own purposes and personality. I feel that I must work that out myself.18
Hearst knew precisely how he wanted to proceed. He had no interest in producing cheaply made “program” pictures for the cramped storefront theaters that littered the streets of every American city. He intended to produce quality “class” pictures for the white-collar workers and professionals who were readers of his magazines and patrons of the dollar vaudeville palaces and higher-priced theaters. In publishing, he had made his fortune by extending the audience for daily and Sunday papers downward into the working classes. In moving pictures, he would extend the audience up the social ladder by producing pictures so stylish and expensive-looking that even “society” would flock to them.
Following on the success of D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, the industry had begun to label its most lavish products “super-specials.” Hearst expected that every film produced by his company would be handled by Zukor as a super-special and booked into legitimate theaters at $1 or more a ticket. “You know, you have told me from the beginning that you want me to make super-specials,” he wrote Zukor in response to the complaint that he was taking too long to deliver his films for distribution. “Very good pictures like all very good products, cannot be made hastily, any more than they can be made cheaply. I want you to realize that we spend a great deal of time and care on these pictures, as well as a great deal of money. I can easily make more hasty pictures and make a great deal more money for ourselves and a great deal less for you. I don’t think you want me to do that and I don’t want to do it because I have an ambition to make the best pictures that you distribute, which is some ambition.”19
As his newspapers and magazines were distinguished by their layout, design, and use of graphics, so would his pictures be marked by superior and costly s
ettings and visual effects. Hearst brought to this project a lifetime of experience with visual display. He had been schooled in Charles Eliot Norton’s art appreciation courses at Harvard and had, for a half century, been a habitué of the finest galleries and museums of Europe. His private rooms and offices were filled with expensive European paintings, sculpture, architectural artifacts, rugs, wall coverings, and the finest furniture. To make certain that his films were designed with the same degree of elegance and extravagance, Hearst hired as his art director Joseph Urban, a designer equally at home, as Hearst himself was, in elegant drawing rooms and Ziegfeld’s Follies.
Joseph Urban had been born and educated in Vienna. After a distinguished career as an illustrator, architect, interior decorator, and theater designer, he had traveled to the United States in 1904 to design the interior of the Austrian Pavilion at the St. Louis World’s Fair. He returned again in 1911 to serve as artistic director for the Boston Opera Company. When the company folded in 1914, Urban was unable to find work in wartime Europe and relocated to New York where he became the chief designer for the Metropolitan Opera and Florenz Ziegfeld’s Follies. He had designed the set and lighting for Marion’s number, “I Left Her on the Beach in Hawaii,” in the 1916 edition of the Follies.20
Urban offered Hearst everything he was looking for: European sophistication and professionalism combined with a flair for the spectacular. Although he had misgivings about taking on a position that might interfere with his work for the Metropolitan Opera and limit his trademark use of bright colors, Urban accepted a long-term contract to become the artistic director for Cosmopolitan Studios. He was to be paid the princely sum of $1,286.98 a week for the first year (equivalent to about $10,000 a week in today’s money) and $1,442.31 a week for the second and third years of his contract. If Hearst chose not to renew for an additional three years, Urban was to get another $25,000. Urban was also given permission to continue his work for the Metropolitan Opera and, with Hearst’s approval, to design future editions of Ziegfeld’s Follies.21
Hearst hired Urban to provide his films with a distinctive look, one that radiated expense, sophistication, and “class.” His purview was to include not only set design but costuming, makeup, and lighting. “The directors and cameramen received Father warily,” Gretl Urban, his daughter and chief assistant, recalled in her unpublished autobiographical notes:
Here was this new Hearst favorite, who was famous for color and knew absolutely nothing about black and white and silent films....Hearst arrived at Father’s office the evening of our first day there and welcomed Father with as much friendly warmth as his unfortunate personality permitted. He had Bill LeBaron [his chief studio executive], Luther Reed [a screenwriter], and a couple of directors with him and told them that from now on Urban would be in complete artistic charge for all productions....He made no secret that he was proud to have Urban as the head of his Cosmopolitan studios.22
Because Hearst had been unable to sign directors and screenwriters to long-term contracts, the only permanent presence at the Cosmopolitan studios in New York City was Urban. Even Marion Davies appeared in only half of Hearst’s films. Urban designed almost all of them. As Hearst later admonished Joseph Moore, “Don’t lose Urban under any circumstances. He makes the high spots in our pictures. There are lots of directors but only one Urban.”23
The Chief went out of his way to accommodate Urban. The affinities between the two men were striking: they were roughly the same age; both were large and physically imposing; each appeared in public only in formal wear—no matter what the weather; and each had fallen in love with a younger woman, though only Urban had deserted his older wife to marry his mistress. With a new wife, a new home, and a workshop in Yonkers, Urban had precious little free time to share with Hearst and Marion. Still, he did occasionally agree to join them for their weekend cruises on Hearst’s newest and most spectacular yacht, the 205-foot Oneida. Hearst made use of the Oneida on both the east and west coasts, moving it back and forth through the Panama Canal. In New York, he had it outfitted with a projection system so that he, Marion, Urban, and others from the studio could view the week’s rushes while cruising the Hudson. When he learned that Urban disliked sailing but enjoyed swimming, “he had the Captain rig up a huge net which with long beams could be lowered from the deck,” his daughter recalled. “Hearst presented it as a special surprise and was childishly pleased when Father dived into it with a joyous shout.” Urban’s wife Mary recalled similarly that Hearst went out of his way to make her husband comfortable. “If Urban expressed a wish for duck and champagne,” during his stay on board the Oneida, “they had duck and champagne until the gang rebelled and he expressed another wish for something instead of duck.”24
“Beside Father, me, and Marion,” Gretl recalled, the Oneida cruises usually included “Bill LeBaron, Luther Reed, and the film director of the moment. We were the visible ones. The invisible ones were Marion’s mother and sister who were never seen after their arrival and whom Father called ‘the Mourners at the Feast.’ They must have been mighty uncomfortable below deck in warm weather and were probably much relieved when Hearst one day decided that Father and I were chaperones enough. ‘Such nonsense’ [Father] used to say. ‘Millie knows all about this clandestine business and is probably glad to have him out of the house.’”25
17. Builder and Collector
ALTHOUGH HEARST HAD ENJOYED camping out at San Simeon during the war years, he was, at age fifty-six, ready to build a permanent vacation home for himself at “the top of the hill at the ranch....the loveliest spot in the world.” That spot, which he called Camp Hill, was 1,600 feet above sea level, connected to the village of San Simeon below by five miles of winding, rutted cattle paths. George had left Phoebe —and Phoebe would leave Will—almost 60,000 acres of land nestled between the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Lucia mountains, halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Looking inland from the Pacific, one sees first a strip of sandy beach, dunes, and bluffs, then an elongated stretch of grassland, rising imperceptibly into rolling hills of green in winter and spring, more yellow and brown in summer and fall, dotted with clumps of sage, laurel, and live oak. The hills slope gently at first, before giving way to steep, rugged ridges and peaks. Camp Hill, an elongated, oval ridge, was located well below the summit of the Santa Lucia mountains, but far enough up the hill to provide respite from the summer heat that regularly consumed the grasslands below. The views from the ridge were spectacular: below was the coastal plain, San Simeon, and the Pacific; on either side, rolling green hills; directly above, the Santa Lucias.
In the spring of 1919, Hearst met with the architect Julia Morgan in her suite of offices on the thirteenth floor of the Merchants Exchange Building in San Francisco. Walter Steilberg, a draftsman in the Morgan offices who overheard the Chief’s conversation with Miss Morgan because “his pitch was very high, so it carried,” said that Hearst wanted her to “build something up on the hill at San Simeon...‘The other day I was in Los Angeles, prowling around second-hand books stores,’ Hearst told Morgan, ‘and I came upon this stack of books called Bungalow Books. Among them I saw this one which has a picture—this isn’t what I want, but it gives you an idea of my thought about the thing, keeping it simple—of a Jappo-Swisso bungalow.’ He laughed at that, and so did she.”1
Julia Morgan was the perfect choice for the Chief. She was frail-looking, only five feet tall, and weighed no more than one hundred pounds, but she was as indefatigable as her employer. “Wearing tailored suits and French silk blouses,” her biographer Sara Boutelle has written, “she clambered over scaffolds and descended into trenches to make sure that the walls and drains met her high standards. The head of a busy, prosperous practice, she worked quietly and alone....Devoted to her career, she seems never even to have considered marriage, although she had many friends among her fellow students, clients, and colleagues.” Her work was her life.2
Miss Morgan had studied civil engineering at Berkeley (there was, a
t the time, no architecture school there) and then traveled to Paris, where she became the first woman to be accepted by and receive a degree from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. On her return to California, she worked alongside two of the state’s most distinguished architects, Bernard Maybeck and John Galen Howard, the official architect of the Berkeley campus. By the time W. R. engaged her, she was nearing fifty, had done a considerable amount of work for Phoebe, including work at Pleasanton, and had won several important commissions for private homes and public buildings in the Bay Area, on the Berkeley campus, at Mills College in Oakland, and in downtown San Francisco, where she rebuilt the Fairmont Hotel which had been destroyed in the 1906 earthquake.3
Hearst had at first discussed building a “simple” bungalow at San Simeon because he could afford no more. When his mother died in April of 1919, however, everything changed. “I don’t think it was a month,” Steilberg recalled, “before we were going on the grand scale....The general scheme was evolved very soon of a big master house. He wanted that to dominate the group. Then the three...guesthouses.”4
Hearst was, as always, in a hurry. In mid-August 1919, he wrote Morgan from San Simeon where he and the family were spending what they hoped would be their last summer in tents: “Mrs. Hearst anxious to have main building built first as that provides both sleeping rooms and assembly rooms. Would like to see the axes established and the rooms staked out before we leave. Say about middle of September.” The Chief expected the “big master house” in which he planned to live with the family to be finished by the following June—in time for their summer vacation—with the smaller guesthouses completed by the end of 1921. Because the major obstacle to meeting this schedule was going to be moving building materials up the winding, muddy, five-mile wagon road from the foot of the hill to the summit at Camp Hill he set to work at once improving it. “I am having the road bettered,” he wrote Morgan in September on returning to New York, “but we will have difficulty in getting heavy things up the hill in slippery weather. We should get them up now”5
