The Chief

by David Nasaw

  Hearst was preoccupied with moving pictures that summer. When he wasn’t working with Marion on her movie career, he was writing, producing, directing, shooting, and acting in his own home movie at San Simeon. “The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter” starred Millicent as the daughter who was abducted by cowboy villains. W. R. played the hero who rescued her on horseback. The film was a mock Pearl White serial with lots of horseback chasing, a scene of abduction and rescue on the open seas, fires, bombs, villains, and cowboys. His sons ten-year-old John and eleven-year-old Bill, Jr. did the special effects and lit the sulfur flares to make the smoke for one of the explosions, almost asphyxiating themselves in the process. Hearst's guests and ranch hands played the minor roles.

  Millicent, as the damsel in distress, was in almost every scene. Though in her late thirties, with five small children, she looked much younger—athletic, trim, and very much at ease in front of the camera. Hearst, her rescuer, cut a slightly ridiculous figure, too old and overweight to easily play the part he had given himself. The film was a delightful spoof of the cowboy melodramas which were then all the rage, with Hearst's intertitles, in rhyming verse, offering a running tongue-in-cheek commentary on the film and the filmmaker.

  The tense excitement strains

  One's very vitals.

  It takes a lot of brains

  To write these titles....

  The hero has the fattest part

  And gets the greatest glory

  But that's because he runs the ranch

  And also writes the story.

  Dog gone it! I don’t want

  To utter strictures

  Or run down other great

  Directors' pictures

  But Griffith, Ince, and Dwan

  Have never seen

  A thing as good as this

  Flashed on the screen.

  You watch and see

  I’ll bet you will agree

  With me.

  The film ends with Hearst doing a Spanish fandango for his guests, with Millicent looking on. They embrace and kiss.

  He loves the dainty maiden

  And our hero never misses

  An opportunity to greet

  His darling girl with kisses.3

  Looking at this home movie today, it is difficult to believe that all the time he was making it with Millicent as his star, he was stealing away to the south to rendezvous with his mistress. Because he could not bring Marion to San Simeon, dared not meet with her in Los Angeles, and was, according to her biographer Fred Guiles, jealous of the attention she was receiving from younger men in Hollywood, Hearst had rented a large private estate for the two of them in a lemon grove just outside Santa Barbara, halfway between Los Angeles and his ranch. To provide himself with a legitimate reason for spending time in Santa Barbara, he had also rented office space there and even considered building a studio.4

  The year 1920 had been good, though not profitable, for the Hearst film companies. It had cost Hearst a small fortune to construct his own moving-picture studio on the site of the former Sulzer’s Harlem River Park Casino between 126th and 127th Streets on Second Avenue. The space was large enough to shoot two features at once. There was also a spacious wood-paneled office for Hearst—which he rarely occupied—and offices for Urban and assorted Cosmopolitan Productions executives; dressing rooms for Marion and the stars; cubbyholes for the directors; and lots of storage space for the art, antiques, and furniture that Hearst bought at auction and had trucked to the studio to add “class” to his pictures.

  Hearst's team of publicists, including M. R. Werner, a future biographer of William Jennings Bryan, were headquartered at the studio, their appointed task to find or invent items for the daily press and the trade journals. Werner interviewed “actors, actresses, and directors. If their lives were not colorful enough or were too colorful, we had to take liberties with them. We manufactured innocent habits for men who really preferred whiskey to their mothers....We made Alma Rubens a direct descendant of Peter Paul Rubens.” Louella Parsons was not yet on the Hearst payroll, but Marie Manning, who as Beatrice Fairfax wrote a “love and advice” column, the cartoonist Harry Hershfield, the reporter Nellie Bly, and the Hearst papers’ favorite psychologist, Hereward Carrington, visited the studio regularly. “They praised our pictures in words and drawing,” Werner recalled, “and every Hearst paper ran most of the stuff. We were allowed carte blanche. All the Hearst papers in the United States—and there were quite a few of them in those days—had to print practically everything we sent them about Cosmopolitan pictures, and all of them published full-page advertisements day after day during the run of one of our pictures in their towns.”5

  Unfortunately, though unlimited publicity might have helped the Hearst pictures at the box office, it couldn’t guarantee their success. Of the five Cosmopolitan features released in 1920, only one, Humoresque, was a hit. Directed by Frank Borzage with a screenplay by Frances Marion, Humoresque, like almost all of the Hearst films produced that year, was based on a Cosmopolitan story by Fannie Hurst, this one about a Russian-Jewish family on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Alma Rubens, Hearst’s “brunette,” was chosen to play the lead, though Vera Gordon, the veteran of the Yiddish stage who played the “Jewish mama,” stole every scene. The film, designed by Joseph Urban, was a first-class tearjerker, about a poor immigrant boy who, with his mother’s love and encouragement, becomes a brilliant concert violinist, enlists in the Great War, returns wounded, and is nursed back to health—and the concert stage—by his fiancée and his mother. The happy ending was required by Zukor and Hearst. It had not been part of the original story.

  Neither Hearst, who produced the picture, nor Zukor, who distributed it, were particularly enthusiastic about the project. “If you want to show Jews,” Zukor told Frances Marion—or so she claimed, “show Rothschilds, banks and beautiful things. It hurts us Jews—we don’t all live in poor houses.” Despite Zukor’s fears, the film not only was a commercial success but was awarded a 1920 Photoplay Gold Medal that was presented to Hearst, “because,” as the magazine explained, “no picture can be greater than its producer. It takes the producer’s faith, foresightedness, money, and appreciation to make a great picture.”6

  Hearst would have agreed entirely. He had put together the team that made the picture and given the designer Joseph Urban carte blanche to spend whatever he wanted on it. Urban brought an operatic sumptuousness to the three-dimensional sets he built for Hearst’s cavernous studio on Second Avenue. He had quickly become, as Hearst had expected when he hired him, the most important man on the set and in the Cosmopolitan studios in New York. He was now doing not only the set design, but the lighting, costuming, and makeup as well. When he refused to make another film with Alma Rubens because he found her difficult to work with, no doubt because she was already under the influence of the heroin that would kill her, Hearst removed her from the picture she was scheduled to shoot. She remained on the payroll, however, fueling unsubstantiated and untrue rumors that Hearst continued to support her because he had had an affair with her. He refused to fire her because, as he wrote Joseph Moore, he had already “put a lot of advertising behind her and helped create her with our audiences.” It was not “easy to get good leading women....Remember we must have the right type, not blonde or ingenue but good looking, dignified and sufficiently good actress.”7

  Although Urban got his way in the Alma Rubens matter, he was never entirely comfortable working for a man who was always watching over his shoulder, often from the balcony above the studio floor. While Hearst seldom interrupted rehearsals or filming, he reviewed rushes, demanded that the director’s print be sent to him for approval, and freely made suggestions for casting, design, costuming, and filming. In May 1921, when Hearst proposed a number of retakes on Enchantment —in which Marion played a flapper in an updated version of The Taming of the Shrew —Urban, exhausted, refused.

  “I am very sorry that you are tired, and I know that you must be,” He
arst wrote Urban after this standoff. “You work very hard; in fact you have overworked, and we all realize that....You ought to take a good vacation ... It is well for you to have your nerves in first class condition because this is certainly a trying business. However, my policy is to go smiling through all kinds of difficulties and you must adopt the same policy both for your own sake and for the sake of the institution....You know I have as much personal interest in the success of these pictures as anybody connected with them. I feel as deeply the necessity for making them popular successes as anyone can.”8

  To make further amends and to provide Urban with the vacation he badly needed, W. R. invited him and his daughter, Gretl, to join Marion, her mother and sister, and an entourage of film people for an extended cruise on the 205-foot Oneida. While he told his guests that they were sailing only as far as Baltimore and would return at the end of the weekend, he had planned an extravaganza of Hearstian proportions. When, at cocktails on Sunday afternoon, Urban casually remarked that instead of heading home for the work week, they appeared to be sailing in the wrong direction, W. R. “gave one of his rare toothy grins and said: ‘Surprise, surprise! The weather’s ideal for a nice sea voyage. I have decided we’re all going to Mexico.'”

  Because none of his guests had been prepared for a long cruise, Hearst had the captain dock the boat at New Orleans, where he treated them to a shopping spree. Though W. R. spent a good deal of the trip going through the great mass of papers he had brought aboard, he was an energetic host and wanted his guests to see everything. In Galveston, Texas, the party disembarked from the Oneida and boarded a private railroad car for the six-hour trip to San Antonio and then south into Mexico. At Tampico, Mexico, they rejoined the Oneida, which had been sent on ahead, and sailed south to Veracruz, where they boarded another train to Mexico City. In no apparent hurry to get back to New York, Hearst personally escorted his guests through every small Mexican village along the route. Only Marion was left behind during each of these expeditions, “for fear of gossip even when we went to stretch our legs in some godforsaken tiny hamlet,” Gretl Urban recalled in her unpublished reminiscences. “In those days Marion was kept under wraps, albeit rather elaborate ones.” After visiting Mexico City, the party returned north to Galveston where the yacht was waiting for them. Anxious to get back to his wife, Urban took the train to New York.9

  The first direct evidence we have that Millicent knew about her husband’s relationship to Davies is from the fall of 1921, only months after their yacht cruise to Mexico. Hearst had stayed behind in San Simeon in the summer of 1921, after Millicent and the boys returned to New York. In November, he traveled to Mexico to inspect his Babicora ranchlands. While there, he received a telegram from Joseph Moore with a query from Millicent about the newspaper advertising for Enchantment, Marion’s new film, which Millicent thought excessive for a film which hadn’t yet opened. Hearst telegrammed back asking Moore to explain to Millicent that the prerelease advertisements had been necessary “to comply with Paramount requirements and to give any picture chance for success.” He hoped that Millicent would understand this. He wanted her “to be satisfied.”10

  She was not. Five days later, Moore reported to the Chief that Millicent had insisted “all advertising be distinctly on picture and not on star.” Hearst responded calmly that he could not permit that. If the Hearst papers in New York ran advertisements that were different from those placed in other publications, it “would cause unpleasant comment in scandal sheets.”11

  Two weeks later, Hearst discovered that the advertisement of Enchantment that had appeared in his New York papers had omitted any mention of the star, as Millicent had demanded. He was furious. “This is ridiculous and wrong,” he telegrammed Moore in New York. “I thought I made clear that advertisement in our papers were to be the same as in other papers’ advertising. Star and photoplay as usual. Has this been done or not? Please promptly proceed to do so now. I cannot allow anybody to run my business but myself. I do not care what the results may be. I intend to manage my own affairs my way. Run all advertising now and hereafter exactly as when I prepared it.” By return mail, Moore defended himself by explaining that the Enchantment ads had been altered only in the New York papers and only because “of your telegram to the effect you wanted Millicent to be satisfied.”12

  From California, where Hearst returned from his Mexican trip in mid-November, he wrote Moore what he must have hoped would be his final letter on the subject of Millicent’s demands and Marion’s advertising. This time, his tone was conciliatory, almost apologetic. He had made a mistake in trying to placate his wife: “I am very sorry I interfered ... but I wanted to please and I thought success would not be needlessly impaired. I was wrong. Advertising was utterly emasculated. It is obvious that outside matters cannot be allowed to interfere with business or else our business will be ruined....Hereafter go right ahead on purely business basis doing what is best for the pictures and allowing no interference from anyone. This telegram is your authority which you can use as required. Can you come west and talk important matters over with me? Perhaps we can go east together.”13

  While Hearst’s tone in this letter is almost confessional, his use of the word “emasculated” to describe what had happened to his advertising is telling, as is his insistence that his promotion of Davies was based on purely business concerns. He was not, he tried to convince Moore as he had convinced himself, promoting Marion because she was his mistress, but because she was his star.

  W. R. was reunited with his family in December of 1921, when he returned East, after a six-month absence, to spend Christmas with his family. He and Millicent were already leading almost entirely separate lives. She had plenty to do in his absence. Millicent Hearst not only ran a household of five children and dozens of servants in one of the largest private apartments in New York, she had also embarked on a career of her own in society. During the war, she had taken a prominent role in several charities. She served as chair of the Mayor’s Committee of Women on National Defense. She organized a campaign to secure a better designed and equipped “soldiers kit” for the boys in the trenches and was a founding member of the Free Milk Fund for Babies. She played a large role in arranging a victory celebration for soldiers returning from Europe, and raised funds for an orthopedic hospital clinic in Brooklyn that treated wounded veterans. While Hearst’s reputation during the war was under siege, Millicent’s only improved. The former chorus-line dancer and daughter of a vaudeville hoofer had not only become more reputable than her husband, but her standing as a philanthropist had grown to the point that in the summer of 1921 and again in 1923, her name would be floated as a possible candidate for a seat in Congress.14

  It may well have been during the 1922 Christmas holidays that Bill, Jr. witnessed one of the few scenes of open marital discord in the Hearst household. Millicent, Bill, Jr. recalled in his memoirs, confronted W. R. “with the fact that she knew he was seeing another woman. Mother was very upset and my father tried to calm her. Suddenly she took off her wedding band and threw it on the floor, declaring, ‘If this is all you think of our marriage, keep it!’ She stomped out of the room and remained secluded for several days. When Mom returned, she was wearing her ring. She and Pop pretended the incident never took place, but apparently he never forgot it.”15

  Perhaps to compensate Millicent for the pain he was causing and to demonstrate his commitment to the family, Hearst consulted with her regularly in planning their family vacation home at San Simeon. In the months to come, Hearst’s letters to Julia Morgan were filled with references to Millicent’s wishes. There was no area of design, landscaping, or construction in which Millicent did not feel competent to make suggestions. In March of 1922, she asked that Miss Morgan add a billiard room for the boys. In late August, she complained that there was “not apparently adequate steel reinforcement of big building.” In September, she demanded—and her husband agreed—that the guesthouses be redesigned and rebuilt so that each bedroom had a
bathroom of its own.16

  At the same time that they were designing their vacation home in California, W. R. and Millicent were embarking on a renovation of their Clarendon apartment so immense that it would take two full years to complete. Whatever had been said—or left unsaid—about their marriage, it appears that they decided to proceed as if Miss Davies did not exist.17

  Hearst had embarked on two extraordinarily costly ventures—building San Simeon and the Cosmopolitan studios—at the worst possible time. The economy was in turmoil, buffeted by a severe postwar depression and a succession of strikes that involved over four million workers—one-fifth of the industrial workforce. For newspaper publishers, the economic downturn was exacerbated by the precipitous end of wartime price controls and the resulting threefold increase in the price of newsprint between 1916 and 1921. The effect on the Hearst papers, the nation’s leading purchaser of newsprint, was, Joseph Moore telegrammed the Chief in April of 1920, severe enough to threaten “the very existence of our newspapers.”18

  While Moore warned that “the financial situation of your various Companies is in an alarmingly serious condition,” the Chief went blithely on, spending money like water. According to Gene Fowler, who worked as a reporter for the Hearst papers through the 1920s, “Mr. Hearst had less regard for money, as such, than anyone else of his financial size. Arthur Brisbane once said that his chief was the only man he ever knew who could not get along on less than ten million dollars a year.”19

  Though already the proud owner of the Oneida, the Chief directed Lawrence O’Reilly in May of 1921 to look into buying him “a sea-going steamer ... or a passenger steamer or even a freight steamer ... preferably an oil-burner or boat with Diesel engines.” When he learned that publisher Frank Munsey had bought a “castle” in Germany, he directed his chief correspondent in Germany, Karl von Wiegand, to find a “really fine castle” for him in Bavaria, the Tyrol, or Austria, this at the very same time he was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars annually constructing his castle at San Simeon.20