by David Nasaw
Hearst tried to maintain his nonadversarial, nonpartisan posture even when in the summer of 1925 Al Smith and Tammany took revenge on him by running James J. Walker, a Tammany loyalist, in the mayoral primary against his protégé, Mayor John Hylan. From San Simeon, the Chief directed his New York editors to run Hylan’s campaign, but without making it “bitter and antagonizing. We may ridicule Walker a little at times if he makes absurd statements but don’t lose our temper. Keep cool like Coolidge and win like Coolidge.”18
Smith and Tammany accused Hylan of being Hearst’s puppet and attacked Hearst as a California immoralist and interloper who spent his days “loafing in the splendor and grandeur of his palatial estate on the Pacific Coast.” Hearst, unable to resist the call to battle, let loose a polemic as explosively effective as any he had written in his youth: “The distinguished Governor of the great State of New York has taken three days laboriously to prepare a vulgar tirade that any resident of Billingsgate, or any occupant of the alcoholic ward in Bellevue could have written in fifteen minutes in quite the same style, but with more evidence of education and intelligence. The Wall Street friends of Governor Smith have enabled him to remove his domicile and his refined person from the neighborhood of the Bowery, but he still reverts in manner of thought and of expression to the familiar localities of Five Points and Hell’s Kitchen, if this may be said without undue offense to these historical localities.”19
None of this, unfortunately, did Hylan much good. He was defeated by Walker in the primary by well over 100,000 votes. In a front-page signed editorial published the day after the primary, Hearst urged Hylan to continue the fight against Tammany by running for mayor as a third-party, reform candidate. Privately, he said in a telegram to Joseph Moore that it was time now for Hylan to “retire from politics.”20
George Hearst circa 1860, when he returned from California to Missouri and married Phoebe Apperson (Courtesy, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley)
Phoebe Hearst in her wedding dress, 1862 (Courtesy, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley)
George Hearst in the late 1880s, when he served as a U.S. senator from California (Courtesy, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley)
Phoebe Hearst at age seventy-three, marching in the San Francisco Preparedness Parade, July 1916 (Courtesy, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley)
William Randolph Hearst as a young boy (Courtesy, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley)
and as a teenager (Copyright © Hearst Castle™/Hearst San Simeon State Historical Monument™)
With a friend (left) at Harvard College (Courtesy, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley)
and in his middle twenties (San Francisco Examiner)
Phoebe and Will at Phoebe’s Hacienda, in Pleasanton, California (Special Collections, California Polytechnic State University)
William Randolph Hearst and Millicent Hearst in the wedding picture published in the Hearst newspapers on April 29, 1903 (Culver Pictures, Inc.)
Millicent and Hearst with their sons George (standing), Bill, Jr. (seated), and John Randolph (in Millicent's arms), in late 1910 (San Francisco Examiner)
The Chief in his middle forties
(Courtesy, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley)
On the reviewing stand with New York dignitaries to welcome American soldiers returning from Europe, March 26, 1919. From left to right: Governor Al Smith; Mayor John F. Hylan; Hearst; Timothy Woodruff, a prominent local Republican; and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt. (Granger Collection, New York)
With Bill, Jr., Millicent, and John, leaving New York for Europe on board the Aquitania, May 1922 (Culver Pictures, Inc.)
A family portrait from the mid-1920s, when Hearst began spending most of his time on the West Coast. The twins, standing in front, were born in December 1915. (Copyright © Hearst Castle™/Hearst San Simeon State Historical Monument™ )
Hearst with Julia Morgan, his San Simeon architect, 1926
(Marc Wanamaker/Bison Archives)
Casa del Monte, or B house at San Simeon, where Hearst and his family stayed during the summers of 1921 and 1922 (Marc Wanamaker/Bison Archives)
“La Cuesta Encantada” at San Simeon, circa January 1948
(Copyright © Hearst Castle™/Hearst San Simeon State Historical Monument™)
St. Donat's, Hearst's castle in Wales, purchased in 1925
(San Francisco Examiner)
Hearst occasionally opened the grounds, including the pool, to the public
(San Francisco Examiner)
Ocean House, the estate in Santa Monica that Hearst bought for Marion Davies in 1926 (Copyright © Hearst Castle™/Hearst San Simeon State Historical Monument™)
Beacon Towers, or the Belmont House, in 1917–18. Hearst bought this home in Sands Point, Long Island, for Millicent in late 1927. (Suffolk County Vanderbilt Museum)
Cinderella House at Wyntoon, Hearst's estate in northern California (Kimberly Lake)
W. R. and Millicent Hearst at a costume ball at the Ritz in New York City, April 28,1927 (San Francisco Examiner)
Hearst with Winston Churchill, who was visiting him at the time, and Louis B. Mayer, on the MGM lot, September 1929
(Marc Wanamaker/Bison Archives)
Giving a radio address on “Painful and Painless Taxation," June 3, 1932
(Marc Wanamaker/Bison Archives)
Hearst, Marion Davies, and Charlie Chaplin at a charity event at the Olympic Stadium in Los Angeles, 1932 (Bob Board Collection)
The Refectory at San Simeon in the mid-1930s. Marion’s empty chair, pulled out on the left, is across the table from Hearst. (Copyright © Hearst Castle™/Hearst San Simeon State Historical Monument™)
Charlie Chaplin and Marion, holding her dachshund, in the San Simeon movie theater, 1933 (Courtesy, Kobal Collection)
Hearst and Marion enjoying a stein of beer during their 1934 stay in Germany. The woman between them is probably Eileen Percy, a friend of Marion’s. (Courtesy, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)
Hearst and Marion at San Simeon (Bob Board Collection)
and at a Western masquerade party, 1933 or 1934 (Bob Board Collection)
Hearst and Marion at Wyntoon, 1935 (Copyright © Hearst Castle™/Hearst San Simeon State Historical Monument™)
The Chief with one of his dachshunds (Copyright © Hearst Castle™ Hearst San Simeon State Historical Monument™)
Cutting the cake at the “circus” birthday party at Ocean House, 1937. Hearst is gazing across the room at Marion, in profile. (Kimberly Lake)
Hedda Hopper and Hearst, dressed as James Madison, at his seventyfifth birthday party, 1938 (Courtesy, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)
Hearst, Millicent, and their five boys at their last reunion at San Simeon, 1938 (Courtesy, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley)
Hearst and Marion at San Simeon in the mid-1940s (Kimberly Lake)
William Randolph Hearst, his son Bill, Jr., and his grandson, William Randolph Hearst III, just before Hearst’s death, 1951
(Courtesy, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley)
Millicent Hearst, followed by George, Bill, Jr., John, Randolph, and David, leaving Grace Episcopal Cathedral after Hearst’s funeral, August 15, 195l
(San Francisco Examiner)
Outside Grace Cathedral (San Francisco Examiner)
VI. The King and Queen of Hollywood
21. “Do You Know Miss Marion Davies, the Movie Actress?”
THE RULES OF CELEBRITY JOURNALISM in the 1920s were not the same as they are now. Publishers of daily newspapers maintained a gentlemanly pact to keep stories of illicit sexual relationships out of their pages, unless they hit the courts. Divorce trials and crime news therefore received extensive coverage. Once a scandal reached the police blotter or the courtroom, publishers could write about it without the fear of libel suits.
W. R. had been with Marion for almost a decade and their names had only once appeared in print together—in a brief item in Colonel Mann’s Town Topics. Now that Hearst’s mother was dead and his political career on hold, he had no reason to fear adverse publicity. He had already been accused of every imaginable crime, including treason. Still, if he cared little about his own reputation, he was determined to protect Millicent’s and Marion’s.
On July 23,1924, William J. Fallon, the flamboyant Broadway lawyer whose clients included Nicky Arnstein and Arnold Rothstein, went on trial for fixing the jury that had acquitted the stock swindlers Edward Markle Fuller and William Frank McGee. Fuller and McGee had been protected by Tammany and Big Tom Foley, who had received substantial kickbacks for their efforts. The evidence against all of them was so overwhelming that Victor Watson, the editor of Hearst’s New York American, was convinced the juries had been tampered with and put his top investigative reporter, Nat Ferber, on the case. After a great deal of digging, Ferber turned up a former associate of Fallon’s, three-hundred-pound Eddie Eidlitz, who agreed to testify that Fallon had fixed the juries. To make sure that Eidlitz didn’t change his story, Watson had him sequestered—at Hearst’s expense—in a Brooklyn hotel, where he was wined, dined, and visited regularly by his girlfriend. Fallon went into hiding. When discovered, he said he had secret information on Hearst’s private life and that he had fled because Hearst and Watson were out to get him.1
The Fallon trial was too big a story to ignore. Every paper sent its top reporters to the courthouse. On July 23, the attorney representing Fallon opened the proceedings by asking prospective jurors if they knew William Randolph Hearst or “Miss Marion Davies, the motion picture actress.” According to the front-page story in that day’s late edition of the Daily News, when the prosecuting attorney objected that the question about Miss Davies was irrelevant, the presiding judge had it stricken from the record, but not before every court reporter in the city had jotted it down on his pad.2
By the time Fallon took the stand in his own defense, his trial had become the hottest show in town. The New York Herald reported in its page one story on August 7,1924, that Fallon “faced the jury” from the witness stand and “calmly related an amazing story of organized persecution and intrigue, intended, he said, to bring about his ultimate ruin.... Fallon testified that William Randolph Hearst, multi-millionaire publisher, had ordered his destruction ‘at all costs’ after learning that Fallon possessed the birth certificates of a motion picture actress’s children.”3
Hearst had become a victim of the methods he had employed to boost circulation in his newspapers. Daily newspapers loved trials because they provided an ongoing storyline that almost always led to an eventful climax—the verdict. Through the early twentieth century, press coverage had consisted in large part of verbatim transcripts of testimony. Hearst had helped to reconfigure the trial story into a more reader-friendly and headlinegrabbing format. The trial narratives he presented on his front pages were plotted as melodramas with little men and women struggling against big, bad, and always corrupt officialdom.
While the Hearst newspapers tried to place Fallon in the role of villain, the attorney brilliantly turned the tables and, from the witness stand, convinced the jury that he was the injured victim and Hearst the villain. In the end, Fallon was acquitted of all charges. Although Fallon testified in court that he had in his possession the “birth certificates” of twins born to Hearst and an unnamed moving-picture actress, he never produced them. Still, the rumors that Marion had given birth to a set of twins fathered by Hearst would remain in currency for the rest of their lives. No birth certificates were ever found nor were witnesses to any birth ever produced. Had these twins been born, it was inconceivable that Marion and W. R. would have abandoned them or hidden them away. According to Marion’s closest friends, she would have readily given up movie stardom to raise Hearst’s children. As Evelyn Wells, who knew both Marion and W. R. personally, told William Swanberg, “Believe me, if Marion had one child by Hearst, she’d have worn it around her neck.”4
Marion may have gotten pregnant at some time during her long liaison with Hearst, but if that were the case, the probable outcome would have been an abortion, the preferred solution for unwanted pregnancies in Hollywood. Alice Marble, the great tennis champion who visited often at San Simeon in the 1930s, recalled in her oral history that when Marion and her friends hid away in Marion’s dressing room where the women gathered to drink in secret, they would talk about their abortions. Fred Guiles, Marion’s biographer, thinks it quite probable that she had several abortions. That at least was the impression she gave a member of her family who, desperate to help out a friend who had “gotten a girl into trouble,” asked Marion for advice. “Marion lightly told her relative to give the name of Dr. So-and-So. ‘He took care of all of mine,’ she said, and she wasn’t laughing.” The story rings true, but Guiles followed it with the reminder that “Marion was a cool lady with a joke, and after a few martinis she often would say just about anything good for a laugh or a shock.”5
To ride out the storm which Hearst knew would accompany Fallon’s testimony, he moved Millicent to San Simeon, and Marion to a rented mansion on Bedford Drive in Beverly Hills. He was worried about Marion’s career. There was little tolerance in 1924 for movie stars who brought adverse publicity to the industry. Hollywood had still not recovered from the scandal that had erupted only a few years earlier when the starlet Virginia Rappe was found dead of a ruptured bladder after a night of sex and booze at Fatty Arbuckle’s hotel suite in San Francisco. Only months after the Arbuckle scandal, the industry had been rocked again when director William Desmond Taylor, who was having simultaneous affairs with the actresses Mabel Normand and Mary Miles Minter, was found shot to death in his Hollywood mansion.
Because of Fallon’s testimony, Marion’s name and photograph were splashed across the pages of non-Hearst papers all over the country. Reporters camped out at her Beverly Hills home hoping for an interview. Joseph Urban, who was at the time in Hollywood, wrote his wife in Yonkers that the Fallon case had become the talk of the dinner parties.
According to Fred Guiles, Hearst, “sick with apprehension, on an impulse sent off a letter to Marion, written on the cheap, yellow-lined pad he so often used for memos, telling her that he had decided to go out of moving pictures. His reasons were, he said, that the work was too hard and the compensation too little.” Marion, he claimed, would do better without him. Throwing caution to the winds, Marion called him at San Simeon to beg him to reconsider. If he retired from moving pictures, she would too. She had, she reminded him, only become a movie star to please him. Hearst wrote back that if Marion wanted him to, he would continue to produce her moving pictures. He cautioned her, however, to keep a low profile until the uproar over the Fallon trial subsided.6
Still worried about the fallout from Fallon’s testimony, Hearst kept Marion on the West Coast through the fall and into the winter. When Millicent and the boys left for New York at the end of the summer, he stayed behind at San Simeon. With Marion nearby, his private secretary Willicombe at his side, and telephone and cable access to Neylan in San Francisco, Moore in New York, and his publishers and editors across the country, there was no need for him to return to New York to conduct business.
This was not the first time he had lingered on the West Coast after Millicent had taken the train east with the boys. In past years, he had returned to New York by November, Christmas at the latest, but in 1924 he remained in California through the autumn, winter, and into the spring, commuting back and forth from San Simeon to the suites of rooms he kept on permanent lease at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles and the Palace in San Francisco.
Because San Simeon was the family’s vacation home, Hearst did not permit Marion to visit him there during the nine months he lived in California in 1924 and 1925. Instead, he bought her a white stucco mansion at 1700 Lexington Road in Beverly Hills. To protect them both from pr
owling journalists, the deed was in the name of Mrs. Rose Douras, Marion’s mother, who had moved with her to California.
With her mother and sisters still acting as chaperones, Marion settled into her new mansion. “That’s where we had the most fun,” she recalled in her memoirs. “Mr. Hearst stayed there too.” Though the mansion was more than spacious, Hearst hired a crew of carpenters and masons to attach a ballroom to it. When Joseph Urban arrived in Hollywood in the fall of 1924, Hearst hosted a “wonderful welcome party” for him at Marion’s new house. Urban wrote to his wife that the guests included Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and director Tom Ince. It hadn’t taken long at all for Marion and W. R. to establish themselves in their new community.7
