The Chief

by David Nasaw

  Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., who was a regular guest at San Simeon, avoided these outings: “I was told that the discipline of the horseback riding was such that you always had to keep behind Mr. Hearst, that you could never ride on your own particularly. It was like a military parade, and I wasn’t of the temperament that would take that. I had books to read, and there was water polo, in the pool.”17

  One of the few inviolable rules at San Simeon was that all the guests had to appear for cocktails at 7 P.M. in the Assembly Room. “The women wore dinner dresses, but the men did not wear dinner coats,” Adela Rogers St. Johns recalled. “An awful lot of the men came in a hurry—they were actors and directors and big publishers. They didn’t always have time to drag their dinner coats along. So that nobody who was traveling would ever be embarrassed, the men never saw Mr. Hearst in a dinner coat.”18

  While the guests awaited the arrival of their host and hostess, they drank their cocktails—no more than two per guest—did jigsaw puzzles, or chatted quietly. According to Merryle Rukeyser, the financial editor for the Hearst papers, one never knew when Hearst might appear: “Sometimes it would be nine, sometimes nine-fifteen, sometimes nine-thirty. In other words, if there was a calamity in New York, and he was on the phone, he wouldn’t say, ‘I can’t talk to you, dinner’s served.’”19

  When the time came, the Chief and Marion would appear, god-like, from the wood paneling in the Assembly Room that concealed the entrance to their elevator. They entered the room together, then separated, each seeking out different guests or greeting newcomers. Though Hearst was unfailingly courteous, he did not easily suffer fools. If his guests had nothing to say or were pompous, he discreetly moved on. Gretchen Swinnerton, the wife of Jimmy Swinnerton, Hearst’s old friend and a cartoonist from the early San Francisco days, remembered one evening when “the Carters, who owned Little Carter’s Liver Pills, came up, and the old man drove W. R. nuts, practically. He was just a fuddy-duddy.... Mr. Hearst just didn’t care for Carter’s Liver Pills, I don’t think. He wanted someone that he could talk to, who was more interesting on different subjects and things.”20

  Hearst remained in close contact with his eastern editors during cocktail hour and dinner. The “hotline” telephone in the Assembly Room, Adela Rogers St. Johns remembered, never stopped ringing. “The American would be beginning to go to bed, all morning papers would be approaching deadline, and whatever news would be breaking, and whatever decisions needed to be made about what to do, they would come through the phone to him, at that time.”21

  After cocktails, Hearst ushered his guests into the Refectory for dinner. It was Marion’s job to arrange the place cards for the meal, but Hearst always changed them around. He and Marion sat facing one another in the middle of the long table, with their favored guests alongside them. “The longer you are there, the further you get from the middle,” P. G. Wodehouse wrote a friend after his visit to the ranch. “I sat on Marion’s right the first night, then found myself being edged further and further away till I got to the extreme end, when I thought it time to leave. Another day, and I should have been feeding on the floor.”22

  Although fine wines were always served at dinner, the waiters and the head butler, Albert, were instructed to watch carefully for signs of overindulgence. “If you gulped it down, four or five drinks at a time,” Rogers St. Johns said, “you didn’t get anymore. Albert had a weather eye, because if something went amiss Mr. Hearst would be very cross with him.”23

  The main course was generally red meat or fowl. “Poultry raised at the ranch included chickens, turkeys, pheasants, quail, guinea hens, partridges, geese and ducks. Hearst’s favorite dish was pressed duck, cooked very rare and squeezed in a silver press.” Much of what was eaten at the ranch was raised there, including all the vegetables and “nuts, oranges, lemons, grapefruit, tangerines, pears, apples, apricots, plums, peaches, nectarines, figs, and avocados. The estate also raised its own berries, persimmons, and kumquats.” Hearst also received regular shipments of delicacies from San Francisco and Los Angeles, including lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, “Debeukelaer Cookies Mayfair Brand,” which must have been a favorite as they were ordered often, and pounds of sausages, calf’s liver, and sweetbreads. Willicombe regularly telegrammed an assistant in Los Angeles who telephoned the orders to Young’s Market. The December 20, 1939, order, which Willicombe wanted sent out that evening, included “Xmas table decorations for 30 persons, 3 jars of anchovies, 24 crumpets, 6 pounds of prepared meats, 18 enchiladas, 12 tamales, 36 tortillas, 12 jumbo squabs, and 8 pieces of smoked Alaska cod, a brick of Kraft Old English, and a round of Roquefort.”24

  The food was prepared in a full-sized hotel-style kitchen, with a giant pressure cooker, a stockpot capable of making soup for sixty, three bread ovens, four regular ovens, a rotisserie, a griddle, a five-gallon ice cream freezer, a walk-in refrigerator to age meats from the cattle slaughtered on the ranch, and four walk-in vegetable coolers. The vegetables were topped with a simple Hollandaise sauce, the meat roasted or broiled and always served rare. “Hearst used to give me hell because I didn’t like my meat raw,” St. Johns remembered. “Roast beef, according to him, should be bright red, or you shouldn’t eat it, and he used to scold me. I don’t think I ever really sassed him back, but we had duck, and it was dripping. I said to him, ‘This duck is going to walk right off your plate if you don’t look out!’ He said, ‘Well that is the only way that it really tastes good.’ And then he’d pour bottles of everything on God’s earth on everything he ate!”25

  Directly before and after dinner, there were games at the table and informal entertainments. “We played this game of ‘who are they,’ which was naming the initials, you did not have to say man or woman, of the silent movie stars,” Alice Marble recalled. “And so we would go on all evening. This was a great dinner conversation thing, because all of these people were silent movie stars.... Everybody would have to get up and entertain. Mr. Hearst could yodel very well indeed. He always had his turn, and somebody told stories. Charlie Chaplin played his left-handed violin.”26

  The evening invariably concluded with Hearst and Marion leading their guests into the private theater for that evening’s prerelease feature film that had been chauffeured up in the afternoon from Los Angeles and would be sent back on the midnight train from San Luis Obispo. There were fifty seats in the theater—with room for chairs in the rear for the help who came into the theater when they finished their work. Hearst and Marion sat up front. If the film was impossibly dull, Hearst, who had a direct line to the projectionist, would order up one of Marion’s films, all of which were kept on hand.

  Most of the guests retired after the film, though some played billiards or gathered in their sitting rooms to talk. Hearst went back to work. By the mid-1930s, he had centralized his work space in his Gothic Study on the third floor, where he worked at a library table under an arched ceiling, surrounded by almost 4,000 books, many of them first editions. It was here that he read his mail, looked over the day’s newspapers, studied his catalogues, and dictated hundreds of telegrams: to MacGregor at the Bronx warehouse, his art dealers and agents, real-estate offices, newspaper publishers, magazine editors, political operatives and allies, movie executives, and his wife and children, wherever they might be.

  Hearst’s younger guests took his departure in his elevator as the signal they were waiting for to let loose. “When the cat was away the mice began to play and the young indulged in all sorts of harmless pursuits,” David Niven recalled in his autobiography. “W. R. knew everything that went on and sometimes damage was extensive but nothing was said provided none of the three cardinal rules were broken—‘No drunkenness,’ ‘No bad language or off-color jokes,’ and, above all, ‘No sexual intercourse between unmarried couples.’ This last was a strange piece of puritanism from a man living openly with his mistress, but it was rigorously enforced.”27

  Though Niven spent an evening at the ranch trying to find the “bedchamber” of the “
very beautiful girl” who had driven up with him from Los Angeles, he was never caught and was invited back several times after this incident. Eleanor Boardman, one of Marion’s closest friends, had no such luck. In her unpublished oral history of life at San Simeon, Adela Rogers St. Johns recalled the day when Marion “said to Eleanor Boardman and Harry D’Arrast [the film director whom Eleanor would later marry] ‘You two have been misbehaving!’ Well, they had been living together for some time. ‘You have to go! I’ll have the car here for you at five o’clock.’ Then Eleanor Boardman turned to her and said, ‘Look who’s talking!’ Marion said, ‘If Mr. Hearst and I could marry, we would. That’s the difference!’”28

  The Chief tried to restrain his guests from drinking at the ranch. “He wasn’t keen about people getting drunk and noisy,” his son Bill, Jr. recalled. “If they made a scene of themselves in any way and if they were new, they wouldn’t come again. There was a superstition, almost, that if they got stewed, let’s say, or disgraced themselves that the next morning or that night when they returned to their room they’d find their bags packed, you know, which was the broad hint that they should leave the next day....It was a running gag that you’d better watch yourself or you’d find your bags packed when you got back.”29

  Marion had been a heavy drinker since her teenage years in New York and, as she aged, found it harder and harder to hold her liquor. W. R. may have tried to limit her drinking by restricting that of his guests, but he failed—on both counts. Her friends and sisters, many of them heavy drinkers themselves, were expected to repay her hospitality by supplying her with liquor. “The smuggling of liquor became our daily pastime ... It was fraught with suspense in which we used to dramatize W. R. as a spine-tingling bugaboo,” Anita Loos recalled in her memoirs. “As soon as any houseguests arrived, a servant was waiting to unpack the luggage; bottles were confiscated, not to be returned until one’s departure. But a well-placed bribe generally overcame that debacle.”30

  “There was one heartstopping occasion,” David Niven wrote in his autobiography, when Marion “opened her handbag upside-down during dinner and after a loud crash of broken glass, the unmistakable smell of Booth’s gin rose from the stone floor...‘My new perfume,’ she giggled nervously at W. R. He smiled indulgently across the table but the hurt and the fear were in his blue eyes.”31

  Hearst knew what was going on, but the most powerful publisher in the world was powerless when it came to saving the woman he loved. “When the drinking had got bad,” Adela Rogers St. Johns remembered, “he used to have to watch her pretty closely ... Marion, whom I adored, was an alcoholic. And we all knew it, and we all did our best about it. Like all alcoholics, she would go along quietly for some time and then suddenly this would all break loose. It was a great shame, it really was.”32

  Hearst played many roles in Hollywood, but the most peculiar perhaps was as its self-appointed moral watchdog. Though Hearst had spent his life opposing any form of press censorship, he had become an unrelenting critic of what he called “suggestive ... and ultra-sex films.” In June of 1933 and then again in October and the following July, he published signed editorials on the “demoralizing” effects of “sex pictures and crime pictures” on the American population; this at the same time that he was protesting any attempt by censors or the Hays Office to interfere with his own films.33

  He was particularly outraged by the way film producers represented newspaper publishers and reporters on screen. In 1931, Warner Brothers released Five Star Final, with Edward G. Robinson playing an unscrupulous evening tabloid editor whose sensational exposés lead to tragedy. The Chief, who may well have seen the film as a direct assault on his papers’ practices, directed a multidimensional attack that was so intense and effective that Variety commented on it at length in successive issues in November 1931. He was incensed, he wrote Jack Warner, with the “constant attacks upon the newspaper fraternity in films which portray reporters as drunkards and editors as unscrupulous rascals,” especially at a time when the studios were importuning newspaper editors to support their campaign against censorship. Five Star Final was given negative reviews in all the Hearst papers, and local editors, including Walter Howey in Boston, were deputized to call on their city officials and ask them to remove the film from the theaters. So powerful was the Hearst attack that two similar antipress films in production were shelved.34

  According to Colleen Moore, Hearst’s power in the film community made him “as much of a legendary figure in Hollywood as D. W. Griffith. Although Mr. Hearst was a mild, even-tempered and congenial man, everyone was scared to death of him. He could even cow Louis B. Mayer, and that took some doing.”35

  He was not averse to using that power to help his and Marion’s favorites. When Marion found out that Joel McCrea’s option was not being picked up at MGM, she told Hearst about it. According to McCrea, Hearst appeared totally uninterested in the news. The next morning McCrea, who was at San Simeon, was handed a Western Union telegram directing him to return to Hollywood to see Louis B. Mayer at his office at MGM. At their meeting, Mayer blamed Thalberg for not re-signing McCrea and offered him a new contract with a $250 a week raise. “He stood up, came over and shook hands and said, ‘You’re an all-American boy.’” Later that day, McCrea was shown a carbon copy of the telegram that had changed Mayer’s mind: “Dear Louis: I understand you just dropped an all-American boy named Joel McCrea. In my business ... we never signed anyone under contract unless we thought they had possibilities. And we never let them go until we explored and found whether they did or not. Joel McCrea has never had a chance.” It was signed William Randolph Hearst.36

  Hearst had a soft spot for all-American, all-California cowboy types like McCrea. According to more than one San Simeon informant, after hearing Roy Rogers perform with the Sons of Pioneers at San Simeon, he decided that Roy, too, should be in movies.37

  The Chief’s primary energies in Hollywood were, as always, devoted to Marion. The most popular starring vehicles in the early 1930s for actresses of Marion’s age, especially at MGM, were what the Motion Picture Herald referred to as “sin and succeed” pictures. The innocent childlike stars of the Mary Pickford silent era had been replaced by exotic sirens like Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich, and homegrown bombshells like Mae West and Jean Harlow. Even Norma Shearer, Mrs. Irving Thalberg, had graduated—if that is the right word—to adult “fallen women” dramas like The Divorcee, for which she won an Academy Award, and A Free Soul, in which she played Clark Gable’s mistress. If Davies were to continue developing as an actress, she too would have to leap into roles which, in Molly Haskell’s words, displayed her sexuality “front and center.”38

  Irving Thalberg, who had faith in Marion’s versatility as an actress, believed that she could make the necessary transition and proposed that her next film be based on a Fannie Hurst story about a dime-store heiress who bore a striking resemblance to Barbara Hutton. Hearst reluctantly agreed, if only because he trusted Thalberg’s taste and Fannie Hurst’s stories. He changed his mind as soon as he read the script. “I do not think I made myself clear about Five and Ten,” he wrote Louis Mayer in March of 1931. “I think Marion has great qualities as a comedienne and a character actress. I do not think she has any special qualities as a sex or sophisticated actress.... I think Marion should stick to her line; and I think that if you and Irving do not think her line has any chance at the Metro studios, you ought to tell her so frankly and let her either retire or go somewhere else if anybody else wants her.”39

  Had Hearst been able to come up with an alternative property for Marion, he might have been able to resist Thalberg indefinitely, but as he preferred not to let Marion remain idle for too long, he reluctantly approved the script of Five and Ten, complete with love scenes and adulterous romances. Marion, who had seen Leslie Howard on Broadway, selected him as her leading man, only to discover when he arrived at San Simeon for rehearsals that he was several inches shorter than she was. They spent three weeks rehearsing
in a tiny theater at San Simeon—with Howard perched on a platform for their closeups—and Hearst watching in the back. As usual, he was convinced that Marion needed him, not only to choose her projects, but to rewrite her scripts and rehearse with her. “He would coach me, and we’d go over the scripts line by line,” Marion recalled in her memoirs. “When I’d see him with a pencil, I’d say, ‘Oh, Lord, don’t change it. I’ve got it memorized.’

  “He’d say, ‘This little change won’t bother you.’

  “We’d rehearse it, and it would throw me off a bit. Lots of times he’d sit on the set, which would make me a little nervous.”40

  Five and Ten was released in July of 1931. Although the conventional wisdom, held by those who have not seen Miss Davies’ films, is that W. R. did not permit her to be kissed on the lips, in Five and Ten she spends several scenes locked in awkward embrace with Mr. Howard. The only real passion displayed in the film, however, is in her kiss-and-fondle scenes with the actor who played her Hearst-aged father.

  Hearst had been correct in predicting that audiences were not going to accept Marion Davies in a Jean Harlow hairdo and role. Five and Ten lost $274,000, more than any other film Marion had starred in.

  In her next project, chosen by Hearst, Marion reverted to form and starred in an old-fashioned, sentimental drama, Polly of the Circus, in which she played a circus aerialist who falls in love with the Reverend John Hartley, played by Clark Gable. Polly of the Circus was released in February of 1932 and, with the assistance of Gable’s charm as a leading man, turned a profit of $20,000, not much, but enough to confirm Hearst’s conviction that he was a better judge of properties than either Mayer or Thalberg.41