The Chief

by David Nasaw

  From England, Joe Kennedy, who was not unaware of the complications incumbent on leading two lives, advised Hearst to protect Marion by putting some of his St. Donat’s antiques in her name, before they were all sold off by the corporation. “It strikes me ... that the ‘protectorate’ [Shearn and the Chase National Bank bankers] might not be especially kind to Marion, in the event that they felt they had to move in,” Kennedy wrote Hearst. “Therefore it seems to me that her things here should be earmarked for her right away so any disputes might be avoided. Also I am not going to be in this job forever [Kennedy was, at the time, ambassador to Britain] and you might tell her if she needs advice on anything else to call me. I would like nothing better than to see that she had whatever protection I could give her against that hungry horde. I hope I’m not being too forward.”13

  Marion’s future should have been provided for—she had been one of Hollywood’s wealthiest women—but when she had liquidated more than a million dollars worth of real estate and jewelry to raise cash to lend Hearst, she received, as collateral, only two very shaky Boston newspapers. In February of 1939, perhaps in response to Kennedy’s suggestions, W. R. wrote Heinie MacKay, his Los Angeles attorney, asking him if the $800,000 outstanding on Marion’s loan could be repaid by giving her $800,000 worth of art from his collections. MacKay replied that though he would be happy to ask one of his associates in New York to talk to Judge Shearn, he doubted that anything would come of the request. With millions of dollars in debt still outstanding, MacKay did not believe that Hearst’s creditors were going to grant Marion any special consideration on her $800,000.14

  Hearst was concerned not only for Marion’s future, but for Millicent and the boys. Millicent’s allowance had already been slashed and the Clarendon sold out from under her. Although, as Randolph, their youngest son, remembered, she lived quite well at her Park Avenue apartment, she did so on a much smaller budget than the unlimited one she had been used to.

  W. R., who was himself on a strict allowance with no extra cash to provide Millicent, asked Richard Berlin, the head of the magazine division, to give her a “job as editor or sub-editor of one of the magazines. I think she could do a lot with Town & Country and would also be useful on House Beautiful. She is clever, resourceful, and tasteful. She would like the work and I think should be compensated on about the basis of the children’s compensation,—that is, $15,000. She would be satisfied with that I am sure.” Berlin rebuffed the request. He was now chairman of the board of the Hearst Corporation, but the real power remained with the creditors who, he wrote Hearst, might very well reduce or remove Millicent’s $2,500 monthly allowance if they discovered that she was also on the Hearst payroll.15

  Hearst worried about his five boys as well. The twins were too young yet to provide entirely for themselves, and Bill, Jr., the second-born, was already well established in New York. His main concerns were George, the oldest, and John, the third-born. While Hearst had demanded that they work for a living and threatened to cut them off if they did not, he had never followed through on any of his threats. Worse yet, as Randolph, one of the twins, remembered, he had “put the older boys in places where they shouldn’t have been,” given their age and lack of experience, and protected them when they failed to produce. W. R. was now worried that with the organization in the hands of the creditors the boys would be discarded as excess baggage. It was imperative that they learn to take care of themselves while they still had a father to look after them.16

  George, now thirty-six, was a jovial, overweight man who drank too much, ate even more, and worked not at all. In 1940, after he had failed at a number of newspaper jobs, W. R. moved him to his San Francisco radio station. When George demanded equal authority with the station’s manager, his father exploded:

  Somebody has got to be in charge of the station. You have not yet demonstrated the ability to run a station.... Just remember, George, you have never demonstrated anything in your life yet. You have not even demonstrated a willingness to work. Nobody is going to put you in charge of any important proposition until they know you are going to work, and until they believe you are going to accomplish something. Please be careful, son, not to make yourself unwelcome in San Francisco, because they will not take you back in Los Angeles, and you would have nowhere to go.

  Like all his letters to his children, this one was signed “Affectionately, Pop.”17

  The letters that “Pop” wrote John were strikingly similar, if a bit nastier. In early 1939, John was transferred from New York, where he had worked at the magazine division, to Los Angeles. He was almost thirty, though his father still treated him as a child:

  Are you carrying out my instructions faithfully to report at the Examiner office every morning at nine o’clock, lay out your program for the day, and attend to that program assiduously, and get some results? To the best of my knowledge and belief you are not doing this, and if you do not do it there is only one of two courses open to me—either to have you pack up your bags and baggage and go back East, where nobody wants you or will have anything to do with you, or else put you on a percentage basis.18

  When Hearst’s prophecy was fulfilled and John lost his position at the Examiner, he was given ninety days to find a job in New York. Tom White suggested that for his own protection, he should look for a place outside of the organization. John was, in the end, hired at Hearst’s American Weekly, but at a salary that did not pay what he thought he needed to live. When he asked his father for an additional allowance—as he had in the past—he was refused. “I am sorry, but I am NOT going to allow you any expenses,” Hearst wrote him. “You are on your own—sink or swim in New York. If you don’t like the job, don’t take it. You are not an infant any longer, swinging on a pap bottle.”19

  When John again disappeared from work—he was drinking heavily at the time—and turned up on the West Coast, W. R. instructed his superiors in New York to only “pay John if and when he works.” He wrote John again:

  I am sorry that you think I am angry with you. I am not. And I do not want to distress you, but I want you to realize that in the compact and economical organization of Hearst Consolidated nobody is going to get paid except for service rendered. In other words, “No tickee no shirtee” is the unvarying motto of the institution....If you are going to stay in our organization, you must work and earn your compensation.

  The message was as clear as Hearst could make it. The Chief had lost control of his organization and could protect his boys no longer.20

  Through late 1939 into 1940, things went from bad to worse for the Chief. In addition to suffering the humiliation of having his art sold out from under him, he was forced to defend himself from shareholder lawsuits that charged him with defrauding Hearst Consolidated by taking a $500,000 salary for part-time work, shifting his personal liabilities to the corporation, and diverting income that rightfully belonged to the shareholders into his private holding companies. By the fall of 1940, he was besieged by so many process servers that his advisers suggested he relocate from San Simeon and Los Angeles, where he was “too open to any legal service,” to Wyntoon.21

  Through the summer and fall of 1940, teams of lawyers arrived at San Simeon to prepare the Chief to be deposed in the stockholder suits. They did their job well. In November of 1941, when the Hearst Consolidated cases finally came to trial, they were dismissed after former executives, including Neylan, offered sufficient testimony to convince the presiding judge that the Chief had indeed been worth his half-million-dollar salary and had not defrauded his shareholders.22

  By this time, the organization had found its Galahad in the person of John W. Hanes, a former Wall Street banker, adviser to Joe Kennedy at the S.E.C., and undersecretary of the treasury, who in the summer of 1940 had been brought in to restructure the corporation and reduce the debt load. After four years of belt tightening, the Hearst corporations and Hearst himself still carried $30 million in debts, $8 million alone to the Canadian paper mills. In the fall of 1940, t
he War Department paid $2 million for 154,000 acres of Hearst ranchland adjoining San Simeon, and the Canadian paper mills demanded that every dollar of it be used to pay off corporate debts rather than Hearst’s New York real estate obligations. After weeks of threats, bluffs, and recriminations, a deal was struck and Hearst was permitted to apply $1 million of the government funds to reduce his own debts.23

  While Hanes struggled to reorganize the corporation without shedding its remaining assets, the Hearst empire drifted aimlessly. As Neylan wrote Alice Head in January 1941:

  Shearn sits at one end of the country, scheming and plotting; Hearst sits at the other end of the country, counterscheming and counterplotting ... My judgement of the situation is that on the one hand, Hearst, in his seventy-seventh year, leads a precarious day-to-day existence, unwilling to look at the facts, incapable of working out a solution and hoping only to hang on. On the other side of the picture, it looks to me as if the cold-blooded gentlemen who handle money have consulted an actuarial table and having determined the life expectancy of a man of seventy-seven have decided it will not be long before they will revamp the institution without his interference.24

  Those who had expected Hearst to fade away, either from shame at losing his empire or from simple old age, were mistaken. All one had to do was to read the Hearst papers to see that the old man remained in control. Nothing of importance got into the Hearst papers without his approval. The text of every editorial was sent to him, edited by him, and set in type only when and as approved by him. Major articles and features were cleared through him as well. In late 1939, in response to the publication of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, the editor of his San Francisco Call-Bulletin commissioned a series of articles on the menace posed to California by the invasion of migrants. W. R. chastised his editor in a letter written on January 2, 1940:

  To be perfectly frank, I think the migrant articles are disappointing. They do not get anywhere. My contention is this: “The migrants are good Americans who have been subjected to great hardships and privation, partly through natural causes—drought, dust storms, etcetera—partly through the depression and the New Deal perverted economies. These migrants have left the lands where they cannot make a living and where relief is insufficient or dishonest; and have come to California where nature is generous, the State reasonably rich, and the people kind. They are better for California than the Chinese or the Japs or the Filipinos or the Mexicans. We are, and should be, glad to have them—as fast as we can absorb them.”...Let us accept the migrants and make good citizens out of them.25

  Although the Chief’s editorial voice was quieter now, less that of an angry demagogue than of a wearied prophet, he remained among the nation’s most prominent “isolationists.” His political stance was the same as it had been before and during the Great War. America, he argued again and again, had no business interfering with or letting itself become entangled in European economic agreements, treaties, or military adventures. No matter how viciously he might attack “lust-crazed Communist mobs in Spain” or “aggressive, belligerent, militaristic, ambitious and impudent” Japan when it invaded China, he insisted that the American government mind its own business and refrain from military or diplomatic entanglements outside the Western Hemisphere.26

  When Walter Winchell, who was by the middle 1930s the most widely read of all his columnists, began offering his own opinions on the Spanish Civil War in which he supported the Loyalists and opposed Roosevelt’s embargo on assistance to them, Hearst was furious and said so. “I must ask all columnists to keep off these highly controversial subjects,” he telegrammed his executives at the International News Service, which syndicated Winchell’s columns. “There is no occasion to go to Spain to project ourselves into a war between Communists and Fascists. Let us pay attention to our own democracy here in America.” He then wrote Winchell directly:

  The above message I sent to the INS, and I mean exactly what the message stated. You were engaged to do a Broadway gossip column. You do a good one. You might be a good war correspondent, but that is not your job. I do not think the sports writer should do society columns ... or the gossip writers controversial politics. Moreover, any political columns written in my papers will be American in spirit, not alien. They will be democratic in character, not communistic or fascist. Furthermore, Walter, you are not a little youth, although you are acting like one. As a matter of fact, you are old enough to know better.27

  No matter how threatening the events unfolding on the continent, Hearst continued to believe that peace could be maintained. In March of 1938, when German troops marched into Austria and annexed it to the Third Reich, Hearst used his front pages to lecture the Führer on his duty as strongman of Europe: “Greatness is not made by marching troops nor by howling crowds, but by enduring records of constructive statesmanship.” He suggested that Hitler mark his annexation of “liberal” Austria by ceasing “his unjust and unreasonable persecution of the Jews.” The tone of his editorial suggests that, although disappointed with Hitler’s action, he believed it possible that the Führer might read his editorial and mend his ways.28

  Through the late 1930s, no matter what actions Hitler took, Hearst refused to demonize him or the Germans. On the contrary, he did all he could to warn readers against English propaganda designed to inveigle Americans into an alliance against Germany. When Judge Clarence Shearn, speaking for his colleagues at Chase National Bank and in the New York investment community, pleaded with Hearst to mute his criticism of the English, the Chief rebuked him for trying to interfere with the Hearst papers’ independence.29

  Nothing was going to stop the Chief from speaking his mind, not even suggestions from his creditors. In October of 1938, Winston Churchill addressed the American people over the NBC radio network, asking for closer Anglo-American ties. Hearst replied, over the same network, that England had no right to ask the Americans to preserve “the domination which she and France have exercised over Europe since the execution of the Versailles Treaty” or to protect her Asian empire from the Japanese:

  England needs help; and where should she turn for help except to good old Uncle Sam, so sought after when needed—so scoffed at and scorned in all intervening times.... Nazis, Communists, Fascists, imperialists are all of the same ilk—all cut from the same cloth—all striving for power and territory—all seeking from time to time a new prize, a new victim ... They are all ready to go to war, and all eager to get us to go to war, to add to their imperial conquests.... Americans should maintain the traditional policy of our great and independent nation,—great largely because it is independent.30

  In November of 1938, Hitler and his propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, seizing on the pretext of the assassination in Paris of Ernst vom Rath, a Nazi official in the German embassy, by Herschel Grynszpan, a Polish Jewish student, unleashed the pogrom of November 9 and 10, the so-called Kristallnacht. As the historian Saul Friedländer has written of the violence that ensued throughout Germany:

  The only immediate aim was to hurt the Jews as badly as the circumstances allowed, by all possible means: to hurt them and to humiliate them. The pogrom and the initiatives that immediately followed have quite rightly been called “a degradation ritual.” An explosion of sadism threw a particularly lurid light on the entire action and its sequels; it burst forth at all levels, that of the highest leadership and that of the lowliest party members.31

  The response of the American press was immediate. Even those papers and those editors and publishers who, like Hearst, had ignored or denied stories of anti-Semitic violence, could no longer look the other way. Hearst responded at once, in an article he claimed had been written in response to a request from the New York Enquirer which he republished in his own papers on November 11. Instead of blaming Hitler or the Nazis for the violence they had unleashed, he attributed it to a generalized European madness:

  The shocking outrages perpetrated against harmless and helpless Jews in Germany are not the result of any moment
ary animal impulse, not the exhibition of any sporadic sentiment or action, not even directly attributable to the mad act of the irresponsible student who attacked the German government representative in Paris. They are the inevitable consequences of the persistent preachments of hate and violence which have characterized European political and social life for a generation, if not for many generations. The creed of violence and hatred is bearing its foul fruit, and the world is beginning to realize what a destructive and death-dealing fruit it is.32

  Still, in the days to come, the Hearst papers would join the rest of the nation’s newspapers in attributing full responsibility for the crimes of Kristallnacht to Hitler and the Nazis. “The entire civilized world is shocked and shamed by Germany’s brutal oppression of the Jewish people,” read the editorial on November 12, 1938. Four days later, in an editorial, unsigned though clearly written by him, Hearst revealed the depths of his disappointment that Hitler had failed to learn the lesson he had tried so hard to teach him: “You set out to liberate your country. You are now isolating it ... You set out to give Germany a deserved place in the sun. You are making it a pariah in the family of civilized nations. You are making the flag of National Socialism a symbol of national savagery.”33