The Chief

by David Nasaw

  For almost forty years, the Hearst papers had targeted Japan as the major threat to American peace, prosperity, and security in the world. Now, as the war in the Pacific he had predicted came closer to reality, he pleaded with Washington to fortify the nation’s Pacific coast. Only enhanced preparedness would derail Japanese global ambitions. The Japanese would not risk an invasion or a war that they knew they would lose.50

  Hearst was convinced that war with Japan was inevitable, but he placed responsibility for the upcoming conflagration squarely on Roosevelt, who he claimed was pushing the United States into war rather than accepting Japan’s claim to an Asian sphere of influence: “We have only to treat Japan in fair and friendly fashion to establish firm peace between Japan and the United States.”51

  Hearst was arguing at cross purposes with himself. The editorial policy he had set and personally articulated for almost fifty years had contributed enormously to the “Yellow Peril” mentality. It supported the fatalistic conclusion that no compromise was possible between a Japan which, in the words of the historian Akira Iriye, sought “to establish an Asian regional bloc under its control” and the United States, which was committed to keeping “Asia open to Western interests and to uphold the rights of ... the colonial empires.”52

  Up to the very last minute, Hearst counseled against war, but when it came in December of 1941, he enlisted: “Well, fellow Americans, we are in the war and we have got to win it. There may have been some difference of opinion among good Americans about getting into the war, but there is no difference about how we should come out of it. We must come out victorious and with the largest V in the alphabet.”53

  Time magazine, which had since the first sign of fiscal troubles in the middle 1930s taken every opportunity it could to ridicule Hearst, devoted a column to what it called “Hearst’s Third War”—his first two having been the Spanish-American and the Great War. The magazine reported that the Chief had left San Simeon for “San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel, whither he summoned his editors and publishers to discuss war policy. Springy of step, looking fitter than he had in years, the old publisher seemed to his admiring Hearstlings well nigh indestructible.”54

  Fearful of invasion, air attack, or sabotage—and compelled by the government to observe the blackout along the coastline and turn off all the lights at night—Hearst decided to close down San Simeon altogether and move to Wyntoon which, deep in the forest and away from the coast, was more secure. Although Hearst would miss his ranch, living at Wyntoon was not a hardship. According to Marion, it was even more beautiful than San Simeon “as far as natural scenery goes.... There was a calmness about it that really appealed to me.... Our happiest times, I think, were at Wyntoon.”55

  W.R. and Marion spent a good part of the day in Bear House, their residence. For the first time in their lives, they were substantially alone. Marion began sewing more. “She made all his ties.... Every tie....All handmade, gorgeous silk ties,” recalled Virginia Dragon, whose husband Roland succeeded Joe Willicombe as the Chief’s private secretary. Marion also devoted more time to her charities, took first-aid courses, and, with visiting girlfriends, practiced bandaging in the Gables, the big stone lodge. Hearst, though now approaching eighty years of age, worked well into the evening. When he was ready for a late dinner, he called for his chauffeur to drive him and Marion—and their dogs—from Bear House to the Gables. “First the dogs would come out, and you’d get out and you’d open the door,” the chauffeur David Christian recalled. “The dogs always got in first. I’m telling you, the dogs were everything. Then they’d get in.”56

  W. R. had always been fond of dogs. His favorites were the dachshunds he bred at San Simeon. As late as 1945, after the zoo and most of the other animals had been sold or given away, there still remained seventy-three dachshunds in his kennels. Hearst and Marion went nowhere without their personal dachshunds. They slept with them, ate with them, drove with them. When guests at San Simeon asked, as they often did, for a dachshund, W. R., according to his son Randolph, would send someone out to buy one, because he didn’t want to give away one of his own dogs to someone he was not sure would provide it with the proper love and attention. When one of his dachshunds was injured in a fight with a porcupine, Hearst “got very excited, very excited,” David Christian remembered. “He offered a big sum of money for each porcupine killed.... Those porcupines were so thick.... But you couldn’t find a one after they started killing them, those guys killed them all. They killed them, and that’s what he wanted.”57

  There are hints that Marion was not having an easy time in retirement at Wyntoon, though she claimed in her autobiography that she loved being there. In 1942, when her special dachshund Gandhi fell ill, she came close to breaking down entirely. “Gandhi was about fifteen, and he promised that he’d live to be fifty,” Marion recalled in her memoirs. “He didn’t feel well, so I had a nurse take care of him.”

  When Gandhi continued to deteriorate, W. R. called for the vet. “They had a conference, and then W. R. took me in the bathroom and said, ‘Now, this is one time I want you to be brave.’

  “‘What’s the matter?’

  “‘They have to put him out.’

  “‘Over my dead body,’ I said. I saw Gandhi looking up with those two appealing eyes.

  “The nurse gave him a shot and he went.

  “I tore the place apart. I broke everything I could lay my hands on. I almost killed everybody, I was so furious.”

  Gandhi was buried at Wyntoon. “We had the Irish priest from McCloud conduct the services. The whole staff was up there. It sounds silly, but it’s so heartbreaking when they go. You feel that not only have you lost your best friend, but a part of your life has gone.”58

  Soon after this incident Marion took ill. The nature of her illness is shrouded in mystery. The only mention of it is in a letter W. R. wrote to Jack Neylan in September of 1942, apologizing for not having seen him during a recent stay in San Francisco: “Marion was very ill and still is. We were in the hands of various doctors in San Francisco. Some advised an immediate operation, and some advised her to get in condition first....I believe we will be back [in San Francisco] soon and Marion will have her operation. It is the second one in a year, and the prospect is not pleasant.”59

  Because Wyntoon was so far away from Los Angeles, fewer of W. R.’s and Marion’s Hollywood friends were able to visit them. Still, in the winter of 1943–44, Clark Gable, Louis B. Mayer, Raoul Walsh, and Louella Parsons all made the trip. Among the other guests that winter were Hearst’s publishing executives; some old friends, like the Swinnertons; the Lindberghs; Anna Roosevelt and her husband, John Boetigger, who worked for Hearst in Seattle; and Joseph Kennedy and his son Jack, who visited in 1940. Jack, to Randolph Hearst’s amazement, went swimming in the freezing waters of the McCloud River during his visit.60

  Karl von Wiegand, who had been one of Hearst’s most valued European correspondents since the 1920s, spent the Christmas and New Year holiday of 1943 at Wyntoon. “Marion had the flu,” he wrote Ed Coblentz, and “couldn’t participate in Christmas dinner and Mr. Hearst was so worried that he didn’t.” Though von Wiegand was too polite to say or think it, it was much more likely that Marion, as was often the case now, was too drunk to appear at dinner. By New Year’s Eve, she had sobered up enough to return to the dining table. With Marion’s reappearance, Hearst was “himself” again, “as lively and full of fun as a boy.... The Chief is astoundingly vigorous, keen and alert. It was a delight and an inspiration to see.”61

  35. Citizen Kane

  IT WAS, IN HINDSIGHT, almost inevitable that Orson Welles should have made his first film about William Randolph Hearst. He had always been fascinated by the power of personality and the personality of power. Before Citizen Kane, he had directed for the stage Doctor Faustus, Julius Caesar, Panic —Archibald MacLeish’s drama about a ruined capitalist—and Danton’s Death.1

  Welles had, in the summer of 1939, signed a two-picture contract with R
KO. His first project, a screen version of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, was shelved because it was too costly to shoot. While searching for another subject, he visited Herman Mankiewicz, who was bedridden with a broken leg. “They would mainly speak,” Welles’s biographer Simon Callow has written, “as people in the same business will, of projects. Welles spoke of Dumas, Machiavelli, and the Borgias, but also of an unformed idea for a film about some larger-than-life American figure—who, he wasn’t quite sure.... Mankiewicz, a keen student of power and its abuses ... had, for his part, long dreamed of a screenplay about a public figure—a gangster, perhaps.” They eventually agreed upon a character nearer at hand, one whom Mankiewicz knew personally and Welles by reputation.2

  Welles had been associated with the Popular Front cultural community in New York City, the same community that had, in the middle 1930s, identified Hearst as “public enemy number one.” The representation of Hearst as fascist menace was, by the late 1930s, being replaced in the popular imagination by that of the millionaire eccentric, like Huxley’s fictional character Jo Stoyte. But for Welles and the Popular Front left, Hearst remained, Michael Denning has written, “an emblem of American fascism, a powerful capitalist who was also a visible demagogue.”3

  Here in Southern California was the subject Welles was looking for: a purported American fascist who also happened to be a powerful man in Hollywood. Welles, as much a master of self-promotion and publicity as of the theater, must have seen at once the marketing potential. What reporter or critic could resist covering the battle of the century between the Popular Front’s boy genius and the fascist Lord of San Simeon?

  Welles commissioned Mankiewicz to write the script and persuaded John Houseman, Welles’s on-again-off-again partner, to keep Mankiewicz off the bottle and on the project. In mid-April of 1940, Houseman and Mankiewicz delivered their first draft to Welles. It was too long, unfocused, and so clearly biographical that it almost invited a libel suit. Welles, in condensing, focusing, and reworking the Mankiewicz script, removed a great deal of the overt biographical detail.4

  When he was finished, there was still no doubt that the film was about Hearst. The New York Times Hollywood correspondent reported, tongue in cheek, that “Mr. Welles says the film, which deals with the life of a fictional figure who owns a chain of newspapers, who unsuccessfully runs for Governor of New York, who boasts that he started the Spanish-American War, who marries an obscure singer and attempts to gain recognition for her as an opera star through his publications, and who finally retires to a fabulous castle to die when his newspaper empire crumbles, is in no sense biographical. Representatives of William Randolph Hearst, the publisher, have advised the producer that they believe another interpretation can be put on the story.”5

  The major discrepancy between the life stories of Hearst and Kane was that Hearst’s real-life mistress, Marion Davies, was a movie star—and a fairly successful one—and the fictional Susan Alexander had no talent, grace, or charm whatsoever. Mankiewicz and Welles could claim—and did—that Kane was not Hearst because Alexander was not Davies. At the same time, they included in their portrait of Alexander several “insider” details that connected her to Davies. Alexander, like Davies, is blond, does jigsaw puzzles, and has a drinking problem. More than that, Xanadu, where Alexander and Kane retire in defeat and disgrace, was, as movie critic Pauline Kael had observed, “transparently San Simeon; and Susan’s fake stardom and the role she played in Kane’s life spelled Marion Davies to practically everybody in the Western world.”6

  Mankiewicz had been a visitor at Marion’s beach house, the Culver City bungalow, and perhaps San Simeon as well. Details about Marion’s drinking habits and jigsaw puzzles came from firsthand observation. He had also done some homework. Mankiewicz denied ever having read Ferdinand Lundberg’s Imperial Hearst, but there were three copies in his personal library. The similarities between his script and Lundberg’s biography were too striking to have been coincidental. Lundberg later sued Welles for plagiarism. He received as a settlement from RKO $15,000 for damages and several hundred thousand dollars to cover his court costs and attorney’s fees.7

  From the very first frames, Welles and Mankiewicz made clear their intention to tell a story about Hearst. The castle on the hill that we see in the opening shots, the “paintings, pictures, statues, and more statues ... Enough for ten museums—the loot of the world” that the newsreel announcer describes for us, the unpacked crates, the zoo are unmistakably Hearst’s. Welles wisely does not caricature or impersonate W. R.—although as Kane he does dress as Hearst did and gesture from the podium as he had. Simply by playing himself—expressing his own inordinate selfconfidence, dominating every scene, looming over every grouping, always having the last word—Welles incarnates the Mankiewicz/Lundberg portrait of the man who, as the newsreel announcer declares in the film’s opening shots, was not only the “greatest newspaper tycoon of this or any other generation,” but “more newsworthy than the names in his own headlines.”8

  Because so much of Welles went into the portrayal, Kane was not an unsympathetic character. We fall in love with his buoyancy, his joie de vivre; we believe his campaign promises to the “workingman and the slum child,” to the “decent, ordinary citizens ... the unprivileged, the underpaid, and the underfed.” We sympathize with him as he grows distant from a wife who parades before him at the dinner table the prejudices of her class and asks him to keep Bernstein, his too visibly Jewish business manager, away from the nursery.

  Kane’s mother is pathologically cold and unloving; his wife is an antiSemite and social snob; his mistress is mindless, untalented, a drunk who becomes a shrill harpy, possessed by one of the screen’s most gratingly annoying voices. These portraits are infinitely crueler than the portrait of Kane, whose behavior is excused because he had suffered a childhood trauma.

  It is possible that Welles was enough of a megalomaniac to believe that Hearst would be so entranced by seeing elements of his own life on the big screen that he would overlook the maliciously false portraits of the three women in his life. As Welles confessed in later years, he had made “Kane ... better than Hearst [while] Marion was much better than Susan—whom people wrongly equated with her.” Marion Davies, he conceded publicly, was a talented actress and a “fine woman” whom he libeled in his film. Of his character assassination of Phoebe and Millicent, he had nothing to say.9

  While the “Hearst” project was conceived and executed in secrecy, there were leaks, as there always were in Hollywood. In September of 1940, a twoline item in Newsweek asserted mistakenly that Welles’s script had been “sent to William Randolph Hearst for perusal after columnists had hinted it dealt with his life.” When Louella Parsons, who claimed to have known Welles’s family in Illinois and “was delighted to give a boost to a local boy who had made good,” asked if the rumors were true, Welles denied them, insisting that he was working on a Faustian story about a powerful man. Louella did not question him further. Neither she nor anyone else in Hollywood believed that Welles was mad enough to take on Hearst.10

  On January 3, Welles and RKO screened a rough cut of Citizen Kane for national magazine reviewers with early deadlines. When Hedda Hopper complained that Welles had promised to show her the film before anyone else saw it, he arranged a separate screening for her.

  “Only six people sat in a private projection room when the finished product was first unveiled,” Hopper recalled in her autobiography. “I was appalled. The film was too well done. An impudent, murderous trick, even for the boy genius, to perpetrate on a newspaper giant...

  “Early next morning Orson was on the telephone demanding, ‘Well, what do you think?’

  “‘You won’t get away with it,’ I assured him.

  “‘Oh, yes I will. You’ll see.’

  “Cockiness I can take; arrogance I abhor. Deciding that Mr. Hearst should know what was afoot, I passed on the information through channels.”11

  W. R., informed by Bill, Jr., whom Hedd
a had contacted, asked Louella to investigate. A screening of Citizen Kane was arranged for her and the two Hearst Corporation lawyers she brought with her.

  “I must say now, so many years later,” Louella wrote in her 1961 memoirs, “that I am still horrified by the picture. It was a cruel, dishonest caricature ... I walked from the projection room without saying a word to Orson. I have not spoken to him since. When the lawyers and I talked with Mr. Hearst, the lawyers told him he had a foolproof libel suit and asked him to take it to court. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t believe in lawsuits. Besides, I have no desire to give the picture any more publicity.’” A libel or invasion of privacy suit would have gotten Hearst nowhere. It would, on the contrary, have been an admission that he was indeed Charles Foster Kane and, worse yet, that Marion was Susan Alexander.12

  Like other long-time, well-paid Hearst editors and columnists, Louella was fiercely loyal to the Chief and to her friend Marion and outraged that Welles, a twenty-five-year-old upstart, braggart, and liar, should have the effrontery to invade Hearst’s hometown and baldly caricature him. She also wanted revenge on Welles for lying to her and for granting Hedda a “scoop” on a story involving her boss. Out of loyalty to Hearst, sympathy for Marion, and loathing for Welles, Louella set out to destroy Welles. Hearst did nothing to stop her.

  In mid-January, a month before Citizen Kane was scheduled to open at Radio City Music Hall, Louella reported to W. R. that she had just received a telegram from Nelson Rockefeller, whose family had a sizable stake in RKO and controlled Radio City Music Hall. Rockefeller wrote Louella that he had had a long talk with George Schaefer, the RKO studio chief, who was “giving the matter serious consideration.” Though we don’t know precisely what “the matter” was, the implication was that Rockefeller had pressured Schaefer to withdraw Citizen Kane or recut it to eliminate the references to Hearst. According to Parsons, “L. B. Mayer, Joseph Schenck [of 20th Century-Fox], Nicholas Schenck and Jack Warner have all refused to book Citizen Kane. Joe Schenck told me that if RKO books the picture the companies will book no more RKO movies in their theaters.”13