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February 7, 2003
The Media Mogul Who Manipulated Men and Events
He was a bundle of contradictions. He was born into wealth, had an overwhelming passion for wealth, power and position; yet, he nurtured a disdain for the rich elite and always upheld the causes of the down-trodden. He had an immense love for his cultured, high-minded mother; but, defying her advice and the Victorian era values, he married a pedigree-less, stage dancer who bore him five sons, no daughter. Subsequently, he was infatuated with an actress, Marion Davies, who remained his mistress for decades till his death. He was indifferent, if not disdainful, towards the bourgeois concepts of respectability.
He respected his virtually illiterate and rustic father, who spelled bird as b-u-r-d, but who earned millions through shrewd investments in mines, ranches and other enterprises, and rose up to be a Senator in his own right. He displeased this doting father by rejecting his offer of the money-making mines and his enormous ranch in Mexico which employed 150 vaqueros to look after tens of thousands of cattle. He wanted his father to give him only his insignificant and ever-losing paper, the San Francisco Examiner. He had just been expelled from Harvard for indifference to his academic pursuits and for several incidents of indiscipline. For instance, once he placed a donkey in the room of a teacher with a plaque around its neck saying: “Now there are two of you”.
While he was taking this impish high spirit of youth to the barely surviving San Francisco paper, every one thought it impossible to turn it into a viable financial entity. But, impossible was a word that did not exist in his lexicon. Impossible, he maintained, was a little more difficult than possible. To prove this right he would be found frequently driven by seizures of furious energy. He refused to let obstacles deter him. When he wanted some thing, he wanted it desperately and he worked for it with full focus, day and night. His admirers called it determination, his opponents selfish zeal.
That was William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951), the builder of the biggest media empire of his time.
In the very first year under his direction, the Examiner launched over a dozen crusades against incompetent and expensive public services. Sensationalism was Hearst’s major tool - to startle, amaze, stupefy, and convulse his readers with excitement. He treated journalism as “an enchanted playground in which giants and dragons were to be slain simply for the fun of the thing.” His chief aim was to keep increasing the circulation of his paper. To him that was the main thing. Money was just no consideration ever for him. He got the best writers, satirists and cartoonists often luring them from other papers through higher salaries.
“Hearst was not a newsman at all in the conventional sense”, wrote his biographer W.A. Swanberg, “He was an inventor, a producer, an arranger. He lived in a childlike dream world, imagining wonderful stories and then going out and creating them so that the line between fact and fancy was apt to be fuzzy”.
Having honed his skills at the Examiner, he decided to move to New York at age 32 seeking a larger playground for the exercise of his talents. He bought the Journal and started competing with the renowned, though blind, Joseph Pulitzer of daily World. The competition between the two gave birth to what came to be known as yellow journalism. For, both had used yellow posters in that city against each other. Subsequently, Hearst came to be called the king of yellow journalism. He started expanding his ownership of newspapers and magazines.
The power he thus acquired turned him into an unprecedented manipulator of men and events. One of his biographers, Ben Porter, commented, “Few individuals in American history - with the exception of certain Presidents - have affected or helped to shape the course of this nation’s history over a 50-year period, either favorably or wrongly, more than William Randolph Hearst.”
His worldwide publishing empire eventually included 32 major city papers, 13 magazines, King Features Syndicate, radio and TV stations, Metrotone News, movie and book companies.
Being a complex person, he invited criticism for his journalistic and personal excesses and praise for vehement defense of justice for the underdog. It was the common man, the underdog who increased circulation.
He would cry at the death of a dog and wouldn’t let his gardeners poison the field mice, but he had no compunction in provoking, through the constant hammering of his papers, the Spanish-American war that took innumerable lives. His scathing and relentless criticism of President William McKinley is often thought to have incited the assassin to shoot him down.
The only child of millionaire parents, he was spoiled by both. His every wish was granted except his desire, on a visit to London, to have Windsor Castle for his residence, or his request to his mother to buy for him a museum whose objects d’art had enamored him. The dream of a castle furnished with statutes, paintings, ornate carpets, draperies, and other exhibits never left him, but it had to wait till he had acquired his publishing empire and could afford to build a castle fit for a king. The construction that commenced in 1919 took almost thirty years to complete the world famous Hearst Castle.
It is located on California Highway 1 about half way between San Francisco and Los Angeles. It comprises a 115-room main building surrounded by guest houses, pools, gardens, playgrounds located over a quarter of a million acres of Hearst holdings which he used to call “my ranch”. He owned the entire area that a human eye could see in all directions from the main building. He was the monarch of all he saw. The Castle stands as a tribute to his genius, his ambition, his achievements and also a manifestation of his vanity. It is now a museum.
His guests at the Castle included President Calvin Coolidge, Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw, Charles Lindberg, Charlie Chaplin, Clark Gable and an array of other show business stars.
Hearst thus had his castle where he owned all that he perceived; outside he had his media empire where he employed over 30,000 persons including a hundred executives, but his political ambitions to be the Mayor of New York, Governor of that state and even be nominated for Presidency were thwarted by the electorate. For, his public image left much to be desired. The voters did not seem to trust him. He reminded the voters of his fake and sensational stories that subsequently turned out to be incorrect. His repeated rejection by the electorate strengthened faith in democracy.
The seamy side of his persona was depicted by Orson Wells is his 1941 film Citizen Kane. I saw the film before writing this column particularly as it was considered by many critics as one of the great films of the twentieth century. Nancy Whitelaw in her biography of Hearst has this to say about the film: “The hero was a wealthy newspaper publisher who craved political power. This character, who left his wife to marry a young singer, was arrogant, hot-tempered, and without moral convictions.” Miss Whitelaw has, perhaps deliberately, avoided to mention the film’s focus on the lecherous and prurient aspects of the hero and the symbolic reference to the singer’s private anatomy. The film is not in good taste.
Mr. Hearst was no doubt a self-centered person - perhaps a megalomaniac - but he was nevertheless a great man as reflected in his great achievements.
Arifhussaini@hotmail.com
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