The Chief

by Nasaw, David

• ISBN13: 9780395827598
• ISBN10: 0395827590
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-06-16
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

The first full biography of Hearst in 40 years includes surprising new information on his private interactions with Hitler, Mussolini, Churchill, and every American president from Glover Cleveland to Franklin Roosevelt. 32 photos.

Author Biography

David Nasaw is the author of GOING OUT: THE RISE AND FALL OF PUBLIC AMUSEMENTS and two other books. He has served as a historical consultant for several television documentaries and is currently chair of the doctoral history program at City University of New York. His work has appeared in THE NEW YORKER, THE NATION, Condé Nast's TRAVELER, and other periodicals. He resides in New York City.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
Preface	xiii
I. GREAT EXPECTATIONS
A Son of the West	3	(20)
To Europe Again and on to Harvard	23	(16)
``Something Where I Could Make a Name''	39	(28)
II. PROPRIETOR AND EDITOR
At the Examiner	67	(15)
``I Can't Do San Francisco Alone''	82	(13)
Hearst in New York: ``Staging a Spectacle''	95	(30)
``How Do You Like the Journal's War?''	125	(20)
III. PUBLISHER, POLITICIAN, CANDIDATE, AND CONGRESSMAN
Representing the People	145	(23)
``Candidate of a Class''	168	(18)
``A Force to Be Reckoned With''	186	(16)
Man of Mystery	202	(12)
Party Leader	214	(13)
Hearst at Fifty: Some Calm Before the Storms	227	(14)
IV. OF WAR AND PEACE
``A War of Kings''	241	(19)
``Hearst, Hylan, the Hohenzollerns, and the Habsburgs''	260	(17)
Building a Studio	277	(10)
Builder and Collector	287	(16)
Marion, Millicent, and the Movies	303	(12)
A Return to Normalcy	315	(13)
Another Last Hurrah	328	(9)
VI. THE KING AND QUEEN OF HOLLYWOOD
``Do You Know Miss Marion Davies, the Movie Actress?''	337	(14)
Family Man	351	(11)
Dream Houses	362	(15)
Businesses as Usual	377	(21)
A New Crusade: Europe	398	(11)
The Talkies and Marion	409	(14)
VII. THE DEPRESSION
``Pretty Much Flattened Out''	423	(14)
``An Incorrigible Optimist''	437	(15)
The Chief Chooses a President	452	(17)
VIII. NEW DEALS AND RAW DEALS
Hearst at Seventy	469	(19)
Hearst and Hitler	488	(12)
The Last Crusade	500	(27)
IX. THE FALL
The Fall	527	(16)
``All Very Sad, But We Cannot Kick Now''	543	(21)
Citizen Kane	564	(11)
Old Age	575	(29)
Epilogue	604	(5)
Notes	609	(48)
Index	657

Excerpts

I Great Expectations One A Son of the West WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST did not speak often of his father. He preferred to think of himself as sui generis and self-created, which in many ways he was. Only in his late seventies, when he began writing a daily column in his newspapers, did he remind his readers - and himself - that he was the son of a pioneer. In a column about the song "Oh Susannah," which he claimed his father had sung to him, Hearst recounted the hardships George Hearst had endured on his thousand-mile trek from Missouri to California in 1850. There was a pride in the telling and in the story. His father had been one of the lucky ones, one of the stronger ones. While others had "died of cholera or were drowned by the floods or were killed by the Indians [or] tarried by the wayside under crude crosses and little hasty heaps of stone," his father had stayed the course, braved "the difficulties and dangers" and "at length . . . reached California in safety."1 The moral of the story was a simple one. Nothing had been given the Hearsts. There were no "silver spoons" in this family. They had scrapped and fought and suffered and, in the end, won what was rightfully theirs. William Randolph Hearst grew to manhood in the city of great expectations on the edge of the continent. He was a son of the West, or, more particularly, of Gold Rush San Francisco. The child and the city grew up together in the second half of the nineteenth century. San Francisco's population in 1870 was nearly three times what it had been in 1860. By 1880, San Francisco had a quarter of a million residents, was the ninth largest city in the nation and the premier metropolis of the West. The city's riches expanded even faster than its population. California's gold boom of the late 1840s and early 1850s had been followed by Nevada's silver boom in the early 1860s, and wherever riches were mined west of the Mississippi, they found their way into San Francisco. Money from the mines went into San Francisco's stock markets or real estate; it was deposited in its banks, and spent in its brothels, hotels, theaters, saloons, and gambling halls.2 With the constant influx of new people and capital, the city on the hills never had a chance to grow old. The Gold Rush mentality, permanently fixed in narrative form by storytellers, historians, and mythmaking adventurers, would dominate the culture and sensibility of San Franciscans for generations to come. There was gold in the hills - and silver and the richest agricultural land the world had ever seen - but that wealth did not sit on the surface ready for picking. It took sweat and savvy and years of labor to pull it up out of the earth. George Hearst was one of the tens of thousands of adventurers lured to California by the promise of gold. He had been born in 1820 or 1821 - he wasn't quite sure when - to a relatively prosperous Scotch- Irish family with American roots reaching back to the seventeenth century. George grew to manhood the only healthy son (he had a crippled brother and a younger sister) of the richest farmer in Meramec Township, Franklin County, Missouri. He was virtually unschooled, having acquired no more than a bit of arithmetic and the rudiments of literacy in classrooms. Franklin County, Missouri, was rich in copper and lead deposits. George's father, William Hearst, owned at least one mine and was friendly with a nearby group of French miners and smelters. On his trips to their camp, which he supplied with pork, Hearst was often accompanied by his son George. "I used to stay about there a good deal," George recalled later in life. "I naturally saw that they had a good deal of money. I think that that was what induced me to go into mining. Farming was such a slow way to make money. You could ma