The Ketchup Bottles on the Refectory Table
On the dining table at La Cuesta Encantada — a table hewn from sixteenth-century refectory boards, beneath the festal banners of Siena, in a Great Hall that could seat 150, surrounded by six Gobelin tapestries that cost $575,000 and the carved bed of Cardinal Richelieu — William Randolph Hearst set out ketchup bottles and paper napkins. He did this every night. He did it when
Winston Churchill came to dinner, and when Calvin Coolidge sat in the carved choir stalls, and when Charlie Chaplin and Clark Gable and Greta Garbo rode the private elevator to the second floor. The gold dinner plates gleamed. The paper napkins stayed. The ketchup, one imagines, was Heinz.
It was a detail so conspicuous that every memoirist recorded it, and so deliberately anomalous that no one could quite decide what it meant. Was it a populist affectation — the richest publisher in the Western Hemisphere signaling that he was still, at bottom, a man of the people? A provocation, the billionaire's equivalent of a whoopee cushion, planted to see who would flinch? Or was it something stranger and more revealing — the unconscious expression of a man who could never fully reconcile the two halves of himself, the frontier son who inherited a mining fortune and the aesthete who bought whole ceilings from Italian palazzi, the democrat who built a monarchy, the shy boy with the tiny voice who made more noise than any American of his century?
The ketchup bottles tell you almost everything you need to know about William Randolph Hearst. He spent more lavishly than any private citizen in American history. He bought castles in Wales and haciendas in Mexico, Renaissance altarpieces and Egyptian sarcophagi, entire monasteries disassembled stone by stone and shipped across the Atlantic in numbered crates that sometimes sat unopened in Bronx warehouses for decades. He built a zoo with zebras and giraffes and kangaroos that loped along the dirt road to his hilltop palace, startling first-time guests into the realization that they had entered a private kingdom operating under its own laws of nature. And then he put ketchup on the table.
Churchill, who visited San Simeon and found its proprietor more interesting than the castle, produced perhaps the most surgically precise character sketch ever committed about Hearst: "A grave, simple child with no doubt a nasty temper, playing with the most costly toys, a vast income always overspent, ceaseless building and collecting, two magnificent establishments, two charming wives, complete indifference to public opinion, a 15 million daily circulation, extreme personal courtesy, and the appearance of a Quaker elder."
A grave, simple child. That is the paradox at the center of everything.
By the Numbers
The Hearst Empire at Its Peak, c. 1935
28Major daily and Sunday newspapers
18Magazines, including Cosmopolitan and Harper's Bazaar
~20MEstimated daily newspaper readership (of 120M Americans)
250,000Acres at the San Simeon estate
165Rooms at La Cuesta Encantada
$15MEstimated value of art and furnishings at San Simeon (1933 dollars)
2Terms served in U.S. Congress (1903–1907)
The Miner's Son and the Forty-Niner's Gamble
There would have been no William Randolph Hearst without the accomplishments — and more precisely, the appetites — of his father. George Hearst was born in 1820 in a log cabin on a small farm in Franklin County, Missouri, a boy who played at prospecting in local copper mines, who assumed his dead father's debts at twenty-six and paid them off within two years by sheer force of commercial instinct. When news of California gold swept into Missouri in 1849, George headed west with the same single-minded hunger that would later characterize his son, though the father's hunger was for metal in the ground and the son's would be for ink on paper. George struck gold at a mine he named Merrimac Hill — after a Missouri river, not a warship — sold it, struck again at the Potosi mine, sold that too, and then proceeded over the next three decades to assemble ownership stakes in some of the largest mines in American history: the Comstock Lode in Nevada, the Homestake gold mine in South Dakota, the Ontario silver mine in Utah, and the Anaconda copper mine in Montana. The son of a debt-ridden farmer became a multimillionaire many times over, a man whose geologic intuition amounted to a kind of genius for reading what lay beneath the surface of things.
In 1862, George married Phoebe Apperson, a Missouri schoolteacher nineteen years his junior. Their only child, William Randolph, arrived on April 29, 1863, in San Francisco. George was largely absent — mining requires absence — and left the boy's rearing almost entirely to Phoebe, who was devoted, cultured, and quietly formidable. At ten, she took William on a grand tour of Europe, where the scale and grandeur of castles and cathedrals detonated something in the boy's imagination that would detonate again, and again, for the rest of his life. He never stopped wanting to reproduce that feeling of first encounter — to own the grandeur, to possess it materially, as though beauty were a thing that could be captured by purchase and shipped home in crates.
George, meanwhile, was acquiring property in California. In 1865, he purchased roughly 40,000 acres of ranchland near San Simeon Bay, eventually expanding his holdings to some 250,000 acres along the Pacific coast. It was wilderness then — good for cattle, good for hunting, good for camping trips where the family roughed it in fully furnished tents pitched by ranch hands on a place they called "Camp Hill," fed by professional cooks. George also acquired, sometime around 1880, a struggling San Francisco newspaper called the Examiner, reportedly as payment for a gambling debt, or perhaps to promote his political career — the stories vary, and with the Hearsts, the stories always vary. George won election as a U.S. senator from California in 1886. The mine owner had become a politician. The newspaper, for now, was an afterthought.
It would not remain one.
Harvard, the Chamber Pots, and the Letter That Changed Everything
William Randolph Hearst arrived at Harvard in the fall of 1882, a lanky, big-boned Californian with pale blue eyes, a strangely high-pitched voice, and a talent for expensive mischief. He joined the Hasty Pudding theatrical group, served as business manager of the Harvard Lampoon — where he demonstrated a genuine flair for the commercial side of publishing, turning around the humor magazine's finances — and distinguished himself primarily through the extravagance of his pranks. He sponsored massive beer parties in Harvard Square. He sent silver chamber pots to his professors, their likenesses carefully engraved inside the bowls. He was, eventually, expelled.
But while Harvard's administrators were losing patience with his antics, Hearst was educating himself in an entirely different curriculum.
Joseph Pulitzer had arrived in New York in May 1883 and launched his
New York World — a new kind of newspaper that combined crusading reform journalism with lurid sensationalism, championing "the cause of the people rather than that of the purse-potentates" while simultaneously running the most titillating crime and scandal coverage the city had ever seen. Hearst flooded his rooms with copies of the
World. He studied its layout, its headlines, its use of illustrations, its genius for making readers feel that the newspaper was fighting on their behalf. "I thought I saw," he later confessed to the journalist Lincoln Steffens, with characteristic understatement, "the principles underlying his methods."
On January 4, 1885, before his expulsion was formalized, Hearst wrote a letter to his father that would prove to be one of the most consequential documents in the history of American media. It was a letter recommending a managing editor for the Examiner, mentioning an interest in politics, and suggesting buying a ranch out west — but its real significance lay in the ambition it revealed. Hearst told George that he wanted the Examiner. Not wanted it as a sinecure or a hobby, but wanted it as an instrument. He had watched Pulitzer build a revolution out of newsprint and ambition, and he intended to do the same.
"Now if you should make over to me the Examiner — with enough money to carry out my schemes," Hearst wrote, articulating a vision with startling clarity for a twenty-one-year-old who could not stop sending professors defaced chamber pots. The paper should be "original," he argued, modeled on "some such leading journal as the New York World which is undoubtedly the best paper of that class which appeals to the people and which depends for its success upon enterprise, energy and a certain startling originality." Illustrations, he insisted, "attract the eye and stimulate the imagination of the masses."
George resisted. He wanted his son in mining. But William persisted with a determination that bordered on obsession, and in 1887, at twenty-four years old, George relented and relinquished control of the Examiner to his ambitious son. The paper's circulation stood at roughly 5,000. Within two years, Hearst had remade it into a profitable blend of reformist investigative reporting and lurid sensationalism, and circulation had climbed past 55,000.
The mechanism was simple, and it would not change for the next fifty years: hire the best talent money could buy, crusade against corruption and corporate malfeasance with genuine moral fervor, wrap everything in sensation and spectacle, and never, ever bore the reader.
Mark Twain wrote for the
Examiner. Ambrose Bierce wrote for the
Examiner. Jack London wrote for the
Examiner. Hearst exposed the City Hall building fraud of 1891 and the municipal corruption that infested San Francisco's political class, even when the targets included companies within his own portfolio. He was simultaneously the tribune of the people and the profligate heir burning through his mother's fortune, and if the contradiction troubled him, there is no evidence of it in the record.
'While Others Talk, the Journal Acts'
By 1895, having conquered San Francisco, Hearst needed New York. He purchased the failing New York Morning Journal for $150,000 — some accounts say $180,000 — funded by his widowed mother, Phoebe, who sold her Anaconda copper shares for $7,500,000 to finance the invasion. What followed was the most spectacular newspaper war in American history.
Joseph Pulitzer — born in Hungary in 1847, arrived in America as a penniless immigrant, fought in the Civil War, made himself into the most powerful publisher in New York through sheer brilliance and volcanic work ethic — had spent a decade building the World into a circulation colossus. Hearst studied the model, then raided it. He hired away Arthur Brisbane, Morrill Goddard, Solomon Carvalho, and, most notoriously, Richard F. Outcault, the cartoonist who drew the phenomenally popular Yellow Kid comic strip. It was a short cut of breathtaking cynicism: having taken the method, he took the men as well.
Then he went further. Hearst cut the Journal's price to one cent, forcing Pulitzer to match it. He hired Stephen Crane and Julian Hawthorne and ran Rudyard Kipling's fiction in the Sunday edition. He invented "eight pages of iridescent polychromous effulgence that makes the rainbow look like a lead pipe" — his own advertising copy for the new color comic section. His foreign correspondents were not correspondents but "special commissioners." His slogans were breathless declarations of supremacy: "You Can't Get More Than All the News; You Can't Pay Less Than One Cent." "While Others Talk the Journal Acts."
The competition between Hearst's Journal and Pulitzer's World — complete with rival Yellow Kid cartoons, each paper claiming the original — gave rise to the term "yellow journalism," which would haunt both men, though it adhered far more tenaciously to Hearst. On the day after Bryan's defeat in the 1896 presidential election, for which Hearst had campaigned ferociously, his morning edition alone printed 956,000 copies. It was an extraordinary triumph.
He is so far ahead of his staffs that they can hardly see him.
But circulation was not all Hearst had achieved. Using the pencil of the cartoonist Homer Davenport and the imagination of the writer Alfred Henry Lewis, he had plastered the Republican boss Mark Hanna with dollar signs that may never have been entirely erased from that statesman's memory. Bryan lost, but Hearst had demonstrated something more consequential than the ability to elect a president: he had shown that a single publisher, with enough money and enough nerve and enough talent on the payroll, could shape the emotional climate of an entire nation.
You Furnish the Pictures
The Cuban insurrection that broke out in 1895 was both a genuine humanitarian crisis and a gift from the news gods to any publisher willing to exploit it. Hearst was more than willing. He plunged the Journal into the conduct of American foreign relations with an inventiveness, a wildness — "a satanism," as the critic E. L. Godkin called it — surpassing anything that had gone before.
There is a telegram. Or perhaps there isn't. In January 1897, Hearst supposedly sent the artist Frederic Remington, whom he had dispatched to Cuba to draw sketches of the rebellion, a cable reading: "Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war." The anecdote, though perhaps the single most-repeated tale in American journalism, rests on secondhand sources. No original telegram has surfaced. Hearst denied having sent such a message. Spanish censors would almost certainly have intercepted it. The journalism professor W. Joseph Campbell has argued for decades that the story is a myth.
And yet. Whether or not the telegram existed as a physical document, it existed as a fact about Hearst's character. His newspapers published Evangelina Cisneros's transformation into "the Cuban Girl Martyr," then arranged her bodily rescue from a Spanish prison. "An American Newspaper Accomplishes at a Single Stroke What the Best Efforts of Diplomacy Failed Utterly to Bring About in Many Months," the Journal crowed. When the USS Maine exploded in Havana Harbor on February 15, 1898, killing 266 American sailors — a disaster whose cause remains disputed — Hearst's papers attributed it to Spanish sabotage with absolute certainty and enormous headlines. Circulation surged past a million.
Did Hearst cause the Spanish-American War? The consensus among serious historians is: not exactly. The conflict, in the final analysis, was the consequence of a three-sided diplomatic impasse far beyond the power of the Hearst press to control. But he lent material assistance. "Through dishonest and exaggerated reportage," the Britannica assessment concludes flatly, "Hearst's newspapers whipped up public sentiment against Spain so much that they actually helped cause the Spanish-American War of 1898." When the war did come, Hearst offered a ship to the Navy if he could go as captain. The Navy declined, with not unnatural alarm. He chartered his own fleet and rushed to the scene. A photograph survives: Hearst after the naval battle of Santiago, "capturing" Spanish sailors from the beach, wearing a straw hat with a bright ribbon, a revolver at his belt, and a pencil and notebook in his hand. He ordered his European representative to sink a blockship in the Suez Canal to prevent the passage of a Spanish fleet.
This was, indeed, a new concept of the function of journalism.
The Candidate Who Couldn't Be Understood
What did William Randolph Hearst want? The question tormented his contemporaries, and it torments his biographers. The answer, insofar as one exists, is: everything. He wanted to own newspapers and run for president and build castles and collect art and make movies and wage wars and reform government and elect his candidates and destroy his enemies. He wanted to give the people what they wanted, and he wanted to decide what they wanted, and he could not see the contradiction. "He thinks he is a democrat," one of his former subordinates observed. "The fact is, there was never a greater autocrat in the world."
His political career was a series of near-misses so agonizing they border on the operatic. Elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from New York in 1902, he served two terms with such conspicuous inactivity that colleagues barely noticed his presence. But in 1904, he made a serious run at the Democratic presidential nomination, converting his newspapers and their staffs into a political machine, blazoning his own name in sonorous capitals across the nation. He finished as the runner-up, collecting 263 ballots at the convention — second only to Judge Alton B. Parker, who went on to lose catastrophically to
Theodore Roosevelt.
In 1905, running as an independent for mayor of New York City, Hearst came within 3,000 votes of winning — or, as Tammany men privately admitted, he actually won by roughly 20,000 votes and was simply counted out. In 1906, having blandly re-allied himself with Tammany Hall, he ran for governor of New York in a whirlwind campaign denouncing bossism, corruption, and the corporations. Roosevelt, who years earlier had run for the same office on a similar platform as the nominee of a similar boss, was "horrified" to hear of "Hearst's strength on the East Side among laborers; and also even among farmers." The Republican establishment dispatched Elihu Root into the state to revive the McKinley assassination scandal — the Evening Journal had published, after McKinley's 1900 reelection, an editorial suggesting that "if bad men can be got rid of only by killing, then the killing must be done," and when McKinley was shot six months later, the nation turned on Hearst with bonfires fed by his bundled papers. Root's intervention was enough. Charles Evans Hughes won.
In 1909, Hearst ran again for mayor and lost worse. His quest for elective office was essentially over, though he would continue manipulating elections — installing the puppet mayor John F. Hylan, whom New Yorkers endured for eight years — for another decade. Something had gone wrong. The man who could manufacture public sentiment on an industrial scale, who could whip twenty million readers into fury or adulation, could not make them vote for him personally. The instrument was too powerful for its operator; the readers loved the Journal but distrusted the man behind it.
The combination in a single man of great genius, great wealth, and total freedom from the particular sort of cowardice which wealth usually generates is of such rare occurrence that it is perhaps asking too much of his contemporaries that they should understand him.
Was it his character? His voice — that strangely querulous, nearly effeminate sound that came out of a six-foot frame? His coldness in person, the reserve that read as arrogance? Or was it something structural — the discovery, endlessly replicated in American politics, that the skills required to manipulate public opinion from behind a printing press are fundamentally different from those required to win trust face to face?
The Enchanted Hill and the Dream That Couldn't Stop Building
When his mother Phoebe died in April 1919 — of the influenza pandemic, like so many millions that year — Hearst inherited the San Simeon property and the remainder of the family fortune. He was fifty-six years old. His political ambitions were largely shattered. His energy, however, was undiminished.
He contacted Julia Morgan, the San Francisco architect who had worked on projects for his mother, and told her: "Miss Morgan, we are tired of camping out in the open at the ranch in San Simeon and I would like to build a little something."
Julia Morgan was, in her own way, as remarkable as Hearst. Born in San Francisco in 1872, she became the first woman to earn a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley, the first woman to graduate from the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and the first woman to obtain an architectural license in California. She would design more than 700 buildings in her career. She was tiny, meticulous, relentless, and almost pathologically self-effacing — the anti-Hearst in every way except ambition and stamina.
Their collaboration lasted twenty-eight years. The "little something" evolved into an estate of 165 rooms spread across 127 acres of gardens, terraces, pools, and walkways, all perched atop what Hearst renamed La Cuesta Encantada — "The Enchanted Hill." The main residence, Casa Grande, rose with twin Spanish bell towers modeled after the Church of Santa Maria la Mayor in Ronda, Spain. Its façade suggested a cathedral; its entrance was flanked by bas-reliefs of knights; a sculpture of Mary holding the infant Jesus perched in a niche over the massive door. Inside: 115 rooms, 38 bedrooms, more than 40 bathrooms, a theater where the latest talking pictures were screened nightly — sometimes flown that same day from Hollywood — and a beauty salon. The Doge's Suite, reserved for the most important guests, featured walls adorned with velvet fabric and an eighteenth-century painted ceiling originally from an Italian palazzo.
Three palatial "guest houses" — Casa del Mar, Casa del Sol, Casa del Monte — surrounded the main structure. The indoor Roman Pool was based on ancient Roman baths, tiled in blue and gold mosaics inspired by the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna. The outdoor Neptune Pool was surrounded by sculptures, colonnades, and the reconstructed facade of a Roman temple, complete with waterfall. The estate's private zoo, reportedly the world's largest, featured white fallow deer, camels, zebras, giraffes, and kangaroos roaming in large enclosures on the hillside.
Hearst could never stop. The estate was perpetually under construction, perpetually unfinished. He would buy entire rooms — ceilings, walls, floors — from European palaces and have them shipped to California and reassembled. He dictated orders daily from San Simeon over a private switchboard, Hacienda 13 F 11, rolling up colossal telephone tolls as he sent meticulous instructions to his editors in San Francisco, Chicago, Atlanta, Manhattan. The messages began "The Chief says . . ." and were signed "Willicombe" — Joseph Willicombe, his six-foot secretary of seventeen years, who flashed the communications over Hearst's Universal Service wire linking the Enchanted Hill to its fiefs across the continent.
The estimated value of the art and furnishings at San Simeon: $15,000,000 in 1933 dollars. The man who called the place "the ranch."
Marion and Millicent and the Parallel Lives
On April 27, 1903, Hearst married Millicent Willson, a twenty-one-year-old former showgirl he had met in New York when she was sixteen and he was thirty-three. They had five sons: George, William Randolph Jr., John, and twins Randolph and David. Their honeymoon drive across the European continent inspired Hearst to launch his first magazine, Motor, which became the foundation of what would grow into Hearst Magazines.
Millicent was smart, socially adept, and increasingly independent. She threw herself into New York philanthropy and society. But by the early 1920s, the marriage had effectively ended. Hearst had fallen for Marion Davies.
Marion Davies — born Marion Cecilia Elizabeth Douras in Brooklyn in 1897, a blonde former Ziegfeld Follies girl with a stammer and a sharp comic intelligence that almost nobody recognized except Hearst — became his companion for more than thirty years. He poured his fortune into her movie career, producing over a hundred films and building a fourteen-room "bungalow" costing $75,000, furnished with Hearst antiques, on the MGM lot for her use between scenes.
Louis B. Mayer — the former junk dealer from New Brunswick who had clawed his way to the top of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, a ruthless egotist who was not above demanding intimate favors from actresses in return for contracts — regarded Hearst with sincere, if not disinterested, reverence. The priceless publicity of the Hearst press made the arrangement irresistible.
Davies was a genuinely talented comedienne whom Hearst persistently miscast in costume dramas. He wanted her to be regal. She wanted to be funny. The disconnect is one of the smaller tragedies in a story full of larger ones. When Orson Welles created Susan Alexander Kane — the talentless, loveless, drunken mistress of Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane — he committed a cruelty that history has never entirely corrected. Davies was neither talentless nor loveless nor, except in her later years, a drunk. She was generous, warm, and genuinely beloved by the Hollywood community. But the movie was more powerful than the truth, and it stuck.
Hearst and Millicent never divorced. He feared the repercussions — the scandal, the legal costs, the damage to his public persona. So two households operated simultaneously: Millicent presiding over New York society, Marion presiding over San Simeon and the Santa Monica beach house, where the parties were legendary and the guest list read like a casting call for American fame itself. Hearst's estranged wife decamped for New York permanently in 1926, after the family christened Casa Grande on Christmas Eve 1925. The arrangement held, in its strange parallel equilibrium, until Hearst's death.
The Empire of Synergy
Decades before synergy became a corporate cliché, Hearst put the concept into practice with a thoroughness that would not be matched until the digital era. His magazine editors were directed to buy only stories that could be rewritten into screenplays, which would be produced by his film studio, then serialized, reviewed, and publicized in his newspapers and magazines. He broadcast the news from his papers over the radio and pictured it in his newsreels. He created the King Features Syndicate, which became — and remains today — the largest distributor of comics and text features in the world. He was, as David Nasaw writes in
The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst, "as dominant and pioneering a figure in the 20th-century communications and entertainment industries as
Andrew Carnegie had been in steel,
J.P. Morgan had been in banking,
John D. Rockefeller in oil, and
Thomas Edison in electricity."
At his peak in the mid-1930s, Time magazine estimated Hearst's newspaper audience alone at twenty million out of a national population of roughly 120 million. His daily and Sunday papers were so powerful as vehicles of public opinion that Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Winston Churchill all wrote for him — not because they admired his journalism, but because there was no other way to reach that many Americans at once. He owned eight newspapers and two magazines by 1905; by 1935, the count had swelled to twenty-eight major newspapers, eighteen magazines, several radio stations, movie companies, a syndicated wire service, and newsreel operations. One in four Americans got their news from a Hearst publication.
The political evolution was dizzying. The young progressive Democrat who championed Bryan and free silver and the eight-hour workday, who crusaded against corporate trusts and municipal corruption, who demanded government ownership of utilities — this man drifted rightward over the decades until he was excoriating Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal with the same fury he had once directed at Mark Hanna's Republicans. He initially supported FDR, then turned against him with such venom that Roosevelt reportedly implemented a tax program targeting Hearst's holdings, declaring: "That's for Hearst." He launched a virulent anti-communist campaign in his papers from 1934 onward, made anti-Semitic remarks, overlooked Hitler's anti-Jewish policies while praising German efficiency, and yet somehow emerged as an intermittent champion of Zionism. He opposed American entry into both World Wars — consistently, if not wisely — based on the same isolationist nationalism he had been preaching since the 1890s.
"It is difficult not to conclude," The Atlantic observed in 1931, "that Mr. Hearst — in the public mind the unprincipled yellow journalist, the shrewd, the calculating, and unmoral self-seeker — was actually entrapped by the simplicity of his own convictions."
Frankenstein and His Mass Monster
The most revealing episode in Hearst's career may be not the Spanish-American War, or the failed gubernatorial campaign, or even the construction of San Simeon, but rather his opposition to American entry into World War I — because it was the moment when the machine turned on its maker.
For twenty years, Hearst had been industriously pumping the bellows of jingo patriotism. He had elevated the Monroe Doctrine, thumbed his nose at England, believed in a nationalist America isolated and untrammeled. But unlike other patriots, who discovered in 1917 that the ancestral injunction to avoid entanglements suddenly required plunging into a European war as Britain's associate, Hearst could not be de-bamboozled. He turned all his journalistic brilliance toward the logical development of the simple theme he had been preaching for two decades. His exposures of Allied propaganda seem, with hindsight, less than criminal. His suggestion that Germans were human beings does not appear, in retrospect, quite so blasphemous as it was represented to be.
But the nation was in the grip of precisely the kind of mass emotion Hearst himself had done so much to cultivate. Again there were bonfires fed with Hearst papers, as there had been after the McKinley assassination fifteen years earlier. It became almost a crime to buy a copy of them. Frankenstein was imperiled by his own mass monster.
He trimmed in time. He supported the war. And then, when the war fever broke and America discovered it was tired of Europe and the League of Nations, Hearst's bitter isolationism suddenly became respectable again. "The most eminent statesmen tacitly accepted Mr. Hearst's assistance," The Atlantic noted with dry precision, "even though hesitating to acknowledge it." In the great work of defeating the Versailles Treaty, Hearst exerted a commanding influence. He had a powerful voice in at least two of the historic decisions of his country — the entry into the Spanish-American War and the rejection of the Treaty of Versailles — and if those two decisions point in opposite directions, that only confirms the essential incoherence of the man.
Whatever is right can be achieved through the irresistible power of awakened and informed public opinion. Our object, therefore, is not to inquire whether a thing can be done, but whether it ought to be done, and if it ought to be done, to so exert the forces of publicity that public opinion will compel it to be done.
The Unraveling
The Great Depression destroyed Hearst as surely as it destroyed millions of Americans far less cushioned from ruin. His vast personal extravagances — the ceaseless building, the compulsive collecting, the art purchases that filled warehouses in the Bronx with crates that were never opened — had created a financial structure as ornate and unstable as San Simeon itself. At his peak in 1935, the empire seemed invincible. By 1937, the Hearst Corporation was reorganized by court mandate. The reins were taken from him. Newspapers were liquidated or consolidated. The film company was shut down. A well-publicized sale of his art and antiques commenced — a humiliation for the man who had spent decades assembling the collection.
By 1940, Hearst had lost personal control of the vast communications empire he had built. He was seventy-seven years old. He lived the last years of his life in virtual seclusion, first at San Simeon, then, when his fragile health required proximity to medical care, at Marion Davies's home in Beverly Hills. He picked up a telephone — of his private switchboard — and talked, perhaps for an hour, to his editors. The messages still went out: "The Chief says . . ." But the Chief was diminished, and everyone knew it.
And then came Citizen Kane.
The Boy Genius and the Aging King
Orson Welles was twenty-four when he took aim at William Randolph Hearst. He had terrified the nation with his War of the Worlds radio broadcast in 1938 and arrived in Hollywood with the most generous contract the industry had ever offered a newcomer. "Everybody told me from the moment I could hear that I was absolutely marvelous," Welles once said. He was brash, gifted, and convinced of his own genius — which, unlike most people so convinced, he actually possessed.
Hearst was seventy-six, a publishing legend whose daring and single-mindedness had made him one of the most consequential Americans of his century. Both men had been raised to believe they could have everything. Both had enormous appetites. Both were geniuses of spectacle. "Hearst and Welles were proud, gifted, and destructive — geniuses each in his way," the producer Thomas Lennon observed. "The fight that ruined them both was thoroughly in character with how they'd lived their lives."
Citizen Kane premiered in 1941. Its connections to Hearst were unmistakable. Both Kane and Hearst built massive mansions. Both contrived yellow journalism plots to push the United States into war with Spain. Both had publishing empires that barely survived the Depression. Both ran unsuccessfully for New York governor. The film's "Rosebud" motif was drawn, in part, from Hearst's love for flowers — and, according to persistent rumor, from his nickname for a part of Marion Davies's anatomy. The famous death scene, depicting Kane alone and abandoned in his cavernous Xanadu, must have been particularly galling to a man who was said to have an acute fear of death, never allowing the subject to be spoken of in his presence.
Hearst set out to destroy the film. Hedda Hopper, the gossip columnist, called it "a vicious and irresponsible attack on a great man." Louis B. Mayer rallied Hollywood executives to buy the negative so it could be burned. Hearst's publications refused to review or advertise it. Threats of blackmail, smears in the newspapers, and FBI investigations were deployed against theaters that dared show it. The campaign was largely successful: Citizen Kane had a limited theatrical run and was a commercial failure. It would take nearly a quarter century for the film to be revived and recognized as one of cinema's masterpieces.
Hearst won the battle. He lost the war. For subsequent generations, Charles Foster Kane — isolated, pathetic, dying alone with the word "Rosebud" on his lips — became William Randolph Hearst in the American imagination. The most famous myth-maker in the history of American media was himself mythologized, and the myth was not kind.
A Quaker Elder at the End of the World
David Nasaw, who spent years with the Hearst papers and produced the definitive biography, arrived at a portrait that defied every caricature. "William Randolph Hearst was a huge man with a tiny voice; a shy man who was most comfortable in crowds; a war hawk in Cuba and Mexico but a pacifist in Europe; an autocratic boss who could not fire people; a devoted husband who lived with his mistress; a Californian who spent half his life in the East." The contradictions were not flaws in the portrait. They were the portrait.
He died on August 14, 1951, in Beverly Hills, at the age of eighty-eight. Marion Davies was with him. Millicent was not. His five sons — George, William Randolph Jr., John, Randolph, and David — survived him. His tomb is in California, in the Hearst family mausoleum at Cypress Lawn Cemetery in Colma.
The Hearst Corporation survived. It survives today as one of the nation's largest diversified media companies, owning newspapers, magazines, television stations, and financial services companies — including Fitch Group, one of the world's three major credit rating agencies. In 2025, the company's CEO, Steve Swartz, acquired the Dallas Morning News, the latest in a series of newspaper acquisitions that have made Hearst arguably the quality newspaper chain in America. The founder's grandson, William Randolph Hearst III, serves as chairman. He has publicly admitted — breaking a family taboo that lasted decades — that he loves Citizen Kane. "It's just a great movie, a great story," he told an audience at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 2017. "It's not meant to be a documentary. But I do think it's quite accurate in the way it portrays the newspaper business."
The castle is a California State Park now. A million people visit annually. They ride buses up the five-mile road to the Enchanted Hill, narrated by a recording of Alex Trebek, past the descendants of Hearst's zebras — which still roam the property, feral and uncatchable, a living remnant of one man's determination to build a private world answerable only to himself.
At the end of the Neptune Pool, with its marble columns and reconstructed Roman temple, the water reflects the California sky. Inside the Roman Pool, where guests once swam at night, the stars and planets are paved in blue-and-gold mosaic on the bottom, magnified and illuminated so they seem to float on the surface. Above, on the ceiling, a representation of the ocean floor: fish and seaweed and shells. "It's an upside-down world," a tour guide says. "And when you stand at the end of the diving board and look down, you are diving into the night sky."
Somewhere on the refectory table, if you look closely enough, you can still see the ring where the ketchup bottle sat.
