June 06, 2008

Randolph Hearst: The Media Mogul

Last week we talked about Walt Disney, the builder of the ‘happiest place on earth’. Let us consider this week another great American, Randolph Hearst (1863-1951), the media mogul who built the monumental Hearst Castle. Next week we shall make a comparative study of the two.
A bundle of contradictions, Hearst was born into wealth, had an overwhelming passion for pelf, power and position; yet, he denounced the rich and always upheld the causes of the downtrodden. 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.
Randolph went to Harvard for higher studies, but did not take to academic pursuits. He was found responsible for several cases of indiscipline. Once, he placed a donkey in the room of a teacher with a plaque around its neck saying: “Now there are two of you”. Expelled from college, he had to return home to take up a vocation. His father offered him the money-minting mines and his enormous ranch in Mexico. But, Randolph wanted to have only the insignificant paper: The San Francisco Examiner.
Every one thought it impossible to turn the paper 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 force day and night.
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.
“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.
His worldwide publishing empire eventually included 32 newspapers, 13 magazines, King Feature Syndicate, radio and TV stations, Metrotone News, several movie and book companies.
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.”
He would cry at the death of a dog and would not 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.
On a visit to London as a young boy, he asked his mother to buy the Windsor Castle for his residence, and 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 guesthouses, pools, gardens, playgrounds located over a quarter of a million acres of Hearst holdings that 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 king 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. It struck me as a manifestation of his indigestion of wealth.
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.
The seamy side of his persona was depicted by Orson Wells is his 1941 film “Citizen Kane”. I saw the film before writing this piece, particularly as it was considered by many critics as one of the great films of the twentieth century. I did not, however, find it 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)