The Chief

...A Tory conspiracy, he said, was out to get him...

...Hearst could never curb his spending habits, nor did he ever want to, and even as a middleaged man, he still turned to Phoebe...

...But two years later the Democrats won the statehouse, and he got his appointment...

...In its fury the left never forgave him...

...Even at lO, Nasaw suggests, Hearst wanted to surround himself with objects that would remain fixed and in place...

...His mother, Phoebe, zo years her husband's iunior, was a former schoolteacher with a yearning for life's finer things, and the deterruination to obtain them...

...The most famous aphorism of the preSocratic philosopher Heraclitus got the matter down with peerless concision: "No man steps iu the same river twice...

...She doted on her son...

...In 1997, an article in Vanity Fair accused him of having accidentally stabbed a movie director to death in 19z 5 with Marion Davies's hatpin...

...At night they rummaged through Shakespeare...

...In 1895, Hearst bought the Journal in New York...

...His schooling at Michigan State, Yale, and Stanford did him no more than the usual harm...

...He dwells apart...

...Hearst, or Kane, is treated more sympathetically, although he dies alone, empty and defeated, crying out only for "rosebud," the sled he had as a child...

...In 194o, while the Battle of Britain raged, he sent a telegram to Lloyd George, preposterously proposing that the two of them "do something to bring this whole war to a just and reasonable cessation...

...ALGIS VALIUNAS is a writer living in Florida...

...He had been "shifted and shunted, withdrawn and newly enrolled in school after school...

...Nasaw says Hearst's "spending and entertaining became more frantic, more spectacular, more lavish as the Depression worsened, as if to signal that he was too strong, self-reliant and self-confident to be swayed by temporary economic dislocation...

...Imaginative journalism was giving way to stunts and contests to attract new readers...

...Then she would send the money...

...From time to time she had left him alone with his nanny or grandpa> ents, "disappearing too often and too early...

...Meanwhile informants kept her apprised of his behavior, and she knew about his Cambridge mistress, and his indifference to classes...

...He hardly knew his father, and even his mother, to whom he was devoted, had disappointed him...

...He was limitless in both his talents and the resources to pursue his ambitions, but he habitually over-reached, and in the ve~, best circles he was judged disreputable...

...At 24, Hearst had found his calling...

...McGuane's second novel, The Bushwhacked Piano (1971), recounts tile misadventures of a young man picking his way through vast expanses of cultural rubble--love, art, war, money lie in fragments all around him--in search of something, anything, worth doing...

...Together they studied French, and attended operettas, and when he was lo she pulled him out of public school--she worried about the "toughs" in his class-and took him on an 18-month tour of Europe...

...In t9o5, as a candidate of the thirdparty Municipal Ownership League, he ran for mayor of New York, and almost certainly won, but Tammany stole the election...

...His father, George, was a tobaccochewing, generally uncouth, semi-literate miner, who struck it rich in the Comstock Lode, and later entered Democratic politics...

...The first big frontpage crime story appeared in May under the headline "THUGSt/A Band of Murderers Discovered in San Francisco/Killing Men to Collect Their Insurance/Unnumbered Awful Crimes Laid at the Door of These Molochs...

...Then he conceived a lunatic plan to prevent the Spanish fleet from using the Suez Canal by blockading it with a sunken tramp steamer...

...Nonetheless at the Democratic convention, where Clarence Darrow seconded his nomination, he received 2o 4 votes on the first ballot...

...Phoebe told him they could not buy everything he saw, but as she also told George, their son "gets so fascinated, his reason and judgment forsake him...

...In fact, three months after Hearst died, Marion Davies married for the first time, and her new husband looked just like him...

...Eventually Hearst did get to Cuba, along with a boat-load of his reporters, and while he apparently had a wonderful time, he was despondent on his return...

...In his essay on Izaak Walton, author of the 17th-century classic The CompIeat Angler, McGuane observes that Walton's book has lasted as long as it has because "it's not about how to fish but how to be 7 The subtitle of McGuane's own book, A Life in Fishing, suggests that one can divine the essentials of how a man lives from the way he pursues his appointed sport...

...Sensational crime stories, and an attentiveness to graphics and layout changed the Examiner almost overnight...

...He also promoted himself...

...Hearst left Harvard in his senior year...

...He was the most powerful newspaper publisher we have ever known, buthe was more interested in making news than reporting it...

...McGuane has always been aware that life, like the rivers he fishes, flows strictly one way and shows no mercy to those who dawdle when they should seize the day...

...I feel about eight years old-and very blue...

...In 193o, she commissioned Mussolini to write for the Hearst newspapers at $1,5oo an article...

...In 188o, his father had bought the San Francisco Examiner...

...He was little esteemed in the college," George Santayana, also in the class of'85, wrote peevishly decades later...

...It is simply killing her" a friend said lugubriously, but she wrote off the original $722,000, and then gave him the $35o,00o...

...Much of what was written about him in the past was either nasty or silly...

...Hearst still dreamed, of course...

...B ut in fact Hearst was 35, and his new life was only beginning...

...Nasaw says Hearst was larger than life, and his splendid biography proves it...

...Hearst, however, had a grander venue in mind, and it 70 September ~ooo The American Spectator is unlikely that he cared...

...The story carried no by-line, but the first sentence referred to Examiner reporters who had uncovered "the most frightful conspiracy in fire modern criminal annals of the civilized world...

...He always thought things would come his way sooner or later...

...He was sworn in as a senator in Washington on March 4, 1887, the same day "W...

...It seems that young Will's life had no center, and he wanted to construct a world his own...

...McGuane has more in mind than fishing when he writes about fishing...

...Hearst was not like other people...

...In 79Ol , he was identified on the cover of Editor and Publisher as "The Foremost Figure in American Journalism 7 In 19o2, he was elected to Congress from Manhattan's Eleventh District...

...Kristallnacht disabused him of that, but even so, he still insisted peace was possible...

...Raising Citizen Kane The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst David Nasaw Houghton Mifflin / 687pages / $35 REVIEWED BY John Corry A #illiam Randolph Hearst was an American original, as much _9 _9 maligned, in death as in life, as he was admired...

...Nothing was beyond him, and secure in his sense of self he made pronouncements...

...In 19oo, he bought the Chicago American...

...There was also, of course, San Simeon, which was not so nmch a house, or even a castle, as an entire Mediterranean village, with the world's largest private zoo...

...Elegant, deft, and funny, it is the tale of a fabulously rich young reprobate hellbent with boredom, who ropes a not altogether eager accomplice into an assault on the woodland pieties of a tony Michigan rodand-gun dub --which is to say, they declare war on civilization itself...

...Hearst was supposedly our leading Aanerican fascist, and he should have been punished for his sins...

...This elegiac turn of mind, activated by waters racing past never to return, goes back a long way...

...Working for Hearst had its pleasures, and as one of his reporters wrote years later, "Nowhere was there ever a more brilliant and more outrageous, incredible, ridiculous, glorious set of newspaper people than there was in that shabby old newspaper office...

...What was good for Hearst, apparently, was good for America, and some of the interests were his...

...He favored front-page stories about corruption in high places, and virtually invented the Sunday supplement...

...He was often spiteful, and he excelled at invective, but delicacy prevented him from exposing the private lives of his enemies...

...He built an oceanside complex for Marion Davies and himself at Santa Monica...

...He also formed the International News Service, or I.N.S., and produced newsreels and movies...

...She liked to travel, JOHN CORRY is The American Spectator's senior correspondent...

...In David Nasaw's The Chief, however, Hearst, who died in 1951 at age 88, finally gets a fair hearing...

...yesterday's river, like the man one used to be, is gone for good...

...McGuane shows himself capable of doing every risible thing he wants to do with the American language...

...he married his college sweetheart, who happened to list Davy Crockett among her ancestors, and he published his first novel, The Sporting Club, in 1969, when he was thirty years old...

...When war broke out in 1914, Hearst and all his newspapers preached non-intervention...

...Privately then he looked ahead to running for president again, although his political career was over...

...in a deadlocked convention, the Democrats might turn to him...

...As Thomas McGuane puts it in The Longest Silence, his bewitching collection of thirty-four essays on fishing written over the past thirty years, "Things that pass ns, go somewhere else, and don't come back seem to communicate directly with the soul...

...Once again a young man at the end of his tether-Thomas Skelton, a serious drug user-finds himself in need of earthly salvation, and he decides to become a Key West fishing guide...

...Then she would remonstrate, and he would repent, but very little would change...

...his childhood had been "defined by impermanence...

...The next year he asked for $35o,ooo more...

...Those uninterested in the sport need not fear...

...and she acted as his roving ambassador...

...They regard him as the Devil...

...Another guide with a violent past takes an immediate dislike to Skelton, and assures him that if he persists in his intention to guide he ~ } will end up a dead man...

...He acquired Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, and Harper's Bazaar...

...The waters are ever on the move, and so is the man...

...The real threat, he said, would come from Japan...

...Meanwhile his newspaper empire grew, and his magazine empire grew even faster...

...Meanwhile as the war went on, Hearst newspaper coverage and editorials became increasingly anti-British and pro-German, When America finally entered the war, Hearst festooned his front pages with flags, and opened "enlistment bureaus" in the cities where he owned papers, although by then it was too late...

...It was called a beach house, but it had 11o bedrooms, 55 bathrooms, and accominodations for thirtytwo servants...

...He held drinking parties and dinners, and often exhausted his $15o monthly allowance--perhaps the largest on camp u s - and frequently asked Phoebe for more money...

...Newspapers then were overtly, not covertly, political, the way they are today, and George Hearst wanted a Democratic state legislature to appoint him to the U.S...

...When the Spanish-American War broke out, he offered to equip a cavalry regiment and serve in its ranks...

...Simply to stand attentively in the presence of moving water gives one a preF ty fair start at understanding nature and one's place therein...

...As a young man he displayed a chivalric devotion to the literary calling, so that his more easily distracted contemporaries dubbed him "The White Knight...

...Ninety-two in the Shade (t973), his best novel to date, brings together the madcap touch of a born comedian with the tragic sense of life...

...He urged Woodrow Wilson, whom he despised, to invade Mexico and protect &nerican business interests...

...Clearly he escaped the just deserts that Welles, an old left,/, had thought appropriate...

...Indeed he did: German porcelain, Venetian glass, and the four white horses that pulled the British royal carriages, among them...

...The only constant The American Spectator _9 S e p t e m b e r ~ o o o 71 was the Chief's optimism, and his unshakable faith in himself...

...I wish you were here tonight...

...About the time McGuane was making a serious name for himself as a writer, he determined that writing was a sorry 72 Sepeernber 20o0 _9 The American Spectator...

...Skelton does persist, and he ends up a dead man...

...Mother and son perfected their French, learned German, and visited museums, galleries, palaces, and churches...

...When his mother died, in 1919, Hearst was bereaved, but at 56 he had finally come into his patrimony, and so he was also very rich...

...He challenged Joseph Pulitzer's World, James Gordon Bennet, Jr.'s Herald, Charles Dana's Sun, Whitelaw Reid's Tr/bune, and four other morning papers, and was expected to fail, but he didn't...

...As Phoebe wrote to George, who had remained in California, "He wants all sorts of things...

...I failed and I'm a failure, and I deserve to be for being as slow and stupid as I was...

...Army declined his offer he told the Navy he would provide it with an armed yacht, although now he wanted to be in command...

...He was very rich, and a profligate and irresponsible spender, but he thought of himself as a tribune of the people...

...Hearst encouraged vivid writing, and Examiner articles had the feel of short stories...

...At 19, he went off to Harvard, moving into rooms in Harvard Yard that Phoebe had decorated in crimson, equipped with a library, and supplied with a maid and valet...

...Readers expected to find figurative, though not necessarily literal, truth...

...Washington suspected him of treason, and opened an investigation...

...Three years later, however, he ordered his wire service chiefs and editors to always use the words "Raw Deal," and never "New Deal...

...The respected and staid New York Evening Post then denounced him as % low voluptuary," while Adolph Ochs's New York Times insisted he stood "for absolutely nothing but the arraying of class against class...

...A reporter who visited said "the place is full of worried editors dodging the kangaroos...

...He had a sense of entitlement, and he always knew what he wanted, whether it was the White House or another tchotchke...

...On the other hand, he said millions were starving to death under Stalin, while the American left was, and unconscionably would remain, beguiled by Communism...

...Usually this left him displeased...

...At the same time Hearst and his wife, Millicent, with whom he had five sons, maintained a civilized relationship...

...R. Hearst, Proprietor," appeared for the first time on the masthead of the Examiner...

...Millicent is depicted as a cold, anti-Semific, social-climbing snob...

...In 1915, when he already owed her $722,ooo, he borrowed an additional $556,000...

...Hearst was born in San Francisco in 1863...

...In Orson Welles's dark and talky" Citizen Kane, regarded by many critics as Holl>~vood's greatest film, Marion, who in real life was an accomplished light-comedy actress, is caricatured as a charmless, graceless, untalented bimbo...

...Hedda Hopper is on his arm, and he looks a bit foolish, or perhaps out of touch...

...Meamvhile young Will felt the first fluttering of what would become a life-long passion...

...N Of Time and the River The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing Thomas McGuane gnopf / 28o pages / $25 REVIEWED BY Algis Valiunas ~ fa serious man is going to devote a significant part of his brief spell on earth to sport, the sport of choice almost has to be fishing, which modulates more readily than any other from action to contemplation...

...This does not wholly explain his enduring urge for acquisitions--houses, land, warehouses filled with otojets d'art and expensive tchotchkes, and, of course, San Simeon-but it may be the best we can do...

...In 1884 , the Examiner backed Democrat Grover Cleveland for president, although California went Republican, and George lost his chance...

...The Times said he was "the spokesman of the Kaiser...

...It is a work of sterling hilarity, as funny as Mark Twain or Evelyn Waugh...

...Hearst's editors and writers were devastated, but convinced, as always, of his own rectitude, the Chief just shrugged it off...

...When the Hearst always thought things would come his way sooner or later...

...He was never a fascist or anti-Semite, but he seemed to believe moral persuasion would work with Hitler...

...Sunk in melancholy then, he wrote to Phoebe: "I made the mistake of my life in not raising the cowboy regiment I had in mind before Roosevelt raised his...

...Davies, of course, was his mistress...

...As Winston Churchill once noted, after visiting him at San Simeon and in Los Angeles, "Those California swells do not of course know Hearst...

...But by the late 192o's Hearst newspapers were in an editorial decline...

...In his eighties, he still slipped poems and notes under her door ever}' night...

...Meanwhile he and Marion were becoming fire new king and queen of Hollywood...

...In 7904, he announced his candidacy for the presidency...

...His sense of self was destroying his judgment...

...Theodore Roosevelt had stolen his glory...

...At the same time, the Examiner championed labor, and attacked big business, the railroads, in particular, and supported Samuel Gompers's call for an eight-hour day...

...A photograph in The Chief shows Hearst at his 75th birthday party, dressed as James Madison...

...In turn, she would reproach him, and ask him to mend his ways...

...Hearst had constructed a world of his own, but the larger world all around that was changing...

...He probably was right more often than he was wrong, but his timing was bad, and the obsessiveness with which he promoted his views made him look foolish...

...They met when he was ~2, and she was 18, and they were together 35 ?:ears...

...Hearst praised Roosevelt when he was elected president in 1932...

...But Hearst, according to Nasaw, "never regarded himself as a failure, never recognized defeat, never stopped loving Marion or his wife," and indeed when he died, ten years after Citizen Kane was first released, he died not in the tomb-like place Welles had envisioned, but in Marion Davies's house in Beverly Hills...

...Senate...