Hearst and historical memory

Controversies overtaken by time, San Simeon tours, and "Citizen Kane"

Recently I returned to Hearst Castle for the first time in years. William Randolph Hearst’s estate at San Simeon commands a hilltop in California’s Santa Lucia Range 1,600 feet above the sea. Visitors are bussed from the bottom of the hill, and in 2025 the recorded narration on the 15-minute trip to the top is still that which was taped by the late Alex Trebek.

Hearst built his Central Coast lair in fits and starts from 1919 until the 1940s, when his advanced years compelled a move to Los Angeles. He passed away at age 88 in 1951.

San Simeon’s architect was Julia Morgan, a brilliant trailblazer whose client frequently changed his mind not merely with regard to plans but with finished construction. The fruits of Hearst’s fortune and of Morgan’s fortitude and mastery have been preserved magnificently as a state historical monument. The setting is spectacular. Tourists have been coming since 1958.

On our day the guide brought us to a spot in front of the main house, Casa Grande, and directed our attention to the upper floors. These windows over here were Hearst’s bedroom suite, he said. Hearst’s wife Millicent was always back east, and these windows over here on the north side were the quarters for Hearst’s girlfriend.

Visitors had been half-listening and snapping pictures in all directions, but this comment sent a ripple of attention through the group. Girlfriend?

Film actress Marion Davies loaned Hearst $1 million in the Depression when the finances of the newspaper publisher and putative richest man in the nation were in dire straits. Her career spanned the silent and early sound eras, she co-starred with Clark Gable and Bing Crosby, and she made her last film in 1937 at age 40. She was with Hearst for 35 years. He died in the Beverly Hills home they shared.

Davies can be glimpsed as a literal face in the crowd on the left edge of familiar newsreels of John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961. It was her last public appearance. She is the subject of an excellent 2022 biography by Lara Gabrielle.

If visitors are nonetheless unaware that Marion Davies was a celebrity linked romantically to Hearst, on this day our tour group wasn’t too clear on Hearst either. Questions posed by our guide elicited little in the way of Hearst knowledge except that he was a rich newspaper publisher.

To the extent that the name Hearst is recognized today it signifies one of California’s top tourist attractions or, possibly, Citizen Kane. In addition it denotes a media corporation with $13 billion in annual revenue and a glossy LEED-certified office tower near Columbus Circle. Persons of a certain age also recall the publisher’s granddaughter being kidnapped a half-century ago.

As for William Randolph Hearst himself, to tour groups he’s little more than the wealthy grandee in the newsreel rubbing elbows with Hollywood stars. The paragon of yellow journalism is as distant and shapelessly august today as Henry Flagler is for visitors to Palm Beach’s Whitehall or as Marjorie Merriweather Post is for tourists at Washington D.C.’s Hillwood.

Hearst would be surprised by this legacy. In his day he viewed his newspapers not only as competing with Joseph Pulitzer’s for circulation but also as doing battle with the forces of evil. In the 1890s those evildoers were seen as Republicans, rapacious municipal trusts, and, most famously, Spain in the run-up to the Spanish-American War.

By the 1930s those enemies were instead communists in the Soviet Union and the Democrat in the White House.

Over a career that stretched from Grover Cleveland’s first term to the Cold War, Hearst’s editorial stances were markedly varied yet consistently bellicose. He was well and heartily detested by both a Republican and a Democratic president named Roosevelt. In 1906 Theodore Roosevelt wrote privately that Hearst was “the most potent single influence for evil we have in our life.” Three decades later Franklin D. Roosevelt messaged his treasury secretary: “Can’t you look up his [Hearst’s] income tax and be prepared.”

The publisher’s 60 years in journalism were punctuated by two notable eruptions of anti-Hearst outrage. In 1901 his New York Journal editorialized that “killing must be done” five months prior to President William McKinley’s assassination. Hearst had already been pilloried on charges of lowering the standards of the press and playing fast and loose with the facts in demanding war with Spain. Now amid the mounting furor after a Republican president’s death, Hearst rebranded many of his Democratic newspapers as “American” in their very names.

Hearst weathered the McKinley storm. He served a desultory stint in one of Tammany Hall’s safe seats in Congress, pursued but did not capture the Democratic presidential nomination, and diversified into early motion pictures. The yellow press of Pulitzer and Hearst that had been castigated as a threat to democracy in the 1890s was by the 1920s regarded with a more indulgent nostalgia. H.L. Mencken even professed to miss the good old days, faulting Hearst for straying from his audacious roots and for becoming, of all things, dull.

Citizen Kane’s early scenes side with Mencken. As a brash heir new to the newspaper business, Charles Foster Kane is charismatic in person, mendacious in print, and clearly having a good time. He builds circulation by trying to start a war with Spain. When Kane’s stuffy Dickensian mentor Mr. Thatcher is infuriated by a headline like “GALLEONS OF SPAIN OFF JERSEY COAST” it’s clear enough where our sympathies are expected to land.

If you were making a film released in 1941 it was hardly a stretch to imagine Hearst warning of Spanish galleons off the East Coast in the 1890s. Hearst was still printing headlines like that in the 1930s, only now the enemy had changed: “Communist Plan for May to Seize All Property in the United States Revealed.”

Confronted with reports of famine and state-sponsored terror in the Soviet Union, the Hearst press concluded that every benefit of the doubt should be extended to stalwart anticommunist Adolf Hitler. Closer to home Hearst newspapers demanded loyalty pledges from public school teachers and investigated alleged subversive tendencies among faculty on campuses from New York and Chicago to Madison and Syracuse. Hearst cabled his editors that university officials were to be supported in “throwing out” communists, adding that editorials should “say, furthermore, that they [communists] should be thrown out of the country.”

All of the above coincided with Hearst declaring open season on President Roosevelt following the 1934 midterm elections. FDR was now referred to as Stalin Delano Roosevelt, the New Deal was the Raw Deal, and the National Recovery Administration was Nonsensical, Ridiculous, and Asinine.

The publisher’s hunt for communist subversion in education and especially his attacks on the president brought about a second great wave of anti-Hearst invective. Circulation took a hit not only due to FDR’s popularity with readers of Hearst’s nominally Democratic newspapers but also as a result of organized boycotts. The American Newspaper Guild supported a nationwide boycott of the Hearst press while college and university student newspapers in particular attacked Hearst as an enemy of free speech.

Taking a page from his response to the McKinley controversy decades earlier, Hearst in the 1930s sought to minimize any damage to his company through rebranding. When movie audiences began booing newsreels carrying the Hearst Metrotone News label, the series was rechristened as News of the Day.

By the close of FDR’s first term Hearst was not merely vilified but topical in a way he hadn’t been for years. Ferdinand Lundberg published Imperial Hearst, a caustic biography with a no less scathing introduction from historian Charles Beard. “Unless we are to believe in the progressive degradation of the American nation,” Beard wrote, “we are bound to believe that Hearst’s fate is ostracism by decency in life, and oblivion in death.”

Hearst’s fate would in fact take some unexpected turns. He went all-in supporting Alf Landon against FDR in 1936 only to see the Republican lose in a landslide. While Hearst’s campaign against the president did no favors to his corporation’s bottom line, an even more pressing issue was his continued and legendary personal spending. With his finances in ruins, he accepted a loan of $1 million from Davies and ceded administrative authority over his company even as he continued to exercise total editorial control over his newspapers.

Presented with a long storied press baron who had only recently become both markedly more unpopular politically and diminished financially, director and star Orson Welles and screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz collaborated on Citizen Kane. Compared to what the studio system had produced since adopting the Hays Code in 1934 the film stood out as thematically audacious, tonally unique, and visually stunning.¹

While Citizen Kane referenced a number of Hearst controversies, in the years since its release it has come to supersede any historical memory of that which brought about the film in the first place, namely, the Hearst furor of the 1930s. At the time Hearst was being condemned as an “insidious influence.” Picture one of the world’s wealthiest individuals, one whose personal life presents a rather baroque aspect. He owns a media colossus where his political opinions receive top billing. (Actually, in Hearst’s case, sole billing.) His business takes a significant hit as boycotts are staged against a brand that was previously coded as strongly Democratic. It all feels familiar.

Nevertheless, Citizen Kane’s portrayal of its Hearst figure turned out to be rather less damning than one might have expected. Charles Foster Kane’s example demonstrates yet again that money can’t buy love and his arc is more tragic than villainous. True villains don’t miss their childhood sled. An iconoclastic but not entirely unsympathetic work of genius made against the wishes of its imperious but weakened subject is perhaps the best thing that could have happened for Hearst’s legacy.²

In addition to Kane the other prominent 21st century portal to Hearst’s legacy is of course Hearst Castle itself. In 2025 the recorded narration for the visitor center’s IMAX film is still that which was taped by the late Donald Sutherland. The film depicts Hearst as a visionary who built a grand estate on the stunning but no less impractical hilltop where he camped out as a child. If this depiction is incomplete, so be it. Settings replete with tour buses and food halls don’t do comprehensive histories.

Hearst’s great rival Pulitzer endowed a journalism school at Columbia and the annual prizes that the university has awarded ever since. For its part Hearst Castle has long functioned in a similar fashion, recasting a once controversial and even reviled name as not only familiar but prestigious. In real time both the establishment of the awards and the construction of the estate were seen as ostentatious and self-serving gestures funded by a sensationalistic and not wholly praiseworthy turn in the American press. Yet the luster of the prizes has long been manifest and the splendor of San Simeon endures. Legacies can defy our predictions.

1. Cinematographer Gregg Toland would sound several of the same deep-focus notes five years later in The Best Years of Our Lives.

2. The instances where Citizen Kane diverges from Hearst’s biography tend to work to the publisher’s benefit. Hearst and Davies remained devoted to each other right up to Hearst’s death. Unlike the character Susan Alexander, Davies was not only talented but beloved in the business. Her attachment to Hearst did afford her the luxury of starting her film career as an above-the-title star. Nevertheless, no less an observer than Charlie Chaplin believed Davies achieved and sustained her box office success despite Hearst’s ham-handed promotion rather than because of it.