William Randolph Hearst
Publisher of twenty-eight newspapers, builder of one castle, model for one Kane. 1863–1951.
The inheritance
Hearst was the only child of George Hearst, a Missouri farmer who walked to California in 1850 and hit three of the biggest ore strikes in American history — the Comstock Lode, the Ontario mine, the Homestake. The family fortune was silver, gold and copper before it was ever ink. Young Will toured Europe with his mother at ten, collected beer steins and photographs, went to Harvard, and was invited to leave it.
What he wanted was a newspaper his father had taken as payment for a debt: the San Francisco Examiner. In 1887, at twenty-three, he got it, restaffed it, spent money on it like weather, and made it roar.
The empire
In 1895 he bought the New York Journal and went to war with Joseph Pulitzer’s World — a circulation brawl of price cuts, poached cartoonists, screaming headlines and manufactured crusades that gave the language a permanent phrase: yellow journalism. By the mid-1930s the Hearst empire counted twenty-eight daily papers, magazines from Cosmopolitan to Good Housekeeping, wire and feature services, newsreels and a film studio. No private citizen had ever owned so much of the American attention supply.
Politics
He wanted the presidency and never got closer than two terms in the U.S. House. He lost the New York mayoralty twice and the governorship once, and his papers’ politics swung across four decades from trust-busting progressivism to bitter opposition to the New Deal. The lesson Hollywood later drew — that owning the megaphone is not the same as being loved — is more or less the plot of a certain movie.
The collector
Hearst bought art the way his papers ran headlines: in volume, above the fold. Tapestries, armor, ceilings, cloisters — at one point an entire Spanish monastery, crated stone by stone. Much of it was meant for the ranch; much of it never left the warehouses. The Depression called the loan: by 1937 the empire was $126 million in debt and Hearst lost financial control of it. Marion Davies sold her jewelry and wrote him a million-dollar check. In 1941 his surplus art was sold, floor-stacked, at Gimbels department store.
After
He rebuilt enough of the fortune to die rich on August 14, 1951, at eighty-eight. The Hearst Corporation he left behind still publishes. The castle belongs to California now, and the definitive public memory of the man belongs — to his lasting fury — to Orson Welles.