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William Randolph Hearst

1863–1951 · 88 years Tier II

Expelled from Harvard for mailing professors their own chamber pots

Portrait of William Randolph Hearst — AnonymousUnknown author — circa 1910 — Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Hearst was the only child of George Hearst, a Missouri-born prospector who struck it rich in Nevada silver and Montana copper and later bought himself a Senate seat, and Phoebe Apperson, a schoolteacher from Missouri who became one of the first women to sit on the Board of Regents at Berkeley. He grew up shuttling between a San Francisco mansion and Europe, collecting art before he was ten. Harvard expelled him twice — once for a beer-and-vaudeville binge, and once, after his family bought his way back in, for mailing chamber pots painted with his professors' faces to their doors. In 1887 his father, who had taken the San Francisco Examiner as payment on a gambling debt, handed the paper to his 23-year-old son to run.

Hearst rebuilt the Examiner around crime, disaster and outrage, then took the formula to New York in 1895 with a failing paper bought largely on his mother's money. His circulation war with Joseph Pulitzer's World invented what both sides called yellow journalism, and in 1898 his papers helped push the country toward war with Spain over Cuba. By the mid-1920s he owned 28 newspapers reaching a fifth of the country's readers, plus magazines, newsreels and a movie studio built largely to make Marion Davies a star. He served two terms in Congress, then ran for mayor of New York twice, for governor once and for president once, and lost every one of those races. What he built instead, on a California hilltop, was a castle.

He was legally married for 34 years and unmarried in every way that mattered for most of them. Millicent Willson, a chorus girl he married in 1903, gave him five sons and then, by the mid-1920s, a permanent separation he never made formal, because Hearst did not believe in divorce. He spent those years at San Simeon with the actress Marion Davies, whom he never married and with whom he reportedly had a daughter, Patricia Lake, raised publicly as his niece. His papers ran unchallenged columns by Hermann Goring and Alfred Rosenberg through the 1930s, and after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 Hearst called him the savior of Europe. The Depression nearly finished him financially: a court forced a reorganization in 1937, and he spent two years auctioning his own art collection to stay solvent.

He died in Beverly Hills on August 14, 1951, at 88, and was entombed at Cypress Lawn outside San Francisco. Davies inherited a controlling stake in the company and gave most of it back within months. San Simeon went to California in 1957 and now runs public tours. Orson Welles had already fixed the other half of the reputation in 1941: Citizen Kane, built openly on Hearst's life, so enraged him that he tried to keep it out of theaters and largely succeeded. In 1974 his granddaughter, Patty Hearst, was kidnapped and later photographed robbing a bank, putting the family name back in headlines he did not live to answer.

Lifespan

15401700180019002030

William Randolph Hearst's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

San Francisco Examiner company
Handed to him by his father to run at 23 1887
New York Journal company
Bought to compete with Pulitzer's New York World 1895
Hearst Castle, La Cuesta Encantada building
Never fully finished, on 250,000 acres at San Simeon 1919
Hearst Corporation company
Peaked at 28 newspapers plus magazines, radio and newsreels 1928

Life in brief

with age at each point

1887 aged ~24 Takes over the San Francisco Examiner at 23
1895 aged ~32 Buys the failing New York Journal Financed largely by his mother, Phoebe Hearst.
1898 aged ~35 His papers push the country toward war with Spain
March 4, 1903 aged 39 Marries Millicent Willson
1919 aged ~56 Begins building San Simeon
1937 aged ~74 Courts force a reorganization of his finances He sold off much of his art collection over the next two years.
May 1, 1941 aged 78 Citizen Kane is released and he tries to bury it
August 14, 1951 aged 88 Dies in Beverly Hills at 88