Photo of the Day: Hearst Tower, NYC

Donald Trump wasn’t the first bumptious New York mogul equally interested in real estate, entertainment, politics, and the female form in multiple aspects: William Randolph Hearst got there first. 

Trump has said that Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, a classic that was notoriously inspired by Hearst’s career, is his favorite film. Yet he seems not to have learned anything from its examination of the limits of ambition and power. For that, he might have absorbed more by walking two blocks west, from his own Trump Tower to Hearst Tower. 

When construction began on what was then called the International Magazine Building in 1926, New York City was in the midst of a construction frenzy that would climax in just a couple of years with the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings. 

Even so, Hearst proposed to add another element to the city’s skyline. His reasoning might have been speculative, but it was hardly insane: the publisher, who had been promoting the film career of his mistress, former Ziegfeld Follies showgirl Marion Davies, was convinced that the Broadway entertainment district would extend all the way up to Columbus Circle. 

And why not? With Carnegie Hall already in the neighborhood and the Metropolitan Opera announcing plans to move to a new home on 57th Street, Columbus Circle and its vicinity did experience a heady growth spurt in the Roaring Twenties.

Anticipating the arrival of the opera, Hearst enlisted the organization’s set designer, Joseph Urban—who had also done work for him (remodeling the Criterion and Cosmopolitan theaters, and designing the Ziegfeld Theater) and who would also become art director of Hearst's new film-making studio, Cosmopolitan Productions. The interests of the architect and the building’s prime mover can be seen in the main entrance of the building, which is flanked by Comedy and Tragedy on the left and Music and Art on the right.

Looking at the structure now on West 57^th Street, however, I saw two buildings of qujte dissimilar appearance this past weekend. The older, six-story base—the one designated a New York City landmark in 1988—made me wonder if the one atop it was some kind of monstrous modern architectural graft. 

What I didn’t realize at the time was that the top portion was, in fact, something of a revival of Hearst’s original intention for the building. The tycoon wanted so much for his publishing enterprises that he thought a skyscraper would be required. Urban didn’t have that kind of experience, so the firm of George B. Post was enlisted for that part of the project. (It didn't hurt that in hiring Post, the architect of Joseph Pulitzer's World Building, Hearst may have felt he was getting his own back against his old rival in New York's tabloid wars.)

The six-story base was finished in 1928. But then the Depression intervened, hobbling even the owner of the greatest publishing empire the world had known to date, as Hearst staved off bankruptcy only through the sale of many of his private assets and money from his own faithful mistress, Davies. Hearst’s plan for a nine-story tower on top of his base lost momentum. Post’s attempt to revive the proposal right after WWII likewise went nowhere. 

Not until 2006 did the present 46-story structure, designed by architect Norman Foster, open. Featuring a glass-and-steel diagrid design, it was the first building to receive a Gold LEED rating for core and shell and interiors in New York City.

The story of Hearst and his building should be heeded not only by Trump, but also by any powerful man who continually tries to exert his power in all sorts of different ways: Sooner or later, interlocking circumstances will conspire to constrain even him, and his original scheme will fall far short of fruition. 

(I took the accompanying image of the Hearst Tower this past weekend, from across the street at Symphony Plaza. So much has changed since the first part of the structured opened 90 years ago: Hearst’s business organization (now more focused on magazines than newspapers), his building, but especially his reputation.)

This Day in Film History (“Citizen Kane,” Archetypal “American,” Opens)

May 1, 1941—The film that debuted in New York on this date and that drew the ire of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst became renowned as Citizen Kane. But the original title for actor-hyphenate Orson Welles’ first picture, American, far better expressed its vastly ambitious commentary on this nation’s relationship to wealth, fame, idealism and the past.

Sometimes in writing this blog, I’m faced with a real dilemma: How do I get my arms around a subject that’s enormous and has inspired millions of words already? Citizen Kane is an especially strong example of this.

I could write about the film’s innovations in sight and sound, its cast, its accuracy in depicting Hearst and other real-life figures, the publisher’s plan to strangle the movie in its crib before it hit the theaters, Welles’ attempt to minimize the contribution of screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, the film’s original reception, its growing critical reputation as the greatest film of all time, and its foreshadowing of Welles’ own decline, among many other topics.

But these stories have all been told over and over again, and—for me, anyway—they’re now old-hat. (Look, if you really want a brief distillation of all of this, rent the PBS documentary, “American Experience: The Battle Over Citizen Kane.”)

What has interested me, and for quite a while, is what Mankiewicz was implying with that title. I’m not sure why the decision was made to come up with a different one. Did Welles think it was too obviously a stab at holding up to the world a representative figure, that he wanted people to infer it from the movie itself?

But keeping that title would have been a remarkably bold statement by Hollywood in 1941. Two years before, director Frank Capra had come under enormous pressure for depicting the U.S. Senate as a cesspool of corruption in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. From his perch as Ambassador to the Court of St. James, Joseph Kennedy sniped that that film was fostering a terribly negative impression of American democracy. (Unlike, say, the impression made by the manipulative, thieving, anti-Semitic, appeasing patriarch of the Kennedy clan.) Yet the rousing conclusion of Capra’s satire ended up paying tribute to the greatness of America, a place where, unlike much of Europe at that point, a common man could win out against a gigantic system arrayed against him.

Two years later, with the situation on the European mainland even darker than before, no such optimistic message was offered by Welles’ moody masterpiece (a film whose style probably owes more to Continental Expressionism than to the American studio system). A single American leaves his mark on the world, but he debases all institutions he touches, brings misery to virtually all in his orbit, and dies alone and unhappy. Using that word "American," then, would have posed a question about a representative man at the intersection of our media and democratic institutions, in the starkest possible terms: Is this what our country could become? More to the point, is this what our country has become?

Very early on, the film is at pains, in its parody “March of Time” documentary newsreel sequence, to establish Kane as a uniquely American figure:

* “America's emperor of the news syndicate, another editorialist and landlord, the still mighty and once mightier Hearst.”
* “Here, for Xanadu's landlord, will be held 1940's biggest, strangest funeral; here this week is laid to rest a potent figure of our Century - America's Kubla Kahn - Charles Foster Kane.”
* “Famed in American legend is the origin of the Kane fortune…” (This last is a wickedly funny parody of the so-called “Times-speak” style mandated by publisher Henry Luce, who decreed that sentences would dispense with articles, dwell on favorite adjectives, compress two words into one, and unwind, in Yoda fashion, from back to front.)

But the strongest invocation of Kane as representative figure is a quote that the newsreels figure prominently: "’I AM, HAVE BEEN, AND WILL BE ONLY ONE THING - AN AMERICAN.’ CHARLES FOSTER KANE.” It was a statement that might look unexceptional today, but that Hearst would have recognized as a direct allusion to himself, as he had said similar things throughout his career.

Okay. So, after watching Citizen Kane, what might a filmgoer—especially a foreign one—think was the essence of an American?

* An American, no matter what his age, is like a big kid, exuberant and energetic, viewing even established major institutions as playthings. I love the image of Welles as Kane that accompanies this post. He stands in the newsroom like a colossus bringing order (or, at least, his version of reality) to the chaos of the world. The early scenes, when Kane assumes control of the New York Inquirer, represent a portrait of the artist as a young whelp. Early on, the film has fun at the expense of banker Walter Parks Thatcher, who fumes as he reads a letter from the young man: "Sorry but I'm not interested in gold mines, oil wells, shipping or real estate...One item on your list intrigues me, the New York Inquirer, a little newspaper I understand we acquired in a foreclosure proceeding. Please don't sell it. I'm coming back to America to take charge. I think it would be fun to run a newspaper.” (Question: In the digital age, how many publishers say the same thing?)

* An American is at pains to publicize his idealism, opening himself up to charges of hypocrisy and corruption. Kane publishes his self-conscious “Declaration of Principles” in his paper. But watch the quizzical expression on his face when friend Jedediah Leland requests a copy. It’s almost as if he’s already wondering if he can live up to his Gatsbyesque platonic conception of himself.

* An American believes that, with enough determination, he can carry everything before him. From his first days as a publisher, Kane sees the impact of his work, whipping the public up to feverish warmongering through wildly exaggerated atrocity stories. (In only a slight variation on one of Hearst’s most infamous moments, Kane telegraphs his paper’s Cuba correspondent: “Dear Wheeler: You provide the prose poems—I’ll provide the war.”)

* An American believes that, if events conspire to disprove the last contention, enough money will fix everything. The young Kane (like the young Hearst) is able to hire away the best talent of his New York rival. His success in establishing a chain of papers leads him to think that money can do just about anything—a principle put to its most severe test when he hires a vocal coach, builds an opera house, and sponsors a tour for his talentless second wife.

* An American—well, the plutocratic sort, anyway--holds the touching belief that he knows what is best for “the people.” The film tells us that Kane has transformed from a liberal interventionist to a conservative isolationist, but doesn’t show this happening. But it does the next best thing, through the drunken tirade by Leland after the publisher has exclaimed in disgust that “the people” preferred corrupt boss Jim Gettys to himself in the recent election: “You talk about ‘the people’ as though you owned them, as though they belong to you. Goodness. As long as I can remember, you've talked about giving ‘the people’ their rights, as if you can make them a present of Liberty, as a reward for services rendered.”

* An American collects objects even as he destroys the past. The young Kane briskly disposes of the incumbent fuddy-duddy editor of the Inquirer by telling him that the news goes on 24 hours, not just 12. All the old niceties about verifying facts goes out the window under his leadership. But Kane’s success in riding roughshod over resistance at home and abroad enables him to go on buying sprees for European art.

* An American searches fruitlessly for an ever-receding past even while being waylaid by the future. After the famous montage scene showing the dissolution of Kane’s marriage, whatever audience sympathy for his charm has diminished. But Mankiewicz and Welles establish residual mercy for him, even after it’s hinted that he’s trying to seduce a young woman encountered on a rain-drenched street. Later on, in her apartment, he confesses what brought him out on this night: “I was on my way to the Western Manhattan Warehouse in search of my youth. You see, my mother died a long time ago and her things were put in storage out West. There wasn't any other place to put them. I thought I'd send for them now. Tonight, I was going to take a look at them. You know, a sort of sentimental journey.” The trouble is that Kane’s obsession with the past has terrible consequences for his own future. On the night Kane goes “in search of my youth," he meets the woman who’ll break up his family and wreck his political prospects in the ensuing scandal.

* An American continually mourns the loss of his innocence. It’s all in the word for Kane’s childhood sled—“Rosebud.” (Legend has it that Hearst became particularly enraged over the film because mistress Marion Davies had confessed, while deep in her cups, that the word was Hearst’s charming endearment for her private parts.)

* An American wants to be loved--badly. No matter how much other countries might assail U.S. military interventionism, an American leader, whether Republican or Democrat, expects to be given credit for spreading the benefits of liberty. We don't understand--we're hurt--when we don't receive it. Again, Leland (now elderly) dismisses Charles’ particular form of self-regard: “It seems we weren't enough, he wanted all the voters to love him too. Guess all he really wanted out of life was love. That's Charlie's story, how he lost it. You see, he just didn't have any to give. Well, he loved Charlie Kane of course, very dearly, and his mother, I guess he always loved her.”

* An American thinks his motives are so pure that they justify actions that are egotistical and destructive. Kane's hatred for Jim Gettys becomes so consuming that he's prepared to disregard the political boss's blackmail attempt, expose mistress Susan Alexander to ridicule and destroy his marriage. He lashes out in contempt for both the boss he despises and the wife he's wronged for taking "the love of the people of this state away from me." But there's another underlying problem in Kane's attitude: by nakedly seeking Gettys' ouster in his own paper, by promising voters he'll appoint a special prosecutor to seek his removal, Kane has, in effect, become accuser and judge in the same case.

* An American contains multitudes within himself, defeating all attempts to arrive at a single settled truth about his life and legacy. In his 1996 account, The Making of “Citizen Kane,” Robert L. Carringer briefly mentions a scene cut in later versions of the American script: Leland reciting Walt Whitman. That brought to mind a great bit of braggadocio from the poet’s Song of Myself: “I contain multitudes.” The Latin American short-story master Jorge Luis Borges said the film “teems with multiplicity and incongruity.”

The scene that best exemplifies this, I think, comes late. After Susan announces she’s leaving Kane, his image is caught in not one reflection but what looks like a half dozen, roughly equaling the number of witnesses offering their perspectives after his death to the reporter. Even after we learn the truth about Rosebud, however, we are left to ponder the question: What difference does knowing this make to our understanding of Kane?

Citizen Kane is famously framed at beginning and end by the "No Trespassing" sign barring the way to Xanadu. But Mankiewicz and Welles' complex narrative affirms that even those who aggressively disregard such signs are still no better off in possessing the truth about the archetypal "American."

Flashback, April 1906: TR Lashes Out at “Muckrakers”

In what normally makes for a dry, ceremonial occasion, President Theodore Roosevelt blasted the investigative journalism that lent fuel to the Progressive movement he headed--and, in the process, demonstrated anew his talent for phrasemaking--by lashing out at purveyors of negativity that the public, taking his lead, quickly labeled “muckrakers.”

Those fascinated by language--the late William Safire and his ilk--have long known about TR’s neologism. But looking at both the content and context of his speech makes for a fascinating glimpse at how America’s leaders once tried to channel political discourse, why the public responded to TR’s particular appeal, and what impact his words made.

The occasion for the President’s address was the dedication for the House of Representatives office building on April 14, 1906. For more than two decades, since his days in the New York state legislature, Roosevelt had battled the forces of corruption that had found a happy hunting ground in the Gilded Age. In the years since, 10 magazines with a combined circulation of 3,000,000--including Everybody's, McClure's Magazine, and the American Magazine--had alerted ordinary Americans to the depredations of robber barons such as John D. Rockefeller, Charles Yerkes, Andrew Carnegie, and others.

The groundswell generated by the resulting anger had enabled T.R., Robert M. LaFollette, Charles Evans Hughes, and other Progressives to pass legislation related to trusts, food and drug safety and municipal corruption.

But two months before the address, whatever goodwill the President felt toward such revelations began to dissipate. The cause was a magazine series called “The Treason of the Senate,” written by reporter/novelist David Graham Phillips.

The Senate was, indeed, a mega-scandal waiting to happen: Because its members were still at that time voted in by state legislatures, they became almost nakedly beholden to corporate interests. Quite simply, the Senators’ votes--their very offices--were for sale.

The President, known to resort to intemperate rhetoric and even name-calling on occasion (when predecessor William McKinley hesitated about going to war with Spain, TR said the President had “no more backbone than a chocolate éclair”), was unnervingly sensitive to its use by others. He became further aroused in this case upon discovering that one object of Phillips’ charges was Roosevelt’s own mentor, the affable junior senator from New York, Chauncey Depew.

TR was annoyed enough that Phillips had gone after his ally and friend by writing of Depew that the New York Central Railroad, operated by Cornelius and William Vanderbilt, “owned him completely.” The President saw the attack as a product of innuendo and exaggeration.

But Roosevelt also saw another force behind the scenes: William Randolph Hearst, who in the past decade had not only become a media mogul but a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives. (Hard to believe, in light of his late-life reputation as a reactionary, but at this point he was selling himself as the people’s tribune.) It was Hearst’s publication Cosmopolitan that ran the Phillips series.

If anyone had an ulterior motive for his actions, TR believed, it was Hearst rather than Depew: By tearing one politician off his pedestal, the publisher-politician was ensuring that he would mount one himself. Ultimately, even Roosevelt’s administration was being undermined by this, he felt, when an ardent supporter such as Depew was being impugned.

Roosevelt did not hit out immediately at Phillips. Instead, he tried out his criticism privately, writing to friends, to see how they would react to his line of argument. Then he vented his frustrations with “hysterical sensationalism” publicly, in the address at the laying of the corner of the House of Representatives Building.

Several points should be mentioned about the speech:

* The literary allusion, “The Man with the Muck-Rake,” that TR transformed into a new term, “muckraker,” derived from John Bunyan’s 17th-century allegory, Pilgrim’s Progress. Virtually every college graduate of the time--and a much wider swath of Protestant America--would have recognized instantly the source. A century later, in a time not only more secular but less likely to install this book as part of the literary canon, that no longer would be true.

* Though later generations seized on the muckraking image as the most notable part of the speech, the media highlighted another aspect of it at the time: TR’s embrace of the progressive income tax. It was TR’s way of signifying that, though he might have resisted the knee-jerk negativity of the muckrakers, he agreed with them that the divide between rich and poor was a menace to the republic and the robber barons of the time needed to be restrained. (That call for a new tax--and one on the rich--would be verboten in the GOP of John Boehner and Paul Ryan, of course.)

* TR’s criticism of investigative journalism was of a piece with his overwhelming distinctions between “good” and “bad.” Jackson Lears’ New Republic review of Edmund Morris’ Colonel Roosevelt is hyperbolic in labeling TR “drunk on his own self-regard,“ but he does have one point: The President lived in a binary universe of moral absolutes. In much the same way that he distinguished between “good” and “bad” trusts, the President drew a distinction between “good” journalism--”absolutely truthful” reports on “every evil man, whether politician or business man, [and] every evil practice, whether in politics, business, or social life”--and “bad” journalism, which, in its “epidemic of indiscriminate assault upon character,” ran the risk of undermining faith in democratic institutions.

* Muckrakers did not take kindly to TR’s criticisms. The day after the speech, Lincoln Steffens, a pioneer of investigative journalism with his “Shame of the Cities” series, told the President: “Well, you have put an end to all these journalistic investigations that have made you." Though some publications carried on the practice, others began to cool on the idea, as admitted by John O'Hara Cosgrave, editor of Everybody's: "The subject was not exhausted but the public interest therein seemed to be at an end, and inevitably the editors turned to other sources of copy to fill their pages."

Quote of the Day (P.G. Wodehouse, on Dangerous Dining in Hearst’s Castle)

“Meals are in an enormous room, and are served at a long table, with [William Randolph] Hearst sitting in the middle on one side and [actress-mistress] Marion Davies in the middle on the other. The longer you are there, the further you get from the middle. I sat on Mario’s right the first night, then found myself being edged further and further away till I got to the extreme end, when I thought it time to leave. Another day, and I should have been feeding on the floor.”—Humorist P.G. Wodehouse, in a letter to a friend describing his visit to William Randolph Hearst’s San Simeon, Feb. 25, 1931, quoted in The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, edited by James Sutherland (1975)

This Day in Film History (What Happened on “William Randolph’s Hearse”?)

November 21, 1924—Three Hawaiian guitarists played at the funeral of Hollywood player Thomas Ince, but the man who had just made a deal with him and thrown a birthday party for him was not among the industry friends who gathered for the sad event.

Those were only the latest of the bizarre, inexplicable events surrounding his hurried departure a few days before from the yacht of William Randolph Hearst. The incident sparked a three-quarters-of-a-century scandal and mystery involving the tabloid publisher; his mistress, silent-film comedienne Marion Davies; and Charlie Chaplin, who had been paying Davies a great deal of attention.

The Ince case was addressed directly onscreen in Peter Bogdanovich’s fine 2002 drama, The Cat’s Meow, as well as in a mystery co-written by none other than Heart’s granddaughter, Patricia Hearst, Murder in San Simeon. What fewer people realize is that it formed a long-unknown backdrop to the controversial, thinly fictionalized version of the publisher’s life, Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane.

Ince ended up on the 280-ft. yacht, the Oneida—subsequently nicknamed by Hollywood wags “William Randolph’s Hearse”—because Hearst and Davies wanted to throw a party in honor of his 43rd birthday. There was no reason for the producer-director not to come—the vivacious Davies threw the type of galas that people talked about for the rest of their lives, and Hearst wanted him in a good mood as they moved to conclude a major business deal. (Hearst desired to use Ince’s Culver City studios as a base for Cosmopolitan Productions, the production company he’d used to propel Davies to stardom.)

In his epic life of the publisher, The Chief, David Nasaw sounds like one of those exasperated historians forced to slap down innumerable far-fetched conspiracy theories surrounding the Kennedy assassination in Dallas: “Today, seventy-five years after Ince’s death, there is still no credible evidence that he was murdered or that Hearst was involved in any foul play.”

I, for one, am also impatient about every cockamamie conspiracy theory that comes down the pike. Unfortunately, so many odd things happened after Ince stepped aboard the Oneida on the 15th that it’s impossible not to believe that something happened and that somebody wanted badly to hide it. The only question is, what was being hidden?

Hearst’s initial statement claimed that Ince had, after that night, complained of acute indigestion. A doctor took him off the yacht and escorted him home, where he died a couple of days later.

Here’s the problem with this:

* Virtually none of the guests aboard that night could agree on what happened.

* No logs, records or photos exist of the events.

* Hearst was known to keep a gun aboard the yacht.

* Only one guest that night—the doctor escorting Ince off the yacht—was formally interrogated by the authorities.

* Ince’s body was cremated before an autopsy could be concluded.

* Ince’s widow, having received a trust fund from Hearst, took off for Europe as soon as she could after the cremation.

* One guest, Louella Parsons, movie editor for the New York American, insisted she had not been in attendance, even though she had been seen at the studio, waiting to depart for the yacht. Hearst rewarded the extraordinarily ambitious Parsons for her see-no-evil stance with a lifetime contract.

* Another yacht guest, actress Margaret Livingston—Ince’s mistress—had her salary raised afterward.

Most of the subsequent speculation about Ince’s fate resulted from three factors: a) the extremely cozy relationship between Davies and Chaplin (which even Nasaw catalogs at some length); b) Hearst’s realization of, and jealousy over, this; and c) the paranoia of Hearst, one of the inventors of modern tabloid journalism, that his beloved Davies—not to mention the wife he would not leave and did not wish to hurt—would be badly damaged by scandal.

So, what did happen? Take your pick, but just remember: In Hollywood, whatever you hear, no matter how unlikely, there’s at least an 80% chance it could be true:

* Hearst hired an assassin to shoot Ince. (This theory was credited by later San Simeon guest Herman Mankiewicz, who used it in a screenplay called American—which, once Orson Welles heavily edited it, became Citizen Kane. Welles dropped Mankiewicz’ incident to make it just a wee bit more possible to claim his film was not based on the publisher’s life--and, of course, avoid a libel suit.)

* Hearst found Chaplin and Davies together, went to find a gun, causing Davies to scream and Ince to come out to help—only to be accidentally shot by Hearst.

* Hearst and Ince were together, looking for medication late at night to soothe his indigestion, when Hearst mistook Ince for Chaplin and shot him.

* Hearst, Chaplin and some other guests were struggling over the gun when it went off, with one bullet entering Ince’s room and accidentally killing him.

* One of the newer theories, trotted out in a 1997 Vanity Fair article, is that Hearst accidentally stabbed Ince through the heart with Davies’ hatpin.

The rumor that threatened to blow the case wide open came from Chaplin’s secretary, Toraichi Kono, who told his wife that Ince was bleeding when he’d been taken off the yacht. San Diego D.A. Chester Kemple heard so much scuttlebutt coming out of this that he brought inb Daniel Carson Goodman, a Cosmopolitan exec who no longer actively practiced medicine but had escorted Ince off the boat, to see what he had to say.

According to another guest on the boat, Gretl Urban, Hearst had warned Goodman as Ince was taken off the boat not to let anyone know the producer had been on the Oneida. Was Hearst nervous about violating Prohibition? Or was there something more?

Aside from the issue of Hearst's own possible culpability, there was the matter of Davies' involvement. Two years before, a welcome-home party thrown by her sister on Long Island had ended suddenly when another female guest fired a bullet into the mouth of her husband. (This was most inopportune for Hearst, as he was in the middle of a gubernatorial campaign in New York.)

Gretl Urban wrote later that after getting off the boat, Goodman had "completely lost his head and fabricated so many impossible tales and acted so super-discreet that the press and everyone else ashore were convinced he was covering up some horrendous crime." But whatever he said to the San Diego authorities, the D.A. seemed disinclined to pursue the matter. Kemple issued a subsequent statement saying he was satisfied with what he heard, and that anything else related to Prohibition infractions would have to be investigated by the L.A. District Attorney. The latter never followed it up.

At this stage, given that no other witnesses were formally questioned about the events, we are unlikely to know what transpired that night. But it seems pretty clear, given the several people connected with the events who were suddenly amply rewarded, that Hearst had gone to extraordinary efforts to buy their silence.

Quote of the Day (William Randolph Hearst, on His “Little Paper”)

“I have begun to have a strange fondness for our little paper (the San Francisco Examiner] -a tenderness like unto that which a mother feels for a puny or deformed offspring, and I should hate to see it die now after it had battled so long and so nobly for existence; in fact, to tell the truth, I am possessed of the weakness, which at some time or other of their lives, pervades most men; I am convinced that I could run a newspaper successfully.”—William Randolph Hearst to his father, California Senator George Hearst, 1885, quoted in A Treasury of the World's Great Letters: From Ancient Days to Our Own Time, edited by M. Lincoln Schuster (1940)

(In a time of declining circulation and increased staff layoffs for newspapers—indeed, for “old media” in general—the letter from which I’ve just quoted fills one with nostalgia for the days when print not only mattered but flourished. Oddly enough, the person nowadays who comes closest to Hearst’s passion for newspapers is his contemporary counterpart in yellow journalism, Rupert Murdoch.

Reading this passage reminds one of brash Charles Foster Kane in Orson Welles’ scandalous cinematic takedown of Hearst, Citizen Kane, except that the real-life events behind this letter are probably even more extraordinary. Hearst’s father, a geologist who had lucked into a goldmine that had made him a multimillionaire, harbored, as his son would after him, political ambitions. To that end, he had bought the struggling San Francisco Examiner as a mouthpiece for his opinions. Nevertheless, he didn’t see much future in the money-losing rag.

William begged to differ. You can see here traces of the scamp who’d been expelled from Harvard for such pranks as sending engraved silver chamber pots—you know, in those days, the kind of receptacles used for relieving one’s self—to professors. But, as the letter goes on, you can also see a keen intelligence that knew how to market to a new age (a change in layout, he observed, could produce “a much cleaner and neater appearance”) and what types of people would be best to staff the paper (“active, intelligent and energetic young men”—not unlike himself, one suspects).