American Experience: “Citizen Hearst,” part 2 (WGBH, PBS, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Tuesday night schedule on KPBS has been quite frustrating of late because for the second week in a row they’ve devoted it to continuations of multi-night documentaries about fascinating Americans which I’ve watched anyway but have seemed abysmally incomplete because I didn’t get to watch the earlier parts. Last night the long-running series American Experience showed the second half of a two-part documentary on the life of William Randolph Hearst, almost inevitably called Citizen Hearst, a weird and back-handed acknowledgment of how much the historical perception of Hearst has been based on Orson Welles’ classic 1941 film Citizen Kane – and how the distortions of Hearst’s life in the script by Herman Mankiewicz and Welles, particularly their portrayal of Marion Davies as a no-talent hack, have been read back into the real history. (Citizen Hearst was also the title of the first major biography of Hearst, by W. A. Swanberg – who later on wrote an equally lucid and well-researched biography of the next generation’s big media mogul, Time magazine co-founder Henry Luce – though the biography they were working from here was a more recent one, The Chief, by David Nasaw, who was interviewed for the film.) Neither imdb.com nor the American Experience Web site notes who directed or wrote this documentary (imdb.com is generally lousy at documenting non-fiction films), but judging from this second episode – which begins in 1919 with the end of World War I (though it flashes back two years to Hearst’s meeting with Marion Davies, his mistress and companion for the rest of his long life) and continuing through Hearst’s death in 1951 – its “take” on Hearst’s life is a pretty familiar one of the youthful progressive (both politically and in business) who turned both more reactionary and more crotchety in his old age.

If anything, the show emphasizes how much Welles and Mankiewicz got right in their movie – images like the ones of Charles Foster Kane being buried in effigy and the oval-shaped logo with the man’s last initial as his company logo, affixed on the Hearst Building in New York City and outside “Xanadu” in Florida (read: San Simeon in California) in the film have real-life analogues in Hearst’s career. So does his opposition to the whole idea of organized labor – when Joseph Cotten as Kane’s lifelong friend warns him that working people are organizing into unions and are going to start demanding rights “as their due, not as your gift,” that tracks quite closely to the real Hearst’s fierce union-busting. The documentary makes it clear that the reason Hearst, who did a couple of bizarre political 180°’s in 1928 and 1932 (Hearst had endorsed Republican Andrew Mellon for President in 1928; Mellon lost the nomination to Herbert Hoover and fiercely opposed even the minor steps Hoover took to intervene in the economy to end the 1929 depression, saying the country should “liquidate everything” to purge the “moral poison” out of the system; in 1931 Hearst wrote an editorial that ran in all his papers calling for massive government deficit spending to end the Depression, he endorsed FDR in 1932 and then violently turned against him when the National Recovery Act of 1933 included a clause – later passed separately as the Wagner Act in 1935 after the U.S. Supreme Court declared the National Recovery Act unconstitutional – that guaranteed American workers the right to organize and form unions), turned so decisively against Roosevelt was his support of organized labor.

Of course, it’s impossible to watch a documentary about William Randolph Hearst in 2021 and compare the real man to the fictitious “Charles Foster Kane” – and in particular to the biggest changes Welles and Mankiewicz made in their film from Hearst’s real life. As Welles himself put it, “William Randolph Hearst was raised by his mother. Charles Foster Kane was raised by a bank.” Indeed, as was detailed in part 1, when Hearst’s father died his mom still had control of the family fortune, and whenever he wanted money to expand his business and follow through on his ambitions (not only for the newspaper business but anything he wanted to expand into, as well as for his maniacal collecting) he had to beg her for it, which must have been humiliating. Phoebe Hearst finally died in 1919 and from then on W. R. had full control of his family fortune – and in the boom period of the 1920’s both his business and his private surroundings expanded before the Depression hit. The film makes clear that the nosedive in Hearst’s fortunes in the 1930’s came not only because the overall economic collapse hit him hard in his advertising income but because the working-class readers on whom he’d built his empire turned against him when he turned against Roosevelt and the New Deal. (This development is especially ironic now, when the white working class has turned so decisively against the Democratic Party and social-welfare programs in general – as I’ve argued many times before, the Democrats have so totally and decisively lost the votes of white men that the only way Democrats can win election is if enough women and people of color vote for them to make up for their loss of white men.)

It’s also impossible to watch this show without thinking of the parallels between then and now, and do the thought-experiment of who fills the role of Hearst and the other media barons today. Rupert Murdoch is probably the closest, both in the extent of his media holdings and his determination to use them to advance his political agenda; but towards the end, when the commentators started talking about the enduring legacy of Hearst and in particular the question that gets raised about whether it’s good for democracy for one man to have as much power over people’s perceptions of the news as he did (remember the line in Citizen Kane in which Kane’s first wife warns him, “Really, darling, people will think – ” and he angrily replies, “What I tell ’em to think!”), the name that usually gets mentioned is Facebook owner and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. It’s hard to imagine Zuckerberg as the Hearst of today because the usual criticism of Facebook is the opposite of that made of the Hearst papers in their heyday – Zuckerberg is considered evil by his and Facebook’s opponents precisely because of his refusal to exercise editorial judgment, his insistence that he can’t censor people’s posts and therefore his platform gets used by people spreading misinformation and outright lies. The show also depicts Hearst’s relationship with the movie industry, as he organized Cosmopolitan Pictures to produce Marion Davies’ films (as well as a movie he produced even before he met Davies: Patria, a bizarre serial in which a virginal heroine, played by dance star Irene Castle, foils a sinister plot by Japanese and Mexicans to take over the U.S. – as the show notes, Japanese and Mexicans were particular bêtes noires in Hearst’s demonology, and when the U.S. entered World War II Hearst’s papers strongly supported the internment of Japanese-Americans and – unlike other supporters of internment, whose arguments for it were more dog-whistle ones about military preparedness – Hearst’s editorials supporting it were open and out-front in their anti-Asian racism) and distributed his productions first through Paramount, then MGM and finally Warner Bros.

There’s a bit of print-the-legend in this film’s treatment of the conversion from silent to sound films – notably the statement that virtually all the great silent stars’ careers were killed by the talkies; the truth is that most of the major male stars survived the transition (Ronald Colman, William Powell, Gary Cooper and John and Lionel Barrymore all had major careers in both silent and sound films), and the women had as much or more trouble by the age a lot of them were hitting when sound came in (their early 30’s, a problematic time for actresses even now) than by the difficulties of dealing with sound (Gloria Swanson is mentioned as a victim of sound, but her first talkie, The Trespasser, was the biggest hit she ever had; what killed her career was her involvement with Joseph P. Kennedy and the lousy stories he picked for her to do) – there are honest assessments of Marion Davies. The film makes the point that Davies was actually a superb light comedienne – only Hearst thought producing and starring Davies in comedies was beneath his and her dignity, so he kept putting her in lavish costume dramas. There’s a great story about Hearst meeting with Frances Marion, who had written many of Mary Pickford’s vehicles, because he was trying to recruit her to write for Davies. At one point, to emphasize how seriously Hearst was pushing her career, said, “I am prepared to spend at least $1 million on each of Marion’s pictures.” “That’s just the problem!” Frances Marion told him. “Marion is a marvelous light comedienne, and you’re smothering her in production values.” When word of that conversation spread around Hollywood, the general reaction was, “At last! Someone told him what’s wrong with the way he’s pushing her career. The rest of us never dared!” The documentary also included a clip from the 1931 film Five and Ten, a talkie in which Davies’ fabled stutter is nowhere in evidence (apparently she stuttered terribly in real life, but she could speak without stuttering when she was singing or speaking pre-memorized dialogue for a film) and she holds her own in a scene with the far more highly regarded Leslie Howard.

In some ways the most fascinating parts of this documentary are the later ones, including the financial crisis Hearst went through in 1937 when his bankers called in their loans to him and forced him to reorganize and turn over control of his empire to their nominee (an event depicted in Citizen Kane but set earlier during the Depression); the loan he got from Marion Davies (who had taken the money he’d given her and invested it more wisely than he was doing with his own) that kept him going, and the unexpected bailout he got from the way the media business changed during World War II. The U.S. rationed newsprint paper during the war – which meant newspapers had to be smaller, which made them cheaper to produce – while the popularity of newspapers increased because even people who had boycotted Hearst over his opposition to Roosevelt in the 1930’s bought his papers, along with everyone else’s, to follow the war news. By the time the real Hearst died in 1951 (11 years after his cinematic avatar, Charles Foster Kane) his company was in the black again and Davies, to whom he’d given control of it on his deathbed, turned it over to his five sons (by his wife, socialite Millicent Hearst – who, unlike her opposite number in Citizen Kane, had been a teenaged showgirl when they met – the same pattern he followed with Marion Davies two decades later – only she’d re-invented herself as a society matron and regularly lent her name and the Hearsts’ money to charitable causes) for $1 and stayed out of the public eye for the remaining 13 years of her life.

The film argues that the real reason Hearst fought so hard to suppress Citizen Kane – to the point of banning any mention in his papers not only of Kane but of any films made by its producing studio, RKO (and cancelling a serial Hearst’s papers had been running of Christopher Morley’s Kitty Foyle as a cross-promotion with RKO to push the 1940 film of it in which Ginger Rogers starred and won her Academy Award) – was its portrayal of the three women in his life: his mother (whom the film’s commentary unfairly claimed that Welles and Mankiewicz turned into “a witch” – actually Agnes Moorehead’s one scene as Charles Foster Kane’s mother is sympathetic and gripping in its pathos as she reluctantly turns him over to corporate guardians because she knows she doesn’t have the expertise or overall smarts to raise someone who’s going to be very rich; once Welles no longer controlled her career, Moorehead got cast in a lot of unsympathetic roles, notably the murderess in the Bogart-Bacall vehicle Dark Passage, but she didn’t really play a witch – in both senses – until the 1960’s, when she got cast as the mother-in-law literally from hell in the TV series Bewitched), his first wife (a chorus girl who reinvented herself as a socialite in real life, a born-to-the-purple 1-percenter in Citizen Kane) and, most of all, Marion Davies, whose reputation is still suffering from the devastating portrayal of her Welles and Mankiewicz created and Dorothy Comingore brilliantly acted. And the documentary also depicts one other important relationship Hearst had with a woman, albeit a purely professional one: Julia Morgan, the architect of San Simeon and Hearst’s other building projects. The depiction of the construction of San Simeon reminded me of documentaries I’ve seen about Adolf Hitler (whom Hearst personally interviewed in 1934 and wrote a fawning profile of that, like all Hearst’s personal editorials, ran in all his papers) and the elaborate residences and fortresses he had constructed for himself with a similar money-is-no-object attitude towards them and an obliviousness to the engineering challenges they created. Of course, Hitler had an entire government treasury to play with while Hearst only had a private fortune, albeit a large one!