Austine Hearst; Wife of Newspaper Chief

Austine McDonnell Hearst, a one-time Washington reporter and society columnist who married the editor in chief of the Hearst newspapers, died Sunday at a Manhattan hospital.

Mrs. Hearst, 72, died at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center after a long battle with lymphoma. Her husband, William Randolph Hearst Jr., and their two sons--William Hearst III, publisher of the San Francisco Examiner, and Austin Hearst, vice president of Hearst Entertainment and Syndication--were at her bedside.

In 1946, Mrs. Hearst joined the now-defunct Washington Times-Herald as a reporter and also wrote a society column, “Under My Hat.” Later, she wrote a syndicated column, “From the Capital,” for 10 years and was a radio commentator for CBS.

She met her husband in Washington and they were married in 1948.

Mrs. Hearst gave up her job in 1956 to accompany her husband on a trip around the world in which she interviewed the wives of world leaders in the nations they visited.

A breeder of Arabian horses, she wrote “The Horses of San Simeon,” a book about the breeding and raising of those animals at Hearst Castle in California.