Every Picture Tells a Story

In March 1919, Adolph Zukor and William Randolph Hearst, the nation’s two most powerful media barons, one in moving pictures, the other in newspapers, announced a joint venture. Hearst was going to build a motion picture studio in New York and produce features based on stories from his Cosmopolitan magazine. Zukor would release them. Suspecting that his partner, at age 56, might need some assistance in his new career as film producer and studio owner, Zukor offered to help. Hearst turned him down. “Making pictures,” he wrote Zukor, “is fundamentally like making publications.... I think I have learned various things in the publishing business that will be of value in the motion picture business.”

Hearst had been telling stories with pictures since 1887, when he took over as editor of his father’s San Francisco Examiner. He had converted a moribund newspaper into the most vibrant paper on the West Coast by outbidding his rivals for their top reporters and editors and signing up the nation’s best artists to illustrate their work. He would follow the same path in moving pictures.

His first step, after announcing his agreement with Zukor, was to offer fabulously inflated contracts to Frances Marion, who until then had been Mary Pickford’s screenwriter, and Josef Urban, the distinguished Austrian artist and architect who was chief designer for both the Metropolitan Opera and Ziegfeld Follies. With Urban designing his sets and Marion writing the scripts, Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Productions quickly established itself as one of the nation’s premier studios. An early film, “Humoresque,” based on a Fanny Hurst short story, won the Photoplay Gold Medal for best picture in 1920.

Hearst had not entered the business to make his companion, Marion Davies, a star. Still, by the early 1920s, she was appearing regularly in his films, several of which not only did well at the box office but also were warmly received by critics not on the Hearst payroll. Even though Orson Welles admitted that his cinematic creation, opera singer Susan Alexander, bore “no resemblance at all” to movie star Marion Davies, it has been difficult not to see Davies--and Hearst, her champion and producer--through the distorting lens of “Citizen Kane.”

Of all the elements in Hearst’s vast media empire--which by the late 1930s included 26 newspapers in 18 cities, 13 magazines, wire and feature services, radio stations, a newsreel company and a film studio--his career in moving pictures is least understood. In “Hearst Over Hollywood: Power, Passion, and Propaganda in the Movies,” Louis Pizzitola attempts to recount the history of Hollywood as impacted by Hearst’s presence and power while “telling Hearst’s life story from a Hollywood perspective.” If Pizzitola had stayed within the boundaries of this project, his book would have been much more successful--and useful--than it is. Even so, he has been able to fill in many of the gaps in our knowledge, especially in regard to Hearst’s involvement in moving pictures before 1919.

It is apparent from the opening pages that Pizzitola has done a prodigious amount of research. His first chapter begins with a discussion of Tammany Hall corruption. Hearst is introduced on Page 8 as “one of the most prominent allies of Tammany Hall.” From there Pizzitola makes his way to the Dewey Theater, which was operated by a Tammany stalwart, to a Hannah Willson, who, in 1895, lived with her daughters behind the theater and, according to Pizzitola, ran a brothel. Willson’s daughter, Millicent, would later marry Hearst. Pizzitola’s evidence that the future Mrs. Hearst grew up in a brothel owned by her mother is attributed to a “preponderance of circumstantial evidence” and an untitled 1913 “broadside” written to smear Hearst. What does any of this have to do with the story of Hearst and Hollywood? I’m not sure. But it is a fit beginning for what turns out to be more an indictment of Hearst than a case study of his association with Hollywood.

It is, of course, not difficult to condemn Hearst on any number of counts, especially after he veered to the hard right in the middle 1930s to become one of this nation’s most vicious Red-baiters and an unabashed Hitler supporter. But Pizzitola also attempts to prove that Hearst was a bootlegger, that he informed on Zukor during a Federal Trade Commission investigation of Paramount for antitrust violations, that he was an “organizer of organized crime” in Chicago and that he so disappointed his own mother that “in one of her final and most severe acts of scorn,” she banned his wife from visiting her deathbed.

Pizzitola never allows a paucity of evidence to interfere with his crusade. He is committed, as others have been, to branding Hearst as an anti-Semite. But instead of digging up direct evidence, he stretches credulity by engaging in tortured exercises of guilt by association. He ties Hearst to rabid anti-Semites such as out-of-work screenwriter Paul Schofield, who, according to Pizzitola, declared in an open letter that American writers should “not stand by and give up their livelihoods for [Jewish refugee] writers who ‘are AWOL from concentration camps.’” Hearst never met Schofield, never corresponded with him, never employed him in any capacity and never referred to him or his work. How then does Pizzitola connect the two? Schofield, we are told, claimed in a letter to Westbrook Pegler that his neighbor, Adela Rogers St. Johns, a Hearst reporter, was an “ally.” Schofield’s views, Pizzitola also tells us, were cited without attribution in an anti-Semitic tract self-published by a radio broadcaster who had once worked for Hearst.

Like Hearst at his worst, Pizzitola can see only one side of the story--his. Evidence that might contradict his interpretation is ignored or dismissed. In the midst of his indictment of Hearst as an anti-Semite, Pizzitola acknowledges that the Hearst papers in 1941 condemned Charles Lindbergh’s accusations that American Jews were “pressing” the country into war. Pizzitola dismisses the editorial attacks on Lindbergh’s anti-Semitism by alleging that Hearst only authorized them “after receiving heavy pressure” from a financial advisor. Surely Pizzitola knows Hearst was beholden to no one--certainly not one of his employees--when it came to setting his editorial policies.

Many of Pizzitola’s claims are simply ludicrous. Though dozens of editorials, letters, memoranda and the evidence assembled by every one of Hearst’s biographers attests to his visceral disgust with President Herbert Hoover and his tepid attempts to rescue the nation from the Depression, Pizzitola declares, without providing any documentation at all, that the reason Hearst finally broke with Hoover was because the president turned down an invitation to visit San Simeon and meet Davies.

The problem isn’t that Pizzitola hasn’t done his research but that he doesn’t know what to do with it. He has, no doubt, spent years on this project, traveled to archives in dozens of cities, interviewed scores of individuals whose parents or grandparents knew Hearst and read tens of thousands of pages from Hearst’s papers and the industry trades. But he isn’t skeptical enough of his sources and doesn’t wish or know how to place them--and Hearst--into any larger historical context.

He makes much, for example, of an agreement negotiated in September 1934 between officials from Hearst’s newsreel company and Ufa, a German film company, giving the International Film Service access to Ufa news films and vice versa. A similar deal was negotiated at the same time with a British film company. There was nothing unusual in either deal and nothing particularly sinister in making an agreement with a German company in 1934. Such deals were commonplace before November 1938 and Kristallnacht. This is not to say that Hearst did not use every means at his disposal to boost Hitler. But he did so publicly, in signed editorials on his front pages, not in secret backroom deals, as Pizzitola implies.

Pizzitola acknowledges in his preface that he has not set out to write a definitive biography. What he gives us instead is a skewed, selective tour of Hearst’s life and work. He is, unfortunately, so focused on convicting Hearst of a lifetime of high crimes and misdemeanors that he ends up undermining his own analysis and distracting himself from what might have been a magnificent--and much needed book--on Hearst and moving pictures.

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David Nasaw is Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and the author of “The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst.”