The Press: Hail and Farewell

High atop San Francisco’s Nob Hill, the mourners and the curious crowded into massive, neo-Gothic Grace Cathedral. The great copper casket was carried into the arched, flower-filled chancel and set between two crosses of white lilies. From the Book of Common Prayer, the Rt. Rev. Karl Morgan Block, Episcopal Bishop of California, intoned the funeral service, without sermon or eulogy. At that moment, in the grimy office of the Examiner, a few blocks away, and in Hearst-papers across the land, typewriters and linotypes stilled their clatter, and for a few minutes the plants lay in silence. William Randolph Hearst had stopped the presses for the last time.

Song of the River. His funeral took place almost within sight of the house where he was born and of the daily on which he pyramided an empire. He was buried last week as he liked to live, in a blaze of regal pomp. The governor was there, the mayor, notables of publishing, screen, stage and public affairs. A movie-studio publicist shepherded the press. Flashbulbs blinked, newsreel cameras whirred. Somewhere in the crowd of 1,500, a woman fainted.

An escort of motorcycle police guided the cortege of 22 black limousines to the cemetery. In the bright noon sunlight, dappling through Japanese plum trees, the casket was placed on a grassy knoll before the marble-columned mausoleum where Hearst’s parents lie. Bishop Block read a poem, The Song of the River, which W.R. himself had written for his papers in 1941:

The river ran its allotted span Till it reached the silent sea.

Then the water harked back to the

mountain top,

To begin its course once more, So we shall run the course begun

Till we reach the silent shore.

Then revisit earth in a pure rebirth

From the heart of the virgin snow.

So don’t ask why we live or die,

Or whither, or when, we go, Or wonder about the mysteries

That only God may know.

In her weeds, William Randolph Hearst’s widow, almost a stranger to him for his last 29 years, walked slowly around the casket. As the family and friends departed, the curious lingered, plucked souvenirs from the hundreds of wreaths.

Song of Sorrow. Oldtime Cinemactress Marion Davies, the woman who had shared his life for three decades, did not attend. At her spreading Beverly Hills home, where Hearst had spent his last days and where he died, she told a nurse: “I had thought I might go to church this morning, but I will just stay here alone. He knew how I felt about him, and I know how he felt about me.”

On the day after his death, she sat behind drawn shades, Hearst’s doleful dachshund Helena beside her. She absently whispered a song: “Little old lady in a big red room, little old lady …” To a visiting newsman, she spoke of happier days: “About four and a half years ago, we came here and quieted down. Before that, it was San Simeon and guests all the time. Hundreds of them. Oh, it was gay, let me tell you! We were riding and swimming and playing tennis, and Mr. Hearst was very active then. I remember the animals at San Simeon, and how we used to throw pebbles at the lions. We were always running, always doing something.”

She was glad that he had managed to keep active, mentally at least, almost to the end. “He wrote three editorials in this last month—one on Eisenhower in Europe, one on Korea and I forget the other.” When he entered his final coma, she sat all night by his bed until the small hours of morning, finally agreed to let the attending doctor give her a sedative, was asleep when death came.

When she awakened, Hearst’s sons had already removed their father’s body, and the Hearst sons and retainers, summoned for the great man’s end, had vanished. Said Marion Davies: “They didn’t even let me say goodbye.” Most of Hearst’s effects were removed at the same time. On the bedside desk remained only a calling card (General of the Army Douglas MacArthur), and a large photograph of Miss Davies, which he had always kept beside him. It was inscribed “To W.R. from Marion,” with a quotation from Romeo and Juliet:

My bounty is as boundless as the sea, My love as deep; the more I give to thee The more I have, for both are infinite.

Only a few days before, she had been The Chief’s principal link with his empire, relaying his telephoned commands: “The Chief suggests . . .” The Hearst-papers had chronicled her every move. Now they stopped mentioning her. Even her courier-delivered daily copies of the two Los Angeles Hearstpapers were summarily cut off.

The New Order. This sudden change in the old order of things was quickly manifested in other ways. Within 20 minutes of The Chief’s death, Richard E. Berlin, top operating boss of the Hearst chain, swept into the Davies home, told the guards and nurses: “You are all working for me now.” Berlin, now second only to William Randolph Hearst Jr. in power, was likely to take a bigger share of command all down the empire’s line. Both Hearst and Berlin well knew the empire was ailing; in 1951’s first six months, even the profits of its major newspaper operating company had shown a disturbing drop from $3,599,800 to $1,322,700, due partly to dwindling advertising in the onetime money-coining Sunday supplement American Weekly (circ. 9,374,850).

One casualty was the Weekly’s editor, aging (69) Walter Howey, prototype of The Front Page’s Managing Editor Walter Burns. Just four days before his death, Hearst removed Howey and replaced him with mild Ken McCaleb, 50, who had done an able job of sparking up the New York Mirror’s Sunday magazine. Howey, himself one of the eight executors named in Hearst’s will,* remains as an “editorial consultant” and editor of the Boston Hearstpapers, but reportedly his power is on the wane.

Those closest to young Hearst predict that he will soon drop such Hearstian acts as antivivisection campaigns, try to get a note of restraint into editorials. Young Bill has a tough job; the Hearst chain, long faltering, was saved mainly by the lush advertising of World War II and the ensuing boom, plus stringent economies. Most of the top brass is now 60 or over, and new blood is needed in the top command. In Hearst shops, the talk is that young Bill will want some changes made.

* The others, all high Hearstlings: Berlin; Martin Huberth, seventyish, board chairman of Hearst Corp.; the Baltimore News-Post’s William Baskervill, 63; the Boston Record and American’s Harold Kern, 53; the Los Angeles Examiner’s Richard Carrington Jr., 62; the New York Journal-American’s William Curley, seventyish; Hearst’s personal lawyer, Henry S. MacKay Jr., 60, of Los Angeles.