1999

21.3

Sharon L. Gravett
Will the "Real" William Randolph Hearst Please Stand Up? Jo Stoyte Versus Charles Foster Kane
 

"They’s a fella, newspaper fella near the coast, got a million acres."
"Million acres? What in the worl’ can he do with a million acres?"
"I dunno. He jus’ got it. Runs a few cattle. Got guards ever’place to keep folks out. Rides aroun’ in a bullet-proof car. I seen pitchers of him. Fat, so’ fella with little mean eyes an’ a mouth like an asshole. Scairt he’s gonna die. Got a million acres an’ scairt of dyin’." (281)

He was undeniably well known; as a publisher, politician, film producer, and tycoon, his exploits were familiar to many. Biographers Oliver Carlson and Ernest Sutherland Bates point out that Hearst’s extraordinary career began with his inherited wealth, "a vast empire of mining properties, valuable forests, tremendous holdings of agricultural and grazing lands, and city real estate" (282). This great wealth financed his other ventures such as his publishing empire and his political career, which included his service in the U.S. House of Representatives. He also came close to being elected mayor of New York City in 1905 and Governor of New York in 1906, and he even made a couple of unsuccessful runs at the presidency. Hearst eventually turned his attention to the movies with Cosmopolitan Productions, which eventually became a part of MGM. Yet, his renown extended even further, as the passage from The Grapes of Wrath indicates. Not only did his extraordinary holdings attract attention, but his peculiar obsessions, such as his fear of death, were noticed as well. Both these aspects of Hearst’s persona reveal his efforts to control every aspect of life, and these efforts are reflected in the characters of Stoyte and Kane. Oddly enough, what Hearst ultimately could not control was the way he would be immortalized in fiction.

Of course, Hearst did try to create his own legacy. Perhaps his most notable attempt to ensure his immortality was his $30 million San Simeon, a "ranch," which Frank Baldanza points out, was half the size of Rhode Island (154). This lavish home is mimicked in Citizen Kane where Kane builds his "stately pleasure dome" Xanadu, while After Many a Summer’s Jo Stoyte lives in an extravagant castle. Stoyte’s magnificent dwelling is described by visiting Englishman Jeremy Pordage: "On the summit of the bluff and as though growing out of it a kind of stony efflorescence, stood a castle. But what a castle! The donjon was like a skyscraper, the bastions plunged headlong with the effortless swoop of concrete dams. The thing was Gothic, medieval, baronial—doubly baronial, Gothic with Gothicity raised, so to speak, to a higher power, more mediaeval than any building of the thirteenth century" (18). Although neither Xanadu nor Stoyte’s castle is an exact replica of the Hearst estate, both owe many of their details to first-hand accounts of San Simeon. As Frank Brady notes, Welles’ co-screenwriter, Herman Mankiewicz, had been a frequent visitor there as had Gregg Toland, the film’s cinematographer (249). Similarly, Baldanza notes that Huxley and his wife Maria had also been Hearst’s guests (151).

Kane and Stoyte follow their role model not only in their ostentatious homes but also in their conspicuous spending habits. Hearst was an avid collector, whose "lifelong, madly compulsive purchase of antiques," according to Baldanza, "is almost impossible to encompass mentally. His fifty-year average expenditure of one million dollars or more per year on antiques of all sorts sometimes constituted ‘a quarter of the entire sales of objects of art in the world’" (154). He observes that Hearst’s collection was so extensive that he "never saw thousands of his antiques" (154). As moviegoers remember, Kane, too, has warehouses full of unopened possessions. The final shot of Xanadu’s interior after his death reveals this staggering excess. Similarly, Stoyte’s estate contains, among other things, "a replica of the grotto at Lourdes" (26), which sounds much like Hearst’s collection which, included, as Baldanza remarks, "a tenth-century Spanish cloister from Segovia purchased sight unseen, for which Hearst built twenty-one miles of railroad to ship out the stones in 10, 700 crates . . ." (154).

Hearst’s relentless extravagance was impressive, but Huxley and Welles do more than merely record it, they also analyze it. Citizen Kane and After Many a Summer show that the sheer volume of Kane’s and Stoyte’s possessions indicates, not the discriminating taste of a connoisseur, but the ravenous appetite of a predator, the need to control both the present and the past. Such was certainly true of their role model, Hearst. Carlson and Bates report, "The aesthetic impulse through Hearst’s life had been wholly subordinated to the impulse to acquire and exhibit" (306; author’s emphasis). In Stoyte’s case, for example, this extensive collecting manifests his need for superiority. Of his school chum Stoyte, his neighbor, the philosopher William Propter, comments, "And Culture, of course, is a thing for which he has positively a Tartar’s hatred. Only, unlike the Tartars, he doesn’t want to burn the monuments of Culture, he wants to buy them up. He expresses his superiority to talent and education by means of possession rather than destruction; by hiring and then insulting the talented and educated rather than by killing them" (215). Similarly, Kane manifests this desire to buy culture, not only through his lavish expenditures but also through his attempts to have his second wife, Susan, succeed as an opera singer. Hearst, too, showed his desire to control culture by his financial support of higher education and his later attempts to ferret out supposed Communists. Carlson and Bates report that Hearst "had always been a ‘friend’ of public education just as he had always been a ‘friend’ of union labor. Actually, his friendship had amounted to no more than a constant clamor for the erection of new school buildings, always productive of fat contracts for local businessmen" (252-53). None of this, however, stopped him from "terrorizing the faculties of colleges and universities in the ’30s with red-baiting" (252).

Stoyte’s and Kane’s efforts reveal another aspect of the Hearst persona: the need to dominate, not only in material acquisition but in personal relationships, particularly with women. What probably shocked contemporary audiences most in both After Many a Summer and Citizen Kane was the presentation of the characters modeled after Hearst’s mistress, the actress Marion Davies. This relationship, while long standing, was certainly not a public one, since Hearst was still married. For example, of Citizen Kane, Pauline Kael points out, "Kane’s infatuation for the singer Susan Alexander in the movie was thus a public flaunting of matters that Hearst was careful and considerate about" (6). Karal Ann Marling adds, "If everybody in Hollywood knew the truth about the couple, it had still not been paraded before the eyes of every moviegoer in the land until Welles and Mankiewicz’s devastating caricature of Davies as the vapid Susan Kane, eternally assembling jigsaw puzzles." Further, as Marling’s comment illustrates, neither Welles’ movie nor Huxley’s novel painted the Hearst/Davies’ relationship in a flattering light. Instead, it is shown as yet another way for these characters to exert control.

In Citizen Kane, Kane literally overshadows his wife Susan in several sequences, and his attempts to bully her into an opera career, for which she is quite obviously unsuited, push her to the brink of suicide. While Hearst and Davies’ relationship was far more amicable, Hearst did repeatedly try to advance his mistress’s career in Hollywood. His biographer W.A. Swanberg notes: "Although both Hearst and the young lady herself knew that she had things to learn about acting, he had no doubt about his ability to transform her into a vibrant Galatea. She had beauty and talent. He would supply the instructors, the writers and directors to bring it out, and the publicity to exploit it. . . . Miss Davies was his most prized possession whom he could train, groom, push and publicize until she reached the heights, eclipsing the reigning Mary Pickford" (324). Unfortunately, Davies could never scale those particular heights, and Swanberg reports that Hearst may have lost as much as $7 million in the attempt (486). Furthermore, the reasons for Davies’ failure are instructive. As Kane’s overbearing tactics pushed Susan into a career for which she was distinctly untalented, so did Hearst force Davies into roles that did not display her natural gifts. Harlan Lebo observes, "Davies, whom Hearst supported in an acting career, was no flop in Hollywood as Susan Alexander was in her brief fling with grand opera—in fact, some Hollywood observers noted that Davies might have gone farther in the picture business without Hearst’s constant meddling in her career" (158). However, Swanberg claims that Hearst’s control did affect Davies’ career: "He was insistent about her roles. He wanted her to play nothing but romantic young heroines and to appear in a succession of gorgeous and appealing costumes before spectacular sets" (411). Baldanza adds, "Especially in his minute supervision of every detail of her movie career, Hearst’s personal image of Marion is clear; he never permitted her mature, maternal roles, and reacted strongly when she wished to play the prostitute Sadie Thompson in Rain. . . . His favorite vehicles for Marion were candy-box-pretty costume pieces in which she appeared as a peach-bloom virgin, often surrounded by authentic antique settings—almost as part of his collection" (156).

Not only did Hearst limit the type of role and picture in which his mistress appeared, he also insisted on other restrictions. Swanberg reports, "Although Miss Davies was nearing thirty . . . [he] denied her maturity, nor would he allow her to portray a mother. She had to fulfill his virgin image of her" (411). Hearst’s willful denial of his mistress’s maturity is echoed in After Many a Summer in the relationship of Jo Stoyte and the aptly named Virginia Maunciple: "Chronologically, Miss Maunciple was a young woman of twenty-two; but that abbreviated upper lip gave her, in all circumstances, an air of being hardly adolescent, of not having reached the age of consent. For Mr. Stoyte, at sixty, the curiously perverse contrast between the appearance of innocence and the fact of experience, was intoxicatingly attractive" (51). Stoyte even calls her "Baby," and she reciprocates by calling him "Uncle Jo." Virginia seemingly acquiesces in Stoyte’s image of her. Repelled by the Giambologna nymph spouting water from her breasts and by the notion of motherhood, Virginia prefers her semi-adolescent state. However, she is a sexually active adult, and Stoyte’s physician, Dr. Obispo, seduces her; this act sets the stage for violence when "Uncle" Jo spots his "Baby" engaged in distinctly adult behavior. As Stoyte goes to fetch his gun, Dr. Obispo leaves, and his assistant, Peter Boone, who has an unrequited crush on Virginia, arrives. When Jo returns, he mistakenly shoots and kills the wrong man.

This incident reflects Stoyte’s jealousy, possessiveness, and impotence, and it also echoes a bit of Hollywood legend associated with Hearst: the mysterious death of film producer Thomas Ince after a trip aboard the millionaire’s yacht. Baldanza reports that one rumor was that a jealous Hearst, believing that he was shooting Davies’ rumored lover, Charlie Chaplin, mistakenly killed Ince instead (159). No Hearst biographer has ever substantiated any of these rumors, but the story was quite well known. In fact, Robert Carringer observes that American, the first draft of Citizen Kane, reflects this incident when Kane has Susan’s lover killed (21). Furthermore, Brady reports that one of Welles’ early ideas was "to manipulate the film into a murder mystery based roughly on the mysterious death in 1924 of film producer Thomas Ince abroad Hearst’s yacht, Oneida" (235).

These purported depictions of Hearst’s relationship with Davies were undoubtedly Huxley’s and Welles’ attempts to sell books and movie tickets by tying their works to scandalous events. However, these depictions also reveal the desperate manipulations of the Hearst-inspired characters. Kane’s relationship with Susan is the most blatant example of how he uses others to further his own ambitions, no matter what the cost. Susan’s opera career certainly brings her no pleasure, but, for Kane, it legitimizes their relationship. It also, perhaps, gives him a possible legacy (with his building of the Opera House) denied him with the failure of his political career and the death of his only son. Furthermore, when Susan’s opera career fails, Kane builds Xanadu instead.

Similarly, Stoyte’s relationship with Virginia reveals his preoccupation with youth and his corresponding fear of aging and death. Stoyte, like Hearst, was extremely interested in experiments in human longevity. Swanberg reports, "As Hearst grew older, time became more valuable, life more precious. He had Walter Hovey, now back in Chicago, check carefully on all news stories about scientific advancements in the prolongation of life, and send him reports. He was much interested in the monkey-gland transplantations performed by Dr. Serge Voronoff for rejuvenating the elderly. . . . An old king with a young consort, he dreaded time, decrepitude, death" (432). Beset by the same fears, Stoyte keeps Dr. Obispo on staff in order to keep up with the latest research. Furthermore, his constant mantra is "God is love; there is no death" (37). This marked avoidance of death was also a well-known Hearst attribute. Baldanza confirms, "But Hearst himself was widely known to fear aging and death—he rarely attended funerals and he kept himself closely informed on longevity and rejuvenation experiments. . . . [W]hen one of a group of transplanted palm trees died during their installation at San Simeon, in order to avoid any suggestion of death, the landscaper hurriedly sprayed the leaves with green paint until he could replace the tree" (150-51). Carlson and Bates add, "The fourth and last rule [at San Simeon] is the most significant: that no one shall, under any circumstance, mention in Hearst’s presence the subject of death" (311). At this point, even these biographers cannot resist the urge to editorialize about this "rule": "What more complete self-revelation could anyone give, what more open confession of neuroticism and abject spiritual bankruptcy?" (311). Welles and Huxley make the same point about their protagonists.

While Stoyte and Kane possess fabulous wealth and the trappings of success, they cannot sustain a meaningful personal relationship, and they devote much of their time to futile obsessions. Interestingly, Welles and Huxley both locate the root of their characters’ dysfunctions in childhood traumas. Torn from his parents, particularly his mother, at an early age, Charles Foster Kane seeks to control all subsequent relationships. Similarly, Jo Stoyte has been scarred by his impoverished childhood and by the teasing he received at school. The same boy called "Slob" and "Jelly-Belly" became, as Propter describes, "the kind of fat boy who bluffs it out. The kind that fights. The kind that bullies or patronizes. The kind that boasts and shows off" (114). Swanberg points out a similar tendency in Hearst, remarking on his "powerful will, which made it necessary for him to dictate the terms of friendship, to call the tune, to have his own way—in short, to exercise supervisory authority over a companion" (54). He also traces Hearst’s drive to his childhood: "There is an oversimplified theory that if he had been spanked regularly as a boy, he might have become both great and good, instead of more great than good. The pressure of his wants, never curbed or disciplined, drove him incessantly" (324). Kane and Stoyte thus also reflect Hearst in their attempt to control all aspects of their lives, not only their business empires, but the people around them and even their own mortality.

Of course, such attempts fail. Like the real-life Hearst, Kane gradually loses much of his own empire during the Depression, and he eventually loses Susan as well. Lebo draws the parallel: "During Hearst’s most severe financial crisis, his banks and a ‘Conservative Committee’ took partial control of his organization; both Kane and Hearst were left figureheads—ambitious men with financial power stripped from them, who in their declining years were left to tinker with the remains of their empires" (156). While Stoyte’s business interests appear to thrive, his personal life ends up in the total control of Dr. Obispo, who knows the truth about Peter Boone’s murder. In the end, the master manipulators become their own victims. Indeed, their careers as dictators are as ill-fated as those of their contemporary political counterparts with whom they are explicitly linked. For example, Stoyte shows his drive for dominance in a revealing conversation with Propter. He exclaims, "I believe in democracy too" (150). Propter replies, "I know you do. And you also believe in being the undisputed boss in all your businesses. . . . There’s another name for an undisputed boss. . . . Dictator" (150). Propter goes on to say that he would rather have Jo Stoyte as his boss than Jo Stalin (150). This same parallel is emphasized in Citizen Kane during the "News on the March" newsreel when Kane is photographed with both Hitler and Mussolini. Michael Denning adds, "[T]he narrative formula runs deeper; the flamboyance and popular notoriety of several generations of robber barons—Jay Gould, Rockefeller, Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, Hearst—was conflated with the fascist dictators, Hitler and Mussolini, and with the great protagonists of the Soviet revolution and its aftermath—Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky" (28). This same dictatorial tendency was noted in Hearst as well. Swanberg observes, "Like Caesar and Napoleon, Hearst enjoyed power. He derived pleasure from controlling masses of people, manipulating them to bring about events of national or international importance" (130). Lincoln Steffens, writing on "Hearst, Man of Mystery" in 1906, and quoted in Carlson and Bates, concurs, maintaining that Hearst was "a boss who would like to give us democratic government just as others of his class would ‘give us’ colleges and libraries and good plutocratic government" (135).

However, totalitarianism, destined eventually to fail in the political arena, is also proven unsuccessful in personal life as well. Despite their attempts at control, neither Kane’s nor Stoyte’s lives—like their sprawling estates and multitudinous possessions—can be forced into any lasting coherence. None of Citizen Kane’s multiple narrators can add up all the bits and pieces of Kane’s life; even the reporter must eventually admit his defeat. Gottlieb asserts, "In fact Kane appears less as a subject than as an object, whose life story is told not by himself but by a procession of witnesses, each of whom offers a partial view. When all these views are put together, we have too much, not too little evidence to assemble what we normally think of as a coherent picture, and the many interrogations that the film is structured around bring us away from rather than closer to any simple understanding of Kane’s life" (112). In After Many a Summer, Jeremy Pordage discovers a similar confusion lurking beneath Stoyte’s possessions. He exclaims, "It’s as though one were walking into the mind of a lunatic. . . . Or, rather, an idiot. . . . Because I suppose a lunatic’s a person with a one-track mind. Whereas this . . . this is a no-track mind. No-track because infinity-track. It’s the mind of an idiot of genius. Positively stuffed with the best that has been thought and said. . . . And every item is perfectly irrelevant to every other item" (174).

The Hearst-inspired characters in both works are men who lack coherence; their possessions, relationships, and obsessions reveal their desperate attempt to impose order on a world that they ultimately cannot control. As a result, their lives become enigmas. The great hall of Stoyte’s castle symbolizes the paradoxical nature of their lives and their worlds:

At one end of the cavernous room, lit by a hidden searchlight, El Greco’s Crucifixion of St. Peter blazed out in the darkness like the beautiful revelation of something incomprehensible and profoundly sinister. At the other, no less brilliantly illuminated, hung a full-length portrait of Hélène Fourment, dressed only in a bearskin cape. . . . Two shining symbols, incomparably powerful and expressive—but of what, of what? That, of course, was the question. (43-44)

The trouble is, you don’t realize you’re talking to two people. As Charles Foster Kane, who owns eighty-two thousand, three hundred and sixty-four shares of Public Transit Preferred . . . I sympathize with you. Charles Foster Kane is a scoundrel, his paper should be run out of town, a committee should be formed to boycott him. You may, if you can form such a committee, put me down for a contribution of one thousand dollars. . . . On the other hand I am also the publisher of the "Inquirer." As such, it is my duty . . . to see to it that the decent, hardworking people of this community aren’t robbed blind by a pack of money-hungry pirates.

Who, then, was William Randolph Hearst? Who, for that matter, are Charles Foster Kane and Jo Stoyte? While they all share a fascination with power and possessions, they remain paradoxes. In Kane’s case, declarations of principles clash with the realities of becoming a "success" in American society. Stoyte’s constant mantra, "God is love; there is no death," competes with the music of the Perpetual Wurlitzer at the Beverly Pantheon, Huxley’s satire of Forest Lawn Cemetery. The "real" William Randolph Hearst himself competes with his fictional counterparts; even W.A. Swanberg’s 1961 biography is entitled Citizen Hearst. This enigmatic nature is indeed what made Hearst such an appealing prototype. In spite of his constant, and grandiose, attempts to impose his will—whether in newspapers, movies, real estate, relationships, or even mortality—he was ultimately unable to define himself or affect his time in any lasting way. He became the strangest of paradoxes: a successful failure.

Where do fabulous wealth and power lead? Kane, in effect, ends up creating in Xanadu his own mausoleum, which "The News on the March" newsreel calls "Man’s costliest monument to himself," and Stoyte willingly trades his humanity for a simian immortality (reminiscent of Tithonus in the Tennyson poem for which Huxley’s novel is named). The man that Steinbeck’s Okies observe had a million acres yet is scared of dying. While Hearst’s own end was not as dramatic as that of his fictional counterparts—he died at the ripe old age of eighty-eight with his sons and mistress by his side—his immortality came not in the form he labored so hard to attain but in the one created for him in art.

And these works of art also reveal the upheaval of Hearst’s life and times. Both After Many a Summer and Citizen Kane move Hearst’s contradictions front and center, not only in their characters’ lives but in the form in which they present these lives. For example, Huxley himself, quoted in Baldanza’s article, described his work as a paradox: "a short phantasy . . . but built up of solidly realistic psychological elements; a wild extravaganza, but with the quality of a most serious parable . . . at once comic and cautionary, farcical, blood-curdling and reflective" (149). Thus, while readers were to laugh at the exaggerated portrait of American preoccupations, they were also to be appalled at the current state of American society, exemplified through Stoyte, with its self-aggrandizement, its ruthless consumerism, and its often ludicrous denial of aging and death. Similarly, the text also refuses to follow a traditional novel format as long chapters are devoted to William Propter’s explanations of his philosophy. The novel thus moves between philosophical treatise and a more (or less) conventional narrative. Welles’ movie also defies easy categorization. Pauline Kael comments, "Kane is closer to comedy than to tragedy, though so overwrought in style as to be almost a Gothic comedy. What might possibly be considered tragic in it has such a Daddy Warbucks quality that if it’s tragic at all it’s comic-strip tragic" (5). James Naremore adds, "At every level the movie is a paradox: Kane himself is both a villain and a romantic, Faustian rebel, as much like Welles as he is like Hearst" (54).

Like the characters they depict, Huxley’s novel and Welles’ movie refuse to cohere in traditional ways. Each work breaks with "so-called good literature" as it is defined by Propter in After Many a Summer: "[I]t accepted the conventional scale of values; it respected power and position; it admired success. . . . It helped to perpetuate the misery by explicitly or implicitly approving the thoughts and feelings and practices which could not fail to result in misery. . . . So that even when a tragedy ended badly, the reader was hypnotized by the eloquence of the piece into imagining that it was all somehow noble and worthwhile" (259). Propter instead prefers "a good satire" which "was much more deeply truthful and, of course, much more profitable than a good tragedy. The trouble was that so few good satires existed, because so few satirists were prepared to carry their criticism of human values far enough" (259). Both Welles and Huxley were willing to go far enough, and they chose the path of satire, not only to comment on Hearst but on the society that created him and the art forms cherished by that society.

Sharron Gravett
Department of English
Valdosta State University
Valdosta, GA 31698
 
 

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