She was 21 when she married him. He was the most powerful man in American media, 19 years older, already restless. For two decades, he gave her five sons, the largest media fortune in the country, and the keys to a 30-room apartment on Riverside Drive. Then he gave her a public humiliation that lasted 40 years.
He moved his mistress into a California castle. He paraded her in his own newspapers. He asked again and again for the divorce. And the showgirl from a Manhattan tenement, who had been taught by her own life that a woman owns nothing she cannot defend, looked at the most powerful man in America and said no. For four decades.
She was 15 years old, kicking her legs in a chorus line at the Herald Square Theatre, when the 34-year-old man in the third row decided he would have her. It was the spring of 1897. The show was a touring production called The Girl from Paris. The chorus number that brought her on stage with her older sister Anita was called The Bicycle Girls.
The Wilson sisters were billed in the program as members of a dancing troupe called The Merry Maidens. There was no reason yet, in the spring of 1897, for any New York theater column to learn the name Millicent Veronica Wilson. She had been born on the 16th of July, 1882, in New York City, the younger daughter of George Wilson, a vaudeville performer, and Hannah Murray Wilson, a homemaker of Irish Catholic descent.
The man in the third row was William Randolph Hearst, born on the 29th of April 1863 in San Francisco. He was the only son of George Hearst, a Comstock Lode mining magnate and recently deceased United States Senator, and Phoebe Apperson Hearst, who had inherited her husband's multi-million dollar fortune six years earlier.
By the spring of 1897, William Randolph Hearst was 34. He had been publishing the San Francisco Examiner for 10 years. He had purchased the New York Morning Journal in 1895. He had launched the New York Evening Journal the previous year. The newspaper war between Hearst's Journal and Joseph Pulitzer's World was already the most expensive and ferocious media contest in American history.
He courted her conservatively, by the standards of his class. He arrived at her family's flat with flowers. He took her, with Anita as chaperone, to restaurants suitable for an unmarried girl of her age. He paid the rent on a better apartment for the Wilson family in 1899. He paid for travel, for theater tickets, and for Millicent's wardrobe.
He waited six years. They were not married until the 28th of April, 1903, in a Catholic ceremony at the Church of the Holy Innocents on West 37th Street. She was 21, he was 40 by one day. She wore white. The wedding was small for a man of his fortune. By his mother's instruction, Phoebe Apperson Hearst, who had previously broken her son's relationship with a Cambridge waitress named Tessie Powers in 1897, had spent six years steering her son away from the chorus girl. She had failed.
The honeymoon was in Europe. They sailed in May. They moved into a small Manhattan house on his return. The first son, George Randolph Hearst, was born on the 23rd of April, 1904, 11 months after the wedding.
He was already, by the time of his first child's birth, the publisher of seven newspapers across five American cities. He was already running that year for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States. The chorus girl had married not just a wealthy publisher. She had married a candidate. He did not win the nomination of 1904. He came in second. He would run again.
The first year of the marriage was spent in Europe and in New York. They lived initially in a series of large rented houses. She entertained for him when he asked her to. She did not entertain often. The press did not yet treat her as a society wife, and the great Manhattan hostesses of the Astor and Vanderbilt circles did not call.
The Hearst money was new money. The Hearst newspapers were considered vulgar. The Hearst political opinions were considered unsafe. Millicent Hearst, the chorus girl wife, was at the edge of New York society and not yet inside it.
Her first son arrived in April 1904. The baby was named George Randolph Hearst after the Senator grandfather and the publisher father. The second son, William Randolph Hearst Jr., arrived in 1908. The third son, John Randolph Hearst, arrived in 1909. The twins, Randolph Apperson Hearst and David Whitmire Hearst, arrived on the 2nd of December, 1915. By the age of 33, Millicent Hearst had born five sons in 11 years.
The Clarendon apartment, occupying parts of three top floors of the building at 137 Riverside Drive, was completed in 1908. It had 30 rooms. It had a private elevator. It had a music room large enough for a small orchestra. It had a dining room that could seat 30. The press, when it described the apartment, described it as a palace.
She was busy with the sons. She was photographed at christenings and at the occasional opera evening. She did not give interviews. She did not appear in the gossip columns. The chorus girl past was, by mutual family agreement, never to be mentioned. Hearst's papers did not mention it. Other papers mentioned it occasionally in tones that ranged from kindly to sneering. Millicent did not respond.
The expansion of the Hearst corporation across the early 1910s was one of the most rapid commercial expansions in American media history. By 1910, he owned eight newspapers. By 1915, he owned 12. By 1920, he would own 20. Each acquisition required attention. Each new market required visits.
He had a home in New York for the wife and the sons. He had a home in California for the ranch, the publishing operation, and his own personal life. He kept moving. Millicent stayed.
She had begun, by the late 1910s, to understand what every other wife of a great American publisher had understood before her. The husband would not come home. The husband would not stop. The husband would, in a relatively short time, take an interest in another woman. And the only question that mattered was what the wife planned to do about it.
Some wives in the same position retired to the country. Some wives took lovers of their own. Some wives drank. Some wives built parallel political identities. Some wives eventually filed for divorce and walked out. Most wives in the great American houses of the period did not divorce. Most wives stayed and built around the absence.
Millicent did not yet know which kind of wife she was going to be. She was, in the late 1910s, still raising five sons. The youngest twins were toddlers. The eldest, George, was a teenager. She was running a household of 20 servants. She was managing the menus, the laundry, the children's tutors, the boys' schools, the doctors, the dressmakers, the social calendar, and the husband who was rarely at home long enough to consult on any of it.
What she did in the years just before the betrayal arrived was build the foundation. She joined the war effort. She organized. She gave speeches. She had her name placed in the newspapers by men of authority in a role that was, for the first time, entirely her own. By the time the betrayal arrived, the foundation was already poured.
Across 12 years, she gave him five sons. And across those same 12 years, his empire doubled, then trebled, then climbed to a scale the country had never seen. By 1917, 14 years into the marriage, the Hearst Corporation owned 20 newspapers in major American cities, six magazines including Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, and Harper's Bazaar, the King Features Syndicate, two news agencies, and a film production company called Cosmopolitan Pictures.
The annual revenue of the company exceeded $15 million, the equivalent today of approximately $380 million. Hearst himself, in the spring of 1917, was 54 years old, the most powerful private publisher in the United States, and the most controversial. His opposition to American entry into the First World War and his bitter feud with President Wilson had made him a publisher whose patriotism was being publicly questioned.
His wife, in that same April, made her decision. She would not retreat from public life. She would push into it. The patriotic ground that her husband was being accused of yielding, she would occupy.
In 1917, Mayor John Hylan of New York appointed Mrs. William Randolph Hearst as chairman of the Mayor's Committee of Women on National Defense. The committee was a wartime body. Its task was to coordinate the mobilization of women's labor in New York City for the war effort. It operated a canteen for soldiers passing through Manhattan. It ran patriotic rallies in Times Square and at Madison Square Garden. It distributed coal and milk and ice to the poor of the Lower East Side, Harlem, and the South Bronx.
Across the 18 months of American participation in the war, the committee under Millicent's chairmanship raised over $2 million, the equivalent today of approximately $50 million. The newspapers covered it daily. Her husband's papers covered it most extensively. But the New York Times, The World, The Tribune, and The Sun also covered it. The chorus girl wife had become, by the late summer of 1917, the most active society wife in wartime New York.
The war ended in November 1918. The committee was wound up. Millicent, by then aged 36, had her platform. She did not surrender it. In 1921, three years after the armistice, she founded the Free Milk Fund for Babies. Its purpose was to supply free pasteurized milk to infants and children in the poorest districts of New York City.
Its first year of operation distributed approximately 150,000 quarts of milk through a network of settlement houses, parish missions, and city clinics. By 1930, the fund was distributing more than 1 million quarts a year. By 1940, more than 3 million. By the time it wound up in the 1960s, it had distributed across half a century an aggregate quantity of milk to New York's poor children of well over 100 million quarts.
The annual benefits of the Free Milk Fund became in the 1920s central events of the New York charity season. The first benefits were held at the Manhattan Opera House. By the early 1930s, the annual gala had moved to the Metropolitan Opera House. The galas were attended by every name on the New York social register, by mayors and governors, by visiting royalty, and by the philanthropic peers Millicent had carefully courted, including Eleanor Roosevelt.
By that point, Millicent Hearst had been the wife of William Randolph Hearst for a quarter century. She had borne him five sons. She had run his Manhattan household. She had attended his political campaigns when he had run for mayor in 1905 and 1909 and for governor in 1906, all of which he had lost. She had managed through patient and unending charitable work to build for herself a separate and distinct public identity.
In that same period, on a stage four miles south of the Free Milk Fund offices, a 19-year-old chorus girl from Brooklyn was learning a routine for the Ziegfeld Follies of 1917. Her name was Marion Cecilia Douras. She had taken the stage name Marion Davies. She had a slight stutter that her dancing teacher was helping her control. She was the youngest of five children of a Brooklyn magistrate. She had recently been spotted by William Randolph Hearst.
Hearst, 54, was making the same arrangements he had made 20 years earlier with Millicent. He was paying for the better apartment. He was paying for the wardrobe. He was paying, in the case of Davies, for film acting lessons. He was preparing to do to his wife exactly what he had not done to her in 1897.
Marion Davies was 19. She was working in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1917, which had opened at the New Amsterdam Theatre on the 12th of June, 1917. Hearst attended the show repeatedly. He sent flowers. By the end of the year, Hearst had arranged for Davies a screen test at his Cosmopolitan Pictures studio.
In 1918, Cosmopolitan Pictures signed Davies to a $500 a week exclusive contract. The figure was substantial. $500 a week in 1918, when the average American worker earned about $20 a week, was the equivalent today of approximately $10,000 a week, or roughly $520,000 a year.
Davies left the Follies. She moved into the publicity machine Hearst had built across two decades. Her films were promoted in every Hearst newspaper. Her photographs ran in every Hearst magazine. By 1924, six years after the contract was signed, Davies was the number one female box office star in Hollywood.
The relationship was, in the late 1910s, a private one. Davies lived in an apartment in Manhattan that Hearst had paid for. He visited her there in the evenings. He did not take her, ever, to the Clarendon apartment where his wife and his five sons lived.
Millicent, by every account that survives, knew about the arrangement within a year of the contract. She did not respond. She did not, on the record, ever respond. What she did instead was learn the details.
She had friends in the New York theatrical community from her own chorus days. She had friends in Hollywood through the social network of the Hearst Corporation. She had friends in the press through her own foundation work. She had, in effect, an intelligence apparatus that ran parallel to her husband's papers, and the apparatus reported to her on Marion Davies for the next 30 years.
She knew which films were being made. She knew which parties were being held at the Santa Monica beach house Hearst had built for Davies in 1922, a 110-room Georgian mansion on the Pacific costing approximately $7 million in contemporary value. She knew which Hollywood lovers Davies had taken across the years, including by widely reported account, an affair with Charlie Chaplin in the mid-1920s that almost broke the Hearst-Davies arrangement entirely. She knew everything. She said nothing.
The reason for the silence was tactical. To respond in any way was to confirm. To confirm even by indignation was to legitimize. Across 30 years, she did not say one quotable sentence. She did not write a letter that surfaced in print. She did not respond when Hearst's enemies in publishing attempted on multiple occasions to draw her into public statement.
There was a moment in 1924 when she nearly broke. She was at the family ranch at San Simeon. Davies was also present. The two women were in the same compound for the only documented overlap of their lives. Hearst had been preparing the construction of what would become Hearst Castle. He had needed Millicent on site for certain estate decisions. He had not been able to ask Davies to leave.
The visit lasted three days. Millicent did not speak directly to Davies. Davies, by her own memoir, said only that the visit was, in her phrase, awkward. Millicent left. She did not return to the ranch for any further visit ever again.
By 1925, Hearst had moved most of his personal time to California. He had ceased visiting New York except on business. He was, in effect, if not in declaration, living with Davies. Millicent in Manhattan was running the Free Milk Fund. The two of them were not yet, in the formal sense, separated. The marriage had become the arrangement it would remain for the rest of his life.
The wife on the Hudson, the mistress at San Simeon. Five sons moving between them. The legal name on the marriage certificate untouched. She was 43 years old. He was 62. The marriage was 22 years in. The mistress was 28. The next 30 years had already taken their architecture.
By 1926, the question was no longer whether the affair was real, but whether Millicent Hearst would publicly admit she had lost. She had not lost in her own assessment. She had been displaced from one residence. She had not been displaced from her name, her sons, or her position.
San Simeon, by 1926, had become Marion Davies' house. The construction of La Cuesta Encantada, the architectural compound on the central California coast that would in time be called Hearst Castle, had been underway since 1919. By 1926, the Casa Grande, the main house with its twin towers based on a Spanish cathedral, was substantially complete.
The compound covered 250 acres on a hilltop with views to the Pacific. It cost, by the time work was halted in 1947, approximately $75 million. The equivalent today of well over a billion dollars. It was in 1926 the most opulent private residence under construction in the United States. It was also indisputably the residence at which Marion Davies served as hostess.
The guests of the late 1920s at San Simeon were the most powerful figures in American film, business, and politics. Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Cary Grant, Calvin Coolidge, Winston Churchill on his 1929 visit, Bernard Shaw on his 1933 visit, Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, Howard Hughes. All of them were greeted at the door by Marion Davies in her capacity as the woman of the house.
Millicent could not be photographed at the same table. To attend would have been to attend in the role of guest in the house her husband's mistress was running. The position was structurally impossible.
Millicent worked it out in the spring of 1926 and made the decision that would govern her movements for the next 30 years. She would not visit San Simeon while Marion Davies was on the property. The unstated condition meant in practice that she would not visit at all. The Mississippi River became the line. East of the Mississippi was her territory, west of it was his.
What she did in New York that year and across the years that followed was double down on the institutional life she had been building since 1917. The Free Milk Fund expanded. The Mayor's Committee work continued. She joined the boards of additional charitable organizations including the New York Foundling Hospital, the Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York, and several committees of the Red Cross.
She was photographed at openings, at dinners, at hospital dedications, at parish events. She was photographed in her box at the Metropolitan Opera. She was photographed at the Saratoga races. She was photographed in the spring of 1927 christening her first granddaughter, Phoebe, the daughter of George Randolph Hearst.
The photographs were never of her with Hearst. The photographs were never of her without one of her sons. The visual story being told by the photographs Millicent allowed was the story of a mother and a philanthropist, not the story of a wife.
The press, including her husband's, cooperated with the story. The Hearst papers did not run photographs of Marion Davies and Mrs. William Randolph Hearst on the same page. The Hearst papers covered the Free Milk Fund in language that called Millicent the leading philanthropist in New York. The Hearst papers also covered Marion Davies' films, premieres, parties, and gowns in language that called her the leading lady of American film. The two parallel coverages, separated by editorial firewall, ran for 30 years.
In the summer of 1928, at the height of her foundation work, Millicent appeared at the annual benefit of the Free Milk Fund wearing a diamond and platinum necklace that had been a wedding anniversary gift from her husband in 1908. The press described the necklace in detail. The accumulated effect was of a woman entirely in control of her own visual presentation.
Across the 1930s, the 1940s, the 1950s, and into the 1960s, she ran this presentation with the discipline of a long-running theatrical production. The press, including the rival papers her husband detested, cooperated. They had been given, by her own example, a storyline they could rely on.
Marion Davies, 3,000 miles west, did not have this kind of public role available to her. The Manhattan philanthropic world would not have her. The New York society columns would not photograph her. She was confined, by the structural fact of being a mistress, to the Hollywood entertainment columns, which loved her, and to the Hearst papers, which adored her.
Davies, by all accounts a generous and warm woman, gave to charity quietly. She funded a children's clinic at UCLA, named for her, opened in 1952, and operating to this day. She was beloved by the people who knew her. She was, in the only metric that Millicent had decided to compete on, unable to enter the field at all.
What Millicent had built by 1930 was a fortress. The Mississippi was the wall. The Free Milk Fund was the inner keep. The five sons were the garrison. The diamonds and the orchid were the colors flown on the parapet. The husband, 3,000 miles to the west, could no more breach this fortress than he could be evicted from his own castle. He could only, year by year, attempt to negotiate terms.
He sent his lawyers across the country with an offer he believed no rational woman could refuse. And the woman in the Riverside Drive apartment refused it without raising her voice.
The exact dates of the early divorce overtures are difficult to fix. The Hearst family papers held at Berkeley contain references to negotiations beginning as early as 1927 and continuing intermittently through the early 1930s.
The first formal offer, conveyed by Hearst's principal personal counsel, John Francis Naylon, to Millicent's lawyer, Frank S. Smithers, in the autumn of 1927, proposed the following arrangement. Millicent would receive outright ownership of the Clarendon apartment, the Sands Point country house on Long Island, an annual lifetime stipend of $250,000, the equivalent today of approximately four and a half million dollars, the sole custody of the three minor sons remaining at home, full freedom to retain the title Mrs. William Randolph Hearst until any future remarriage, and a discreet civil divorce to be filed in the state of Nevada.
In exchange, Hearst would receive an uncontested divorce, full operational and corporate control of the Hearst Corporation and all its subsidiaries, sole title to San Simeon, Wyntoon, St. Donat's Castle in Wales, and his various other real estate holdings, and the right, beginning 12 months after the divorce decree, to remarry.
Millicent's counsel returned the offer with a single sentence reply, written in his own hand, that read in full, "My client declines, with no counter offer to follow at this time." The reply was conveyed in late November 1927. It was not accompanied by any explanation. It was a closing of a door.
Hearst, by every account, was angered. He had calculated that the offer would be irresistible. He had not, on his side of the country, paid sufficient attention to the structure of his wife's actual life.
She did not need the apartment. She had it. She did not need the stipend. She received, as the wife of the publisher, comparable income through the ordinary marital channels. She did not need the divorce. She did not want, on theological, financial, or strategic grounds, to be the divorced ex-wife of William Randolph Hearst. She wanted to be Mrs. William Randolph Hearst.
A second offer arrived in 1930. The annual stipend was raised to $400,000. The Clarendon was supplemented with an additional Manhattan property. The custody arrangements were sweetened with a college expense fund for the twins. The same closing reply, almost word for word, was returned.
A third offer arrived in 1932. The annual stipend was raised to $600,000. Millicent's counsel was, by this point, instructed to begin including, in his replies, the polite suggestion that further offers along the same lines would not be entertained, but that an offer that recognized the actual scale of Millicent's commercial interests in the corporation might receive consideration.
The suggestion was the first signal Hearst received that his wife was not, as he had believed, refusing the divorce on emotional or religious grounds. She was refusing it because she had a counter price, and she had not yet been offered it.
What was the counter price? It was, by inference from the subsequent 1937 negotiation, ownership of one of the principal corporate properties. Cosmopolitan magazine, it would turn out, was the specific property.
Hearst, in 1932, did not understand this. He continued to escalate the stipend. He continued to add real estate. He continued to negotiate as though his wife was holding out for more cash, when his wife was, in fact, holding out for capital. The miscommunication ran for years.
The early 1930s were difficult for the Hearst Corporation. The depression had cut national newspaper advertising by approximately 40% between 1929 and 1933. The Hearst papers, dependent on high-cost national advertising, suffered disproportionately. Hearst's personal spending on real estate and on the Davies film career continued in the early depression years at pre-crash levels.
The pause in the divorce negotiations was not a pause in the marriage. The marriage continued. Davies remained at San Simeon. Millicent remained at the Clarendon. The sons continued to move between them.
The pause was instead the closing of one chapter in the negotiation in which Hearst had attempted to buy his wife out and the opening of a different chapter in which his wife had begun, with the patience of a woman who had been studying her husband for 30 years, to wait for the moment when she would name the price he could not refuse. The closer he came to losing the company, the more valuable her no became.
When at last she said she might consider terms, she named a price so specific and so calculated that her husband, the most powerful publisher in America, walked away from the negotiation rather than meet it.
The year was 1937. The Hearst Corporation was in serious trouble. Total corporate debt by the spring of 1937 was approximately $126 million. Annual revenues, which had peaked at approximately $120 million in 1929, had fallen by 1936 to approximately $75 million.
The corporation could not continue to operate without restructuring. The directors, led by the lawyer Clarence J. Shearn, imposed a conservation committee on the 26th of May, 1937. The committee took over the operating control of the corporation. William Randolph Hearst, for the first time since he had inherited the San Francisco Examiner in 1887, was no longer in charge of his own company.
In the same year, Hearst initiated, through Naylon, the most substantial divorce offer he had yet made. The offer included, by the most reliable contemporary accounts, an annual stipend of $1 million, the equivalent today of approximately $22 million, full ownership of the Clarendon apartment, Sands Point, and a Hearst Corporation pension equivalent to a senior executive salary for life.
Millicent, through Smithers, replied this time with substance. She would consider terms. She named her price. Cosmopolitan magazine.
Cosmopolitan in 1937 was, by a substantial margin, the most profitable property in the Hearst magazine division. Its circulation that year was approximately 1,700,000. Its advertising revenue was estimated at five and a half million dollars annually. Its profit margin was approximately 35%. It was a financial fortress in the middle of a financially failing empire. To give it up would have been to give up the most reliable single revenue stream the corporation still possessed.
The demand was, on its face, audacious. The demand was also, on closer reading, an act of intimate and unforgiving familiarity. She had been married to him for 34 years. She had read every annual report the corporation issued. She knew to the dollar which property he could not afford to give her. She had asked with absolute precision for the one property whose loss would have most damaged him.
Hearst, by every surviving account, was furious. He refused the offer within a week. He told Naylon to suspend the negotiations. The talks collapsed in late summer 1937.
Millicent's lawyer, Smithers, conveyed to Naylon in the closing communication of the round that his client remained, as ever, willing to consider terms that recognize the scale of her interests, and that no further action would be initiated by her. She had said no four times. She had said no with a price the fifth time. Both kinds of no had worked.
The press did not learn the specifics. The press learned that summer and autumn that the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. William Randolph Hearst remained intact. The press did not learn that the wife had, weeks earlier, declined to leave for any sum short of one of her husband's principal corporate properties.
What had she learned in the course of the failed negotiation? She had learned beyond any doubt that her husband still wanted the divorce. She had learned that he was prepared to pay handsomely. She had learned that there was a ceiling above which he would not go. She had learned that her bargaining position would only get stronger as long as the corporation's troubles deepened, and that if she waited him out, the day would come when he could no longer pay any of the prices he was willing to pay. She waited him out.
She also, in the meantime, watched her husband's body begin its slow decline. He was 74 in 1937. He was 77 by the time the war began. He was 80 by the time the war ended.
The Conservation Committee, having stripped the corporation of its lavish overhead, gave back operating control to Hearst in 1945. The corporation, restructured, returned to profitability. By 1946, the company was earning more than it had earned in any year since 1929.
Hearst, by then, was nearly blind in one eye. He had survived a series of cardiac episodes. He could no longer climb the stairs at San Simeon. He moved with Marion Davies into a leased Beverly Hills mansion at 10107 Beverly Drive in 1947. The mansion had a ground floor bedroom, which San Simeon had not provided. He never returned to San Simeon.
He did not, in these years, raise the divorce question again. He could not, by the late 1940s, have raised it on terms that Millicent might accept. He had already lost most of the corporate flexibility he had once possessed. There were no more Cosmopolitan magazines available to be promised in marital negotiation, because the magazines were now under the operational supervision of the board, not the publisher.
Millicent, in those same years, continued the Free Milk Fund. She continued the Met Opera Gala. She continued the diamonds and the Mainbocher. She visited her grandchildren. She had, by 1947, 10 grandchildren.
The date of the last departure from San Simeon was the 17th of May, 1947. He was 84. He had been told by his physicians that the altitude of the San Simeon hilltop was straining his heart. He had suffered a cardiac event severe enough that further refusal was no longer possible. He was carried on a stretcher down the staircase from his bedroom in the Casa Grande and placed in a private ambulance. He was driven the 210 miles south to Los Angeles. He never saw San Simeon again.
The Beverly Drive house had been chosen for him by Marion Davies. It was a one-story Spanish Revival mansion of approximately 20 rooms. Davies moved in with him. The sons visited. Millicent did not.
The last four years of Hearst's life were quiet in a way the previous 84 had not been. He could not work full days. He could not climb stairs. He read newspapers, including fastidiously, the ones he owned. He listened to the radio. He watched films at the screening room of the Beverly Drive house.
He was anxious about Davies. He had not been able to give her his name. He had not been able to give her a Catholic wedding, the only kind his wife's refusal to divorce had ever allowed him to consider. He could give her, however, money.
In 1950, he established a trust for Marion Davies. The trust held 30,000 shares of Hearst Corporation stock, which by the valuation of the day was worth approximately $3 million, the equivalent today of approximately $37 million. The trust was an irrevocable transfer. The income from them was hers for life.
The will he signed in early 1951 contained the second installment. Davies would receive, on his death, an additional 170,000 shares of Hearst Corporation stock. The two transfers together, taking effect on his death, would put Davies in possession of 200,000 shares of Hearst Corporation common stock. The voting power of those shares was sufficient to give Davies briefly control of the company.
He knew when he signed the will that the family would not allow the arrangement to stand. He had built the will in effect as a final gesture of recognition to Davies.
He fell ill again in early August 1951. By the 12th, he was bedridden. By the 13th, he was unconscious for stretches of several hours at a time. Davies kept the vigil. She had been awake for 60 hours by the morning of the 14th.
He died at 9:45 on the morning of the 14th of August 1951. He was 88. The family had gathered in Beverly Hills. Marion Davies was asleep in the same room, drugged into the deepest rest she had had in three days. According to several accounts, the family arranged for the funeral directors to arrive and remove the body before Davies woke. She woke to find the room empty.
She did not attend the funeral. The funeral was held on the 22nd of August at Grace Cathedral, the Episcopal cathedral on Nob Hill in San Francisco, the Hearst family's church. Millicent Hearst, the widow, attended. She wore black. She sat in the family pew. The five sons sat with her.
The eulogies were given by Hearst's editorial associate Joseph Nolan, and by Senator Hiram Johnson. Neither speech mentioned Marion Davies. The press coverage the next day, including the coverage in the Hearst papers, did not mention her, either.
He was buried at Cypress Lawn Memorial Park in Colma, California, the Hearst family plot, beside his father George and his mother Phoebe. The pallbearers were his five sons. The wife, who had not visited him at San Simeon since 1926, stood graveside in Colma on a foggy California morning and watched him buried among his own people.
He died at dawn on the 14th of August, 1951, and within 11 weeks his mistress signed away 200,000 shares of the family company for a single American dollar.
The will had given Davies the shares. The shares had given Davies voting control. Davies with 200,000 shares in her name could in theory have appointed corporate officers, directed editorial policy, and intervened in operating decisions across the Hearst Corporation. She did none of those things.
What she did instead was sign the share transfer agreement of the 30th of October, 1951. The agreement transferred from Marion Cecilia Davies to Mrs. Millicent Hearst all 200,000 shares. The consideration named on the agreement was $1. The dollar was the legal price required for an enforceable transfer.
Davies received in exchange for the shares a written acknowledgement from the Hearst family that her existing trust holdings, including the 30,000 shares from 1950 and certain Hearst Corporation properties Hearst had previously transferred to her by gift, were uncontested. She received in addition peace. She received the family's withdrawal of any potential challenge to the assets she had already received from her lover across the previous 30 years.
What she did not receive was the company. The control passed back to the family.
Marion Davies married Captain Horace Brown, a sea captain she had known for several years and who, by some accounts, physically resembled Hearst, on the 31st of October, 1951, the day after the share transfer. The marriage was performed at her El Dorado Ranch in Indio, California.
Davies kept Brown until her death on the 22nd of September, 1961. She died at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles of malignant osteomyelitis of the jaw, a rare bone cancer. She was 64. She was buried at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in a marble mausoleum beside her sister. She did not, even in death, reach the Hearst family plot in Colma.
Millicent, 69 years old in October, 1951, did not comment on the share transfer publicly. She did not comment on the Davies marriage publicly. She continued to appear in her usual columns. She attended the autumn benefits. She wore the diamonds. She presided in the early winter over the annual Free Milk Fund gala at the Metropolitan Opera House. The donations exceeded $1 million.
What Millicent achieved in the 11 weeks between the death and the share transfer was the consolidation of the Hearst Corporation under her family line. The five sons were, by the autumn of 1951, in their 40s and 50s. They had been working in the company for two decades. They were ready to take operating control. They took it.
The trust terms, by Hearst's own design, kept the company family-controlled for as long as any grandchild alive at his death remained alive. The arrangement would last, by reasonable actuarial projection, into the 21st century. It has.
The Hearst Corporation today, three quarters of a century after William Randolph Hearst's death, is still privately held and family-controlled. The trust still operates under the original terms. The corporation has expanded across radio, television, cable, and digital media. Its estimated value, by the most recent published figures, is between 21 and 25 billion dollars.
The architecture of family control that Millicent's refusal to divorce had been quietly designed to protect has held for three quarters of a century. The price she had named in 1937 had not been paid in 1937. The price had been paid in a different form in 1951. The price was the corporation itself.
She was 69 years old when she became in the eyes of the law for the first time in 25 years the only woman in the country entitled to use the title Mrs. William Randolph Hearst. She did not change anything about how she used it.
She kept the apartment at the Clarendon. She kept the Sands Point country house. She kept the box at the Metropolitan Opera. She kept the chauffeur. She kept the seasonal rhythm of New York life that she had established in the 1920s. Winter at the Clarendon, summer at Sands Point, autumn at the racetrack, periodic short visits to Newport for charity, Paris for fittings every other year, London for the Royal Academy show in May.
She kept the wardrobe. The Mainbocher gave way across the 1950s to Charles James and to Pauline Trigere and eventually to Christian Dior. The diamonds did not change.
She continued the Free Milk Fund. She continued the Mayor's Committee work. She continued her board memberships. She added in the 1950s a new board, the Lighthouse Mission for the Blind in Manhattan. She continued to be photographed in her box at the opera. She continued to give the brief annual speech at the Free Milk Fund gala.
The sons aged. George Randolph Hearst lived until 1972 and died at 68. William Randolph Hearst Jr. won in 1956 the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for his coverage of the Soviet Union, the first member of the Hearst family ever to receive the award. John Randolph Hearst struggled with alcohol throughout his life and died relatively young in 1958 at 49. The twins Randolph and David continued in the corporation with Randolph eventually becoming chairman of the corporation's executive committee.
Grandchildren multiplied. Patricia Campbell Hearst, the second daughter of Randolph and Catherine Wood Campbell, was born on the 20th of February 1954. Millicent was 71. She held the new granddaughter on the day of her christening.
She did not write a memoir. She refused multiple offers from publishers across the 1950s and into the 1960s. The most substantial of the offers, by reliable account, was from Doubleday in 1957 for an advance of $100,000, the equivalent today of approximately one and a quarter million dollars. She declined without explanation.
She gave, throughout the period, no interviews. Her closest companion across the last two decades of her life was, by friends' accounts, her sister, Anita Bertha Wilson, who had danced beside her at the Herald Square Theatre in 1897, and who lived in the same building as Millicent at the Clarendon until her own death in 1968.
Marion Davies' autobiography, The Times We Had, had been dictated by Davies in the late 1950s. The book was held by the family lawyers after Davies' death in 1961. The book was eventually released in heavily edited form in 1975, the year after Millicent's own death. Davies' account of San Simeon, of Hearst, and of the Hearst family was warm and discreet. The book did not contain attacks on Millicent.
The two women, who had met only once and who had not spoken in person across 30 years of shared subject matter, had, in the end, decided independently to keep almost everything to themselves.
Millicent, by the late 1960s, was past 80. She had outlived Davies. She had outlived three of her own daughters-in-law. She had outlived several of her closest friends. She continued, with the slight reduction necessary to her age, the rhythm, the Clarendon, Sands Point, the opera, the Free Milk Fund, the diamonds, the orchid, the composed presentation that had been, for 60 years, the cover under which her actual decisions had been made.
In February 1974, a sound recording arrived at the Hearst family lawyers, and on it, Millicent's 20-year-old granddaughter declared that she had joined the people who had kidnapped her.
The kidnapping had taken place on the 4th of February, 1974, at an apartment Patricia Campbell Hearst shared with her fiance, Steven Weed, at 2603 Benvenue Avenue in Berkeley, California. Three members of the Symbionese Liberation Army, a small armed leftist group based in the San Francisco Bay Area, broke into the apartment, beat Weed, and took Patricia by force, bound and gagged in the boot of a stolen car.
The case, from the morning of the 5th of February, was the most extensively covered American kidnapping since the Lindbergh case of 1932. Randolph Hearst, Patricia's father and Millicent's son, became the public face of the family across the months that followed.
The demands, after their initial monetary phase, included the establishment of a multi-million dollar food program for the poor of California. Randolph Hearst funded the program. The program distributed approximately $2 million in food across several California cities in the early spring of 1974. The program did not secure Patricia's release.
On the 3rd of April, 1974, 60 days after the kidnapping, the Symbionese Liberation Army released a sound recording. On it, Patricia announced that she had chosen, of her own will, to remain with her captors. She had taken, she said, the revolutionary name Tania. She denounced her family, her fiance, and the American government.
Millicent Hearst, at the Clarendon apartment on Riverside Drive, 91 years old, listened to the recording on her radio. By the accounts of the staff who were with her, she made no comment.
On the 15th of April, 12 days after the recording, security cameras at the Hibernia Bank branch at 2276 Noriega Street in San Francisco captured Patricia Campbell Hearst holding an automatic carbine participating in the armed robbery of the bank by members of the SLA. The federal government issued a warrant. Patricia Hearst was now, on the public record, a wanted fugitive.
The press came back to the Clarendon. The press did not, in Millicent's case, gain access. She did not give an interview. She did not appear at the press conferences her son, Randolph, was giving. She did not, on the public record, say one sentence about the granddaughter, the kidnappers, or the situation.
The family accounts say only that she was, throughout the eight months of the unfolding case, composed. She continued to take her meals at the usual hours. She continued to receive certain visitors. She read the newspapers, including her family's. She did not weep, at least not publicly.
She fell ill in the autumn of 1974. The exact diagnosis has not been published, but the contemporaneous accounts suggest a series of small strokes followed by a more substantial one in late November. She declined visitors. She refused additional medical intervention.
She died on the 5th of December, 1974, in her bedroom at the Clarendon apartment at the age of 92. She had outlived her husband by 23 years. She had outlived Marion Davies by 13.
Patricia Hearst was captured by federal agents on the 18th of September, 1975, nine months after Millicent's death.
The New York Times obituary, published on the 6th of December, was respectful and thorough. It described the marriage, the five sons, the Free Milk Fund, the Mayor's Committee, the long Manhattan philanthropic career. The obituary did not mention Marion Davies. The obituary did not mention the divorce negotiations. The obituary did not mention the share transfer of 1951.
The funeral was held at St. Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue. The cardinal archbishop of New York presided. The pews were full. The five sons were the chief mourners. The grandchildren, with one famous exception, were all present. The granddaughter who was not present was, that day, in a federal safe house under a different name, still on the run.
She refused to be buried beside him, and that final refusal said everything the four preceding decades had said by silence. The body was taken from the Clarendon on the 7th of December, 1974, to Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. The Hearst family plot in Colma, California, where William Randolph Hearst had lain since 1951, was not the destination she had chosen.
She would lie in New York. She would lie under the name Hearst. She would not, however, lie in the family plot on the West Coast.
The funeral monument at Woodlawn is simple. The stone reads in letters of moderate size, Millicent Veronica Hearst, July 16th, 1882 to December 5th, 1974. There is no reference to her husband. There is no reference to her marriage. There is no reference to her foundation. There is only the name and the dates.
The empire, 2,500 miles to the west, has not stopped. The Hearst Corporation has continued across half a century to expand. The corporation today owns publishing, radio, television, cable, and digital interests. It is partnered with the Disney organization in the cable network ESPN. It is partnered with A&E Networks. It owns Lifetime. It owns Hearst Magazines, which includes Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Elle, Harper's Bazaar, Good Housekeeping, House Beautiful, and many others.
It owns Hearst Television with stakes in 33 American local television stations. It owns the King Features Syndicate, the largest syndicator of newspaper comic strips in the world. It owns the Houston Chronicle, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Albany Times Union, and other major American newspapers.
The corporation's estimated value, by the most recent published figures, is between 21 and 25 billion dollars. The family stake in the corporation, controlled by the trust William Randolph Hearst established in 1951, is one of the largest single family fortunes in the United States.
Marion Davies' Children's Clinic at UCLA, opened in 1952, continues to treat children with congenital and severe medical conditions. The clinic is now part of the UCLA Mattel Children's Hospital. It bears her name.
The Free Milk Fund for Babies, Millicent's foundation, was wound up in the 1960s as municipal nutrition programs absorbed its function. Its records are preserved in the New York City Municipal Archives. There is no monument to Millicent's foundation in the city she ran it from for half a century.
There is no published biography of Millicent Hearst. There is no scholarly monograph devoted to her. She does not appear in the indexes of most general histories of the period. She appears when she appears in chapters and footnotes within the biographies of her husband, or in the more recent and more carefully researched biographies of Marion Davies.
The wife who had refused for 50 years to convert her private life into public material has been rewarded by the publishing trade with the obscurity her conduct had earned. Marion Davies, who had also kept her counsel but had been the public companion of a famous man, has been studied. Millicent has not.
The wealth was William Randolph Hearst's. The love was Marion Davies's. The respectability was Millicent's. The respectability outlasted both of them. It outlasted his castle. It outlasted her clinic. It outlasted the marriage that had been its starting condition. It still exists now in the legal architecture of the corporation her sons inherited and in the trust her grandsons and granddaughters continue to direct.
A name once held is the only piece on the board that does not have to be given back. Millicent had been given the name by her husband on the 28th of April, 1903. She had been asked repeatedly across the next four decades to give it back. She had refused.
She had paid for the refusal in social isolation she did not show, in private grief she did not name, in marital absence that filled half her life, and in the cost of being a public figure who could never speak about the matter that the public was most curious about. She had not by any reasonable assessment paid more than the title was worth. The title was worth in the end the empire.
She was a strategist. She played the long game. She did not lose.
The men's names in this story are on castles, on newspapers, on a 30-room apartment on Riverside Drive, on a clinic in Los Angeles, on a corporation that has lasted three quarters of a century, on a county on the West Coast, on a museum at Berkeley, on the front of the $10 bill of an earlier century. The wife's name is on a single small stone at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.
Millicent Veronica Hearst.