When not harassing presidents, or running for president, or demanding or opposing U.S. military intervention, or causing as many scandals as his newspapers exploited, William Randolph Hearst liked to attend costume parties, where he dressed up as a Tyrolian peasant or circus ringmaster. His favorite dish was pressed duck, cooked very rare. An erratic host, he refused on principle to provide guests with breakfast in bed. He was a more than passable yodeler. To Hearst's detractors, all this no doubt confirms the banality of evil. To David Nasaw, his latest and most empathetic biographer, these are humanizing details, part of a vast mosaic fashioned by a meticulous scholar whose industry is equaled by his insights.

Nearly forty years after its publication, W.A. Swanberg's Citizen Hearst remains the most famous biography ever denied the Pulitzer Prize, its notoriety of a piece with its protean subject. With the passage of time, however, comes a cooling of passions, not to mention access to papers and a perspective that goes beyond Wellesian caricature. In contrast to today's dully acquisitive Internet tycoons, or boardroom bean-counters as interchangeable as the media properties for which they dicker, Swanberg's "champion loser of his time" appears a veritable renaissance man. With his movie studios and magazines -- in the 1920s one out of every six American households read a Hearst publication -- the Laird of San Simeon can lay claim to being the father of modern media synergy.

It's easy to ridicule Hearst; Nasaw, the chair of the doctoral history program at City University of New York, has undertaken the much greater challenge of explaining him. Having plumbed dozens of family and corporate archives unavailable to Swanberg, Nasaw is that academic rarity: a prodigious researcher with a genuine storytelling gift. His tale begins with an appalling set of parents who alternately smothered or neglected their only child. Hearst's absentee father, George, was a semi-literate buccaneer who employed a fortune based on Nevada silver, South Dakota gold, and Montana copper to buy himself a seat in the United States Senate in 1886. To compensate for her husband's physical and emotional distance, Phoebe Hearst withdrew nine-year-old Willie from school so that mother and son might together pursue a cultural education in Europe.

Foreshadowing a life whose extravagant appetites exceeded its taste, Hearst early displayed what Phoebe called "a mania for antiquities." These ranged from Venetian glass and German porcelains to the specially bred white horses that pulled the carriages of English royalty. At Harvard, Phoebe supplied a maid and valet to look after her boy and the pet alligator named Charley that shared his crimson-colored suite. Will showed his disdain for Yankee bluebloods by taking as his mistress a Cambridge waitress with whom he spent an apparently happy decade. At the same time, the congenial "Sausalito Bill" surprised detractors by swearing off alcohol and boosting circulation of the Harvard Lampoon by 50 percent. His studies commanded far less of his attention. Nasaw demolishes Hearst's claim to have been expelled from Harvard for unspecified pranks. In reality, the prodigal couldn't wait to apply the lessons of Joseph Pulitzer's crusading brand of journalism, first in San Francisco, and eventually nationwide.

In a curious role reversal, the younger Hearst issued marching orders to his father ("Stir yourself, daddy pop"), who had purchased the failing San Francisco Evening Examiner to advance his political prospects. On the same day George Hearst took his oath of office in Washington, the name of "W.R. Hearst, Proprietor" appeared for the first time on the Examiner masthead. "We must be alarmingly enterprising, and we must be startlingly original," declared the new publisher. True to his word, baseball scores moved to page one, quickly supplemented by crowd-pleasing reports of boxing, horse racing, and, most notoriously, crime.

Other newspapers had been quick to see lucrative possibilities in human depravity. But it was Hearst who most profitably treated decapitation, insanity, butchered Negroes, Chinese garroters, opium rings, and capsized steamers as so many urban melodramas. The twenty-four-year-old arriviste cast his reporters as heroic protagonists and the Examiner itself as an instrument of justice. In such a climate, objectivity mattered less than outrage. Still, one couldn't hope to succeed exclusively on a diet of sensation -- even in San Francisco. Hearst prevailed, writes Nasaw, "because he was a master at constructing news from nothing." In truth, he made as much news as he made up. Moving east in 1895, he challenged the fading Pulitzer with a revitalized New York Journal. while others talk the journal acts! the newspaper proclaimed in a rare bit of understatement. One of those acts was to pirate away virtually the entire staff of Pulitzer's World.

Hearst's New Journalism upheld the rights of labor, attacked greedy trusts, and assailed Tammany boodlers even as it inflamed public opinion against those foreigners presumptuous enough to insult Old Glory. For a hundred years it has been accepted wisdom that Hearst and his yellow journals singlehandedly incited hostilities between the United States and Spain in 1898. Certainly bloodthirsty Spanish officials offered a perfect foil for crusading Journal reporters like Richard Harding Davis. Yet the famous telegram ("you furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war"), which Hearst may or may not have sent, had nothing to do with the splendid little war of legend, but, rather, with an earlier struggle pitting Cuban revolutionaries against their Spanish oppressors. It was Hearst's genius as a self-promoter, Nasaw argues, that "convinced the rest of the nation that without the Hearst press leading the way, there would have been no war."

Ironically the conflict he agitated proved the making of Theodore Roosevelt, whose melodramatic exploits overshadowed Hearst's simultaneous newsgathering in the shadow of San Juan Hill. Their ensuing rivalry was a bitter compound of envy, contempt, and raw ambition flavored with class warfare. Hearst's Journal attacked TR for wearing pink shirts and a tasseled silk sash. Roosevelt shot back that Hearst was "the most potent single influence for evil we have in our life." When the president coined the word "muckraker" for those guilty of journalistic abuse, no one doubted his target. Characteristically, Hearst played the political game by his own rules. As a New York congressman he loudly demanded enactment of antitrust laws, the direct election of United States senators, and public ownership of the railroads. Yet in his first term alone he skipped 168 out of 170 roll calls.

Ninety years before Ross Perot and Jesse Ventura roiled the political waters, Collier's dubbed the celebrity publisher "the first one-man party to have gained anything like national headway in the history of our democracy." As William Jennings Bryan's self-anointed heir, Hearst finished second in the balloting for the 1904 Democratic presidential nomination. The next year he ran for mayor of New York City where, according to local custom, Tammany fraud narrowly deprived him of city hall. In 1906 he sought the governorship of New York against Charles Evans Hughes, that year's version of a reformer with results. Ever the innovator, Hearst resorted to talking pictures to advance his candidacy, a full generation before Al Jolson gave voice to The Jazz Singer.

It was all for naught, as TR dispatched Secretary of State Elihu Root ("Root the Rat") to remind voters of the publisher's alleged complicity in the assassination of President McKinley. Hearst's attempt to form a national third party in 1908 ended in humiliation when his hand-picked candidate, a Massachusetts dealer in axle grease named Thomas Hisgen, finished far behind the Socialists and Prohibitionists. His subsequent diatribes against Wilsonian internationalism and U.S. entry into World War I earned him surveillance by the War Department.

The Chief reveled in his notoriety. "Can't you stand an investigation?" he asked an unhappy friend less enamored of official snooping. "I just love to be investigated." What Hearst loved most was to be the center of attention. The burgeoning movie industry afforded him no shortage of opportunities. Practicing the art of buzz long before it had a name, in 1914 he teamed with Pathé Pictures to film The Perils of Pauline, the first of many "novelizations" to simultaneously appear as Sunday newspaper features. Soon after he made the acquaintance of an eighteen-year-old chorus girl named Marion Davies, then appearing on Broadway, appropriately enough, in a production number called "The Girl on the Magazine Cover." Thus did history repeat itself; Hearst's wife Millicent was herself a former showgirl less than half her suitor's age at the time of their marriage in 1903.

Replicating his father's negligence, Hearst showered long-distance counsel on his children, none of whom seemed disposed to take it. His five sons were "mad as March Hares on the money question," complained Hearst. "These nincompoops are never satisfied and are being ruined by living far beyond their means and mine." Even as he wrote this, the disappointed parent was preparing to build a 110-bedroom, $7 million beach house at Santa Monica for himself and Marion. By the twenties he was living a bicoastal existence, his relationship with Davies an open secret. "I started out a g-g-gold digger and I ended up in love," acknowledged Davies, whose film career gets exhaustive treatment in the book. Here, Nasaw gives us too much of a good thing -- akin to Marion's fourteen-room "bungalow" on the MGM lot.

  Millicent, meanwhile, consoled herself with a monthly allowance of $10,000, a palatial New York apartment, and a Long Island pleasure palace originally built for Alva Vanderbilt Belmont. In the summer of 1927, Mrs. Hearst visited Rome, where she recruited Mussolini to write for her husband's newspapers at $1500 per article (Il Duce also promised help in finding Italian marble and marble-carvers for San Simeon). The result of his collaboration with a remarkable architect named Julia Morgan, the hilltop principality featured the world's largest privately owned zoo, complete with bison purchased for $1,000 a head from a Missouri refuge, and reindeer fed on Iceland moss specially flown in until the creatures became accustomed to native grasses.

During a rare visit to San Simeon, Millicent appeared in a home movie directed by her straying husband. One of the title cards said it all:

"The hero has the fattest part

And gets the greatest glory

But that's because he runs the ranch

And also writes the story."

As a metaphor for twenties recklessness, it would be hard to beat the feverish expansion of Hearst's empire, or of Hearst's debts carried by New York bankers. According to his friend Arthur Brisbane, Hearst was the only man he knew who couldn't get along on $10 million a year. "I am of a promoting temperament," the publisher asserted; any fault lay with his financial managers for not reining in his extravagance. (When his chauffeur hit a goose on a French road, Hearst fired the man, then presented the animal's owner with a replacement goose -- inside a new Renault.) He was equally generous toward postwar Republican presidents. Discarding his theories of municipal ownership, the erstwhile populist embraced Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge for their domestic policies. He promoted Andrew Mellon for the White House instead of Herbert Hoover, whose internationalist tendencies clashed with Hearst's vehement opposition to U.S. membership in the World Court. But then, Hearst had never trusted the continent whose treasures he plundered with borrowed money.

By 1930, he owned twenty-six daily newspapers. Millions saw his newsreels, listened to his radio stations, or looked forward to regular installments of Krazy Kat, Mandrake the Magician, or the Bumsteads. Frederic Remington drew for Hearst. So did the young Doctor Seuss. Walter Winchell, Damon Runyon, and Hedda Hopper became household names, in part because Hearst compelled editors to take his syndicated features, a practice that forced cutbacks in local coverage and columnists. In place of their former social crusading, Hearst publications now resorted to stunts, contests, and celebrity journalism. The old man telegrammed his editor at the New York Mirror to lay off Gloria Swanson: nearly everybody i know is weeping on my shoulder because the way mirror roasts them. can you not get some good-natured reporters on staff?

Hoping to garner respectability among readers of "the better class," Hearst fashioned an early op-ed page, then signed up Aldous Huxley, Oswald Spengler, H.G. Wells, Will Rogers, Leon Trotsky, and Adolf Hitler to fill it (unable to meet deadlines, the putative Führer soon fell out of Hearstian favor). George Bernard Shaw's byline appeared sixty times in the New York American ("A Paper for People Who Think") alone. Winston Churchill, another Hearst contributor, visited San Simeon in 1929. He found its owner "a grave simple child ... playing with the most costly toys" who had "the appearance of a Quaker elder -- or perhaps better, Mormon elder."

As the Depression deepened, Hearst economized by using red damask instead of green Majorcan velvet in the castle's movie theater. He anticipated FDR by calling for a $5 billion public works program to increase "the purchasing power of the masses." In the 1932 campaign Hearst successfully pressured Roosevelt into retracting his earlier support for U.S. participation in the League of Nations. Unable to make "Cactus Jack" Garner a serious contender, Hearst still controlled enough delegates in Texas and California to play the kingmaker, an option he exercised when Joseph P. Kennedy appealed for his help in securing Roosevelt's nomination. A $25,000 campaign contribution followed. Once in office, Roosevelt thanked Hearst for the flattering depiction of an activist president in the 1933 film Gabriel Over the White House.

Though remembered today for his diatribes against "Stalin Delano Roosevelt," Hearst was anything but a consistent critic of the New Deal. The shrill redbaiter labeled "the outstanding demagogue of America" by New Masses actually welcomed Roosevelt's recognition of the Soviet Union in November 1933. At other times the aging tycoon wavered between fierce attacks on "the Raw Deal" and shameless flattery of the president whose relations he hired at inflated salaries. Scorned for his union-busting, Hearst became the subject of a boycott by left-leaning progressives like Sinclair Lewis and Norman Thomas; at Amherst, protesting students drowned out a Hearst newsreel, chanting "We want Popeye!" Eventually, Hearst took his name off Hearst Metrotone News.

  An acute embarrassment to his would-be protégé, Kansas Governor Alfred M. Landon, Hearst at least had the tact to go abroad for much of the 1936 presidential contest. This did not prevent an election-night call from Marion to Hyde Park. "We have been run over by a steamroller," Hearst told the president's son-in-law, John Boettiger, "but . . . there are no hard feelings." FDR was less forgiving. Never reluctant to use the full resources of government to harass his enemies, Roosevelt had already directed Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau to investigate the income taxes of both Hearst and Davies. They must have made for interesting reading. Years of financial mismanagement and overspending drove Hearst to seek Joe Kennedy's aid in a corporate reorganization. On her own, Marion sold jewels and real estate worth a million dollars, and insisted her lover accept the proceeds.

"I'm afraid I'm like a dipsomaniac with a bottle," Hearst confessed in a rare moment of candor. As bankruptcy loomed, one financial adviser begged Harry Chandler of the Los Angeles Times not to call in his $600,000 mortgage on San Simeon. Even FDR weighed in. "Please tell W.R. I advise him to get rid of his poorest papers, to print more news, not to print so many features, keep just the good ones, and to kill his editorial page," wrote the president who had so often felt the sting of Hearst's displeasure. Excluded from the empire he had built, publicly humiliated as his immense collections were auctioned off, Hearst couldn't even secure Millicent a job with Town and Country. Rather than despair, at the age of seventy-seven he began a daily column, scattering like birdseed the contents of his ragbag mind. In the autumn of 1940, he proposed to former Prime Minister David Lloyd George that the two men broker an agreement to end the war then reaching a crucial moment.

Under the circumstances, Orson Welles's brutal dissection of Hearst in Citizen Kane appears less a profile in courage than kicking an old man when he was down. With a gift for self-dramatization that rivaled Hearst's own, Welles goaded Louella Parsons, among others, into a foolish campaign to kill the picture, whose murky brilliance and unconventional narrative did more than anyone in the mogul's employ to thwart its commercial success. Only later did Welles acknowledge "the real story of Hearst is quite different from Kane's. And Hearst himself -- as a man, I mean -- was very different."

In his final years Hearst campaigned for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and urged the demotion of George Patton -- "that brutal 'kick 'em in the pants' General." Thanks to increased circulation brought about by the war he had so strenuously opposed, in his eighties Hearst was able to regain control of his media empire. As licensing of comic characters like Popeye and Blondie generated fresh income streams, Marion's million-dollar loan was repaid. In May 1947 they left San Simeon for the last time. The once hulking publisher's weight was down to 128 pounds shortly before his death on August 14, 1951. Marion awoke from sedation that day to find Hearst's body gone -- whisked away by his sons, who buried the tycoon with his parents in San Francisco, the raucous city he had grown up with, if he ever grew up at all.

Neither apologist nor prosecuting attorney, Nasaw brings to this epic a balance all too rare in Hearst's own publications. By taking Hearst seriously, The Chief reveals a man neither beneath contempt nor beyond our understanding. Though hardly the last word on the Yellow Fellow, Nasaw has given us the most credible, comprehensive portrait to date. It will make a helluva movie. *

Richard Norton Smith is author, most recently, of The Colonel: The Life and Legend of Robert R. McCormick.

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