Hearst and Pearl Harbor a Memoir in 41 Parts

Hearst and Pearl Harbor A Memoir in 41 Parts by Taylor Coffman Part 1 DAILY NEWSPAPERS routinely include a corrections box. This journalistic tradition goes way back; in fact, it originated more than a century ago in the better media. Never mind how the National Enquirer goes about its strange business. From The New York Times down to hundreds of other mainstream papers in this country, misspelled names or erroneous dates get corrected quickly, very often the next day. Freedom of the press is a basic American right, to be sure—but it’s also a serious matter of public trust, not to be lightly invoked. Magazines handle such matters differently. By appearing once a week or, in many instances, just once a month, their corrections tend to be stale when they finally appear. They do get published, though, if only “for the record.” With books it’s another story. In the realm of nonfiction a given edition of a biography or a historical work may have one appearance only, extending over many years before its backlog “sells through.” A good while ago my book about San Simeon called Hearst’s Dream was denounced by a nervous bureaucrat; and thus its lengthy ban in the Hearst Castle gift shop. Denied its main market, the first printing of 5,000 copies took 17 years to deplete, from 1989 to 2006. There was no feasible way to make updates to all those shrink-wrapped bundles, each comprising 10 copies. Not until about 2005 was it realistic to make any factual repairs before a second printing would finally be ordered. Other books sell much faster, of course, than the original © 2013: all rights reserved 2 HEARST AND PEARL HARBOR Hearst’s Dream. The more successful titles go into later printings and, if enough changes or improvements are made en route, into updated versions that can rightly be called new editions. Ideally, that’s how the history game works: an author learns of discrepancies, finds ways to rectify them, and sets about righting the ship before it can do any more sinking. Daily newspapers and periodical magazines aren’t my focus here. Both of those media will keep making their errors—and their corrections—with reasonable speed. It’s the sluggish and obdurate realm of nonfiction books that affects me more. Waiting 17 years to mend fences may be atypical. But what about those instances where corrections that could have been made and should have been made at shorter intervals are simply ignored? In other words, where the reprint presses are allowed to run with little if anything new having been done? This is frankly more the norm than the exception. Revisions and adjustments take time, as many a harried author will attest. Some of those changes are a relief to make. Yet too often they’re a burden, a troublesome bore. In such cases it helps to have the publisher hold a gun to the writer’s head: by no lesser means is the new work apt to be done. In the field of Hearstiana—my longtime specialty—the greatest error lodged in the final 30 years of William Randolph Hearst’s life stems from Pearl Harbor in 1941. (He’ll figure as W. R. Hearst or simply as Hearst from here on.) Previously, the nature and timing of the man’s art collecting, and its bearing on his progress at San Simeon through Julia Morgan, was a huge challenge, replete with the most glaring discrepancies. But those matters have long since been resolved to nearly everyone’s satisfaction; I know, having been at the center of what my longtime editor, John Porter, a Castle guide since 1971, en- dearingly regards as “the Coffman revolution.” Primary documentation was our manifesto. No end of secondary sources—biographies, history books, and the like—could have carried the day as firmly. Plus we had A MEMOIR IN 41 PARTS 3 the Castle compound itself as a major witness. Architecturally and in other ways, the grand old buildings provided endless clues the closer we looked. It reminded me of what a famous photographer and wordsmith, Minor White, said years ago about his riveting work: For technical data—the camera was faithfully used. Two days before I started writing Hearst and Pearl Harbor in October 2012, I heard from a close colleague named Dennis Judd. We go back a good ways—to 1975, when I was a young guide at Hearst Castle and Dennis, younger still and brand new to the job, gave his first tours, partly under my tutelage (a case of the blind leading the blind). Dennis has since gone on to teach U.S. History at Cuesta College, San Luis Obispo. Together, we produced an unprecedented Hearst Sympo- sium in 2005 at Cuesta, a day-long event sponsored by Will Hearst III. A man my age (born in 1949), Will is a grandson of W. R. Hearst and someone whose name will crop up again in these numbered parts. When I told Dennis what I was planning to write—an essay on historical veracity, not knowing then how far I’d be going with it—he offered a short but telling reply: Accuracy is at the root of what we do. I am amazed, in fact very upset, at how often major textbooks get basic facts wrong. I don’t read textbooks. I get my history by other means. Yet I’m as amazed as Dennis is at how some writers who ought to know better are so often prone to error—and to doing nothing about it. No revisions, no updates, no methodical rewrites. On such a note as that, I should dedicate the remaining 40 parts in Hearst and Pearl Harbor to Dennis Judd and also to Will Hearst, two people of lasting importance to me. The names of several other people will appear as we continue. There surely remain hills to climb in clarifying the Hearstian details connected with the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941 and its aftermath—hence this new book, one that’s no longer the mere essay it originally was. A major point is that, in writing biography (despite its 4 HEARST AND PEARL HARBOR chronic limitations), authors ideally need to know where their subjects were at every crucial turn. Yet a day-to-day recounting of someone’s life can be impossible. Nonetheless, with the more salient events of the 1920s, when Hearst got going at San Simeon, and up to his death in 1951, his whereabouts need to be determined almost minutely. Where was he, for instance, when the Great Crash occurred on Wall Street in October 1929? Or in July 1932 when Franklin D. Roosevelt captured the Democratic nomination in Chicago? Above all for these three decades following World War I, where was Hearst on the morning of December 7, 1941? Why is this famous date of surpassing concern? In part it’s because the Hearst fortune wasn’t overly dependent on the stock market and, more so (with a passing nod to the kingly FDR), because Pearl Harbor is arguably much larger by American historical standards—larger, that is, than those two other events I’ve just mentioned. We should want to know what Hearst was up on that “date which will live in infamy,” much as we should want to know what President George W. Bush was doing on the morning of 9/11 in 2001. In between 1941 and 2001 falls November 22, 1963. Everyone of sufficient age recalls certain details of that shocking Friday in Dallas. A MEMOIR IN 41 PARTS 5 Part 2 THE PEARL HARBOR QUESTION might be of only passing importance were it not for the account given by Marion Davies in her often boozy memoirs, tape-recorded in 1951 starting shortly before Hearst died. Frivolous one minute yet surprisingly insightful the next, Marion’s words have been cited in many books, as though an oracle had spoken. And yet a careful study of The Times We Had: Life with William Randolph Hearst, a hardcover expensively published in 1975, discloses that part of Marion’s famous “bubbly” style stemmed from her tendency to fib and tell fanciful tales. Or to put it less politely, her occasional tendency to be a brazen liar. She admitted as much in her recording sessions. It seems she’d always been loose with facts, a trait handed down by her father, Bernard Douras (who still managed to serve as a New York City magistrate in the 1920s). Marion’s recounting in Chapter 4, for example, of Charles Lindbergh’s presence in New York in 1927, right after his famous flight, is beyond merely coy and absurd. It’s almost inane when measured against the well-established details of what Lindy did during the week of June 12-18 that year, a period when Hearst and Marion (as the couple is now well known) were also in Manhattan. Marion further said in her memoirs that she and Hearst had been at San Simeon in 1941, on the very day that Pearl Harbor was hit. Those weren’t her exact words; she was usually more roundabout and allusive. What she recounted in her typical style appeared as the opening of Chapter 12, toward the end of The Times We Had, published not quite 15 years after she died in 1961. “We hadn’t been to Wyntoon for a long time,” began the most influential passage in her book, “until the war started.” She meant World War II, of course: We were told to get out of San Simeon, so we went.

Load more