Volume 47, Number 13 · August 10, 2000
A Boy's Life
By Russell Baker
The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst
by David Nasaw
Houghton Mifflin, 687 pp., $35.00
From Mark Twain and Theodore Roosevelt to Steven Spielberg and Bill Clinton the evidence is overwhelming: the adult American male's dream of paradise is eternal boyhood. David Nasaw's Hearst is a sublime example. Nasaw presents him at age ten in London asking his mother to buy him the royal family's carriage horses and in his seventies throwing costume parties for movie stars—Gary Cooper coming as Dr. Fu Manchu, Groucho Marx as Rex the Wonder Horse, Hearst presiding as cowboy gunslinger, Tyrolean peasant, circus ringmaster. In the years between ten and seventy-five he builds himself a castle on 60,000 acres and furnishes it with a private zoo, tries to start some wars, cruises Europe like a king on a royal progress chatting up the mighty and buying any and all treasures that catch his fancy. He hires Winston Churchill, puts both Mussolini and Hitler on his payroll, runs for president.
Review, 4988 words
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