Citizen Hearst

Interview, Oct, 1996 by Brigid Berlin

When I first met Patricia Hearst, on the set of John Water's Serial Mom in 1993, it seemed like destiny. After all, I grew up thinking that her grandfather, William Randolph Hearst, was God. In a way, Mr. Hearst was my grandfather, too, in that he had considered my father, Richard Emmett Berlin, a son. Daddy worked for the Hearsts for fifty-two years. He became president of Hearst Magazines and, eventually, the entire Hearst Corporation. And while Patricia never knew her grandfather, who died in 1951, as a child I was lucky enough to spend Easters and Christmases at the Hearsts' San Simeon castle in California, where I once roller-skated through the same rooms that Orson Welles re-created for Citizen Kane.

Patricia recently sent me a copy of her first novel, Murder at San Simeon (Scribner), which she co-wrote with Cordelia Frances Biddle. Based on the still-unexplained death of film director/producer Thomas Ince, who died under mysterious circumstances following a party on the Hearst yacht in 1924, the book is a real page-turner, and Patricia's descriptions of San Simeon brought back a lot of wonderful memories for me. I don't want to give away the ending - you'll have to read it yourself - but I can tell you that it would make a great movie.

BRIGID BERLIN: Hi, Patty.

PATRICIA HEARST: Hello.

BB: I'm so nervous because one of the last articles I did for Interview was some twenty years ago with Tab Hunter, and I ended up with nine hours of tape and there was no Tab on it, just me. So please feel free to interrupt. [laughs]

PH: Well, I had four sisters and a noisy family, so I'm really good at interrupting.

BB: I've read your book, Murder at San Simeon, and I think it's great.

PH: Oh, thank you.

BB: But it isn't really a novel, is it? [PH laughs] I believed every single word of it.

PH: Well, good! Yes, it is a novel, but I kind of believe every single word, too.

BB: Where did you get the idea?

PH: I was doing research on my grandfather [William Randolph Hearst], because I really didn't know anything about him. I was about twenty-six before I finally saw Citizen Kane. All my life my parents had told me that [the film] had absolutely nothing to do with him. We were also told he had nothing to do with the Spanish-American War. In any event, a few years ago I got curious - mostly because my daughter's teacher said to her, "You know, your great-grandfather started the Spanish-American War." At that point, other than being annoyed with the teacher for picking on some kid, I thought, I really don't know enough about him. I read about fifteen or twenty books, and in the process, I kept coming across the Thomas Ince story.

BB: I didn't even know about that.

PH: Oh, it's been around. [Actress] Marion Davies [William Randolph Hearst's mistress of thirty-four years] wrote about it in her book, The Times We Had: Life With William Randolph Hearst. I even saw Thomas Ince's grandchildren being interviewed on television once, and they said flatly that William Randolph Hearst had murdered their grandfather. I was stunned. That's quite an accusation. And I also thought, Gee, it really is a great story. So that's how it got to be part of the novel.

BB: God, all the characters seem so crazy! Like the story about Marion sitting in that big, overstuffed chair surrounded by gin bottles, not letting the servants take them away because she thought they were her army!

PH: Yeah, poor little thing.

BB: And I love [in the book] Marion calling him "Popsie." It made me think, What does Veronica [Patricia Hearst's stepmother] call your father [Randolph A. Hearst]? "Randy"?

PH: You'll have to ask her, but I have heard her call him "Daddy," though I think it was only because we were there, maybe, I hope. I don't know.

BB: It was unbelievable that Hearst would leave Marion stuck in that castle for a couple of months at a time while he went to New York to see Millicent, his wife.

PH: Mmm-hmm. That was a very strange relationship - all three of them. I think they just finally settled into it. I don't think Millicent would ever have agreed to a divorce - and well she shouldn't have - but I think Marion held out hope until the end that he would [divorce Millicent and] marry her.

BB: I saw Marion once, when she was very old and in a wheelchair. She came up to my family's house wanting money or something. That must've been in the late '50s.

PH: I never saw her, and I had never heard anything said about her, good or bad. But when my sister, Anne, was about twenty-one, she gave my father The Times We Had for his birthday, and he was furious. By that time it was no mystery that my grandfather had lived with Marion for almost thirty-five years.

BB: When you were growing up, did your father talk about his father?

PH: Almost never. It wasn't discussed. You know, my father and his twin brother, David, were nine when my grandfather left to go live with Marion. I don't think they knew him very well. The other boys [John Randolph, George Randolph, and William Randolph Hearst, Jr.] were in their teens, so they were more aware of what was going on. And this was the '20s. I'm sure it was humiliating to have everybody know about it. Actually, I think Marion had a very tough time [at San Simeon]. She was young and sexy, and she had basically condemned herself to this glorious life in a castle on a hill where she was miles away from all her friends. And she was living with a man who was obsessed with his work.