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If he can no longer "eat anything, anytime,'' if he can no longer ride all day and dance all night, and if he no longer, in a single hour, does everything from buying a Venetian palazzo to scrapping a dozen printing presses and remodeling the fashion pages of Harper's Bazaar, he still spreads his newspapers on the floor beneath him and he can feel that no other publisher is such a power in the land. Even adolescent Hearst-readers feel the reverberations of his career. Did he not always want to be President or make one and were not his telegrams the electric power which welded the Roosevelt- Mc-Adoo-Garner deal and put the New Deal in the White House? Controlled inflation, the policy of the hour—whose policy is it, if not his? And looking out upon the Pacific he may sometimes see the smoke of a fleet which he has always urged must be ready to fend off the Yellow Peril.
After Hearst? When a mighty man is 70, men eye his heirs. There are five Hearst sons (no daughters) of whom two —Twins William Elbert & Randolph Apperson—are too young to be studied as successors to their father's power & glory (but not too young to borrow one of his airplanes last week to fetch a Pittsburgh girl to the Lawrenceville Junior prom). One of the other three, fat George, 29, is senior—and least likely on his showing to date to handle the Hearst empire when the Chief passes. Nicknamed "Fanny." good-natured Son George has been tried out on the papers in New York and San Francisco, where he delighted in treating the composing room crew at a bar. At present he is in Los Angeles, ostensibly "learning the game from all angles." But flying (at which he is fairly expert) and fast motoring he finds more diverting. Currently he is very much "in the dog house" with The Chief, who did not like his dalliance and divorce.
The second son, tall, curly-headed William Randolph Jr., 26, has also been divorced but was last week cordially received at the ranch on his second honeymoon. From his father he inherits a high-pitched voice, a mannerism of drumming fingers & feet, a habit of reading newspapers on the floor, and a capacity for quick decisions. From his mother he inherits graciousness, sentimentality. Well-liked throughout the organization, "Bill" has honestly tried to apply himself to being publisher of the New York American within the limits imposed by a crown-princely aura and his father's incurable autocracy. Also he understudies bald, owlish Edmond David ("Cobbie") Coblentz as editorial chief of all Hearst morning papers. His enthusiasms are genuine. And if the American's capture of the old World's classified advertising and the development of a lively "opposite editorial page'' are not to be credited to him solely, at least he knows what it is all about.