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William Randolph Hearst came to rescue Ambrose Bierce in early 1896, when he was holed up in Oakland alone and depressed. He gave him a new target on which to focus his flagging energies: Collis P. Huntington. Bierce headed east for the first time, along with his son Leigh as a traveling companion. He arrived at Washington in the last week of January and immediately set up headquarters at the Page Hotel near the Capitol. Bierce had despised Huntington for several years. He kept up a remorseless barrage on the now-reeling Huntington and called him as an “inflated old pigskin” and a “veteran calumniator,” among all other names. Bierce had his hardest months of hard work. His life in San Francisco as a fearless writer is detailed in this chapter.

By the spring of 1887, even though he had contempt for journalism as a profession, Ambrose Bierce had already been writing for two decades. He started his writing as an apprentice with Californian, New Era, and Overland Monthly in the late 1860s. He progressed to News Later, Figaro, Fun, and The Lantern, and later on Argonaut and Wasp as a fearsome Prattler. He became famous and unavoidable. His entire journey was exhausting, exciting, and exhilarating. William Randolph Hearst became the most influential newspaperman of modern times. The life of Hearst as a journalist was described in this chapter. It is also stated that Hearst and Bierce had a complex relationship. Bierce could see some traits in Hearst that were similar to his.

This chapter reconstructs the patriotic pageantry that the Hearst media empire staged in its newspaper pages and on city streets across the United States and argues that these pageants downplayed the coercive spectacularity of their stagings by showcasing the myth of performative citizenship. It demonstrates how William Randolph Hearst, as a metonym for the centralized power and influence of media magnates in this era, staged his own patriotic spectacles so as to exclude Japanese Americans from such assertions of loyalty to the United States and reiterate instead the other’s theatrical duplicity. The interplay between the myth of performative citizenship and the spectacularization of Japanese suspiciousness—a dual movement defined as racial performativity—yielded a repetitive melodrama in the Hearst pages throughout the six months in which the military evacuated Japanese Americans from the West Coast. The chapter shows how Hearst’s wartime coverage of the West Coast’s so-called Japanese problem punctuated his five decades of anti-Asian propaganda and deployed melodramatic film techniques gleaned from Hearst’s Pathé studio in order to offer a compelling narrative in favor of the internment of Japanese Americans. Once the internment was under way, Hearst’s pages constructed the evacuation as a benign field trip for Japanese Americans, a farcical spectacle that insisted upon the playfulness of U.S. internment camps, in contrast to the racist seriousness of Nazi concentration camps abroad. Such coverage obscured the internment’s violent import and traumatized Japanese Americans by compelling them to “miss” the event of their own disenfranchisement.

The 1896 elections, coming after a long period of economic distress, produced a political realignment and mobilized various new media forms for politicking purposes. Many traditionally Democratic newspapers rejected William Jennings Bryan’s Populism and switched their loyalties to Republican candidate William McKinley, giving William Randolph Hearst an opening to become a champion of Democracy. The Republican candidate’s brother, Abner McKinley, invested in the American Mutoscope Company and the Republican National Committee sponsored its official theatrical debut as its biograph projector screened McKinley at Home. The rival Edison Manufacturing Company offered a train scene featuring Bryan. The Republicans embraced technological novelties such as the phonograph, the telephone and the bicycle--implying that innovation would help to solve the economic crisis.

The fifth chapter reveals, through a case study of Milwaukee, how newspaper syndicates and chains created and distributed national culture. Around the turn of the century, syndicates began to sell the same news articles, features, and illustrations to dozens or even hundreds of different newspapers around the country. Meanwhile publishers such as William Randolph Hearst and E. W. Scripps bought up multiple papers and formed chains, which shared reports and features among themselves. By the 1910s and 1920s, most of the articles that Americans read in their local papers had either been bought or sold on the national news market. By suggesting that many other places were worth knowing about, newspapers stocked with syndicated features from around the world transitioned U.S. citizens away from strict provincialism and toward more national and global concerns. As they broadened readers’ horizons, though, these newspapers also homogenized Americans’ vocabularies and experiences. Milwaukee’s distinctively German-influenced and left-leaning local culture appeared less and less frequently in the city’s papers. Instead, Milwaukee papers printed syndicated material that fostered a more generic but broadly intelligible national culture.

Capellani made four films for Cosmopolitan, including The Young Diana (1922), with Hearst’s mistress Marion Davies. His last years in America were difficult, and Capellani was no doubt thinking of going back to France, making frequent travels back to his home country. His health was also an important factor; he was suffering from diabetes, then incurable. The intense activity of the past years was taking its toll. Capellani left the United States for France in 1922.

This chapter examines several commissions made by people connected with Hollywood, including W. R. Hearst, Dorothy Arzner, Jack Warner, and George Cukor, and designers working for them (Julia Morgan, Florence Yoch, and T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings) that deployed the vocabulary of classical forms to express their owners’ aspirations. These houses were large, in some cases visible to passersby for at least a few years (until lush plantings filled in), and were widely seen in published photographs, ensuring their influence on contemporary discourse and practice; information survives about the attitudes of the designers and their clients—documentation lacking for smaller commissions—and they remain intact today, making these projects appropriate for study.

Shilts enrols at University of Oregon and quickly engages with the Eugene Gay People’s Alliance. Early attempts to start a gay liberation movement among Oregon students, including the university’s first-ever Gay Pride Week. He loses a later bid for Student Body President under a theme of “Come Out for Shilts.” Shilts embraces a “gay centric” approach to schoolwork and his life, living fully out despite some miscues, convinced heterosexuals are unaccepting of homosexuals because they lack understanding or knowledge of gays and lesbians. Oregon classmates recall Shilts’s transition from student politics to journalism. Shilts finds being “out” in conflict with his dreams of a career in mainstream journalism. Shilts writes about a summer job at a gay bathhouse.

After his career move from the Saturday Evening Post to Cosmopolitan magazine, owned by William Randolph Hearst, Cobb continued to win awards for his brilliant storytelling. - A man who took great pride in his accomplishments, Cobb apparently cared little about critical approval; his only goal was to satisfy his reading public—the vast middle class that read poplar magazines and novels. Ellis reveals Cobb’s close relationship with his daughter Buff, who also pursued a writing career. Much of the chapter, however, focuses on Cobb’s writing in the mid to late 1920s as he continued to do what he did best—turning out popular and predictable articles and stories for Hearst publications. Cobb was one of the highest paid writers of his time.

This chapter illustrates how, in the years leading up to the launch of The New Yorker, sport had assumed an increasingly important place in American mass leisure. Joseph Pulitzer became the first publisher of a New York daily paper to establish a distinct sports department — one of a series of measures that saw the circulation of the World rise from 11,000 in 1883 to 1.3 million in 1898. Although Pulitzer recruited regular contributors on forty different sports, it was the popularity of baseball and boxing (decried as barbaric on the editorial page but heavily represented in the sports pages) that transformed casual readers into fervent fans. William Randolph Hearst followed Pulitzer's example when he took over the New York Journal in 1895, expanding the sports section and even placing sports stories on the front page.

This chapter recounts how, soon after completing The Mysteries of Myra, the Wharton brothers undertook a new production, Beatrice Fairfax (1916). This serial was financed once again by William Randolph Hearst and distributed by his International Film Service through the Pathé Exchange. Originally titled Letters to Beatrice, it capitalized on the recent trend of real-life female reporters, who “became familiar, consistent personalities, much like serial queens” and who sought out “novel and thrilling experiences that extended the experiential sphere of women” by vivifying places and activities that were typically “out of reach to women, restricted by virtue of either their danger or their indelicacy.” The Whartons' serial, which reflected the strong real-life collaboration with newspapers that had made the serial genre so popular, was based on Fairfax's widely read “Advice to the Lovelorn” column syndicated by Hearst. But, in fact, there was no actual Beatrice Fairfax; that was a pseudonym used by Hearst employee Marie Manning.

Following a disagreement with Metro about production costs, Capellani left the company for good in spite of the huge success of The Red Lantern. He decided to become an independent producer himself. Albert Capellani Productions started in 1919 with an innovative “filmusical-comedy” after P. G. Wodehouse, Oh Boy! Capellani produced eight features, but the company encountered severe financial difficulties following the destruction of the studio laboratory. By 1920, the company was dead, and Capellani had to sign a contract with Cosmopolitan Productions, headed by William Randolph Hearst.

The Introduction questions the legendary origin story for sensational journalism: in the late 1890s, competition between William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer degraded serious journalism into “yellow journalism” – sometimes blamed for the outbreak of the Spanish-American War. The apocryphal story of Spanish authorities strip-searching female Cuban rebels captures sensationalism’s essence: the dissemination of false news to increase sales and further an agenda, through strident headlines, inventive reporting, and eye-catching illustration. As early as 1870, in fact, line illustrations gave commercial publications across the political spectrum tools to attract readers, or perhaps more accurately, “news consumers.” While use of headlines, scoops, and stunts date back to the 1830s, it was the proliferation of images in newspaper pages that came to define sensational journalism by century’s end.

Ziegfeld escapes to his Canadian getaway, showing that he is an outdoorsman at heart. While vacationing at his camp, Ziegfeld displays another side to his personality that is much warmer and more jovial than his cool, professional persona. The camp is also where Ziegfeld and his tomboy daughter bond. Once he is back in New York, Ziegfeld must face some unpleasant realties. He produces three flops: The Comic Supplement, Louie the 14th, and a new edition of the Follies. Ziegfeld feels even more antiquated when his competitor Charles Dillingham produces a smash hit with Marilyn Miller called Sunny. In an attempt to keep his career afloat, Ziegfeld retreats to Palm Beach more often. He makes a deal with William Randolph Hearst to build a theater bearing the Ziegfeld name. Included in the chapter is previously unpublished correspondence between Burke and Ziegfeld covering Ziegfeld’s neglect and his possible philandering with women at Palm Beach. Also included are some of Patricia’s letters to Ziegfeld, which are touching displays of a little girl’s adoration for her imperfect father. The chapter concludes with Ziegfeld planning to produce shows in Palm Beach because of his bitterness toward the harsh New York critics.

This chapter focuses on the serial The Exploits of Elaine (1914). The fictional Elaine Dodge, an enterprising young woman who dedicates herself to solving the mystery of her father's death at the hands of an anonymous villain, would help to shape and advance the Wharton brothers' film career. As Pathé-Hearst's The Perils of Pauline (1914) neared its conclusion, newspaper tycoon and movie producer William Randolph Hearst was determined to create a new serial that would afford his popular star Pearl White an exciting encore. That serial was The Exploits of Elaine, which was expected to be a landmark venture for Hearst. In turn, for the Whartons, the chance to be associated with Hearst's enterprise seemed an unparalleled opportunity, one that would allow them to move beyond short pictures and to make their own singular contribution to the increasingly popular serial genre.

This chapter details how, given The Exploits of Elaine's enormous appeal, plans for an extension, or “extender,” began even as the original serial was still in production. Indeed, the opening episode of The New Exploits of Elaine (1915) was released just one week after the first serial concluded. By picking up where Exploits left off, both William Randolph Hearst and the Whartons hoped to maintain the keen interest in the adventures of Elaine Dodge and Craig Kennedy—and in Pearl White and Arnold Daly, the popular stars who played them. The production of serial-sequels, by then, had become an increasingly common practice among studios hoping to capitalize on their original successes. The unresolved-plot ending of The New Exploits of Elaine provided a natural segue into the third and final installment of the Elaine serial. On the one hand, The Romance of Elaine harked back to familiar elements of the serial formula, among them recurring threats from a mysterious villain, death-defying escapes, car chases, explosions, and romantic rescues. On the other, it celebrated Elaine's tenacity and reinforced the image of her as a new and increasingly independent female type of protagonist within a sensational, action-packed, typically male-oriented and male-dominated story line.

“Junk” is the final word spoken in Hollywood’s most famous art project, Citizen Kane. Chapter 6 of Pleasing Everyone argues that the peculiar texture of Kane derives from its attempt to think its way out of a theoretical double bind, generated by the contemporary insistence that the only way a movie could rival traditional art forms was to reject them as models for emulation. That is why Citizen Kane ties its own artistic bravura less to the Old World sculptures Kane collects than to such mass-consumed junk as a sled whose brand name is Rosebud.

This chapter talks about George Luks securing work at Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, wherein five and a half months later he would illustrate the paper’s most popular comic strip, Hogan’s Alley. The comic strip depicts one of its more loveable characters, Mickey Dugan, a barefoot street urchin who was always covered in a yellow nightshirt. Dugan was a creation of Richard Felton Outcault, and debuted in Pulitzer’s newspaper in February of 1895. The chapter narrates how Outcault was seduced by William Randolph Hearst, editor of the rival New York Journal, and how Pulitzer then hired Luks to continue drawing the Yellow Kid. Hogan’s Alley, however, was quite different from Luks’s other drawings for the news items appearing in the World. With Hogan’s Alley, the picture itself became “news.” The rest of the chapter talks mostly about the success and the influence that Hogan’s Alley created for Luks.

Following Elsie Leach’s release from the asylum in 1936, Cary Grant began to rebuild his relationship with his mother. In her many letters to him, she addressed him as Archie, and she urged him to visit her and hinted that she would like to visit him in Hollywood. He was reluctant to bring her to California, where he lived a life among the rich and famous, with friends including the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst and the eccentric millionaire Howard Hughes. On screen, his reputation was enhanced when he reunited with George Cukor and Katharine Hepburn in the sophisticated comedy Holiday (1938). He also branched out, playing a very unsophisticated, Cockney soldier in the British Empire adventure film Gunga Din (1939). Although his performance is delightfully zany, and Gunga Din was an enormous success on first release, it has not aged well. The film’s racist attitudes and imperialist ideology have rendered it unpalatable for modern audiences.