William Randolph Hearst

The Los Angeles Herald Examiner, once the nation's largest afternoon newspaper but recently just a scrappy shell of its former self, announced today it will cease publication Thursday. Robert Danzig, vice president and general manager of Herald Newspapers, made the announcement at an emotional meeting in the newsroom this afternoon. The Herald Examiner, founded by William Randolph Hearst in 1903 as the Los Angeles Examiner, was put up for sale by the Hearst Corp. earlier this summer.

The last edition of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner was published on Nov. 2, 1989, with the headline: "So long, Los Angeles. " But 23 years later, one employee has not yet said goodbye. Chuck Lutz hasn't even left the building. "They never told me not to come back to work, so I just kept coming back to work," said Lutz, who was exaggerating a little. When a colleague declined an offer to supervise the shutdown of the newspaper plant, Lutz - who joined the Her-Ex in 1973 as a truck driver - gladly stepped into the job. One task led to another, and the Hearst Corp., which published the newspaper and still owns the building, kept the reliable Lutz around to keep an eye on things and open the door for film crews that use the property.

"Xanadu! Its cost: No man can say. " --Citizen Kane Cary Grant, a guest more than two dozen times, called it "a great place to spend the Depression." Hedda Hopper, in a rare moment of near-poetry, said it was "a visit to Never-Never land. Never have we seen its like, and never will we again." It's formal name was La Cuesta Encantada, the Enchanted Hill, but to its owner and absolute ruler it was simply "the ranch."

Phoebe Hearst Cooke, who was a granddaughter of publishing tycoon William Randolph Hearst and used one of the nation's biggest fortunes to support a variety of philanthropic causes, has died. She was 85. Cooke, who had pneumonia, died Sunday in a Templeton, Calif., hospital, according to a statement from the Hearst Corp., the media company she served as a director for 36 years. Her twin brother, George Randolph Hearst Jr., who was a former publisher of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, died in June after a stroke.

"A COLLECTION of everything. So big it can never be cataloged or appraised. Enough for 10 museums. The loot of the world." That's the description of the art collection in "Citizen Kane," Orson Welles' masterpiece inspired by William Randolph Hearst. And the 1941 film has left an indelible impression of a voracious accumulator who focused on quantity, not quality. Art history has been no kinder to Hearst, whose mining inheritance financed a media empire and an enormous art collection that filled six palatial dwellings -- including Hearst Castle, the 250,000-acre, 165-room estate that overlooks San Simeon on the Pacific Coast.

When the film "Citizen Kane" came out in 1941, William Randolph Hearst gave it an unequivocal two thumbs down. The press lord kept ads for the film out of his many newspapers. Just before its release, one of his allies in Hollywood tried to buy the footage in order to burn it. Another approached FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, who launched a decade-long investigation of Orson Welles, the film's 26-year-old director, producer, co-writer and star. But rosebuds bloom in unlikely places.

Phoebe Hearst Cooke, who was a granddaughter of publishing tycoon William Randolph Hearst and used one of the nation's biggest fortunes to support a variety of philanthropic causes, has died. She was 85. Cooke, who had pneumonia, died Sunday in a Templeton, Calif., hospital, according to a statement from the Hearst Corp., the media company she served as a director for 36 years. Her twin brother, George Randolph Hearst Jr., who was a former publisher of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, died in June after a stroke.

Randolph Apperson Hearst, the last surviving son of the legendary newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst and chairman of the family's media empire from 1973 to 1996, died Monday in a New York hospital. He was 85. Hearst also was editor and president of the San Francisco Examiner when his daughter Patricia was kidnapped by the radical Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974. During the long ordeal, a visibly shaken Hearst regularly faced television cameras and pleaded for his daughter's return.

One hundred-plus years after the newspaper comic strip was born in San Francisco, a reader might well ask: Who was the greatest comic artist of all time? Some scholars say the question was settled in 1924 by New York arts critic Gilbert Seldes, whose book on the American cultural scene, "The 7 Lively Arts," devoted an entire chapter to a reclusive cartoonist in the Hollywood Hills named George Herriman and his avant-garde comic strip, "Krazy Kat. " Although President Woodrow Wilson, a notorious egghead, and writers T.S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein were fans and newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst was an ardent supporter, Herriman's dialect-heavy but poetic strip was a problem for many newspaper editors and most readers — where were the jokes?

Leo Albert Pollock, 99, a veteran Hearst newsman who helped Fox movie studios create newsreels shown in movie theaters. Born in Harlem in 1890, Pollock worked on Hearst dailies in New York, covering major stories such as the trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann for the kidnaping and murder of aviator Charles Lindbergh's infant son. Pollock later moved to California, where he worked with Fox and served as publicist for actress Marion Davies, companion of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst.

The demise of the Hearst newspaper empire in Los Angeles began in 1962 when publisher George Randolph Hearst Jr. abandoned the morning newspaper market. Hearst and the company that owned the Los Angeles Times made what some viewed as a back-room deal: At almost the same time, they folded editions that directly competed with each other. A sister paper of The Times, the afternoon daily Mirror, stopped publishing while the Hearst Corp. "merged" the morning Examiner with the afternoon Herald-Express.

You can draw a straight line, in terms of architectural history, from William Randolph Hearst'ssprawling estate in San Simeon to the corner of Broadway and 11th Street in downtown Los Angeles. It was at that downtown site in 1913 that Hearst commissioned architect Julia Morgan to design a headquarters for his Los Angeles Examiner newspaper, which he'd founded in 1903. Morgan produced one of the most remarkable designs of her prolific career, a 103,500-square-foot Mission Revival building draped with Italian and Moorish touches, including domes covered in yellow and blue tile.

When the film "Citizen Kane" came out in 1941, William Randolph Hearst gave it an unequivocal two thumbs down. The press lord kept ads for the film out of his many newspapers. Just before its release, one of his allies in Hollywood tried to buy the footage in order to burn it. Another approached FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, who launched a decade-long investigation of Orson Welles, the film's 26-year-old director, producer, co-writer and star. But rosebuds bloom in unlikely places.

John Randolph Hearst Jr. Grandson and heir of William Randolph Hearst John Randolph Hearst Jr., 77, a grandson of media titan William Randolph Hearst and heir to the family fortune, died Friday in New York, Hearst Corp. said in a statement. The cause was not disclosed. Nicknamed "Bunky," Hearst spent most of his career at the company his grandfather founded. Besides serving on the board, he was a trustee of the Hearst Family Trust and a director of the Hearst Foundations.

For the Trappist monks at the Abbey of New Clairvaux, life follows a pattern centuries old. They spend their days in the field and their nights in silence. They gather in prayer seven times daily, starting at 3:30 a.m. In many of their affairs, they are still guided by the 6th century Rule of St. Benedict ? but not one of its 73 chapters deals with their current travails. Benedict offers no words of wisdom on how the monks might find the funds to complete their most passionate pursuit: the resurrection of a medieval monastery from a jumble of stones William Randolph Hearst shipped over from Spain.

One hundred-plus years after the newspaper comic strip was born in San Francisco, a reader might well ask: Who was the greatest comic artist of all time? Some scholars say the question was settled in 1924 by New York arts critic Gilbert Seldes, whose book on the American cultural scene, "The 7 Lively Arts," devoted an entire chapter to a reclusive cartoonist in the Hollywood Hills named George Herriman and his avant-garde comic strip, "Krazy Kat. " Although President Woodrow Wilson, a notorious egghead, and writers T.S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein were fans and newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst was an ardent supporter, Herriman's dialect-heavy but poetic strip was a problem for many newspaper editors and most readers — where were the jokes?

Michael Wilmington ("Orson Welles: Giant of Cinema, Maker of Myths," Oct. 20) missed one of the most important reasons why Orson Welles had a lack of opportunity to do the films he wanted and had so little success in getting financial backing. In "Citizen Kane" he tread on the toes of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, who took Welles characterization of Kane personally. After "Citizen Kane" no Hearst papers ever carried mention of Welles, and that included the columns of Luella Parsons, the most influential of the gossipers.

"The Old Gringo," Carlos Fuentes' book about the terminal period in the life of Ambrose Bierce, a journalist for William Randolph Hearst some 80 years ago, contains a passage which is shocking in the similarity to President Bush's statement on the rationale for Operation Just Cause in Panama: "I did it to save lives." Bierce is reflecting on Mexico: "This land . . . He (Bierce) had never seen it before; he had attacked it by orders of his boss Hearst, who had enormous investments in ranches and other property and feared the Revolution; but he couldn't say, Go protect my property, he had to say, Go protect our lives, there are North American citizens in danger, intervene!"

As part of the "William Hearst, Marion Davies and Hollywood" series at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Blaine Bartell, senior newsreel preservationist at UCLA Film and Television Archive, will present a series of restored examples from the Hearst Metrotone News Collection at UCLA on Saturday evening. "Hearst was in partnership with the Fox corporation in order to have access to the sound-on-film technology," Bartell said.

He created one of the great film classics of all time, but Orson Welles also did a major disservice to actress Marion Davies with "Citizen Kane." The writer/director/star's landmark 1941 film is a thinly veiled and highly critical account of newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst. Welles was also unsparing in his depiction of his protagonist Charles Foster Kane's second wife, Susan Alexander -- a boozy, suicidal and hopelessly untalented would-be opera singer.