Tag: William Randolph Hearst

On Idle Gossip

Is there anything more delicious or more dangerous that gossip? A rumor that takes wings and soars over our ears, passing from one throat to the other, each telling of the tale making the story only slightly more luscious and salacious and opprobrious. We’ve all played the whisper game in school, where a simple sentence is told to the person next to you, who passes it on to the next, and so on, so that at the end, the sentence rarely bares any resemblance to the original message.

Rose Oettinger found a way to make idle gossip pay, and pay well. But she didn’t start out that way. Rose was born in Illinois in 1881, and she wanted to be a serious journalist at a time when most middle class women rarely worked outside the home. She wrote for her local newspaper for a time after her schooling, given stories by the editor about weddings and societal events. From there, she learned how to write scenarios for silent films in the ‘teens and early ’20s. She also published a book detailing how to write for the movies. It was a modest success. Ruth then got a plumb job writing about film for a Chicago paper. She loved that work. But then, the newspaper tycoon, William Randolph Hearst, bought the paper and fired Rose because he didn’t think film warranted news coverage.

Out of a job, Rose moved to New York and continued writing about film for a paper there. Part of her job included conducting interviews of up-and-coming movie starlets and young stars, as film journalists today have to do as well. And Rose was good at ferreting out those interesting tidbits of information that the public wanted to know about their new favorite film actors. She said it helped that she was from a small town, and that gave her an advantage over her city-raised competitors. She knew what small-town America was wanting to know, and she gave it to them.

One of those starlets Rose interviewed was a lovely girl named Marion. Like Rose, Marion came from fairly humble origins. She had been a chorus girl on Broadway for a time before her big break came and she was able to star in a feature film. Sadly, most film critics panned Marion’s performance, a mark that could have been a career killer for a new starlet. But Rose liked Marion from the get-go, and the two became good friends as a result of the interview Rose conducted. When she wrote her article about Marion’s film, Rose told people to give the girl a chance, that she saw great things for Marion’s future. Because of that glowing interview, the film producer who had backed Marion’s film became a cheerleader for Rose’s writing career. That patronage led to Rose being given a job writing about film for a newspaper in Hollywood at the rate of almost $2000 per week in today’s money.

Then, in 1924, Rose was invited on a short trip down the southern California coast on a private yacht, the Oneida. Onboard that boat on that trip were some famous people, including the legendary Charlie Chaplin, famous (at the time) producer/director Thomas Ince, and Rose’s actress friend, Marion. Something happened on that boat, but we aren’t sure what it was exactly. The result was that Thomas Ince was dead. What many people believe is that the owner of the boat, a wealthy businessman and Rose’s boss, shot Ince in a jealous rage. You see, what we know for sure is that the boat’s owner was in love with the much younger Marion. It has been speculated that the wealthy older man flew into a jealous rage when he thought Chaplin was flirting with Marion, and he shot at the silent film star but hit Ince instead. The inquest that followed said that Ince died from heart failure, but his body was cremated before a full inquiry could be made.

Whatever happened, Rose and the others on board never said. What resulted is that shortly after the trip, Rose was given a hefty raise and a life-time unbreakable contract if she would write gossipy stories about Hollywood’s stars. Rose agreed. Of course, you don’t know her as Rose Oettinger (if you know her at all). No, she wrote under her first name and her married name.

Oh, and that wealthy man who was in love with Marion? He was the same newspaper tycoon (and one of America’s most powerful men), William Randolph Hearst, who had fired Rose years before. He and Marion stayed together for the next three decades.

And, until she died, gossip columnist Louella Parsons never disclosed what really happened aboard the Oneida during that trip.

On a Rough Rider

We have largely forgotten the Spanish-American War. Perhaps the only thing most remember from the war was the propulsion of Theodore Roosevelt to national prominence—and, eventually the White House—as a result of the exploits of the troops under his command, the Rough Riders.  Roosevelt had helped to put the unit together, billing it as being made up of mostly western cowboy-type cavalry men. In reality, it was a fairly diverse volunteer unit of troops and included several Ivy League and upper class friends of Roosevelt’s as officers. Ironically, even though they were cavalry, they fought the war in Cuba on foot because their horses never arrived.

The Rough Riders and Roosevelt won their notoriety in a famous charge up San Juan Hill in Cuba. Roosevelt made sure that plenty of reporters were on the ground in Cuba with his troops so that his heroics there could be documented. Today, we would say that the reporters were embedded with the troops, and, indeed, several reporters even took up arms in the conflict. These reporters described the battle in glowing terms, giving credit to Roosevelt for his leadership and coolness under fire. Such was the popularity of this type of reporting that President William McKinley, running for reelection in 1900, chose the young Roosevelt as his running mate.
In many ways, the Spanish-American conflict was a war created by and for tabloid journalism. When tensions were rising between Spain and the United States, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst sent artist Frederic Remington to Cuba to report on the situation. Supposedly, Remington sent a telegram back to Hearst stating that there was no real conflict to report on. Hearst, possibly apocryphally, said something to the effect that the artist should provide pictures and Hearst would provide the war. The idea was that Hearst would whip up sympathy for the American cause and hatred towards Spain that would result in a war fever. He was not far from wrong. Newspapers were the major source of news for the United States in the era before electronic media. However, sensationalism ruled, and the public ate up the lurid details of Spanish atrocities against the United States—even if the “atrocities “ had been fabricated by newspaper men like Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer.
Thus, Teddy Roosevelt’s rise to fame was a part of this pro-war propaganda. However, not all Roosevelt did in Cuba received good press. You see, the Rough Riders had been in another engagement in the days before the famous charge up San Juan Hill. And, unlike San Juan Hill, a previous battle, called
Las Guasimas, was the opposite of glorious. Accounts are muddled, but it appears that the Rough Riders and Roosevelt blundered into a Spanish ambush. Oh, the Spanish were retreating anyway, but the fact that Roosevelt and his troops gained control of the battlefield caused TR to claim a victory despite the fact that the Spanish outfoxed and outfought the Americans. Several American troops were killed including one of Roosevelts officers.
One reporter’s story back home headlined the battle of Las Guasimas this way: Roosevelt’s Rough Riders’ Loss Due to a Gallant Blunder. The reporter criticized the American troops and leadership for ignoring the warning signs of the ambush and for not listening to their Cuban scouts who had warned them of trouble ahead. The reporter credited this to an American overconfidence when prudence and caution would have saved American lives. It made Roosevelt and the other leaders look foolish.
Roosevelt was furious when he heard about this report. He knew how important reporting such as this would be seen, especially to someone like him who had political ambition. He later spoke of what he called cheap novelists posing as reporters who wanted to strike out against anyone they considered to be their superiors. In his book about the war, written a year later, Roosevelt tried to set the record straight regarding the ambush at Las Guasimas. In fact, Roosevelt portrayed himself as being such a hero, one critic of his memoir said that the book should have been titled Alone in Cuba.  Luckily for Roosevelt, the positive press that surrounded the charge up San Juan Hill quickly obliterated any negative reporting that may have happened after Las Guasimas. Some historians have argued that Roosevelt led the impetuous charge up San Juan Hill in an effort, in part, to change any possible negative public perception that the ambush had caused.
And who was this reporter who struck such a nerve with the future president? He was, in fact, a novelist. Roosevelt got that part right.
The novelist was Stephen Crane, the author of The Red Badge of Courage.