The Tragic Tale of Bunky and Barbara Hearst

Ever since American courts granted corporations the legal status of persons-in the most woeful misapplication of the 14th Amendment’s due process clause prior to the imbecilic Rehnquist court ruling in Bush v. Gore-the traditional upper-caste battle royale over a robber baron’s legacy has been an especially fraught family matter. Should a litigating person qua person emerge triumphant, a carefully constructed family ownership trust can become the plaything of a crass interloper, in no way to the manor born. Company assets and proprietary business plans can turn into just more fodder in courtroom campaigns of personal destruction-as carelessly repurposed and quickly tossed away as one of Larry King’s elective affinities or a U2 concept album. That, at any rate, is the plain moral of the harrowing tale of John Hearst’s divorce, as recounted in Fortune writer Mark Fass’s epic reconstruction of the sordid drama, Citizen Bunky.

John, the once-boyish grandson of the maniacal yellow-press baron William Randolph Hearst-nicknamed “Bunky” by Washington Redskins owner George Marshall, who found him a dead ringer for the baby-hero of a 1920s comic strip-is among the 13 fortunate souls presiding over the Hearst Family Trust. The Trust conveniently also makes up a stolid majority of the Hearst Corporation’s board of directors. This clannish overlapping directorate was the brainchild of Big Daddy Hearst, who was determined that his blood descendants should lord over the sprawling Hearst empire with the same iron fiat that he enjoyed. When Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974, guardians of the Hearst holdings won the right to quarantine the identities of the lead trustees as well as most of their fiduciary doings, on the theory that publicizing such information would grant a virtual blueprint for other scheming scion-abductors.

As a result, Fass notes, the Hearst corporation “is almost certainly the largest company managed by trustees”-a much more tightly-held family property than, for instance, the media trusts maintained by the Sulzberger and Graham clans, which mix publicly held stock with the voting shares controlled by the heirs to the respective family fortunes that preside over the New York Times and Washington Post. So when Bunky’s third marriage-to Barbara, a former Hamptons-cruising photo stylist who had formerly been in hock to the IRS for $50,000-went fabulously asunder in 2004, much more than the Hearst legatee’s sense of amour propre was at stake.

Although Bunky’s share of the Hearst empire was a nominal 5% (yielding some $9 million in annuities), still the jealously guarded family-cum-company secrets threatened to spill over into the increasingly ugly court proceedings. That would expose to unwonted public view the financial arrangements behind more than 200 Hearst-owned magazines (including Cosmopolitan, O the Oprah Magazine, and the scion-friendly monthly that Bunky commandeered through most of his nominal working life, Motor Boating), 16 newspapers, 29 TV stations, the Arts and Entertainment cable channel, and 20% of ESPN.

At first, no such threat seemed imminent. Bunky initially tried to smite down Barbara’s robust proposed settlement of shared assets via the tried-and-true adultery tactic-a claim that soon caromed through tabloidland. Bunky’s allegation was that Barbara had been on the scene and in flagrante when a neighbor dropped dead. The neighbor was found naked in his bedroom under the influence of a dosage of black-market Viagra. (Barbara, meanwhile, chalked up the awkward scene to a fatal heart attack the poor gent suffered during a post-gardening shower. She was merely lunching on site; midday gardening and chemically-enhanced rutting evidently are near-identical in the domestic rounds of Hamptons life.)

But the adultery strategem proved a wash. Bunky, who had been disabled by a stroke in 1989, had prevailed on a nurse for a blowjob, Barbara’s legal team countercharged-while freely conceding that their client had approved a series of “sexual surrogates” for Bunky once the couple’s sex life went permanently south. So Team Bunky mounted a fraud offensive. The scheming Barbara, Bunky’s attorneys claimed, had taken advantage of her husband’s “vulnerable” condition to quietly leverage control of most of his holdings. She had fired his longtime lawyer and took on one who made some brisk transfers, permitting her to pile up real estate holdings and to close nearly all of Bunky’s bank accounts, while opening more than a dozen bank and brokerage accounts in her name.

Nonsense, came the counterparry from Barbara’s camp: If Bunky’s citadel of privilege was such easy prey for a photo stylist on-the-make, why, then, should he have been deemed a competent Hearst trustee in the first place? Here, clearly, was grounds to review each and every company decision he had taken and every transcript of board minutes he had reviewed over the couple’s 15-year marriage.

And this, of course, is where all the otherwise divertingly voyeuristic War of the Roses-style legal positioning came to a halt. Hearst lawyers made it a point of unassailable corporate honor that Bunky was merely “vulnerable” to Barbara’s wily machinations, and not flat-out “incompetent” to manage his, and the family’s, affairs. In that none-too-flattering distinction, after all, resided the hallowed Hearst prerogative to keep company plans and finances firmly grounded in the family hearth.

Given the eventual resolution of things, it’s hard to resist the surmise that this is the calculation that Barbara and her legal advisers had been counting on all along. Bunky coughed up most of the $10 million in assets to which Barbara had laid claim-though not the $90,000 in monthly alimony she had requested at the peak of hostilities in 2007. Barbara agreed to concede an unspecified marital fault for the divorce to be finalized-but certainly not the fraud charges floated by Bunky’s attorney.

Bunky’s consolation prizes included restored full title to his favorite boat, The Millicent (named for his grandmother), and the Hamptons estate that Barbara, in that beguiling way of hers, dubbed “Little Versailles.” Mainly, though, he stays in the cottage abutting the spread, which sits on the water near his boat; there, he sneaks cigarettes when out of view of his nurses, and dotes on possessions like a copy of the famed “Rosebud” sled featured in Orson Welles’ fictionalized account of his granddad’s exploits, Citizen Kane. (We’re never told what Bunky’s views may be on Gore Vidal’s celebrated claim that “rosebud” stands in for a very different kind of mogul’s perk for the elder Hearst. )

Barbara, meanwhile, has a new blonde dye job (which you can admire on her sadly invitation-only Facebook page). What’s more, of course, she’s hung on to the Hearst family name-and, given all that she’s done to surmount New York state’s otherwise ungenerous divorce settlement laws, who can deny that she’s earned it?

Previously: The Magna Cum Laude Recession

Chris Lehmann is available.