MR HEARST OF THE SILKEN VOICE.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3129, 7 August 1922, Page 8

MR HEARST OF THE SILKEN VOICE.

(By James Douglas.) An hour ago I met Mr William Randolph Hearst, the Amenoam newspaper multi-millio'naiiire, whose three thousand miles of journals keep the Pacific Ocean in ton oh with the Atlantic Ocean. The corridors outsidb his rooms are barricaded with Stonehenge monoliths disguised as Saratoga trunks. There is no room, for chairs in the conridorst therefore his visitors sit on the monj»liths drumming their heels on th.«M* brass nails. Mr Hearst, like all' celebrated men, is unlike himself. That is to l say, be is unlike the popular dream of him. The protagonist of yellow journalism is not like one of his own scare headlines or comic sections or photogravure supplements. Ho is not loud, or noisy, or violent, or aggressive or audacious, or orchidaceous or flamboyant or polychromatic. Ho is nearly as long as his name, > say, twenty-one feet. I wished I could stand on a monolith to talk to him. But when he sat down he was lifesize. He is not like the the New York American. He is like a poet. His clear blue eyes arei imaginative, and his face oddly resembles the face of the late Stephen Phillip or of bis cousin, Lawrence Binyon. It is a dreaming face, the face of a visionary rather than of a viking or a Visigoth. His voice is very soft, very low, and very slow. He thinks slowly and talks slowly. It is a silken voice, and it drawls and purrs caressingly. I caught myself listensing to its tones rather than its words. His smile matches his voice. It is a slow, lazy, languid smile. It is the smile of a temperament that knows where it is going and how it is going and why it is going. The head is so well proportioned and well balanced that it seems smaller than its real size, for it is a very large head, as big as Mr Lloyd George’s. The face is curiously unwrinkled, and there are only three or four faint furrows in the forehead. The lips arc ascetic, hut mobile. Upon the whole, a romantic rather than a materialistic face. But the romance is well bitted and bridled, for lie is a man of judgment as well as a man of dreams. A happy man, I think, with simple tastes and careprool habits Otherwise that silken voice could pot croon and coo like a large dove with a grove of olive trees in its urbane bill.