REBEL SISTER A HEARST BREAKER
As heiress wages war on her family’s media company, insiders reveal story of siblings up in arms
LAST week, magazine heiress Victoria Hearst won the war against her family and one of their most prized possessions, Cosmopolitan magazine. After a yearslong campaign by Victoria, 61, and her cohorts, including the anti-obscenity group National Center on Sexual Exploitation, to make Cosmo less accessible to impressionable young girls, Walmart announced that it was banning the publication from checkout counters at 5,000 of its stores. Now, the women’s mag — and such cover lines as “Best Quickie Position Ever” and “How to Get & Give Supreme Pleasure” — will be relegated to less-prominent areas of the stores.
“Thank you, Walmart Corporation, for caring about the welfare of your customers’ children by no longer allowing kids in your checkout lines to stand face-to-face with the barely dressed women and sexually explicit article titles on Cosmopolitan magazine’s covers,” Victoria wrote in her official statement. “To quote our Lord Jesus Christ: Well done, good and faithful servant.”
But members of her famous family — who have benefited from the riches of the media company, which generated nearly $11 billion in revenue last year, for their entire lives — are none too happy.
“Her sisters tried to talk her out of it,” said a Hearst family insider of Victoria’s siblings who include socialites Anne, 62, and Patty, 64.
“Victoria’s an Evangelical,” the in-insider said. “No one else in the family shares her beliefs — which translates into some pretty wacky political ideas.”
Still, her siblings and cousins mostly keep their mouths shut about her conservative views regarding abortion, gun rights and sexual promiscuity. But the anti-Cosmo crusade has drawn a line between Victoria and her relatives: “It is the [one] thing that really directly impacts the family because it’s a concern too the publishing empire.”
While Anne and Patty regularly mug for high-society Manhattantan party photos together, Victoria has turned her back on the trappings that come with her storied surname. Patty keeps a place at the Carlyle; Victoria runs a ministry in Colorado.
“She’s a bit of a black sheep,” said the insider. “She doesn’t live a lavish lifestyle and doesn’t hang out with people with her kind of means, you know? She’s a gun owner and a Second Amendment supporter and enthusiast.
“She turned her back on the relatively cosmopolitan background and milieu in which she was raised.”
ALL told, the Hearst family is worth a collective $35 billion. The siblings are the granddaughters of William Randolph Hearst, the publishing titan who made his fortune from mining and newspapers and was the inspiration for the 1941 film “Citizen Kane.” His life was glamorous, too, as he carried on a long-term affair with movie star Marion Davies and hobnobbed with Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo and Jimmy Stewart. The girls grew up in a wealthy San Francisco suburb,, attending private school with other children of the rich and famous and vacation at one of the family’s most opulent ranches in San Simeon, Calif., a 140-acre estate that is home to the famed Hearst Castle.
Their father, Randolph Apperson Hearst, and mother, Catherine Wood Campbell, had five daughters: Catherine, the eldest, who passed away in 2009; Virginia, now 68, who resides in Santa Barbara, Calif., and is the only sibling to sit on the Hearst Corporation Board of Directors; Patricia, known as Patty; Anne, a benefit-circuit fixture married to gadfly novelist Jay McInerney; and Victoria, who never married and has no children.
Patty, of course, made shocking headlines in 1974 when she was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a ragtag group of domestic terrorists on the West Coast, and allegedly brainwashed — eventually joining forces with her captors and holding up a bank with a machine gun. (She served 22 months in prison before her sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter in 1979. President Bill Clinton pardoned Patty on his last day in office in 2001.)
In her younger years, at least, Victoria still embraced the glamour and glitz of her family lineage, moving to Los Angeles at the age of 18 to pursue an acting career. She landed a role on “General Hospital,” playing a psychiatrist, but in 1995, after a bad relationship, left her Hollywood dreams behind to devote herself to God.
Two years later, she moved to Ridgway, Colo. When Randolph died in December 2000, he bequeathed (in addition to the riches of the family trust fund) each of his five ddaughters a conditional bequest of $100,000 to be used within one year to “spend such sum on something special, such as a trip or purchase which such child would not otherwise make,” per his will.
According to Victoria’s bio on her site, CosmoHurtsKids.com, God instructed her to purchase a 10,000square-foot barn in Colorado with the cash, which she turned into the Praise Him Ministries in 2001.
Victoria’s new life put a strain on her relationship with her sisters.
“No one really understands her,” said the insider.
Other family members are said to be close — Anne and Patty vacation together (South Africa last year and the Bahamas a few months ago) — and the whole group gets together for reunions at their estate, Wyn- toon, a 67,000-acre property in Siskiyou County, Calif., with a mansion that looks straight out of a fairy tale. But the family insider said Victoria hasn’t attended the get-togethers in years.
At one of the last reunions she attended, Victoria told the New York Observer in 2012, a relative told her “that he wouldn’t mind if his tween daughter read Cosmo because he wanted her to have a good sex life.”
Comments like that only fueled Victoria’s fire.
“Anne had her over for Easter a few years ago. She was fairly well behaved,” the insider added with a laugh. “There’s not bad blood, but on the other hand, no
one wants to talk politics with her because we tend not to agree. This Cosmo situation is a good example.”
THERE’S another group who does not want to talk to Victoria: the executives at Hearst Communications. The company, which was founded in 1887, now employs 20,000 workers and has 20 US magazines, including Harper’s Bazaar, Elle and Good Housekeeping, as well as 300 international editions. The largest privately held firm in New York, Hearst has branched out, in recent decades, picking up stakes in ESPN and the Lifetime cable networks. A glorious monument of success, the Norman Foster-designed Hearst Tower was the first building to break ground in Manhattan post-9/11, costing a staggering $500 million and with escalators that cruise by a three-story waterfall sculpture.
Victoria’s crusade against Cosmopolitan commenced in 2001 when she contacted Hearst — out of the blue — to tell execs that the magazine was pornographic and damaging to women.
“I felt like the Lord was telling me I needed to talk to the company,” she told the New York Observer in 2012. She never heard back. “I had apparently been branded a Christian fanatic,” Victoria said.
She tried making her case to then-- Hearst CEO Frank Bennack Jr., who retired in 2013.
Nicole Weider — a Christian leader with whom Victoria paired up in 2012 to lobby for Cosmopolitan being sold solely to adults — said Victoria complained that she was dismissed by Bennack and his team.
“[She said] they made fun of her and said, ‘ You have no say in what we publish and you are out of touch,’ ” Weider tole The Post.
Victoria might not have had a say, but her voice was beginning to garner attention outside Hearst Tower.
In 2015, Victoria and the National Center on Sexual Exploitation successfully got stores including Rite Aid and Walmart to cover up Cosmo’s racy headlines with so-called pocket shields that obscure the magazine’s cover on newsstand shelves.
But one Hearst honcho said Victoria is “living in the past,” arguing that Cosmo is no longer as sex-focused as it used to be.
Nonetheless, over the past year, Victoria has doubled down on her efforts. In a move seemingly inspired by the movie “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” she paid for ads on billboards in Memphis, Tenn., Nashville, Tenn., and Salt Lake City — proclaiming “Cosmopolitan Magazine Contains Porn” — and launched her CosmoHurtsKids.com Web site last fall.
Family observers see that as committing two unforgivable faux pas: messing with the bottom line and bringing unwanted attention.
“She’s using her name to get publicity,” said the Hearst honcho.
“There is a level of discretion that is, dare I say, admirable,” said Michael Gross, editor of Avenue and longtime chronicler of the Hearst clan, noting the family’s avoidance of scandal since Patty’s headline-grabbing kidnapping and aftermath. “They keep their heads down.” But Victoria is keeping her head highigh and standing her ground, even if it hurts her bottom line in the long term.
“Victoria owns a percentage of the Hearst Corporation, as do the other sisters,” said the insider. “Nobody can block her income stream because it’s a . . . legally binding will.
“She is biting the hand that feeds her.”
No one else in the family shares her beliefs [or] wacky political ideas. — Hearst family insider on “black sheep” Victoria Hearst