Real estate booms leave unbuilt buildings like craters in their wake, feverish glass-and-steel dreams cut short. Exuberant heights are truncated, blueprints never make it off the ground. The city's sputters and false starts are rendered visible. In 1929, William Randolph Hearst's International Magazine Tower stopped a good seven stories short of its imperial aspirations, depositing on Eighth Avenue something more mausoleum than high-rise, an elephantine hulk squatting below urn-spiked spires. Architect Joseph Urban's dashes of Deco flamboyance turned funereal with time, his hooded figures ringed like mourners around the sepia-tinged fortress of print media.

If Hearst, the zealous upstart from California, was intent on conquering New York, he found a compatriot in Urban, a maestro of spectacle who made a name for himself designing sets for the Metropolitan Opera and the Ziegfeld Follies. Urban's theatrical inheritance may not have endeared him to the architectural elite, but it was a background that equipped him well for the megalomaniacal fantasies of the rich and famous, who seized on his special talent for bending an indifferent city to personal dramaturgy. (Urban's other commissions for the Hearst empire included a theater to showcase actress Marion Davies, Hearst's mistress.)

It took another boom decade for Hearst (long dead, the Hearst empire not looking much better) to finally have his tower. When it was finished, in 2006, Norman Foster's glass triangles shot up through the original building's center, all gleaming zigzags and brazen geometry. It was an almost cartoonish stunt, a crosshatched, pow-fisted phantom blasting through Urban's stupefied tomb.

But for all its incandescent fantasy, Lord Foster's vision was a distinct departure from Urban's sumptuous brand of showmanship. Developers these days may be angling for green status, but at the turn of the last decade, when the Hearst Corporation enlisted Lord Foster, the idea of a green-certified city was little more than idea. With its recycled steel-stitched lattice, its glass triangles gushing natural light, the tower was the first commercial building declared energy efficient in the city. The apotheosis of Hearst's real estate dreams, 70-odd years in the making, was also a kind of inversion-an imprint tempered by its surroundings.

It was something of a departure from the city's showmanship, too. New York has a way of erasing time, of projecting an eternal nowness across the skyline. It scraps the scenery like speed-fueled stagehands, tears up and down, and gives us buildings convinced of their own timelessness. It's the architecture of illusion, and it hinges on the belief that no building came before this one; nothing will replace it; and a square of vertical air is forever. But the Hearst Tower manifests time in plain sight. Instead of a plot of provisional air, it offers the idea of a city, one that stretches not just horizontally and vertically but across time, too.

When Hearst arrived in New York at the end of the 19th century, the city's vying newspaper empires had already taken to battling it out in the field of real estate. On Newspaper Row, the Syndicate Building was among the world's tallest buildings. A vast, gilded dome crowned the headquarters of Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. As the industry headed uptown, first The New York Herald to Herald Square, then The New York Times to a somewhat less distinguished square of its own, Hearst set his sights on Columbus Circle. When he finally set out to build his International Magazine Tower in 1928, he vowed to transform the neighborhood into a sleek media hub.

Hearst couldn't have foreseen Time Warner's steely-eyed touchdown on Columbus Circle's crest, but he knew media empires and he knew real estate. Of course, having finally erected its proud piece of statement architecture, the Hearst Corporation is lately scrambling for real estate in the digital world, not the physical one. The company recently acquired the digital marketing group iCrossing in a gambit to harness the potential of search engines, just as the likes of Rupert Murdoch is shunning them.

As the City Council and the mayor's office work through the minutia of greening arcane building codes, it's worth wondering what awaits the city's glassy new paeans to its media dynasties-the New York Times Building's infinite floors of space, for instance. In a precarious moment for media of all kinds, the Hearst Tower represents, at least, a kind of exuberance about architecture's potential to shape its surroundings, its ability to align itself with a city of boundless possibility.

It's worth wondering, too, as the dust of the real estate boom settles behind us, what stunted development projects we'll find ourselves left with for decades to come, what odd phantom limb of a building will grow on us, accumulate layers and stash away years like the rings of trees, not to mention which, in some glittery decade far away, will startle someone at its new possibility.

egeminder@observer.com

“Before I was married, I was very picky and selective about who I chose to get intimate with,” she told The Daily Transom at a recent dinner party benefiting ACRIA, an AIDS charity.

And though the great granddaughter of media mogul William Randolph Hearst was lucky enough to be born with a silver spoon in her mouth, Ms. Hearst-Shaw, like her sister, Lydia, knows the value of a decent bag.

“I always used condoms,” she said. “At first, I’ll admit, I was embarrassed going and buying condoms. But then I kind of … you get over it. And I went for the full-spermicidal, lubricated nonoxynol-nines!”

“I mean, it’s not worth it. What’s the point?” she asked, looking lovely in a Diane von Furstenberg dress. “It’s better safe than sorry.”

Have young, wealthy New Yorkers started to forget about the terrifying H.I.V. epidemic that remained at the forefront of New York's young people just 20 years ago?

Ms. Hearst-Shaw nodded with a pleasant, knowing smile.

“You just never know—you see a cute person at a bar and you bring them home. And it might not be that they know and just didn’t tell you; it might just be that they just don’t know either, which is the frightening part.”

She is a successful model—despite being 5 feet 7 inches short. She often has her pick of runway shows and photo shoots around the world. In the past two months, modeling has taken her to Paris, London, Florence and Los Angeles. She designs handbags for Puma, and is putting finishing touches on a line of Puma fitness wear. She sometimes stays up all night looking at color swatches. And she writes a column for the New York Post’s Page Six Magazine, called “The Hearst Chronicles.” She writes it sitting at her desk, which belonged to her great-grandfather, William Randolph Hearst.

“I try to sleep at least five hours,” she chirped in her crisp New England accent.

At the tender age of 23, she tries not to let her family’s great wealth and illustrious history cloud her judgment.

“I tell her, ‘Listen, you’re a socialite, it’s a fair enough description, you come by it honestly,’” said her mom, Patricia Hearst-Shaw. “For ‘heiress’ we usually substitute ‘airhead’ around here. Just on general principle, lest anyone get too full of themselves.”

“I am definitely not a socialite,” Ms. Hearst explained over dinner recently in SoHo. She looks you in the eye when she speaks. She has big blue eyes and excellent posture. A natural blonde, her dyed red hair was pulled back tight against her forehead. A miniscule black cocktail dress clung tightly to her body. She said she has “very fortunate” measurements: 32-inch bust, 21-inch waist and 34-inch hips. She wears a size six shoe and has a bear her dad shot as a rug in her apartment.

“I am definitely not a preppy New York girl,” she said. “The last thing you will ever see me wearing is a polo shirt—I’m not a pearl-necklace-wearing little sorority girl.”

She insisted she can’t remember the last time she went to a country club and said she’s not interested in donning a gown and showing up at “some celebrity party that is pretending to help poor underprivileged children. I’d much rather put on my shorts and sneakers and go to the country and help the underprivileged children.”

And if you have to ask, she’s no Paris Hilton. “I always keep my legs together and wear underwear,” she said. “I’m a lot more conservative than the Hollywood counterparts are. I’m an East Coast girl.”

“Everything I do, this is not a hobby for me,” she said. Indeed she considers even fitness as part of her job, and spends between two and four hours a day with her personal trainer when in New York. She recently purchased a two-bedroom condo for $1.49 million right across the street from the Hearst building on West 57th Street. She’s almost done decorating. “It’s very San Simeon,” she said. (Her older sister, Gillian, and her new husband also recently bought in the building.)

“I am all business, I am all work,” Ms. Hearst continued. “You have to take it seriously—this is a world that will eat you up and spit you out faster than you know what hit you, and you need to stay ahead of the game and you need to understand that it’s not all about the parties.”

She gets some of her chutzpah from her mother, a beauty who was famously kidnapped in 1974 at age 19 by the Symbionese Liberation Army. She was convicted of helping her captors rob a bank and spent 22 months in prison before having her sentence commuted by Jimmy Carter.

Given that many socialites dabble in fashion and journalism these days—though few can legitimately put “model” on their résumé—Ms. Hearst is understandably eager to distinguish herself from the herd.

At least once a month, she gets up at 6:30 a.m. and delivers food for the charity God’s Love We Deliver. She recently helped found a charity called “Designers for Darfur.”

She hates champagne—she said she only drinks “the champagne of beers,” Miller Lite, and tequila on the rocks. She’s equally particular about food: strictly meat, fish, pasta and potatoes. She doesn’t eat vegetables. Her favorite bar is Milano’s, a dive on Houston Street. She said she doesn’t have a boyfriend. “I do believe that everyone deserves great love,” she said. “I just turned 23, I’m not necessarily planning the rest of my life at the moment. My idea about being in a relationship is like it’s a whole other form of creation.”

What sort of guys does she fall for?

“I much prefer people who are very in tune with themselves, very musically inclined—no pretty boys,” she said. “They have to be close with their family, most importantly—family has to come first.”

As for the column, she said she may use it to call out phony socialites who repulse her.

“My column is my observation on life, my reaction to the people I’m surrounded by and the experiences that I have,” she said. “Like I was just in Los Angeles for the fashion week, and I was there with the Victoria Secret Pink Party and it was amazing—it was almost like going back to college. I got to get all dirty, and cover myself with blood, and just walk down the runway and close the show.”

One of the issues she’s already addressed in her column is the campaign to make it illegal to smoke in apartment buildings in New York. “I don’t smoke, but people say that you get secondhand smoke,” she said. “But this is a country that was founded mainly on the tobacco industry—tobacco and coffee. It’s so surprising that they are now essentially making cigarettes illegal, when that is where the whole country came from.”

She described her writing process this way:

“I sit down and I write what I’m thinking and what I feel—it happens all at once, I never stop writing. Probably when I go home tonight, I’m going to open my computer and just start typing… I always envision myself being a Hemingway type—sitting in a dark corner with my glass of, I guess it would be, my glass of tequila and lime juice-- that’s how I do it.”

After Patty Hearst had been released from prison in 1976, she’d married her former bodyguard, Bernard. Shaw. (Mr. Shaw is currently head of security for the Hearst Corporation.) Their second daughter, Lydia Hearst-Shaw, was born on Sept. 19, 1984 in Wilton, Conn.

“When I was little, my parents took me to the San Diego Zoo,” Ms. Hearst said. (Back then she was known as Lydia Shaw for “security reasons,” although Hearst-Shaw is on her birth certificate, and now she prefers to go by Lydia Hearst. )“I was about 5 years old,” she continued, “and I got a tour of the zoo that hardly anybody else has ever had. I went five levels below the earth’s surface, and on every layer, they would slam steel, one-foot-thick doors, and finally we got down to the bottom, we are going down this dark stone corridor, and we get to the end of the corridor and the man hands me an apple and he tells me to go up and put it on the bar—and I go and set the apple on the bar and then they call me back—and this giant grizzly bear slices through the apple and cuts it into about a million perfect slices.

“I believed at that point that bears only lived in zoos,” she added.

The next summer at her family’s 300,000-acre ranch in Northern California, she learned otherwise.

“They are all talking about how they had just seen a bear across the road,” she said. “And I’m this 6-year-old girl who thinks she knows everything—I basically called them liars and said that bears only lived in zoos. And everybody piled into the truck, and my dad’s best friend was driving and I was a 6-year-old little bubbly blond girl, who still wore mismatching socks and jelly sandals, and we are pulling up in the middle of the woods and there is this giant, 600-pound black bear—and to this day I am the only person who ever saw it—and I squealed with excitement and I screamed, ‘There’s a bear!’ And I threw open the door and I went running for it. And everyone else just saw a big cloud of dust because the bear took off.”

Mrs. Hearst-Shaw said that for years, Lydia insisted on taking guests at the ranch to look for bears, including the likes of Clint Eastwood.

She went to Lawrenceville boarding school in New Jersey, but found it stifling in her junior year and returned to public school in Wilton. In 2004, while a freshmen at Sacred Heart University, she was discovered by fashion photographer Steven Meisel.

“I started at the top,” she said. “My first job was the cover of Italian Vogue, which is the equivalent essentially of winning an Academy Award. So, there was nowhere else to go from there. I have been very fortunate, because I have been able to maintain that level.

“I love it,” she continued. “It’s a job just like any other, and what kind of girl growing up doesn’t want to be Barbie and doesn’t want to play dress-up every single day?” (Indeed, as a girl she had a formidable trove of Barbies, including a collectible series by designer Bob Mackie.)

Recently, she’s been hanging out with a group of young people who call themselves “the 2.0.” They include a giddy gaggle of creative aspirants such as photographer Nadav Benjamin and musician and nude Internet dude Cisco Adler, whom she has dated.

“I would say my closest friends are probably the 2.0,” she said. “It’s not about a clique, it’s just about a group of people coming together and it’s a lifestyle—it’s a bond. … So many young people are wrapped up in the party scene. The great thing about everyone in this group is, we all have real jobs, we get up in the morning. We work and that’s what brought us together…We are hardly ever apart. It’s all artists—everyone in that group is successful in their own right, whether it is music, fashion, art, photography, business. We don’t want to compare ourselves to the Factory, because you can’t have the Factory without Andy Warhol, but essentially it is like a new wave and it’s a new style of living, and we are all just riding the wave, we are all being inspirational to each other and we are helping each other out and we are always there for each other, and we are hardly ever separated for more than a day—each one of us has the same mentality, which is breaking free of the mold that is the stereotype of society and the way that we are expected to be.”

Last month, the 2.0 gang went out and all got tattoos of a skeleton key; Lydia’s is on her inner right forearm. “The symbolism behind the skeleton key is that it opens every door and it’s bonded us together,” she said.

Her occasional interest in politics sets her a bit apart from her immediate family.

“My family generally doesn’t go into politics, we have our own history there,” she said. “I am a rebel. I heard that they are now trying to start a war with Cuba again—it was in the papers yesterday—it would be like another Bay of Pigs. I hope that [Stephen] Colbert wins. I think he is incredible and I think that this country needs somebody new and outrageous who is not afraid to speak out and who really will actually stand for this country and not lie, and actually just do the job and get out there and make a difference. I would vote for him.”

[Mr. Colbert ended his presidential campaign a few days after this interview.]

Ms. Hearst said not a day goes by when she doesn’t think of the towering figure portrayed in Citizen Kane, her great-grandfather.

“If there was anyone that I would want to meet or anyone that I could ever be—that would be him,” she said. “He is my idol. He lived life, he never let anybody tell him no, and if somebody did tell him no, then he proved them wrong and accomplished all of his dreams and went for it. He was unstoppable.”

The case is already turning up details of the late, great media baron's estate.

It turns out that Mr. Hearst-who was the closest of all the grandkids to Gramps-is not only an heir to the Hearst family fortune, but a trustee of the estate and a director of the Hearst Corporation. That means the soon-to-be-former Mrs. Hearst will want to see what value, if any, he has added to the estate.

For one thing, if under his leadership during their approximately 15-year marriage (his third) the worth of the trust and the corporation increased, she could argue to the court that she'd made an indirect contribution by being his wife and taking care of him.

She seems likely to argue that it entitles her to a larger stake of the trust, which otherwise is considered not marital but separate property.

Peter Bronstein, who is representing Ms. Hearst, said: "What we have uncovered during the process of discovery is very revealing and shows the enormous contributions that John Hearst Jr. has made to the value of the corporation and the trust. My client is not at liberty to discuss the details, since the discovery process in a divorce case is a private matter. But at the trial, we will have no choice but to present the evidence we have amassed to prove what is a fair, equitable distribution to my client and in order to fix an appropriate award of future support."

"Under New York law, financial disclosure is mandatory in a divorce proceeding," said Judith Poller, a matrimonial and trusts and estates partner at Bryan Cave.

Bunky Hearst's lawyer, Sharon Stein, declined to comment.

But if Ms. Hearst's side is allowed to bring this evidence into court, then the trial could be a juicy airing of the value and workings of the Hearst Family Trust, the private body overseeing the Hearst Corporation.

One might think that the Hearst heirs would be fiercely protective of that information. But not all of the Hearst inheritors are likely to object to a little more sunshine. Hearst heirs have called for a reopening of the original estate of William Randolph Hearst, the model for Charles Foster Kane in Orson Welles' Citizen Kane.

According to the terms of the will, the family company is overseen by a 13-member trust. According to The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst (Houghton Mifflin, 2000), at the time of his death Hearst didn't trust any of his five sons not to break up the business, so he mandated that the trust consist of five family members (Bunky Hearst is currently one) and eight Hearst corporation executives. These trustees elect the 21-member board of the corporation, on which several family members sit. Hearst also had no patience for dissenters, adding an in terrorem clause (that's from the Latin for "in terror") to the will stating that those who contest it can be disinherited.

This clause has frustrated Bunky's younger brother, William Randolph Hearst II. Of the 17 income-beneficiaries of the trust, he has become the self-appointed gadfly of the clan.

At the top of his list of crusades over the past decade has been greater access to information on the trust and greater control of its workings by its beneficiaries.

In his latest court appearance before a probate judge in Los Angeles Superior Court in April-first reported by the Daily News-he asked for the court to determine whether, if he requested the trustees to increase the distributions that the trust pays out to the heirs, he would be violating the no-contest clause. (That's according to Andy Garb, the Los Angeles–based lawyer for the trustees; Mr. Hearst's lawyer, Robert Sacks, declined to comment.)

And William Randolph Hearst II isn't the only one interested in lifting the veil. After his cousin, Patty Hearst, was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974, the court acceded to the trustees' demand that the will and probate files be sealed so as not to lead other potential criminals to their doorstep. Last month, as was first reported in Daily Variety, the brothers' cousins-Patricia Hearst, her daughters Gillian and Lydia, and her sisters Victoria and Catherine-filed a petition seeking to unseal the document and "18 boxes of related legal proceedings."

The sisters' act, a largely symbolic move, would reopen the file that was available to the public for the approximately 20 years following their grandfather's death in 1951.

A lawyer for the sisters, Kenneth Wolf, said their petition was different from Mr. Hearst's inquiry: It related exclusively to a First Amendment issue regarding the public's right to information. Patricia Hearst told Daily Variety: "I call it the Hearst family secret, not the Hearst Family Trust.

"I think we have a right to know the true valuation of the company," she added.

Mr. Garb, representing the trust, said the heirs already know all they need to know.

"There is a substantial sharing of information with the beneficiaries," Mr. Garb told The Observer. "The beneficiaries get more information than a shareholder of a public corporation would get about the company."

Barbara Hearst's case against her husband could give heirs like William Randolph Hearst II a risk-free window into the trust, and his cousins may be interested as well. ("I wasn't aware of the divorce case," said Mr. Wolf.)

Presumably, however, Bunky Hearst's lawyers will attempt to convey as little of his wealth to the court as possible. And while Ms. Hearst may try to show that she is entitled not only to support for lifestyle purposes, but also to the "equitable distribution" of assets acquired as a result of work done by the parties during the marriage, it may be hard to isolate her husband's role in the trust's financial success-particularly since he suffered from a stroke prior to their marriage.

"They would need to know specific information regarding the assets of the trusts," added Ms. Poller. "For example, at the time of the marriage, what was the value of the trust, what has the growth been, what responsibilities has the husband/trustee had for investing the assets, how much time has he devoted to it, how has his role been more significant than the other trustees, how have the assets grown as a result of his efforts versus market activity? It might be very difficult to show that the appreciation should be marital where you have 13 trustees, eight of whom are independent. But it is worth a shot."

The resignation on May 4 of David Heleniak from Shearman and Sterling after 31 years with the white-shoe Manhattan firm was a shock to some and a relief to others.

As The Observer reported, during Mr. Heleniak's nearly four years as senior partner-the firm's top management position-profits per partner stalled when compared with the firm's competitors, and his term has been bookended by involuntary exoduses: In 2001, the year he assumed the title, the firm laid off about 90 associates, and over the past year the firm has encouraged as many as 20 partners to leave. This winter, an anonymous memo calling for his resignation circulated among the partners. Anxiety at the firm was looking high, and morale low.

None of this seemed to cause much of a stir at Morgan Stanley, the investment bank where Mr. Heleniak is jumping. He struck a deal to become vice chairman of the company; according to The Wall Street Journal, he'll be paid $40 million over three years. (Former partners estimate that he was making between $2 million and $3 million at Shearman and Sterling.)

According to a former partner, when Steve Volk, the senior partner before Mr. Heleniak, stepped down, he made his announcement about a year in advance. The pace in this year's election will be accelerated (the vote is scheduled for early June; look for the white smoke issuing from the conference-room windows of the firm's Lexington Avenue headquarters).

By many accounts, Mr. Heleniak was an old-fashioned firm loyalist during his three decades there, someone who, according to a former partner, "eats, breathes and sleeps Shearman" and "who never believed S. and S. could do anything wrong."

So the sudden move has a certain tragic quality to it-even if Mr. Heleniak is more than quadrupling his annual salary in the process.

In 2004, Shearman and Sterling's policy committee appointed two mergers-and-acquisitions partners, John Madden and Georg Thoma, to the newly created position of global co-managing partners, a move that some considered a sign of waning confidence in Mr. Heleniak.

Mr. Madden, whom the firm announced would be replacing Mr. Heleniak as interim senior partner, also appears to be the odds-on favorite to become his permanent successor. Mr. Madden was the runner-up to Mr. Heleniak in the last election for senior partner, and though the pair weren't notably close, they did run the mergers-and-acquisition department together in the late 1980's and early 1990's, when it was clubbily referred to as the "Heleniak-Madden team."

"He's a strong contender for the role," said a current Shearman insider about Mr. Madden.

"He's not one of these guys: 'Let me tell you about me and how great I am,'" said a former Shearman lawyer who knows the genteel Mr. Madden well.

But when the mergers-and-acquisitions heyday finally ended, things got rougher for the firm, which specialized in closing deals. And Mr. Madden's professional ties to Mr. Heleniak could mean, in the end, that he won't beviewed as new enough blood.

Capital-markets partner Rohan Weerasinghe's name has also been tossed around, though some wonder if he's interested (he didn't return a call for comment) or has enough of a boardroom presence.

One dark-horse candidate might be Linda Rappaport, one of the firm's 29 women partners and a member of the policy committee. ( The American Lawyer once predicted that she would have the senior partner position.) Other names being mentioned include the youngish M.-and-A. partner Creighton Condon as well as Mr. Thoma, a gruff M.-and-A. heavyweight whose chances seem slight because he's based in the firm's Düsseldorf office.

What do you get when you cross a plaintiff's law firm known for winning large asbestos verdicts with a commercial- and civil-litigation boutique in Manhattan?

A boutique Manhattan firm that advertises on the subways?

Hanly, Conroy, Bierstein and Sheridan is creating a "joint venture" with SimmonsCooper, a leading personal-injury law firm based in what trial lawyers regard as the premier plaintiffs' haven in the country: Madison County, Ill.

Hanly Conroy's six lawyers will be joined by an as-yet-to-be determined number of lawyers from SimmonsCooper, which in 2003 won a $250 million verdict for a client who had developed a deadly form of cancer, mesothelioma, while working at a U.S. Steel plant.

The firm simply bankrolls the litigation on behalf of their clients-if they think the case has a prospect of success. And if it succeeds, they take 20 to 40 percent of the payout.

The new office, at 112 Madison Avenue, opens on May 16.

"I think this goes back to our philosophy as a firm, that it's very important to diversify," said Steve Jones, a partner at SimmonsCooper.

Mr. Hanly said that he wasn't worried about enabling frivolous lawsuits, but rather saw it as allowing smaller businesses to pursue litigation that they might otherwise pass on because of the expense.

"I know for a fact that there are many, many situations where companies in that situation simply say, 'Forget it. Why spend all that money? We may not win the case,'" said Mr. Hanly. "And the claim is not pursued."

"I have a lot of respect for them, and it's a very good idea," added Manhattan lawyer Ed Hayes, who has consulted with SimmonsCooper.

A murder is committed at sea, and the Oneida makes an emergency stop in San Diego to remove a seriously wounded passenger-Ince-who later dies on shore in his own bed and is quickly cremated before any autopsy can be performed. This scandalous episode in Hollywood's history was completely hushed up until it was "exposed" in Kenneth Anger's underground chronicle Hollywood Babylon , published more than 40 years ago, when I first read it. I'd never heard of the play by Mr. Peros, and he has not figured in any of the press about the movie. In one interview, Mr. Bogdanovich claims he first heard the story from Orson Welles, never mentioning Anger. But this is nothing new for the director, who remains, even in eclipse, the name-dropping star and total auteur of his own life story.

To put a point on it, Peter and I have managed to irritate one another over the years on the true origins of American auteurism, and the artistic worth of At Long Last Love (1975), and even his lucky break in scoring a box-office hit with his joylessly ritualistic reprise of Hawksian screwball comedy, What's Up, Doc? (1972). And how often is that lovingly revived nowadays compared with Hawks' commercial flop of 1938, Bringing Up Baby , now an acknowledged classic? When I first met Peter in the early 60's, he'd never heard of Howard Hawks or seen any of his movies. Eugene Archer and I once had to fill him in on all the plots of a series of old movies our mutual sponsor Dan Talbot was showing at his New Yorker Theater, then a beacon of cinema on the Upper West Side. Peter, Eugene and I were among many contributors of program notes, for which Dan paid $100 apiece. Among the other contributors were Jack Kerouac and Susan Sontag; yet of all the writers, Peter was the only one to copyright his contributions. Clearly, here was a man to watch in his seemingly meteoric rise to the top. Still, it never occurred to any of us auteurists that all we had to do was pick up the phone and call the directorial objects of our affections, and make enough contacts to begin making our own movies. I once told Polly Platt, Peter's first wife, that I hated him for cashing in on something the rest of us did for the love of it.

The truth is that I envied Peter for his genius in organizing himself into a relentless career projectile. I gave him full credit for the somber intensity he summoned in The Last Picture Show (1971) and Paper Moon (1973). I liked his wife Polly and his longtime girlfriend Cybill Shepherd, and was impressed that neither ever had an unkind word to say about him. I never met the Stratten sisters, and I didn't rejoice when They All Laughed (1981), which I sort of liked despite-or because of-its very vulnerable and slightly sad romanticism, sank without a trace. But really, how can you hate someone who has lost $5 million?

Fortunately, The Cat's Meow ultimately plays to Mr. Bogdanovich's strength in correcting the injustice that Welles inflicted on the reputation of Marion Davies, through the shrill overdirection of Dorothy Comingore into a laughable caricature in Citizen Kane (1941). By contrast, Mr. Bogdanovich's sensitive direction of Kirsten Dunst as Marion Davies is everything the other critics have said, and more. Ms. Dunst is a new star in the making, combining the period flapper with the modern woman in a miracle of buoyancy and grace. As her loving patron, Edward Herrmann brings more passion and substance to his portrayal of a multifaceted Hearst than Welles could ever imagine under his tons of old-age makeup as the elderly Charles Foster Kane, who literally dodders in his last days. By contrast, Mr. Herrmann's Hearst, facing his supreme crisis, manages to placate and pay off every possible incriminating witness to the crime. He thus demonstrates the managerial skills of a C.E.O. accustomed to making snap judgments and acting upon them without hesitation. As for Eddie Izzard's Charles Chaplin, he doesn't look the part in the beginning, but grows into it as the picture continues. Jennifer Tilly plays Louella Parsons much too broadly, with the wrong kind of clumsiness at first-at least for those of us old enough to remember Parsons' "exclusives" on radio-but she comes through with the steel-trap Jennifer Tilly we all know and fear when the time comes for her to blackmail Hearst into a unique lifetime contract with his newspaper syndicate.

I may as well let the cat all the way out of the bag by revealing that Hearst shot Ince in a fit of jealously, thinking he was shooting Chaplin. But how do you stage this genuine accident? Though I heard the story decades ago, I could never visualize how Hearst had shot the wrong man. A bad shot caused by the blindness of jealousy? Here I must credit Mr. Bogdanovich and Mr. Peros with having contrived a plausible scenario consistent with the chaotic mise en scène aboard the Oneida . Of course, no one at the time could imagine the enormity of what might have happened if the gods weren't looking out for Charlie aboard the Oneida . No The Gold Rush in 1925, no The Circus in 1928, no City Lights in 1931, no Modern Times in 1936, no The Great Dictator in 1940, no Monsieur Verdoux in 1947, no Limelight in 1952-in short, Charlie Chaplin with a huge slice of his immortality denied him. One can't expect the other passengers on the Oneida to have appreciated the genius in their midst, who had just experienced his first flop with A Woman of Paris , which Charlie directed but did not appear in.

Still, Mr. Bogdanovich is no Robert Altman when it comes to maneuvering a crowded ensemble. Not only does he reduce everyone but the leads to colorless extras, he often underestimates the ability of his audience to slide into the past without being prodded by overly expository dialogue and wisecracks and laboriously mounted period detail-like the obscure slang of the movie's unsatisfactory title.

Joanna Lumley's Elinor Glyn lends her authoritative British accent to narrate the flashback framing of the story, and to participate in the dance-fools-dance Charleston processionals that keep the movie kinetic in an otherwise cramped space. Yet neither Mr. Bogdanovich nor the revelers ever lose themselves in rapturous abandon. The trouble is the lack of any stylistic build-up to the mobile Charlestons. Mr. Bogdanovich's furiously moving camera has kept all the characters too much on edge, with no real hope of emotional relief or redemption.

As is so often the case with Mr. Bogdanovich, he is least effective when he mistakes flippancy for humor. For example, his running gags about the visual jokes Chaplin proposes for his then work-in-progress, The Gold Rush , fall flat time and again. People who know The Gold Rush will be put off by the cheap exploitation of the failed "inside" references, and people who don't know The Gold Rush will simply be puzzled.

Nonetheless, as it stands, The Cat's Meow is Mr. Bogdanovich's best film since Mask (1985), and in this period the frantic farce Noises Off (1992) is one of his worst. This should give him a hint as to what he should do next if he gets the chance. Unfortunately, the commercial prognosis for The Cat's Meow is cloudy-not because of anything Mr. Bogdanovich has done or not done, but because movies about movies or movie people have never done well at the box office.

Sweet Smell of Success Held Over … at Movies

Alexander Mackendrick's Sweet Smell of Success (1957), from a screenplay by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman, is being returned to Film Forum for an extended run after its recent successful two-week revival. Please see it if you haven't already, and don't be put off by its cult status after failing at the box office on its initial release. At the time, my friends and I were startled most by the brilliant performance of Tony Curtis in his much-ridiculed "my foddah, da caliph" period. Mr. Curtis' Sidney Falco feeds items to Burt Lancaster's J.J. Hunsecker, a power-hungry right-wing gossip columnist modeled after Walter Winchell. Acting honors go also to Emile Meyer as a crooked police detective at least a decade before his time. Falco and the detective form an uneasy alliance to frame jazz musician Martin Milner on a drug rap to end his relationship with Hunsecker's nubile sister, played by Susan Harrison. The intimations of covert incest on the part of Hunsecker toward his sister was another taboo-breaker. But the main incentive to see this movie is its witty, pungent and idiomatic dialogue, such as you never hear on the screen anymore in this age of special-effects illiteracy.

Executives at the Hearst Corporation, which has its corporate headquarters in the six-story building at 959 Eighth Avenue, have hired Lord Norman Foster, a member of the steel-and-glass vanguard and the 1999 recipient of architecture's highest honor, the Pritzker Prize, to design a tower to be built above their heads, fulfilling the plans originally laid by William Randolph Hearst and abandoned during the Great Depression.

The company has hired Jerry Speyer's Tishman Speyer Properties to build the tower.

"We've engaged Foster and Partners to explore development of the building," said Hearst spokeswoman Debra Shriver. "We're not at the design phase as of yet."

The idea, said Ms. Shriver, is for the company to consolidate the offices of its 17 magazines-titles like Good Housekeeping , Cosmopolitan , Esquire and Talk -now scattered across the city in more than a half-dozen different buildings. Hearst is following the lead of media companies like Condé Nast magazines, which built a tower at 4 Times Square two years ago; The New York Times , which is planning a new building on 41st Street at Eighth Avenue; and, on a larger scale, AOL Time Warner, which is building a headquarters at Columbus Circle.

"[Hearst] is picking an excellent architect, and there's exciting potential," said Roger Duffy, an architect with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. "Looking at Foster's work, it's going to be mostly glass and very modern-but exceptional."

The intended look and contours of the addition remain shrouded in secrecy. Mr. Speyer did not return phone calls, and a spokeswoman for Lord Foster said that he was traveling and unavailable for comment. But judging from the building's current zoning allotment, the tower could be anywhere from 25 to 45 floors, depending on the square footage per floor-and by negotiating with the city or buying air rights from neighboring properties, the company could build even higher.

Any alterations to the existing limestone structure-which was designed by Joseph Urban, built in 1928 and landmarked in 1988-would have to pass muster with the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission, with which Hearst has had preliminary conversations. But there, too, the company has hired some high-powered help. They've retained Sandy Lindenbaum, the attorney and omnipresent real estate operator, to make their case as they negotiate the thicket of zoning and preservation issues involved. Mr. Lindenbaum declined comment, citing client confidentiality.

"There is a great affection for the building," said Ms. Shriver. "We want to preserve the building, but at the same time we urgently require space."

Lord Foster, 65, has ample experience designing around historic buildings. His much-acclaimed addition to the Reichstag in Berlin, featuring a latticed glass dome, has become a symbol of the new unified Germany. For a newly unveiled renovation of the British Museum, he designed a glass-covered courtyard that architecture critic Paul Goldberger, writing in The New Yorker , called "stunningly beautiful."

At home in Britain, he is best known for building the snaky (and shaky) Millennium Bridge across the Thames River, which was shut down after its opening weekend last June due to structural problems, and for being one of the modernists Prince Charles targeted in his famous 1987 speech declaring that architects had done more damage to London than the Luftwaffe.

Still, his selection will likely be cheered by Manhattan's aficionados of modern architecture. For years, they've bellyached about the lack of imaginative design in the city. But over the past few months, there's been a veritable Pritzker outbreak: In late November, the city approved a plan for a Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim Museum on the East River downtown; in October, Renzo Piano (in conjunction with the Manhattan firm Fox & Fowle) won a competition to do the new Times building. Both Lord Foster and Mr. Gehry were among The Times' four finalists.

In a column explaining The Times ' choice of architects, Herbert Muschamp, a member of the paper's selection committee, wrote of the glass-pyramid-inspired design submitted by Lord Foster: "I prize few qualities higher than rational thought, but I don't fully trust its architectural expression." Faint praise indeed-but the spurned designer may yet win some measure of revenge. The Hearst Building is just 15 blocks north of the intended Times site, and the inevitable comparisons between the two buildings have already begun. "My guess is Hearst wanted to outdo The Times ," one prominent local architect said.

The Hearst Magazine Building began as a product of William Randolph Hearst's boundless acquisitiveness. Through the 1920's, Hearst had heard rumblings of a bridge from Manhattan to New Jersey, to be built at 59th Street. Looking to make a real estate killing, he snapped up land all around Columbus Circle. When the George Washington Bridge was located 120 blocks north instead, Hearst came up with an ambitious plan to redevelop the land as an entertainment complex. Hearst bought and renovated the Cosmopolitan Theater, on 58th Street, as a showcase for his mistress, Marion Davies, and commissioned a magnificent 20-story skyscraper called the International Magazine Building for the western stretch of Eighth Avenue between 56th and 57th streets. He hired Joseph Urban, the Viennese architect who designed the New School for Social Research on West 12th Street, the Mar-a-Lago mansion in Palm Beach, and the sets for many of Davies' plays and silent films.

Only six stories of the skyscraper made it off the blueprints. The result is Urban's unfinished architectural thought: a limestone pedestal, with six classical columns stretching a full floor above the building's truncated top. "A charmingly literal interpretation of the aspirations of the Hearst empire in theater and communications," author Eric P. Nash called it in his book, Manhattan Skyscrapers . Sculpted allegorical figures flank the columns: a bare-chested athlete, a laborer with his sledgehammer, a musician carrying a lyre. Architectural echoes of the building can be seen in the base of the Empire State Building, Mr. Nash writes.

There were plans to complete the tower later, but when the Depression came and Hearst fell on hard times, the blueprints were set aside. The International Magazine Building became the Hearst Magazine Building, and eventually Hearst lost control of his empire.

Every so often, the Hearst Corporation talked about reviving the plans-most recently in the early 1980's, before the building was landmarked-but nothing ever came of it. Today, occupants of the building include Hearst Magazines president Cathleen Black and other top company executives, Good Housekeeping magazine and the Good Housekeeping Institute, a veritable Mayo Clinic of home economics. The walls along the upper floors are lined with paintings by famous modern artists; most Hearst employees see the inside of the place only for rare conference-room-type meetings.

Condé Nast's success in Times Square has not been lost on Hearst executives. With the price of Manhattan real estate surging, and with AOL Time Warner's Columbus Centre finally about to fulfill Hearst's dream of making Columbus Circle an entertainment-industry magnet, the tower began to make sense. Last April, the company disclosed its intention to "construct a world-class headquarters building" in a short article in The New York Times .

Aside from allowing Hearst to keep up with the Newhouses and the Sulzbergers, the new tower would presumably save money in rent and allow the sale of other buildings owned by Hearst, if the company chooses. Hearst owns buildings at 224 West 57th Street, where O , Cosmopolitan and Country Living are located, and 250 West 55th Street, which Esquire calls home. Harper's Bazaar and other magazines rent space at 1700 Broadway, Marie Claire has a lease at 1790 Broadway, and SmartMoney.com is unhappily ensconced in the way-west Starrett-Lehigh Building on 26th Street, between 11th and 12th avenues.

Yet Hearst employees say they've heard little about the tower beyond what they've read in the newspapers. Members of local Community Board 4 said they're still waiting to hear from Hearst executives about the company's plans, too. Hearst hasn't filed a formal application with the Landmarks Preservation Commission either, according to the commission's chief of staff, Terry Rosen Deutsch, though they have had informal discussions about the project with the commission's staff. Hearst has also made initial overtures to the City Planning Commission and the Municipal Arts Society.

The land is zoned for a 600,000-square-foot building, though the current building is just 153,000 square feet. Even without air rights and zoning bonuses, that leaves Lord Foster a lot of room to work with-enough to build 45 stories if the floors are exceptionally skinny, as Landmarks Preservation Commission guidelines seem to require.

Ms. Shriver, the Hearst spokeswoman, said that whatever Lord Foster designs, it will fit contextually with Urban's original vision. "It's very much a part of our heritage," she said of the landmark building.

Pleasing everyone will be a tough assignment. "This is what strikes me as one of the toughest architectural problems to come along in a long time," said Kent Barwick, president of the Municipal Arts Society. And the problems aren't just political: In addition to the inevitable zoning and landmarking issues that must be solved, real estate executives familiar with the project said, the plans call for carrying out the renovation project while employees continue to work in the building.

"Honestly, I think most seasoned real estate people will tell you it's not what you'd call an economically efficient concept," said one executive.

Architects, meanwhile, are waiting expectantly to see what Lord Foster will do. "I can't think of a prototype in the United States for what's being discussed for the Hearst Building," said Mr. Duffy, who often works on renovations of landmarked buildings. In Europe, by contrast, historic buildings are considered less untouchable: Lord Foster refigured the Reichstag, and I.M. Pei added a glass pyramid to the Louvre. Mr. Duffy hopes the Hearst project will open up opportunities for similarly ambitious additions in New York. "It's exciting because it could establish a precedent for the future," he said.

Yet Mr. Barwick sounded a note of caution, saying it was important to preserve the spirit of the original Hearst Building, the only Joseph Urban–designed structure left in midtown.

"It's such a distinctive building," he said, "such a wild extravaganza of a building."

-Additional reporting by Gabriel Snyder

In 1916, at age 53, William Randolph Hearst–already a media tycoon whose publishing empire included newspapers such as the New York Journal and San Francisco Examiner , magazines such as Cosmopolitan and some of the first motion picture newsreels; a congressman who became an arbiter of Democratic party politics; a social reformer who forced Tammany Hall to take on the New York City utility trusts; and a philanderer known for carousing with two teenage showgirls at his side (he eventually married one of them)–was forced to borrow $350,000 from his mother. His total debt to her now stood at nearly $2 million.

This detail pops up on page 233 of David Nasaw's exhaustive biography, in a paragraph about Hearst's finances–it follows a short passage about his art collection and precedes a discussion of syndication services and their role in the expansion of the Hearst publishing empire. What does it mean when a middle-aged millionaire grovels for money from his mother? Mr. Nasaw doesn't ask. Again and again in his 687-page tome, he presents telling bits of information; and just as often, obvious questions are ignored.

Mr. Nasaw was granted unprecedented access to Hearst family and business archives, including files the Hearst Corporation has kept in a Bronx warehouse since the 1920's. Mr. Nasaw writes that his biography is based on "hundreds of thousands of letters, telegrams, memoranda, transcripts of phone messages, articles, and editorials." He adds: "There were some fine biographies dating from the 1950's and 1960's, but none had been able to call upon the vast archival resources that have become available since then. I was able to start fresh, to detour around the anecdotal information that my predecessors had had to rely on." The detour seems to have led him straight past the point of interest.

In a recent review for The Wall Street Journal , Conrad Black, who, as chief executive of Hollinger International, publishes 379 newspapers and magazines around the world, gushed that The Chief "is unlikely to be surpassed as the definitive study of its subject." In the next breath he added approvingly, "Mr. Nasaw takes no psychological liberties and leaves it to the reader to judge."

We learn a lot from Mr. Nasaw's study, including, of course, the bare-bones riches-to-fabulous-riches story. The son of a miner from Missouri who headed west during the California gold rush, Hearst grew up in San Francisco, a product of Gold Coast wealth. He was raised by his mother while his distant father took care of business, and because his mother harbored high social aspirations, he was packed off to boarding school at St. Paul's (which he left after a bout of homesickness) and then to Harvard College, from which he failed to graduate. Rather than study, he spent his time funding clubs, managing the Lampoon and throwing decadent parties in his suite of rooms–which his mother had redecorated in Harvard crimson.

Hearst was not yet 24 when he went to work as publisher of the San Francisco Examiner , a small paper his father had purchased to further his political ambitions. In time, young Billy Buster (as his father called him) expanded circulation with a lively mix of sensational headlines and lavish illustrations, a formula borrowed from Joseph Pulitzer's New York World . After his father's death in 1891, Hearst convinced his mother to finance the purchase and expansion of the New York Journal and began a money-losing competition with Pulitzer's World . As his publishing empire expanded, Hearst shamelessly employed his media outlets to bolster his own political career–which helped him win a Congressional seat in 1902, fight unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination, win re-election to Congress in 1904 and then, also unsuccessfully, campaign for New York governor in 1906.

Always a populist in both his newspapers and his politics, Hearst helped Franklin D. Roosevelt win election in 1932 and then attacked him and his New Deal policies later in the decade. In a shameful episode in 1934, Hearst visited Hitler and called him a "Moses leading [the German people] out of their bondage"; he dismissed the anti-Semitism of the Nazi regime as "such an obvious mistake that I am sure it must soon be abandoned. In fact, I think it is already well on the way to abandonment."

At the end of his life, in 1950, Hearst's son Bill Jr. shared files on American Communists with Senator Joe McCarthy and Hearst columnists, including Walter Winchell. The family newspapers were full of enthusiastic redbaiting. But Hearst himself found the Red scare a bit overboard. He sent the following telegram to his editors: "The Chief instructs not, repeat not, to press the campaign against Communism any farther."

We learn all this and much, much more–but we never learn about Hearst the man.

For instance, Mr. Nasaw tells us at the very beginning of his biography that Hearst believed "there were no 'silver spoons' in [his] family," and yet everything about his life flows from the fact of George Hearst's mining fortune–the ore, rich in gold and silver, dug from the ground near Virginia City, Nev. What kind of "self-made" man is bankrolled by his parents?

Hearst's mother even put his "oldest and dearest friend," Orrin Peck, on the payroll–she "supported his art studies"–so that Peck would keep an eye on his pal. Hearst never had many friends, and yet this is all Mr. Nasaw has to say about the combined effect of Peck's death in 1921 and the demise of his Harvard friend Jack Follansbee, who died of drink in 1914: "They had always been there when he needed them. He would sorely miss them."

Mr. Black is right about the absence of psychologizing in The Chief –and it's a shame. Since at least 1941, when Orson Welles released Citizen Kane , the psychology of William Randolph Hearst has been a topic of much speculation. But Mr. Nasaw won't play. In his chapter on Citizen Kane , which describes in detail the attack Hearst mounted against the film (the Chief even dispatched an editor to gather material on Welles' leftist leanings), Mr. Nasaw concludes that Charles Foster Kane is nothing like Hearst: "Welles' Kane is a cartoon-like caricature of a man who is hollowed out on the inside, forlorn, defeated, solitary because he cannot command the total obedience, loyalty, devotion, and love of those around him." When Mr. Nasaw turns to the subject of his biography, we get a string of negatives: "Hearst, on the contrary, never regarded himself as a failure [and] never recognized defeat.... He did not, at the end of his life run away from the world to entomb himself in a vast, gloomy art-choked hermitage."

Mr. Nasaw has made heroic efforts with his research and compiled an impressive documentary record. But the result reads like a dictionary: reliable, comprehensive, well-ordered and bone-dry.

Gabriel Snyder writes Off the Record for The New York Observer.