Randolph Apperson Hearst, who died on December 18th aged 85, was the one of the five sons of William Randolph Hearst who looked after the business side of his family's vast American newspaper, magazine and broadcasting empire.
Quiet and fabulously wealthy, he was catapulted into most unwanted notoriety when his daughter, Patty, was kidnapped in February 1974 by a group of black militants calling themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army.
In a classic example of what has been become known as the Stockholm syndrome, Patty Hearst seemed to have been converted by her captors, and went with them on a bank raid. She was caught by closed-circuit television cameras holding a weapon, and subsequently sentenced to seven years in prison, of which she served just less than two years.
At her trial she denied that she had embraced her kidnappers' revolutionary hostility to capitalism. Her father, who, with his wife, had faithfully attended the trial, surprised many by refusing to condemn his daughter and trying to understand her feelings about the experience.
Randolph Hearst's father, William Randolph Hearst, was the son of a rich mining investor with major holdings in the Comstock silver lode in Nevada, the Anaconda copper mine in Montana and rich goldmines in California. The father was flamboyant. He was famous for reproving the western artist, Frederick Remington, hired to cover the Spanish-American war in Cuba but unable to find any fighting to paint, with the words: "You provide the pictures, Mr Remington; I'll provide the war.["]
The founding father won the San Francisco Examiner in a poker game and gave it as a present to his son, William Randolph Hearst, then a student at Harvard. Hearst snr, brilliantly caricatured by Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz in the film Citizen Kane, built up a chain of right-wing newspapers and other media properties across America.
When he died in 1951, William Randolph Hearst declined to leave the properties to his five sons. Instead, he left them to be managed by accountants and editors, with the sons outnumbered on a 13-man board of trustees.
After boarding school at Lawrenceville and Harvard, Randolph Hearst worked for various family papers and then served in the air transport command of the United States Army Air Corps, rising to the rank of captain.
After the second World War, he worked his way up in the management of the San Francisco Call-Bulletin to become its publisher, shortly before his father's death. He then moved into the corporation management of the Hearst companies, becoming president, director and chief executive of Hearst Publishing and Hearst Consolidated Publication.
The family business was losing millions of dollars a year. Randolph Hearst backed managers who pruned away unprofitable elements of the business and restored and increased its profitability. From 1973 to 1996, he was chairman of the family's privately-owned holding company. He also occupied important positions in the Hearst family's charitable foundations.
He served on the board of the National Council of Christians and Jews, and was a member of the council of both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
His personal fortune grew inexorably. The most recent estimate by Forbes magazine put his net worth at $1.8 billion, and shortly before his death he bought the Vanderbilt mansion in Manaplan, near Palm Beach, Florida.
Until 1974, Randolph Hearst and his then wife, Catherine Campbell Hearst, led a cheerful and prominent social life in San Francisco. Then the thunderbolt fell. His daughter was abducted from her dormitory at the University of California at Berkeley. Her kidnappers demanded that her parents give millions of dollars to poor people in California, and Randolph Hearst started a programme called People In Need, to which he pledged $2 million. Eventually, more than 90,000 bags of food were distributed to the poor.
For a man of such wealth, who had done so well in business, Randolph Hearst was surprisingly shy and retiring. Friends say that he felt he had fallen short of his father's achievement. But when the family catastrophe happened, Randolph Hearst insisted on being his own media spokesman, and personally took on the burden of rescuing Patty, while trying to understand her motives - and those of her kidnappers. Less than a month ago, the Hearst family sold the Examiner, its first newspaper property, and took over its ancient rival, the San Francisco Chron- icle.
Randolph Hearst's first marriage ended in divorce in 1982. A second marriage, to Maria Cynthia Scruggs, also ended in divorce. He is survived by his third wife Veronica de Uribe and five daughters.
Randolph Apperson Hearst: born 1915; died, December 2000