By David Nasaw. Houghton Mifflin Company. He is a hollow hulk of a man entombed in a Charles Addams mausoleum of art. Even his drunken harpy of a mistress has abandoned him. He shuffles toward death through Xanadu's darkened galleries, his impotence mocked by the statuary he has spent a lifetime lifting from the palaces of Europe.
History has more to fear from an artist than a hack.
We see Richard III as a ''poisonous hunch-back'd toad,'' though he didn't have a hunchback at all, because Shakespeare's intent was to epitomize evil and its inevitable retribution. Welles, similarly, cannot allow his monster to depart, as he did in truth, amid light and flowers at San Simeon, entertained in his final happy years by the wittiest people in the world, attended to devotedly by Marion Davies, his movie-star companion of 35 years, because that finale would suggest redemption for a man who had betrayed the socialist ideals dear to the young Welles. David Nasaw's absorbing and ingeniously organized new biography might finally rescue Hearst from the curse of Kane. ''The Chief'' is not an authorized biography, but the Hearst family and the Hearst Corporation gave Nasaw, a history professor at the City University of New York, the keys to personal papers stored in a Bronx warehouse since the 1920's, and the San Simeon papers secured in a ranch bunkhouse after W. R.'s death in 1951 at the age of 88. Nasaw was a good choice. He is a meticulous researcher and a cool analyst.