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Up The Road: Hearst Castle, William Randolph’s Pleasure Palace

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The Hearst San Simeon State Historic Monument on the coast just south of Big Sur ranks right up there with Disneyland as one of California’s premier tourist attractions. Somehow that fact alone puts the place into proper perspective. Media magnate William Randolph Hearst’s castle is a rich man’s playground filled to overflowing with artistic diversions and other expensive toys, a monument to one man’s monumental ego and equally impressive poor taste.

William Randolph Hearst was quite a wealthy and powerful man, the man many people still believe was the subject of the greatest American movie ever made, Orson Welles’s 1941 Citizen Kane. These days even Welles’s biographers say the movie was about the filmmaker himself. Still, there’s something to be said for popular opinion.

“Pleasure,” Hearst once wrote, “is worth what you can afford to pay for it.” And that attitude showed itself quite early; for his 10th birthday little William asked for the Louvre as a present. He didn’t get it, poor little guy. But he more than made up for that later, after pillaging war-torn Europe for rare art to accessorize the pleasure palace he was building for himself, a project that took almost three decades.

There’s one scene in the movie in which Charles Foster Kane shouts across the cavernous living room at Xanadu to attract the attention of his bored young mistress. She’s sitting in front of a fireplace as big as the mouth of Jonah’s whale, endlessly working jigsaw puzzles. None of that will seem so surreal once you see Hearst Castle.

But before there was La Cuesta Encantada, or The Enchanted Hill—Hearst Castle, as it came to be known—there was the vast expanse of land it crowned, originally three Mexican land grants—40,000 acres bought by mining mogul George Hearst in 1865. George, the first millionaire Hearst, later expanded the family holdings here to 250,000 acres (including 50 miles of coastline) for the family’s Victorian retreat and cattle ranch, Camp Hill. With his substantial wealth, he also bought himself a U.S. Senate seat.

Young William Randolph had even more ambitious plans—personally, and for the property. The only son of the senator and San Francisco schoolteacher, socialite, and philanthropist Phoebe Apperson Hearst, the high-rolling William took a fraction of the family wealth and his daddy’s failing San Francisco Examiner and created a hugely successful yellow-journalism newspaper chain, eventually adding radio stations and movie production companies.

Putting his newfound power of propaganda to work in the political arena, Hearst (primarily for the headlines) goaded Congress into launching the Spanish-American War in 1898. But, unlike his father, William Randolph was unable to buy much personal political power. Though he aspired to the presidency, he had to settle for two terms as a congress member from New York. Poor guy.

Hearst’s good fortune included his decades-long partnership with architect Julia Morgan, who supervised the execution of almost every detail of Hearst’s rambling 165-room pleasure palace. Hearst Castle is not really her style, but no doubt the most famous of her many masterpieces. We’ll talk about why next time.

Kim Weir is the founder of Up the Road, a nonprofit public-interest journalism project. She researches, writes, and hosts Up the Road, a radio show and mini-podcast about California co-produced by North State Public Radio. Kim got her start as a travel journalist in 1990 with the publication of the first and original Moon Handbooks Northern California, a surprise best-seller. Six other Moon books on California soon followed. She is a member, by invitation, of the venerable Society of American Travel Writers (SATW). Kim earned a BA in environmental studies and analysis, with an emphasis on botany and ecology, and also holds an MFA in creative writing. She lives in Paradise.
Matt Fidler is a producer and sound designer with over 15 years’ experience producing nationally distributed public radio programs. He has worked for shows such as Freakonomics Radio, Selected Shorts, Studio 360, The New Yorker Radio Hour and The Takeaway. In 2017, Matt launched the language podcast Very Bad Words, hitting the #28 spot in the iTunes podcast charts.