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From Primedia Publications
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The Hearst Castle: A Castle for the Chief
Newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst never
did anything on a small scale.

By Steve Boisson

Of Hearst's Castle, George Bernard Shaw once remarked, "This is how God would have done it, if he'd had the money."
The Hearst San Simeon State Historical Monument, better known as Hearst Castle, sprawls atop the foothills of the Santa Lucia Mountains like a California Shangri-la. In its time the castle was an exotic place, known as the weekend destination for Hollywood royalty like Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Cary Grant. For the average citizen, the estate must have seemed as fantastic as something from a movie, with its mansions filled with priceless artworks, a castle serving as the main building, and even its own zoo.

Hearst's ruthlessness was usually reserved to things in the abstract, people at a distance.
Today, the average citizen no longer has to be content with speculating about Hearst Castle. Since 1958 the "Enchanted Hill" of publisher William Randolph Hearst has been open to the public, and buses depart regularly from the visitor center off Highway 1. It's a smoother ride than the one Hearst’s guests endured, though it’s still daunting, as the buses spin around hairpin turns on the steep road and up to the newspaper tycoon’s once-private domain.



"This is how God would have done it, if he'd had the money," George Bernard Shaw supposedly said upon his arrival here. After a recent two-tour Hearst-a-thon, I realized that if Shaw never actually said those words, he could have. The hillside complex, which Hearst referred to as "the ranch," is not just a castle. It's a Spanish-style village with lush Mediterranean gardens, marble colonnades, and ornate guest houses that are mansions in themselves. At the summit stands Casa Grande (literally, "the big house"), a large, cathedral-like structure patterned after the Renaissance churches of southern Spain. Standing on the Neptune Terrace, with its pristine pool and Greco-Roman statuary, I felt I was in the realm of emperors, not at the private retreat of a newspaper publisher. Of course, William Randolph Hearst was not your average publisher. His media empire included newspapers, newsreels, news services, magazines, radio stations, and a movie studio. The son of a frontier prospector who struck it rich in the silver rush of the late 1850s, young Will passed over his father’s hugely successful mining enterprise in favor of running the old man’s floundering San Francisco newspaper. Lavishing grand salaries on editors and writers, he bought the best talent in the West and turned the anemic Examiner into a major voice. In 1895 he took on New York by buying the New York Journal and starting a competition war with Joseph Pulitzer and his World. Most notorious, perhaps, was Hearst’s role in helping push the United States into the war with Spain in 1898 (though his famous dispatch to illustrator Frederic Remington—"You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war"—is apocryphal). As a publisher, Hearst spared no expense to get a good scandal into print—he once rented an entire apartment building where a murder suspect resided, to keep rival reporters away—and led the pack in the creation of "yellow journalism."

Like his father, Senator George Hearst, he served in Congress, though he proved an uninspiring representative from New York. In 1904 Hearst even attempted to gain the Democratic Party’s nomination for president and the next year ran, unsuccessfully, for governor of New York and later for mayor of New York City.

Known to his underlings as "the Chief," Hearst was not what one would expect from a powerful press baron. "Hearst's ruthlessness was usually reserved to things in the abstract, people at a distance," wrote biographer W. A. Swanberg. "Anyone hurt within his immediate ken, be it human or animal, enlisted his sympathy to such an extravagant degree that he seemed womanly and even ridiculous." A large man with a high, piping voice, he was unabashedly sentimental and enjoyed wearing loud, brightly colored clothes. Nothing better expresses his quirks and eccentricities than his palace on the enchanted hill.

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Steve Boisson is a freelance writer who lives in Valley Village, California. Quotes from Julia Morgan's correspondence are from the Julia Morgan Collection at Special Collections, California Polytechnic State University.