California (Central Coast)
San Simeon (Hearst Castle)

San Simeon began as a whaling and shipping port, and its long pier was later used to haul building supplies and works of art to Hearst Castle, enthroned above the gently rolling coastal hills. Hearst Castle (805-927-2020 or 800-444-4445. Reservations required; adm. fee) Resembling a slice of Europe on the California coast, the 165-room Spanish-Moorish estate (1919-1947) of publishing mogul William Randolph Hearst boasts a main house and three guesthouses, with Renaissance furniture and tapestries, carved ceilings, a library with 5,200 volumes, and a swimming pool laid out beside a Greco-Roman temple facade.

Forty-five miles northwest of San Luis Obispo, the hilltop Hearst Castle is one of the most extravagant houses in the world. The home where publisher William Randolph Hearst held court over such guests as Winston Churchill, Charlie Chaplin, George Bernard Shaw and Charles Lindbergh now brings in over a million visitors a year. Its interior combines walls, floors and ceilings torn from European churches and castles with Gothic fireplaces and Moorish tiles, while nearly every room bursts with Greek vases and medieval tapestries. Ironically, the same financial power and public infamy which allowed Hearst to hoard these artifacts to himself have made them viewable to more people than had they remained in the lands in which they were created.

Work on Hearst’s 250,000-acre ranch began in 1919, managed by architect Julia Morgan, who designed each room and building in the spirit of the works destined to be housed inside. The castle was never truly completed: rooms were torn out as soon as they were finished in order to accommodate yet more acquired treasure. The main facade, a twin-towered copy of a Mudejar cathedral, stands at the top of steps which curve up from a swimming pool (the most photographed in the world) filled with spring water and lined by a Greek colonnade.

Four different two-hour guided tours (summer daily 8am–4pm; rest of year daily 8am–3pm; tel 1-800/444-4445; $14) leave from the visitor center just off Hwy-1. A tour is essential, as are reservations. The most dramatic time to visit is first thing in the morning when the coastal fog hides the castle from the world below. Another magic event at the castle is the evening tour series in spring and fall, when docents in period dress take visitors through the castle, speaking of Hearst in the present tense.

W. R. Hearst – Citizen Kane
Often portrayed as a power-mad monster – most memorably by Orson Welles in his thinly veiled Citizen Kane – William Randolph Hearst seems in retrospect more like a very rich, overindulged little boy. Born in 1863 as the only son of a multimillionaire mining engineer, he learned his trade in New York working for Joseph Pulitzer, the inventor of “Yellow Journalism.” When he published his own Morning Journal, Hearst took Pulitzer’s advice to heart, fanning the flames of American imperialism to ignite the Spanish-American War of 1898. As he told his correspondents in Cuba: “You provide the pictures, and I’ll provide the war.” Hearst eventually controlled an empire that during the 1930s sold twenty-five percent of the nation’s newspapers – and sixty percent in California.

Despite his war-mongering and nationalism, Hearst was middle-of-the-road politically, a lifelong Democrat who served two terms in the House of Representatives but failed to be elected as Mayor of New York, let alone President. Besides his many newspapers, Hearst owned eleven radio stations and two movie studios, which he used to make his mistress, Marion Davies, a star. The Depression forced him to sell off most of his holdings, but he continued to exert power and influence until his death in 1951, aged 88.

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