Up and up we rode, up the Enchanted Hill. From the visitors` center to the mansion on the crest, the road runs 5 miles. At each switchback turn we could see more of the Pacific, fringed in white surf. A few cattle grazed on the slopes, and a brown hawk rode the wind without beating a wing.
Higher still, the tour bus entered a tunnel of flowering shrubs, and, on the right, our driver pointed out the bear pits of a private zoo that had been the world`s largest. Now, the driver deadpanned, the empty cages were nothing but ”bare” pits.
Suddenly, around the final turn, we came face to face with the castle. At the foot of wide marble stairs stood a man of middle years, hands folded, shoulders back, in a trim blue blazer: our guide.
How to get off the bus
”Please stay seated,” the driver intoned, ”until the guide comes on board and explains the unloading procedure.”
So this was San Simeon, the home of newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst, who died in 1951. If Mt. Olympus is where the gods live, this may be where they go on vacation.
Sitting on a 1,600-foot crest, often seeming to float in a low-lying cloud, the Hearst mansion offers a view as spectacular as any in America: the lumpy, green Santa Lucia Mountains on one side and 50 miles of undeveloped Pacific coastline on the other. And all of it framed in the picture windows of what looks vaguely like a Spanish cathedral and monastery, with flourishes by Walt Disney.
Stars came calling
Nearly every weekend during the 1920s and `30s, the estate was filled with guests from the Hollywood movie colony about 250 miles to the south. The guests would gather on Friday nights at the Glendale station, near Hollywood, and take a train up the coast, with a band and a club car providing entertainment along the way. At San Luis Obispo, the guests would be met by a fleet of limousines and driven to the castle.
Since 1958, when it became the property of the State of California, San Simeon has been open to the kind of people who never would have been invited in Hearst`s day, people like us.
This day we have chosen Tour No. 2, limited to 15 people, which will take us into suites and private rooms of the mansion where the larger tour groups can`t fit.
Rules are strict
But first, the rules: Follow the guide, stay close, no straggling. W.R. Hearst was a man who exercised strict control over his vast enterprises-and his guests. We too are expected to stay in line.
There is only the slightest chance, however, that on our brief tour we will violate any of the three unwritten rules that actor David Niven said all guests had to follow in Hearst`s day: ”No drunkenness, no bad language or off-color jokes and, above all, no sexual intercourse between unmarried couples.”
This last rule, Niven noted in his Hollywood memoir, ”Bring on the Empty Horses,” was awfully prudish for a man who was living openly with his mistress, Marion Davies, a Hollywood actress and ex-showgirl, who had a problem with alcohol.
`Citizen Kane` link
But Hearst was a man of contradictions, the model for the title role in Orson Welles` seminal movie, ”Citizen Kane,” portrayed as a power-mad demagogue with a small-talent floozy for a girlfriend and a cold, dark monstrosity for a mansion.
Back down the hill, in a photography exhibit at the visitors center, the real Hearst was portrayed a little differently, as a successful publisher, movie producer (he backed ”The Perils of Pauline”), collector and host.
His father, George Hearst, had been a California gold prospector in the days of the `49ers, and though he never found all that much gold, he came upon the Comstock Load, ”the richest silver strike in the history of the United States,” according to our guide, gentlemanly Bill Coleman.
A generous dad
With his riches, George Hearst bought his son a little gift: a newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner. To his credit, the son built that gift into a newspaper empire that stretched from coast to coast. There was a time in America when almost every big city had a Hearst newspaper.
And the papers had influence. Hearst`s Hollywood columnist, the legendary Louella Parsons, could make or break careers merely by a favorable mention, or an unfavorable one.
More important, Hearst`s newspapers were responsible for drumming up much of the public hysteria-”Remember the Maine”-that brought on the Spanish-American War at the end of the last century.
His presses helped keep the United States out of World War I for a long time, and, after that war, helped stop the nation from joining the League of Nations.
Just `the ranch`
Besides power, Hearst had enough money to spend $30 million, a staggering sum at the time, on San Simeon, which he quaintly called ”the ranch.” The
`20s was a period when the rich loved to flaunt their wealth, and no one flaunted it more than William Randolph Hearst.
For sheer size and cost, sheer grandiosity of every kind, Simeon compares with almost any house built back East by the likes of the Vanderbilts. But this was California-looser, lustier than the hidebound East. Hearst`s tastes went `way beyond the medieval dining halls, vaulted ceilings and walk-in fireplaces that other plutocrats favored.
Oh, he had these, sure. But who else had polar-bear pits? Giraffes on the grass? Leopards on the lawn? Some descendants of these wild animals still roam the mountain, we were told. They say you occasionally can see a zebra or mountain goat around a turn in the road.
The pear-shaped publisher, whose newspapers succeeded on his formula of
”sex, sensation and sea serpents,” took pretty much the same approach to mansion-building.
Our tour started outdoors with the Neptune Pool. Roman emperors might have envied this-the marble, the pillars, the naked statues, the temple gates. No wonder that Stanley Kubrick came here to film the pool scene in
”Spartacus.”
Contrasting views
From the pool, looking west, we could see nothing but pure blue sky, a sensation that really did make us feel as if we were on Olympus. The other way we saw the mountains through a frame of tall palms that Hearst, like some ancient pharaoh, had had delivered by barge up the coast from warmer Southern California.
Soon we were inside the house and looking at the ”doge`s suite,” the blue-tinted private quarters of some long-ago ruler of Venice. Then we were off to see other guest rooms, each one a museum of the decorative arts.
”Cary Grant said he was here 34 times, and he stayed in a different bedroom every time,” Coleman informed us.
Owned other properties
Hearst, at the time of his death, was said to have had the world`s largest collection of art objects. Besides San Simeon, he owned a mansion at Sands Point, N.Y., where his wife, Millicent, stayed; he owned other properties as well, including a million-acre ranch in Mexico.
The style of decoration at San Simeon is southern European and medieval. From one room to the next we seemed to pass from one country to another, and from one century to the next. Many of the walls, ceilings, floors, doors-sometimes whole rooms-had been taken from the castles and estates of Europe.
Tour No. 2-there are four tours in all-took us into the most intimate quarters of the mansion, the parts that most guests never saw. Each evening the aging host would have dinner with them at the knights` table in the banner-bedecked great dining hall. After the meal, and perhaps a private screening in his movie theater, he would retire with Marion Davies, taking an elevator to the Gothic suite.
Then, to work
Then, while the party continued below, the publisher would lay out copies of his newspapers, flown in from the scattered cities, and go over them with a critical eye.
For the next few hours, Coleman told us, he would remain in the Gothic study, doing the business of the 94 corporations that he owned or had an interest in.
Hearst and his mistress each had a bedroom in the Gothic suite. Only the guests selected to sleep in the ”celestial suites” in the two bell towers had a higher perch.
All told, the Hearst castle has 165 rooms, far too many to see on a single tour. That`s why there are four. Each begins at the Neptune Pool and ends precisely 1 hour, 45 minutes later at the indoor Roman Pool, itself a marvel of hammered gold and Venetian-glass tiles.
Little has changed
Out-of-doors, as within, nothing much has changed from Hearst`s day. His property at its peak amounted to 250,000 acres; today, the state owns only the 125 acres at the very peak of the hill. But nothing the eye can see from that hill shows any sign of change.
The Hearst Corp. still owns 80,000 of the acres. Today, the company remains a media giant-if anything, larger than before. In addition to its chain of newspapers, it owns two book-publishing houses and a long list of magazines, from Redbook and Cosmopolitan to Popular Mechanics and Sports Afield.
But it is here, at San Simeon, that the spirit of William Randolph lives. In one frozen moment in his book, Niven captured him forever-nearly 6 feet 6 inches tall, round-bellied, with an unruly crop of gray hair-welcoming weekend guests in San Simeon`s vast reception hall:
”On an immense Spanish table in the middle of the room stood a very large bowl full of fruit juice, and into this bowl W.R. Hearst was pouring a thimbleful of gin.”
