New Times Logo
55 fiction
ad info
archives
avila bay watch
best of slo
classifieds
connections
hot dates
menus
Movies
the shredder
about new times home



Hearst’s revenge

The behemoth mansion is a memorial to the megalomaniac’s life, but was there something more?

BY JOHN RICHARD STEPHENS

William Randolph Hearst was a tremendously powerful and influential man. He could have been a great man. But he wasn’t. He wanted to be a great man and probably thought of himself as one, but he never was. With all his money, power, and connections, he could have done many great things–things that could have profoundly affected our lives. He could have changed the world much more than he did. Instead, after failing in his attempts to become president of the United States, he ended up devoting an inordinate amount of his time and money to building the castle and buying artifacts to put in it.

Hearst was a strange and fascinating character, but the castle is the biggest enigma of his life. Why did he build it? It’s not really a castle and never was intended to be. Hearst called it his ranch house, but it’s definitely not a ranch house. It’s not a mansion–not in the traditional sense. It’s not a personal museum–its treasures are used for decoration, not display. It’s roughly modeled on an Italian hill town, but it’s not supposed to be a town. Some have suggested that it’s a private resort hotel, which is probably partially true. And others believe it’s a memorial to his beloved mother. But evidence appears to point to a different conclusion–that it’s really Hearst’s revenge.

Now take a look at it for a minute.

1.) Here is something to which he devoted a tremendous amount of his time, energy, and money. Guinness Book of Records used to list it as the most expensive private residence. It’s estimated that Hearst poured $30 million to $40 million into it, but it would cost billions to build the castle today. He certainly didn’t care about the expense. The castle had to be perfect, no matter the cost. He had one of the three guest houses torn down and rebuilt farther away because he didn’t like the impression it gave him as he drove up the hill. He also thought the tower of the main building was too stark, so he tore it down and replaced it with two of them. In addition, he spent thousands of dollars moving 33 full-grown Italian cypress trees from Paso Robles. The job took two years. Palm trees were hauled down from Berkeley and at least five large oaks were moved around on the property. One plum tree was moved after it had been planted because it was three inches out of alignment with the other trees in the row.

In the main building there was a huge fireplace, which, when it was lit, needed to have a door ajar on the opposite side of the room to provide a draft until the fire was going or else smoke would come into the room. When Hearst discovered this, he had the fireplace torn out and rebuilt at tremendous expense.

2.) Hearst didn’t really need the castle. He had five other major estates and who knows how many smaller residences. After all, he owned more than two million acres of real estate. He only used the castle as his primary residence from the mid-1920s to about 1940 and then for two and a half years from late 1944 to early 1947, and for many of those years he only used it as his winter residence.

3.) At a time when he should have been more focused on his publishing empire and movie studio, he was busy with the castle. Even after he nearly went bankrupt, he kept on building until his finances forced him to stop in 1938. He resumed construction after the war in 1945, even though he couldn’t really afford it. This was the same year that his beach palace in Santa Monica, which cost him $3.25 million to build, was sold for $600,000 and its contents, which he spent $7 million on, were auctioned off in New York for $204,762. In spite of these losses, and at the age of 82, he resumed his obsessive construction at the castle.

4.) His failing health forced him to leave the castle in 1947–four years before his death–and even though he was too sick to return, he kept on building for another year. He never even got to sleep in his master bedroom. And the castle remains unfinished. If he had continued living for many more years, it’s doubtful he ever would have finished it. He claimed it was only about half finished, but this is optimistic considering he constantly revised and altered the plans during construction. He continually wanted to make it bigger and better. It was his obsession.

5.) Hearst didn’t intend to pass the castle on to his family or the Hearst Corporation. He knew it would be an albatross around their necks, because it was too expensive to maintain. Instead he planned to donate it and its contents to the University of California at Berkeley. After all that work and expense, he wanted to just give it away. But, after his death, UC Berkeley wouldn’t take it, which created a problem. His family didn’t want it and no multimillionaires could afford to buy it. It wasn’t until six years later that his sons were finally able to convince the state to take it to turn into a park.

To summarize, it was his obsession. He devoted his time, money, and energy into it at the expense of everything else even though he didn’t need it. And he didn’t want his family to have it.

So why the hell did he build it? His own explanation doesn’t tell us much. He told one of his sons, "I just wanted to. Period. I loved the place."

Perhaps it was a monument to himself, as W. A. Swanberg writes in "Citizen Hearst." "It was almost as if Hearst subconsciously realized that his newspapers were trashy, his political life a failure, even his motion pictures not entirely successful, and was determined that in San Simeon, if nothing else, he would leave an enduring monument to his greatness."

Maybe it was just his creative spirit run amok. And maybe the fact that he was born a twin, with the death of his sibling at birth, had something to do with it. But, as with the Winchester Mystery House, it’s likely there was something much deeper driving him.

It starts to become clearer when we look at his relationship with his parents. When William Randolph Hearst’s father, George, died in 1891, he left his entire $18 million fortune to his wife, Phoebe. Even though W. R. was 27 years old at the time, his father left him nothing because he knew his son had absolutely no money sense and would quickly spend it all. For their entire lives, George and Phoebe treated their son like a wayward child and never trusted him with money of his own. Even as an adult they doled out money to him in a monthly allowance.

Up until his mother’s death in 1919, W. R. constantly had to ask his mother for money. She did give him money to expand his business, as well as for most of the things he asked–often in the form of loans–but he still had to ask her and get her approval. He was 56 when she died and he finally gained financial independence, but up until then he was dependent on her.

Phoebe also thought he had no sense when it came to women and she directly busted up two–possibly three–of his five serious relationships.

All of this must have been very frustrating for Hearst, but what probably started him on the road toward building the castle was something that began in about 1893 when he was 30. It was shortly after his father died that he decided to build a mansion on his father’s horse ranch near Pleasanton. His father’s death had halted improvements to the place, so he took up the reins.

With the help of an architect, he completely modernized the old house and began to build a larger mansion high on a ridge overlooking Livermore Valley. In front of the mansion he installed a five-ton stone wellhead he had bought in Verona during a trip to Italy and had shipped to the property. Hearst called the ranch El Rancho del Oso and, according to John Tebbel in "The Life and Good Times of William Randolph Hearst," it was "Hearst’s only real home on the West Coast until he built San Simeon in the early ‘20s."

By 1896 Phoebe heard what was going on and was furious that he would take over her land and build on it without her permission. She came out from Washington to see what he was up to. At that time W. R. had moved to New York and was building up his newly acquired newspaper there, but the shell of the new mansion in Pleasanton had been completed. After chewing out W. R., she seized control of the project and had the architect redesign the mansion to her specifications. She then renamed the ranch La Hacienda del Poco de la Verona after W. R.’s wellhead and it became her primary residence until she died 23 years later.

When Phoebe died, W. R. inherited just about everything except the Hearst Building in San Francisco, the large estate at Wyntoon about 30 miles southwest of Mt. Shasta (which he later bought back), and the Pleasanton Hacienda. Even in death she wouldn’t let him have the hacienda. Her will stipulated that it had to be sold, with the proceeds going to W. R.’s five sons. No one could live there after she was gone. Hearst loved his mother and even though he inherited an estate estimated to be worth $7.5 million (during her life she had given more than $20 million to charities and UC Berkeley), no doubt he took this as quite a slap in the face. He definitely was extremely upset over losing Wyntoon.

Hearst was in New York when he received word of his mother’s failing health and immediately took a train to California. During the two weeks his mother lay dying of pneumonia at the hacienda, Hearst spent part of the time in San Francisco with Julia Morgan drawing up plans for the castle. He actually began discussing the idea with her as early as 1905, but the plans were very modest. That is, until right before his mother died. That’s when the castle began.

It probably wasn’t his gaining control of the fortune that set him off, though that may have had something to do with it. More likely it was her withholding the hacienda from him and selling it off that did it. She had made this change to her will just two years before her death, so he probably didn’t find out about it until right before she died. She took from him his mansion on the ridge, so after her death–now that he, at the age of 56, was finally in control–he was determined to build the biggest damn edifice on a ridge that anyone had ever seen.

He went on to spectacularly prove that his parents were right about him after all–he was totally clueless when it came to spending money. He always got rid of it faster than he could get it. It was only the limits to his credit that prevented him from spending more. Ironically his parents, themselves, were shopaholics and never showed restraint with their own spending. Their shopping genes definitely combined in their son to produce the king of all shoppers. When W. R. wanted something, he bought it, no matter the price.

An excellent story illustrating this occurred long after he had inherited his mother’s fortune and involved a small piece of land next to his Santa Monica beach palace. The land was owned by Will Rogers, and Hearst wanted it for a tennis court. The two had known each other since Rogers’ days with the Ziegfeld Follies. Rogers didn’t particularly want to sell the land, so when Hearst’s realtor approached him, Rogers grudgingly set an outrageous price of $25,000 for it. Hearst came back with an offer of $20,000. Rogers countered with a price of $35,000, so Hearst offered $30,000, to which Rogers raised the price to $45,000. Whether the humorist was peeved with Hearst for some reason or was just playing around with him isn’t known, but they went back and forth like this until, in the end, Hearst bought the land for $105,000. He explained to his realtor, "Pleasure is worth what you can afford to pay for it." Unfortunately Hearst routinely spent far more than he could afford to pay for it.

Hearst never saved money. In fact, he almost always spent his substantial income long before he received it by pushing his credit to the limit. He never paid in cash, because he rarely had any. Instead, he offered personal "notes" that he would usually delay paying for as long as possible, and when his creditors grew desperate, he would finally settle with them on his own terms and always to his advantage.

It’s said that by the 1920s he was spending $15 million a year. That’s $155 million a year in today’s money. By the mid-1930s his companies were $110 million to $126 million in debt, or around $1.5 billion in 2002 dollars. While that doesn’t quite compare with Enron’s estimated $13 billion in debt, it’s still nothing to sneeze at. Hearst’s bankruptcy would have ruined a lot of people. In order to prevent this, control of the Hearst Corporation was taken away from Hearst in about 1937 and turned over to more qualified businessmen who, through management changes and restructuring, were able to reduce Hearst’s debt to just $4 million by 1945.

The lowest point probably came in 1941 when Hearst almost lost the castle. Not only was Hearst unable to pay his mortgage on San Simeon, he discovered that the note was held by his competitor, Harry Chandler, owner of the Los Angeles Times. Chandler was as big a tycoon as Hearst and was the model for the villain in the 1976 film Chinatown. Apparently he had no desire to own the castle, so he extended Hearst’s loan.

If Hearst had lost the castle, it probably would have destroyed him. He had failed in so many other areas of his life and in his mind these failures probably eclipsed his achievements. The castle remained tangible evidence of his success, even though his heyday had passed. It was a reminder of those glorious years he had following the death of his mother up until control of his businesses was taken from him.

Some say he built the castle to honor his mother–as a memorial to her. His will does say that he wanted to donate it to UC Berkeley in her name, but he must have been painfully aware that she would have thoroughly disapproved of his building the castle in the first place. Did he build it to honor her? That’s doubtful. As biographer Judith Robinson so perceptively put it in her book "The Hearsts," "It was almost as if he were shaking his fist at the heavens and saying, ‘I’ll show you, mother.’ " So in a way, it is a memorial to her–one sparked by revenge. But it was probably also a celebration of his freedom from her control. A celebration of his freedom for that short period of time when he was able to do whatever he wanted. Æ

Freelancer John Richard Stephens is an author from Cambria. He can be reached for comments through the editor at [email protected].




Pick up New Times at over 600 locations in
San Luis Obispo and Northern Santa Barbara Counties.
home | 55 fiction | about new times | ad info | archives | avila bay watch
best of slo | classifieds | connections | hot dates | menus
movies | the shredder

New Times
©2002 New Times Magazine San Luis Obispo, CA USA
web site hosted and maintained by ITECH Solutions

to top