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Description
Ponyfied William Randolph Hearst is strolling through the garden of his castle.

William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951) was a wealthy newspaper man and a media genius whose influence extended to publishing, politics, Hollywood, the art world and everyday American life. His power and vision allowed him to build one of the most ambitious architectural endeavors in American history, the result is his sprawling estate known as Hearst Castle in San Simeon, California.

William Randolph Hearst was born in San Francisco, California in 1863, His father George Hearst was a wealthy miner and an engineer that owned his own gold mine as a result of relentless work and creativity in his various mining interests, allowed young William the opportunity to see and experience the world as few do. When he was ten years old, William toured Europe with his mother, Phoebe. He was Inspired by the grandeur and scale of castles, art and history. This experience fueled Hearst’s life long aspiration to recreate this majesty for his own enjoyment. Back in the United States, Hearst was enrolled in St. Paul’s Preparatory School in Concord, New Hampshire at the age of 16. Hearst continued his education at Harvard where he showed the first signs of becoming a future publishing tycoon. At Harvard, he excelled in journalism and acted as the business manager of the Harvard Lampoon. His election to the “Hasty Pudding” theatrical group revealed his talent and interest in drama.
During his time at Harvard, his father George acquired the San Francisco Examiner as payment for a gambling debt. Soon after, William pleaded with his father to turn over the paper to him and In 1887 the older Hearst relented and relinquished control to his ambitious son. Shortly after, William Randolph Hearst purchased another newspaper, the New York Journal, which would become the second in a long list of newspaper holdings that he acquired in the next decade of his life. At his peak he owned more than two dozen newspapers nationwide; in fact, nearly one in four Americans got their news from a Hearst paper. In 1903, Mr. Hearst married Millicent Willson in New York City. The couple had five sons together during their marriage: George, William Randolph Jr., John and twins Randolph and David. Their honeymoon drive across the European continent inspired Mr. Hearst to launch his first magazine, Motor. Motor became the foundation for another publishing endeavor that is still known as Hearst Magazines. Hearst’s interest in politics led him to election to the United States House of Representatives as a Congressman from New York in 1902. After reelection in 1904, he unsuccessfully pursued the New York Governorship in 1906.
In the 1920s he started one of the first print-media companies to enter radio broadcasting. Mr. Hearst was a major producer of movie newsreels with his company Hearst Metrotone News, and is widely credited with creating the comic strip syndication business. His King Features Syndicate today is the largest distributor of comics and text features in the world. In his career, William Hearst produced over 100 films including, “The Perils of Pauline,” “The Exploits of Elaine” and “The Mysteries of Myra.” In the 1940s he was an early pioneer of television.

In addition to his brilliant business endeavors, Mr. Hearst amassed a vast and impressive art collection that included American and European Old Master paintings and sculptures, tapestries, oriental rugs, Greek, Roman and Egyptian antiquities, silver, furniture and historic ceilings. Much of this collection found its home at Hearst Castle and five other sumptuous properties, while the remainder filled warehouses on both the East and West Coasts. Like many of his contemporaries, Hearst voraciously collected art and established a museum quality collection.
Throughout his life, Hearst dreamed of building a castle similar to those he had seen on his European tour as a boy. Hearst Castle was to become the realization of this dream as he and architect Julia Morgan collaborated for 28 years to construct a castle worthy of those he saw in Europe.

During construction Hearst used the Castle as his primary residence, and it was here that he continually entertained the elite of Hollywood, politics and sports. Hearst left his San Simeon estate in 1947 to seek medical care unavailable in the remote location. While the Castle was never completely finished, it stands as the remarkable achievement of one man’s dream. The estate is a pastiche of historic architectural styles that its owner admired in his travels around Europe. Hearst was a prolific buyer who did not so much purchase art and antiques to furnish his home as he did build his home to get his bulging collection out of warehouses. This led to incongruous elements, such as the private cinema, whose walls were lined with shelves of rare books. The floor plan of the Main Building is chaotic due to his habit of buying centuries-old ceilings, which dictated the proportions and decor of various rooms. Hearst Castle featured 56 bedrooms, 61 bathrooms, 19 sitting rooms, 127 acres (0.5 km2) of gardens, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, tennis courts, a movie theater, an airfield, and the world's largest private zoo. Zebras and other exotic animals still roam the grounds. Morgan, an accomplished civil engineer, devised a gravity-based water delivery system that transports water from artesian wells on the slopes of Pine Mountain, a 3,500-foot (1,100 m) high peak 7 miles (11 km) east of Hearst Castle, to a reservoir on Rocky Butte, a 2,000-foot (610 m) knoll less than a mile southeast from Hearst Castle.
One highlight of the estate is the outdoor Neptune Pool, located near the edge of the hilltop, which offers an expansive vista of the mountains, ocean and the main house. The Neptune Pool patio features an ancient Roman temple front, transported wholesale from Europe and reconstructed at the site. Hearst was an inveterate tinkerer, and would tear down structures and rebuild them on a whim. For example, the Neptune Pool was rebuilt three times before Hearst was satisfied. As a consequence of Hearst's persistent design changes, the estate was never completed in his lifetime.
Although Hearst Castle's ornamentation is borrowed from historic European themes, its underlying structure is primarily steel reinforced concrete. The use of modern engineering techniques reflects Morgan's background as a civil engineering graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and the first female architecture graduate of the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Morgan designed tiles for the castle, and used several tile companies to produce them: Solon & Schemmel (San Jose), Grueby Faience Company (Boston), Batchelder (Pasadena), and California Faience (Berkeley). Albert Solon and Frank Schemmel came to Hearst Castle to perform the tile work. Camille Solon, son of Marc-Louis-Emmanuel Solon and brother of Albert Solon of Solon and Schemmel Tile Company, designed the mosaics of blue-and-gold Venetian glass tile used in the property's indoor Roman Pool and he also designed and painted the murals in the Gothic Study of Casa Grande. During Hearst's ownership, a private power plant supplied electricity to the remote location. Most of the estate's chandeliers have bare light bulbs, because electrical technology was so new when Hearst Castle was built.
Invitations to Hearst Castle were highly coveted during its heyday in the 1920s and 1930s. The Hollywood and political elite often visited, usually flying into the estate's airfield or taking a private Hearst-owned train car from Los Angeles. Among Hearst's guests were Charlie Chaplin, Cary Grant, the Marx Brothers, Charles Lindbergh, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, James Stewart, Bob Hope, Calvin Coolidge, Franklin Roosevelt, Dolores del Río, and Winston Churchill. While guests were expected to attend the formal dinners each evening, they were normally left to their own dwellings during the day while Hearst directed his business affairs. Since "the Ranch" had so many facilities, guests were rarely at a loss for things to do. The estate's theater usually screened films from Hearst's own movie studio, Cosmopolitan Productions.

In 1941, Orson Wells made a movie baised on Hearst's life story called Citizen Kane which is a movie about a newspaper tycoon named Charles Foster Kane and like Hearst he built his own castle called Xanadu and he collected statues and had a private zoo on his property. Hearst hated the movie and upon its release, he prohibited mention of the film in any of his newspapers and he banned any advertising, reviewing, or mentioning of it in his papers, and had his journalists libel Welles. Welles used Hearst's opposition as a pretext for previewing the film in several opinion-making screenings in Los Angeles, lobbying for its artistic worth against the hostile campaign that Hearst was waging. A special press screening took place in early March. Henry Luce was in attendance and reportedly wanted to buy the film from RKO for $1 million to distribute it himself. The reviews for this screening were positive. A Hollywood Review headline read, "Mr. Genius Comes Through; 'Kane' Astonishing Picture". The Motion Picture Herald reported about the screening and Welles's intention to sue RKO. Time magazine wrote that "The objection of Mr. Hearst, who founded a publishing empire on sensationalism, is ironic. For to most of the several hundred people who have seen the film at private screenings, Citizen Kane is the most sensational product of the U.S. movie industry." A second press screening occurred in April. When Schaefer rejected Hearst's offer to suppress the film, Hearst banned every newspaper and station in his media conglomerate from reviewing—or even mentioning—the film. He also had many movie theaters ban it, and many did not show it through fear of being socially exposed by his massive newspaper empire.

The Oscar-nominated documentary The Battle Over Citizen Kane lays the blame for the film's relative failure squarely at the feet of Hearst. The film did decent business at the box office; it went on to be the sixth highest grossing film in its year of release, a modest success its backers found acceptable. Nevertheless, the film's commercial performance fell short of its creators' expectations. Hearst's biographer David Nasaw points out that Hearst's actions were not the only reason Kane failed, however: the innovations Welles made with narrative, as well as the dark message at the heart of the film (that the pursuit of success is ultimately futile) meant that a popular audience could not appreciate its merits. Hearst's attacks against Welles went beyond attempting to suppress the film. Welles said that while he was on his post-filming lecture tour a police detective approached him at a restaurant and advised him not to go back to his hotel. A 14-year-old girl had reportedly been hidden in the closet of his room, and two photographers were waiting for him to walk in. Knowing he would be jailed after the resulting publicity, Welles did not return to the hotel but waited until the train left town the following morning. "But that wasn't Hearst," Welles said, "that was a hatchet man from the local Hearst paper who thought he would advance himself by doing it.”

Welles never confirmed a principal source for the character of Charles Foster Kane. Houseman wrote that Kane is a synthesis of different personalities, with Hearst's life used as the main source. Some events and details were invented,and Houseman and Mankiewicz also "grafted anecdotes from other giants of journalism, including Pulitzer, Northcliffe and Mank's first boss, Herbert Bayard Swope." Welles said, "Mr. Hearst was quite a bit like Kane, although Kane isn't really founded on Hearst in particular, many people sat for it so to speak"Kane's career in the publishing world is born of idealistic social service, but gradually evolves into a ruthless pursuit of power. Narrated principally through flashbacks, the story is told through the research of a newsreel reporter seeking to solve the mystery of the newspaper magnate's dying word: "Rosebud."

William Randolph Hearst died in Beverly Hills on August 14, 1951, at the age of 88. He was interred in the Hearst family mausoleum at the Cypress Lawn Cemetery in Colma, California. All of his sons followed their father into the media business and his namesake, William Randolph, Jr., became a Pulitzer Prize-winning Hearst newspaper reporter.

Description
Ponyfied William Randolph Hearst is strolling through the garden of his castle.

William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951) was a wealthy newspaper man and a media genius whose influence extended to publishing, politics, Hollywood, the art world and everyday American life. His power and vision allowed him to build one of the most ambitious architectural endeavors in American history, the result is his sprawling estate known as Hearst Castle in San Simeon, California.

William Randolph Hearst was born in San Francisco, California in 1863, His father George Hearst was a wealthy miner and an engineer that owned his own gold mine as a result of relentless work and creativity in his various mining interests, allowed young William the opportunity to see and experience the world as few do. When he was ten years old, William toured Europe with his mother, Phoebe. He was Inspired by the grandeur and scale of castles, art and history. This experience fueled Hearst’s life long aspiration to recreate this majesty for his own enjoyment. Back in the United States, Hearst was enrolled in St. Paul’s Preparatory School in Concord, New Hampshire at the age of 16. Hearst continued his education at Harvard where he showed the first signs of becoming a future publishing tycoon. At Harvard, he excelled in journalism and acted as the business manager of the Harvard Lampoon. His election to the “Hasty Pudding” theatrical group revealed his talent and interest in drama.
During his time at Harvard, his father George acquired the San Francisco Examiner as payment for a gambling debt. Soon after, William pleaded with his father to turn over the paper to him and In 1887 the older Hearst relented and relinquished control to his ambitious son. Shortly after, William Randolph Hearst purchased another newspaper, the New York Journal, which would become the second in a long list of newspaper holdings that he acquired in the next decade of his life. At his peak he owned more than two dozen newspapers nationwide; in fact, nearly one in four Americans got their news from a Hearst paper. In 1903, Mr. Hearst married Millicent Willson in New York City. The couple had five sons together during their marriage: George, William Randolph Jr., John and twins Randolph and David. Their honeymoon drive across the European continent inspired Mr. Hearst to launch his first magazine, Motor. Motor became the foundation for another publishing endeavor that is still known as Hearst Magazines. Hearst’s interest in politics led him to election to the United States House of Representatives as a Congressman from New York in 1902. After reelection in 1904, he unsuccessfully pursued the New York Governorship in 1906.
In the 1920s he started one of the first print-media companies to enter radio broadcasting. Mr. Hearst was a major producer of movie newsreels with his company Hearst Metrotone News, and is widely credited with creating the comic strip syndication business. His King Features Syndicate today is the largest distributor of comics and text features in the world. In his career, William Hearst produced over 100 films including, “The Perils of Pauline,” “The Exploits of Elaine” and “The Mysteries of Myra.” In the 1940s he was an early pioneer of television.

In addition to his brilliant business endeavors, Mr. Hearst amassed a vast and impressive art collection that included American and European Old Master paintings and sculptures, tapestries, oriental rugs, Greek, Roman and Egyptian antiquities, silver, furniture and historic ceilings. Much of this collection found its home at Hearst Castle and five other sumptuous properties, while the remainder filled warehouses on both the East and West Coasts. Like many of his contemporaries, Hearst voraciously collected art and established a museum quality collection.
Throughout his life, Hearst dreamed of building a castle similar to those he had seen on his European tour as a boy. Hearst Castle was to become the realization of this dream as he and architect Julia Morgan collaborated for 28 years to construct a castle worthy of those he saw in Europe.

During construction Hearst used the Castle as his primary residence, and it was here that he continually entertained the elite of Hollywood, politics and sports. Hearst left his San Simeon estate in 1947 to seek medical care unavailable in the remote location. While the Castle was never completely finished, it stands as the remarkable achievement of one man’s dream. The estate is a pastiche of historic architectural styles that its owner admired in his travels around Europe. Hearst was a prolific buyer who did not so much purchase art and antiques to furnish his home as he did build his home to get his bulging collection out of warehouses. This led to incongruous elements, such as the private cinema, whose walls were lined with shelves of rare books. The floor plan of the Main Building is chaotic due to his habit of buying centuries-old ceilings, which dictated the proportions and decor of various rooms. Hearst Castle featured 56 bedrooms, 61 bathrooms, 19 sitting rooms, 127 acres (0.5 km2) of gardens, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, tennis courts, a movie theater, an airfield, and the world's largest private zoo. Zebras and other exotic animals still roam the grounds. Morgan, an accomplished civil engineer, devised a gravity-based water delivery system that transports water from artesian wells on the slopes of Pine Mountain, a 3,500-foot (1,100 m) high peak 7 miles (11 km) east of Hearst Castle, to a reservoir on Rocky Butte, a 2,000-foot (610 m) knoll less than a mile southeast from Hearst Castle.
One highlight of the estate is the outdoor Neptune Pool, located near the edge of the hilltop, which offers an expansive vista of the mountains, ocean and the main house. The Neptune Pool patio features an ancient Roman temple front, transported wholesale from Europe and reconstructed at the site. Hearst was an inveterate tinkerer, and would tear down structures and rebuild them on a whim. For example, the Neptune Pool was rebuilt three times before Hearst was satisfied. As a consequence of Hearst's persistent design changes, the estate was never completed in his lifetime.
Although Hearst Castle's ornamentation is borrowed from historic European themes, its underlying structure is primarily steel reinforced concrete. The use of modern engineering techniques reflects Morgan's background as a civil engineering graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and the first female architecture graduate of the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Morgan designed tiles for the castle, and used several tile companies to produce them: Solon & Schemmel (San Jose), Grueby Faience Company (Boston), Batchelder (Pasadena), and California Faience (Berkeley). Albert Solon and Frank Schemmel came to Hearst Castle to perform the tile work. Camille Solon, son of Marc-Louis-Emmanuel Solon and brother of Albert Solon of Solon and Schemmel Tile Company, designed the mosaics of blue-and-gold Venetian glass tile used in the property's indoor Roman Pool and he also designed and painted the murals in the Gothic Study of Casa Grande. During Hearst's ownership, a private power plant supplied electricity to the remote location. Most of the estate's chandeliers have bare light bulbs, because electrical technology was so new when Hearst Castle was built.
Invitations to Hearst Castle were highly coveted during its heyday in the 1920s and 1930s. The Hollywood and political elite often visited, usually flying into the estate's airfield or taking a private Hearst-owned train car from Los Angeles. Among Hearst's guests were Charlie Chaplin, Cary Grant, the Marx Brothers, Charles Lindbergh, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, James Stewart, Bob Hope, Calvin Coolidge, Franklin Roosevelt, Dolores del Río, and Winston Churchill. While guests were expected to attend the formal dinners each evening, they were normally left to their own dwellings during the day while Hearst directed his business affairs. Since "the Ranch" had so many facilities, guests were rarely at a loss for things to do. The estate's theater usually screened films from Hearst's own movie studio, Cosmopolitan Productions.

In 1941, Orson Wells made a movie baised on Hearst's life story called Citizen Kane which is a movie about a newspaper tycoon named Charles Foster Kane and like Hearst he built his own castle called Xanadu and he collected statues and had a private zoo on his property. Hearst hated the movie and upon its release, he prohibited mention of the film in any of his newspapers and he banned any advertising, reviewing, or mentioning of it in his papers, and had his journalists libel Welles. Welles used Hearst's opposition as a pretext for previewing the film in several opinion-making screenings in Los Angeles, lobbying for its artistic worth against the hostile campaign that Hearst was waging. A special press screening took place in early March. Henry Luce was in attendance and reportedly wanted to buy the film from RKO for $1 million to distribute it himself. The reviews for this screening were positive. A Hollywood Review headline read, "Mr. Genius Comes Through; 'Kane' Astonishing Picture". The Motion Picture Herald reported about the screening and Welles's intention to sue RKO. Time magazine wrote that "The objection of Mr. Hearst, who founded a publishing empire on sensationalism, is ironic. For to most of the several hundred people who have seen the film at private screenings, Citizen Kane is the most sensational product of the U.S. movie industry." A second press screening occurred in April. When Schaefer rejected Hearst's offer to suppress the film, Hearst banned every newspaper and station in his media conglomerate from reviewing—or even mentioning—the film. He also had many movie theaters ban it, and many did not show it through fear of being socially exposed by his massive newspaper empire.

The Oscar-nominated documentary The Battle Over Citizen Kane lays the blame for the film's relative failure squarely at the feet of Hearst. The film did decent business at the box office; it went on to be the sixth highest grossing film in its year of release, a modest success its backers found acceptable. Nevertheless, the film's commercial performance fell short of its creators' expectations. Hearst's biographer David Nasaw points out that Hearst's actions were not the only reason Kane failed, however: the innovations Welles made with narrative, as well as the dark message at the heart of the film (that the pursuit of success is ultimately futile) meant that a popular audience could not appreciate its merits. Hearst's attacks against Welles went beyond attempting to suppress the film. Welles said that while he was on his post-filming lecture tour a police detective approached him at a restaurant and advised him not to go back to his hotel. A 14-year-old girl had reportedly been hidden in the closet of his room, and two photographers were waiting for him to walk in. Knowing he would be jailed after the resulting publicity, Welles did not return to the hotel but waited until the train left town the following morning. "But that wasn't Hearst," Welles said, "that was a hatchet man from the local Hearst paper who thought he would advance himself by doing it.”

Welles never confirmed a principal source for the character of Charles Foster Kane. Houseman wrote that Kane is a synthesis of different personalities, with Hearst's life used as the main source. Some events and details were invented,and Houseman and Mankiewicz also "grafted anecdotes from other giants of journalism, including Pulitzer, Northcliffe and Mank's first boss, Herbert Bayard Swope." Welles said, "Mr. Hearst was quite a bit like Kane, although Kane isn't really founded on Hearst in particular, many people sat for it so to speak"Kane's career in the publishing world is born of idealistic social service, but gradually evolves into a ruthless pursuit of power. Narrated principally through flashbacks, the story is told through the research of a newsreel reporter seeking to solve the mystery of the newspaper magnate's dying word: "Rosebud."

William Randolph Hearst died in Beverly Hills on August 14, 1951, at the age of 88. He was interred in the Hearst family mausoleum at the Cypress Lawn Cemetery in Colma, California. All of his sons followed their father into the media business and his namesake, William Randolph, Jr., became a Pulitzer Prize-winning Hearst newspaper reporter.