In May 1947, William Randolph Hearst descended the hill from his castle for the last time. Behind him stood 165 rooms filled with medieval tapestries, Renaissance paintings, and Roman statues worth millions. Ahead of him lay a rented room in Beverly Hills, far from the kingdom he had spent twenty-eight years building on a California hilltop. Hearst had once owned the largest media empire in America, controlled what millions of people read each day, and built a palace that made European royalty jealous.
The dream that created his enchanted hill also destroyed everything he had worked to achieve. The story begins with a ten-year-old boy clinging to the tale of a pony as it climbed a California hillside. Young William Randolph Hearst arrived at his father’s ranch near San Simeon in the early 1870s, hauled up steep slopes to a spot the family called Camp Hill. There, under canvas tents pitched by ranch hands, the Hursts camped beneath the stars, listening to the Pacific Ocean crash against rocks far below.
George Hearst had purchased the original forty thousand acres in 1865, back when California still felt like a frontier. He had made his fortune in mining, discovering part of the legendary Comstock Lode and developing the Homestake mine. It was William’s mother, Phoebe Apperson Hearst, who planted the seeds of what would eventually consume her son. In 1873, when William was ten, she took him on a grand tour of Europe.
They visited castles in France, toured museums in Italy, and walked through palaces where kings had once lived. Young William saw rooms filled with paintings by old masters and furniture crafted by artists whose names meant nothing to him then but would become obsessions later. He watched his mother buy art and antiques, learning that beauty could be owned, that history itself could be purchased and brought home. When he returned to California and those camping trips on Camp Hill, he carried with him a vision of something far more magnificent than canvas tents and campfires.
William attended Harvard, where he proved himself more interested in parties and pranks than studies. He worked as business editor of the Harvard Lampoon, showing early signs of his future career, but was eventually expelled for various misadventures, including sending chamber pots engraved with professors’ faces as gifts to faculty members. His father, recognizing that traditional education was not going to work for his restless son, gave him control of the San Francisco Examiner in 1887. The newspaper had been acquired by George as payment for a gambling debt, and it was struggling.
William transformed it into something new: sensational, shocking, packed with scandals and murders designed to grab attention and sell copies. He hired talented writers and photographers, paid them well, and ran up massive debts while building circulation. His father watched the losses mount, but William’s instincts proved correct. By 1890, the Examiner was turning a profit.
When Phoebe Hearst died in 1919, William inherited not just the San Simeon property but thousands of additional acres his mother had accumulated. The estate had grown to nearly 250,000 acres of California coastline and inland ranges. William was fifty-six years old, wealthy beyond measure from his newspaper holdings, and finally ready to create the castle he had been dreaming about since he was ten. Julia Morgan was not an obvious choice to build America’s most ambitious private residence.
She was a woman in a profession dominated entirely by men, working in an era when female architects were so rare they were treated as curiosities. Born in 1872 in San Francisco, Morgan had been the first woman admitted to the architecture program at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. She endured years of discrimination and skepticism before finally being admitted in 1898 and graduating in 1902. When she returned to California and opened her practice in 1904, she became the first licensed female architect in the state.
Morgan specialized in institutional buildings: churches, schools, YWCAs. She had already designed buildings for Phoebe Hearst, which is how she came to his attention. In 1919, shortly after his mother’s death, Hearst summoned Morgan to discuss a project. He reportedly told her they were tired of camping out in the open at the ranch in San Simeon and wanted to build something a little more comfortable.
Morgan, who had seen the site, understood immediately that Hearst was not talking about a simple ranch house. He described his vision: something inspired by the European castles he had toured as a child, something that would showcase the art and antiques he had been collecting for years, something comfortable for entertaining but grand enough to impress anyone who saw it. Morgan accepted the challenge. She was forty-seven years old, at the height of her abilities, and ready for a project that would test everything she had learned.
She could not have known it would consume the next twenty-eight years of her life. They named the estate La Cuesta Encantada, the Enchanted Hill. Construction began in 1920, and from the start it was clear this would be unlike anything else in America. Morgan designed a complex of buildings: a main residence she called Casa Grande, surrounded by three guest houses named for the views from their windows.
The architecture mixed Mediterranean Revival with Spanish Renaissance and Gothic elements. The relationship between Hearst and Morgan was extraordinary for its time. He treated her as an equal, trusting her judgment on technical matters while pushing his own aesthetic vision. They communicated constantly through telegrams and letters, thousands of them over the years.
Morgan would spend weeks at the site supervising construction, then return to her San Francisco office to work on other projects, then go back to San Simeon when Hearst wanted to discuss changes, because there were always changes. Hearst would see something in a European catalog, or buy an entire room from a Spanish monastery, or decide he wanted a different ceiling in the assembly room, and Morgan would have to figure out how to incorporate these new ideas into buildings already under construction. The Neptune Pool alone went through three complete rebuilds, the final version completed in 1936 stretching 104 feet and featuring marble columns and statuary surrounded by a facade inspired by a Roman temple. Inside the buildings, every room became a showcase for Hearst’s collecting obsession.
He purchased entire ceilings from Spanish monasteries and Italian palazzos, having them carefully dismantled, shipped to California, and reassembled in his castle. Gothic tapestries hung next to Renaissance paintings. Roman statues stood in gardens designed by French landscape architects. It was a museum masquerading as a home.
Morgan handled it all with remarkable patience, supervising not just the buildings but everything needed to support them: water systems, power generation, road construction, even housing for the workers. She designed structures for Hearst’s private zoo, which eventually housed the world’s largest collection of exotic animals in private hands, and warehouses to store the seemingly endless stream of art and antiques arriving from Europe. Marian Davies was just nineteen when William Randolph Hearst first saw her performing in the Ziegfeld Follies in 1916. She was blonde, beautiful in a girl-next-door way, and blessed with natural comic timing.
Hearst was fifty-three, married with five sons, and one of the most powerful men in America. When he decided he wanted Marian Davies, there was little question that he would get her. He attended the Follies every night for eight weeks, sitting in the front row, sending flowers and gifts. By 1917 their relationship had become intimate.
Divorce was out of the question: Millicent refused to give Hearst the freedom to remarry, and Catholic doctrine meant he could not simply walk away from his marriage. So Marian became his mistress, a relationship that would last until Hearst’s death thirty-four years later. Hearst threw his resources into making Marian a movie star. In 1918 he formed Cosmopolitan Pictures specifically to produce her films.
The tragedy is that Marian had genuine talent: she was a gifted comedian with natural timing and charm, as films like The Patsy and Show People showcased perfectly. But Hearst insisted on casting her in dramatic romantic roles that did not suit her gifts. He wanted her to be a serious actress, a tragic heroine, when she was born to make people laugh. By the mid-1920s, San Simeon had become as much Marian’s home as Hearst’s.
She was the hostess of the castle, planning the elaborate weekend parties that made the estate famous. Movie stars, politicians, and business magnates all wanted an invitation, and Marian was the one who made it all work. She softened Hearst’s rougher edges and brought warmth to an environment that could easily have been cold and formal. In 1928, William Randolph Hearst stood at the peak of his power.
He owned twenty-eight newspapers and eighteen magazines. His publications reached one in four Americans. His media empire generated enormous revenue, and he spent it as fast as it came in. The castle alone had cost over ten million dollars by 1930, and construction continued.
He purchased estates across the country, including a Welsh castle called St. Donats. He bought art with abandon, so much that warehouses in New York and California overflowed with unopened crates. At one point his art collection was valued at fifty million dollars, the largest ever assembled by a private individual.
Then came October 1929 and the stock market crash that triggered the Great Depression. Advertising revenue, the lifeblood of newspapers and magazines, dried up. But Hearst did not cut back. He kept buying art, kept spending on Marian’s movies even as they lost money at the box office, kept construction going at San Simeon.
By 1933, San Simeon itself had to be mortgaged to Harry Chandler, owner of the Los Angeles Times, for six hundred thousand dollars. The castle Hearst had built with cash was now secured by debt. By 1937, the two corporations that controlled Hearst’s empire found themselves 126 million dollars in debt. When he tried to raise money through a bond sale, investors refused.
The board of directors took control away from Hearst and formed a committee to salvage what they could. The committee’s solution was brutal: sell everything not essential to the core newspaper business. Starting in 1937 and continuing through the early 1940s, Hearst sold art and antiques on a scale that shocked the collecting world. In 1941 he put twenty thousand items up for auction.
The sales included paintings by Van Dyck, medieval religious objects, even George Washington’s waistcoat and Thomas Jefferson’s Bible. Entire rooms that had been carefully assembled were broken up and sold piecemeal. At San Simeon, Hearst had to tell Julia Morgan to stop all work. In 1937, construction halted for the first time since 1920.
The constant sound of building that had filled the hilltop for seventeen years suddenly went silent. Marian watched Hearst’s empire crumble and made a decision that surprised everyone who thought she was just a gold digger. She sold her jewelry, her stocks, and real estate she had accumulated, and wrote Hearst a check for one million dollars to help save him from complete bankruptcy. She could have walked away.
Instead, she gave him everything she had. Hearst avoided official bankruptcy, but at seventy-four years old, the man who had once dominated American journalism was essentially working for people who had once worked for him. Hearst and Marian retreated to San Simeon, living more quietly. The lavish parties stopped.
Most of the servants were let go. World War II brought an unexpected reprieve. With the war economy booming, advertising revenues soared, and Hearst’s newspapers became profitable again. By 1945, Hearst felt secure enough to return to San Simeon and resume construction on a limited scale.
But he was eighty-two years old, and his health was failing. In early 1947, his doctors told him he needed to be near medical facilities. San Simeon was five miles from the nearest road and another thirty miles from the nearest town. If Hearst had a medical emergency on the hilltop, he would likely die before reaching a hospital.
In May 1947, Hearst made the decision to leave San Simeon. He and Marian packed what they could and moved to her house in Beverly Hills. It was a comfortable home, but it was not a castle. Hearst went from living in 165 rooms in a palace to renting space in someone else’s house.
He never returned to San Simeon. At the castle, a skeleton staff maintained the buildings and grounds, but with no residents and no guests, the place felt abandoned. The exotic animals were gradually sold off or donated. The buildings began showing signs of neglect.
When Hearst died on August 14, 1951, at age eighty-eight, Marian was present at the house, but Hearst’s family immediately took control and arranged the funeral without consulting her. Marian was not invited to the funeral. The woman who had spent thirty-four years as Hearst’s companion, who had given him a million dollars when no one else would, was excluded from his final goodbye. She had always drunk heavily, but after Hearst’s death her drinking became worse.
She died in 1961, just sixty-four years old. Hearst’s will provided instructions for San Simeon. The castle and much of its contents were to be offered to the state of California as a gift, with the stipulation that it be maintained and opened to the public. In 1957, six years after Hearst’s death, the Hearst Corporation officially donated the property to the state.
Julia Morgan, who had closed her San Francisco office in 1950 after a career of forty-two years, died in 1957, the same year the castle was donated, never seeing what would become of the project that had defined her later career. Today, Hearst Castle is one of California’s premier tourist attractions, visited by hundreds of thousands of people each year. The state operates it as a museum and park. Visitors climb the same stairs Hearst climbed, walk through the same rooms where Hollywood stars once gathered, and swim in pools where Marian Davies once hosted parties.
Hearst built his castle as a private retreat, a place where he could escape public scrutiny and live as he pleased with the woman he loved. He spent decades and tens of millions of dollars creating a world that would be his alone. And now thousands of strangers tour through it every week. The most private dream imaginable has become utterly public.
Much of Hearst’s original collection remains at the castle. The Spanish ceilings are still in place. The Gothic tapestries still hang on the walls. But something essential was lost when Hearst left.
The castle without its creator feels empty despite all the treasures. The rooms are beautiful, but they are museum rooms now, roped off and climate controlled. And everywhere there are the unfinished projects: rooms that were being redesigned when construction stopped in 1947, plans that Julia Morgan drew but never implemented. The castle is frozen at the moment Hearst’s health forced him to leave, incomplete despite twenty-eight years of construction.
The story of Hearst Castle is often told as a tale of excess, a rich man who spent too much, collected too compulsively, built too grandly, and paid the price when his fortune evaporated. There is truth in that interpretation. But there is another way to understand what happened on that California hilltop. Hearst created something genuinely magnificent, a palace that combined architectural brilliance with the greatest art collection a private individual had ever assembled.
The tragedy is not that Hearst built the castle. The tragedy is that he could not stop building it. He could not accept that dreams have limits, that even great fortunes can be exhausted. He poured his entire empire into those 127 acres on a hilltop, and when the empire failed, he lost everything: his media holdings, his wealth, his independence, and finally the castle itself.
The dream consumed him completely. The boy who fell in love with European castles built his own castle in California, then spent the rest of his life trapped by it. The castle won. The dream consumed the empire.
And the man who spent twenty-eight years building his perfect world spent his final years exiled from it, living in a borrowed house in Beverly Hills, waiting to die.