The telegram arrived in San Francisco without ceremony. Stop all work entirely San Simeon. It was 1937, and William Randolph Hearst had just sent his architect of twenty-eight years a command that ended the most ambitious private construction project in American history. Julia Morgan closed her office at the estate and returned to the city.
The castle on the California hilltop would never be finished. Hearst had been building that castle since 1919, when he inherited 250,000 acres of rugged coastal ranch land from his mother, Phoebe. He was fifty-six years old then, already one of the most powerful men in America, a newspaper publisher whose empire reached nearly one in four readers. But the dream the castle embodied was far older.
When he was ten, Phoebe had taken him on an eighteen-month tour of Europe, where he stood beneath medieval fortresses and Renaissance palaces and became mesmerized by their scale and permanence. He wanted to build something like that, something that would last for centuries. The land at San Simeon, where his family had camped in tents on a spot they called Camp Hill, was where he would do it. He wrote to Morgan in 1919 with what became a famous understatement.
He wanted to build a little something on the hill. He was getting tired of camping in tents. Morgan, the first woman licensed as an architect in California, had already designed buildings for his mother. She knew Hearst was not asking for anything little.
She climbed the sixteen-hundred-foot hill, assessed the remote, windswept site, and began planning the estate that would eventually be called La Cuesta Encantada, the Enchanted Hill. Morgan was exceptionally suited to the task. She had studied engineering at Berkeley and had become the first woman admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, she had pioneered reinforced concrete construction that survived seismic stress while other buildings collapsed.
She was methodical, patient, and technically brilliant, qualities that proved essential when working with a client who changed his mind constantly and never accepted limits. Construction began in 1920. Workers first built a road up the hillside, then a water system fed from mountain springs miles away, then a power system. The three guest houses, Casa del Mar, Casa del Monte, and Casa del Sol, were completed by 1922, and Hearst and his mistress, the actress Marion Davies, moved into Casa del Mar while the main building, Casa Grande, rose around them.
The main structure eventually contained 115 rooms, with twin bell towers rising 165 feet above the hilltop, making the castle visible for miles. Hearst was married to Millicent Willson, and she refused to grant him a divorce. For over three decades, Marion Davies lived as his companion, hostess, and the center of his world, but never as his wife. He had met her in 1916 when she was a nineteen-year-old chorus girl in the Ziegfeld Follies and he was a fifty-three-year-old married mogul.
He had founded a film studio to make her a star and used his newspapers to promote her relentlessly. She was genuinely talented, especially in comedy, but he insisted she play only virtuous, respectable roles, even as their private life violated every convention of respectability. The castle was built for her as much as for him, a private kingdom where her legal status did not matter because she reigned regardless. During the 1920s and 1930s, San Simeon became the most celebrated private retreat in America.
Hearst assembled the largest private zoo in the world, with zebras and kangaroos and camels roaming the hillsides. Hollywood stars came constantly: Charlie Chaplin, Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Jean Harlow. Politicians came to court his influence. Winston Churchill stayed as a guest.
Marion served as hostess for extravagant parties, though Hearst imposed strict rules on his guests, including limiting everyone to one cocktail before dinner, a rule aimed at controlling Marion’s worsening drinking. The castle filled with treasures at a pace that overwhelmed any attempt at order. Hearst bought entire ceilings from European palaces, dismantled them, shipped them to California, and had them reinstalled. Sixteenth-century choir stalls from a Spanish monastery lined the dining hall.
Flemish tapestries covered the walls of the assembly room. A fifteenth-century Spanish convent entrance became the front door. Warehouses in New York and San Francisco overflowed with crates he never unpacked. The collecting was compulsive, driven by desire rather than judgment.
The pools were engineering marvels. The outdoor Neptune Pool, framed by a marble colonnade and a temple facade, was built and rebuilt three times between 1924 and 1936 before Hearst was satisfied. Inside the basement of Casa Grande, the Roman Pool was covered entirely in over a million blue and gold glass mosaic tiles, with marble statues of Roman gods standing in niches. Both pools were spectacular statements that rivaled the baths of ancient emperors.
The golden age ended with the Great Depression. Hearst’s empire, built on debt, collapsed. By 1937, his liabilities exceeded ninety-five million dollars. Creditors forced him into a financial reorganization, and a conservation committee took control of his assets.
His art collection was auctioned off at depression prices. His properties were sold. His annual salary was cut to five hundred thousand dollars, and he was forced to pay rent to the committee to live in his own castle. Marion loaned him a million dollars from her personal savings to keep him solvent.
In 1940, Orson Welles began filming Citizen Kane. The film was transparently based on Hearst, and its portrayal of the tycoon’s mistress, the untalented, alcoholic Susan Alexander Kane, was widely understood to be a portrait of Marion. The film was a masterpiece, but it destroyed Marion’s reputation. Younger audiences assumed the character was accurate.
Welles later expressed regret, calling what they did to her a dirty trick, but the damage was permanent. Hearst tried to suppress the film. His newspapers refused to advertise or review it. Nothing worked.
The controversy only increased public interest, and Citizen Kane cemented the public image of Hearst and Marion as cautionary figures, their castle a symbol of empty excess. By the mid-1940s, Hearst’s health was failing. His doctors insisted he move to Los Angeles for medical care. On May 10, 1947, at age eighty-four, Hearst left San Simeon for the last time.
He never returned. He died four years later in Beverly Hills, with Marion at his bedside. She kissed him just before he died. Then his family took over.
Marion was not his wife and had no legal standing. While she slept, exhausted from her vigil, Hearst’s body was removed. She was not told where or when the funeral would be held. She watched from a distance, uninvited, as Millicent buried the man Marion had lived with for thirty-four years.
She later said, For thirty-two years I had him, and they leave me with his empty room. Eleven weeks later, she married someone else. She died in 1961. Julia Morgan died in 1957, largely forgotten.
She had designed approximately seven hundred buildings and received almost no public recognition for the castle that became her most famous work. The castle itself survived, but only by becoming public. The Hearst Corporation donated the estate to the state of California in 1957, a decision motivated by tax benefits and public relations, but one that ensured the castle’s preservation. Public tours began in June 1958.
The response was enormous. Today, over a million people visit Hearst Castle annually. The estate remains unfinished, preserved exactly as Hearst left it in 1947. The rooms that were never completed remain incomplete.
The collections that remained after the liquidations still fill the rooms. The Neptune Pool still sparkles, the zebras still graze on the hillsides, and tourists still climb the hill to see what one man’s dream looked like translated into stone and tile and imported European history. The castle that Hearst built as the most private pleasure palace in America became one of its most public treasures, and the dream that began when a ten-year-old boy toured European castles with his mother outlasted everyone who built it.