Sunday, June 20, 2010

A WEEKEND WITH WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST

I'd intended to spend Friday and Saturday with the otters on the beaches near San Simeon, but the water was too cold for bathing so I and the family ended up spending a lot of time at the Hearst Castle instead.  Boy, am I glad I did! I've been to the castle before but I never took the all-important Tour #2, which concentrates on the architecture and the bedrooms.  What I saw may have changed my opinion of Hearst forever.  















I can't make an adequate argument for the man in just one post. I'll just say that what I saw and heard convinced me that he was dedicated to persuading Americans that they lived in the most interesting and stimulating country in the world, that they had deep roots in European culture, and had an historic mission to advance civilization to a new level. His publications promoted these ideas and so did the castle, which he built as much for you and I as for himself.  


 You get a sense of this when you see the working spaces provided in guest's rooms.  I couldn't find pictures to match what I saw, but here's one (above) that hints at it.  The desks were museum pieces but were also frequently large and comfortable to work at. 


Too much is made of the movie stars and celebrities he invited to the castle. An awful lot of the guests were writers, artists and photographers, and musicians, including creative people from his own publications.  Hearst wanted to be a catalyst for their work. He hoped he could inspire them with his vision of a Jazz Age dynamism informed by the highest achievements of Western civilization.





















Here's (above) a frequently used room which served as Hearst's personal library, a conference room, and a study where he would work alone for long hours into the night.  Here he constantly admonished his editors and writers to try harder, to be more enthusiastic about the wonders of their time, to wake up the country to its enormous potential.

He had a smaller, more personal desk in a small room at the back, behind the large painting. I've noticed that people who live in large houses often have personal spaces which are surprisingly modest in size and content.



















Hearst's many guests stayed in opulent rooms. He saw to it that they had every convenience.





















He himself stayed in quarters which were more modest; more intimate and cozy. This (left) is his bedroom but the photograph doesn't do it justice.


The deep impression the real room makes depends on the visitors awareness of the powerfully sheltering medieval ceiling (detail above), the beautifully proportioned space of the room taken as a whole, and the understated but intelligent design of the opposite walls. The room tells you a lot about the man, and it's all favorable.

I'm a huge fan of Orson Welles, but in "Citizen Kane" my hunch is that he chose an interesting fiction about Hearst over infinitely more interesting facts. Hearst was a visionary hands-on publisher, whose magazines and newspapers were immensely successful. He was a money maker, not just a money spender. 

17 comments:

  1. Anonymous4:58 AM

    Interesting. Now something this historical and important beats the beach any day, IMHO. I've heard about Hearst before, and have even seen Citizen Kane for myself (didn't know that was a Hearst reference when I first watched it), but it seems like you've shed a little bit of light on this man and his newspaper publishing endeavors.

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  2. Thats some mighty fine home. I could get lost in those super-sized houses.

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  3. Anonymous7:43 AM

    RIP Ken Muse. http://i.imgur.com/QcAF1.jpg

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  4. Anon: Ken Muse just died!? I'm sorry to hear that. Thanks for the link. That comic strip deserved more exposure.

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  5. Anonymous3:49 PM

    http://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/cgw6j/my_dad_cartoonist_ken_muse_died_today_his_1960s/ His son just posted the sad news on Reddit. Did you know him?

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  6. Anonymous4:03 PM

    Uncle eddie this is most likely not what you want to hear and I shouldn't be the only one with the problem so you might already know; but some text, most importantly - also some pictures, extends out in the sidebar and gets completely covered, as well as the sidebar pics/links being cut in half. It might be stupid but I dont come back as often as I did before you switched over. :(
    I love your blog.

    I use Mozilla Firefox 3.6.3 for windows

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  7. Wow, I have to see that house sometime. The only celebrity house tour I went on was at Elvis Presley's Graceland in Memphis. It's actually pretty fascinating. The man owned a LOT of TVs; one room even had three (so he could watch all three networks at the same time, according to the tour guide). The upstairs floor was Elvis's private space and only his closest friends and family members ever went up there. Even today it's still restricted from tourists.

    Oh, and just to avoid confusion...

    The Ken Muse who died is not the animator (he passed on in 1987), but rather a print cartoonist based in Detroit.

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  8. Anonymous8:32 PM

    Orson Welles has said in interviews that Citizen Kane wasn't really about Hearst, he was more of a starting off point. Everything negative written about Hearst is more than cancelled out for his championing of comics like Krazy Kat.

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  9. ....It is......a VERY rusty carrot peeler.......

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  10. Hearst also kept Krazy Kat in his papers long after demand for it waned. The public never quite GOT it, but Hearst LOVED it. Of course, the concept of a publisher having an opinion about the comics they run is laughable today.....that is, if tearfully, bloodily sluicing off the palm of your hand with a carrot peeler at three in the morning, every morning, is a form of laughter....

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  11. I have to take tour #2 next time.

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  12. Anonymous6:22 PM

    Hearst was plainly a major inspiration for Kane, but it intge end WAS both a fictional screenplay done for maximumdramatic effect-and also largely written by Mankewicz(who was much older than Welles and-unlike Orson-had had extensive personal experience with Hearst). Welles worked the script over but it wasn't entirely "his" in terms of theme and words-the direction? That's Orson.

    Hearst actually went broke; Marion Davies sold many of the valuable items he'd given her over the years to help him-a great act of love and loyalty on her part.

    I went to San Simeon as a small child & it made a profound impression on me. A surprising place with a unique atmosphere.

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  13. Anonymous7:18 PM

    NO! It was all Hearst! Down to the sled!

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  14. Anonymous9:04 PM

    Yeah, it'd be cute but the thing is-a lot of people actually believe it. Including the sled.

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  15. Nice post. San Simeon is a beautiful place. They don't make them like that anymore.

    Hearst was a complex man. He helped contribute to criminalizing marijuana by publishing fake stories and information about the "ills" of the herb, yet he was the one of the few publishers who openly condemned Adolph Hitler during a time when others were either turning a blind eye or minimalizing what Hitler was doing.

    What I found fascinating about Hearst is his relationship with Marion Davies. I disagree with the critics who said that Marion Davies was an opportunist. I believe that Davies really loved Hearst. As one of the Anonymous's mentioned, Hearst went broke at one time in his life, and she was the one who bailed him out of financial trouble. I also remember seeing in a bio of Davies on how Hearst's handlers wouldn't let her be with him while he was dying. I thought that was sad.

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  16. Jennifer, Anon: Thanks for the comments about Davies. It's very touching to think that she loved him that much.

    Anon: Thanks for the criticism. I'm afraid that I'm wedded to the cluttered look for the time being, but I'll definitely remember what you said.

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  17. Design credit, BTW, to architect Julia Morgan, who deserves to be better known.

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