CENTRAL CALIFORNIA | SAN SIMEON
Behind the scenes at Hearst Castle
Step this way. Behind the velvet ropes. See who really runs the inner workings of the palace in San Simeon.
Weston Country: Carmel, California
Hearst Ranch: San Simeon, California
San Simeon, California
It doesn't take long, wandering behind the scenes among the 38 bedrooms and 41 bathrooms (not counting those in the guest quarters next door), to sense a few differences between your house and Hearst Castle.
The museum accreditation, for instance. The paid staff of 234, not counting the food, gift shop, bus and movie concessions. The conservator in the billiard room delicately applying a brush to an ornate pine ceiling that dates to 15th century Spain.
"Hearst acquired it, I think, in 1930 or '31," says Gary Hulbert, the conservator, peering down from his perch on a metal scaffold. "And it was installed in 1932."
Yet as this storied 127-acre mansion property marks its 50th anniversary as state property on Monday, it becomes less an anomaly every day.
For the evidence, look at Las Vegas, the new North American capital of promiscuously juxtaposed European architectural fantasies. Look down the list of the world's wealthiest media companies, where William Randolph Hearst's corporation has fallen out of the Top 15. And look at the houses that belong to today's top executives: Bill Gates of Microsoft with his 66,000-square-foot lakefront compound in Medina, Wash.; Larry Ellison of Oracle with his 23-acre Japanese estate near San Francisco; the 123-room French château in Holmby Hills commissioned by producer Aaron Spelling, who died in 2006. California has plenty of castles these days.
So maybe it's not surprising that the annual visitor count at Hearst Castle has fallen from more than 1 million in the late 1980s to fewer than 670,000 in 2006-07. We have plenty of crazy buildings these days, and some of them have even more powerful families behind them.
But are we here, inside California's original over-the-top castle, to grumble that the goblet is half-empty? We are not.
Hearst Castle, donated to the state by the Hearst Corp. on Dec. 31, 1957, and opened to public tours six months later, remains the fanciest open house you'll find between Los Angeles and San Francisco. It's a living (and occasionally leaking) testament to what results when a well-traveled, art-intoxicated, house-proud rich guy ignores all common sense, keeps a patient and pliable architect busy through 28 years of design, construction, addition and revision, then leaves it all in the hands of a government agency.
It's a big job just to keep the art safe and the doors open, and that's the drama we're here to spy on.
AN EARLY START
Just after 6 most mornings, museum custodian Letty Lachance is among a team of six to 10 people who creep up the hill in a van and unlock a basement-level door, make their way through the pantry and kitchen, open the main doors, throw about 100 light switches and get to sweeping, mopping, dusting, vacuuming, waxing and adjusting the rubber mats that tourists will step onto starting at about 8:20.
Gingerly, they work around the tapestries and silver, the ancient Greek amphorae, the 17th century Persian tiles, the 15th century Spanish chest, the 14th century Italian paintings. Outside, four gardeners armed with backpack blowers blast and rake leaves from tour paths, then gather up the night's fallen fruit. Three times a week, they deadhead the roses and other flowers.
Meanwhile, restoration supervisor Bruce Jackson prowls the southern terrace, his gaze traveling back and forth between the tile work underfoot and the teakwood gables now being refinished by workers on scaffolding four stories up.
In a minute, he'll swing by a set of greenhouses, reconstructed after 60 years of decay, that are almost ready for plants again.
"It's just like having your own house," says curator Frank Young, "but 1,000 times bigger."
And more visible. On Feb. 12, 1976, while Patty Hearst was on trial in Los Angeles in connection with her involvement with the Symbionese Liberation Army, a terrorist group called the New World Liberation Front bombed the balcony of one of the guest houses, causing about $1 million in damage. The blast, which staffers did their best to keep quiet at the time, ultimately prompted the Hearst family to give up a guest house it had continued to use. It also prompted tighter security, which continues today.
It cost $9.75 million last year to operate the castle, which is open for tours 362 days of the year and available for weddings and bar mitzvahs if you don't mind a bill of four or five figures. Between ticket sales ($20 to $30 per adult), concession income and those special events, the castle brought gross revenues of $11 million to the state park system. (The "profit" helps cover the cost of running other state parks.)
Though the castle is public property, it remains a personalized place. "It's not like going through a museum where they've got plastic boxes over everything," says curator Mary Levkoff, who has been organizing a 2008 Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibition of works collected by Hearst. Moreover, she says, "Every time I go there, I see something I didn't notice before."
She likens it to the castles built by King Ludwig II of Bavaria, whose architectural ambitions encouraged composer Richard Wagner in the 19th century and inspired Walt Disney in the 20th. (Ludwig's Neuschwanstein was the model for Disneyland's Sleeping Beauty Castle.)
As for America's other mansions, none can match the role played by Hearst's in the first half of the 20th century. This is partly because there's no Orson Welles around to make another "Citizen Kane." And it may be impossible now to match a houseguest roster that starts with actor Charlie Chaplin dining on venison, author P.G. Wodehouse cracking wise about the yaks in the private zoo, photographer Cecil Beaton joining a trail ride, comic Harpo Marx turning somersaults in the library and actors David Niven and Cary Grant bemoaning the shortage of booze.
In "Hearst Castle: The Biography of a Country House," author Victoria Kastner notes that Hearst's favorite guests were show-business people, perhaps because they "had little sense of history, still less of social standing, but they had a tremendous appreciation for effect."
The property, built by Hearst (a.k.a. "The Chief") and architect Julia Morgan between 1919 and 1947, includes four houses: the 115-room, 60,645-square-foot Casa Grande, which has 30 fireplaces to go with all those bedrooms and bathrooms; and three sizable guest residences.
Together, they give the effect of a little hill town huddled around a twin-towered cathedral.
Then there are the castle's water features: the outdoor Neptune Pool and the indoor Roman Pool, which lies, in all its blue-tiled splendor, under the tennis courts. And there was the zoo. Although it was mostly dismantled before Hearst's death in 1951, zebras, goats and deer still wander the Hearst-owned ranchland next to the castle. Sometimes, on your way up the winding path to the hilltop, you can glimpse them through the mist.
But you probably won't glimpse too many staffers. By 10:30 a.m., when things are just heating up at the National Geographic Theater (opened in 1996) and the visitor center (which got a $5-million remodel in 2006), most castle employees are halfway through the workday. When the tourists are on the march, they like to disappear.
The cleaning team keeps its vacuum cleaners, light bulbs and toilet paper in one of Hearst's old safes -- the liquor vault where the Chief, mindful of his mistress Marion Davies' alcoholism, kept most of his spirits under lock and key.
On the first of every month, employees turn over the rubber mats that tour groups tread upon and pull out poles to do the high dusting, a tall order in a house whose ground floor has 24-foot ceilings.
To keep indoor humidity around 50% and the temperature between 65 and 70 degrees, Lachance paces the Casa Grande, setting and resetting 53 humidifiers and 50 dehumidifiers. Just in the Refectory, the main dining room, she tends two humidifiers, one dehumidifier, two ionic air filters and three fans.
Hearst, who lived from 1863 to 1951, made his name by converting his family's mining fortune into a newspaper and magazine empire. He developed many of his tastes in the course of European travels at a tender age. In designing the castle, he and Morgan were influenced most by Spain.
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