The Chief

by David Nasaw

  It would have been easier building a house on a desert island in the Pacific than on the hillside Hearst had chosen. “The experts told Pop that it couldn’t be done,” his son Bill, Jr. recalled in his autobiography:

  No one could build an adequate foundation for a large home up there on the crest of that steep hill overlooking the Pacific and the little village of San Simeon. There was no proper building material available—no lumber, no nearby steel or iron. Even if such materials were carried by boat to the pier, a rising, curving road would have to be constructed out of the wilderness. And it was more than a five-mile pull up the 1,600-foot grade to the mountaintop. Wet winter weather could make such a twisting route treacherous to climb, especially with heavy, unstable loads. Where would the skilled workmen come from? Where would they be housed? How would they be fed? And where would sufficient drinking water be found?6

  All his life, Hearst had accomplished the impossible, and he saw no reason why he could not do as he pleased on his hillside. He was deterred only by a serious shortage of cash. His mother had left a large estate, but after dispensing more than a half million dollars to her friends and relations and paying the $1 million estate tax, there was not enough to build a dream house, especially one on a rocky isolated hilltop that was a considerable journey from San Francisco, the nearest source of building materials and skilled labor. Hearst had estimated the cost of construction at fifty cents a cubic foot for 156,000 cubic feet in the main building. When he discovered that he had underestimated the size of the building and the cost by half, he cabled Morgan to “wait more definite figures before giving instructions to proceed.” Morgan replied that she would “do my very best to keep the cost down, but as you know, both the times and the local conditions are full of uncertainties.”7

  In late September, Joseph Moore in New York wrote Hearst that “the financial situation at the International Film Company” was in such bad shape that he had had to divert $40,000 from other Hearst enterprises to meet the weekly payroll and expenses. By October, Hearst’s inability to pay his bills had reached the point where his long-time accountant, Henry Bicknell, resigned after twenty-three years of service. “There seems to be a lack of appreciation of the fact that payrolls, paper bills, trade acceptances and other immediate obligations must be met with daily cash payments,” Bicknell wrote Hearst. The accountant had spent his life with Hearst holding back payments and adopting a series of “expedients to meet these demands.” He was no longer willing to do that.8

  Two days after receiving Bicknell’s letter, Hearst authorized Morgan to begin work again, but on the smaller “bungalows” instead of the more expensive main building. Three would be built at once, others in the future. For the time being, these were referred to as Houses or Cottages A, B, and C. Later each would be named for the view from the front window. House A, which looked out on the Pacific, would become Casa del Mar; House B, which faced the mountains, Casa del Monte; House C, which looked west toward the setting sun, Casa del Sol. In a three-page, single-spaced letter mailed in late October, with his own annotated drawings attached, the Chief outlined the new construction program. He wanted the bungalows, small houses, or cottages, as they were alternately referred to, sited lower on the hill than originally planned, with their sitting rooms repositioned for maximum views. “The main thing at the ranch is the view,” he reminded Morgan. If his drawings were not clear, would “take the train and come west [to] locate the houses exactly.” He had, he told Morgan, also made “considerable changes in the interior arrangements.” He had enlarged the “closets, because we need them for trunks as well as clothes” and the bathrooms, dressing rooms, and bedrooms in House A, where his family would live until the main building was constructed. He suggested that the large fireplace in House B—the cottage across the plaza from the one his family would be occupying—be replaced with “a Della Robbia bas relief in blue and white, or blue and white and yellow, against the white background of the wall.” In response to Morgan’s query about the floors, he directed her to use wood instead of tile or concrete, except in the bathrooms which he wanted tiled, floor and ceiling, in white. “Paneling, however, or ceilings, doors or window frames, beams or anything else, which appears to be of wood, should be made of composition [a plaster product that could be painted brown to simulate wood], by all means. In the first place, the composition is cheaper, as it can be cast in any number of duplicates; in the second place, it is non-inflammable; and in the third place, the rats will not eat it, and they will eat anything of wood.” Although California-bungalow architecture featured ceilings “open up to the roof,” he did not want that style ceiling “in the living room or anywhere. I think flat-beam ceilings, moulded and decorated, are much richer and more home-like.”9

  By early November, Morgan was able to report that her on-site superintendent, Mr. Washburn, the young builder she had imported from Monterey, had “his camp ready and is hauling sand and gravel so that in another two or three weeks things should be pretty well assembled” and construction could begin. Washburn had earlier had rock from Camp Hill tested and the reports, Morgan told Hearst, had shown that it “will make a remarkably fine grade of concrete. I believe it will be economy when the time comes to build the main building, to quarry a good part of the rock needed from under the main building itself—using part of the ‘hole’ resulting for your basement.”10

  Morgan’s toughest job, for the moment, was getting building materials to the old whaling village of San Simeon and then up the hillside. Shipments by water from the Bay Area, the closest source of supplies, had been delayed by a waterfront strike. Only in December did the first lumber for the cottages arrive after a long journey. The lumber had been purchased in Portland, then transported via railway to Oakland where, once the strike was settled, it was loaded onto the Cleone, “a very disreputable old coaster,” Morgan called it, “carrying cement,...nails, reinforcement bars for concrete, ready roofing and a second-hand band saw, and rock crusher.” Unfortunately, by the time the lumber arrived, the rains had made the wagon road too slippery to use. Morgan had to not only rebuild it, but find more powerful trucks to haul the materials up the hillside. When she finished with the roadway, she rebuilt the pier so that larger steamers could dock and unload there.11

  Though Morgan was consistently upbeat in her letters to Hearst, she was, she wrote him in April 1920, plagued by a persistent “shortage of every kind of material and of workmen.” All of the workmen she had hired in the winter had left, a few before they had unpacked: “Some stayed a week or more. They all agreed that the living conditions, money and food were all right, but they ‘didn’t like feeling so far away from things.’” She wrote again, in mid-May, that she had found it “necessary to provide board, lodging and transportation in order to get men in any of the trades, crafts or even plain labor. The cost of temporary shacks, tents, bedding, kitchen and dining outfits, etc. has been heavy ... The chef says he is the most important man on the mountain and while one does not like to hear it too often, the latest cook is a find.”12

  Hearst approved all of Morgan’s attempts to keep the workmen happy, with one exception. When, in the spring of 1921, he learned that some of the crew had been hunting and fishing on the property, he sent off an uncharacteristically harsh letter to Morgan: “Impossible to allow men on Hill to wander over the ranch or to fish or hunt ... If you hired a plumber to fix your bathroom you would not expect him to be wandering around your parlor or reading your books in the library. We do not even allow indiscriminate hunting or fishing by guests on ranch....Please definitely instruct Washburn I am sorry but a very definite stand is necessary in such matters to protect the property.”13

  Morgan was now spending almost every weekend in San Simeon. On Friday evenings, she booked an upper berth (the upper afforded her room to work on her portable drafting table) in a sleeping car on the southbound eight o’clock Lark. The train arrived at San Luis Obispo at 2 A.M. After a bowl of milk and bread, she began the long trip by
automobile over paved and unpaved roads to the ridge on Hearst’s mountain. On Sunday evening, she took the train back north, arriving in San Francisco at dawn.14

  The tiny architect and the tall, overweight publishing tycoon made an odd couple, but they worked well together. Hearst provided Morgan with recommendations not only for the size, shape, and siting of the main buildings and the surrounding cottages, but for furnishing the houses and landscaping the hillside. Millicent was, through the early 1920s, the third partner in this enterprise. In his instructions to Morgan, Hearst referred to her regularly and when he did not, used the pronoun “we” to suggest that he had consulted her on the question at hand. Though he was seeing Marion regularly in New York, visiting her on location, spending time with her at his apartment at the Bryant Park Studios, and enjoying weekends in good weather cruising the Hudson on the Oneida, he had no intention of abandoning Millicent and his five boys. His vacation home on Camp Hill was to be a family home. He would spend his summers there, while Marion remained in New York, filming her moving pictures.

  While Morgan’s construction crew worked on the exterior of the three guest cottages, Hearst, Millicent, and Morgan began to design the main building, which would become known as the castle or the big house—Casa Grande. This was to be Hearst’s personal front page, his signature on the landscape. He wanted to build in a style that was indigenous to California, but agreed with Morgan that the Mission style of early California Spanish architecture was too primitive. Like other wealthy Californians, he was drawn to a “neo-Mediterranean,” “Spanish Colonial” style that looked for inspiration not to early California but to the southern Spanish Renaissance. Though this style “had no historic association with California, or rather with the Spanish architecture in California,” he asked Morgan rhetorically if it would “not be better to do something a little different than other people are doing out in California as long as we do not do anything incongruous?”15

  It made perfect sense that Hearst, having decided to build himself a dream house—surrounded by dream cottages—in a “city on the hill” in Southern California, would look to a Mediterranean model. As the historian of California Kevin Starr has written, Mediterraneanism at the turn of the century represented an essential ingredient of the California dream:

  It challenged Californians to achieve something better in the manner of American living: to design their cities and homes with reference to the poetry of the past and in harmony with the land and the smiling sun. It asked them to bring their gardens to ordered luxuriance....Here in California, Mediterraneanism suggested, might emerge a people living amidst beauty ... a people animated by a full play of sense and spirit.16

  A defining component of the Mediterranean style, as incorporated in the San Simeon design, was the integration of architecture and landscape, house and garden. The esplanades, walkways, and plazas became essential design elements, intended, as Hearst wrote Morgan in December of 1919, to “bring all the structures together into a harmonious whole.” In February 1920, he wrote Mr. Fairchild, the editor in San Francisco who was acting as his business agent at San Simeon, that he wanted “all paths, pergolas, terraces, etc. finally finished with the planting by May first. I propose coming west, living in houses and superintending planting and such details.”17

  Though Morgan worked with a succession of landscape designers and gardeners, she was responsible for the overall plan. Hearst had chosen to build his Mediterranean village 1,600 feet above sea level but well below the highest peak of the Santa Lucias. The hilltop was rugged, steep, and very rocky, dotted here and there with some California laurel and coast live oaks. Though the views were extraordinary, the landscape was not spectacular enough for Hearst. To improve it would, in the end, require almost as much time, effort, and funding as it did to build the cottages and Casa Grande. First the ridge had to be entirely regraded and terraced. Then topsoil had to be brought up the hill and water piped down from natural springs. Where the ground was too rocky to dig, workmen used pickaxes to open crevices, inserted sticks of dynamite and set them off, then filled the holes with topsoil. Only after the ground had been thus prepared could the trees, shrubs, plants, and flowers be hauled up the five-mile curving roadway to their final destinations.

  The first shipment of plants, mostly geraniums and roses, arrived on the hillside from a nursery in Santa Barbara in early 1921. Through January and February, Hearst and Morgan exchanged correspondence on the “color floral scheme for houses.” Each of the guesthouses was to have its own garden with its own color scheme. Hearst’s cottage would be planted in pink and white to set off the dark blue and white frieze tile. The garden in front of House C would be crimson and deep yellow; the House B garden would be planted in blue, light yellow, and orange. Hearst proposed that bougainvilleas be planted to climb up the walls and terraces of House A and that oleanders, heliotrope, and red, white, and yellow French flowering cacti be placed in the courtyards of Houses B and C. Elsewhere on the hillside, he asked Morgan to consider “flowers like hollyhocks ... some flowering trees like magnolia, flowering eucalyptus, and blue flowering tree seen in Santa Barbara. Advise Italian cypress for certain effects ... Don’t think I like ivy for bedding. It is too black and buggy.”18

  W. R. asked his old friend the artist Orrin Peck to work with Morgan on laying out the gardens. While he was in residence at San Simeon, Orrin also became Morgan’s chief consultant on the fireplaces, which Hearst said were emitting too much smoke. Peck, who had no other visible means of support—and had probably not received a regular allowance since Phoebe’s death—was delighted to have work. Will, in turn, was delighted to have his oldest friend back from Europe.

  No one amused him as much as Orrin and no one got along as well with the women in his life. Orrin had, in the fifty years he and Will had been friends, been close to Phoebe—and Will’s chief defender—as well as to Tessie, Millicent, and now Marion. By the time he relocated to San Simeon, he was approaching sixty and, though apparently in good health, stouter than ever from a lifetime of good eating. In early 1921, he took a break from his work on the hilltop to visit a friend in Los Angeles. While there he suffered a fatal heart attack.

  Orrin’s death, following by only a few years that of Jack Follansbee, who had died of alcoholism in a New York sanatorium in December of 1914, deprived Hearst of his two oldest, closest friends. Although in the years to come, he would establish personal relationships with several of his longtime editors, Brisbane chief among them, no one would replace Follansbee and Peck. He had grown up with them, traveled with them, and been defended by them when his mother complained about his indiscretions. Follansbee had been his partner in Mexico and, for a brief time, his roommate in New York; Orrin Peck had been his best man and accompanied him and Millicent on their honeymoon. They had always been there when he needed them. He would sorely miss them.

  Through the winter and spring of 1920, while Morgan was building his cottages and landscaping his hillside, Hearst was shopping for art, furnishings, and architectural elements for his rooms, courtyards, and terraces, which he transported to the West Coast in private railway cars. The first carload arrived in March, the second on May 18. While the cottages were being finished, the material was stored in warehouses at the foot of the hill. On May 23, Hearst wrote Morgan that he had “bought some more stuff at the last auction sale of the season. I am sending it in a third car, which should arrive in about a month from date.” There followed a single-spaced two-page letter describing what he had bought and where he wanted it placed. The pair of excellent doors and matched window grills were for House A; the two pairs of matched doors with Renaissance panels and a window grille for House B; the two fine Hispano Moresque columns of the twelfth century were for the loggia of House C, the big stone mantel with the grotesque figures, the twenty-six rather plain iron and glass lanterns, the Gothic stalls, Gothic pictures, and the large, square fifteenth-century Italian sideboard were for the trophy, living, and dining rooms of the main house
whose foundation had not yet been laid.19

  Had he chosen to, Hearst could have furnished every room in Casa Grande with items in storage from his own and his mother’s art collections. He preferred not to. Collecting was his oldest and his most constant passion. Through good times and bad, since his first trip to Europe with his mother, he had been a compulsive shopper, hungry to possess every object of beauty he came across. Hearst did not rely on “experts” to tell him what to buy and why. Like J. Pierpont Morgan, the collector he most resembled in the catholicity of his tastes and the money he spent to indulge them, Hearst did not limit himself to one scholarly adviser, or to one specific period, one genre, or a single standard of taste. And like Morgan, he never sought to strike a bargain for anything he wanted. He bought from every major dealer and gallery in Europe and New York City. Alice Head, who was in charge of his magazine company in London, was his primary buyer in the British Isles and Paris. Luigi G. Gallandt worked as his agent on commission in Italy. Arthur and Mildred Stapley Byne, who had spent their lives writing about and collecting Spanish art, scouted for him in Spain. Karl von Wiegand, his chief correspondent in Germany, oversaw Eastern and Central European acquisitions.20