by David Nasaw
Hearst purchased and imported entire rooms from different parts of Europe and installed them at the beach house. Three of the public rooms in the main building, “each more than sixty feet long,” according to Anne Edwards, writing in Architectural Digest in April 1994, “came from Burton Hall in Ireland. There was a ballroom from a circa 1750 Venetian palazzo and a tavern from an inn in Surrey dating from 1560.... Going from one room to another was somewhat like an abbreviated tour of grand European houses—English, French, and Spanish predominating. The artworks displayed had no feeling of a collection.”7
There were dinner parties at Marion’s every night of the week when she was in town and all-day swimming parties on the weekends. “On Saturday,” the actress Louise Brooks remembered of a weekend visit in April of 1928, “there were twenty people to lunch, forty were added in the afternoon to swim in the Venetian pool of white marble which separated the house from the ocean, and forty more were added for the buffet supper served on the porch overlooking the pool.” On special occasions, like Hearst’s birthdays, which after 1926 would be celebrated with Marion in California, huge canvas tents were erected to accommodate up to 2,000 guests.8
If her husband’s increasingly expensive, quasi-public relationship with Marion caused Millicent discomfort, she did not exhibit it. Marion Davies might be the queen of Santa Monica; Millicent ruled over a much larger and more important social empire in New York City.
Millicent received an allowance of $10,000 a month (equivalent in buying power to more than $95,000 in today’s currency) from Hearst’s International Magazine Company. Hearst’s companies also paid for her living expenses at the Clarendon, her winters at The Breakers in Palm Beach, summers in Europe, and Septembers at San Simeon. All that Millicent lacked to keep up with her society friends in New York was a between-season residence that was not too far from Manhattan.9
In the autumn of 1927, a little more than a year after construction had begun on Marion’s beach house, W. R. bought his wife the beachfront estate at Sands Point, Long Island, that had been owned by Mrs. Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, the former Alva Vanderbilt. Short of cash, he directed Jack Neylan to find the first $100,000 payment for Belmont House, which, he told Neylan, had been bought at Mrs. Hearst’s insistence.10
The estate, also known as Beacon Towers, had been designed by Richard Howland Hunt of the firm of Hunt & Hunt, the architects of choice on Long Island’s North Shore. Mrs. Belmont, who had previously commissioned the Hunts to build a $3 million fairy-tale French mansion at 660 Fifth Avenue and the $11 million Marble House at Newport, outdid herself on the eighteen acres of beachfront property she purchased in Sands Point. Beacon Towers was one of the strangest and most magnificent dwellings on Long Island. Built directly on the Sound, it was part Norman fortress, part Loire Valley manor house. Though Millicent’s neighbors included Vincent Astor and Daniel Guggenheim, and there were glorious mansions up and down the north shore, when F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby in 1925 he modeled Gatsby’s mansion on Mrs. Belmont’s 140-room medieval castle.
“The desired effect,” writes Robert B. King, author of The Vanderbilt Homes, “was to awe and overwhelm the eye: the building rose from the beach of Long Island Sound with no lawn to taper and balance its extreme height: rather the building seemed to rise out of the sea itself, reaching five stories into the sky. The house’s exterior was left unadorned of embellishments or detailing. Rather, battlements and balconies protruded from its mighty mass, while turrets, towers, and gables rose upward from all directions.” To keep out intruders, Mrs. Belmont built a stone wall around the estate. When the North Hempstead Town Board questioned her right to block access to the beach, she bought an additional five and one-half acres of beachfront land and the lighthouse that stood on it.11
Millicent was, she wrote W. R. in October, delighted about Belmont House, but she agreed with her husband that renovations were necessary before they could move in. The roof had to be raised, the windows enlarged to let in more light, the lighthouse converted to a guest cottage. Though Millicent suggested that the “inside” be left alone, Hearst had ideas here as well. According to Robert King, Hearst removed “the oppressive medieval-style murals of St. Joan [and] the grilled-iron gateway and heavy doors. Archways were installed in their place, and extraordinary medieval stone fireplaces brought over from Europe were added. A carved oak dining room was purchased [from Scotland and] decorated with paintings by Sir Joshua Reynolds and with gold consoles and mirrors from a mansion near London.”12
The New York Times, in its report on the sale of the home, noted that it had been purchased as a “‘between season’ home” for the Hearsts, plural. This was certainly Millicent’s intention. “When are you coming on so you can make some changes,” she wrote her husband in early October 1927, just before they took title. “I think it would be delightful for us all to be there in early spring. Think you would enjoy it. Twins tickled to death. They now want a boat. When do you think you and A. B. [Arthur Brisbane] will be coming?”13
Though W. R. was already overseeing the construction of Ocean House in Santa Monica and Casa Grande at San Simeon, he took complete control of the renovation and decoration of Millicent’s new estate. When, in the spring of 1929, Emile Gauvreau, the future editor of the New York Daily Mirror, met Hearst for the first time at Sands Point, he was invited to help him uncrate furniture. “While we talked,” Gauvreau recalled, “Hearst and I hacked away at crates, pulling excelsior from early American pieces such as highboys, benches and chests. Various periods were represented in card tables, candlestands, wing chairs, love seats and what not. I admired the flat surface decorations and wood inlay work of some of the furniture and my remarks seemed to please the publisher who felt the lacquered areas with a certain fondness.”14
While Hearst was intimately involved with Marion’s and Millicent’s estates, and with St. Donat’s, his castle in Wales, his first passion remained San Simeon. It was here that he spent the greatest portion of his time and his corporations’ income from the middle 1920s on. Hearst had learned, from his father perhaps, that if one had the patience to wait and did not panic as debt piled upon debt, investments wisely made in the past would pay off handsomely in the future. His newspapers, like his father’s mines, had required an enormous initial outlay, with a time lag of years before they began to turn a profit. By the middle and late 1920s, the papers he had purchased earlier in the decade—and refused to sell when urged to by his financial advisers—had begun to pay back their investments, and more.
Having substantially reduced his expenditures on his moving-picture studio and entered into what appeared to be a lucrative coproduction deal with MGM, Hearst found himself with more money to spend than ever before. Other businessmen might have saved some of this newfound income for future investments or some sort of rainy-day fund, but Hearst did not. Income was for spending; investment capital, when needed, could always be borrowed.
As his disposable income grew ever larger, his imagination ran wild. Though he had learned to read plans, the finished product seldom matched his expectations. Time and again, he would visit a recently constructed or renovated room at San Simeon and decide that mistakes had been made, that the plans which he had approved had not been correct, that the proportions were all wrong, the ceiling too low, the fireplace at the wrong end of the room.
Walter Steilberg, one of Julia Morgan’s assistants, was present during the completion of the work in House C, Casa del Sol, in the early 1920s. “The fireplace,” Steilberg recalled in his oral history, “had been located on the long side of one of the living rooms. He came in, and I was there when he said, ‘No, I don’t like it there. Take it out and move it over here.’ It was all built! Chimney going up to the roof, and everything, and the foundation went to hell and gone down the hillside. I was also there when, six months later, Hearst said, ‘No, that was a mistake. We shouldn’t have moved it from where it was. Take it out of there and put it back where it was.’ I think h
e enjoyed it like a small boy, in a way.”15
This type of decision making was almost routine. Nothing he built was ever left alone for long. In July of 1922, he purchased some Roman temple fragments and had them installed in his new rose garden. In 1923, he instructed Julia Morgan to construct a reflecting pool in front of the temple fragments and plant it with night-blooming water lilies. In 1924, he asked her to enlarge the reflecting pool into a swimming pool for his boys. The following spring, he had the swimming pool enlarged. When the enlargement was finished, he decided he wanted the pool lined with marble. In 1928, he had dressing rooms and an extended Neptune Terrace added. Three years later, he would rip up everything and redesign the entire structure for a third time.16
Hearst disliked stasis. As soon as something was completed—or neared completion—he began planning improvements or replacements or shifted his attention to an entirely new project. In April of 1927, as the marble was being installed in his newly enlarged Neptune Pool, he decided that he needed another pool, elsewhere on the property, and wrote Morgan:
We could put a big hot-house down where we were going to build the Persian Garden, and in the middle of this hot-house we could have a big pool about the size of our present pool. In the hot-house, sufficiently back from the pool, we would have palms, ferns, and whole lot of orchids.... The temperature of the hot-house, and of the pool, too, would be warm on the coldest, bleakest winter day. We would have the South Sea Island on the Hill.... Towards the sea there should be a big rest room, and a loggia. Here we could serve toi or poi, or whatever the situation called for. The pool, of course, would be the main attraction; and we might put a turtle and a couple of sharks in to lend verisimilitude. This, except for the sharks, is not as impractical a proposition as it might seem. It is merely making a hot-house useful, and making a pool beautiful.17
Hearst carried around in his head the blueprints for every room, terrace, and plaza at San Simeon. When he saw something that might fit, he bought it. As his income expanded during the 1920s, so did his expenditures on his art collections. “A great many very fine things will be arriving for the ranch—some of them have already arrived,” he warned Miss Morgan, from Los Angeles, in February of 1927. “They are for the most part of a much higher grade than we have had heretofore. In fact, I have decided to buy only the finest things for the ranch from now on, and we will probably weed out some of our less desirable articles. I had no idea when we began to build the ranch that I would be here so much or that the construction itself would be so important. Under the present circumstances, I see no reason why the ranch should not be a museum of the best things that I can secure.”18
For four decades Hearst had collected treasures and stored them away in his warehouses. He was now ready to undertake the laborious but rewarding process of relocating his most prized possessions to the West Coast. On an almost daily basis, he cabled Chris MacGregor at his Bronx warehouse or Miss Schrader, his personal secretary whose office was at the Clarendon, with instructions to locate and pack a particular painting, windowpane, architectural element, rug, or piece of porcelain for shipment in the next railroad car to San Simeon, via San Luis Obispo. Working for the most part from memory, he described the pieces he wanted, hoping that MacGregor would know where to find them in the five-story warehouse in the Bronx. When MacGregor located the item requested, he had it unpacked and photographed, with its dimensions recorded on the back of the photograph. The photograph was then mailed West. Only after Hearst received the photograph and approved final shipment was the item crated for shipment.
When enough material to fill a full railroad car had been assembled, a detailed list of the contents of that car was mailed to San Simeon, with a summary sent by wire. Each item, each list, each lot and packing case was sequentially numbered. To make sure that Hearst’s instructions were followed exactly at each stage of the process, a copy of every letter or telegram sent from San Simeon to the Bronx was forwarded to Miss Schrader at the Clarendon, who was instructed “to keep them on file and make sure, by sufficiently frequent inquiry, that instructions have been or will be carried out.”19
While Casa Grande was under construction, Hearst lived in House A, Casa del Mar. There were two bedrooms with adjoining bathrooms on the upper floor, one for him, one for Millicent, with a sitting room in between that Hearst may have used as his office. We don’t know where Marion stayed when, sometime in the spring of 1926, she replaced Millicent as Hearst’s de facto West Coast wife and hostess at San Simeon.
“I’d go up on weekends,” Marion recalled in her memoirs, “and there’d be twenty or thirty guests, possibly forty or fifty. The train would leave Los Angeles at eight-fifteen and arrive at San Luis about three in the morning and we’d motor on up. We’d come back on Sunday to be at work Monday.” Hearst’s guests would be met at San Luis Obispo by a fleet of limousines which would transport them for the ninety-minute drive over dirt roads to San Simeon. “When we arrived we’d have breakfast and a rest. Luncheon was about two-thirty and dinner about half past eight at night. Saturday night we’d watch a movie. Before breakfast on Sunday we’d play tennis or go horseback riding—the usual things, the sporting life routine. Or we’d swim.... W. R. would come out and join the guests and go swimming. And he played tennis and went horseback riding. He was excellent at riding.”20
W. R. was, by the middle 1920s, well into his sixties; Marion was not yet thirty. The last thing he wanted was to coerce Marion and her friends into traveling a full day to spend two days with him at the ranch, if they were going to end up being bored there. He began making additions to San Simeon until it was not simply the most beautiful place on earth but the most fun.
In April of 1926, he informed Miss Morgan that he was going to be doing more entertaining at the ranch and that she should hire extra servants. In July, he asked her to purchase the biggest and best Frigidaires available. “We have all the electric power we need and these big Frigidaires will make the temperature almost anything you please. You can freeze meat solid if you want to. They also make ... ice and if we have enough Frigidaires ... we would not have to transport so much ice as we do now.” In August, he directed her to install Victrolas and radios in the Assembly Room, to construct dressing rooms near the pool, and to rebuild the tennis courts which, in their current state, did “not correspond in sumptuousness with the rest of the establishment.” The following February, he instructed her to refit the rooms in the guesthouses with sound-proofing in the walls and ceilings: “It keeps people in the bed rooms from being annoyed by the phonographs and radios and maniacs in the parlors.”21
Swimming, tennis, hiking, picnicking, and sightseeing were apparently not sufficient diversions for his guests, so, in the fall of 1927, he asked Miss Morgan to add “a polo field ... on the lower part of the ranch ... I think this could be combined with a flying field. I want these made very LARGE and very GOOD and with a small stand for spectators.” The flying field would be built, but not the polo field, probably because none of Hearst’s guests played polo.22
One of the attractions on the hillside was the largest privately owned zoo in the world. “W. R. wanted the animals around because it was picturesque,” Marion Davies remembered. “And he thought the zoo might entertain the guests.”23
At first, he bought only animals that could live in his fields without having to be caged: elk, white fallow deer, and a herd of bison which he purchased for $1,000 a head from a Missouri refuge. Species that could not live together were segregated in their own special preserves. In October of 1925, Morgan wrote him that the reindeer had arrived and the man who delivered them had suggested that they be separated from the buffaloes and bulls. Though they would eventually be able to graze on the native grasses, Hearst was told that he would have to buy Iceland moss for them to eat until they were used to new food.24
W. R. retained Richard A. Addison of the San Diego Zoo to buy wild animals for him. Addison traveled regularly to Boston and New York City to purchase animals of
f the ships transporting them from Africa and other countries. The animals were then loaded onto private express railway cars for the trip to San Luis Obispo, where they were offloaded onto trucks for the final journey to San Simeon. Julia Morgan telegrammed the Chief in July of 1927 that the latest shipment of animals had arrived “in beautiful shape. I had to rub my eyes last night when out of the semi-darkness staring at the lights were grouped three ostriches, five zebras, five white deer, two with big horns, a llama, and some speckled deer. All in a group! The giraffes are a beautiful specimen.”25
Because the animals needed shelter and safe feeding places—and because Hearst wanted his guests to see them—he directed Morgan to build a set of “exceedingly picturesque log houses and put them in certain picturesque locations not far from the main road. Watering troughs can be put adjacent and feeding rooms established in connection, so that the animals will congregate at places where they can be seen from the road.” He was especially concerned with the giraffes whom he wanted “transferred from where they are. Nobody yet who has come to the ranch has seen the giraffes.”26
By 1928, an inventory of his zoo listed over three hundred animals, including twenty-seven antelope, five kinds of deer, forty-four bison, three cougars, five lions, two bobcats, a leopard, a cheetah, three kinds of bears, a chimpanzee, three Java monkeys, a tapir, sheep, goats, two llamas, two kangaroos, and a wallaby. There were special kennels for the dogs that Hearst bred, a lion den, bear pits, and a house for Marianne, the elephant Hearst bought in 1929 and named after Marion’s first role in a talking picture.27