Hearst Castle and the myth of the American Dream
"This is really cool, but also...billionaires should not exist."
Welcome to another week of travel. This week, we’re currently in Los Osos, CA, and my sister came to visit!! We took her to see the elephant seals (see below) and to some restaurants, but we also just watched several episodes of The Midnight Club and got scared. It was great.
As soon as our tour guide mentioned the private zoo, I knew it. I may have only seen about 20 minutes of Citizen Kane (I’m sorry film fanatics, I got bored), but I knew that it must have been based on William Randolph Hearst and his extravagant California estate.
Aaron and I visited Hearst Castle last weekend. Formally known as La Cuesta Encatada (“The Enchanted Hill” in Spanish), the estate of newspaper magnate W.R. Hearst is just about 45 minutes north of where we’re staying.
We drove along Highway 1, which was gorgeous, and not a problem for my vertigo issues, and then took a tour bus up the scary steep mountain hill to the estate—also gorgeous, but very much a problem for my vertigo issues, so I barely looked. I did see some zebras grazing on the property before I closed my eyes.
Our tour guide walked us through the gardens, showing us the outdoor pool, the guesthouses, the rose garden, and all the artwork along the way. Then we went into Casa Grande, the main house, to see the assembly room, dining hall, billiard room, movie theater, and indoor pool.
You know, your basic house.
Throughout the tour, I was fascinated by everything I saw: the scale, the architectural details, the sheer number of antique items. But I also kept thinking, This is so American.
The castle is not exactly beautiful. Don’t get me wrong; the grounds are beautiful. The views—as much as I could stand to look at them—are breathtaking. There are many pieces of art, antiques, and detailed finishes that are astounding in their simplicity and detail. And I’m truly impressed that estates like this can physically be built at all, especially up so high. (How did anyone do it in Europe so many more centuries ago?)
But the whole is, well, kind of garish. It smashes together historical pieces with recreations, and mixes architectural design styles and time periods with abandon. The grand assembly room is in a Renaissance style, yet the dining hall next door is entirely Gothic. A statue of Neptune, carved centuries ago and brought to the estate to be installed above the pool, didn’t fit in its intended spot—so they simply lopped his feet off.
The wealth on display is truly insane. And the guide’s banter and jokes about how frequently Hearst changed his mind—leading to entire walls being torn down and redone, or the pool being rebuilt three times—felt tone deaf.
And everything about the experience, from the Alex Trebek voiceover on the bus ride to the tour guide’s commentary to the movie we watched at the end, felt like American dream propaganda.
Our tour guide kept making jokes that were basically some form of “We all want this, right?”
Several references were made to a childhood Hearst, who apparently started collecting art at the age of 10 (how?) and regularly asked for huge amounts of property and money, as if it were the sign of a precocious, ambitious child and not an out-of-touch, entitled one.
And the end of the movie, which I guess could be called a documentary, was all about being inspired to take hold of and build your dreams. You can do it. Just be bold. Go after your dreams, just like William Randolph Hearst did.
Never mind that he inherited wealth and land from his parents.
Never mind building a fortune by selling newspapers via the 1900s version of click-bait headlines. (It’s interesting to me that the tour guide very specifically mentioned that he and his papers never made up or distorted news stories for sales, even though history says otherwise.)
Never mind raising the prices of papers and taking advantage of the newsboys who sold them, leading to the Newsboys’ Strike of 1899 (you can’t fool me, I saw Newsies and Hearst is one of the villains!).
Never mind his ongoing racism and loud support of Japanese internment camps.
We really will ignore just about anything in service of a good old “self-made man” story in this country, won’t we?
Just look at this house! Don’t we all want to accomplish this for ourselves?
It was such a surreal experience, to be in what’s essentially a museum and also essentially a state park (the estate has been run by California since 1958), and yet completely ignore so much of the actual history surrounding it. It was as if the Hearst family said, Of course, you can run this castle and make tons of money off of it, as long as you never speak a bad word against our ancestor, and the state of California said, Sure!
As we walked up the stairs from one guest house to another, after we’d seen the outdoor Neptune pool but before we’d seen the indoor Roman pool, I whispered to Aaron, summing up my feelings about the entire experience.
“This is really cool. But also…billionaires should not exist.”
What else is going on? This week, we:
saw the Elephant Seals at their protected beach in San Simeon! This was the same day as Hearst Castle, just a few miles up the road. Just a bunch of elephant seals, sunbathing and swimming.
As I mentioned before, we hung out with my sister Kate and started watching The Midnight Club on Netflix. We’re not done yet, but I highly recommend it if you enjoyed any of Mike Flanagan’s other spooky shows (The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, and Midnight Mass) OR if you’re a millennial who loved Are You Afraid of the Dark?
I discovered, so so so late, Off Book: The Improvised Musical Podcast and it is very much up my alley.
I’ve also been watching a lot of Hannah Bayles’s YouTube videos—she’s a vocal teacher who watches professionals sing and explains their technique, while also being delighted by their talent. It’s fun, and it really has me wanting to sing again.
