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SAN SIMEON: A MEMORIAL TO EGO, |
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Hearst. often bought unknown
art from expensive brochures that came to him in the mail the way
lesser people received their Sears Roebuck catalogues. He could afford
it. The wealth that sired San Simeon is almost beyond comprehension.
This is a temple of limestone, concrete, brick, and marble, all of
it earthquake-proof and fireproof. Venetian glass and gold are everywhere.
"If you see anything that looks like gold," says the guide,
"it is gold." |
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Entering the gardens of San Simeon your eyes sweep over a kaleidoscope of ancient monuments and majestic statues. Through the gardens, past "Sekhmet" -- the gleaming diorite lion-faced carvings of the goddess of war, which date back to the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty -- you approach La Casa Grande. Made of white Utah limestone, it contains 100 rooms. You enter through sixteenth-century Spanish doors to stand before the assembly room, the largest in the building. Within is majesty and pomp, ornate comfort -- all the simplicity of the baroque! Guests would then wander through to
the refectory to sit in replicas of sixteenth-century Dante chairs
before polished monastic Italian walnut sixteenth-century tables.
A vast Gothic fireplace dominates the room. And you marvel. Swanberg
said of Hearst that he spent more on housing than any man in history,
king or commoner. www.sansimeonbest.com |
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The $30 million spent on San Simeon, the $7 million for the Santa Monica beach house, the $1 million for his Wyntoon Estate, the $400,000 for his wife's house on Long Island, and the expense of St. Donat's Castle in Wales add up to an unbelievable total. St. Donat's Castle exemplifies the style of the man. He bought it, sight unseen, for $120,000. He happily spent $1,250,000 in restoration, and when his true costs are calculated, over his total domicile there of four months, the daily "rent" for living in the castle was $11,400 a day. |
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However, money concerned Hearst only as a means to pleasure and power. When the Hearst organization sold his lesser collections in the late 1930s to stave off bankruptcy, they found two five-story warehouses in New York City that employed thirty men permanently at work. The pallbearers at Hearst's funeral were: Bernard Baruch, Louis B. Mayer, the mayor of San Francisco, the governor of California, General MacArthur, and Herbert Hoover. A distinguished farewell for the man who once said, "Nobody likes us but the people."
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