The road climbs five miles and rises about sixteen hundred feet, and for most of that climb you cannot see the house at all. You see the animals first. Somebody planned that. Somewhere on the way up, a herd of white deer lifted their heads out of the dry grass, and there might be a zebra standing in among them.

The driver would slow down without being asked. By the time the car came around the last bend, the people in the back seat had been told something about their host, and nobody had said a word. I keep coming back to that drive rather than to the house. The room count you can find anywhere in about four seconds.

What I wanted was smaller and a good deal harder to find. What time did people eat? Who carried the water up the hill? What did the staff do through the winter when there was nobody up there to cook for?

What did it cost in labor and money and patience to produce one ordinary evening on top of a mountain in California? Some of that is well recorded. Some of it was never written down by anybody at all. And a fair amount of what gets repeated about the place was invented by men with books to sell.

The owner was William Randolph Hearst. He was fifty-six when he began, which is later than most people assume, and there is a reason for that which hardly ever gets mentioned. He kept building for twenty-eight years. He stopped only because his doctors would not live that far from a hospital.

He died four years after that in a house in Beverly Hills with a view of almost nothing. The hill had no water on it when he started. No power, no road worth the name, and no flat ground to put a building on. Everything you have ever seen in a photograph of that place went up in pieces from a wooden pier at the bottom.

And every evening at half past seven, forty or fifty people were expected in one particular room. The room was the largest in the main house. Guests describe walking into it the way you describe walking into a church. You are not certain you are allowed in.

There was a fireplace at one end taken out of a French chateau. Choir stalls ran along the walls brought from a Spanish cathedral. Above them hung the silk banners that the districts of Siena carry through the streets for the horse race. The furniture sat in small conversational islands the way furniture is arranged in a hotel lobby, and for much the same reason.

People had to be able to find each other. The staff brought cocktails round at half past seven—one drink or possibly two, depending on which guest you believe. This was the only fixed point in the entire day. Guests could ride, swim, play tennis, take a car down to the beach, or sleep until the afternoon, and nobody came looking for them.

But at half past seven they were in the assembly room. At nine they went through into the refectory to eat. The refectory is a long hall with a monastery ceiling. Down the middle runs a table that came out of an Italian religious house.

More antique choir stalls lined the walls. The whole room imitates somewhere a medieval community had eaten in silence for four centuries. On that table, set out among the silver, there were bottles of tomato ketchup, jars of pickles, mustard in the manufacturer’s own container. The napkins were paper.

We know this because Charlie Chaplin wrote it down. He stayed there often enough to know the routine. His account of dinner runs through pheasant and wild duck and partridge and venison. Then it arrives at the paper napkins and the shot bottles standing on a table built for monks.

He noticed one further thing which most retellings drop. When Millicent Hearst was in residence, the paper went away and the linen came out. Millicent was his wife. She lived in New York and came west rarely.

Marion Davies ran the house the rest of the time. Marion Davies was not his wife, and everybody at that table knew it. So the napkins were a kind of weather report. If you arrived and found linen, you knew who was upstairs.

I have read a good deal of speculation about why a man who could buy a monastery would put paper on the table. The usual reading is that he was performing a ranch informality, reminding his guests this was a working cattle operation rather than a palace. That may well be right. Chaplin does not say so.

He simply records it the way you record something that struck you as odd at the time and never got explained. After dinner, everybody went to the theater. It seated around fifty. There was a film every single night, often something from Cosmopolitan Productions, the company Hearst had built around Marion Davies.

Before the theater was finished, they showed films outdoors. Attendance was not compulsory in any formal sense and was completely compulsory in every other sense. One rule carried a real penalty. No hard liquor in the bedrooms.

The wine cellar held something in the region of seven thousand bottles, so this was not a house that disapproved of drinking. The rule was about control rather than abstinence. The common explanation is that it was aimed at protecting Marion Davies, who had a serious problem with alcohol. That reading comes from later historians rather than from anything Hearst said, and I would hold it loosely.

What is documented is what happened to people who broke it. Somebody drove them down the hill and put them on a train. There was no argument and no second conversation. The nearest town of any size sat forty-five miles away over unpaved road.

Being sent home from San Simeon was not a gesture. It was a journey. Guests smuggled bottles up anyway. Marion Davies did.

Everybody knew, including him, and the rule stayed. That is roughly the shape of an evening. Cocktails at half past seven. Dinner at nine under a monastery ceiling with mustard in a jar.

A film at eleven. And somewhere above all of it, a man of seventy working. None of it could have happened if somebody had not first solved the problem of the water. Nothing about that hilltop suggested a house.

It was called Camp Hill, and the name is accurate. The family had been coming up there since George Hearst bought the Rancho Piedra Blanca in the 1860s. What they did when they arrived was pitch tents. Good tents, furnished ones put up by the ranch hands, with professional cooks brought along to feed everybody, but tents.

There was no water on top of that hill. This is the fact that governs everything else. It almost never appears in accounts of the place because plumbing is not what people come to a story like this one for. Julia Morgan solved it with gravity.

Morgan tapped three natural springs on Pine Mountain, further inland and higher up, and piped them into a system of three reservoirs. The largest sat on Rocky Butte. From there, the water came down to the hilltop under its own weight. No pumps to fail, no fuel to haul.

Nothing that needed a man standing next to it. That system is still the bones of the water supply today. In recent years, the state has had to close public lavatories at the castle because parts of it are a century old and failing. Power was a separate problem and got a separate answer.

The estate ran on its own hydroelectric plant until 1924, when the San Joaquin Light and Power Corporation finally reached that stretch of coast. Then there was the question of how anything arrived at all. San Simeon sits at the bottom of the hill on a small bay, and there was a wooden pier. Nearly everything came in by coastal steamer and came off onto that pier.

Cement, steel, lumber, roof tiles, marble. Entire carved ceilings crated up in Spain, eventually the contents of a New York warehouse. Warehouses had to be built at the bay to hold it. Material arrived faster than it could be carried up the hill, and those two rates never matched.

From the pier it went five miles and sixteen hundred feet up a graded dirt road on trucks. I want to sit on that for a second, because it is the part that gets skipped. Every stone in that building went up a dirt road on the back of a truck. So did the baths, the trees for the gardens, and the crates of Roman sarcophagi—on a route that in a wet winter turned to grease.

The buildings themselves are reinforced concrete, not stone. Concrete faced with cast stone and carved detail. That is why they are still standing in earthquake country a hundred years later. Julia Morgan took a degree in civil engineering before she ever took one in architecture.

The reason that house has survived is that an engineer built it. The size of the workforce is harder to pin down than it ought to be. The figure that circulates is between twenty-five and a hundred and fifty men at any one time. It comes from a book published in the 1970s rather than from a payroll.

The men lived in barracks and cabins down the south side of the hill and ate out of a camp kitchen. Some of that fabric is still there. It is a strange thing to stand near. The workers’ quarters and the guest quarters were a few hundred yards apart and belonged to different centuries.

Work stopped and started constantly. Weather did it, and so did money, but most often the cause was Hearst changing his mind about something already built. A building superintendent named George Loorz ran the job from 1932. His letters survive in quantity and were published in 2003.

Anyone who wants to know what the wages actually were and what the crews made of the man on the hill has to go to that book. It is not on the internet, which tells you something about how this subject gets written. All of that was in place before a single guest was invited anywhere. The springs, the reservoirs, the pier, the warehouses, the road, the barracks, the camp kitchen.

A house on that hill was an engineering project before it was a house at all. And the man who gave the order to begin was fifty-six years old. Which is worth explaining, because he had been rich his whole life and he had not been able to do it until then. George Hearst could not spell, and he could read a mountain the way other men read a page.

He walked to California in 1850 out of Missouri at twenty-nine years old. He made money and lost it and made it again. Then in 1859 he bought into a claim on the Comstock Lode in Nevada—one sixth of the Ophir. The ore came out so heavy with silver that they had to work out what to do with it before they could sell it.

After that, he had the pattern. Buy early, buy deep, be right about rock. The Ontario silver mine in Utah. Homestake in the Dakota territory in 1877, which became the largest gold mine in the United States and ran for well over a century.

Anaconda Copper in Montana in 1881, on a scale that made the others look like practice. He ended up in the Senate representing California, which in those days you could more or less buy. He did. When he died in 1891, he left something in the region of nineteen million dollars.

He left all of it to his wife. Phoebe Apperson Hearst had been a school teacher in Missouri, twenty-two years younger than her husband. She turns out to be the most important person in this entire story. The money was hers, not the son’s.

William Randolph, the only child, got an allowance and a newspaper. The newspaper was the San Francisco Examiner. George had taken it in payment of a debt and had no use for it. The son asked for it in 1887 and got it.

He spent the next three decades building a national chain out of it and losing money at a rate that would have finished anyone without a mother like his. She covered him again and again for thirty years. Phoebe made up the shortfall on a business her son could not make pay. He was in his forties and still writing to his mother about money.

And she was doing a great deal more than that with it. Phoebe Hearst put her husband’s mining fortune into schools, kindergartens, and archaeology. She became the first woman regent of the University of California. She paid for an international competition to design the Berkeley campus.

She also found and funded a young architect from Oakland, sending work her way for years, and eventually commissioning a country house from her. The architect’s name was Julia Morgan. So the woman who built San Simeon was working for the mother long before she worked for the son. That is not a coincidence anybody arranged.

It is what happens when one family holds the purse. Phoebe died on the thirteenth of April 1919 at her house in the Livermore Valley. Influenza, in the pandemic year. She was seventy-six.

And William Randolph Hearst, at fifty-six years old, finally took control of his own family’s fortune. The ranch at San Simeon came with it. By most accounts, the family land along that coast had reached something like a quarter of a million acres, with fourteen miles of ocean frontage. You will see much smaller figures quoted, and they have never been reconciled.

Within weeks, he was sitting in an architect’s office in San Francisco. What he said there comes down to us through a draftsman named Walter Steilberg, interviewed in the 1970s, repeating what Morgan had told him fifty years earlier. Memory of a memory, and it should be held that way. Every version agrees on the substance.

He was tired of going up to San Simeon and camping in tents. He was getting a little too old for that. He would like something more comfortable. Fifty-six was not a young age for a man in 1919.

He had been running newspapers for thirty-two years. He had stood for mayor of New York and lost, stood for governor and lost, wanted the presidency and never got near it. He had a wife in New York and a companion in California. He had five sons.

Now the money was his, and he could point at a bare hilltop and say what should be on it. He was still pointing at it twenty-eight years later. The original idea was a bungalow. That is where the brief started in 1919.

It is worth holding on to, because everything that followed was an enlargement of a small request by a man who kept thinking of one more thing. The woman who absorbed all of it was about five feet tall. She wore plain tailored suits and would not be photographed if she could avoid it. Julia Morgan had a civil engineering degree from Berkeley, taken in 1894, the first awarded to a woman there.

She was the first woman admitted to the architecture section of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris at the very end of the 1890s, and the first to come out of it with the certificate in February of 1902. In 1904, she became the first woman licensed to practice architecture in California. She was not, whatever you may have heard, the first woman architect in America. Louise Blanchard Bethune was practicing in Buffalo from 1881 and became the first female member of the American Institute of Architects in 1888.

The claim gets made about Morgan constantly, and it is simply wrong. I raise it because she does not need the inflation. What she actually did is enough. Roughly seven hundred buildings in a working life of about forty-six years, almost all in California.

Churches, schools, hospitals, a great many buildings for the Young Women’s Christian Association, and a great many houses for people nobody has heard of. Then a client who never stopped. Hearst floated an idea early on for something in a Japanese-Swiss manner, which tells you how unfixed the whole thing was at the start. It grew into four separate residences, then the gardens, the pools, and the tennis courts, then everything else on that hill.

Because Morgan did not only design the houses. She designed the workers’ quarters, the warehouses at the bay, the farm buildings, the animal enclosures for the zoo, the water system. Her fee was six percent, raised later to eight and a half, and the rise was not greed. She was running the whole operation—hiring the crews, buying the material, managing the warehousing, dealing with dealers in Europe.

Which is where something needs correcting. There is a persistent story that Julia Morgan worked at San Simeon for nothing, or refused payment out of devotion to the work. She did not. Over about twenty years, her fees came to seventy thousand seven hundred fifty-five dollars.

One estimate of her overall profit on the job puts it near a hundred thousand. The myth seems to have grown out of a real anecdote, and the real anecdote is better. When she designed the Monday Club in San Luis Obispo, a women’s clubhouse, she did not charge a professional fee. She asked the members to cover her room and board instead.

That is one building and one arrangement, and it got generalized into a character trait, then hardened into a fact. What she did give away was her weekends. The routine was a night train out of San Francisco on Friday. It reached San Luis Obispo around midnight, where a taxi driver called Steve Zegar was usually waiting to drive her the last forty-five miles.

She would be on the hill Saturday and Sunday, and back at her drawing boards in the city on Monday morning. She did this for the better part of twenty years—hundreds of journeys in the dark, each way. The two of them wrote constantly in between. More than twenty-five hundred letters, telegrams, and notes survive from 1919 to 1941, running past thirty-two hundred pages.

They sit today in a university archive in San Luis Obispo, forty-five miles from the hill they describe. That correspondence is the closest thing this story has to a recording device. In it, a man who has bought a hill keeps asking for things to be moved. An engineer keeps working out whether they can be.

Neither of them ever quite says what they think of the other. They also had a shared history that nobody planned. Morgan had been building for his mother while he was still an expensive problem his mother was solving. When Phoebe died, the architect she had backed for twenty years was the obvious person for the son to call.

Morgan was in her seventies before the work let her go. The invitation came from a colonel. Joseph Willicombe was Hearst’s private secretary, and he controlled the guest list absolutely. He decided who was asked, when, and for how long, and the way you stopped being invited to San Simeon was that you stopped being invited.

Those who were asked came up on a Friday—a train out of Glendale in the evening, private cars hired for the occasion, north through the dark, then limousines from San Luis Obispo for the last forty-five miles. People arrived on the hill in the small hours. A few flew in instead, once there was somewhere to land. There was a dirt strip on the ranch by the late twenties—not much more than nineteen hundred feet of it, with no hangar.

Forty guests on a weekend was ordinary. There are accounts of close to a hundred at table. The traffic ran in both directions at once. One party would be heading down to the midnight train while the next was coming up at dawn.

There were stretches of that decade when the house never emptied at all. It simply exchanged people. Now, the three guest houses. Casa del Mar, Casa del Sol, and Casa del Monte stepped down the hillside below the main building—twenty bedrooms between them, forty-six rooms in total.

Morgan started with those three rather than with the main house, for a practical reason. They were small enough to finish. Casa Grande was not begun until April of 1922, by which time there was already somewhere on that hill to put a visitor. And not one of those three guest houses had a kitchen in it.

You could not make yourself a cup of coffee. You could not have a tray sent up and stay in your room with a book. If you wanted to eat, you walked up the hill to Casa Grande and sat at the table with everybody else, including the man who owned the mountain. I do not think that was an oversight.

Whether or not anybody wrote it down as a rule, the effect of it was a rule. The house assembled itself every evening because there was no alternative to assembling. Beyond that one obligation, the days were genuinely loose. The state’s own interpreters described the expectation plainly enough.

You were meant to be out—swimming, playing tennis, riding, taking a picnic down to the beach. Formality was rare. Only two occasions in all those years are recorded as requiring evening dress. One was a visit from Calvin Coolidge.

The other was a wedding. Winston Churchill came in September of 1929 and wrote to his wife about it afterwards. He found the place astonishing and the hospitality generous. He thought his host was playing, in his phrase, with the most costly toys.

One thing gets said about the guest system that I would not repeat. It is said that where you were put reflected your standing, and that being moved closer to Hearst’s own suite amounted to a promotion. You will hear it on tours and read it in a hundred articles. There is no documentary basis for it that I can find—not in the state park’s own material, not in the scholarship.

It may well have felt that way to the guests. That is not the same as it having been a system. And there is one more thing to clear away while we are up here, because it is probably the most quoted sentence ever written about San Simeon. George Bernard Shaw is supposed to have said that this is the way God would have done it—if only he had had the money.

Shaw did visit in 1933. The line does not appear attached to his name in print until a book published in 1971. That is thirty-eight years after the visit and twenty-one years after Shaw was dead. The joke itself is older than the association.

Versions of it were circulating by 1929 about grand houses on Long Island, with no particular author attached. Later versions got credited to two or three different wits, about somebody else’s estate entirely. So, it is a good line, and it has been walking around for a century looking for somebody famous to belong to. It found Shaw forty years late.

The switchboard was staffed around the clock, and the exchange had a name of its own—Hacienda. There were about eighty telephones in the buildings on that hill. Not eighty extensions of one line. Eighty instruments on a private exchange, with an operator sitting at it before dawn in case the man upstairs wanted San Francisco.

He usually did. This is the part of San Simeon that gets lost underneath the swimming pools, and it is the part that explains the whole place. That house was not a holiday home. It was a head office with a party attached, and the party was downstairs.

Hearst ran an empire from that hilltop. Around two dozen daily newspapers at the peak, magazines, a newsreel operation, a film company, radio stations. The decisions were being made two hundred miles from the nearest large city by a man in his sixties and then his seventies, working the hours he had always worked—through the night and into the morning. There was a teletype machine just inside one of the doors.

Somebody who was there remembered him coming in, stopping at it, reading whatever had arrived, and dictating an editorial on the spot, standing up. I like that detail more than any of the marble. It is the only one that shows you the actual man at work. Everything else shows you what he bought.

The technology in that house was ahead of its moment, and almost none of it was for the guests. A phonograph in the basement fed sound up into the rooms. There were teleprinters and telegraph lines and a private exchange that would have suited a small hotel. Colonel Willicombe sat at the center of all of it—the correspondence, the invitations, the instructions going down the wire to editors in New York and Chicago and Los Angeles.

A newspaper is a machine that has to be fed every day, without exception, forever. Somebody in that building was awake at any hour to feed it. Meanwhile, the guests were asleep, or in the pool, or on a horse, and most of them had no idea. What strikes me about this arrangement is how solitary it must have been at the top of it.

Forty people in the house. A film every night. And after the film, a man going back up to a gothic study to work while the people he had invited went to bed. He did not retire.

He never retired. He was still directing newspapers at eighty-four. I have seen those work habits described as an obsession, which may be true. There is a duller explanation that sits alongside it.

Those newspapers were the argument of his life. He was not going to hand them to anybody else while he could still hold a telephone. There is a second thing the machinery was doing, and it is easy to miss. A man who lives two hundred miles from his own newsrooms cannot be walked in on.

He cannot be lobbied in a corridor or caught at a lunch. Every approach to him went through a switchboard, a secretary, and a road. Whether he built it that way on purpose, I genuinely do not know. Nobody wrote it down.

But the effect is hard to argue with. The most visible man in American publishing arranged his life so that almost nobody could reach him without permission. Politicians came to him. So did the film stars.

And so, in the end, did Churchill. There is one more piece of equipment worth mentioning because of where they put it. A phonograph sat in the basement, wired up so that sound could be sent to rooms above. Music arrived in a room without a musician in it and without anybody carrying anything, at a time when most American households were still cranking a handle.

It belongs with the telephones and the teleprinters rather than with the antiques. All of it is the same instinct: put the machinery out of sight, underneath or behind, and leave the surface looking four hundred years old. Guests noticed the ceilings. Almost nobody wrote about the switchboard, and the switchboard is the reason any of them could be there at all.

A man cannot spend eight months of the year on a mountain unless he can run his business from it. Without the wires, San Simeon is a holiday house. He would have visited it for two weeks a summer and built something a tenth of the size. The wires are why he stayed.

And staying is why it got so big. Downstairs, at four in the morning, the operator waited. There were giraffes—four of them at the peak—on a hillside in San Luis Obispo County, along with camels and yaks and musk oxen and kangaroos. The proper name was the Hearst Garden of Comparative Zoology, and it is often described as the largest private zoo in the world at the time.

It came in two parts. The first part was open ground. Around fifty species of grazing animal ranged across fenced hillside—zebras, antelopes, llamas, emus, ostriches, sheep, and a herd of white fallow deer numbering around three hundred. Cars coming up the road had to stop for them, which was the effect the owner wanted and paid for.

Some of that ground ran close enough to the public highway that people who had never been invited anywhere could pull over and look at a camel. Julia Morgan designed a shelter beside the road so that arriving guests could get out and look at the animals from close range. Even the zoo got a viewing position. The second part was the menagerie proper, in cages north of the main house.

Black bears, grizzly bears, sun bears, lions, tigers, leopards, jaguars, cougars, chimpanzees, orangutans, monkeys, macaws. A veterinarian was kept on staff through the 1930s, with controlled diets and exercise regimes for the animals. For the period, that is a serious operation rather than a rich man’s whim. And a serious operation needs people in it, which is where this stops being decorative.

Somebody had to get feed up that same dirt road in quantity every week for years. Somebody had to keep a polar-climate animal alive through a Californian August. Somebody had to be the man who walked past the grizzly bears at six in the morning with a bucket. None of those people are named in anything I could find.

One more thing about the animals, which I think is the whole point of them. A private zoo is not a collection of objects. A painting hangs on a wall and asks nothing of anybody. An orangutan has to be fed, watered, sheltered, medicated, and mucked out every single day.

That holds whether or not the owner is in residence and whether or not he is still interested. Hearst bought a great many things that sat in crates for twenty years. He could not do that with a giraffe. So the zoo was the one part of the estate that could never be postponed.

It is also the part that tells you most clearly how much permanent labor that hilltop required. The zoo began to be broken up in 1937, and the reason was money, of which there was suddenly none. Dispersal took more than fifteen years. Animals went to zoos around the country, one consignment at a time, as arrangements could be made.

By the time the state of California took the property over, the large predators were long gone. What remained on the hills were zebras, elk, deer, and sheep. The zebras are still there. They graze on Hearst ranch land along Highway 1, which is still privately owned and still a working cattle operation.

If you drive that stretch of coast, you can see them from the car. Estimates of the herd vary quite a bit—from around eighty in one report to about a hundred and twenty-six a decade later. In January of 2011, three of them got out. They were shot by neighboring ranchers.

A zebra in California has no protected legal status, so nothing followed except a certain amount of local bitterness. Steve Hearst, who runs the ranch now, said afterwards that neighbors are usually there to help their neighbors, not to shoot their zebras. Which leaves the last living piece of that zoo standing in a field beside a highway. Not the giraffes—they went.

Not the bears. A small herd of striped horses standing in a field where they have no business being, ninety years after somebody put them there so his weekend visitors would have something to look at on the way up. And still occasionally getting shot for it. In the winter, when the house was shut and there was nobody to cook for, the garden still needed watering.

There were a hundred and twenty-seven acres of them. Terraces, orchards, thousands of trees hauled up that same dirt road. Some of them mature specimens, moved in whole. A garden on a dry hilltop in California is not a decoration.

It is a permanent commitment of labor and water, and the water was the expensive part. This is the half of the year nobody photographs. Hearst was often away in New York or at his place in the north, and for months at a stretch the hill held no guests at all. The work did not pause for that.

Trees do not know the owner is in Manhattan. The gardeners are actually documented, which is unusual. The record comes from the Smithsonian rather than from the house. Hugh Hazard was head gardener from 1921 to 1922.

Albert Webb followed him, then Fred Macklin, then James Chatfield. Nigel Keep was the orchard man and tree planter from 1922 until the late thirties. Most of the mature planting on that hill went into the ground under his hands. And then there is Norman Rotanzi.

He became head gardener in 1934, when Hearst was seventy-one and the building was still going on. He was still head gardener in 1992. Fifty-eight years. He worked for William Randolph Hearst.

He was there when Hearst left for the last time. He was there when the family gave the place to the state and through the whole era of public tours. He was there in an age when the visitors arriving by coach had been born after the man who built it was dead. One gardener, one hillside, most of a century.

Elsewhere on the estate, Ed Trinqueler made the ironwork. Bruce Porter, Gardner Daily, and Isabella Worn worked on the landscape design at various points across the twenties and thirties. Below all of this sat the household, and here the record goes quiet in a way I find frustrating. We know the shape of the accommodation.

There was a service wing with its own dining room. There were twelve bedrooms for female servants next to the kitchen. The men were further out, in the barracks and cabins on the south slope. Underneath the main house lies a basement of around nine thousand square feet—wine storage, pantries, boilers, a barber’s chair.

They fitted the kitchen out in Monel, a nickel alloy that cost money then and costs money now, at a scale you would expect in a hotel. What I cannot tell you is how many people worked inside that household. Or what any of them were paid. Or the name of whoever actually ran it day-to-day.

No head housekeeper, no steward, no wage book that I could reach. For a house this famous, that is a strange hole in the middle of the story. And it is not because the material does not exist. Hearst Castle’s own staff spent years recording oral histories with people who had worked there—over a hundred interviews with employees and guests and associates.

The transcripts are held in special collections at California Polytechnic in San Luis Obispo. You can read them if you go there in person. They have not been published online. So, the people who carried the trays, heated the water, drove the trucks, and made the beds did leave an account of themselves.

It is sitting in a university library about an hour and a half down the coast from the house. In boxes. Waiting for somebody with the time. Coaches arrive on that hill all year round.

Almost nobody makes the second trip. I want to be fair about this, because it is not negligence. Oral history transcripts are long, uneven, and expensive to digitize, and the institution holding them is a library with a budget rather than a broadcaster with an audience. But it does shape how this house gets told.

The building has been measured, photographed, and filmed from every angle for seventy years. The people who ran it recorded themselves once on tape, and there the story stops being convenient—which is roughly the position those people occupied when they were alive. So the arrangement has at least been consistent about who gets written down and who does not. A guest arriving in the summer of 1934 might well have found the great outdoor pool drained, fenced off, and full of men.

The Neptune Pool went through three phases of construction between 1924 and 1936. You will often read that it was built three times over because Hearst was never satisfied. That is a small exaggeration of something true enough. There was one ornamental pool in the Temple Garden.

It was substantially enlarged in 1926 and 1927. Then it was enlarged a second time in the mid-thirties into what is there now. What is there now holds three hundred and forty-five thousand gallons of water, faced in Vermont marble, and it could be heated with oil. At one end stands the front of a Roman temple.

The columns and pediment fragments in it are genuinely ancient. They were bought in Europe, shipped across, and hauled up the hill, then assembled into a facade that no Roman ever saw. One estimate puts the cost of that one pool at around half a million dollars in the money of the day. Indoors, there is a second pool lined in blue and orange and gold mosaic, made from small glass tiles fused with gold leaf.

A muralist called Camille Solon designed it, working from Roman baths and from the mosaics at Ravenna. It took seven years. The tennis courts are the roof of it. People played doubles on top of a swimming pool and mostly did not think about it.

The main house came to sixty-eight thousand five hundred square feet. A hundred and fifteen rooms, thirty-eight of them bedrooms, forty-two bathrooms, and thirty fireplaces. Forty-two bathrooms is the number that stays with me, because it is the one somebody had to clean. And then the question everybody asks, which is what the whole thing cost.

The honest answer is that nobody knows. Julia Morgan’s own accounting in 1945 came to about four million seven hundred thousand dollars for everything. Later historians have put the project at under ten million, or between seven and eight. One scholar simply states that the exact cost cannot be established.

The figure of thirty million that circulates in articles and on television has no archival basis I can find at all. It appears to have been established by repetition. But the cost is not the part that matters for anybody who was actually staying there. Work at San Simeon ran more or less continuously from 1919 until the order to stop in 1937—eighteen years.

Which means that essentially every guest who ever stayed in that house stayed on a construction site. There were crews on the hill. There was scaffolding on the towers for years at a stretch. There was the noise of stone being cut and trucks on the road.

A wing you walked past in the spring might be open to the weather by the autumn, because the owner had decided the ceiling was wrong. And not one guest account complains about it. Which is harder to explain than the building. Forty people, a weekend, for eighteen years, on a site that was never done.

Somebody must have been woken up by a pneumatic drill. Somebody must have walked out to swim and found the pool full of masons. Nobody wrote it down. They wrote down the ceilings.

There is one more thing about a permanent building site that is easy to miss from a photograph. It gives the owner something to do. A finished house is finished. A house that is never finished gives a man of sixty-five a reason to come back every year.

An argument to have with an architect. A decision waiting that only he can make. Whether that was ever in his mind, I have no way of knowing. But he had twenty-eight years of it, and he stopped only when a doctor made him.

And the photographs, of course, show none of it. The photographs were taken to show a finished house, and across the whole of his lifetime there was never a finished house to photograph. Stop work entirely at San Simeon. That was the instruction that went to Julia Morgan in 1937.

It did not come from a man who had lost interest in his house. The Hearst organization had run out of money. How much it owed depends on who is counting and what they are counting. One widely cited account puts the debt above ninety-five million dollars.

A banker brought in a few years later found a hundred and twenty-six million spread across ninety-four separate Hearst companies. Those numbers are measuring different things at different moments, and I am not going to pretend they reconcile. What is clear is the mechanism, and the mechanism is worse than the number. He did not go bankrupt.

He never filed. What happened instead was that he signed away voting control of everything he had built. The man who received it was Clarence Shearn, a former New York Supreme Court justice who had once been Hearst’s own lawyer. Shearn became voting trustee with control of Hearst finances.

At seventy-four, the founder became an employee. His salary was cut to five hundred thousand a year, or to a hundred thousand, depending on the account. Around seven hundred thousand in annual dividends stopped at the same time. He began paying rent to live at San Simeon.

The house was still legally within the organization, and the organization was no longer his to direct. And there is a detail from four years earlier that I had to read twice. In 1933, the hill itself had been mortgaged for six hundred thousand dollars. The lender was Harry Chandler, who owned the Los Angeles Times.

His chief rival in California held paper on his house. The order to stop work landed on a payroll as well as on an architect. Crews that had been coming up that road for years were let go, in a county with not much else to go to in the middle of a depression. The zoo started going that same season.

Animals were sold and shipped out to other collections, a few at a time. The process took more than fifteen years, because you cannot liquidate a giraffe quickly. The art went too, quietly at first. In the first year of selling, he moved items totaling around eleven million dollars.

And Marion Davies sold her jewelry. She sold her stocks and bonds as well and wrote him a check for a million dollars. Then she arranged a second million from the publisher Cissy Patterson. This is the moment where the woman everybody assumed was a kept mistress turns out to have been solvent when he was not.

Her money was entirely her own. She had made forty-five feature films in about twenty years. By 1924, she was being described as the leading female draw in Hollywood, in an era before anybody was counting properly. By the 1950s, she owned office buildings in New York and Los Angeles and land on the Miracle Mile and in Bel Air.

She bought the Desert Inn at Palm Springs for two million. The received picture of Marion Davies is of a pretty blonde who could not act, kept in a palace by an old man. The record shows a working comedian who could not save her own films from her protector’s taste in scripts. It also shows her bailing him out of the largest financial collapse of his life with her own capital and taking no credit for it afterwards.

I would like to be careful here, because it would be easy to swing too far the other way and make her a saint. She drank heavily for most of her adult life. She was not a businesswoman by training, and some of the property had come to her through him in the first place. But she wrote the check.

He cashed it. And for fifty years afterwards, the popular version of these two people had it exactly backwards. That was not an accident of memory. Somebody put it there in 1941, in a film.

You could buy a piece of it for twenty-five cents. In January of 1941, Gimbel Brothers and Saks Fifth Avenue in New York put the private art collection of William Randolph Hearst on sale to the general public. Not an auction for dealers. A department store sale, on the fifth floor, alongside the hats and the household goods.

The store laid out somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand objects across eighty thousand square feet of shop floor. The oldest of them had been made about two thousand five hundred years before Christ. The collection had been appraised at something in the region of fifty million dollars. You could walk in off a New York street and carry some of it home in a bag.

The man who set the prices was Armand Hammer, and he took a commission for doing it. Most of this material had been sitting in a five-story warehouse on Southern Boulevard in the Bronx. That building was where nearly everything he bought in Europe came to rest. A great deal of it had never been unpacked at all.

So the crates went to a shop counter. Shoppers walked between suits of armor and Spanish ceilings on their lunch hour. About half the Bronx holdings left his hands that way. He took a loss on the whole business.

It was a buyer’s market, and everybody knew whose furniture it was and why it was there. And in the same year, a twenty-five-year-old made a film about him. What the Hearst organization did about Citizen Kane is well documented, and it was severe. He forbade his newspapers to mention the film.

They refused advertising from RKO across the chain. The Hearst press attacked Orson Welles personally, including insinuations of communism, and the FBI opened a file on him. There is a further story that the studio heads, led by Louis B. Mayer, raised money among themselves and offered RKO eight hundred thousand dollars for the negative so that it could be destroyed.

The studio head, George Schaefer, refused. That eight-hundred-thousand-dollar figure comes from Schaefer’s own recollection, passed on through Welles and published thirty years later. One man’s memory then, rather than a document. The film took nine nominations and won one, for the screenplay.

There was audible booing in the room when it was read out. Then something happened that I did not expect when I started reading about this. The strongest correction of Citizen Kane came from the man who made it. In 1975, writing a foreword to Marion Davies’s memoir, Welles set out what his film had got wrong.

Kane was born poor and raised by a bank. Hearst was born rich. Of Susan Alexander, the talentless mistress pushed into an opera career, Welles wrote that to Marion Davies she bears no resemblance at all. He called her one of the most delightfully accomplished comedians in the whole history of the screen.

He said she would have been a star if Hearst had never happened. He accepted the blame for the shadow he had cast on her. He said the models for the opera plot had been other people entirely, and named them. He also said elsewhere that Hearst was quite a bit like Kane, although Kane was not really founded on Hearst in particular.

Thirty-four years after the fact, the man who did the damage went back and wrote it down. While we are clearing ground, there is one more story attached to Hearst. And it is the darkest one. And it is not true.

In November of 1924, the film producer Thomas Ince became ill aboard Hearst’s yacht. He died three days later, at forty-four. The popular version says Hearst shot him. The death certificate, signed by a physician named Ida Cowan Glasgow, records angina.

The district attorney in San Diego stated publicly that there would be no investigation. The casket was open for viewing, and no mourner ever reported a wound. Two newspapers investigated independently and found nothing. The murder version reached the public through a book called Hollywood Babylon, published in French in 1959 and in America in the sixties.

Its author, Kenneth Anger, asserted a bullet hole in the head. He has since been shown to have invented a great deal of what is in that book. A companion detail—that the columnist Louella Parsons was bought off with a lifetime contract for her silence—falls apart on the dates. She was already working as a motion picture editor for a Hearst paper a full year before Ince died.

She was not on the boat. Ince’s widow put it plainly at the time. She asked whether anyone thought she would have done nothing if she had even suspected foul play. Nobody has ever answered her.

He left on the second of May, 1947, and there is no indication that anyone in the car described it as the last time. He had suffered a heart attack earlier that year. He was eighty-four. The problem with San Simeon, which had never been a problem before, was that it sat a long way from a hospital.

No doctor would agree to live up there permanently. So the man who had spent twenty-eight years making a hilltop habitable was defeated by the one thing he could not have carried up it. He went to a house on North Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills, with Marion Davies. He never saw the castle again.

He had, by then, won his last fight. The debt was under control by the middle forties. New management had replaced Shearn, and he was directing his own newspapers again in his eighties. Work on the hill had even resumed, on a limited basis.

It resumed too late to matter. What had been built by 1937 was what there was going to be. Though the crews did not stop when he did. The interior of the North Wing—around seventeen thousand square feet of it—was officially completed in 1948, the year after he walked out.

This is worth getting right, because the line you always hear is that Hearst Castle was never finished. The exterior of that North Wing never was. A great ballroom that had been planned never got built. But the builders kept going for a year after the owner had gone, closing up what could be closed up, and then they stopped as well.

He died in Beverly Hills on the fourteenth of August, 1951, at eighty-eight. The funeral was held at Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill in San Francisco, conducted by the Episcopal Bishop Karl Morgan Block. Around fifteen hundred people came, among them the governor and the mayor. There was no sermon and there was no eulogy.

Instead, the bishop read out a poem that Hearst had written himself ten years earlier. A man who employed several thousand writers was seen off by the only one he fully trusted. He was buried at Cypress Lawn in Colma, next to the mother whose money had started all of it. Marion Davies was not there.

She stayed in Beverly Hills. A contemporary report has her telling a nurse that she had thought she might go to church that morning and that she would stay where she was instead. Accounts from her side say the sons moved the body before she could say goodbye. Those accounts come from people with no love for the sons.

They had been together for more than thirty years. She had kept him solvent in ’37. She was not on the list. There was one more piece of business, and it took eleven weeks.

Davies came out of his will holding a large block of Hearst Corporation shares—enough to give her a controlling hand in the company. At the end of October 1951, she sold that block back to Millicent Hearst. The price was one dollar. She kept a smaller holding and an advisory title that meant very little.

Whatever was said in the room, the wife ended up with the company and the companion ended up with the receipt. In 1957, the Hearst Corporation offered the castle to the state of California. The gift took in the gardens, the art still standing in the house, and about a hundred and fifty acres around it. The gates opened to the public in June of 1958.

The family kept the ranch—all eighty-two thousand acres of it. And on the hill, through every part of that, the same gardener. Norman Rotanzi had watched the building stop and the animals leave. He watched the owner go down the road for the last time, and then he watched the first coach party come up it.

He was still turning the soil on those terraces in 1992. Forty-two bathrooms. I keep going back to that, because somebody had to clean them, and nobody has ever written down who. That is more or less what I found.

The house is exhaustively documented, and the life inside it is not. And the gap between those two things is the most interesting fact about the place. We know the ceilings came from Spain. We do not know the name of the woman who ran the household.

What can be said is this: for almost everybody who was up on that hill, it was work. And a great deal of it. And almost none of it visible from the drive. Men in barracks on the south slope.

A dozen women in bedrooms off the kitchen. A gardener on those terraces for fifty-eight years. Somebody feeding a grizzly bear at six in the morning. An operator at a switchboard at four.

A taxi driver in San Luis Obispo waiting at midnight for a small woman coming off a train, because his passenger worked weekends for twenty years. The guest got the swimming and the pheasant and the film at eleven. Everyone else got a shift. As for the man, the arithmetic of his life still stops me.

He was fifty-six before his own money was his. He built for twenty-eight years and never lived in a finished house. He mortgaged the hill to his rival, paid rent to sleep on it, and watched his collection sold off a shop counter to strangers buying at a quarter. And at eighty-two, with the debts cleared, he started building again.

Then a heart went, and no doctor would live that far from town, and that was the end of it. He went down the road in a car in May and died in a bedroom in Beverly Hills four years later, and the crews finished the North Wing without him. The zebras stayed.