Excerpt from Chapert 1, End of the Fairytale…
WR’s first wife was Catholic, and so she would not agree to a divorce. Divorce back then was earthshaking, and because the Catholic prohibition against it was generally respected WR and Marion remained unmarried lovers for the rest of his life. Marion had been a Ziegfield Follies girl. She met Hearst when she was nineteen and he was fifty-three. WR loved her dearly, and I frequently saw them holding hands as they walked around the great estate together.
The Hearst Castle at San Simeon—or “the ranch” as society called it back then—is a palatial complex on a hill halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles a few miles off the California coast. It was and still is famous for its sumptuous accommodations and the grand scale of its pastiche of architectures, all selected by WR in his many travels. One year, when we spent Easter at the ranch, we hunted Easter eggs among the rose and flower beds and slept in a guest house in the voluptuous bed of Louis XIV, perhaps the greatest and most flamboyant of all the kings of France.
Linnie and I spent a lot of time in the great dining hall, which seemed incredibly vast to us small children with its long, wooden table seating forty, lined end to end with high-back, carved wooden chairs with plush red cushioning. The hall looked like a cathedral, with stone walls, a high ceiling, and tattered medieval flags hanging along the walls. The adults slept late because they partied every night, so Mamidouli, Linnie, and I would have an early breakfast there by ourselves, sitting in those huge chairs at one end of the long table. WR always had mustard, ketchup and paper napkins on the table—”to keep the feeling of a ranch,” he said, dead serious.
The ultimate tycoon, WR invited to the ranch from all over the world every famous writer, scientist, politician, and artist of the time. Guests would often stay for several weeks. Besides participating in the endless swimming, riding, tennis and zoo activities, guests could watch the latest movies in the theater and attend the costume parties, games, or other entertainments in the evening. WR always had an enormous jigsaw puzzle in a perpetually unfinished state in the library. Guests took turns placing pieces while waiting for dinner.
Linnie and I loved to swim in the two huge pools. The outdoor pool looked like a Greek temple, surrounded by white columns with large black and white tiles on the bottom. The indoor pool was more fun, though, because it went around corners and into different rooms, and we could swim from one room to the next. Like all the architecture of the Castle designed by master architect Julia Morgan, the indoor pools were lavishly decorated in classical styles.
Hearst kept an entire zoo on the estate with lions, tigers, and gorillas in cages. Elephants, zebras, camels, bison, antelope, gnus, and giraffes were each in different pastures below the house on the hilltop. A backyard like no other.
Copyright (c) 2011 A. Vidor Publications
