3D Media

[Above photo: AM. Used courtesy of Hearst Castle®/California State Parks]


William Randolph Hearst spoke to the nation through the New York Journal and to posterity through his house, Casa Grande.

Casa Grande is the central ‘keep’ of Hearst Castle on La Cuesta Encantada – “The Enchanted Hill” – the complex and grandiose buildings which were the inspiration for Xanadu in the film Citizen Kane. They perch on top of a 1,600 ft mountain looking out over the Pacific in California, at the centre of a 50,000-acre estate. Built between 1919 and 1947, Hearst Castle is really a collection of European-style structures in modern materials, designed to accommodate the acquisitive lifestyle of its owner.

Hearst Castle is now a California State Monument. The Spanish-style name of the main house seems more appropriate to European eyes, to whom a castle has curtain walls and crenellations. The multiple names reflect the fact that to William Randolph Hearst the place was an expression of many different ideas about his home, as power-base, family focus and memory of childhood explorations. As a child of 10 in 1873 he had been taken by his doting mother on a European tour lasting eighteen months. They had seen the British Isles, France, Germany, Switzerland and Italy, tracing the kind of itinerary favoured by wealthy young Europeans on the Grand Tour. Spain was not included in those travels. The Spanish element of Casa Grande came from the settlers from that country who set up missions and ranches in an older California.

Having inherited his father’s wealth from silver mining and the estate, Hearst began to create a home to impress the world. His own business was newspapers, starting with the San Francisco Examiner once owned by his father, adding more plus consumer magazines and cinema newsreels later. Hearst wrote editorials and reports for the Examiner and for the New York Journal that he bought. Together with contemporaries such as Joseph Pulitzer and Merrill Goddard of the New York Herald he set much of the tone and style of American opinion in the early twentieth century. His whole life was spent promoting his own opinions about the world, and he did so using his home as well as his papers. As Casa Grande/Hearst Castle grew, full of eclectic European-style architecture and objects and even a menagerie with zebra, lions and giraffes. William Randolph invited in politicians and playboys, film stars and financiers, for weekend parties presided over by himself. He could show off his culture and learning as well as his wealth and control of a media empire.

Hearst Castle was a home and a statement of power and an interest in art, and it is now a tourist attraction. There is a web site with information about its story. A visitor leaflet can be downloaded with a brief history and explanation of what can be seen at the property to take the narrative further. A Visitor Centre at the entrance to what is now a State Park shows a National Geographic Imax film about Hearst and the house. From the Centre a shuttle bus climbs the mountain to deliver each party of visitors to a tour guide who will show them round. The architecture, works of art and the landscape – still with zebra and cattle to be seen – stimulate more thoughts about the place and its owner. Back at the Visitor Centre books, videos and DVDs can be bought about both of these and about the architect who worked for Hearst, Julia Morgan. There are miniature reproductions of statues, there are candle snuffers, copies of tiles, ornaments and pictures. To some visitors these are just status symbols to be stuck on a shelf and hopefully admired by their visitors in turn – just as in the days of the Grand Tour. To others they provide three dimensional examples, on a smaller scale and less well made, perhaps, not only of the life of the man who collected the originals but also of a culture distant in both time and space. To someone on one side of the world what did ancient Egypt look like on the other – or Greece, Russia or England? By themselves they tell very little. On the other hand, like the smell of a cake to a nostalgic mind they might set off a train of thought and enquiry which opens up a better understanding of what was, long ago, and what is, far away.

California still has the San Francisco Examiner and it has the Hearst San Simeon State Historical Monument. Both newspaper and tourist attraction tell their stories daily to thousands of people. Each of them have staff who select the stories and the illustrations for them. They decide which channels will carry those stories to people – newspaper sections, web site and special publications in the case of the paper; tour guides, books, videos, exhibition and Imax film for the Park. They are informative, entertaining, profound, shallow, illuminating, educational or propagandist in turn according to how they relate their narratives and to how their audiences interpret the messages. Both are examples of different varieties of mass media, spreading their messages from their narrators to their mass audiences. The newspaper is a medium of two dimensions, the great buildings and collections of Hearst Castle are of three. Tourists ‘read’ landscapes and attractions the world over, three-dimensional media which have been created to say something to the people who behold them.

At Piedra Blanca, to the north of San Simeon, a large colony of Elephant Seals lives, and there are interpretive panels and a guide lecturer to explain all about them