Xanadu on the Sunset Sea

While Europe was incubating dictators, the United States was inventing media tycoons. The only son of the very personification of the Wild West’s prospecting frenzy, William Randolph Hearst was a Harvard-educated greenhorn, better suited to a dude ranch than to the Chisholm Trail. And yet he was a tough individual: one very likely apocryphal story has him reassuring Frederic Remington by telegram that, despite his doubts, there most certainly would be bloody combat for the artist to sketch for Hearst’s newspapers: “Remington, Havana: Please remain. You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war. – W. R. Hearst.” A man who could inspire that level of mythmaking needed a very adamantine architect indeed, and Californian Julia Morgan fit that bill. Paris-trained and the epitome of a new, egalitarian civilization spawned on the American shores of the vast Pacific Ocean, Morgan was precisely the visionary to build him a miraculous Xanadu on a mountaintop. The blue-green extravaganza of exquisite tiles reflected both the water in the pool and the salt water five miles away: in that imperial splendor lounged guests such as Charlie Chaplin, Cary Grant, Buster Keaton, and Jean Harlow.