San Simeon: The Hearst Castle Tour

The Hearst Castle tour is trip back in time to the 1930's, Hollywood's glamour days, when an invitation to spend a weekend at William Randolph Hearst's "ranch" was coveted by celebrities.

As our tour bus chugs up the five-mile hill, we pass the grassy fields where Hearst housed the largest private zoo in America. The bus drops us off in front of the Castle, where Bob, our tour guide, waits to greet us.

Bob talks to every guest, noting their hometowns and working that information into his Castle commentary. (“No pool as big as this in Podunk, right?”) A large man with a ranger hat and squishy black tennis-shoes-disguised-as-dress-shoes, Bob sucks us all in with his booming voice and love of Hearst’s Castle and grounds. He has the special personality of a long-time tour guide—thirty-one years—infinite patience and charm.

Hearst’s Neptune Pool, as dramatic as I have seen in photos, glimmers in the heat. The pool is surrounded by Greek or Roman pillars and marble statues. The confluence of scents mingling in the garden rises up to my nostrils, creating a single, pleasing perfume. The tour group walks through one of the four-bedroom guest houses, Casa del Sol. Period clothes are hanging in the bathrooms or lain out on the short beds. (Were people that much shorter in the thirties?)

In the main house, Casa Grande, Italian church chairs are built into the walls of the long living room in the main house. Above the chairs hang grand tapestries, all hundreds of years old.

The dining room features an endlessly long, set for ten guests in the center. The packaged Hearst Castle tour does expose a weakness of the man, lest we think they are covering something up. Bob reveals Hearst’s scandalous love of low-brow ketchup. The elegant table is set up with ketchup and mustard at reachable intervals on the table to prove it. Would he have used the more sophisticated “catsup”?

We walk through the billiard room and the indoor pool, magnificent with blue and gold leaf tiles. The indoor pool, built underneath the outdoor tennis courts, is empty, exposing the delicate blue tile pattern on the bottom.