SAFETY MEASURES AT HEARST CASTLE,
SAN SIMEON, CALIF.
One recent morning, a dozen Barbary sheep started to shamble across the main road to Hearst Castle, then stopped in the middle.
And why not? They hadn’t seen a loaded tour bus on that road since March.
As California wages a seesaw battle against the coronavirus, the castle’s keepers confront the challenge of reopening a historic site that depends on bus transportation and has no air filtration system. Nobody is sure when California’s most famous mansion will reopen, including Dan Falat, superintendent of the California State Parks district that includes the castle.
The castle stands about 230 miles northwest of Los Angeles, halfway to San Francisco, a location that helped, until now, make it a prime tourist attraction for decades.
At its Roman Pool, where 1,800 tourists per day no longer pass by, the freshly scrubbed tiles have never looked bluer. In most of the compound’s 165 artifact-filled rooms, there’s less dust than usual – because, as curator Toby Selyem explained, there aren’t visitors shedding dead skin as they shuffle past. Like millions of other homeowners who have been filling their pandemic days with longpostponed household projects, the team on the Hearst Castle hilltop has a long list of chores.
Workers are trying to revive and clone an ailing oak tree, to replace rusted iron with stainless steel wherever possible, to power-wash tiles, to pluck ash from pool filters.
They’re also trying to calculate how many COVID-era tourists can safely fit on a 54-seat bus – perhaps 13? maybe 27? – and how many can stand in the grand Assembly Room where publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst once rubbed shoulders with Winston Churchill, Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Harpo Marx, Joan Crawford and Cecil Beaton.
The castle is really a 127-acre compound of buildings dominated by Casa Grande, the principal residence, whose exterior resembles a cathedral that’s been smuggled out of southern Europe. Clustered around it are three guest houses; two pools; extensive gardens and tennis courts, all sur
rounded by the blond hills and stately oaks of the 80,000-acre Hearst Ranch, still owned by Hearst Corp.
The visitor center is just off California 1. In normal times, 16 tour buses roll up and down the steep, 7-mile road between the visitor center and the castle complex, with two departures every 10 minutes in peak hours. Now the buses sit idle at the bottom of the hill while the sheep, which prefer the high country, cross the road at will.
The animals, a North African species known as an aoudad, are descended from early occupants of Hearst’s private zoo. The same goes for the zebra, elk and several other species that roam the ranch lands.
Since the pandemic, “you definitely see them a little bit more now in the road,” Falat said. “They have a little bit more carte blanche.”
At the Roman Pool – the spectacularly tiled indoor space that is the last stop on most tours – workers have partially drained the water, pressure-washed areas that hadn’t been cleaned since the 1980s, re-plastered here and there, repaired glass mosaic tiles and set about replacing rusty iron railing with stainless steel sleeves.
The room’s eroded cork ceiling tiles still need repairing and resealing, a tricky job because the tennis courts are just above. But the blue room, dusted with gold leafing and empty of visitors, shimmers like a mirage.
Outside at the larger Neptune Pool, where marble statues are gathered like a weekend retreat of Greek and Roman gods, it’s been two years since workers finished a fouryear leak-sealing project. But the nearby Dolan wildfire in September sent so much ash into the air (and then into the pool water) that workers had to double or triple their scheduled cleanings of the filter system.
William Randolph Hearst, who inherited a mining fortune and built a publishing empire, launched his planning for the estate in 1919, after his mother’s death in the influenza epidemic of 1918.
He spent more than 25 years acquiring items, drawing and redrawing plans with architect Julia Morgan. The result, many experts have said, is a vast but disparate collection of European art and artifacts from many eras and locales, displayed cheek by jowl.
“It was a fantasy project,” said James Allen, public relations director of the castle.
Atop a 17th century Italian dining table set for 22 in the Refectory, Hearst liked to keep bottles of Heinz ketchup and French’s mustard at the ready. So they remain.
Whether you consider this castle the realm of an unpretentious potentate or the kingdom of kitsch, it made for many entertaining weekends. Hearst usually shared host duties with his longtime mistress, actress Marion Davies, while his wife, Millicent, remained in New York.
When he left his castle in 1947 for the last time because of health troubles, Hearst still viewed it as incomplete. He died in 1951. Seven years later, Hearst Corp. donated the hilltop and the 2-acre visitor center site to the state. Since then, more than 40 million tourists have come and gone.