Recently Read: The Golden Days of San Simeon, by Ken Murray

Ken Murray's 1971 book on William Randolph Hearst's castle in San Simeon, California, once one of the largest private residences in the U.S. is, in some respects, a disappointing puff piece. It revels in the details of the architectural structures Hearst acquired in Europe and cobbled together for his magnificent home and features many B&W photos of Hollywood royalty having fun but shies away from anything that even hints of being controversial or takes away from the legend of San Simeon as a relentlessly fun pleasure palace for visitors.

For those looking for the specifics of each room's European sources, or what actresses visited when, the book, featuring many B&W photographs Murray shot, will satisfy. It's truly bizarre, though, for Murray to not mention that the ever-present actress Marion Davies was Hearst's mistress (common knowledge since at least the 1920s). The death of Hearst's dog Helen literally gets more space in the text than his wife, Millicent, who's mentioned in one sentence when she "visited" the castle.

The Golden Days of San Simeon was created partly to coincide with castle tours and partly to showcase Murray's photographs, but for a history of the residence which doesn't lie by omission, there are other books to explore.

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Recently Read: The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst, by David Nasaw

David Nasaw's 600-page biography of the newspaper and multimedia tycoon is probably the definitive one. The book explores Hearst's amazing life in all its contradictory trajectories, progressive early in life, conservative later. The 1890s term "yellow journalism" was coined to describe Hearst's (and publisher Joseph Pulitzer's) use of shameless journalistic sensationalism; Hearst made a fortune railing against entrenched monopolistic political powers on behalf of his working class readers. He was a prescient pioneer in creating a synergistic business model exploited later by even larger corporate giants, making movies based on short stories already published in his magazines and newspapers, and then, full circle, promoting those same movies (often starring his mistress and life-long companion, Marion Davies) in his magazines and newspapers.

Hearst lived and spent large, constantly updating his castle in San Simeon, CA, owning on the same land what was the largest privately owned zoo in the world, nearly every day ordering enough antiques from auction catalogs that they filled entire warehouses (German comic books were one of the first things he collected as a boy; later, the merchandising of comic strips he published in his newspapers helped keep his company afloat during hard times). Hearst had a voracious, devil-may-care personality, optimistic, fun-loving, generous to friends and employees. He was also politically naïve, letting his American isolationist prejudices lead him to believe and trust the "good intentions" of the pre-WWII Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.

Director Orson Welles said (out of self-preservation) at the time of his making Citizen Kane that his film was not based on Hearst. That he said it wasn't is patently ridiculous, and yet he was inadvertently correct. Neither Hearst or Marion Davies were much like the characters Welles and screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz put on the screen. The real people were ever more nuanced, complex and interesting.

Nasaw's book is eminently readable, painstakingly researched, and careful to keep the author's personal views out of the picture most of the time. Beginning with mining operator George Hearst (born in 1820) and ending with the aftermath of William Hearst's passing in 1951, the scope of the story is huge and mesmerizing.

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