(See front cover)
The most fabulous dwelling place in the U. S. is the ranch of William Randolph Hearst. Midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, it surveys the Pacific along a 50-mile crest of hills. Five times the size of the District of Columbia, its 240,000 acres give lordly privacy to its little capital. La Cuesta Encantada. On this Enchanted Hill, the monarch's castle rears cathedral towers to the sky. On the hill's slope, lesser castles serve humbly as "guest houses'"—Casa del Mar, Casa del Monte, Casa del Sol. Hard by these are enchanted gardens, marble swimming pools, a zoo complete with lion, leopard, bear, elephant, chimpanzee. On the hillside roam bison, zebra, kangaroo, giraffe, llama, antelope, the emu and the gnu. These are but outward show. Within the palace portals is a treasury of Art that brings the value of their new-found home to $15,000,000: a Great Hall, where 150 trenchermen may dine on 16th Century refectory boards beneath the festal banners of Siena; six Gobelin tapestries which cost $575,000; carved ancient choir stalls; the bed of the great Richelieu for guests; $8,000 vases; gold dinner plates and paper napkins; a ping-pong table of medieval wood; a lavish theatre, where each night is shown the latest talking picture film, very likely flown that day from Hollywood; and 150 men and women menials to tend the comfort of their lord.
Such is the fitting home of the man who rules the biggest publishing empire ever carved out of these U. S. His hermitage it was originally, his place of retirement from the world, but each year he has made it more and more a capital whither he calls satraps, whence he sends commands. There he picks up a telephone —of his private switchboard, Hacienda 13 F 11—to talk, for perhaps an hour, to his editors in San Francisco or Chicago or Atlanta or Manhattan. There every day he dictates sheafs of orders-of-the-day beginning "The Chief says . . . ," signed "Willicombe" — Joe Willcombe his 6-ft. secretary of 17 years service, who promptly flashes the messages over Hearst's Universal Service wire which links Enchanted Hill to its fiefs across the continent—and to its outposts throughout the world. And there last week William Randolph Hearst prepared to meet old age. There the scandalous Bad Boy of only yesterday —the genius of a thousand melodramas— becomes 70 years old on April 29.
The telephone and telegraph operators on Enchanted Hill will be just as rushed on the Chief's 70th birthday as any other day. For the man who has given freer play to every whim and ambition than any American of his time holds no dav pure holiday. And he has said: "The time to retire is when God retires you and not before."
Hearst at 70 has become something of a myth. Few. of his 20,000,000 readers have ever seen his 6-ft., big-boned frame; his long, horsey face and cold, pale blue eyes; few have heard his strangely querulous, nearly effeminate voice. He went to Cleveland for a throat operation last autumn, has not crossed the Rockies since.