William Randolph Hearst spent childhood summers in canvas tents at Camp Hill on the California coastal land his mining magnate father George Hearst bought in 1865, then at age 10 toured Europe for 18 months with his mother Phoebe in 1873. When she died in 1919, he inherited 11 million dollars and a quarter of a million acres, and asked San Francisco architect Julia Morgan for a simple bungalow. Morgan, the first woman admitted to the architecture program at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the first licensed female architect in California, instead designed a Spanish Renaissance complex inspired by a church in Ronda, Spain, fed by a gravity reservoir system piping spring water from the Santa Lucia Mountains.

Over a 20 year partnership, the two traded blueprints across dinner tables while guests like Winston Churchill, Calvin Coolidge, Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, and Clark Gable ate game off antique silver with paper napkins and store-bought ketchup. Hearst lived there with actress Marion Davies, rationing alcohol to control her drinking, and ran his newspapers by telegraph and teletype. In 1941 he used a press blackout and threats through Louella Parsons to fight Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. Debts above 100 million dollars forced a 1937 reorganization, and much of his art was sold in Macy’s and Gimbels. He left the hill in 1947 and died in 1951, and his family excluded Davies from the funeral.

• How Morgan used natural elevation to push water across canyons into million gallon reservoirs without pumps
• Over 40 bedrooms, gold-leafed pools, a movie theater, and a private zoo with zebras on the hillsides
• Monasteries dismantled stone by stone in Europe, with Spanish villagers rioting against his workers
• Why Hearst’s campaign against Citizen Kane hurt its box office but sealed its reputation
• The 1958 gift of the estate to California and the posthumous honors finally given to Julia Morgan