Joan Didion on the Uninhibited Pleasures of Hearst Castle
"San Simeon, “La Cuesta Encantada,” the phantasmagoric barony that William Randolph Hearst made for himself on the sunburned hills above the San Luis Obispo County coast. San Simeon was a place which, once seen from the highway, was ever in the mind, a material fact which existed in proof of certain abstract principles. San Simeon seemed to confirm the boundless promise of the place we lived. The gates were always barred on that road up the hill, and yet there was a kind of frontier accessibility about the Hearsts; the Hearst money was Western money, money that had come originally from a silver strike in Nevada, money made and spent in a singularly Western spirit of luck, imagination, irresponsibility, and general flamboyance. If a Hearst could build himself a castle, then every man could be a king."
