William Randolph Hearst's fairytale castle
IF YOU were the fabulously wealthy American William Randolph
Hearst and you were having a passionate, extramarital affair with a goddess of
the silent screen, the last place you would think of setting up a love nest for
the pair of you would be in a small Welsh town.
By MARI GRIFFITH
PUBLISHED: 10:40, Thu, Jul 30, 2015 | UPDATED: 08:00, Wed,
Aug 5, 2015
Hearst's fairytale castle
And yet that is exactly what Hearst did for himself and his
mistress, the silent screen star Marion Davies.
He bought her a fairytale castle in Wales. Naturally, she
wanted to show it off to her friends so, during the 1930s, it was not unusual
to catch a glimpse of Clark Gable, Bob Hope or Charlie Chaplin on the streets
of Llantwit Major in the Vale of Glamorgan.
Politicians Winston Churchill and Lloyd George were no
strangers to the area either and it is said that a youthful John F Kennedy,
destined to become 35th President of the United States, paid a private visit
during this period.
Some of the fi lm stars were pleased to scrawl their names
on the wall in one of the picturesque local pubs though, sadly, a misguided
landlord saw fit to limewash over their autographs a couple of years later.
They all converged on the town because, at various times,
they were invited to stay at the lovely medieval castle of St Donat’s, just a
clifftop stroll away, as house guests of the American newspaper tycoon, who had
bought the castle on a whim in 1925.
Hearst had seen St Donat’s advertised for sale in Country
Life magazine and cabled his English agent the instruction to buy it at once.
It would be the ultimate gift for Marion Davies, the lover with whom he was
absolutely besotted.
William Randolph Hearst was super-rich. Whatever he wanted,
he bought and it’s generally agreed that he was the model for the Orson Welles
fi lm Citizen Kane. Welles himself denied this, claiming that the script for
his 1941 blockbuster was not based on any one person, more an amalgam of two or
three. Whether this was true or not, Hearst sued.
That’s the kind of man he was. He had money and he could do
what he liked. He could buy anything he wanted and did, spending huge amounts
on those people he admired and those who could be of use to him, entertaining
them extravagantly and showering them with gifts.
The person on whom he lavished more money than anyone else
was Marion Davies, who was already establishing an enviable reputation for
herself as a comedy actress in silent films.
Hearst, whose cheque book came in very useful for buying
dreams, bought a theatre to further her stage career, renamed it the Marion
Davies Theatre, refurbished it completely and had it painted a delicate shade
of rosebud pink in her honour.
What God would have built if he’d had the money
George Bernard Shaw
Though he invested heavily in her career, Hearst wasn’t sure
about the lightweight roles she played on fi lm. He preferred to think of her
as a classical actress of some stature and promoted her as such through his
newspapers.
Then he founded Cosmopolitan Pictures in Hollywood, bringing
financial pressure to bear on the new company’s producers to cast her in
weighty historical dramas rather than in the comedy roles which were really
what suited her best.
He financed several films on condition that they would be
starring vehicles for her, including the 1922 production When Knighthood Was In
Flower, a costume drama in which she played the leading role of Mary Tudor, the
younger sister of King Henry VIII.
St Donat’s castle would be the perfect classical backdrop
for Marion Davies, a real-life setting from medieval times.
There’d be no need for set designers and fi lm cameras to
create this, it was the real deal.
The picturesque castle dates back to the 12th century and
the fabric of the building was in need of considerable attention. Hearst spent
a fortune restoring it, buying entire rooms from castles and manor houses
throughout Europe and installing them in his new love nest.
The most significant of these was the Great Hall which came
from Bradenstoke Priory in Wiltshire. He had it dismantled then reconstructed
brick by brick at the heart of St Donat’s.
Hearst and his adored
mistress would invite influential politicians and fi lm star friends to stay
with them in these opulent surroundings where more than 30 marble bathrooms had
been installed for the comfort and convenience of the guests.
According to George Bernard Shaw, it was “what God would
have built if he’d had the money”.
Oddly – though perhaps Hearst didn’t know this at the time –
the castle already had American presidential connections long before JFK paid a
visit because, back in the 15th century, it was the home of the ancestors of
the man who became the sixth President of the United States, John Quincy Adams.
They were Sir Edward Stradling and his wife Joan, who was the illegitimate
daughter of Cardinal bishop Henry Beaufort, himself the illegitimate child of
John of Gaunt and his mistress, Lady Katherine Swynford.
So when it came to deciding on a location for a sequence in
my historical novel Root Of The Tudor Rose, it seemed a heaven-sent opportunity
to use St Donat’s.
It’s just down the road from where I live and if it was good
enough for Hearst, it was good enough for me!
The book tells the story of another romance, a clandestine
liaison between the very first Tudor of all, the Welshman Owen Tudor, and
Catherine de Valois, the lovely young widow of King Henry V.
The lovers were both foreigners at the English court of
Catherine’s baby son, King Henry VI where she, as a French woman, was treated
with suspicion.
Owen befriended her and they fell in love, embarking upon a
passionate affair. In time, Catherine became pregnant but no one at court could
ever, ever know about the baby.
After all, the Queen was a widow and her lover Owen Tudor,
who was Clerk of her Wardrobe, was a servant.
The pair were desperate to find somewhere for their baby to
be born and it did seem reasonable to me that Joan Beaufort, Lady of the Manor
at St Donat’s, might have welcomed them.
These days, the castle is home to the sixth form Atlantic
College, the first of 15 United World Colleges, founded in 1962 and established
to enable students from all over the world to follow an international
curriculum.
It also, occasionally, provides a wonderful location for
sequences in films and TV series such as Doctor Who and Wolf Hall, though it’s
just as well that this never happened in the days of William Randolph Hearst.
He would probably have insisted that Marion Davies should
star as Anne Boleyn.
To order Root Of The Tudor Rose by Mari Griffith (Accent
Press, £7.99 paperback, Hardback available £14.99) call the Express Bookshop on
01872 562310. Alternatively, send a cheque or postal order payable to The
Express Bookshop to Tudor Rose Offer, PO Box 200, Falmouth, Cornwall TR11 4WJ
or visit expressbookshop.co.uk. UK delivery is free.
Art historians are appealing for the return of hoards bought
by billionaires
Robin Stummer
Sun 5 Mar 2017 00.05 GMT Last modified on Sat 2 Dec 2017
03.30 GMT
This article is over 1
year old
Hearst Castle, fantasy home of ‘the great accumulator’ and
publishing magnate, where many valuable artefacts are displayed.
Leading British historians are calling for the return of a
huge hoard of UK art treasures that has gone missing in the United States.
The works – a slice of the nation’s cultural history – range
from ship-loads of paintings and sculptures to entire interiors from old
houses, transported across the Atlantic as part of the largest movement of art
and architecture since the Renaissance. The former V&A director, Sir Roy
Strong, is one of the academics calling for Britain’s vanished heritage to be
found.
The extent of the lost art and architecture has emerged
since the launch in January of an appeal to find a Tudor oak parlour “missing”
from Gwydir castle in north Wales. The ornate panelling and a fireplace were
bought by the US billionaire William Randolph Hearst in the 1920s and were last
seen at his palatial home in New York in the 1930s.
Efforts to find the room, one of two from the castle sold to
Hearst, have so far failed. But the search has brought to light the greatest
single loss of cultural artefacts from Britain. Though many pieces shipped
across the Atlantic passed into public collections in the US, and some
worldwide, the fate of the bulk of the material is unknown.
Hearst, fictionalised by Orson Welles in the film Citizen
Kane, was an obsessive collector of European – especially British – art and
architecture. He was dubbed “the great accumulator” by one dealer. Rumours
persist that sealed Hearst containers remain in storage.
The largest Hearst storage site is in the Bronx, New York,
but other warehouses are believed to exist across the country. His fantasy
medieval castle at San Simeon, California – Xanadu in the film – displays many
works, though they are thought to be only around 10% of his entire collection.
More than 90 rail wagons brought treasures to San Simeon, and one of the final
scenes in Citizen Kane shows an endless vista of crated art at Xanadu.
Hearst was one of several super-rich Americans vying to
amass art and antiques. John D Rockefeller, JP Morgan and Henry Clay Frick were
also major players, with an extensive “second tier” of buyers below them.
For nearly 60 years, from the 1880s, items from Italy,
France, Spain, Germany and Greece were snapped up, but Britain was the richest
source. The trade was frenzied. When the Titanic sank in 1912, 30 tons of
crated English architectural objects were on board. Entire historic interiors
would be acquired – panelling, fireplaces, doors, paintings, timbers and
plaster ceilings, libraries and tapestries – and shipped as job lots, often without
an inventory. Artworks in particular were sold “en bloc” – by quantity – by
dealers with no detailed description.
Over time, US galleries and museums came to own some of the
items. Georgian rooms bought by Hearst, taken from Sutton Scarsdale Hall in
Derbyshire, were used as film sets in Hollywood before ending up at the
Huntington Library collection, California. Other Sutton Scarsdale rooms are
held by the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
In the 1990s, the owners of Gwydir traced one of the
castle’s two missing interiors, a 1640s room, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art
in New York, which acquired it from Hearst. The room had been stored at the
museum for decades, and the owners bought and reinstated it.
The extent of exports of British art and antiques to America
is known to a few academics, but Gwydir’s search for its lost room has brought
this episode out of the shadows. Now calling for a concerted effort to find the
lost heritage are the pre-eminent historians Sir Roy Strong and John Harris.
Strong told the Observer: “There were ship-loads of early
English portraits exported, not just grand things. There were interesting
Elizabethan and other pictures. Back then, you wouldn’t have got 50 quid for an
Elizabethan painting.
“It was the fashion, the English ‘Tudorbethan’. There’s
English sculpture – how much of that went to America? We don’t know. There were
no export controls. Records just went over to America, those of fantastic
gardens, for instance. The fate of the rooms has never been highlighted.
“A large proportion of Britain’s art history from the 16th
to 18th centuries may be missing.”
John Harris, who, with Marcus Binney – founder of SAVE
Britain’s Heritage – campaigned in the 1970s to prevent heritage neglect,
shares Strong’s concern. Harris is the only historian to have studied the
export of artefacts from the UK. “I lived in New York in the early 1960s,”
Harris told the Observer. “Around 20 houses on Park Avenue alone had old
English rooms. Hundreds, if not in the low thousands, of items [are unaccounted
for]. Some of the finest craftsmanship. At least 200 rooms were taken apart.
“We have underestimated the number of [historic] rooms in
the US. It is unclear what is in storage, what the Hearst people have. It is
odd that there has never been an effort to identify what is in the States.”
The scale of the buying was historic. “Only the Renaissance
princes were spending on an equivalent scale,” says Dr Mark Westgarth, art
historian at Leeds University and a specialist in the art trade. “One of the
reasons why heritage laws began in Britain was to stop the flood of material to
America.
“Hearst was notorious for buying pieces then leaving them in
storage.”
By the late 1930s, Hearst’s empire faced bankruptcy and, in
1941, 20,000 lots were auctioned off at New York department stores Gimbels and
Saks. “There hasn’t been sufficient awareness of this aspect of what has been
exported to America,” says Harris. “That was seriously to this country’s loss.
“A lot of the documentary records have vanished, dealers’
papers especially. Years ago, I searched the records of one, French &
Company, and Hearst without success. I’ve always been told there are Hearst
stores in the US, difficult to access. Efforts must be made to examine Hearst
sites and open containers. But I’m past it now.”
Those looking after the surviving Hearst archives believe
there is much to be discovered. “The whereabouts of a lot of the items Hearst
bought are not known,” says Dr Catherine Larkin of the William Randolph Hearst
Archive at Long Island University, New York.
“Things have gone missing by being placed in homes which
might not exist any more, or are still in one of Hearst’s many warehouses.”
"Want buy castle in England . St Donat Castle |
Citizen Kane's domain: 1925–1960
William Randolph Hearst inherited a mining and real estate
fortune from his mother, and made a fortune of his own through the
establishment of the Hearst Corporation, the largest newspaper and magazine
company in the world. Part of the revenues were spent on the building of San
Simeon, his Spanish-style castle in California, which began construction in
1919. By 1925 he was eager to purchase a genuine castle, and on 13 August he
sent a wire to Alice Head, the London-based managing director of his European
operations, "Want buy castle in England . St Donat's perhaps satisfactory
at proper price. See if you can get right price on St Donat's or any other
equally good". Within two months it was Hearst's, or specifically, the
property of the National Magazine Corporation. The price paid for the castle
and 111 acres (45 ha) of surrounding land was $130,000. Hearst employed Sir
Charles Allom as his architect and designer. Allom was a noted decorator, the
founder of White Allom and Company, and had been knighted in 1913 for his
redecoration of Buckingham Palace.
Hearst attracted strong opinions. Theodore Roosevelt called
him "an unspeakable blackguard (with) all the worst faults of the corrupt
and dissolute monied man". Winston Churchill, who stayed as Hearst's guest
at St Donat's and at San Simeon, described him in a letter to Clementine
Churchill as "a grave simple child – with no doubt a nasty temper –
playing with the most costly toys ... two magnificent establishments, two
charming wives, complete indifference to public opinion, oriental hospitalities".
Churchill's mention of "two charming wives" refers to Marion Davies,
Hearst's long-time mistress and a constant presence at both San Simeon and St
Donat's. P. G. Wodehouse, invited to San Simeon, recalled Hearst's way of
dealing with over-staying guests, "The longer you are there, the further
you get from the middle [of the refectory dining table]. I sat on Marion's
right the first night, then found myself being edged further and further away
till I got to the extreme end, when I thought it time to leave. Another day,
and I should have been feeding on the floor".
Hearst undertook a "rapid and ruthless"
redevelopment and rebuilding programme at St Donat’s. He spent large sums
renovating the castle with architectural trophies from across the United
Kingdom and abroad; at the peak of his buying, Hearst's expenditure accounted
for a quarter of the world's entire art market. Alice Head, manager of Hearst's
London operations and the actual purchaser of St Donat's, recorded her
exhilaration, "We were on top of the wave – out of (one) year's profits,
we bought The Connoisseur, we bought St Donat's and we bought vast quantities
of antiques". The writer Clive Aslet described Hearst's passion for
antiquities as "naked obsession... romance gave way to rape", and his
mania for collecting was satirised in Orson Welles's 1941 film Citizen Kane.
Kane's palace Xanadu, modelled on San Simeon, is described as containing
"A collection of everything, so big that it can never be catalogued or
appraised. Enough for ten museums, the loot of the world." Hearst's
actions were vigorously opposed, particularly in relation to the destruction of
the Augustinian foundation Bradenstoke Priory in Wiltshire. Built in 1142, by
the 20th century the priory was in poor repair. Hearst purchased the site in
1929, under conditions of secrecy, and had workmen take down the cloister,
tithe barn, prior's lodging and refectory. Parts were shipped to California,
major elements were incorporated into St Donat's as part of the newly created
Bradenstoke hall, while other pieces, including the tithe barn, were lost.The
Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings ran a poster campaign on the
London Underground, using text that was considered libellous and which had to
be pasted over. The campaign also saw questions on the issue being raised in
Parliament. Hearst was unconcerned, Miss Head responding to the SPAB secretary:
"Mr Hearst and I are well aware of your views. You must please allow us to
hold our own opinions."
Hearst did not visit until September 1928, and even then
spent only one night in residence.Having undertaken a night-time tour of the
castle which was illuminated by kerosene lamps, he left the following morning
to board the Berengaria for New York. During the voyage home he wrote a
twenty-five-page memorandum with instructions for further improvements to the
castle.Over the next decade his time at St Donat's amounted to some four
months; between his purchase in 1925 and his death in 1951 he visited, normally
for a month at the end of his summer European tours, in 1930, 1931, 1934 and,
for the last time, in 1936. His infrequent visits were invariably undertaken
with a large entourage, whom he sometimes took for drinks to the Old Swan Inn
at the nearby village of Llantwit Major. Among his guests were the actors
Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Errol Flynn and Clark Gable, in addition to
political luminaries including Winston Churchill, David Lloyd George and a
young John F. Kennedy, who visited with his parents, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and
Rose Kennedy. Visiting writers included Elinor Glyn, Ivor Novello and Bernard
Shaw. Of St Donat's, Shaw was quoted as saying, "This is what God would
have built if he had had the money".
In the late 1930s Hearst's publishing empire came close to
collapse. St Donat's was put up for sale in 1937, the Hearst Corporation noting
that it had invested £280,000 in the castle through its subsidiary the National
Magazine Company. An opinion on the chances of recouping this sum was sought
from James Milner, a prominent solicitor and Deputy Speaker of the House of
Commons. His response was not encouraging: "We have at St Donat's a white
elephant of the rarest species".Billy Butlin, the holiday-camp
entrepreneur, was uninterested and a development proposal by Sir Julian Hodge
did not progress. Much of the furniture, silver and works of art were disposed
of in a series of sales conducted by Christie's which began in 1939 and
continued for some years. During World War II it was requisitioned for use by
British and American troops.Hearst did not return after the war but continued
to lend the castle to friends; Bob Hope, the comedian, stayed in May 1951
during his visit for a golf tournament at Porthcawl.
Hollywood's hunger for turrets
Adrian Tinniswood
16 MAY 2016 • 1:07PM
Adrian Tinniswood on
William Randolph Hearst and the rich Americans who coveted our castles
In the summer of 1925 Alice Head, the managing director of
Good Housekeeping magazine in Britain, received a telegram from her boss in
California:
Want buy castle in england please find which ones available
stdonats perhaps satisfactory at proper price but price quoted seems very high
see if you can get right price on stdonats or any other equally good hearst
The newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst had begun to
think about acquiring a country residence in Britain in the spring of that
year. The leading contender was St Donat’s, an imposing medieval fortress 20
miles west of Cardiff (the distinction between England and Wales was lost on
Hearst). That summer, he bought it.
Why did Hearst want a castle? Although he didn’t broadcast
the fact, he liked the idea of a place where he and his mistress Marion Davies
could entertain after their annual European vacation. Their guests included
Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George, Errol Flynn and Clark Gable, a young
John F Kennedy and an elderly George Bernard Shaw, who is rumoured to have said
that St Donat’s was “what God would have built if he had had the money”.
But perhaps Hearst’s real reason for buying an “English”
castle had more to do with finding the right setting for his collection of
British and European art treasures, which was growing rapidly. At his peak,
Hearst accounted for a quarter of the world’s art market.
“Need ancient
atmosphere at St Donat’s,” read one of his many telegrams to Head. On another
occasion he urged her “always to add old things” rather than making new. “We
shall just increase [the castle’s] historical interest,” he told reporters in
1930, “by bringing tapestries, ceilings, panelling screens, pictures – every
one of which will be genuinely antique.”
Some were more genuinely antique than others. Hearst’s bed,
for example, was said on rather slender evidence to have been the one in which
Charles I slept before his defeat at the Battle of Naseby. Other items were of
more certain provenance, albeit of doubtful taste – thumbscrews, an
executioner’s sword and other instruments of torture. But the majority of
contents amassed for St Donat’s were of the best quality and in the best taste:
portraits by Zoffany and Sir Thomas Lawrence, furniture by Chippendale,
Brussels tapestries and neoclassical sculpture. St Donat’s was not a
re-creation of a Welsh castle, or even an English castle. It was not a
Hollywood set. It was a museum.
Hearst was far from being the only American to disrupt the
social and architectural fabric of upper-class life in Britain. In the late
19th century, an unholy alliance was forged between socially ambitious mothers
of heiresses from New York or Chicago and impoverished English aristocrats, who
were happy to offer a title in exchange for a hefty dollar dowry.
The poster girl for that discordant entente was Consuelo
Vanderbilt, the daughter of a New York railway magnate and the reluctant wife
of Sunny Spencer-Churchill, ninth Duke of Marlborough. Consuelo spent 11 years
lost in the marble halls of Blenheim Palace, surrounded by blank-faced servants
and condescending in-laws, before her marriage collapsed in 1906. Dinners with
her husband were painful affairs, she later recalled. “As a rule neither of us
spoke a word. I took to knitting in desperation and the butler read detective
stories in the hall.”
By the Twenties, the tenor of the exchange had become subtly
different: Americans now brought glamour and dynamism, as well as money. When
Texan heiress Iva Lawson bought Herstmonceux Castle in Sussex, undeterred by a
phantom giant drummer who walked the battlements, the press on both sides of
the Atlantic was delighted: “Along Came a Brave American Girl Who Scoffs at
Ghosts and Just Adores Haunted Rooms”, cried an American paper. The young Earl
of Jersey found a film-star bride, Virginia Cherrill “of Hollywood, USA”, as
Debrett’s Peerage primly put it. Lutyens couldn’t bear her: when she insisted
on his installing a cocktail bar, the architect called her “a common little
woman without brain [who had] no idea of what an Englishman’s house should be”.
By contrast, Edward VIII was in love with America (and
Americans, come to that.) He used the United States as a yardstick by which to
judge modern country house conveniences. At Fort Belvedere in Windsor Great
Park he introduced “many of the creature conveniences that I had sampled and
enjoyed in the New World – a bathroom to nearly every room, showers, a steam
bath, built-in cupboards, central heating”. When he left Windsor Castle after
his abdication speech, he drove into exile in a Buick.
Occasionally, an American would not only buy a slice of
British architectural history, but also take it home with them. The
timber-framed Tudor Agecroft Hall in Lancashire, for instance, was dismantled
in 1926 and re-erected beside the James River in Virginia. (Today, visitors are
invited to explore Agecroft’s “dyninge parlour” and “noble passageways”.) Three
years later Basildon Park in Berkshire was offered for sale: it could be taken
down and re-erected anywhere in the US in return for $1 million, said its
owner. “There seems to be a craze in the United States at the moment for this
sort of thing,” said the bewildered secretary of the Ancient Monuments Society.
More often, Americans who wanted to buy into the past left
it where it was and merely “improved” it, not always with the happiest results.
Back in the early years of the century the wealthy New Yorker William Waldorf
Astor had transformed the childhood home of Anne Boleyn, Hever Castle in Kent,
filling it with panelling in Italian walnut or English oak, brand-new carved
work in the style of Grinling Gibbons and chimneypieces of Verona marble,
tapestries, Tudor portraits and suits of armour. But casual sightseers were no
longer allowed, earning Hever’s new owner the nickname “Walled-off” Astor. The
architect Philip Tilden lamented the passing of tumbledown old Hever: “It has
now become a miniature Metropolitan Museum of New York.” The castle was now
somehow un-English, as though Astor had tried too hard.
When it came to trying too hard, Wisconsin-born Harry Gordon
Selfridge was hard to beat. In 1916 he commissioned Tilden to add a 450ft tower
to the top of his Oxford Street department store. Although it came to nothing,
five years later Selfridge bought two and a half miles of coastline outside
Bournemouth, including Hengistbury Head, a promontory jutting out into the
Channel with views across to the Isle of Wight. Again he brought in Tilden. He
wanted a Little Castle, which despite its name was to be enormous, and would
stand on the very edge of Hengistbury Head with only the sea beyond it. Above
and behind it, in a plateau encircled by four miles of turreted walls, was to
be the site of what Tilden labelled the Large Castle, with good reason. It was
to be the biggest castle in the world.
Tilden’s vision for Selfridge Castle began with a gateway
which pierced the bastioned walls, “like the gate to a Spanish city”. That was
ambitious for Bournemouth, but it was only the start. The main drive would wind
its way upwards until it reached a piazza and a marble staircase hall with a
dome almost as big as that of St Paul’s. The central vista, a thousand feet
long, stretched out to either side of this hall which opened into a cloistered
garden with a vast galerie des glaces based on that at Versailles.
There were 250 guest suites, dining chambers that would seat
hundreds, a theatre, tennis courts, picture galleries and baths. Dominating the
palace was to be a 300ft tower filled with laboratories and observatories,
culminating in a viewing platform. Selfridge
Castle remained a palace of dreams: its owner sold the site in 1930 without a
stone being laid. Decades later Tilden wrote with regret of his castle in the
air, “where one could watch the great liners gliding up the Solent to their
berths; or through some giant telescope learn more of the eternal vastness of
space”.
Besides the bartered brides and business tycoons, there is
another group of Americans who had an enormous impact on the country house
world between the wars: people like Ronald Tree at Ditchley Park and the
diarist and MP Chips Channon, who bought the Kelvedon Hall in Essex in 1938.
What this eclectic group have in common is their Anglophile Anglo-Americanism,
the fact that they all had a foot on both sides of the Atlantic.
Prominent among them was American-born Olive Paget, who
could trace her ancestry to the first Marquess of Anglesey, who commanded the
cavalry at Waterloo and lost a leg in the process. Her American mother Pauline
was a Whitney heiress, who in 1916 left Olive a fortune in the region of
$2 million.
Olive divorced the Hon Charles Winn in 1925 and married a
big game hunter, Arthur Wilson Filmer, the same year. They began their life
together by renting Bawdsey Manor, an extravagantly turreted example of
Victorian Tudor Revival in Suffolk. But Olive’s pet monkey caused £2,000 worth
of damage to the furnishings and landed the newly-weds in court as a result, so
they had to move. In February 1927, they bought Leeds Castle in Kent for a
reputed £200,000, well over £11 million in today’s money. (St Donat’s had cost
the Hearst empire a paltry £27,000.) They spent £100,000 more on modernising
it.
Leeds was the romantic fortress. “I had heard of such
wonders, but only in the realms of grand opera and fantasy,” said E V Lucas,
when he caught a glimpse of this vast castle rising out of a lake during a
flight from Paris to London in 1931. “It is incredible, unearthly.” It once
belonged to Eleanor of Castile: her widowed husband Edward I honeymooned here
in 1299 with his second wife, and it became a tradition for English kings to
grant the castle to their queens as part of their dowry.
But romance was not enough. Olive and Arthur installed a
radiogram in the old chapel, which piped music around the castle. There was an
open-air swimming pool with underwater lights and a wave machine, one of the
first in England. There were zebras and llamas in the park, and 24 flamingos
who spent a few months enjoying the lake before flying away.
The reinvented Leeds Castle was a strangely satisfying
cocktail of Arts & Crafts medievalism, French Gothic and Hollywood
theatricality. Like St Donat’s and Selfridge Castle, it reminds us that the
Americans brought to the English country house more than just their millions
and an acquisitive admiration for the Old Country. They brought something of
their own that we tend to undervalue: a flamboyance, a joy in the past.
Extracted from The Long Weekend (Jonathan Cape, £25) ©
Adrian Tinniswood 2016. To order a copy for £20 from the Telegraph, call 0844
871 1514
Millicent Hearst.
In 1903, Hearst married Millicent Veronica Willson (1882–1974), a 21-year-old chorus girl, in New York City. Evidence in Louis Pizzitola's book Hearst Over Hollywood indicates that Millicent's mother Hannah Willson ran a Tammany-connected and protected brothel near the headquarters of political power in New York City at the turn of the 20th century. Millicent bore him five sons: George Randolph Hearst, born on April 23, 1904; William Randolph Hearst Jr., born on January 27, 1908; John Randolph Hearst, born in 1910; and twins Randolph Apperson Hearst and David Whitmire (né Elbert Willson) Hearst, born on December 2, 1915. Hearst was the grandfather of Patricia "Patty" Hearst, widely known for being kidnapped by and then joining the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974 (her father was Randolph Apperson Hearst, Hearst's fourth son).
Conceding an end to his political hopes, Hearst became
involved in an affair with the popular film actress and comedian Marion Davies
(1897–1961), former mistress of his friend Paul Block,[51] and from about 1919,
he lived openly with her in California. The affair dominated Davies's life.
Millicent separated from Hearst in the mid-1920s after tiring of his longtime
affair with Davies, but the couple remained legally married until Hearst's
death. Millicent built an independent life for herself in New York City as a
leading philanthropist, was active in society, and created the Free Milk Fund
for the poor in 1921. After the death of Patricia Lake, Davies's supposed
niece, it was confirmed by Lake's family that she was in fact Hearst's daughter
by Davies.
Philip Tilden |
Tilden was born on 31 May 1887, the son of William Augustus Tilden, a prominent chemist who discovered synthetic rubber. Educated at Bedales and Rugby, Tilden joined the Architectural Association in 1905, leaving in 1908 to become an articled pupil to Thomas Edward Collcutt, with whom he later went into partnership. By 1917, he had established his own practice and for the next twenty years worked almost exclusively for a small circle of rich, interconnected, patrons for whom he designed, or re-constructed, country houses, gardens, chapels and churches, castles and a vast tower that was intended to sit on top of Gordon Selfridge's department store on Oxford Street, London.
His best known works, apart from the unexecuted design for
the Selfridges tower, were all for politicians: from 1918 to 1923 he designed
the Moorish Courtyard, compared by Honor Channon to a "Spanish
brothel", and the gardens and swimming pools at Port Lympne for Lloyd
George's secretary, Philip Sassoon and may also have worked for Sassoon at
Trent Park. Later in 1920s he completely reconstructed Chartwell Manor for
Winston Churchill and during the same period built Bron-y-de, at Churt in
Surrey, as a country house for David Lloyd George.
By the late 1920s, Tilden's career had peaked: near
bankruptcy, following some failed speculative developments;[8] combined with a
mental breakdown, which Bettley attributes to Tilden's attempting to reconcile
his homosexuality with his marriage to Amalia Broden, a Swedish author; led to
his leaving London entirely and moving to Devon. The latter part of his career
was spent mainly in the West Country, where he undertook the restoration of a
number of, mostly, less important country houses for a variety of less eminent
clients. Examples include the reconstruction of Antony House in Cornwall and of
Sydenham House in Devon.
Many of Tilden's buildings now enjoy Listed Building status
although this is sometimes due to the fame of their owners, or to work that
pre-dated Tilden, rather than to his own efforts: examples include Port Lympne
Mansion, Grade II* listed as at 29 December 1966; Chartwell, Grade I listed as
at 16 January 1975 and Antony House, Grade I listed as at 21 July 1951.
In 1954 Tilden published his autobiography, True
Remembrances: the memoirs of an architect. Bettley considered it highly
unreliable. Philip Tilden died on 25 February 1956 at Shute, Devon.His obituary
in The Times, described him as "an architect with a talent for restoring
old buildings, though of a somewhat lush and luxurious taste."
True remembrances: The memoirs of an architect – 1 Jan 1954
by Philip Tilden
1 comment:
I am very pleased to read that Hearst bought a theatre to further his lady love's stage career, refurbished it and renamed it the Marion Davies Theatre. And I am impressed that he founded Cosmopolitan Pictures in Hollywood, financing films on condition that they would be starring vehicles for Davies in important historical dramas.
Otherwise we might have thought that Hearst was a shallow, vain man throwing his vast money around, just to get some leg over :)
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