Fairytale for 'parvenus'. William Randolph Hearst and his adventures in 'Neverland'.

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

https://www.express.co.uk/news/history/594892/William-Randolph-Hearst-s-fairytale-castle

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

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/mar/05/art-historians-seek-missing-uk-treasures-us-hearst-hoard-return-to-britain

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

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/hollywoods-hunger-for-turrets/

 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).

 Marion Davies

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