Bookworm Room

Whew! Another long and busy day. Mr. Bookworm subscribes to the school of vacations that says you have to go and do until you drop. As a “vacation should be relaxing person” myself, I find these days wearing, and that’s true no matter how entertaining they are.

Today was, in fact, quite entertaining. We made the two hour drive from Santa Barbara up to San Simeon to give the children their first introduction to Hearst Castle. It was the perfect day for this trip, since we got crystal clear weather all the way up Highway 1. It’s really staggering how beautiful the central California coast is.

Hearst Castle came as something of a surprise, and that’s despite the fact that this was my 4th or 5th visit there. When I was last there, there was a small visitors/ticket center at the valley bottom, where you parked your car, bought your ticket, and queued to get on the bus that took you up to the Castle itself. There was also a small museum, but the whole thing was a rather casual affair. That has certainly changed.

The State of California, which runs the show, now has a monstrous visitor center, both in size and quality. It feels like one of those roadside rest stops on the Jersey freeway heading into New York — utterly chaotic and gigantic, but still boasting too few stalls in the women’s restroom, and those in bad shape. There’s also an Imax theater that shows a hagiographic film about Hearst that was too worshipful to be interesting.

The Castle itself is what it always was — both fascinating and repellent. I love the vision that Hearst and Julia Morgan, his architect shared, and some of the art work is beautiful. On the other hand, it’s a monument to ostentation, and you can see that Hearst often bought art just because it was there, not because it added anything. The pools are probably the best part, because the water’s wonderful blue purity seems to wash away some of Hearst’s excess.

The problem with the day was that the tour was too big (50 people) and the tour guide herself was a waste of space. She had a soft, flat monotone, and leaked out random tidbits of information that often had nothing to do with the space before us. Fortunately for the kids’ level of interest, I felt free to expound about the art and about Hearst’s history. Bless their little hearts, they came away fascinated, and actually expressed interest in doing one of the other tours on another trip through that neck of the woods.

I suspect that part of this interest had to do with my story about the time Hearst almost certainly got away with murder, a notion that really intrigued them. I’ve always believed the story to be true because, after the infamous yacht trip on which Ince died, Hearst took an almost abnormal interest in promoting the career Louella Parsons’ career. Since Parsons, a woman with an unquestioned absence of talent, had been a guest on the cruise, I’ve always wondered if he didn’t buy her silence.

After Hearst Castle, we drove a few miles further up the coast to a beach that has become a sea lion habitat. It’s a wonderful spot, since dozens of sea lions litter the beach. With a few notable exceptions, they’re completely motionless and, indeed, look like a bunch of carcases, lying about with their bellies and backs catching the sun. The exceptions are the few beasties (a) that are splashing sand on themselves and (b) that wriggle around like giant gelatinous noodles. A couple of them heightened the excitement even further by yodeling at each other, but they quickly retired, exhausted, and collapsed once more into immobile brown heaps on the sand. It was very amusing and, as the kids instantly noted, quite pungent.

And now I’m back in Santa Barbara, and two over-excited little kids having finally been corralled into their beds. I’m a bit tired myself, but am savoring the quiet too much just to give up and retire.

Tags: Hearst Castle, Thomas Ince, William Randolph Hearst

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