How to blow it
We are beset by television advertisements extolling the “freedom” one will acquire if one buys a lottery ticket and wins so many millions of dollars.
I’ve recently come back from touring the estate of a newspaper baron who acquired and spent several hundred million dollars. William Randolph Hearst owned a chain of American newspapers and blew most of the money in building a series of huge dwellings on a hilltop in California. These were stocked with paintings, tapestries, statuary, Greek and Roman pillars and ornate ceilings imported from Europe.
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While he lived, his castle was kept secure from the general public, but Hearst collected celebrities as he collected art. Movie stars of the 1920s and 1930s came on invitation to the Hearst estate, as did authors and statesmen, including Winston Churchill and George Bernard Shaw. At the castle today they will show you a movie of Charlie Chaplin playing tennis against world champion Bill Tilden and it is plain why Tilden was champion and Chaplin wasn’t.
A feature of the estate was a huge tiled outdoor pool ranging in depth from two to 10 feet. Clark Gable, we were told, paddled in the shallow end because he’d never learned to swim.
Hearst blew so many of his millions on this and other residences in the United States and Wales that by 1937 he was $126 million in debt. Fortunately, he had taken up with a movie star called Marion Davies and she sold some of her art and other properties to keep him afloat. Even those with “freedom” can stub their toes. When Hearst died, the estate went to the state as a tourist attraction.
