The Lady from the Black Lagoon Read online

  In 1921, when Milicent was six years old, a wonder was being built.

  World War I had ended, the 1920s were starting to roar and San Francisco was enjoying its rebirth. Fifteen years had passed since the earthquake and it was a beautiful city that the Rossi family returned to.

  While Camille was looking for local work, he came across an advertisement from a San Francisco architecture firm looking for a structural engineer and superintendent of construction needed in San Simeon, California. San Simeon was a day’s train ride south from San Francisco, but that’s not what attracted Camille. The ad was being run by Julia Morgan, the star architect in charge of creating a new summer home for William Randolph Hearst, America’s first media mogul. You might not recognize Hearst’s name, but you’ve probably seen the film loosely based on his life, Orson Welles’s mighty classic Citizen Kane. Hearst was one of the most wealthy and influential men of his day, so this wasn’t going to be any old summer home. The plans were for an opulent, over-the-top 127-acre estate known as La Cuesta Encantada (The Enchanted Hill) that was in keeping with his opulent, over-the-top lifestyle. Camille, always drawn to prestige, was attracted to this project like a moth to a flame. He applied and got the job. Hearst, his colossal and extravagant home, and Milicent’s experience growing up there would become some of the forces that shaped her life.

  * * *

  Hearst was born in 1893 in San Francisco, the only son of Gold Rush millionaire14 George Hearst.15 After being expelled from Harvard for misconduct—Hearst was always a partier—he returned to San Francisco. While he was away at college, his father had acquired the newspaper the San Francisco Examiner in a bet. When Hearst arrived back on the West Coast in 1887, he begged his father for permission to take it over. George said yes and Hearst immediately went to work.

  Right away, Hearst invested a lot of money in the Examiner and upgraded all the equipment. He also wisely invested in the best equipment of all: his writers. He hired great writers, many of whom would go on to become American literary legends, like Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce and Jack London.

  Along with quality writing, as the editor, Hearst encouraged a sensational brand of reporting. The Examiner had a lot of old-timey clickbait: lurid headlines, wild stories, overblown writing. Despite being booted from Harvard, Hearst was a smart businessman. He didn’t beg for the Examiner from his father as a hobby; he wanted money and influence. He knew that the more sensational his headlines, the more the papers sold.

  The Examiner became a success and Hearst set his sights on the East Coast. He used his profits to buy the New York Morning Journal, and a year later started publishing the Evening Journal. Both papers featured his sensational reporting style. Hearst soon entered into a fierce competition with Joseph Pulitzer, the then-king of New York newspapers, who ran the New York World.

  Hearst wanted to be the top in circulation and used his vast amounts of money to raid the staff of the New York World, offering them better positions at higher salaries. The term yellow journalism comes from this battle. The New York World ran a very popular cartoon, drawn by a man named George Luks, called The Yellow Kid. When Hearst lured Luks over to his paper with an insane sum of money,16 Pulitzer was furious. The battle became even more intense after Pulitzer hired another cartoonist to make an unsuccessful knockoff of The Yellow Kid. Pulitzer and Hearst became locked in a battle of sensationalism, each trying to outsell the other with more and more eye-catching headlines, and the term Yellow Kid journalism—eventually shortened to yellow journalism—was born.

  By 1897, Hearst had won out. His newspaper circulation numbers were higher than Pulitzer’s. He began to buy newspapers in cities all over the country, including Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles. At his peak, he owned more than two dozen; one in four Americans would get their news from him.

  He had a brief political career in New York; for four years, he was in the House of Representatives. But it was difficult to handle the responsibilities of being a representative and build his massive media empire at the same time. So in 1907, he returned to publishing.

  By the time 1920 rolled around, Hearst was spreading his empire even further. The reach of media was expanding and Hearst was savvy enough to see it. His was one of the first print media companies to enter radio and he became one of the major producers of movie newsreels and of movies themselves. Over his lifetime, he would produce more than a hundred films.

  When he hired Morgan to build his summer home, Hearst was fifty-seven years old and his wealth and influence were enormous. The year previous, Hearst’s mother died and bequeathed him the land in San Simeon. George had purchased the land in 1866, originally forty thousand acres of ranchland, a mere sixteen years after California joined the United States. The original plot belonged to a well-known Spanish California family, the Estradas. It was a cattle ranch, called Piedra Blanca Ranch, and the area was called Piedra Blancas.17 In 1865, after a series of disasters, the family put the land up for sale. There was a massive flood that devastated the crops, followed by a drought, which devastated the cattle.18 The families in the area were being financially ruined by tax increases and legal bills due to litigation over land grants and rights in the brand-new state of California. Welcome to America!

  George purchased more and more land as the years went on, eventually totaling 168,000 acres, or 262.5 square miles. These are miles of picturesque coastal prairie, nestled between the Pacific and the rolling foothills of the Santa Lucia mountain range. The views are dramatic, but the land is difficult to develop. Earthquakes and mudslides are common and water is not in abundance. The surrounding countryside is still largely undeveloped. It has Mediterranean weather—cool wet winters and hot dry summers. Isolation, if you’re a working-class rancher. Peace, if you’re a rich businessman.

  Being a rich businessman, George fell in love with the area. He built a beautiful redwood ranch house that would become the base of operations for the ranch farms. He wanted to maintain the land as a working ranch and hired a member of the Estrada family, the son of the former owner, to help run it and serve as the majordomo for the cowboys there. It would also serve as the home base when he took his son camping in the hills.

  Hearst quickly adopted his father’s love for the place and continued to travel to San Simeon into adulthood for camping trips. It was his escape from the stress of his life in New York City. The East Coast never grew on him and as his media empire expanded, the peaceful California hills became more and more alluring. When he and his wife, Millicent Hearst, began to have children, he would continue his father’s tradition and take them camping in San Simeon.

  So when the land was left to him in 1919, Hearst got the idea of building a house up in those beloved hills. He wrote to Julia Morgan. He had worked with her several years before on the headquarters for his newspaper in Los Angeles (also called the Examiner). “I would like to build a little something,” he said. That little something ended up becoming what is now known as Hearst Castle.

  Morgan accepted the project and started plans in her San Francisco office, beginning a collaboration that would last for twenty-eight years. Hearst almost immediately expanded the scope of his original idea, and the blueprints quickly started to show a massive estate. Organizing a project of that magnitude took a lot of time and a lot of money, and Hearst was willing to spend both in abundance.

  In 1921, Morgan ran an ad for a structural engineer and Camille answered. He started that same year in her office, working on the rapidly multiplying plans. Morgan’s office was on the thirteenth floor of the Merchant Exchange building, a fifteen-story skyscraper in the financial district near the waterside. In 1906, the building had been heavily damaged in the earthquake and Morgan had helped design the repairs. Her own small office at her parents’ home was also destroyed in the earthquake, so she moved her operations into the newly repaired Merchant Exchange, where she stayed for the rest of her career. It was a beautiful office, with carved wood ceiling
s, marble columns, six-by-eight-foot oil paintings of ships and a library containing over five hundred books on architecture. After years of working in a remote mining town in Peru, I imagine that walking into this stately space every day would have been thrilling for Camille.

  Hearst was a man who liked to do things big, a trait that jibed right away with Camille’s ambitious personality. Eventually, the two men would become lifelong friends. But at the start of the project, Camille wasn’t working with Hearst every day. He was working with Morgan. It was the first time in his career he had to answer to a woman.

  Morgan was California’s first licensed female architect. Over the course of her life, she would design almost eight hundred buildings in the state. Born in San Francisco in 1872, she studied civil engineering at the University of California at Berkeley and then went on to attend the École des Beaux Arts, one of France’s most influential art schools.

  The school initially refused Morgan admission because she was a woman. After two years and multiple applications, she was finally accepted. But it wasn’t because all those snooty French dudes suddenly realized that sexism was bad, it was because Morgan was that talented. Even though the school eventually allowed her to attend, the administration continued to make things hard for her. Her first attempts to receive her certificate were all denied without reason. Finally, in 1902, after five years of kicking ass, she became the first woman to receive an École des Beaux Arts certification in architecture.

  She returned to America and began to work for an architecture firm in San Francisco. It was very important to her to design buildings in her hometown and the use of materials that were from the surrounding area of a building project became part of her signature. Unfortunately, Morgan didn’t leave the misogynistic hardships behind in France. Her first employer, John Green Howard, liked to brag to colleagues that he didn’t have to pay Morgan as much because she was a woman.

  Luckily, this was the firm that was hired for several projects by Phoebe Hearst, William Randolph Hearst’s mother. Morgan worked on these projects and the Hearsts were impressed with her work. They became clients that she would take with her when she opened her own office in 1904. Suck it, John Green Howard.

  Her first big job on her own was the post-earthquake reconstruction of the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. At the opening, while everyone was commenting on the beauty of the new building’s design, a reporter approached her. He asked her about being the decorator of the place, assuming that was her contribution. She was furious. From that point forward, Morgan shunned the press and never gave another interview.

  Needless to say, by this time, Morgan was an old hand at dealing with men who looked down on women, a skill that would prove problematic for Camille.

  The San Simeon buildings were to be designed in a combination of European and Spanish Colonial Revival styles. Hearst’s taste was inspired by tours of Europe he took when he was young. He was filled with a desire to re-create the majesty he witnessed in European castles and cathedrals, a desire that would last his entire life. The main house on the estate, in fact, was modeled after a Spanish cathedral.

  Hearst had also amassed a vast and rather motley art collection. After WWI, import duties on European art and antiquities were reduced. This, combined with rising estate taxes in Europe, made it a perfect time for American buyers. Hearst bought the vast majority of his collection at auctions and galleries in New York City. He had an incredible array of paintings, statues and furniture from all over Europe. One of Morgan’s tasks was to integrate these pieces in the design, no small feat. She had to mix, match and blend art and architecture that spanned a thousand years. Hearst was the extremely wealthy version of the aunt that wants her leopard print armchair to match all her Precious Moments figurines.

  The designs were created by Morgan and her team in her San Francisco office. There were over nine thousand architectural drawings by the end of the project. At the end of every Friday, Morgan would take the train down to San Luis Obispo, the nearest town to the building site, and a man named Steve Zegar would drive her in his taxi all the way to the Castle.19 Every Sunday night, she would reverse the trip and head back to San Francisco so she could be in her office Monday morning.

  The monthly allowance Hearst sent to Morgan started at $500 and grew to $60,000 during heavy construction periods (about $837,000 in 2017 American dollars). This may seem like a lot of money, but the amount constantly proved insufficient for the massive project and caused Morgan a lot of frustration. These were the funds she had to use for everything: workers’ salaries, materials, equipment, transportation, landscaping and her own salary. Over the twenty-eight years she worked on Hearst Castle, her salary varied between 6 percent and 8 percent, which many felt at the time was low, especially considering the scope of her work.

  Morgan’s duties were far more extensive than most architects back then, and even most architects now. Through her firm, she hired all the employees, handled the payrolls, ordered and oversaw the shipments of art and materials, even supervised the details of landscaping and housekeeping. She was doing all this in her late forties and at the peak of her impressive career. I think that having to constantly ask for more money from one of the most wealthy men in the country must have been irritating.

  But make no mistake, Morgan loved working with Hearst, especially on this fantastic house. They were both workaholic dreamers with a deep passion for architecture and the two really understood each other.

  Julia Morgan was a practical workaholic with no artistic ego. A small woman, she subsisted mostly off black coffee and candy bars. She always wore glasses and eschewed makeup. Morgan refused to carry a purse, but as far as I can tell from photos, had an impressive collection of shapeless felt hats. She cared about her work first and foremost and expected everyone else in her employ to do the same. Most of her time was spent at the office and her staff became a kind of extended family. She made a point of hiring women, both as artists and for drafting. In other words, she was a badass.

  The roads between San Simeon and San Francisco were poorly maintained and indirect, making it costly and difficult to ship materials over land. Construction supplies were sent to San Simeon by sea. William Randolph Hearst’s father had a wharf built in San Simeon Bay in 1878 and when construction on the Castle hit its stride, Hearst decided to enlarge upon the idea. He had Julia Morgan design bayside warehouses for whatever needed to be stored, whether it was construction materials or priceless pieces of art.

  Ground had been broken up on the Hilltop in 1920, the year before Camille joined Morgan’s team. Construction started on the three guest cottages before the main house was built. Hearst loved to entertain in a grand fashion, so these were less cottage and more sumptuous villa. The first cottage, the Casa del Mar, faced the sea, while the Casa del Monte faced the mountains and the Casa del Sol faced the setting sun.

  In early 1922, Camille was asked to take over as on-site superintendent of construction. The Rossis packed up and headed to San Simeon that June. Sadly, Elise’s father did not get to enjoy having his daughter close to San Francisco for very long; he passed away shortly after the family settled in San Simeon. Camille, Elise, Ulrich, Milicent and Ruth would spend the next ten years of their lives living on the Hearst estate.

  Milicent would spend her formative years as Alice in Wonderland.

  * * *

  Before I had recovered from jet lag or adjusted to my new time zone, I threw myself into the search for Milicent. All the meetings I had set up and inquiries I made before flying out from New York turned out to be dead ends. Few film historians had heard of her and the ones who had didn’t care much or have any information to share. It was as if she vanished after Creature from the Black Lagoon.

  I would’ve been frustrated if I wasn’t buzzing with the low-grade high that East Coast natives feel in Southern California. Your body simply isn’t used to so much vitamin D. That, combined with the fact
that I could see the ocean from where I was staying, made living out of suitcases while trying to get my life back together bearable.

  The stress of uprooting myself was eased by the support of Chuck and Belinda, the friends whose guestroom was now crammed with all the stuff I could take with me on the plane to Los Angeles. Not only did they kindly take me on as a temporary house guest, but Chuck and Belinda both lent their prodigious smarts to my search. They’re best friends and business partners and after decades of working in the entertainment industry as producers, they know everyone. Both of them had been racking their brains for names of people that might be able to help me.

  One morning over a meal that probably involved avocados—that California stereotype is absolutely true—I was talking about the project with Belinda. Belinda is the kind of sunny and sage woman who belongs in an enchanted forest drinking dew and having birds braid her long, blond hair. Lucky for us, she spends her time developing creative projects and making pie instead.

  Belinda suggested looking through the Los Angeles Times archives for articles mentioning Milicent, so we both got our laptops out. If any newspaper in the country had some missing pieces of Milicent’s life, this would be the one.

  “Hey, look at this!” she gasped.

  I leaned over and read the headline on her screen.

  “‘Daughter Traces Builder’s Role at Hearst Castle,’ holy shit!”

  It was an article from 1986, an interview with a Milicent Patrick Trent. I almost jumped out of my chair. That’s why I was having such a hard time finding her; she must have gotten married and gone by a different name later in life! I read her father’s name, Camille Rossi. Rossi. So she began life under yet another name and Patrick must have been a business pseudonym. That brought the count of names to search for up to three. I was starting to see why Milicent was a difficult woman to track down.