BONUS NUMBER 83: WHAT'S GAY ABOUT HEARST CASTLE?
(Did You Sleep With the Models?)
Hearst Castle, that 100,000-square-foot monstrosity halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, was designed by Julia Morgan (1872-1957), who is thought to have been a lesbian. It’s certain that William Randolph Hearst engaged her to build his monolithic showplace; her sexual preference is less clear. That’s because, unlike Oscar Wilde but like most other lesbians and gay men of the time, she knew to keep her private affairs secret — or else. The July 1983 issue of Mandate featured Leigh W. Rutledge’s “The Gay Side of Hearst’s Castle,” with his luscious photographs to accompany the article. (An inveterate photographer, at last count he had an archive of some 35,000 pictures, many of them gay-themed.)
Julia Morgan worked on the project from 1919 until Hearst’s death in 1951. During these three decades, she devoted her life to “designing, shaping, reshaping, building, and rebuilding” Hearst Castle. Ironically, the notoriety of the place owes as much to Citizen Kane as to Hearst and Morgan, even though the Orson Welles cameras came no closer to it than 780 North Gower Street in Hollywood — the address of RKO Studios.
Leigh told me recently, “I'm almost certain that my article on Hearst Castle was the first in any publication to bring up the possibility of Julia Morgan’s being a lesbian.”
Julia Morgan was a versatile architect. Below, two examples of her work that one would not associate with Hearst Castle.
