On the Central Coast, Tales of Two Titans

On a road trip last weekend, I meandered down the craggy California coast from San Francisco to Monterey, east to the vegetable fields of Salinas and south through Big Sur to San Simeon. The views were dramatic--otherworldly even. But what impressed me more were encounters with the ghosts of two titans of the Central Coast: William Randolph Hearst and John Steinbeck.

Though opposites in so many ways, the men had things in common--they lived and worked during the Great Depression and based their careers (at least in part) on an ability to relate to everyday folks: Hearst as a steady supplier of sensationalist newspaper stories, and Steinbeck as a writer who gave a voice to the downtrodden.

Naturally, they drew inspiration from vastly different places, and likewise, left vastly different legacies. In the tourist spots dedicated to each man, I found a simple object that seemed to encapsulate their separate worlds: a bed.

Hearst’s is a 17th century mahogany piece with an ornate headboard carved with a cardinal’s hat and three fish. The bed sits in a guest room in the unfinished north wing of the castle, near a window with a grand view of the dusty Santa Lucia Mountains. A tour guide said the piece, one of thousands Hearst bought in Europe for his exclusive San Simeon retreat, once belonged to Cardinal Armand-Jean du Plessis Richelieu, chief minister to King Louis XIII in France. Richelieu’s claim to fame was establishing royal absolutism, a concept no doubt attractive to the dictatorial Hearst.

Hearst was immortalized as a symbol of corporate greed in Orson Welles’ 1941 film “Citizen Kane,” but his building project was the largest employer of people from San Simeon and nearby Cambria during the Depression years, according to a castle tour guide. Today, thousands pay $14 each for a brush with American royalty at Hearst’s monument. Before boarding shuttle buses to the top of the hill, visitors with $17 and a fantasy about living there smile for camera-toting staff who superimpose their images onto a photo of the castle.

The other bed, if you can call it that, is a dirty mattress inside a tin can-like steam boiler, on view at the National Steinbeck Center. Migrant workers at the Monterey’s Cannery Row lived in similar quarters in the early 20th century.

Steinbeck’s legacy is considerably less gilded than Hearst’s. His tales of Dust Bowl migrants, honky-tonks and hobos earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962. But his birthplace, Salinas, is a wasteland, its Main Street all but boarded up. North of San Simeon, the cannery he wrote about in “Tortilla Flat” (1935) and “Cannery Row” (1945) has been transformed into an outlet mall. And, sadly, his castle--the modern-looking National Steinbeck Center--attracts few visitors.

*

Booth Moore can be reached at booth.moore@latimes.com.