"Have Fun Storming the Castle"

From the remote roadway of California’s Highway 1 it is barely visible, a Mission looking house on a hill nestled on the back of what appears to be ranch land.  It is always a welcome sight to southbound travelers coming off of the three hour long drive through Big Sur from Carmel as it signals the end of the twisting, sometimes treacherous road through the forest of the central coast; a landmark that says Highway 46 and its 15 minute trip to the well traveled Highway 101 or perhaps a stop in the quaint, upscale village of Cambria where a warm dinner and a soft bed is just a short distance away.

To those who choose it as their destination, it is small from the highway. The driveway is modest, the low gate says, simply: “Hearst Castle.”

The parking is free and leads directly to the Visitors Center where the requisite pictures and legends of the park, ticket windows, a selections of tours and their descriptions and, of course, the gift shop are housed. But these are no ordinary park tours; this is no ordinary park.  One is immediately struck by the friendliness and knowledge of the park staff, they are beyond helpful. They obviously love this place, and they enjoy working here. Tour A is recommended for the first time visitor, it touches on a bit of everything the house has to offer.

A comfortable theater at the center is an excellent starting point and well worth the 40 minute film: “Hearst Castle: Building The Dream.” A five story tall screen shows this original film which familiarizes the neophyte with not only William Randolph Hearst and his sensational life but how it came to be. The Hearst family history is much more than newspapers, and the family is a firm and integral part of Central and Northern California.

From there, one boards the bus that will take you on the 15 minute ride up “The Enchanted Hill” while a pre-recorded sightseeing spiel backed by music of the '30s and '40s gives a bit more information about where you are. Don’t be surprised if the driver switches off the recording to point out something unusual…perhaps the zebras are out, or a short stop must be made to allow a party of peacocks to cross. William Randolph Hearst kept a zoo on the property, and many of the descendants of those animals continue to roam the vast lands.

A word to the wise, yes, there ARE Zebras on the property. Consider your wardrobe before boarding the bus.

 If your tour is early morning, or in the three seasons other than summer, you may find yourself breaking out of the low fog as you approach the Castle. Your guides are waiting for you, several guides per bus, each taking a group of 8-12 visitors.  The white house on the hill that was your destination suddenly towers above you, surrounded by its magnificent gardens, Grecian pools, twin towers and three guesthouses, each one large enough to house a family of six.

Your tour will take an hour or more, depending on your choice. The guides have an obvious affection for the place, they know their history, the land, the family and the gossip. I've never heard a question asked they couldn't answer and nothing is taboo. Much is known of Mr. Hearst, Mrs. Hearst and Marion Davies. They hold parties here on occasion and are happy to talk about them.  Yes, they have been in the pools and no, the pools are not heated.

The kitchen faucets.

We prowl everywhere, through the kitchens, the bedrooms, the tennis courts, the pools, from the large outdoor pool and down to the indoor Roman pool, location of many a late night swim. 

The indoor pool looking toward the diving platform

We hear of lovers' trysts in secluded corners, as this was a Hollywood playground away from the prying eyes of the press and their cameras, a place where the most public persons could relax and act like the rest of us. The docents and staff like this place, they are full of stories, invariably interesting, personal stories of the man who built this place and the people who enjoyed it's hospitality.

It's certainly not the most convenient of locations, it's a trip that must be made by road, at least once one leaves Paso Robles, about 20 miles east.  If you live in Los Angeles or San Francisco and like to drive it can be done as a day trip, I've done it more than once. But there are any number of hotels in San Simeon and Cambria, from cozy bed and breakfast inns or romantic fireplace cottages on Moonstone Beach to simple clean family friendly motels and spending a night, or two will be well worth the trip. Try and get one of the last tours of the day, the sunset alone will make you glad you came.

 The house remains alive, the table is set for dinner, complete with ketchup bottles marching down the center. Clothing hangs in closets, the balls are racked up on the pool table. During the Christmas season the Castle is draped in its holiday finery, a near carbon copy of the pictures that exist from the Castle's heyday. If you do overnight, go to the Visitors Center early in the day and book the special evening tour. The house is warm and inviting, glowing with light and decorations. Christmas trees shine in every room and docents dressed as guests of the '20s and '30s wander the halls, play pool and chat with guests in an evening that will make you forget, for a few hours, what decade you are actually living in. 

From the smallest detail to the largest pool, the place fires the imagination and remains a curiosity and a rare look back at a time and a California past. It is opulent and personal all at the same time. I have been there many times and taken each and every tour and never fail to discover something different and beautiful.

"Every Picture Tells a Story, Don't It?"

How much others see in this photograph. How little I see. 

Periodically, I read my email. Oh, I read specific mail, always and quickly. But every now and then I look at the things that come in on subscription.  The sale at 6pm.com. What’s new at Amazon. What does Nancy Pelosi have to say? And is there something I can contribute to on the “Help a reporter out” mailing list. 

There - in the middle of the pleas for experts in every field from real estate to economics to bio chemistry there is an interesting question: Did you and your spouse meet in an interesting or unusual way?  Well, some people think so. Funny, I don’t anymore; I guess I’m used to it. But I took a minute and hit the “reply” button.  “My husband and I met when we were contestants on a game show” 

When I look at this picture, I remember two people, young, enthusiastic, full of excitement. We were smart, sexy and funny. 

We grew up when television was still young, summer days and Christmas vacations from school were spent in front the television. “I’ve Got a Secret,” “To Tell the Truth,” “Match Game” “Video Village,” “Concentration,” and the Rolls Royce of the genre: “Jeopardy!” 

In 1978 the show was in a comeback, and had moved to Los Angeles. The ad appeared in the Los Angeles Times: Contestants wanted.  Written tests, try outs, mock games and there, in a green room (which wasn’t any shred of green) at NBC, during the ever popular “What’s your sign?  Me too! What’s your birthday?” round robin we discovered we shared a birthday and, eventually, so much more. 

And that is what brought us here, to this place, sitting in a booth at Canter’s Delicatessen on Fairfax, posing with coffee and lox, wishing I could go home, wishing I had never answered the damn query.

When our story was chosen (along with four others) I thought it would be a mention, a paragraph or two, our names in a magazine. And then there were interviews, re-writes, a photographer flown out from New York and a stylist who came over the night before the shoot with two racks of newly purchased clothes for us to try on while she took pictures with her iPad and made final decisions on what color, what style made us look our best. 

Asked to submit a list of places that meant something to us, we realized that all those places were gone. Hamburger Hamlet. The big Pickwick bookstore on Hollywood Blvd. Victoria Station Restaurant up the hill at Universal City. My husband decided on The Magic Castle, he’s a member and a Castle Knight. Permission to shoot inside the private club isn’t easy to get, but he got it. It didn’t mean much to me and I wasn’t disappointed when the magazine offered us Canter’s on Fairfax or Dupar’s at the Farmer’s Market on Fairfax. We chose Canter’s…at least we’d been there, more than once.  

I always liked the place, open 24/7, there is an air of equality unrivaled anywhere else in Los Angeles. Kings and vagabonds all stand in line, waiting for a booth or table. Our family has it’s big Christmas celebration on Christmas Eve, we’ve spent more than one Christmas Day having dinner at the packed Jewish deli as they merrily serve up roast turkey and stuffing to Jews and Gentiles alike. Legend has it that the restaurant, located in the heavily Jewish Fairfax district of Los Angeles,  was run by Jews understandably sensitive to discrimination and determined to treat others better than they themselves had been treated.  Back in the 60s and 70s it was a place hippies, flower children, comics, lawyers, rock musicians and Elizabeth Taylor were all seated only when they got to the front of the line. And all were welcomed, no one said a word about long haired men  or bell bottoms.

When I look at this picture, I see two people - strangers,  people who are showing their age, a grey haired man and a fat middle aged woman with chopped off hair, tired and distant. 

At Canter’s, we changed clothes in the closed bar, "The Kibitz Lounge.".We were pinned and posed. We were brought plate after plate of food, all of it set up with  more care than usual by a kitchen aware they were decorating the table of a magazine shoot. The pancakes were professionally cut. The lox and bagels were artfully scattered with sliced onions and capers. I hate lox and I hate onions. The waiter who was helping out used to be a food stylist. 

Only in L.A.

When I look at this picture I remember us speaking in banalities. We talked quietly about the food, about liverwurst and rye and matzo ball soup. We conjectured about the storm brewing between the crew of the magazine and the manager on duty that morning, we were in a separate room but the manager had seated a group of women having a breakfast meeting in there with us. The magazine had booked the room from 8am to 12 noon but the women having the meeting were annoyed. The manager on duty demanded the photographer turn off all the lights being used for the pictures. She said we were using the room too long, we were annoying the diners in the other dining room. She told them to get this wrapped up and over by 10:30. 

Cell phones were immediately taken out of pockets and bags and a representative from the magazine mentioned to us that, considering the size of the check Canter’s had received for these four hours the manager should be helping us dress. 

When I look at this picture I remember smiling as the current owner of Canter’s showed up, spoke to the manager and watched her purse her lips and leave the room, we never saw her again. The room relaxed and the pictures continued. The current owner, a great grand nephew of Ben Canter, told fascinating family stories of the restaurant’s early days, when, during the depression, the Bank of American borrowed money from THEM.  We finally wrapped and were sent home with the outfits we were wearing, two sandwiches packed to go and a box of rugalah.   I was glad I never had the idea to go into modeling, we were exhausted. I thought of my husbad’s high school friend who DID become a model and wondered how she ever got through all those photo sessions.

When I look at this picture I see the distance between us, the same distance that had grown between us over the last 10 years. I see the bad hair, the awful profile, the slouched shoulders, the uninvolved look in our eyes. I see my husband, anxious to get this over with and get to the site of a writing assignment, I see myself, always thinking that something will change and we will become the couple we once were and always being disappointed. 

Two and a half months later, the February issue of Real Simple was on the newsstands, we didn’t want to wait for ours to be delivered and the local super market had their new supply out. My husband and I looked at the page, our page and had the same thought: “They took hundreds and hundreds of pictures and they picked THAT one? We look awful!” I looked fat, he looked old. We looked un-attached to one another. 

The next morning I took the magazine to work with me. It was the cause of some excitement, and some disinterest. I wasn’t surprised. Until I showed it to an Executive Vice President, someone I like very much but thought wouldn’t be particularly impressed. 

When HE looked at the picture he said “My God…you two are crazy about each other – and after all these years. I’m jealous.” 

A picture IS worth a thousand words. It’s deciphering them that takes all the time.

Project 2: Coming of Age

Like me, someone who came of age during the 60s, Carlo had a childhood that seemed to mirror the cliché vision of Southern California he used to read about. His paternal grandfather emigrated from Sicily by way of New York, learning English on the streets of Brooklyn which, remembers Carlo, was a unique blend of Italian and New York street slang. His grandfather would look at a piece of machinery that had stopped functioning and pronounce “She’s a no woik!” as his all-encompassing diagnosis. His maternal grandfather was an Oscar winning cinematographer and his parent’s marriage was quintessential Los Angeles…literally.  “Orange groves and movies. Like a 1920s travel poster” Carlo says.

Growing up in turbulent times, he graduated high school in 1969…the height of the escalation in Viet Nam. 

The world as we knew it, the world as our parents knew it, was exploding around us, and them. The oldest son of a WWII Vet, Carlo, like so many others of his generation, didn't just argue with his father over the car keys. Unlike his dad, he found no honor in serving...at least not at that time and not in that place.  Morally opposed to an undeclared war he, like so many others, became one with a generation of young men who not only did not WANT to go, they were flat out refusing...something never before seen in such numbers in the United States. Canada was close - and welcomed the resistors with open arms. Not since the Civil War had so many been helped from stop to stop, an estimated 60,000 "draft dodgers" crossed out of the United States and into the protection of Canadian soil. 

He came from a family of veterans and yet he had no idea what he would do if he opened the envelope and read the dreaded salutation: "Greetings".  Canada wasn't all that far, but at what price?  As he approached the time when a decision might have to be made, the U.S. government blinked. Overwhelmed with draftees refusing to heed the call, refusing to report for physicals, declaring themselves conscientious objectors if they did, Selective Service reinvented itself. No more would masses of letters of conscription sent out. A lottery was instituted. The birthday lottery. 

 Morally opposed to the Viet Nam war, Carlo remembers listening to the birthday lottery as if it were yesterday. Three hundred sixty five dates were randomly pulled out of a bag (or a hat or a bowl or something), much like the Super Lotto numbers are pulled in over 40 states now.  Draft notices then were sent to the newly graduated seniors based on their birthday .. the first date called was the first group to be summoned. His birthday finally surfaced…Number 228. But he was still 17 and, while his relatively high number made it a good bet he wouldn’t have been called he was too young anyway. The next year…the year he turned 18, he again waited to hear the dreaded "June 2nd" called and finally it was - number 304. He wasn’t going. He enrolled in college,  spent six weeks in London, went to Disneyland and, to this day, still isn’t sure what he would have done had he been called.

Fast forward 42 years.  Carlo is now a mature man, married almost 30 years, father of two adult sons and a freelance writer, sat with me and our two grown sons in the mezzanine of the Pantages Theater in Hollywood, watching a stage full of remarkable young performers who weren't even born when Saigon fell yank us back to that time and place in "Hair".  Wondering if this acclaimed revival was little more than a pleasant nod and wink to the "Age of Aquarius" he found himself yanked back to those days of a youth that was far from idyllic, a world that made him, and hundreds of thousands like him, make life defining choices far before they were ready. He stayed in his seat and watched as one of his sons and I danced on the stage singing "Let The Sunshine In." Why? 

"I always loved that show" he said. "But I never wanted to get up and celebrate what was going down."

Panno, Carlo. Personal Interview. 20/September/2012.

Kindig, Jessie. "Draft Resistance in the Vietnam Era."Antiwar and Radical History Project - Pacific Northwest. University of Washington, Seattle, 2008. Web. 25 Sep 2012. <http://depts.washington.edu/antiwar/vietnam_draft.shtml>.