tonight on a second look, we revisit a program we first aired in 1989. ktvu's george watson traces the tracks of william randall hurst and the enormous castle he built along the california coast. >> reporter: he was born before the battle of gettysburg and he

was to live well beyond the atomic age spanning the bridge to modern times. he started a publishing empire. he was married and with five sons. but everyone though married, he flaunted his affair with a movie star. he was throughout his life reviled and honored as he led his country men on a roller coaster of emotions. randolph hurst would be the citizen who would be king. william randall hurst wanted his newspapers to be fun to read. this is not a new idea but typical of hurst it was an idea

that he seized and pushed to the limit. a hurst newspaper was essentially three things, headline, comics and sports. hurst would latch on to a single story and blast it into the public with relentless glee. for days, the headlines would breathlessly glare out the day's latest. if the news wasn't interesting enough on its own merit then a hurst reporter would make it so. for example, without knowing yet exactly why a preacher ran off with his 18-year-old ward, a hurst reporter wrote that the man was written by a love microbe that strangely enough seemed to exist only in the long island neighborhood where the preacher lived. the preacher wound up killing himself. there is the story of the hurst

reporter who sought a photo of a dead girl. the reporter proceeded to set a fire in the back of the house. when the mother fled, he sneaked into the house and stole the dead girl's picture. do we have here an intrepid reporter or a heartless thief. a hurst newspaper gave you all this and more. from sports to comic favorites like maggie and jigs and happy high hooligan and sheet music of the popular songs of the day. this wasn't just a newspaper it was a penny a copy home entertainment center. hurst was 23 years old when he took over the san francisco examine. his father gave him a money losing rag that ranked last. the grandson had an idea what his grandfather was tried to do

102 years ago. >> i think the direction was one of like nfl films. a kind of making the every day into the heroic. making a fire into a confligration. making a war into the the story of the century. it's taking a story that's in the face not interesting to everybody and finding the story within the story. given that, william randolph started an assault on the masses. like him or not, the country was dealing with a giant of a man, not to mention a giant of the newspaper that had an opinion on everything. >> make sure you yourself nominate the candidate for whom you are to vote. >> reporter: but one thing slowed him down in the early days, he did not have unrestricted access to the

hurst fortune. his father had died, his mother had all the money. hurst constantly badgered her for $500 here, 100 there. finally, she turned $7.5 million to her 30-year-old son. only then did william randolph hurst was able to go out and write history the way he thought it should be written. he began by buying the new york journal and immediately enbarking with the newspaper he admired the most, the new york world. the outcome was the birth of yellow journalism. but yellow journalism symbol rised the tactics william used to sell newspapers. for instance, to win a circulation war, how about a real war with spain?

it began with hurst offering a $50,000 reward for information on the sinking of the u.s.s. submarine. he himself went to cuba with a set of reporters. when fredrick remmington told hurst he wanted to come home because nothing was going on. he came to him with his fame line, you supply the picture, i supply the word. >> television although it has a quality news segment is basically an entertainment oriented medium. and i think that, when there was no tv and there was no radio you were inventing mass media. entertainment had to be a major

come opponent come component of what was there. i see it as the creating of mass media. >> reporter: on april 18, 1906 the great quake and fire lay waste to the city of san francisco. san francisco lay ruin as did hurst's newspaper. how would the reporters handle this tragedy. he raised $200,000 in cash for quake relief. he introduced a bill in congress calls for $4.5 million to rebuild the city's gutted public buildings. then under the highly publicizing of the hurst newspaper, he organized trains to ship supplies for the

homeless. he never missed a single edition. hurst purchased presses at double the price and put out his dailies from oakland. follow second look on f acebook and twitter. okay, kids, we can record one more show. who should get it? i really love jennifer. yeah, she's great. yeah. yeah. kyle's got that thick head of hair. and that should be rewarded. okay, moment of truth.

on "three," say which kid you love the most. ooh, fun, yeah. one, two, three. jennifer. jennifer. whoa. wow. she's so pretty. yeah. or we give it to kyle. it's really all he's got. [ male announcer ] switch to at&t u-verse and record four shows all at the same time. just $29 a month for 6 months. at&t.

when william randolph was a boy his father would take him camping up on this hilltop. in those days they lived in tents. when william hurst became a man he decided he did not want to live in tents anymore. so he decided to build a more permanent home. he asked an architect to build him a bungalow. a single bungalow, he obviously changed his mind. >> reporter: perhaps the greatest skill lay in the fact that she was patient enough to work with hurst. mrs.morgan got a preview of the

hurst style of architecture way back in 1913 when he commissioned her to build the biggest and best newspaper plant in the world. it was to be the home for his los angeles examiner. the spanish influences here as is the heavy medieval ornateness of the lobby. this is the way hurst liked his buildings. this was certainly training for mrs. morgan. for example, one day he was driving up the hill to his castle. he didn't like the way one of the guest cottages looked in relation to the main house. he had the cottage torn down and moved. the grand towers we see

tonight were not the first. he wanted a better view of the mountains so he added the third floor gothic suite as another afterthought. he may have been right on all accounts but i think you get the picture. on the other hand, it's hurst house, it's what he wants and he has the money to pay for it. let him do what he wants. money however was the problem. the way he was spending he was compromising the fiscal integrity of his own empire. morgan began the project down at the bay where george hurst built the first warehouses. the senior hurst also built a house that is still used by the hurst corporation. the home is not as much of a statement as the one built by his son at the top of the hill. a village for the workers was

built. it is a marvel that morgan could deal with the relentless demands of the man who was paying for it all. it seems that hurst and morgan both shy and enormously gifted respected each other. unfinished as it is this is the fruit of their communal effort. the suite was at first intended to be hurst lair. but he built the third floor for himself and this became the vip suite where guests such as wiston churchill would stay. marion slept in the third floor but as hurst mistress she reigned supreme over the rest of the castle. as a hostess she was

rationallable making the famous and unknown -- she was remarkablable making the famous and unknown equally comfortable. he would call in his wife to oversee the castle and his guest. mariam would leave and not take kindly to the situation. but hurst time at the castle was simply showcased. his vast time would be spent with mariam. guests were free to do what they pleased. swim outdoors or indoors. they could play tennis, horse back ride or drop by the largest private zoo in the world. guests could also lounge in the library surrounded by chryslers books and works of arts. or if you were charlie chaplin

you could playfully seduce the mistress of the manor. night however, guests had to play by hurst rules. 20 minutes before the 9:00 dinner hour they would allow in the assembly room and be allowed one cocktail before dinner. the guests usually managed to work around this prohibition. mariam davis would hide bottles in the ladies bedroom. but promptly at 9:00 there would be dinner at the long table in the refectory. after dinner the guests made another mandatory appearance at

the castle theater for the evening's movie which of course changed every night. the chief created a dream like atmosphere for himself and his guest that was as much fairy tale castle as it was over worldly. there were those who still found the place delightful on its own merit. >> to me it was grand. the biggest bone i have to pick is that it portrays as a dark gloomy place. i don't perceive it that way at all. i perceive it as open and light and illuminated in a way. as pleasant as hurst tried to get the life on the ranch, he didn't quite get it the way he wanted he ran out of time and money. he under estimated $50,000 a year and he was making less

than that. hurst made money just so he could spend it. hurst could never be president of the united states, but he could have anything he wanted to buy, that is until the year 1957.

at the age of 74, wr hurst had bulldozed the most profitable newspapers in the world. they were $26 million in debt. hurst couldn't save himself. he was a brilliant newspaper technician but he was an inept administrator. he had to give up control of the world within a world he had created. he had to stop buying and building. he had to start selling off the symbol of his power. sell ising off the newspaper would be like hurst losing his power of speech.

if he sold the newspaper in rochester new york. that meant he could no longer billow out his message to that part of the country. but the committee now has the fiscal power to be routeless. hurst agreed to part off with 1/10 of his collection. art,tapestry, armour. he paid more than for their arts of work than he was sold. now that he was selling he was getting less than what they were worth. the same could be said for his new york real estate. it just wasn't worth what he paid for. >> this whole system of income taxation has degenerated into a racket. in which the public tries to

cheat the government and the government tries to rob the public. >> at a time when the bankers would not borrow him any money. he gave wr a million dollars interest free loan. it was a true mark of the woman who would share so much of his woman with hurst. she was his mistress but she was also his best friend. and she was shrewd enough to get a million dollars in her hand during the depression. far beyond the capabilities of randolph hurst. the war that hurst denounced for so long would soon save his empire. the united states was at war and the country was clambering for the news that hurst was willing and able to provide. after decades of anti japanese propaganda, the war finally validated hurst distrust of the

japanese. but at the same time, he was now afraid japanese submarines would take their revenge by shelling san simian, high atop the enchanted hill. so hurst and davies moved out and left the castle and moved to the timber rich estate in northern california. he would spend much !

in his 70s, hurst survived his woes. in his 80s he still maintained active editorial control over his newspapers. but in 1947 at the age of 84, he became too ill to live in the isolated splendor of his castle. he would be forced to leave for the last time.

after he told morgan he wanted a bungalow he would go to beverly hills to die. near his doctors he would hang on for four more years still unwilling to give up the life he had so extravagantly lived. wealthy beyond imagination he had power but never the presidency. he had the glitter of hollywood all around him but he never became the king of hollywood. throughout his lifetime he was passionately loved, and just as passionately hated. time magazine once wrote of hurst, quote, no other press lord ever wielded his power with less sense of responsibility. no other press ever matched the hurst press for flamboyance and mass hysteria, end quote. on august 13, 1951 the founder of one of the greatest publishing empires in the world

died. with the leader gone, jockeying for power became at once. the first one to fall was davies. she was asleep when hurst died. the hurst organization worked to get the body removed before she woke up. they cancelled the subscription to her copies of hurst example examiner. they were afraid of davies and the power she wielded through her ownership through a huge chunk of her stock. davies never tried to take control of wr's empire. davies was of course excluded from his funeral.

and she reassumed her role of the wife of randolph hurst. the family gave sansimien to the state. they kept the road leading up to the castle and the land. but the castle was deeded to the state. after hurst died the family tried to sell it. not surprisingly there were no takers. they eventually had to do some serious negotiating to get the state to take it off their hands. the house on the enchanted hill was built to suit the peculiarities and enormities that built it. only hurst could truly call this place home. this could never be a home to someone rich. so like it or not. this place has become the symbol of the man who grabbed

the world by its shirt collar and shook it until it paid full attention to what he had to say. >> for william randolph hurst the world was a stage. was he a politician, a journalist, an art collector, a father, a philanthropist. he was all of those things, but what seemed to be more important to him was that the world knew who he was. he built it here on the enchanted hill where william randolph hurst truly made a name for himself. [ male announcer ] this... is the montrose pet hospital --

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