While living in a lavish hilltop castle on the California coast, a wildly rich media mogul recruits charismatic foreign dictators as columnists, criticizes one of his own reporters for being too anti-Nazi, and tries to interest America’s president in a scheme to acquire much of Mexico. When not publishing fake and incendiary news stories, he enjoys acquiring beautiful, often looted antiquities and creating a private zoo with lions, kangaroos, monkeys, and an elephant named for a character played by his alcoholic movie-star mistress in a film.Article continues after advertisement
Add in a crypto heist and some gratuitous sexual deviance, and you might have the premise for a (somewhat predictable) streaming series that dramatizes the billionaire-owned media landscape, exploding wealth inequality, and autocracy-curious politics of our age.
In fact, these details are all documented biographical facts from the life of William Randolph Hearst, whose empire of newspapers at its peak in the 1920s reached roughly one in four American families. Hearst successfully provoked a war with Spain, recruited both Hitler and Mussolini to write columns for his papers, and kept a living bestiary of exotic animals at his vast estate on the central California coast, including an elephant named for a character played by his mistress, the movie star Marion Davies. He was an avid collector of ancient artifacts, many of dubious provenance.
