KING of the HILL : Audacious as the media lion who built it, William Randolph Hearst’s ‘castle’ is the ultimate home tour for looky-loos.

“Xanadu! Its cost: No man can say. “

--Citizen Kane

Cary Grant, a guest more than two dozen times, called it “a great place to spend the Depression.” Hedda Hopper, in a rare moment of near-poetry, said it was “a visit to Never-Never land. Never have we seen its like, and never will we again.”

It’s formal name was La Cuesta Encantada, the Enchanted Hill, but to its owner and absolute ruler it was simply “the ranch.”

That would be William Randolph Hearst, a media lion of surpassing lung power, one of the most influential men of his day. Through dozens of radio stations, magazines and, of course, all those newspapers, he reached fully one quarter of all Americans.

If he wanted to build the largest, costliest, most impressive private residence in North America and install his young mistress, silent film actress Marion Davies, as hostess, who was going to stop him?

Sited almost exactly halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco inland up a hill from ocean-hugging California 1, Hearst Castle has gracefully changed from one man’s magnificent obsession to a top-drawer tourist attraction.

With more than a million visitors a year, it prints tourist information in French, German, Spanish, Japanese and Hebrew, with Italian and Korean set to join the list.

Yet, although it is second only to Disneyland on out-of-state tourists’ lists of sightseeing wishes, Hearst Castle’s middle-of-nowhere location has paradoxically meant that Southern Californians often are reluctant to make the journey.

Which is a shame, especially because in recent years an infusion of state funds has put the castle into spiffier shape than at any time since its opening. Now one can truly see what a man who said, “Pleasure is worth what you can afford to pay for it” got for his money.

What Hearst is estimated to have spent on the buildings and furnishings, incidentally, has been put at between $7.2 and $8.2 million.

Herman J. Mankiewicz, a frequent guest at the castle and co-screenwriter of the Orson Welles-directed “Citizen Kane,” clearly modeled Charles Foster Kane and his Xanadu after Hearst and his “ranch,” but fact and fiction diverge as often as they match, Mankiewicz’s brutal skewering of Marion Davies as the talentless Susan Alexander being the prime case in point.

One key thing that both film and reality agree on, however, is that Hearst, like Donald Trump, was born to a taste for affluence.

Hearst’s father, George, was a miner who struck it rich enough to become the 16th-wealthiest person in the nation.

He began accumulating land for a cattle ranch in the San Simeon area in 1865, and when his only son inherited the spread in 1919 at age 56, it sprawled over 275,000 acres, an entity half the size of Rhode Island and including 50 miles of the prettiest coastline in California.

Most men might consider settling into placid retirement at that age, but W. R. Hearst was definitely not most men.

At first thinking only of building some relatively simple guest bungalows on the ranch, Hearst hired feisty, diminutive Julia Morgan, the first woman to graduate from the architecture department of Paris’ prestigious Ecole des Beaux Arts, to do a little designing for him. It turned out to be a job that was to last nearly 30 years.

Morgan was ideally suited to the task. She was a perfectionist with a passion for quality and detail who designed about 700 buildings in addition to the castle.

Her background in civil engineering gave her the know-how to cope with the technical difficulties presented by the then-new process of reinforced concrete construction. Her Paris education made her conversant with art and antiquities and their potential decorative use, a skill that was to prove especially useful. For as the project grew in grandeur, so did Hearst’s lust for artwork.

Faced with an impoverished Europe thirsting for American dollars, he bought the heritage of generations almost literally by the carload, and Morgan would get used to receiving telegrams such as this one, sent in 1930 from London: “Can you use to advantage a 15th-Century Gothic ceiling seven meters long and five meters wide?”

What gradually was taking shape on the California hill was was not so much a castle as a small Mediterranean village clustered around an imposing cathedral, nominally modeled after the Cathedral of Santa Maria a Mayor in Ronda, Spain.

That building, La Casa Grande, is the main wonder of the Hearst complex. It has 100 rooms, 37 of them guest rooms, and, although built in an era when indoor plumbing was hardly universal, 41 bathrooms.

Its 73,510 square feet were nominally spread over four stories, but La Casa has so many levels and split levels that Hearst regularly issued maps to his guests.

Even more interesting, notes one architecture writer, is that not only is “each of the floors visually, spatially and experientially a separate entity,” but “each room is a complete visual experience in itself, having no sense of spatial participation with adjacent rooms.”

A lifelong lover of animals, Hearst also assembled, if not, as Citizen Kane insists, “the largest private zoo since Noah,” then certainly one of the biggest and most unusual.

He was host to 200 to 300 species of animals, including many carnivores, and 70 species of grazing animals including zebras, some of whose descendants are still roaming around.

The grazing animals had a 2,000-acre preserve to wander about in, bounded by an eight-foot high, 10-mile fence. Within that area they had the absolute right of way. Winston Churchill, or so the story goes, once had his car blocked for more than an hour by a particularly obstreperous giraffe.

Hearst was equally obsessed with the landscaping and employed 24 full-time gardeners. Seven miles of hedges were planted, and enormous Spanish fan palms and Italian cypress trees, some weighing up to two tons apiece, were brought in to help give the ranch its Mediterranean identity.

When Hearst tired of looking out on his 1.25 million-gallon reservoir he had 6,000 pines planted and hand-watered to obscure the offending view.

Because of the castle’s location far from centers of civilization, everything, including top soil for the plants and ice for the polar bears, had to be brought in by steamer from San Francisco and then laboriously hauled to the top of the hill by diesel chain-drive Mack trucks that managed a top speed of one mile an hour.

Getting to the castle is much easier now, but the first glimpse of it high on the hill remains both magical and forbidding. As you climb 1,600 feet up on five miles of winding roads you can’t help but feel how intimidating it must have been to visit when Hearst was king of the hill.

Four tours are available for viewing his domain, with a fifth, a night-time viewing of the castle, on the agenda for a possible start next fall.

It is theoretically possible to take all four tours in a single day but three is much more manageable, and no one should go to the trouble of visiting the castle without taking at least the first two.

The first and most essential tour concentrates on the large, impressive public rooms on the castle’s first floor, including the enormous refectory, the complex’s only dining room that once sat 60.

Tour No. 2, in many ways the most interesting, takes you upstairs to Hearst’s private suite, including a 5,000-book library and his stunning faux-Gothic office.

Tour No. 3, dubbed “the Persian rug and bathroom tour” by one of the guides, concentrates on the castle’s newest wing, while Tour No. 4, given only from April through October, concentrates on the elaborate outdoor gardens, where foliage was planted in color-coordinated groupings.

Tour groups are small enough, and the castle so immense, that one always feels slightly in awe of the surroundings.

The necessity of staying on carpet runners adds to the feeling that Hearst might appear at any moment and scowlingly demand an explanation for your presence. This feeling is especially strong in his surprisingly small bedroom.

It features the castle’s rarest and most unusual ceiling, a stunning 14th-Century Gothic masterpiece, as well as portraits of Hearst’s parents and the most significant painting in the whole place, a golden madonna and child that art historians say might have been done by the great Duccio di Buoninsegna.

Among the castle’s more human treasures are its tour guides, almost all of whom appear to be genuinely attached to the place and eager to point out quirks and fill in history.

It is from the guides that you learn the precise locations of the hidden elevators that Hearst used to make entrances that seemed almost magical.

The guides also like to point out that the massive refectory was often the site of ranch-style lunches, with paper napkins and bottles of ketchup and mustard incongruously resting on the massive convent tables.

All tours stop at the twin jewels of the place, its pools. The outdoor pool, at 345,000 gallons the world’s largest outdoor private heated (to 80 degrees) pool, is possibly the world’s most beautiful as well.

Its splendors, as viewers of the film “Spartacus” will remember, include 2,000-year-old Roman temple ruins surrounding a cool, elegant, marble-floored space.

The indoor pool, tiled to a fare-thee-well with 2 million Venetian blue glass and 10,000 22-carat gold leaf tiles, is equally gorgeous, but apparently was used mainly for romantic night-time rendezvous.

During the day it was so unpopular with guests that Hearst finally let the servants swim in it.

Visitors to the castle have a tendency to nit-pick about the specific choices both Hearst and Morgan made. Rooms are positively crammed with antiquities, everything from a 2,000-year-old mosaic to stone fireplaces big enough to walk through, to priceless Asian vases turned into lamps.

If a ceiling was too big for one room, Hearst and Morgan would chop it in two and use it twice. If they couldn’t find exactly what they wanted in Europe they would hire domestic craftsmen to duplicate it painstakingly. So visitors to the castle can’t really be sure if what they’re seeing is real or a copy.

On the one hand, one is inevitably tempted to say that the whole thing looks like a movie set, that it would be boring to live in, that Hearst’s style of pillaging is immoral and should have been illegal.

Yet finally all those cavils stick in the throat at the sheer audacity of the project. Sprawling, yes, impossible, yes, but somehow, against all odds and considerable logic, it is amazing to note that the place works. Like a particularly far-fetched jigsaw puzzle, everything seems to fit.

Hearst thought so too, and when he left it because of health reasons in 1947 it was only after trying unsuccessfully to get his heart doctor to move into one of its mansion-like guest houses.

When Hearst died in 1951 at age 88, the Hearst Corp. offered it to UC Berkeley as an art museum, but without an endowment it was refused.

Then the place was put on the real estate market, but no one nibbled hard enough. Finally it was offered to the state of California, which took four years to settle the terms of the bequest before accepting the complex and the 100-plus acres on which it sits.

Whatever you think of what Hearst wrought, however, one leaves the castle with great admiration for its inventive and resourceful architect, Julia Morgan.

But she was leery about taking too much credit. The most she would say, according to her nephew, was “Well . . . if someone else had done it . . . it would have been worse.”