41: Politics
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So what was it like after Election Day this week for the couple who live in the White House? Well, every morning they got up, put on the robes, went downstairs, and jumped in the pool for a swim. And we do that year round. And of course, coffee is very mandatory. I'm in there. Well, the usual, I go fight with the face and Max Factor, and my husband goes off to the office. The office in this case is not the Oval Office. No, she spends more time there. He drives into San Francisco, where he has an office for his business in international finance. The couple who live in this house are named Norman Eckersley and Rosemary Ashley Eckersley. Neither is a member of the Democratic Party, both have lots more money than the President of the United States, and the White House, this one anyway, is about 15 miles south of San Francisco in a suburb called Hillsborough. Welcome to WB-EZ Chicago, it's This American Life, I'm Eric Glass. Today on our program, surprising stories of American politics, we have campaign diaries from Michael Lewis, a new theory of politics and television from Henry Jenkins, the Mexican-American self-deportation movement, Joan Jet Black, and we start with Act One, Life in the White House. My tour guide at the Western White House, this White House, was the real estate agent who's trying to sell the thing, Anne Riley, and she began the tour with a packet of old photos and press clippings that she'd assembled. This is really quite a fascinating home, and it has had several lives. It started off this, the original, this just looks like a big old house. It was a Victorian, it was an old Victorian, here it is, in the beginning, and then it became. The house has been around for over half the life of the United States, and it's the kind of huge structure that reflects every prevailing fashion over time. It's been redesigned in the neoclassical style, the French Normandy style, as a massive Swiss chalera, as a Mediterranean home with a tile roof, and finally, in 1930, George Hearst, the oldest son of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, bought this place and hired Julian Morgan, the architect who designed Hearst Castle, St. Simeon, to turn this house into a facsimile of the White House. Why? Anne Riley says the best guess anybody has is this. Julian Morgan's charge was to deliver a house that he could invite the presidents to stay in when they came to the West Coast. So, you know, that's the myth, and I say it's, you know, it's a story. And we actually, we don't know exactly why he decided, there's no documentation or quotes or anything from him saying, "Here's why I'm going to do this." Well, his father, you know, had all of these wonderful Hollywood starlets cavorting all over Simeon, you know, I mean, there was all this great stuff going on, and I think George was just trying to rise to the occasion, so what else would be famous besides a movie starlet? Well, the presidents of the United States might give him a little muscle, you know, in the family feud. I don't know, that's my, you know, it just feels so, hmm. And once your dad builds Hearst Castle, what are you going to do?
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