Palace Envy

By Douglas Brinkley

If there is such a thing as a secret American Dream, it has many more rooms than inhabitants and gold-plated fixtures to boot. We all crave stately pleasure domes, such Xanadus as William Randolph Hearst's San Simeon and Bill Gates' new ode to monstrosity in Seattle. But only the occasional hyper-mogul ever attains one. These opulent shrines to capitalism we regard with a mixture of envy, awe and abhorrence: "Isn't that ridiculous--nobody needs a house that big." Or, "Just think how hard it would be to keep that thing clean." The fact that he or she has a Xanadu--and you don't--proves that the owner is a greedy hustler or a planet-polluting slumlord with close Mob ties who should be flogged into bankruptcy like Donald Trump (and, unlike him, left there).

This Puritan disdain for ostentation is a cherished tradition. After all, Thomas Paine penned Common Sense hoping to liberate Americans from the grip of ostentatious English aristocrats. In fact, the most poignant lesson in U.S. history teaches that today's Horatio Alger (see Andrew Carnegie) is tomorrow's robber baron (see Andrew Carnegie)--unless, of course, the baron performs a useful public service, such as owning a pro sports team or three, like 60-year-old Ted Turner, who also recently gave a billion dollars to the United Nations for humanitarian causes. Turner was following the tradition of the Astors, Mellons and yes, Carnegie, who put much of their fortune into such good works as libraries, hospitals and museums. Microsoft's Gates, by contrast, has yet to follow robber-baron etiquette--other than pouring money into his own dream castle.

In the early 1990s everybody was pulling for Gates, who proved that even an uber-nerd whom the rest of us beat up in the playground could make it big in the land of opportunity. But the world's richest man made the classic hubristic mistake: building what one newspaper called the "new Xanadu" and bragging about it. Gates' high-tech haven would top even Hearst's epically garish San Simeon as the most grandiose castle in America. But as Hearst once quipped of his estate--which housed, among other things, a large zoo--"Pleasure is what you can afford to pay for it." And Gates is richer than Hearst ever dreamed of being, as his "tastes" reveal: an indoor pool; a 1 1/2-story trampoline room; a salmon stream; a movie theater; a miniature-golf course. Perhaps the most telling gilded lily in Gates' mansion is a system of electronic "art panels" in every room, which at a mouse click allows the lord of the manor to display whatever, say, Rembrandt painting or Ansel Adams photograph he fancies. The rooms even interact with visitors, each of whom gets a microchip ID on arrival.

For all his marketing wizardry, Gates blundered in displaying the same attitude that doomed certain robber barons. As writer Ambrose Bierce once gibed of Hearst, "Nobody but God loves him, and he knows it." Likewise, Gates' Xanadu has helped transform the boyishly charming geek into the Microsoft Monster, who is being chased by torch-bearing mobs brandishing antitrust suits. Nowhere in Gates' overwired palace is there a program to inform him how to act in the nation he lives in: the U.S. of A., in which throngs cheered the heavy-metal band Motorhead when it performed Eat the Rich and where Garth Brooks became a megastar for crooning about having friends in "low places," even if by doing so he has made himself into a country-music mogul with a bodacious estate of his own. Still, every country singer since Hank Williams has made his fans want to burn the mansions on the hill to the ground. It's simply not American to root for a guy who has elevators in his house. This is why the American people still won't turn on Bill Clinton--he's a lifelong renter and lives in mansions at the public's whim. If Clinton owned a Xanadu in Little Rock, he would have been drummed out of the White House long ago.

Douglas Brinkley is author of American Heritage's History of the United States