TAXATION: Return of Hearst

Three years ago, with an angry blast at California’s then new 15% income tax law and a comparison of tax collectors to gangsters & gunmen, William Randolph Hearst changed his legal residence from California to New York. Lately, Mr. Hearst has been having his prodigiously scrambled possessions audited, consolidated, made liquid by a new set of exchequer chancellors (TIME, March 14, et ante). Last week, for reasons best known to his tax experts, William Randolph Hearst wrote a letter to Assessor W. M. Hollister of San Luis Obispo County, Calif. announcing that as of January 1 he had returned his legal residence to his San Simeon estate. Though he issued no detailed explanation of his return to native soil, the inference was that California would now be less expensive for him and his heirs than New York. For Assessor Hollister he listed $1,366,300.25 in “solvent credits,” bringing his total assessable properties in San Luis Obispo County to a modest $3,000,000.