She said she would not, to which he replied: "Well then, will you buy me the Louvre?"

Born in 1863, Hearst went on to create one of the greatest newspaper empires in history. He pioneered what became known as "yellow journalism" and whipped up populist support for US military adventures at the end of the 19th century.

Hearst also spent more than $50m . . . in those days a staggering sum . . . on his art collection. He was the buyer of a full quarter of the world's art objects that were sold in his lifetime.

Hearst's sons, nephews and grandsons . . . many of whom were given his exact name . . . have continued to run the massive empire he founded, expanding it into broadband services and Silicon Valley venture capital firms. They have been largely unexciting figures, apart from one of his granddaughters, Patty.

She came to public notoriety in 1974 when, as a college student, she was kidnapped by a gang of political revolutionaries calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army. They demanded that the Hearst family distribute millions of dollars worth of food to the poor. Six million dollars changed hands.

It soon became clear that Patty had come to identify with her captors, a response dubbed Stockholm syndrome, when the SLA issued a photo of her holding a machine gun.

The heiress was put on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted List.

She was eventually captured in a shoot-out, convicted of bank robbery and imprisoned for almost two years, before her sentence was commuted by Jimmy Carter.

Following her release Patty married her bodyguard, wrote several novels . . . as well as an account of her own kidnapping . . . and took bit parts as an actress. In 2001 Bill Clinton granted her a full pardon.

The Hearsts remain in the public eye thanks to Patty's daughter, the 22year-old model Lydia HearstShaw, who has fronted campaigns for Prada, Louis Vuitton and Alexander McQueen and is a fixture on the New York social scene. Her own entrepreneurial efforts have included designing handbags for Puma.