Sorting out fact from fiction can be harder on the constitution than separating milk from whipped potatoes in a cupful of vichyssoise. And when you succeed, the results may taste sharper than vinegar on the tongue. Let’s take the case of Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst.
The newspaper tycoon, with a wife and five sons, and the golden-haired charmer from the Bronx shared many things in life—laughter, riches, tears, disaster; everything except his name. Mrs. William Randolph Hearst denied him the divorce he begged for, spurned his offers of millions and anything else she wanted. The legend is that W.R. found his golden-hearted girl when she was a mere sixteen, skipping around in Flo Ziegfeld’s Follies of 1917. Truth is, it happened some years earlier.
He was fifty years old, with a long, pale face and piercing blue eyes when he sat in the Globe Theatre and saw her dancing in the chorus of Queen of the Movies, directed by Julian Mitchell. She was then fourteen years old. It was January 1914.
A sister of hers was another of the six chorus girls. Marion Cecilia Douras—she changed the name to Davies later—wanted to be with her sister and work beside her. Neither her father, Bernard, nor her mother, Rose, objected. Her one obstacle was the Gary Society, whose inspectors supposedly saved young girls from a fate worse than death, meaning sin and exploitation in the theater, by seeing they didn’t dance in any chorus until they were at least sixteen years old.
She took her problem to a family friend, Pat Casey, who arranged it so that Marion would land the job, and he fibbed about her age. To all intent and purpose, she had reached the essential sixteenth birthday when she went into the show. On opening night Hearst was there with a companion, a judge. The next morning, from the Louis Cohen Ticket Agency, he ordered two seats in Row C for every performance of the show’s run, one for himself, the other for any friend who wanted to see the show. Or if no friend was available, the vacant seat was a handy place to park his hat.
Most of the cast had a hunch he had his eyes on Marion’s sister. But after a week or two he tipped his hand by sending a note to Marion inviting her to have supper with him in Delmonico’s. She took the note to Casey to ask: “What should I do? What could I possibly talk about to a man like him?”
“Accept the invitation,” answered Pat, “but be sure you always take a girl friend with you.”
Pat had some sound advice for another cute beginner in the same chorus line. This other sixteen-year-old was Al Jolson’s light of love. He had reached the point of promising to marry her when another beauty caught his eye and he married her, instead. The young dancer went to Pat with her troubles. “Keep quiet and let me handle it,” he said.
He and Al had some serious talking to do. “I feel like a dog,” said Jolson. “What can I do?”
Pat had the answer: “You can give her $100 a month as long as she lives, plus a home in Westchester County.” Al was happy to escape so lightly. She outlived him and collected an additional keepsake of the glorious days that used to be. In Jolson’s will he left her $100,000, and nobody knew who she was, except the lawyer who drew up the document.
Measured either in love or money, Marion did much better than that. To Hearst she was a golden, blue-eyed princess, and he showered her with treasure until ultimately she was worth more than $8,000,000 in her own right. When she died she owned three skyscrapers in New York City, the Desert Inn in Palm Springs, plus an estate in Beverly Hills.
From the moment he saw her, he fell under her spell. She didn’t waver in the affection she gave him. Toward the end, though, she had different feelings about his family. She had a special reason for being pleased with her Manhattan skyscrapers. “Wherever the Hearsts walk on the East Side, if they ever do,” she said, “they have to pass one of my buildings—on Fifth Avenue, Park, or down Madison.”
No princess in a picture book enjoyed such gifts as were heaped on her by W.R., history’s most extravagant spender. In their early days he decreed that she was to be the greatest star in motion pictures. In New York she lived with her family, was surrounded with instructors in every subject under the sun that might further her career. She was cast in an inconsequential drama, Cecilia of the Pink Roses, for a start, and his newspapers and magazines started promoting her.
He insisted that she play only ingénue roles, though her talent was as a comedienne. If he’d let her play comedy, she could have been the real success he’d set his heart on. But she worked only to please him. “I was never crazy about making pictures,” she told me. “It was all right once we got started. But to me it was wasting time. You live only once; you’ve got to have fun, and you can’t work all the time.”
Another typical bit of Hearst’s fancy didn’t do Marion any good. One cocktail was the rule for her at San Simeon. If she wanted an extra drink, she had to sneak it. In each of the castle’s countless powder rooms she kept a bottle of champagne hidden in the tank of the toilet. Friends like Carole Lombard and Frances Marion knew the secret and shared the bubbles. I’ve seen Marion Davies drink a pint of champagne in half a dozen gulps and walk out singing. If W.R. had been less strict on the subject of liquor, she wouldn’t have drunk so much.
After Cecilia, Marion had her own movie studio to reign over. Hearst bought the River Park Casino up on 127th Street in Harlem and converted it as the production center for his Cosmopolitan Pictures. There all the stops were pulled out for a hang-the-expense Tudor epic, When Knighthood Was in Flower, designed to put her in the front rank of the movies in a single leap. She cared no more for this sword-and-cloak stuff than for anything else about the business she’d been pushed into. “The only thing I liked about making pictures was the fun we had on the side,” she said. “But there was always somebody pulling your hair, powdering your nose, and those hot lights!”
Hearst wasn’t a man to listen to argument, much less admit defeat. She went on making pictures, some of them winning enough praise from critics other than his own men to justify his relentless ambitions for her. Little Old New York was “exquisite,” according to the New York Times. Janice Meredith, another costume cutup, also came in for Times approval. “No more brilliant achievement in ambitious motion pictures ... has ever been exhibited.”
He failed in his movie plans for Marion and himself as he failed in many other things he attempted, except making money. He didn’t become the greatest producer in the world; he missed laying hands on the governorship of New York; he never got into the White House. The biggest irony of his life was the deal he made by telephone from San Simeon to the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1932 to swing most of the California delegates behind a candidate he didn’t like, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. More than any other man, the deeds of Roosevelt ruined Hearst. Then World War II made Hearst another fortune.
The Shepherd of San Simeon had a long way to go before he let Marion ease her way out of the career he had chosen for her. The arrangement he came to with Louis Mayer and the Cosmopolitan company brought Marion from New York to Culver City in such style you’d imagine it was Louis XVI transferring Marie-Antoinette from Paris to Versailles. Near the front of the lot a fourteen-room bungalow was built for her as a combined dressing room and summer home.
Later, when Marion left for Warners, it was transported lock, stock, and barrel there. When she departed from Warners, an addition was made and the whole thing moved to Benedict Canyon in Beverly Hills. Louis Mayer bought it and lived in it. Then it became the home of Kay and Arthur Cameron. But they were divorced, and Cameron lived on there alone.
San Simeon, two hundred miles from Culver City, was too far for daily travels to Metro. Hearst built a new castle for his princess on the gold coast of Santa Monica. This new ninety-room Georgian mansion, with two swimming pools, three drawing rooms, two dining rooms, and a private movie theater, was called the “beach house.” It cost $7,000,000.
W.R., in his sixties now, and the gorgeous young girl, whose stutter only added to her charm, had dreamed that someday, somehow they would be man and wife. Mrs. Hearst—who was Millicent Willson, a chorine in a group called “The Merry Maidens” when she first met W.R.—thought otherwise. Her husband’s hopes of marriage to Marion seemed about ready to bloom when Millicent was being escorted by Alexander Moore, once married to Lillian Russell and once United States Ambassador to Spain. As an inducement to divorce, W.R. was offering Millicent $10,000,000 together with the huge apartment house in which they used to live.
Millicent sought advice from one of the biggest men in the country, who was a good friend of Marion’s, too. His reasoning prevailed with her: “Mrs. William Randolph Hearst is a very important name in America and the world. What would you gain if you gave it up?”
Marion made friends with Moore in later years when he was in California very ill. She sat by his bedside during his last days. “Before the end comes,” he murmured, “will you put your arms around me and kiss me?” She didn’t hesitate a moment.
She performed that same, final act of compassion for another man, her father, long after it was clear that, in spite of all Hearst did for her, he could never give her his name. Bernard Douras, like the rest of Marion’s family, had shared in W.R.’s generosity. As a result of ties with “Red Mike” Hylan, mayor of New York, Douras had been appointed a city magistrate and was invariably referred to in Hearst papers as “Judge” Douras. He had been a stanch Catholic all his life. He, too, died in Marion’s arms.
She had a heart big as the Ritz Tower, which was one of the hunks of New York real estate W.R. owned in those days, after taking it over from Arthur Brisbane when he couldn’t meet the payments. Socially, in Hollywood she was the queen bee for more than thirty years. Friends fallen on hard times could rely on a check from Marion to see them through. A girl who wanted to impress a producer or land a job could borrow Marion’s best dresses, furs, and fabulous jewels—whatever the occasion called for.
When talking pictures arrived, Marion had problems like everybody else; she got going with Marianne and went on to The Floradora Girl. “Somebody told me I should put a pebble in my mouth to cure the stuttering. That goes back to the days of the Greeks, the pebble treatment. During a scene the first day, I swallowed the pebble, and that was the end of the cure.”
She had no cause to worry that speech trouble would put an end to her career. The birth of the talkies ruined many another reputation. Two of the cruelest, most primitive punishments our town deals out to those who fall from favor are the empty mailbox and the silent telephone. But Marion was a hostess who took no notice of who was in and who out of the social swim. Her friends, rich or poor, were invited up to San Simeon. Her parties and picnics mixed the important guests with people you saw no other place. Mighty executives rubbed shoulders with has-beens still living under her protective wing. Quite a few careers were started all over again as a result.
In her bungalow she had a complete household staff, including a fine cook, Mrs. Grace, with a young daughter, Mary. When Mrs. Grace fell fatally ill, as a last favor she asked Marion to look after her Mary. The little orphan was raised like a daughter. When she reached school age, she went away to be educated, then returned to live with her foster mother.
Mary begged for a photograph of Marion autographed “To my darling daughter.” And on that deceptive bit of pseudo-evidence was built the juicy rumor that W.R. had children by Marion. Only after some years did she retrieve the picture from Mary Grace, but the damage had been done, prompting Hearst in his will to testify: “I hereby declare that the only children I have ever had are my sons....”
Marion did some matchmaking on Mary’s behalf by introducing her to one of Hearst’s band of trouble shooters, William Curley, publisher of the New York Journal American, who had five children of his own by a former marriage, plus grandchildren, and was old enough to be Mary’s grandfather. Mary was married to William Curley at San Simeon.
Doris Duke, the tobacco heiress, was one of the bridesmaids, and her husband of the moment, Jimmy Cromwell, one of the guests. Before the ceremony Curley changed his will in Mary’s favor; which later left her a rich widow. Marion was a bridesmaid on that occasion, as on many others. I knew how much she envied any bride.
I stayed in Hollywood largely because of her. When picture parts grew scarce as hen’s teeth, I holed up in a three-room basement flat with my son. I was ready to quit and return to New York when Marion heard about it from Frances Marion and put me into a picture of hers, Zander the Great, for which Frances wrote the script. That also opened the door to San Simeon for me. It was the springboard to more jobs, and that kept me, for better or worse, in the movies.
Wealth came to mean nothing to Marion except in terms of the good it could do. “You’re rich not because of money but only through what you give,” she used to say. She built a children’s wing on UCLA’s Medical Center, with a trust fund added to maintain it. With her wry humor that remained intact to the end, she shrugged off any fancy talk about the building being her memorial: “It won’t do me any good; I’ll be down below where I can’t see so high.”
This Lady Bountiful extended her warmth to Hearst’s close family and employees. She mothered John R., Jr., the Chief’s twelve-year-old grandson, nicknamed “Bunkie,” when he came to live at San Simeon after his parents were divorced. She interceded with the iron-willed man to save his sons—William, Jr., John, David, Randolph, and George—from their father’s wrath. She supported one of the five for years after he had spent his inherited money as if it would last forever.
For thirty years she protected the boys from W.R.’s anger and disapproval; covering up their sins in his eyes; lending them money when they needed it; taking them and their friends in under San Simeon’s roof and into her Santa Monica home. In return, the sons behaved as if she was one of their nearest and dearest friends. No hostility was ever shown until after W.R.’s death.
She bestowed the same kind of favors on Hearst’s staff. Thanks to Marion, Louella’s job was enlarged for her, with steady increases in salary. Through Marion, she got to know all the stars and greats of the world. Cobina Wright picked up her stint as society columnist by Marion’s pleading on her behalf with W.R.
Hearst’s staff treated Marion fondly during her protector’s lifetime. Richard Berlin, the organization’s strong man who emerged as president of Hearst Corporation, was one of the many who scrupulously saw to it that every birthday and similar anniversary in her life was marked by flowers and the cordial words of congratulations.
When W.R.’s fortunes crumbled and his empire faced sudden ruination, Marion came to the rescue. She lent him one million dollars. “You’ll be left without a penny,” said I, always the practical one, to her.
“What would you do?” she asked. “It came from him. Would you deny him when he needs it?”
In 1947 the two of them took refuge from the storms that blew increasingly around him—old age and an America entirely changed from the land he’d left his stamp on. They closed down San Simeon and moved into a Spanish stucco house on North Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills. W.R. was reluctantly facing the fact that he was no more immortal than any other man.
For Marion herself, W.R. had a special warning—against the wife of one of his sons. “Be careful of her,” he said in his quavering, high-pitched voice. “She will be far more hostile than Mrs. Hearst.”
The final act in Hearst’s eighty-eight years began on the night of August 13, 1951, as he lay dying. Marion could sense it, though she would not put it into words. She summoned her nephew, the writer Charles Lederer, to the house. She had been drinking and was on the verge of hysteria. W.R.’s two physicians, Dr. Prinzmetal and Dr. Corday, were already in attendance. Presumably summoned by one or the other of them, Bill and David Hearst and Richard Berlin also arrived at the house.
When things got too hot to handle, Lederer persuaded Dr. Corday that Marion should be taken to her bedroom and given sedation. The wrangling continued after she had left, and in the course of the evening Lederer returned to his house, close by on North Beverly Drive.
Early next morning Lederer received a telephone call that Hearst was dead. He had died in the arms of his Catholic valet, Henry Monahan, now with Conrad Hilton, who said prayers for him. Two hours later the body was flown to San Francisco.
When Marion’s nephew arrived back at the Hearst house, he was greeted by Berlin: “Where do you think you’re going?”
“To see Marion.”
“Make sure you go to her room and nowhere else.”
“This house belongs to Marion Davies,” Lederer said, “and I’ll go where I please.”
Marion couldn’t be roused from her drugged sleep until after the body was being flown to San Francisco, escorted by Bill, David, George, and Randolph Hearst. Mrs. Hearst, Bill’s wife, “Bootsie,” and other members of the family flew from New York for the service. Louella was one of the hundreds of mourners who gathered in San Francisco. Marion read about the funeral arrangements in the paper. What W.R. had planned before his death was a quiet service in his home with only Marion and an Episcopal minister reading from the Bible.
The day he was buried, I sat with Marion in her dining room. We prayed silently together. “I had him while he lived,” she said. “They can have him now.” Though she disguised it, she was still in a state of shock at the loss of the man she had loved for nearly forty years.
When the announcement came, a few months later, that she had eloped to Las Vegas with Horace Brown, a hell-for-leather Merchant Marine captain who looked somewhat like a younger version of William Randolph, the Hearst paper in Los Angeles, the Examiner, reported with satisfaction: “It was Miss Davies’ first marriage.”
* * * * *
I decided one day to write a piece about what happens to a retired movie star and went to Marion to talk about it. With Horace and Dennis the Menace, a small brown dachshund, she lived in the house where W.R. died. Its long front hall retained a touch of the beach-palace days, with life-sized portraits of her in her leading roles hanging on the walls. In the library there were three more pictures. On a table stood a “Lucky Lindy” photograph of Charles Lindbergh autographed “To Marion Davies, best wishes and many thanks.” On the mantel were two photographs of Bernard Shaw, one of them inscribed, “This is what is left of me—1948.” Shaw, said Marion, was the only man that Gandhi, W.R.’s favorite dog, didn’t try to bite. “He wanted to listen to what GBS had to say, but Gandhi took it out on me later.”
She was wearing dark brown slacks, cinnamon-colored silk blouse, and flat-heeled leather shoes. The blond hair looked as though it had just been washed and set. On the coffee table in front of her she kept a compact and two lipsticks which, while we talked, she applied almost unconsciously, with perfect aim.
She said: “I don’t look at motion pictures any more, most of all my own. I used to see one every night. I have prints of most of mine, but they’re slowly molding in a vault downstairs. I have Little Old New York, but my projector goes too fast to run it off.”
“Wasn’t Bill Powell in that one?”
“No, he was in When Knighthood Was in Flower. Remember those symmetricals he wore to make his legs look pretty? When we ran that at San Simeon, Carole Lombard was with him. She never got over his symmetricals. He was a real villain in that picture.”
“I saw him in Palm Springs. He said it wasn’t exciting, but it’s adding years to his life. Would you like to make another picture?”
“Not if they offered me Mars on a silver plate. I have other ideas along the theatrical line. Something big, like washing elephants.”
“What was your favorite picture?”
“The Big Parade. Long time ago, but I liked it.”
“How about Gone With the Wind?”
“I liked that, but I didn’t see much of it. I went with Carole and Clark to the opening here. Raoul Walsh was with us, too. A man who pretended he was Burgess Meredith picked a fight with us. Clark was nervous and didn’t want to sit through the picture, anyway. So we all went into the manager’s office. The manager was off somewhere, and the phone kept ringing. We’d pick it up and say: ‘Sorry, no reservations; all sold out for a year.’ We thought that was funny. Carole was a lot of fun. She liked to have a good time.”
“So did you.”
“It’s taken its toll.”
“Did you ever have any protégés?”
“I kept it all for myself. I couldn’t act.”
“Well, I know you helped Ray Milland, for instance.”
“He played my brother in Bachelor Father. The director got impatient with him. It was his first picture and he was nervous. Who isn’t, even on the twenty-fifth picture? So I told him to pretend that the director wasn’t there.”
I asked her about the plush party she gave for Johnnie Ray not long after W.R.’s death, which caught a bit of the glamour of our yesterdays, with six hundred invited and a thousand showing up.
“I was having my hair done when Charlie Morrison brought him in. He didn’t know me at all. He must have been awful young. I never saw so many people I didn’t know—I didn’t know ninety per cent of the guests. We were in a turmoil for weeks. They put gardenias in the bushes and moved all the furniture.”
What was her average day? “I have business things. Then I watch TV and read. I sleep late.”
We talked again about the old days. “Gloria Swanson always liked to play games. So she cooked this one up at San Simeon one night. I played the minister, off in another room. All the men were to pick the girls they wanted to marry, then couple by couple they came into the room where I would perform the ceremony. Then I’d say, ‘All right, seal it with a kiss,’ and when they started to do that, Gloria would pick up a towel that she’d filled with ice and conk the guy on the head.
“Everybody laughed until it was Joe Hergesheimer’s turn. The girl he picked was Aileen Pringle. He was so serious about it and so mad that when Gloria let him have it, he stormed out of the house and said, ‘I’ll write about this. I’m through with Hollywood.’”
Changing the subject: “Why did you keep making pictures if you didn’t like it?”
“Mr. Hearst wanted me to,” she said, “and contracts had something to do with it.”
“Did he have any eccentricities?”
“Yes, he placed his faith in the wrong people.”
Marion put on two more performances during her life. One was for the sole benefit of the Hearsts, when she sat in Joe Kennedy’s box at his son’s 1961 inaugural ball and rode with Joe in the parade, so that Millicent and her sons could see Marion undefeated and unconquerable. But she was a very sick girl and never recovered from that trip.
She’d earned Joe’s hospitality by handing over her house to the Kennedy clan for the Los Angeles convention of the Democrats that nominated John F., while she paid $3500 a month for a rented house in Santa Monica. Joe had extra phones put in her house, installed his own servants, and wouldn’t permit Tom Kensington, who had been with Marion for fifteen years, to remain after he learned Tom was a former FBI man.
She also ousted her sister out of her own house, to make room for the Robert Kennedys, and rented another temporary home for the sister. When Joe heard how sick Marion really was, he sent off three specialists to see her. But Marion paid all the bills.
Earlier, she put on a fine performance, too, to appear on one of my television shows. By this time she was in the middle of her three-year fight with cancer. When word got out that I’d asked her, Kay Gable waxed indignant. “She can’t possibly do it,” said Kay. “She’s not well enough.”
“Why do you think I asked her?” I said. “For one reason only—to lift her morale.”
“But she looks so ill.”
“Take it from me, she’ll look beautiful.”
On the day the show was due to be filmed, I went to Marion’s house wearing the make-up Gene Hibbs had already given me at my home. I brushed aside her compliments: “Wait until you see what he does for you. And George Masters is coming, too, to do your hair.”
She was so weak that her nurse, Mrs. Mauser, had to help her downstairs to the dressing room where the two wizards were waiting to ply their arts. I went off to the bottom of her garden to shoot some scenes there. When I came back, the transformation had been worked. It was as if a magic wand had waved lovingly over her. She looked thirty years younger than when I’d left not more than an hour before.
She literally danced out of that dressing room and hurried upstairs to put on a blue satin gown. Her body was so thin I had to pin the dress in with safety pins all up the back to keep it from falling off. Her arms were as thin as wrists. “You need a mink stole,” I said, “to wear around your shoulders.” When that last touch had been added, she took a long look at herself in a mirror. “You look beautiful,” I said. She nodded agreement, smiling like a girl on her way to her first prom.
I got Charlie Lederer on the telephone. “Come over to Marion’s right away. I want you to see something.”
“What is it?” he said instantly, afraid as we all were that her illness was taking a bad turn. I refused to tell him, let him see for himself. At the first sight of Marion with her age and sickness erased, he burst into tears and left the room.
For fear of her stutter and of fatiguing her, we’d arranged to give her only one line to say: “Welcome to my house.” She carried it off on the first take. “Is this all I get to do?” she demanded. “I want more.”
“Don’t be a greedy little girl.” At five o’clock she insisted on going visiting. She went to Pickfair to show Mary how young she looked and then all over town, until it was time for bed. At midnight I received a call from her: “How do I get this stuff off my face?”
When the show was screened, she was a sensation. Thanks to Hibbs and Masters, she enjoyed a last flurry of fame and fun, including her trip to the inauguration, while I went off for a month to Europe. She had two more offers for TV.
When I came home, Marion had been taken into Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. She never came out alive. She was in a coma for five weeks. “I don’t think she’ll recognize you,” Mrs. Mauser said. But I went anyway. I’ll never forget my last picture of her. Weeks of daily cobalt treatments had colored her neck and part of her face a deep purple. It was heartbreaking, yet she was feeling no pain.
On September 23, 1961, the Los Angeles Examiner reported the death of Marion Davies the previous day. “The list of Miss Davies’ close friends,” the obituary said, “was long, impressive and diverse, reflecting her wide range of interests. They included George Bernard Shaw, William Randolph Hearst, Sir Thomas Lipton, Winston Churchill, Lloyd George, Bernard M. Baruch.... Miss Davies’ only venture into matrimony lasted until her death. She was married to former Merchant Marine Captain Horace Brown....”
* * * * *
A letter Frances Marion wrote her earlier struck some different notes: “Remember how we laughed even when we were crying?... How we danced the shimmy and the Charleston ... tossed our petticoats over the windmill ... went to the Follies to applaud A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody and cheer the beautiful Miss Davies, who was Miss-Miss-Miss America!
“Then the thirties ... those fabulous excursions to San Simeon ... the long table in the dining room with W.R. shepherding his flock (and not all of us lambs) ... nipping champagne in the little girls’ room ... those overnight picnics ... Miss-Miss-Miss America on a gentle old nag but looking more scared than if a mouse had run up her riding habit ... sleeping under the stars ... W.R. pacing up and down as he waited for his forgotten Seidlitz powders ... the ride back in the morning, the fields dappled with wild flowers ... a lot of us wilder than the flowers but just as pretty ... Bill Haines dressed as though for the North Pole wearing a hood over his head and face, and mittens on his hands ... Errol Flynn smacked in the heart by the limbs of Lili Damita....
“All of this was ours to enjoy and be grateful for the rest of our lives. And none of these memories could have graced our past if it hadn’t been for you and your loving kindness.”
If anybody can sum up a life in nine words, Frances can. Of Marion Davies she says: “She was a butterfly with glue on her wings.”