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After the Freeport affair in 1923, Hearst may have been hoping
for a breather from the searing ill winds of bad publicity,
but matters further deteriorated when some signature Hearst
investigative reporting took a wrong turn and blew up in his
face.
Having built the reputation of his New York papers on battling
the power of the corrupt political machine known as Tammany
Hall, it was only natural that, when two Tammany-backed stock
swindlers went on trial in New York, the Hearst papers took
a serious interest in the outcome. After the defendants, Fuller
and McGee, were acquitted in spite of what was generally considered
overwhelming evidence of guilt, Hearst unleashed his attack
dogs. In full, spare-no-expense style, the mode in which Hearst
was at his most dangerous as a journalist, the editor of the
New York American, Victor Watson, ordered the paper’s
top investigative reporter, Nat Ferber, to get to the bottom
of the case. Ferber found exactly what Hearst had hoped for:
one Eddie Eidlitz, a former associate of the defense lawyer
William J. Fallon who had won acquittal for the Tammany swindlers.
Eidlitz was willing to testify that Fallon had participated
in corrupting the jury. Thus began the sensational, front-page
prosecution of William Fallon.
Eidlitz, in fear of his life on account of the involvement
of Tammany Hall and the extremely dim view that would be taken
there of his betrayal, was kept hidden away in lavish circumstances
at Hearst’s expense, virtually a private witness protection
program.
But Hearst had picked the wrong victim to use in his personal
battle with Tammany Hall. In a maneuver that any extremely
clever, even brilliant, defense attorney would be proud of,
Fallon turned the tables on Hearst. He testified at trial
that he was in possession of birth certificates for twin sons
born to Marion Davies, and that, because of his knowledge
of these children and of Hearst’s intimate relations
with Davies, Hearst and his agents were out to destroy him
at all costs. That the main witness against him, Eidlitz,
had been discovered by Hearst’s reporter and was being
handsomely maintained at Hearst’s expense were facts
used by Fallon’s defense to compromise the integrity
of the prosecution testimony and win Fallon’s acquittal.
The publicity against Hearst and Marion was a disaster. From
the moment that jury selection had begun with the defense
inquiring of the prospective jurors whether any of them were
personally acquainted with a William Randoph Hearst or a Miss
Marion Davies, the motion picture actress, the trial became
front page material in the city newspapers and literally the
talk of the town. The end result of this round in the continuing
Hearst-Tammany Hall prizefight was crushing defeat for Hearst;
not only did Fallon’s defense gambit succeed wildly
in acquittal but the publicity of the trial had exposed Hearst’s
relations with Marion Davies to public view, causing additional
embarrassment and hurt to his wife and children as well as
endangering Marion’s career as an actress. In Hollywood,
where private degeneracy was de riguer, public exposure
of this kind often led to career death, especially in the
atmosphere of Hollywood in 1924 following three major scandals,
one involving Fatty Arbuckle, the others involving the unsolved
murder of director William Taylor and the drug overdose death
of another director.
Hearst et al. retreated to California following the trial
to ride out the storm. He and Marion even seriously discussed
exiting the film business. Sometime in the early 1920s, according
to later family declarations, Marion had given birth to her
only child by Hearst, Patricia. This was kept a highly secret
family affair, the daughter being placed with Marion’s
sister Rose and her then-husband, George Van Cleve, who also
was employed by Hearst. Then, in 1924, to compound Hearst’s
woes, Van Cleve kidnapped Patricia and went into hiding. After
five years of work by Hearst’s detectives, the pair
were located and the child returned to Rose, only to be taken
away again after custody proceedings in which it was found
that because of Rose’s drinking the child should remain
with George Van Cleve. On her deathbed, Patricia Van Cleve
revealed to her son that she was indeed Marion Davies’
daughter, this news being but thinly reported in 1993.
The months went by and, in 1925, in view of their extended
stay out West, Hearst bought a Beverly Hills mansion for Marion’s
use, which became the place where, according to Marion’s
autobiography, they had their best times. For years to follow,
Marion’s house was the epicenter of a lush film-world
social life. Located close to the studios and presided over
by Marion and her sisters, the mansion provided the main forum
for constant celebrity partying during the 1920s. The flow
of guests and revelers was constant, but two or three days
a week the sisters threw especially elaborate dinner parties
with up to a hundred guests, among whom were the likes of
Chaplin, Valentino, Barrymore, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks
and a mixed supporting cast of actors, actresses, politicos,
athletes, dancers, elite foreign visitors, and Hearst’s
top-level staff.
1924 had had its other low points for Hearst, especially concerning
Charlie Chaplin, the legendary film comedian who was almost
equally notorious at the time as a lady-killer. He and Marion
appear to have been lovers at least for a time. While his
fiancée was in late-stage pregnancy, Chaplin spent
a great deal of time with Marion, especially when Hearst was
not around. When the latter would come on to the set where
Marion was working on Zander the Great, word would
be gotten to Chaplin so that he could disappear through a
studio side-door unnoticed by WR. The New York tabloids, which
generally did not publish gossip about WR and MD, had a field
day with Chaplin-Davies stories. Their public outings at clubs
and restaurants in New York City were reported in loving detail,
the accounts all emanating the strong belief that the two
were intimate. No doubt, WR was put into a wounded state by
these reports and other private accounts he would naturally
have received from his friends and agents.
Indeed, during a cruise on the Oneida led by Hearst
and with the usual mélange of guests and hangers-on,
including Chaplin, an elaborate costume party was staged,
following which one of the guests, Grett Urban, the daughter
of Hearst’s artistic director, stumbled upon Chaplin
and Marion making love. Young Grett made this claim in an
unpublished memoir, suggesting it was no idle gossip or malevolent
libel.
The Freeport murder, the Fallon affair, the kidnapping of
Patricia, and Marion’s provocative behavior with Chaplin
must have had the love-sick Hearst beseeching the heavens
for relief from all the turmoil. Had he been a less determined
man, he might have finally given up Marion, gone back to Millicent
to lead a life of casual philandering like other men of his
station. However, determination per se was probably
Hearst’s most pronounced personal characteristic. Inherited
no doubt from his father, who had stayed with mining through
ups and deep downs until finally wringing from the mines fabulous
wealth, this same stubborn persistence had kept Hearst in
politics far longer than either reason or experience would
suggest was reasonable; it had also impelled Hearst to build
or buy dozens of media properties and driven him, against
the disadvantages of age and background, to court and keep
Marion Davies regardless, even heedless, of many formidable
obstacles. Bad publicity, scandal, gossip, outrageous expense,
harm to Millicent and the boys, Marion’s constant flirting
and likely love affairs, and soon her addictive alcohol consumption,
none of these factors ever succeeded in persuading Hearst
to cease pursuing his love for Marion. And the worst was yet
to come.
The Death of Thomas Ince
On another cruise aboard Oneida, in fact a week after
the costume party cruise on which Grett Urban saw Marion and
Chaplin making love, and populated by all the usual attendees,
including Chaplin, one of the guests, Thomas B. Ince, an important
movie producer and studio head, took ill and died ashore the
next day. Ince was only forty-three and the circumstances
of his death were never clarified. No autopsy was ever done.
Police dropped their investigation after interviewing only
two witnesses, neither of whom were cooperative with respect
to even the simple question of who was aboard the Oneida
that night. At first, Hearst himself had taken steps to cover
up the fact that Ince had been onboard when he first took
ill. This, together with the wildly inconsistent stories told
to reporters by others who were on the boat that night, led
to a rush of rumors, one of the especially hardy ones being
that Hearst had shot Ince in the mistaken belief that it was
Chaplin, generally believed by the public, as mentioned, to
have been involved romantically with Marion at the time. Whatever
the reality, the Hearst machine was able to extinguish the
budding wildfire of police investigation and what would have
been the accompanying journalistic frenzy à la
Fallon. Few news stories appeared after the initial reports.
Ince was quietly buried and public interest flagged.
This time, however, though he had escaped what could have
been his worst scandal yet, Hearst was deeply shaken. Normally,
when Joseph Moore or WR’s other advisers, recommended
cutting back on expenses or otherwise retrenching, Hearst
would dismiss them out of hand. Generally, Hearst was always
in full-spend mode, acquiring art, newspapers, and magazines
at breakneck speed, overpaying for everything just as he overpaid
talent and overindulged Marion, Millicent and, indeed, himself.
However, in the wake of the Ince disaster, the Fallon affair,
and the Freeport case, Hearst was thrown sufficiently off
balance to agree with his staff in their cost-cutting proposals
this one time. He closed down his New York film studio, merged
magazines and restructured his film production operation to
make it part of MGM, relieving him of great expense. Marion’s
salary at this point had risen to $100,000 a year, a royal
sum at that time for any twenty-eight-year-old, much less
an actress without stellar acting abilities, though perhaps
not so much for a beautiful young woman sacrificing her youth
and beauty for a wealthy man approaching seventy.
No Powder Room? Let’s Build Another Mansion
The regard that Hearst had for Marion, and which by dint of
his power and influence he caused others to have for her,
is illustrated by an event that took place when Marion was
first setting up on the MGM lot. In the building designed
to house the female leads, only one of the dressing rooms
had its own bathroom, it being intended that Marion, as
primus inter pares, should occupy this special
facility. Arriving on set, however, Marion discovered that
Lillian Gish had arrogated the special dressing room for herself
and adamantly refused to give it up. The MGM lot was chock
full of temperamental, demanding talent like Gish: Norma Shearer,
Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford were all there at the same time,
a collection of divas probably never assembled in one place
again thereafter. In a perfectly Hearstian gesture that bespoke
the grandeur of his affections for Marion, and did so in a
most public way such that even the rival divas would understand
who-was-who on the MGM lot, he ordered a bungalow built for
Marion on the lot, a structure that would end up having fourteen
rooms, including top floor living quarters for Marion and
a downstairs banquet room and office space for Hearst himself.
The structure sat on the re-named Davies Square.
The heroine-worship, as it were, that consumed Hearst extended,
of course, to his newspapers and magazines, which, from early
on in their relationship, he had used to publicize and flatter
Marion, at one point even causing Millicent, as noted before,
to become aroused to a fighting pitch by what she perceived
as excessive, ad hominem advertising for Marion’s
films. Louella Parsons, Hearst’s gossip columnist, and
whose lifetime contract was attributed by some to Louella’s
having been witness to Hearst’s murder of Thomas Ince,
was enlisted to give the full star treatment to Davies on
the release of MGM’s Zander the Great. The
resulting articles written about Davies oozed flattery to
the point of beatification, over-the-top hagiography that
would be laughed at and mocked in our more cynical and jaundiced
times.
Not only did Louella depict Marion as a star among stars and
as a virtuous maiden for the ages, there was the further imputation
that the little blonde actress and former hoofer was a kind
of classical scholar. During their “interview,"
Louella noted that Marion was holding, discreetly obscured
but still visible to the prying journalistic eye, a copy of
The Life of Socrates. Marion “mischievously"
noted that, yes, she was reading the book, but was shy about
revealing that because, as she explained “naively,"
“wouldn’t people believe I was just posing for
the press?" Indeed. Louella herself had only been invited
to join the Hearst organization in 1916 due to her favorable
review of Marion’s first film, Runaway Romany,
Louella’s having been the only favorable review written
of that film. Incidentally, Hearst always advised Marion never
to read the negative reviews of her work, only the positive
reviews.
Marion also had a full-time reporter of her own, Ralph Wheelwright
of the Los Angeles Examiner, commanded by the Chief
to attend upon all Marion’s doings on the MGM lot, shadowing
her constantly, to report even, as Upton Sinclair later described,
her “change of hats." Whether this reporter was
used exclusively for publicity purposes or whether he also
served as a kind of chaperone for Marion is a good question;
Hearst liked to keep an eye on Marion himself, often showing
up on her sets, but he couldn’t do that every day. No
doubt, young Ralph, who was sorry to have been taken off his
more interesting journalistic duties at the Examiner
to babysit Marion, was, unbeknownst to him, doing a little
domestic spying as well.
On the domestic front, during the first ten years, 1915 –
1925, of Hearst’s double life with Marion Davies, emotionally
charged scenes between Millicent and WR were fairly common.
By 1925, Millicent’s patience had run out. Although
Marion believed, according to her own autobiography, that
WR wanted a divorce but could not get one, the truth was apparently
just the opposite: He did not want a divorce because it would
collapse his empire, always a house of financial cards anyway,
and also because the adverse publicity about Marion might
ruin her film career, which depended on a clean public image.
In any event, to mollify Millicent’s by now gravely
wounded feelings and avert divorce proceedings, Hearst persuaded
her that continued married life, even on a sham basis, would
be financially advantageous to her and the boys. In other
words, in the Hearstian way, he would undertake to support
them all in a style far exceeding anything that divorce could
possibly bring, in fact, exceeding what they would have enjoyed
even if Hearst were the husband, father, and man he ought
to have been. The fantastic expenses Millicent would thereafter
incur must have gone some way in helping her to forget the
humiliation of dethronement as Queen of the Hearst Kingdom.
Davies’s memoir suggests that Hearst had at one time
employed private detectives to obtain evidence of Millicent’s
own indiscretions, though the historical record is otherwise
totally bare of proof that Millicent was guilty of any marital
misconduct or, indeed, that Hearst had ever thought so, much
less retained detectives to prove it. On the other hand, it
is entirely possible that Hearst, in recounting to Marion
his false account of striving for divorce, embellished that
little tale with a side-story of hiring detectives to capture
Millicent in flagrante delicto. Still only twenty-eight
years old at the time, Marion may have been young enough to
believe anything her great supporter, admirer, and lover told
her.
At any rate, from 1925 until Hearst died in 1951, the Hearsts
remained husband-and-wife, on good terms, in frequent communication.
In fact, they often entertained friends and family jointly
as if they were still a true, married couple. The sons, however
well-cared for by Millicent and the household staff, felt
the sting of WR’s long absences, often not even broken
by a call, letter, or telegram. Throughout their adult lives,
they complained of the lack of affection, of Hearst’s
simply not being there for them when they were growing up.
By and large, the sons grew up to be experts at spending money
and spotting female talent, with not much else to recommend
them, constituting huge disappointments to Hearst. Though
he lived larger-than-life and achieved virtual deity status
in his profession, he, like many of the rest of us who have
been parents, could only stand by and watch his children waste
their advantages and opportunities. At least he was sensible
enough to concede defeat when, after placing his sons in charge
of various properties and seeing them stumble, he had to fire
them and put professional journalists into places that were
meant for his direct heirs. Not that the boys were ever cut
off financially, merely that Hearst was too proud of his empire
to have it run down by the playboys that he and Millicent
had raised. Would it all have been different had Hearst made
a better example of himself as husband and father? Quite possibly
yes, as both he and Millicent must have painfully imagined
as the boys became men.
By the mid 1920s, the string of media acquisitions he had
made and the restructuring of his film production business
both had paid off handsomely. Revenues were streaming in nicely
and Hearst characteristically wasted no time in putting the
new streams of money to work doing what he felt money was
best suited for: constructing or acquiring homes and real
estate. Four major projects were ongoing simultaneously: the
final building phase of San Simeon, the construction
of a new Santa Monica beach house for Marion, the acquiring
of a Long Island mansion at Sands Point in New York for Millicent,
and the purchase of a castle in Wales, St. Donat’s.
As for Marion’s beach house in Santa Monica, a spot
was chosen not far from other prominent Hollywood people like
Mayer, Thalberg, and Fairbanks, but the house built for her
there dwarfed anyone else’s. Similarly, Millicent’s
new digs, formerly owned by ubersocialite Mrs. Oliver Belmont,
the former Mrs. Alva Vanderbilt, and situated near to the
Astors and the Guggenheims, was the most magnificent in that
rarefied neighborhood, a 140-room, five-story castle on eighteen
acres of beachfront property. The estate property was surrounded
by a stone wall and had its own lighthouse.
However unimaginably vast were his expenses in building or
buying at Santa Monica and Sands Point, the greater part of
his income actually went into San Simeon. Marion
and the typically large crowd of guests would take the train
up from Los Angeles on Friday evenings and not arrive at San
Simeon until early on Saturday. The weekend would be
all fun and games, with the trip back to LA on Sunday night
for work on Monday. It could be a grueling exercise for the
guests, and, to be certain that the party crowd required to
entertain Marion would make the trip, Hearst had no choice
than to make San Simeon the most fun and interesting
place imaginable, going so far as to build the world’s
largest private zoo, a park that held lions, tigers, elephants,
giraffes, reindeer, bison, elk, zebras, ostriches, assorted
primates, and sundry other manner of beast. To create and
maintain such total and complete magnificence, Hearst spent
the greater part of his fortune. One finds a disturbing contemporary
parallel in Michael Jackson’s Neverland, designed along
Hearstian proportions and driven perhaps by Hearst-sized ambitions
and desires.
Even though by the mid-20s, Hearst was well into his sixties
while Marion was not yet 30, he maintained an active and physical
life comparable to a much younger man. He neither smoked nor
drank and stayed active in tennis, riding, hiking, and swimming.
No doubt having the companionship of a beautiful and exciting
young woman contributed to his health.
As time wore on at San Simeon, and especially once
Marion became the grande dame of the establishment
around 1926, finally usurping Millicent’s former role,
the guest list came under Marion’s control and hence
tilted to the film world side and further away from the journalists
and power brokers whom Hearst himself identified with most
closely. Complaints were increasingly heard among the guests
of the “strange" ways of Mr. Hearst, his steady
and penetrating gaze flowing out from a very large, imposing
man, the seeming aloofness or coolness of his overall demeanor.
No doubt WR had not mastered air-kissing protocols and the
rest of the tribal mores of Marion’s Hollywood crew;
this alone would have marked him as a suspicious outsider,
however much he was involved in Marion’s film-world
life and affairs. WR seemed to prefer the youngish reporters
he employed who occasionally received invitations to San
Simeon, no doubt both because they spoke his native language
and also were bound to kowtow to the Chief himself in his
magnificent lair. WR often held meetings with his visiting
staff outdoors, near the zoo and its animals. A wit among
these young reporters wrote archly about San Simeon,
“The place is full of worried editors dodging the kangaroos."
Oddly enough, throughout the entire medieval-like village
that comprised San Simeon, with its great house and satellite
“bungalows," Casa Del Monte, Casa
del Sol, and Casa Del Mer, all situated atop
La Cuesta Encantada (the Enchanted Hill),
no food or drink was to be had except in the great house.
An overnight visitor wanting even her usual morning coffee
would have to trudge up to the main kitchen of Casa Grande
to satisfy this simple thirst. Evidently, having food available
only in a central location was part of Hearst’s strategy
to ensure continuous partying and conviviality.
Adventures of the Late 20s
By the late 1920s, as the era of silent movies came to an
end, Hearst, Marion, and the real cinema brains at MGM had
finally found a formula to make good films starring Marion
that also turned a profit. Essentially, instead of the elaborate,
artsy, costume-rich, period dramas favored by WR, they turned
out light-hearted, contemporary comedies, which, though still
produced using quality talent, were far less costly and also
more reliably popular among filmgoers. The Patsy
and Show People were two representatives of this
class of production, the latter earning $176,000 for MGM,
a solid profit in 1928. It was also Marion’s last silent
movie.
By now, Marion’s income was very large, stemming not
only from her grand salary at the studio but also from her
share of the profits of WR’s production facilities.
The tax problems she experienced in 1928 reflect how huge
her income really was. Called to Washington, DC by the federal
tax authorities, she was presented with a bill for nonpayment
of $950,000 and, to settle the separate question of the fraud
charge the government was ready to prosecute, an additional
$110,000 would have to be paid. In Marion’s view,
It was all a political thing. I don’t want to mention
his name, but
he was the President of the United States [Calvin Coolidge],
and
he had been attacked by the Hearst papers for going to South
America.
He was getting even by using me.
The historical record shows little or no serious conflict
between Coolidge and the Hearst editorial pages. By and large,
and much to H.L. Mencken’s dismay, Hearst went along
with Coolidge’s policies. However, perhaps taking a
lesson from this unfortunate row with the taxing authorities,
once Hearst’s candidate for president in the 1928 election,
Herbert Hoover, was elected, a representative of Hearst visited
Hoover and received the latter’s assurances that the
new president had personally conveyed some instructions “very
favorable to Mr. Hearst" to ranking officials of the
income tax bureau.
Together with the huge income, Marion, by virtue of her Hollywood
connections and relationship with Hearst, had achieved social
cachet. Neither she nor Hearst cared for the company of traditional
high society, but Princes and Dukes, even Kings, showed up
at their parties, as well the just plain rich and famous.
She was in New York in 1927 when Charles Lindbergh was wildly
received as a hero on returning from his historic flight across
the Atlantic. Huge crowds followed his every move in the city,
and he was on every grande dame’s hit list
as the number one guest to have for dinner. Lindbergh, being
no socialite himself, caused Mrs. Astor to feel she had failed
in having him to dinner when he ignored her society guests
and spent the time talking only with his map man and his fuel
man, fellow aviators that Lindy had brought along. Next up
for the flier-god was dinner with the Vanderbilts, but with
characteristic impulsiveness and heedless of the social implications,
Marion decided that she wanted Lindy to come visit her and
a small group of friends in the Warwick Hotel. To this end,
she got the Mayor of New York City, Jimmie Walker, on the
phone and requested him to extend her personal invitation
to Lindbergh, the Mayor being nominally in charge of the flier’s
itinerary while he performed his triumph in the city. Walker,
eager to avoid offending Mrs. Vanderbilt, who was waiting
in her Fifth Avenue manse with three hundred guests
dying to meet Lindbergh, attempted to dissuade Marion and
declined to intervene. Not to be denied, she then called a
Hearst minion whom she knew was with Lindy at the time, Victor
Watson, and instructed him to issue the invitation. Watson
did so and Lindbergh accepted. The Mayor called back after
getting the news of Lindbergh’s change of itinerary
and begged Marion not to go through with her plans. Marion
sensibly replied that it should be left up to Lindbergh as
to where he wanted to spend his time.
Word had leaked out that Lindbergh was coming to the Warwick,
and he had to fight his way through a huge crowd outside the
hotel to get up to the Hearst suite; he stayed for a few hours,
played the guitar for Marion and her guests and engaged in
some charades and other parlor games before leaving to continue
his victory parade. The man whom Mayor Walker had sent to
break the news to Mrs. Vanderbilt later reported to Marion
that, as he broke the news, Mrs. Vanderbilt exclaimed, “Don’t
tell me. He’s not coming," and then fainted dead
away.
M. Davies, Espionage
Agent
In 1928, as the clouds that foreshadowed the great debacle
of the Second World War began to gather over the pretty blue
skies of Europe, secret diplomacy once again came into its
own, the kind of bilateral, separate, and clandestine dealings
that had played a significant role in the prelude to WWI.
Specifically, just as Hearst-plus was making its annual tour
of Europe, the French were privately agreeing to British naval
expansion in exchange for British accession to France’s
ground forces’ expansion, all in contravention of earlier,
post-WWI arms control agreements. The French political faction
opposed to this secret agreement decided that leaking the
text of the proposed agreement to Hearst’s agents would
guarantee its publication, thus circumventing its realization.
They calculated that the Hearst newspapers’ editorial
policy, tilting towards Germany and Italy at the time, would
impel Hearst to expose the secret treaty and derail it.
In the event, according to Marion, she was taken aside, apparently
by an agent of the French Foreign Minister, during a luncheon
hosted at the Elysee Palace and casually led to an open safe
in which a lone document was lying in plain view. She snatched
it up and stuffed it into her intimate clothes, subsequently
furnishing it to Hearst himself back at their hotel. On its
publication, the French opponents of the plan achieved their
goal: the agreement was canceled. In her own account of these
events, Marion offers simply and simple-mindedly the motive
of child-like curiosity for her stealing the document, claiming
that she just wanted to read something written in French,
though she understood not a word of that language. It appears
to be the case that Marion had, in fact, been pre-selected
by the French, with the cooperation of Hearst’s agents
or perhaps WR himself, to purloin the document.
Hearst had to leave France after the note was published in
his newspapers. And again, in 1930, after arriving for a visit
to France, he was required by French officials to quit France
due to this a hostile act against the French government.
The single biggest crisis of Marion’s Hollywood sheltered
professional life was the advent of the talkies, 1928 –
1929. On first hearing Al Jolson sing in The Singing Fool,
Marion burst into tears, not for the poignancy of the great
singer’s performance but rather for the fate she imagined
in talkies for a stuttering actress such as she was. Chaplin,
though he did not stutter, regarded the coming of sound to
movies with equal horror. He, and many other Hollywood figures
put into shock by the prospect of having to speak while performing,
predicted that talkies were a fad that wouldn’t last.
Typically, though Marion was ready to throw in the towel immediately
and give up her film career, Hearst dismissed that thought,
took out his giant-size checkbook, and hooked Marion up with
a thorough professional program of speech therapy, elocution,
and drama lessons.
The results were good. Marion passed her initial screen test
for talkies, the discovery being made that she had a pleasant
enough voice. Other stars of the silent era, like Emil Jannings
and John Gilbert, were not so fortunate, the advent of sound
ending their careers because their voices sounded bad. As
movies with sound overran the film business, Hearst moved
quickly to establish his little bon-bon as a leading
lady in this new genre. Ironically, one of the first starring
vehicles for Marion was The Floradora Girl, a story
based on the show that Evelyn Nesbit was starring in on Broadway
when she first met Stanford White in 1901.
Though MGM management was delighted to have the powerful Hearst
media empire as an ally, individual producers and directors
found his constant meddling in Marion’s pictures to
be distressing and distracting. There were always conflicts
between Hearst and those making the films that Marion was
in: this was to be expected since Hearst’s primary interest
was not that the film be good or that it should earn a profit,
but rather that Marion Davies be loved by the audience as
he loved her. His jealousy, also quite natural in a man of
60+ in love with a woman of thirty, a flirtatious woman at
that, also drove him to come on to her movie sets to keep
an eye on her.
As the decades wore on, Marion admitted that though she had
started up with Hearst in the role of gold-digger, she had
eventually come to love him. She also finally gave up the
idea of ever becoming Mrs. Hearst, the public’s view
of Hearst as a towering public figure entitled to a young
mistress would not, at the same time, regard it favorably
were he to divorce his wife and separate from his children
in order to marry this same mistress. They probably had it
right on this score. While the public and the Hollywood community
could well tolerate discreet, though unauthorized, amours,
the public scandal of divorce was an entirely different matter.
When asked whether she was worried about the marriage issue,
Marion liked to say, “Why should I run after a streetcar
when I am already on board?" This was characteristic
of her jaunty, saucy and devil-may-care attitude, probably
another aspect of her that Hearst found alluring.
Hearst was a lucky man, from his advantages at birth right
through all his successes in journalism, films, and romance.
And Fortune herself did not fail him on October 29, 1929,
when the worst stock market crash in American history struck
millions of investors, leveling many a rich man and inaugurating
the Great Depression. Hearst owned little stock – his
fortune was mainly in real estate owned by his publishing
companies. Perhaps his near-mad spending on art and architecture,
which left him no spare change for market speculation, saved
him in the end.
In the initial onset of depressed economic conditions, even
Hearst felt constrained in spending. This was symptomatic
and causative in the gathering force of that economic deluge,
characterized by the sudden, final contraction of overall
economic demand, so pronounced and obvious that even the very
largest of the big spenders like the Chief cut back in 1929
and 1930, extinguishing the possibility of normal recovery.
Short of Louis XIV, the Sun King of France in the early eighteenth
century and perhaps a few others, few consumers more extravagant
than Hearst had ever lived.
By the end of 1930, Hearst had recovered his personal animal
spirits and was back in full swing, lavishing money on his
castles and mansions. Perhaps the fall in prices and wages
excited his natural acquisitive and bargain-seeking impulses.
Generally, journalism fell on hard times, including Hearst’s
chain. Advertising revenues declined among all newspapers,
reflecting the extreme contraction in demand. The McLean family’s
flagship paper, the Washington Post, was forced into
bankruptcy and sold at auction to Eugene Meyer; the Pulitzer
heirs were likewise forced to sell their New York papers to
Scripps-Howard. In the midst of all the financial wreckage,
Hearst, ever the optimist, schemer, and spender, decided upon
an extensive campaign to acquire radio stations, which he
perceived as the best means to increase newspaper circulation
via advertising over the airwaves. Since more capital was
needed, he executed a major re-structuring of his assets,
issued a large class of non-voting, preferred stock and used
the full power of his presses to retail the shares of Hearst
Consolidated Publications Inc. to the general public. The
preferred stock guaranteed a nice return of 7% and was rather
cleverly marketed as a good investment for ordinary folks
in times of economic distress, the underlying concept being
that the Hearst properties backing the instruments were solid
and stable. To enhance their appeal to the public, a $25 share
could be purchased on a $2 per month installment plan. It
probably did not hurt the financial community’s view
of the viability of the Hearst businesses that, in 1934, consistent
with the direction of the entire labor situation at the time,
an across-the-board pay cut of some 39% had been imposed over
all the Hearst publications. Hearst initially opposed the
pay cut, but was finally persuaded by his financial advisors
of the necessity of reducing wages.
The party life continued at San Simeon, which Marion
described as “quite romantic," meaning that, in
the evenings, if WR were upstairs working or not on the premises,
she and the guests would play boardgames and flirt; she would
often notice one or more of the men looking at her in that
certain way. They might even offer some bold, provocative
flattery about her looks. Naturally, Marion was charmed, but,
she claims, as soon as the Chief showed up, these forward
gents would take flight. Nevertheless, at least some of these
young hopefuls are believed to have succeeded with Marion,
from time to time.
By the 30s, Marion’s incipient alcoholism, first evident
in her teenage drinking, had fully blossomed. Her circle of
friends, family, and acquaintances conspired with her to maintain
a steady supply of booze in the face of WR’s determination
that her drinking be kept under control. Guests at San
Simeon, though permitted to drink wine in moderation,
even during Prohibition, would find themselves disinvited
in the event of their displaying drunken behavior on the premises.
The head butler at San Simeon developed significant
expertise in the art of decanting appropriate quantities of
wine during dinner, knowing just the point at which to withdraw
the bottle from potentially overindulging guests. Rowdy behavior
of any kind annoyed Hearst, whether excess in alcohol or the
portrayal of frank sexuality on screen; notwithstanding his
own large sexual adventure with the teenage Marion and notwithstanding
the habitually soused condition of the grown version of that
same lady, Hearst was full of disapprobation of others with
any of these issues. One evening when Jean Harlow was a dinner
guest at San Simeon and came into dinner dressed
in her usual sex-bomb garb, a tight white silk dress without
underwear, Hearst demanded that Marion advise Harlow to go
back upstairs and “get dressed." While actresses
like Harlow, Garbo, and Dietrich were heating up the screen
with sizzling portrayals of feminine wiles and desires, Hearst
refused to support any acting of that kind for Marion, even
forbidding her to engage in the by-then almost obligatory
kissing scenes. In this regard, he once advised Louis B. Mayer:
Marion cannot do sex pictures. She does not look like a
vampire. But she is marvelous in boys’ parts…She
is excellent
as a waif…She does a fine college girl…She does
inimitable
characterizations…She is good as just a fresh American
girl...and
she is good in a sentimental story.
It is not altogether unlikely that Hearst’s private
view of Marion as some kind of Girl Scout, or even Brownie,
was not how others saw her. In her memoir, she discusses Howard
Hughes being a frequent visitor to San Simeon, describing
him favorably as very kind and smart though not loquacious.
As to his notorious, famously excessive, romantic life, she
writes:
Howard went around with Billie Dove. I think he went with
her for longer than with any other girl. The other girls were
more or
less just ice cream.
He loved ice cream, you know. He never drank or smoked, but
he was an ice cream addict. He ate it by the quart. At one
time
I too was an ice cream fiend, and we used to have ice cream
races
at night. I always ate the most, so I always won….One
man said
he had won a prize for eating ice cream. He said to me, “Nobody
can outdo me!" Well!! He was green when I got through
with him.
It is well-established that Howard Hughes’ principal
addiction as a young man was sex. He is reported to have maintained
literally dozens of young women in various apartments around
Hollywood simultaneously. Not until he was elderly and had
difficulty eating is ice cream ever mentioned in the existing
biographical materials. The close and imaginative reader of
Marion’s description of so-called “ice cream races"
is tempted to interpret the passage as Marion’s indirect
description of sexual orgies that were held at San Simeon
when Hearst was absent, and the right crowd was in town. Her
use of the word “fiend" is suggestive, as is her
reference to Hughes’ girlfriends as “just ice
cream."
If this interpretation is correct, the outsized sexual appetite
Marion confesses to have had would be no surprise: she was
in a sensual cage created by living with a man forty-two years
older than she. The fantasies she would naturally have had
under these circumstances could be lived out in the debauched
company of her Hollywood friends.
By 1934, Marion’s film career had begun to falter, with
Hearst and the studio executives constantly at odds over her
pictures, which lost money pretty regularly. MGM believed
that borrowing Bing Crosby from Paramount would improve the
prospective box office for Marion’s upcoming film Going
Hollywood. Unfortunately, Marion and Bing became close
drinking buddies and the making of the film involved such
an amount of daytime drinking and partying, and very late
morning arrivals on set by Marion, that after six months of
shooting and nearly one million in costs, the film ended up
losing $250,000. She made one more disastrous movie at MGM
before leaving that studio for a new deal with Paramount.
Hearst was blind to the causes of her MGM films’ failures:
his incessant meddling and misguidance of her career, Marion’s
undisciplined attitude and drinking, and, in the last analysis,
her lack of talent. Marion herself, in her autobiography,
repeatedly states her belief that she had no talent whatsoever.
She never pretended to; she had no diva complex, no “artistic
temperament" like the other major female leads, simply
because she was in essence no artist. She started out life
as a moderately pretty showgirl on Broadway who, but for the
intercession of Hearst’s power, would have in all likelihood
married well and gone on to a relatively normal life like
that of her sisters. But Hearst, in his monumental obsession,
had other plans. Marion would often complain to WR regarding
the constant overpraise for her performances to be found in
his Sunday supplements. She believed, probably rightly, that
the public would, on seeing her actual performances, come
away angry with the big build-ups they had read in the papers.
One of the disappointing blights on Hearst’s fantastic
life and career was his hyperbolic anticommunism and the related
anti-labor policies that he pursued during the 1930s. Standing
alone, these might not have done much harm to his reputation
as an historical figure, but Hearst’s early support
of Hitler and Mussolini sealed his fate as one of the ultimate
bête noirs of the American left. While scattered
reporting of his affair with Marion occurred every now and
again earlier in their careers, especially during those relatively
brief moments of public scandal, the press generally did not
doggedly pursue Hearst until, in confronting labor and the
left-wing of the American intelligentsia, WR became an object
of constant attention and vituperation in the leftist media.
They went after him ad hominem, especially relating
to Marion.
Upton Sinclair, author of The Jungle and an active
Socialist Party member who ran unsuccessfully for Governor
of California listed the so-called “public outrages"
in America that had motivated his run, among these being:
…our richest newspaper publisher keeping his mistress
in a
city of palaces and cathedrals, furnished with shiploads of
junk
imported from Europe…letting it out as a jest that he
had spent
six million dollars to this lady’s reputation, and using
his new-
papers to celebrate her changes of hats.
By 1936, labor and political pressure on Hearst had become
unbearable. Strikes proliferated at his newspapers; FDR ridiculed
him by name in public. Leftist biographies published in 1937
excoriated him. The extremely clever Roosevelt, attuned to
the growing national unpopularity of Hearst due to the latter’s
stance on events in Europe and his anti-labor activities,
conceived a strategy to diminish his opponent, Alf Landon,
by connecting Landon to Hearst’s approval. Hearst, inflamed
by the charges against him of harboring fascist sympathies,
launched a full-scale counteroffensive against Roosevelt,
calling him the candidate of the communists. The business
outcome of Hearst’s public controversies at the time
was a drop in the circulation of his papers that ultimately
threatened insolvency for the chain once again.
When, after Hearst had publicly proclaimed on the day before
the 1936 presidential election that Landon would beat Roosevelt,
the latter actually won an historical landslide victory, it
was Marion who was tasked to break the ice in sending Hearst’s
congratulations to the Roosevelts. She was personally well
acquainted with Roosevelt’s son-in-law, John Boettiger,
from his Hollywood days. Boettiger was called to the phone
at Hyde Park in New York, where the Roosevelt family was celebrating
victory in the election. Marion got on the line and told her
old friend that she loved him and wanted the Roosevelts to
know that, although she and WR felt as if they had been “flattened
out by a steam roller" due to the extremely one-sided
election results, there were no hard feelings harbored by
Marion or Hearst. He then took the line and recapped the gist
of Marion’s statement. Beyond the obligatory message
of congratulations and the diplomatic use of his editorial
pages to applaud the huge victory, Hearst took things a rather
cynical step further, hiring John Boettiger to be editor of
the Seattle Post-Intelligencer with a guaranteed
level of editorial independence theretofore unheard of amongst
Hearst editorial staff. No doubt, Boettiger’s being
Marion’s old Hollywood friend played a role in the hiring,
but it is also clear that Hearst wished to gain some favor
in the Roosevelt White House where it can be said without
exaggeration that he was looked upon as a rascal and national
enemy.
February 2006
From guest contributor Joe Leibowitz
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