23 Movies | January 3rd, 10th, 17th and 24th
In the decades since Orson Welles’ groundbreaking Citizen Kane (1941) was released, audiences have come to believe that the character of Susan Alexander - an alcoholic, untalented singer whose career was created, managed and publicized by Charles Foster Kane, was based on Marion Davies and her life with William Randolph Hearst. At first glance, the comparisons are understandable. Marion, like Susan, was a pretty blonde in a relationship with a powerful, married millionaire publisher who produced and publicized her career. She also lived with Hearst in baronial splendor, and was known to drink heavily and do jigsaw puzzles. The screenplay for Kane was written by Herman Mankiewicz, who was a very close friend of Davies. His grandson, Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz, told Vanity Fair that his grandfather’s biggest regret was that people thought Davies was Susan. Supposedly, the character was inspired by Gladys Wallis, whose husband, Samuel Insull, reportedly built the Chicago Civic Opera for her in 1929, and for whom Mankiewicz once wrote a drunken review similar to the one Jed Leland writes of Susan in Kane. While there is no question that Mankiewicz used elements of Davies’ life, Marion Davies was no Susan Alexander. She was a success on stage before she ever met Hearst, and a talented actress whose films made money, even during The Depression. Film historian Kevin Brownlow called her, “arguably the best female comedienne on the screen.”
Marion Davies was born Marion Douras on January 3, 1897 in Brooklyn, New York, to a judge and his wife. Her three older sisters, Rose, Reine and Ethel all changed their names to Davies and went on the stage, and Marion wanted to follow them. “I was surrounded by show business. I loved it. It was just like a fairy tale, and I was fascinated.” By thirteen, Davies quit school and studied with Russian ballet dancer Theodore Kosloff before getting work in a show called Chin Chin. As a teenager, she worked as a model for popular illustrators like Howard Chandler Christy and rose through the ranks from pony dancer to Ziegfeld Follies girl. She would later say that this was happiest time of her life. In 1917, Davies tried her hand at movies. “I couldn't act, but the idea of silent pictures appealed to me, because I couldn't talk either.” Only 19, she wrote and starred in her first film, Runaway Romany (1917), directed by her brother-in-law, George Lederer and financed by her then-boyfriend, Paul Block. Her next film, Cecilia of the Pink Roses (1918) for Select Pictures through her Marion Davies Film Co., was sold to distributors in the trades with the line, “Marcus Loew did big business with this picture…and so can you!” It was around this time that she became romantically involved with Hearst, a unhappily married man in his fifties.
Hearst formed Cosmopolitan Productions in New York in 1919, with Marion as head of production. “W.R. [Hearst] rang up my father and said, ‘I would like to start some productions with your daughter at any amount of money.’ And my father said, ‘Well, I don't know. Did you see her first picture? She really was no good on the screen.’ That was my dad. And I agreed with him, but apparently the answer was yes. W.R. sent a contract to the house for me to sign for $500 a week for one year with an option. I signed it, because on the stage I was only getting $45 or $50 a week.” From 1919 to 1937, Cosmopolitan made 46 Davies films and Hearst reportedly spent over $7 million on publicity, the equivalent to over $130 million today. After his death, Davies would admit that Hearst went too far and it damaged her career. “In New York City there were big signs, blocks and blocks of signs, and people got so tired of the name Marion Davies that they would actually insult me.”
Hearst controlled as much of her films as he could, even trying to prevent her kissing her co-stars, which Davies put down to jealousy. “He said, ‘Mary Pickford's always made very fine, clean pictures. And I want you to do the same.’” She managed to kiss them, anyway. He also wanted her to do costume dramas where she could be the virtuous heroine, as she was in When Knighthood Was in Flower (1922), which became the first million-dollar film to make a profit. Having released their earlier pictures through Paramount and Goldwyn, the company moved from New York to Hollywood and aligned with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1924. There, Hearst built Davies her own 14-room bungalow to serve as a dressing room. Davies was so in-demand that there were times when she made two films at once, as in the case of The Red Mill (1927) and Tillie the Toiler (1927). “That meant I could work from nine to five on one and six to four in the morning on the other. That was for six weeks. I had to sleep in the bungalow, on a couch. There wasn’t a bed, there.”
A naturally funny person who was often the life of the party, Davies had a significant break from the dramas Hearst wanted when she starred as love-sick Patricia, who moons over her sister’s boyfriend in The Patsy (1928), directed by her friend, King Vidor. This was the first film that let her run wild, including doing devastating lampoons of other stars, like Lillian Gish and Pola Negri, which she used to do at parties. Brownlow noted that the critics went wild over the film. “It was a totally fresh comedy performance, coming from somebody who had already created remarkable films. They couldn’t quite put their fingers on it, but if they had the term, they would have used ‘screwball comedienne’.” Show People (1929), again directed by Vidor, is perhaps her best film. In this satire of Hollywood, Davies plays a wanna-be actress trying to break into the movies. It gave her a chance to reveal more of her comedic abilities, and featured cameos from Davies’ real-life friends Charle Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Hearst gossip columnist Louella Parsons, among others.
Talking pictures had been in development from the beginning of the film industry, but The Jazz Singer (1927) showed that the technology was ready, the public wanted talkies and the silents were doomed. Having a pronounced stammer since childhood, Davies waited as long as she could to make a sound test. When she finally did, it was so good that it earned her a five-year contract at MGM. Davies found, to her amazement, that she could control her stammer in front of the camera. Her first talkie, Marianne (1929), let her show off her singing and ability to do accents. Unlike other major stars, the public accepted her voice. In the 1930s, Davies co-starred with some of the biggest leading men in Hollywood, later admitting that Bing Crosby, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper and Robert Montgomery were her favorites. “You get some leading men who want to steal the whole scene, but those four […] were fine to work with.” She didn’t feel that way about Gable at first. MGM wanted him to costar with Davies in Five and Ten (1931), but she thought that Gable looked like “a prizefighter.” Instead, she specifically asked for Leslie Howard after seeing him onstage in Berkeley Square in New York. “He was a very fine actor. Maybe I had an audience crush on him, but I thought he was perfect.” Davies later became good friends with Gable, who would often tease her about the “prizefighter” remark, which he’d overheard. Five years later, she asked him to star with her in Cain and Mabel (1936), a remake of a 1924 Cosmopolitan film starring Anita Stewart. Gable did it out of friendship, even though Davies knew he didn’t want the part. Ironically, he played a prizefighter.
After eleven years at MGM, Davies, her 14-room bungalow and Cosmopolitan Productions left for Warner Bros. in 1935. She had wanted the title role in Marie Antoinette (1938) which went to MGM executive Irving Thalberg’s wife, Norma Shearer. It was not the first time Davies had been disappointed, she wanted to play Elizabeth Barrett Browning in The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934) and Juliet in Romeo and Juliet (1934), which had all gone to Shearer. “They said, ‘Marion's too lively. She's got to do comedy.’ I was frustrated at each end. W.R. was much more mad than I was. He said, ‘I don't want you to ever have anything more to do with the MGM studio.’” She was likewise unhappy at Warner Bros., where she made her last four films, including Page Miss Glory (1935) with Dick Powell and Ever Since Eve (1937) with Robert Montgomery. With roles no longer to her liking and reaching the age of 40, Davies felt she’d worked long enough.
She retired from films and devoted herself to taking care of Hearst. Some detractors unfairly called her a gold-digger, but Davies had made millions through her films and clever real estate investments. She didn’t need Hearst for financial stability, she truly loved him. In 1937, Hearst, now in his seventies, was in real danger of bankruptcy and it was Davies who sold assets to give him a million-dollar check to help stabilize his companies. When that wasn’t enough, she gave him all her jewelry. Davies and Hearst were together for more than 30 years, but they never married because his Catholic wife refused to divorce him. Only once did they come close, but at the last minute, Hearst decided the terms were too expensive. Although she wanted to marry him, Davies accepted the situation. “I was very happy the way we were. I had great respect for him and he had respect for me. We were together, and that was all that mattered.” Davies nursed Hearst through his final illness at their home in Beverly Hills. On August 14,1951, a nurse suggested that the exhausted Davies take a sedative. When she woke, she found that Hearst had died, and his sons had ransacked the house, removing every trace of their father. They didn’t even invite her to the funeral.
Rumors circulated for years in Hollywood that Davies had given birth to Hearst’s child. On her deathbed in 1993, Davies’ niece, Patricia Van Cleve Lake, said that when she was 11, Davies told Lake that she and Hearst were her parents, which Hearst reportedly confirmed on Lake’s wedding day. Davies’ most recent biographers point to a lack of hard evidence, and interviews with friends of Davies’ sister, Rose, claim Rose was Lake’s mother.
Marion Davies was well-known throughout the industry as a philanthropist who donated to many causes, put countless children through school and paid the hospital bills of those who needed help. The last ten years of her life were spent doing more charity work, including the building of a children’s clinic at UCLA, real-estate investing and raising money for political candidates, including John F. Kennedy, whose family she’d known for decades. Her last public appearance was at Kennedy’s inauguration on January 20, 1961. She died of cancer on September 22nd.
Orson Welles always regretted what Citizen Kane had done to Davies’ reputation. Fourteen years after her death, he wrote the foreword to Davies’ posthumous autobiography, “The Times We Had,” noting that “Marion Davies was one of the most delightfully accomplished comediennes in the whole history of the screen. She would have been a star if Hearst had never happened. She was also a delightful and very considerable person.”
