Marion Davies
Movie star, hostess of the Enchanted Hill, and the most libeled woman in American cinema. 1897–1961.
Follies to films
Davies was a Brooklyn chorus girl in the Ziegfeld Follies when she met Hearst, thirty-four years her senior. He built a film company, Cosmopolitan Productions, substantially around her, and his papers promoted her with a heaviness that did her no favors — the publicity always arrived before the performance could.
The comedienne problem
Hearst wanted her in velvet costume dramas; she was, by nature, one of the best physical comediennes of the silent era. The proof survives in the two King Vidor comedies of 1928, The Patsy and Show People, in which Davies mugs, pratfalls, and does wicked impressions of her fellow stars. Critics then and film historians now agree on the injustice: the money kept casting her against the talent.
The hostess of the hill
At San Simeon Davies ran the human side of the enterprise — seating charts, party themes, costume balls, the smuggling of forbidden liquor past W.R.’s one-cocktail rule. Guests uniformly remembered her as the warm one. When the empire cracked in 1937 she sold her jewelry and handed Hearst a check for one million dollars. He took it, and it mattered.
Not Susan Alexander
The cruelest thing Citizen Kane did was to Davies: audiences read Susan Alexander — the talentless singer drinking alone in a castle, forced onstage by a tyrant — as her portrait. It was not. Davies had genuine gifts, genuine friends and a genuine, durable devotion to Hearst that lasted until his death. Orson Welles spent his later life saying exactly that, in print, in the foreword to her memoir The Times We Had. See Rosebud for the other apology he owed her.