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.