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.