When the announcement came, a few months later, that she had eloped to Las Vegas with Horace Brown, a hell-for-leather Merchant Marine captain who looked somewhat like a younger version of William Randolph, the Hearst paper in Los Angeles, the Examiner, reported with satisfaction: “It was Miss Davies’ first marriage.”
* * * * *
I decided one day to write a piece about what happens to a retired movie star and went to Marion to talk about it. With Horace and Dennis the Menace, a small brown dachshund, she lived in the house where W.R. died. Its long front hall retained a touch of the beach-palace days, with life-sized portraits of her in her leading roles hanging on the walls. In the library there were three more pictures. On a table stood a “Lucky Lindy” photograph of Charles Lindbergh autographed “To Marion Davies, best wishes and many thanks.” On the mantel were two photographs of Bernard Shaw, one of them inscribed, “This is what is left of me—1948.” Shaw, said Marion, was the only man that Gandhi, W.R.’s favorite dog, didn’t try to bite. “He wanted to listen to what GBS had to say, but Gandhi took it out on me later.”
She was wearing dark brown slacks, cinnamon-colored silk blouse, and flat-heeled leather shoes. The blond hair looked as though it had just been washed and set. On the coffee table in front of her she kept a compact and two lipsticks which, while we talked, she applied almost unconsciously, with perfect aim.
She said: “I don’t look at motion pictures any more, most of all my own. I used to see one every night. I have prints of most of mine, but they’re slowly molding in a vault downstairs. I have Little Old New York, but my projector goes too fast to run it off.”
“Wasn’t Bill Powell in that one?”
“No, he was in When Knighthood Was in Flower. Remember those symmetricals he wore to make his legs look pretty? When we ran that at San Simeon, Carole Lombard was with him. She never got over his symmetricals. He was a real villain in that picture.”
“I saw him in Palm Springs. He said it wasn’t exciting, but it’s adding years to his life. Would you like to make another picture?”
“Not if they offered me Mars on a silver plate. I have other ideas along the theatrical line. Something big, like washing elephants.”
“What was your favorite picture?”