“I was having my hair done when Charlie Morrison brought him in. He didn’t know me at all. He must have been awful young. I never saw so many people I didn’t know—I didn’t know ninety per cent of the guests. We were in a turmoil for weeks. They put gardenias in the bushes and moved all the furniture.”
What was her average day? “I have business things. Then I watch TV and read. I sleep late.”
We talked again about the old days. “Gloria Swanson always liked to play games. So she cooked this one up at San Simeon one night. I played the minister, off in another room. All the men were to pick the girls they wanted to marry, then couple by couple they came into the room where I would perform the ceremony. Then I’d say, ‘All right, seal it with a kiss,’ and when they started to do that, Gloria would pick up a towel that she’d filled with ice and conk the guy on the head.
“Everybody laughed until it was Joe Hergesheimer’s turn. The girl he picked was Aileen Pringle. He was so serious about it and so mad that when Gloria let him have it, he stormed out of the house and said, ‘I’ll write about this. I’m through with Hollywood.’”
Changing the subject: “Why did you keep making pictures if you didn’t like it?”
“Mr. Hearst wanted me to,” she said, “and contracts had something to do with it.”
“Did he have any eccentricities?”
“Yes, he placed his faith in the wrong people.”
Marion put on two more performances during her life. One was for the sole benefit of the Hearsts, when she sat in Joe Kennedy’s box at his son’s 1961 inaugural ball and rode with Joe in the parade, so that Millicent and her sons could see Marion undefeated and unconquerable. But she was a very sick girl and never recovered from that trip.
She’d earned Joe’s hospitality by handing over her house to the Kennedy clan for the Los Angeles convention of the Democrats that nominated John F., while she paid $3500 a month for a rented house in Santa Monica. Joe had extra phones put in her house, installed his own servants, and wouldn’t permit Tom Kensington, who had been with Marion for fifteen years, to remain after he learned Tom was a former FBI man.