by David Nasaw
Conveniently located at the top of a hill, just off Sunset Boulevard and a short ride from the studios, Marion and her sisters, with Hearst’s occasional assistance, presided over the gayest social scene in Los Angeles. According to Louella Parsons, who was Marion’s houseguest on several occasions, “Rudy Valentino, Charlie Chaplin, John Barrymore, Mary and Doug, the lovely ill-fated Alma Rubens, Harry D’Arrast, and Harry Crocker belonged to the coterie who met several times a week at Marion’s house.” From the moment that Marion moved to Beverly Hills, Charlie Chaplin recalled, “the film colony enjoyed an era of Arabian Nights. Two or three times a week, Marion gave stupendous dinner parties with as many as a hundred guests, a melange of actors, actresses, senators, polo players, chorus boys, foreign potentates and Hearst’s executives and editorial staff to boot.”8
There were masquerades, weekday and weekend parties, and smaller Sunday gatherings around the swimming pool. Whatever the day, whatever the hour, the Victrola played, couples danced, and there were card games into the dawn. The parties were especially lively, Chaplin remembered, on those occasions when Hearst was away at San Simeon, San Francisco, or New York. Marion “would gather all her friends at her house ... and we would have parties and play charades into the small hours. Then Rudolph Valentino would reciprocate at his house and I would do the same at mine. Sometimes we hired a public bus and stacked it with victuals and hired a concertina player, and ten or twenty of us would go to Malibu Beach, where we built a bonfire and had midnight picnics and caught grunion.”9
With a succession of solid hits—and Hearst’s publicity machine behind her—Marion had become an attractive commodity in Hollywood. In early July, Adolph Zukor asked if Hearst would be interested in coproducing James Barrie’s Peter Pan, with Marion as the possible lead. Because James Barrie had his mind set on Lillian Gish as Peter, Marion would have to “test” for the role. Hearst rejected the offer outright. Marion was a star now. He was not going to allow her to audition for anyone.10
Concerned that Marion’s ascendance toward Pickford-like stardom would be stalled if she did not return to work immediately, Hearst leased studio space at United Artists so that Marion could shoot her next film, Zander the Great, in California. Frances Marion was hired to adapt the 1923 stage play, which had starred Alice Brady; Louis B. Mayer, who had been brought in by Marcus Loew to manage his new conglomerate, helped finance the film, which would be the first Cosmopolitan feature to be released by Metro-Goldwyn.
Hearst consulted regularly with Frances Marion and made several suggestions for the scenario. When shooting began, he visited the set regularly, and had the daily rushes messengered to him wherever he happened to be, even in San Simeon. By mid-September, the film was well under way, but Hearst concluded that it was not up to the standards of a Cosmopolitan Productions feature. He abruptly closed down production, destroyed the existing footage, and wired Joseph Urban to take the next train West to redesign the production.11
Shooting on Zander, now under Urban’s supervision with a new director, George Hill, continued through the fall. Only Marion appeared unperturbed by the turmoil on the set. Though she often had trouble getting up in the morning after a particularly strenuous party the night before, she enjoyed herself once she got there. Her old friend from Broadway, Hedda Hopper, at the time a not very successful film actress, played her mother.
Marion’s double Vera Burnett remembered that Charlie Chaplin “used to come on the set quite frequently” while Marion was working on Zander. Under ordinary circumstances, he would have been engrossed in his own work, but he had suspended filming on The Gold Rush because his leading lady and soon-to-be wife, Lita Grey, was pregnant. While Lita waited out her pregnancy at home with her mother, Charlie showered Marion with attention. Chaplin, who was notorious in Hollywood for flitting from one gorgeous woman to another, found Marion captivating for the same reasons Hearst had: she was beautiful, unpretentious—especially for a movie star—and funny. She was also unattached during the long stretches that W. R. spent at San Simeon.
“They seemed to be very enamored of each other,” Vera Burnett remembered. “They had told me if I saw Mr. Hearst come in, just to let them know. Also, they told Jimmy Sweeney, who was the prop man, to immediately notify them and Mr. Chaplin would go out the back door.” In her unpublished diary, Mary Urban recounts the story of the “evening on the lot when the moving picture group got out of hand. Hearst was away and they started to play. A lion’s den was a set constructed for one of the pictures and Marion and Charlie went inside the set and some one performed a mock marriage.... Everybody got into the act and the cameraman started to shoot. The picture itself was being shot under the direction of Luther Reed [one of Hearst’s screenwriters], and he was furious. Urban went haywire trying to gather up all the film and destroy it before some enterprising person got it to Hearst.”12
While the daily press continued to stay away from stories about Marion and Hearst, there was no such prohibition on gossip about Marion and Chaplin. “Charlie Chaplin, the real sheik of Hollywood,” Grace Kingsley wrote in a New York Daily News column on Sunday, November 9, 1924, “seems to be dividing his attention between two young things these days. One is his lovely leading lady, Lita Grey; the other is Marion Davies, Cosmopolitan star.... Marion Davies and Charlie Chaplin have attended several big dinner-dance parties together. The last one was a Halloween party given by Elinor Glyn at the Biltmore.” The following week, Kingsley wrote almost the same column, this time with photographs of Chaplin and Davies: “Charlie Chaplin continues to pay ardent attention to Marion Davies. He spent the evening at Montmartre dining and dancing with the fair Marion the other night. There was a lovely young dancer entertaining that evening. And Charlie applauded but with his back turned. He never took his eyes off Marion’s blonde beauty. Miss Davies wore a poudre blue dinner dress and small blue hat and looked very fetching indeed.”13
Hearst, of course, was partly responsible for Marion’s wandering off. She was thirty-five years younger than he was and unlikely to go into seclusion while he was away at San Simeon every weekend. During one of Hearst’s visits to San Simeon, Marion, according to her friend Gretl Urban, arranged to go away for the weekend with Charlie Chaplin. Hearst, who found out about their plans though he was hundreds of miles away in San Simeon, directed Joe Willicombe to follow their car and bring Marion back “without fuss and without scandal,” which he did. Marion later told Gretl that the “incident was never mentioned by Hearst.”14
To make up to Marion for choosing San Simeon over her almost every weekend, Hearst spoiled her when he was in Los Angeles, hosting lavish entertainments for her and her friends at 1700 Lexington and taking them on luxurious cruises on the Oneida, which he had had sailed through the Panama Canal and now moored in San Pedro Bay. One of these weekend cruises, to Catalina Island, included Luther Reed, Bill LeBaron, a Cosmopolitan Productions executive, Anita Stewart, who was starring in a Cosmopolitan feature, Charles Chaplin, and Gretl, Mary, and Joseph Urban. Marion decided to hold a costume party. Hearst, as usual, gave her what she wanted, though according to Gretl Urban, “Everyone except Marion was utterly bored at the idea.” Hearst landed the yacht on Catalina Island and his guests went shopping for their costumes. “Marion and Anita bought themselves some little-girl dresses. Charlie Chaplin put on one of my dresses, and I put on one of his suits. Bill LeBaron wore a dark robe and said he was a monk. Luther Reed borrowed a rather fancy negligee of Mary’s, while Father and Mary just wrapped themselves in blankets and said they were Indians. Hearst, not in costume, had the boat decorated with Japanese lanterns, and, crackpot idea or not, we all had a good time as we sailed along.” Chaplin was, as usual, the life of the party. “Unexpectedly, Charlie Chaplin suddenly stood up in the prow of the lounge where we were sitting and started reciting ‘To be, or not to be,’” Gretl remembered. “He had us all spellbound, his handsome head silhouetted against the evening sky. It was an extraordinary, deeply moving experience, everybody for
getting that he was wearing a dress.” Later that night, Gretl stumbled upon Charlie “making love to Marion in my cabin. To ease the embarrassment I laughed and told Marion I was glad she was having a little playacting fun.”15
Another yachting trip was planned for the following week, this time to San Diego in honor of the forty-third birthday of Thomas Ince, one of Hollywood’s top producers and directors, with whom Hearst was negotiating a coproduction deal. According to Gretl Urban, who was a guest on the Oneida, the cruise was uneventful, the mood “pleasant and relaxed, the food and drink ... the best, the sea smooth and the night balmy. We sat on board until midnight, then all went to bed.” During the night, Mary Urban, Joseph’s wife, heard groans from Ince’s cabin and awoke Dr. Daniel Carson Goodman, one of Hearst’s Cosmopolitan executives. “Ince was in great pain and vomiting profusely,” Gretl Urban recalled. “I don’t know whether Dr. Goodman was much of a doctor, but he diagnosed it as a severe heart attack. We headed immediately for San Diego. When the anchor was dropped, we all stood around as a launch was lowered. In front of us, Hearst warned Dr. Goodman not to let anyone ashore know that his patient had come from the Oneida. ...The unfortunate Goodman, upset by the sudden tragedy ... completely lost his head and fabricated so many impossible tales and acted so super-discreet that the press and everyone else ashore were convinced he was covering up some horrendous crime.”16
Ince was taken to his Hollywood home, where he died the next day. Though the news of Ince’s death was a big story in newspapers across the country, only the New York Daily News mentioned that he had been stricken on Hearst’s yacht. The Daily News story also linked Hearst to Davies by suggesting that “Miss Davies [had] issued the invitations for the yachting party” and adding that although the Oneida was “said to be listed ... under the name of International Film Corporation, it has been regarded ... as the personal yacht of Miss Davies.” Complete with photographs of Hearst, Chaplin, Davies, Goodman, Elinor Glyn, and Margaret Livingston, who was rumored to be Ince’s mistress, the Daily News story took up most of the third page of the afternoon edition, then disappeared entirely from later editions.17
Stories began to percolate through Hollywood that Hearst, in a fit of jealous rage, had murdered Ince. The absence of hard evidence made it easier to invent new rumors. In the years to come, Hearst would be accused of poisoning Ince, shooting him, hiring an assassin to shoot him, fatally wounding him while aiming at Chaplin—and, most recently and ridiculously, in an article published in 1997 in Vanity Fair, of accidentally stabbing him through the heart with Marion’s hatpin, causing an instant, fatal heart attack. Today, seventy-five years after Ince’s death, there is still no credible evidence that he was murdered or that Hearst was involved in any foul play.18
While it was true that Hearst had done his best to keep Ince’s presence on the Oneida a secret, he had done so not to cover up a murder, but because he did not want the press or the local police investigating his yachting party with champagne flowing in flagrant disregard of the Prohibition laws.
Ince was buried in Hollywood on November 21 after a private funeral. Marion, Chaplin, and a number of Hollywood stars were there to pay their respects. Hearst was not. He had left Los Angeles and, he hoped, public view, for an extended stay at San Simeon. The Ince case, coming as it did only four months after the Fallon accusations, frightened him. The wall he had put up around his private life remained in place, but he could not be certain that it would withstand another assault. He retreated to San Simeon and summoned Joseph Moore, his treasurer and chief financial adviser, and Ray Long, who ran his magazine division, to meet him there. Sobered perhaps by the Ince tragedy, he paid attention this time when Joseph Moore warned him about the rapidly increasing gap between corporate expenses and income. He agreed to cut costs by merging Hearst’s Magazine into Cosmopolitan and closing down film production in New York City.
The decision to close down his 127th Street studio was difficult but inevitable. With Marion making movies on the West Coast, there was no reason to maintain a costly production facility in New York. Though he intended to continue to produce Marion’s pictures, he was ready to merge his Cosmopolitan Productions into a major studio and hand off the headaches of managing his own production facilities. After extensive negotiations with every major company in Hollywood, in March of 1925 he signed an “extremely advantageous” deal with Metro-Goldwyn, which already distributed his pictures. The arrangement, he wrote Moore in New York, not only relieved him of all expense in producing moving pictures, but it put him in a position where he ought to make a half million dollars a year. He would be paid for the rights to the Cosmopolitan magazine stories, and get 40 percent of the profits on Cosmopolitan-based films: “They attend entirely to the production and all I have to contribute is a reasonable amount of promotion, which is left entirely to my discretion, and a sufficient number of good stories.” Marion’s salary was raised to $10,000 a week for forty weeks a year, $6,000 of it paid by the studio, the remaining $4,000 by Hearst who, in return, received one-third of the profit from Marion’s pictures.19
Though Louis B. Mayer now held what was arguably the top management position in town, he was still a relative newcomer to Hollywood, having arrived in 1918 from New England, where he had made his fortune as a theater owner and film distributor. Mayer had signed a lucrative deal with Hearst for two critical reasons: because it made good business sense and because he believed that by associating with the likes of Hearst he would raise his own status and that of his company. In San Francisco and New York the Hearsts had been regarded as parvenus, but by Hollywood standards they were American aristocrats. For second-generation Jews like Mayer who, as Neal Gabler has written, “regarded themselves as marginal men trying to punch into the American mainstream,” W. R. was an American colossus. He was the son of a millionaire miner and senator. He had gone to Harvard, traveled widely in Europe, and was a collector of fine art, a confidant of presidents, and a native-born Californian who looked at ease in the saddle.
“Towering above him,” Mayer’s daughter Irene recalled, “Hearst would place his hand on my father’s head for emphasis and pat it as he spoke, calling him ‘Son.’ They were certainly an incongruous pair. Hearst tall, portly, a man with light blue eyes and a high-pitched voice who appeared not to have too much on his mind, and whose inner self never seemed to surface; my father stocky, compact, dynamic.”20
In the middle 1920s, Hollywood was struggling to establish itself as more than just a movie set, more than a mirage of glittering surfaces. Fame and fortune were transient commodities. The real power in the industry was in the East where the bankers made the major decisions. Studio bosses like Louis B. Mayer were constantly looking over their shoulders. Their power was local, ephemeral, that of lesser feudal lords beholden to distant princes. Hearst was different. He had been a vital force in California before movies were produced and would remain one whatever happened to the industry. His empire was not built on celluloid.
There was another reason why Mayer was pleased to absorb Cosmopolitan Productions into Metro-Goldwyn. He was convinced, as Hearst was, that Marion Davies was a legitimate, bankable star. In April 1925, he publicly welcomed her to the studio by presenting her with a ceremonial makeup box. The photograph of the two of them, transmitted by telegraph wire from California to New York, marked the official beginning of their partnership.
Soon afterward, putting aside his otherwise inviolable “puritanical instincts,” Mayer took his wife and daughters and went calling on Miss Davies who was, at the time, living in a rented summer home in Santa Monica, just down the beach from the Mayer family. “Considering Dad’s propriety,” Irene Mayer Selznick wrote in her autobiography, “I am at a loss to explain how he reconciled our being exposed to Marion.”21
Of all the “queens” on the Metro-Goldwyn lot, and there were plenty of them, including Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Lillian Gish, and Greta Garbo, only Marion had her own palace. When she arrived at Culver City, Marion
recalled, all the dressing rooms on the lot had been located “in a wooden building.... The women were on the top floor.... The men were underneath, and there was a sign ‘No Men Allowed to Go Upstairs.’” Only one of the women’s dressing rooms had its own bathroom and although it had been promised to Marion, Lillian Gish had stolen it away. Either Marion complained to Hearst or Hearst on his own decided that she should have her own dressing room. In May, a month after he signed with Mayer, W. R. asked Joseph Urban “to design immediately a bungalow for Marion Davies outside the Goldwyn lot.” Urban had a week to draw up the plans and send them to the Goldwyn people who were going to execute them. He visited Hearst’s warehouse in the Bronx to pick out furniture and artwork, only to be told that it would cost a minimum of $700 to uncrate the items he wanted to look at. It didn’t much matter. Although Hearst, Marion, and everyone else on the lot persisted in referring to the building as a bungalow, it was in fact a self-contained fourteen-room mansion, with living quarters on the top floor and Hearst’s office and a banquet-sized dining room on the ground floor.22
Hearst was more comfortable in Hollywood than he had ever been in New York. He arrived without his past trailing after him. Hollywood didn’t know or care about his feud with Al Smith or blame him for the excesses of yellow journalism. And, in this town without history, no one remembered that he had opposed the World War or had been accused of being a German spy. There was no doubt just as much whispering, but there was much less moralizing about his private life. Hollywood in the 1920s and 1930s was filled with Svengalis who advanced the careers of women they loved and admired: D. W. Griffith and Lillian Gish, Joseph Schenck and Norma Talmadge, Irving Thalberg and Norma Shearer, Joe Kennedy and Gloria Swanson. Marion had become a Hollywood favorite—no one was going to fault Hearst for being in love with her.