During the run of the Ziegfeld Follies of 1917, a man in his mid-50s kept reappearing in the audience night after night—always buying two tickets, one for himself, one for his hat—to stare at a blonde chorine named Marion Davies. He already had a wife, five sons, a gold mine, seven magazines, ten newspapers, more than a million acres of land—and now he wanted the chorine. Getting her was as easy for William Randolph Hearst as hailing a taxicab. Remarkably, she remained his mistress for 34 years.
Hearst made plans to build Marion into the supreme star of the U.S. cinema. Born Marion Cecilia Douras, daughter of a small-time New York politician, she was still in her teens; her convent education had stopped some years earlier. But Hearst bought a Harlem studio, established his own film company, hired tutors and drama coaches, the best scenarists, set designers, and directors to help shape his Galatea. For the opening of her first film, Cecilia of the Pink Roses, in 1918, he had the theater ventilating system loaded with attar of roses, bathing the audience in florid scent. His newspapers, of course, hailed the new star's birth with eight-color superlatives in reviews that ran under eight-column headlines.
Imperial Virgin. Marion stuttered and blinked simultaneously, but that hardly mattered to Hearst, who spent millions on prototype superspectacles—and happily lost money on most of them, always casting Marion as a kind of imperial virgin. Full of fun and laughter, with a clear eye for the absurd, Marion called him Pops, and liked to run her fingers through his sterling-silver hair. She would have become his wife as well, but Hearst's wife (and still surviving widow) Millicent, herself a former chorine, steadily denied Hearst his request for a divorce.
When the film capital shifted from New York to Hollywood, Hearst arranged for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to pay Marion $10,000 a week in return for her talented services—and Hearst publicity for M-G-M films. For Marion, Hearst constructed on the M-G-M lot a 14-room, $75,000 mansion, calling it the "Bungalow." Goodhearted, free-spending Marion dispensed Hearst's money with a generous hand, soon became the most popular actress at the studio, paying doctor bills for office boys, distributing expensive gifts to grips and electricians, even paying a studio newsboy's tuition at private school.
Hearst haunted the sets of Davies pictures, giving two dozen orders a minute to hapless directors; and after Norma Shearer managed to beat out his protégée for a part, Hearst told his editors from coast to coast never to mention Norma's name in print. With uncanny foresight, Hearst papers could be counted on for banner headlines such as MARION DAVIES' GREATEST FILM OPENS TONIGHT.
Life of Midas. As film fatales went, Marion was not a complete zero, and non-Hearst critics—including the New York Times—now and then gave her a line of modest praise. But her pictures continued to lose money, and since it had been apparent for some time to both of them that she never would become another Mary Pickford, in 1937 Marion made her last picture. She and Pops more or less settled down to the life of Midas—at their 55-bathroom, $3,250,000 beach palace in Santa Monica, and the twin-towered $30 million Hearst castle at San Simeon.