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At the fabled house parties, the aging Hearst persisted in limiting predinner cocktails to one per person, but Marion
Davies and Carole Lombard would remedy that in the ladies bathroom. After Calvin Coolidge spent a weekend with Hearst, Marion complained: "All they talked about was their g-g-g-goddamned circulation."
Vigorous & Loyal. Extreme old age, however, had no effect on Hearst's extreme jealousy. As they always had, his eyes followed Marion wherever she moved; her leading men were afraid to enter wholeheartedly into on-camera kisses, since Hearst's newspapers had ruined other men's careers for less cause. When Hearst's own empire was facing ruin in the Depression '30s, Marion lent Hearst back $1,000,000, won his lifetime gratitude. Still in her vigorous 40s when Hearst was in his 80s, Marion remained loyal until Hearst died, reading to him, nursing him during the four years between his heart attack and his death in 1951.
Ten weeks after his death, she impulsively married Captain Horace G. Brown, sometime skipper of an oceangoing tanker and former cop, who looked very much like William Randolph Hearst. The marriage almost ended within a year as Brown began making a nuisance of himself: he pushed her into the pool, his monkey bit her, and he let the air out of the tires of visitors' automobiles. She decided to ignore him and became absorbed with real estate interests, acquiring office buildings in Manhattan, Palm Springs' Desert Inn, and 360,000 acres in Mexico.
Slowed by a stroke five years ago, she later developed osteomyelitis and cancer. This spring her friend Joseph P. Kennedy sent specialists from the East. Last week Marion Davies died, aged 61. Some 30 years earlier on the lot at MG—M, after answering an interrupting phone call from Pops, she had turned smiling to a friend and stuttered out a line that could be her epitaph: "H-h-h-hearst come, H-h-h-hearst served."