he ever knew. He was offered a part in _Bataan_ that let him join
Jennifer in California. They were wrapped up in each other’s happiness
until Selznick fell madly in love with her; then the Walkers separated.
She divorced Bob in June 1945, after six years of marriage. David’s
wife, Irene--Louis B. Mayer’s younger daughter--was separated from her
husband two months later. She divorced David in January 1949, and David
and Jennifer were married six months later.
“The breakup with Jennifer,” said Bob on my patio, “gave me an excuse
for amplifying my troubles. When I had a few drinks, I got to thinking
about Poor Me and the broken home and all the et ceteras. Only now I
can talk about it freely. I used to refuse to discuss my breakup with
Phyl because I felt it was nobody’s business. I talk about it now
because it’s part of the story that I want to get over. So far as I’m
concerned, she is first and foremost the mother of my two children.”
He went on working, detesting himself. “Laying oneself open to be
hurt,” he said, “is an agonizing way to be living.” He tried another
marriage--with John Ford’s daughter, Barbara, after he’d known her
eight weeks. That was two weeks longer than they lasted together as man
and wife.
He relied chiefly on liquor for survival. It was a news picture of
Bob Walker drunk in a police lockup, with fists clenched and mouth
distorted, that convinced him he needed psychiatry. “I would rather
have had a knife stuck in my side,” he told me, “because then I should
have known what was wrong. There was terrific remorse the day after.
I decided that sometime soon I was going to end up dead. I tried an
analyst in town, but I wasn’t ready for him. My back wasn’t yet up
against the wall.”
When Dore Schary took over Mayer’s job at Metro, he had Bob in for
a talk. “I think you need help,” he said. “I want you to go to the
Menninger Clinic.”
“After I left Schary’s office,” Bob said, “fear hit me. I thought about
a mental clinic like an insane asylum. I kept asking myself: ‘Is there
something about me that others can see and I can’t?’”
But he promised Schary that he’d try Menninger’s. With a studio
publicity man as companion, he rode the plane to Kansas wearing a pair
of dark glasses, with his hat pulled down over his face, hoping nobody
would recognize him. “When I first hit Topeka, I couldn’t bear the
thought of people looking at me. It was as if the whole world had its
eyes focused on me. Actually, nobody gave a damn.”
Living in a hotel, he drove each day to the clinic for a week of tests.
“I hated myself and blamed myself all my life for things I shouldn’t
have blamed myself for. I felt that everybody was against me, hated me,
couldn’t understand me. I couldn’t even understand myself. I was only
moments away from alcoholism, which is a slow form of self-destruction.”
On the basis of the tests, the clinic recommended that he be admitted,
warning his father and Dore Schary that Bob would require at least one
year of treatment, possibly two. He returned to Hollywood and went to
the desert to hide, afraid to see people, until it was time to sign
himself into Menninger’s.
“I got the idea that the clinic was something like a country club, so
I asked for a single room and bath. First thing I noticed was that all
the doors were locked. Then everything sharp, including my razor, was
taken away from me--you could only shave with an attendant watching.
The room I was taken to had bars on its window. When I was told:
‘You’re rooming with so-and-so,’ I said I was leaving. That first night
a patient who understood how a newcomer felt gave up his room and bath
without my knowing it, so it would be easier on me.”
For the first four weeks he was under observation only; no analysis.
“You have to have a recreational therapist with you even on walks over
the grounds.”
He lived in one of several “lodges,” with fifteen patients to each
floor, ages varying from eighteen to sixty-five. “We didn’t discuss our
illness with each other. Most of the men were wonderful, because it’s
often the self-sacrificing, overly kind people who take all the blame
on themselves and land up in such conditions.” His one thought was to
leave the place.
At the end of that quiet first month he was still a good enough actor
to persuade a doctor that he was perfectly capable of going into Topeka
alone one night. “Or perhaps the clinic was trying to convince me how
sick I was. Anyway, when I went to town I got drunk, landed up taking
a swing at another cop, and smashed my fist through a window. I was
more determined than ever to get away because I was sure the clinic had
driven me to it.”
He contacted his father, begged him to come and take him away, signing
to assume responsibility. It was suggested Bob should see one of
Menninger’s analysts. “I told them I didn’t want to. Why spend more
money on an analyst when he couldn’t do me any good? Even then, I was
making excuses to keep from facing facts.”
Soon afterward, a psychoanalyst who had been assigned to him anyway,
came to his room, said he knew Bob was leaving, but had just stopped by
to say hello. “He stretched himself out on the bed and let me do the
arguing. At the end of about an hour I thanked him for coming, but told
him I was still going to leave. The next day I found some excuse to ask
him to visit me again. I still argued that I was leaving. It was some
time before I realized I was doing all the talking--not him. I made up
my mind to stay.”
He had one hour of analysis a day, six days a week. “For three weeks
I spoke to nobody but this doctor, keeping myself shut up in my room,
eating scarcely anything, sleeping very little, drinking cup after cup
of coffee. When I started to get some inside on the cure, I began
to work constantly at it. Pouring out your thoughts and mind is an
emotionally exhausting experience. But you could never know the thrill
it was when I realized that hate was leaving my heart.”
In September 1949 an announcement from the clinic said that he had
completely recovered from a “nervous breakdown.” “I came back here
scared as hell,” Bob said, “and I don’t think I’ve got the world by the
tail. I haven’t worked for over a year, and I’d like to do two or three
pictures in a hurry now and go back to the clinic for two months next
spring.”
He was in a proselytizing mood when he talked to me. “The $64 question
is where the average man can go for mental help. They can’t afford
high-priced clinics, and they can’t afford to take the time off for
what I did. People are waiting to get into clinics, but there’s not
enough public demand for real work in this field because so many are
unaware of its importance. If you have a decayed tooth, you can go to a
dentist and have it removed. But if you have a mental stumbling block,
you’re provided with no such opportunity.”
He spoke of trying to shield his sons from the truth about himself.
They wanted to read the first newspaper interview he’d given. “Since
it mentioned several unpleasant subjects like drinking, I hesitated.
Then I decided to keep nothing back from them. The boys read it, and I
explained the things they couldn’t understand. At night I read to them.
Right now, we’re going through _Swiss Family Robinson_. About once a
week we take in a show, usually a drive-in. They work two hours a day,
scraping paint off a fence and a shed, and get fifty cents a day for
it.”
I had written up his interview with me when, two days later, he
telephoned. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t run that story. I poured
my heart out, but I wasn’t thinking enough of my sons. I’d rather not
have them read it all yet. When they’re older they’ll understand.”
* * * * *
At six o’clock on the evening of August 29, 1951, Mrs. Emily Buck,
who was Bob’s housekeeper and nurse, called a psychiatrist who had
been treating Bob for the previous eighteen months. Mr. Walker, she
said, needed help in a hurry. He had been drinking, and he was losing
control of himself. The doctor answered the call, and two hours later
telephoned his associate to join him at the Walker house because he
thought an injection would be necessary.
Two men among the group of friends who had gathered at the house held
Bob down while the doctor prepared the needle. Bob was pleading: “Don’t
give it to me. I’ve been drinking. It will kill me. Please don’t give
me that shot.”
The following day the doctors reported that as many as thirty times
before they had injected sodium amytal to calm him. Seven and a half
grains “is not an abnormal dose if the patient is extremely emotional,”
said the coroner’s autopsy surgeon. Bob’s breathing had begun to fail a
matter of minutes after the shot entered his veins. The fire department
rescue squad was called at eight-thirty. Not until ninety minutes later
did they give up hope. Bob was thirty-two years old.
Jennifer Jones is still a very beautiful woman, her face unlined by
age. She is an excellent actress on her own account--not since _A
Farewell to Arms_, in which she starred with Rock Hudson, has David
Selznick made a picture with or without her. She is very nervous
while acting, hating to be watched at work by anybody but the minimum
necessary crew, flinching at even routine questions when she’s
interviewed.
The David Selznicks live beautifully. His income comes largely from
selling or leasing his backlog of pictures, made in the days when
David had walked out of MGM to open up as an independent producer. The
backlog does not include _Gone With the Wind_, which makes a sure five
or six millions every time it’s sent on the rounds again. Under the
terms of the ruthless bargain Metro drove with him before he could have
Gable play Rhett Butler, every cent of income goes now to that studio,
not to David.
At the second gala premiere held not long ago in Atlanta, where _GWTW_
first opened in December 1939, he was asked: “Don’t you feel dreadful
that you don’t receive a thin dime from all this?”
“No, I did it with my own little hatchet,” he said. “I never regretted
it.” He has his own grandiose plans to stage a musical version of his
greatest movie on Broadway, using two separate casts, producing it in
two halves on successive evenings. Alfred Hitchcock once asked the
unanswerable question about David’s checkered career: “When you’ve
produced a picture like _Gone With the Wind_, what can you do to top
it?”
David still loves parties as he always did, but most always goes alone.
Instead of going with him, Jennifer stays home and reads or applies
herself to yoga, which she took up long ago. Sometimes she takes a trip
to India to meditate. She went twice to Switzerland to see Carl Jung
but was too late the second time. He was ill and receiving nobody. “If
I had pressed it, I might have seen him,” she said. “I shall always
regret that I didn’t try harder.”
If David ever thinks about it, he must notice the contrast between
Jennifer, who is very gracious and feminine, and Irene Mayer, who had
a brain like a man, plus sound business sense and an instinct for the
theater. She was also bossy like her father, and David rebelled against
it. He would come home tired from slaving at a studio, which he did as
a habit then, but she’d say: “Take those old clothes off, get into a
tub and dress. We have guests arriving in fifteen minutes.”
He’d grow so mad he’d toss his clothes on to the floor and stomp on
them. Then: “David, pick those things up and put them away properly.”
Louis B. Mayer used to tell me about those scenes. “If I were married
to Irene, I’d hit her,” he said. “I love her, but I see all her faults.”
David and Jennifer have one daughter, whom they adore. They also have
the two sons she had by Robert Walker. Bob, Jr., is twenty-five now. He
looks exactly like his father. He lives with his wife and their baby
in a cottage on the Selznicks’ estate. George Seaton, the director,
tells me Bob will be as fine an actor as his father. The younger son is
also following in his father’s footsteps, cutting quite a swath with
teen-age beauties in our town. It must be easy for Jennifer to remember
and mighty hard to forget.
_Eleven_
Sorting out fact from fiction can be harder on the constitution than
separating milk from whipped potatoes in a cupful of vichyssoise. And
when you succeed, the results may taste sharper than vinegar on the
tongue. Let’s take the case of Marion Davies and William Randolph
Hearst.
The newspaper tycoon, with a wife and five sons, and the golden-haired
charmer from the Bronx shared many things in life--laughter, riches,
tears, disaster; everything except his name. Mrs. William Randolph
Hearst denied him the divorce he begged for, spurned his offers of
millions and anything else she wanted. The legend is that W.R. found
his golden-hearted girl when she was a mere sixteen, skipping around
in Flo Ziegfeld’s _Follies of 1917_. Truth is, it happened some years
earlier.
He was fifty years old, with a long, pale face and piercing blue eyes
when he sat in the Globe Theatre and saw her dancing in the chorus
of _Queen of the Movies_, directed by Julian Mitchell. She was then
fourteen years old. It was January 1914.
A sister of hers was another of the six chorus girls. Marion Cecilia
Douras--she changed the name to Davies later--wanted to be with her
sister and work beside her. Neither her father, Bernard, nor her
mother, Rose, objected. Her one obstacle was the Gary Society, whose
inspectors supposedly saved young girls from a fate worse than death,
meaning sin and exploitation in the theater, by seeing they didn’t
dance in any chorus until they were at least sixteen years old.
She took her problem to a family friend, Pat Casey, who arranged it so
that Marion would land the job, and he fibbed about her age. To all
intent and purpose, she had reached the essential sixteenth birthday
when she went into the show. On opening night Hearst was there with
a companion, a judge. The next morning, from the Louis Cohen Ticket
Agency, he ordered two seats in Row C for every performance of the
show’s run, one for himself, the other for any friend who wanted to see
the show. Or if no friend was available, the vacant seat was a handy
place to park his hat.
Most of the cast had a hunch he had his eyes on Marion’s sister. But
after a week or two he tipped his hand by sending a note to Marion
inviting her to have supper with him in Delmonico’s. She took the note
to Casey to ask: “What should I do? What could I possibly talk about to
a man like him?”
“Accept the invitation,” answered Pat, “but be sure you always take a
girl friend with you.”
Pat had some sound advice for another cute beginner in the same chorus
line. This other sixteen-year-old was Al Jolson’s light of love. He had
reached the point of promising to marry her when another beauty caught
his eye and he married her, instead. The young dancer went to Pat with
her troubles. “Keep quiet and let me handle it,” he said.
He and Al had some serious talking to do. “I feel like a dog,” said
Jolson. “What can I do?”
Pat had the answer: “You can give her $100 a month as long as she
lives, plus a home in Westchester County.” Al was happy to escape so
lightly. She outlived him and collected an additional keepsake of the
glorious days that used to be. In Jolson’s will he left her $100,000,
and nobody knew who she was, except the lawyer who drew up the document.
Measured either in love or money, Marion did much better than that. To
Hearst she was a golden, blue-eyed princess, and he showered her with
treasure until ultimately she was worth more than $8,000,000 in her own
right. When she died she owned three skyscrapers in New York City, the
Desert Inn in Palm Springs, plus an estate in Beverly Hills.
From the moment he saw her, he fell under her spell. She didn’t
waver in the affection she gave him. Toward the end, though, she had
different feelings about his family. She had a special reason for
being pleased with her Manhattan skyscrapers. “Wherever the Hearsts
walk on the East Side, if they ever do,” she said, “they have to pass
one of my buildings--on Fifth Avenue, Park, or down Madison.”
No princess in a picture book enjoyed such gifts as were heaped on her
by W.R., history’s most extravagant spender. In their early days he
decreed that she was to be the greatest star in motion pictures. In
New York she lived with her family, was surrounded with instructors in
every subject under the sun that might further her career. She was cast
in an inconsequential drama, _Cecilia of the Pink Roses_, for a start,
and his newspapers and magazines started promoting her.
He insisted that she play only ingénue roles, though her talent was as
a comedienne. If he’d let her play comedy, she could have been the real
success he’d set his heart on. But she worked only to please him. “I
was never crazy about making pictures,” she told me. “It was all right
once we got started. But to me it was wasting time. You live only once;
you’ve got to have fun, and you can’t work all the time.”
Another typical bit of Hearst’s fancy didn’t do Marion any good. One
cocktail was the rule for her at San Simeon. If she wanted an extra
drink, she had to sneak it. In each of the castle’s countless powder
rooms she kept a bottle of champagne hidden in the tank of the toilet.
Friends like Carole Lombard and Frances Marion knew the secret and
shared the bubbles. I’ve seen Marion Davies drink a pint of champagne
in half a dozen gulps and walk out singing. If W.R. had been less
strict on the subject of liquor, she wouldn’t have drunk so much.
After _Cecilia_, Marion had her own movie studio to reign over. Hearst
bought the River Park Casino up on 127th Street in Harlem and converted
it as the production center for his Cosmopolitan Pictures. There all
the stops were pulled out for a hang-the-expense Tudor epic, _When
Knighthood Was in Flower_, designed to put her in the front rank of the
movies in a single leap. She cared no more for this sword-and-cloak
stuff than for anything else about the business she’d been pushed
into. “The only thing I liked about making pictures was the fun we had
on the side,” she said. “But there was always somebody pulling your
hair, powdering your nose, and those hot lights!”
Hearst wasn’t a man to listen to argument, much less admit defeat.
She went on making pictures, some of them winning enough praise from
critics other than his own men to justify his relentless ambitions for
her. _Little Old New York_ was “exquisite,” according to the New York
_Times_. _Janice Meredith_, another costume cutup, also came in for
_Times_ approval. “No more brilliant achievement in ambitious motion
pictures ... has ever been exhibited.”
He failed in his movie plans for Marion and himself as he failed
in many other things he attempted, except making money. He didn’t
become the greatest producer in the world; he missed laying hands on
the governorship of New York; he never got into the White House. The
biggest irony of his life was the deal he made by telephone from San
Simeon to the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1932 to swing most of
the California delegates behind a candidate he didn’t like, Franklin
Delano Roosevelt. More than any other man, the deeds of Roosevelt
ruined Hearst. Then World War II made Hearst another fortune.
The Shepherd of San Simeon had a long way to go before he let Marion
ease her way out of the career he had chosen for her. The arrangement
he came to with Louis Mayer and the Cosmopolitan company brought
Marion from New York to Culver City in such style you’d imagine it was
Louis XVI transferring Marie-Antoinette from Paris to Versailles. Near
the front of the lot a fourteen-room bungalow was built for her as a
combined dressing room and summer home.
Later, when Marion left for Warners, it was transported lock, stock,
and barrel there. When she departed from Warners, an addition was made
and the whole thing moved to Benedict Canyon in Beverly Hills. Louis
Mayer bought it and lived in it. Then it became the home of Kay and
Arthur Cameron. But they were divorced, and Cameron lived on there
alone.
San Simeon, two hundred miles from Culver City, was too far for daily
travels to Metro. Hearst built a new castle for his princess on the
gold coast of Santa Monica. This new ninety-room Georgian mansion,
with two swimming pools, three drawing rooms, two dining rooms, and a
private movie theater, was called the “beach house.” It cost $7,000,000.
W.R., in his sixties now, and the gorgeous young girl, whose stutter
only added to her charm, had dreamed that someday, somehow they would
be man and wife. Mrs. Hearst--who was Millicent Willson, a chorine in
a group called “The Merry Maidens” when she first met W.R.--thought
otherwise. Her husband’s hopes of marriage to Marion seemed about ready
to bloom when Millicent was being escorted by Alexander Moore, once
married to Lillian Russell and once United States Ambassador to Spain.
As an inducement to divorce, W.R. was offering Millicent $10,000,000
together with the huge apartment house in which they used to live.
Millicent sought advice from one of the biggest men in the country, who
was a good friend of Marion’s, too. His reasoning prevailed with her:
“Mrs. William Randolph Hearst is a very important name in America and
the world. What would you gain if you gave it up?”
Marion made friends with Moore in later years when he was in California
very ill. She sat by his bedside during his last days. “Before the end
comes,” he murmured, “will you put your arms around me and kiss me?”
She didn’t hesitate a moment.
She performed that same, final act of compassion for another man, her
father, long after it was clear that, in spite of all Hearst did for
her, he could never give her his name. Bernard Douras, like the rest of
Marion’s family, had shared in W.R.’s generosity. As a result of ties
with “Red Mike” Hylan, mayor of New York, Douras had been appointed a
city magistrate and was invariably referred to in Hearst papers as
“Judge” Douras. He had been a stanch Catholic all his life. He, too,
died in Marion’s arms.
She had a heart big as the Ritz Tower, which was one of the hunks of
New York real estate W.R. owned in those days, after taking it over
from Arthur Brisbane when he couldn’t meet the payments. Socially, in
Hollywood she was the queen bee for more than thirty years. Friends
fallen on hard times could rely on a check from Marion to see them
through. A girl who wanted to impress a producer or land a job could
borrow Marion’s best dresses, furs, and fabulous jewels--whatever the
occasion called for.
When talking pictures arrived, Marion had problems like everybody
else; she got going with _Marianne_ and went on to _The Floradora
Girl_. “Somebody told me I should put a pebble in my mouth to cure
the stuttering. That goes back to the days of the Greeks, the pebble
treatment. During a scene the first day, I swallowed the pebble, and
that was the end of the cure.”
She had no cause to worry that speech trouble would put an end to her
career. The birth of the talkies ruined many another reputation. Two of
the cruelest, most primitive punishments our town deals out to those
who fall from favor are the empty mailbox and the silent telephone.
But Marion was a hostess who took no notice of who was in and who out
of the social swim. Her friends, rich or poor, were invited up to
San Simeon. Her parties and picnics mixed the important guests with
people you saw no other place. Mighty executives rubbed shoulders with
has-beens still living under her protective wing. Quite a few careers
were started all over again as a result.
In her bungalow she had a complete household staff, including a fine
cook, Mrs. Grace, with a young daughter, Mary. When Mrs. Grace fell
fatally ill, as a last favor she asked Marion to look after her Mary.
The little orphan was raised like a daughter. When she reached school
age, she went away to be educated, then returned to live with her
foster mother.
Mary begged for a photograph of Marion autographed “To my darling
daughter.” And on that deceptive bit of pseudo-evidence was built the
juicy rumor that W.R. had children by Marion. Only after some years did
she retrieve the picture from Mary Grace, but the damage had been done,
prompting Hearst in his will to testify: “I hereby declare that the
only children I have ever had are my sons....”
Marion did some matchmaking on Mary’s behalf by introducing her to one
of Hearst’s band of trouble shooters, William Curley, publisher of the
New York _Journal American_, who had five children of his own by a
former marriage, plus grandchildren, and was old enough to be Mary’s
grandfather. Mary was married to William Curley at San Simeon.