husband of the moment, Jimmy Cromwell, one of the guests. Before the
ceremony Curley changed his will in Mary’s favor; which later left her
a rich widow. Marion was a bridesmaid on that occasion, as on many
others. I knew how much she envied any bride.
I stayed in Hollywood largely because of her. When picture parts grew
scarce as hen’s teeth, I holed up in a three-room basement flat with my
son. I was ready to quit and return to New York when Marion heard about
it from Frances Marion and put me into a picture of hers, _Zander the
Great_, for which Frances wrote the script. That also opened the door
to San Simeon for me. It was the springboard to more jobs, and that
kept me, for better or worse, in the movies.
Wealth came to mean nothing to Marion except in terms of the good it
could do. “You’re rich not because of money but only through what you
give,” she used to say. She built a children’s wing on UCLA’s Medical
Center, with a trust fund added to maintain it. With her wry humor that
remained intact to the end, she shrugged off any fancy talk about the
building being her memorial: “It won’t do me any good; I’ll be down
below where I can’t see so high.”
This Lady Bountiful extended her warmth to Hearst’s close family and
employees. She mothered John R., Jr., the Chief’s twelve-year-old
grandson, nicknamed “Bunkie,” when he came to live at San Simeon after
his parents were divorced. She interceded with the iron-willed man to
save his sons--William, Jr., John, David, Randolph, and George--from
their father’s wrath. She supported one of the five for years after he
had spent his inherited money as if it would last forever.
For thirty years she protected the boys from W.R.’s anger and
disapproval; covering up their sins in his eyes; lending them money
when they needed it; taking them and their friends in under San
Simeon’s roof and into her Santa Monica home. In return, the sons
behaved as if she was one of their nearest and dearest friends. No
hostility was ever shown until after W.R.’s death.
She bestowed the same kind of favors on Hearst’s staff. Thanks to
Marion, Louella’s job was enlarged for her, with steady increases in
salary. Through Marion, she got to know all the stars and greats of
the world. Cobina Wright picked up her stint as society columnist by
Marion’s pleading on her behalf with W.R.
Hearst’s staff treated Marion fondly during her protector’s lifetime.
Richard Berlin, the organization’s strong man who emerged as president
of Hearst Corporation, was one of the many who scrupulously saw to it
that every birthday and similar anniversary in her life was marked by
flowers and the cordial words of congratulations.
When W.R.’s fortunes crumbled and his empire faced sudden ruination,
Marion came to the rescue. She lent him one million dollars. “You’ll be
left without a penny,” said I, always the practical one, to her.
“What would you do?” she asked. “It came from him. Would you deny him
when he needs it?”
In 1947 the two of them took refuge from the storms that blew
increasingly around him--old age and an America entirely changed from
the land he’d left his stamp on. They closed down San Simeon and moved
into a Spanish stucco house on North Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills.
W.R. was reluctantly facing the fact that he was no more immortal than
any other man.
For Marion herself, W.R. had a special warning--against the wife
of one of his sons. “Be careful of her,” he said in his quavering,
high-pitched voice. “She will be far more hostile than Mrs. Hearst.”
The final act in Hearst’s eighty-eight years began on the night of
August 13, 1951, as he lay dying. Marion could sense it, though she
would not put it into words. She summoned her nephew, the writer
Charles Lederer, to the house. She had been drinking and was on the
verge of hysteria. W.R.’s two physicians, Dr. Prinzmetal and Dr.
Corday, were already in attendance. Presumably summoned by one or the
other of them, Bill and David Hearst and Richard Berlin also arrived at
the house.
When things got too hot to handle, Lederer persuaded Dr. Corday that
Marion should be taken to her bedroom and given sedation. The wrangling
continued after she had left, and in the course of the evening Lederer
returned to his house, close by on North Beverly Drive.
Early next morning Lederer received a telephone call that Hearst was
dead. He had died in the arms of his Catholic valet, Henry Monahan, now
with Conrad Hilton, who said prayers for him. Two hours later the body
was flown to San Francisco.
When Marion’s nephew arrived back at the Hearst house, he was greeted
by Berlin: “Where do you think you’re going?”
“To see Marion.”
“Make sure you go to her room and nowhere else.”
“This house belongs to Marion Davies,” Lederer said, “and I’ll go where
I please.”
Marion couldn’t be roused from her drugged sleep until after the body
was being flown to San Francisco, escorted by Bill, David, George,
and Randolph Hearst. Mrs. Hearst, Bill’s wife, “Bootsie,” and other
members of the family flew from New York for the service. Louella was
one of the hundreds of mourners who gathered in San Francisco. Marion
read about the funeral arrangements in the paper. What W.R. had planned
before his death was a quiet service in his home with only Marion and
an Episcopal minister reading from the Bible.
The day he was buried, I sat with Marion in her dining room. We prayed
silently together. “I had him while he lived,” she said. “They can have
him now.” Though she disguised it, she was still in a state of shock at
the loss of the man she had loved for nearly forty years.
When the announcement came, a few months later, that she had eloped
to Las Vegas with Horace Brown, a hell-for-leather Merchant Marine
captain who looked somewhat like a younger version of William Randolph,
the Hearst paper in Los Angeles, the _Examiner_, reported with
satisfaction: “It was Miss Davies’ first marriage.”
* * * * *
I decided one day to write a piece about what happens to a retired
movie star and went to Marion to talk about it. With Horace and Dennis
the Menace, a small brown dachshund, she lived in the house where
W.R. died. Its long front hall retained a touch of the beach-palace
days, with life-sized portraits of her in her leading roles hanging on
the walls. In the library there were three more pictures. On a table
stood a “Lucky Lindy” photograph of Charles Lindbergh autographed “To
Marion Davies, best wishes and many thanks.” On the mantel were two
photographs of Bernard Shaw, one of them inscribed, “This is what is
left of me--1948.” Shaw, said Marion, was the only man that Gandhi,
W.R.’s favorite dog, didn’t try to bite. “He wanted to listen to what
GBS had to say, but Gandhi took it out on me later.”
She was wearing dark brown slacks, cinnamon-colored silk blouse, and
flat-heeled leather shoes. The blond hair looked as though it had just
been washed and set. On the coffee table in front of her she kept a
compact and two lipsticks which, while we talked, she applied almost
unconsciously, with perfect aim.
She said: “I don’t look at motion pictures any more, most of all my
own. I used to see one every night. I have prints of most of mine, but
they’re slowly molding in a vault downstairs. I have _Little Old New
York_, but my projector goes too fast to run it off.”
“Wasn’t Bill Powell in that one?”
“No, he was in _When Knighthood Was in Flower_. Remember those
symmetricals he wore to make his legs look pretty? When we ran that
at San Simeon, Carole Lombard was with him. She never got over his
symmetricals. He was a real villain in that picture.”
“I saw him in Palm Springs. He said it wasn’t exciting, but it’s adding
years to his life. Would you like to make another picture?”
“Not if they offered me Mars on a silver plate. I have other ideas
along the theatrical line. Something big, like washing elephants.”
“What was your favorite picture?”
“_The Big Parade_. Long time ago, but I liked it.”
“How about _Gone With the Wind_?”
“I liked that, but I didn’t see much of it. I went with Carole and
Clark to the opening here. Raoul Walsh was with us, too. A man who
pretended he was Burgess Meredith picked a fight with us. Clark was
nervous and didn’t want to sit through the picture, anyway. So we all
went into the manager’s office. The manager was off somewhere, and the
phone kept ringing. We’d pick it up and say: ‘Sorry, no reservations;
all sold out for a year.’ We thought that was funny. Carole was a lot
of fun. She liked to have a good time.”
“So did you.”
“It’s taken its toll.”
“Did you ever have any protégés?”
“I kept it all for myself. I couldn’t act.”
“Well, I know you helped Ray Milland, for instance.”
“He played my brother in _Bachelor Father_. The director got impatient
with him. It was his first picture and he was nervous. Who isn’t, even
on the twenty-fifth picture? So I told him to pretend that the director
wasn’t there.”
I asked her about the plush party she gave for Johnnie Ray not
long after W.R.’s death, which caught a bit of the glamour of our
yesterdays, with six hundred invited and a thousand showing up.
“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.
She also ousted her sister out of her own house, to make room for the
Robert Kennedys, and rented another temporary home for the sister. When
Joe heard how sick Marion really was, he sent off three specialists to
see her. But Marion paid all the bills.
Earlier, she put on a fine performance, too, to appear on one of my
television shows. By this time she was in the middle of her three-year
fight with cancer. When word got out that I’d asked her, Kay Gable
waxed indignant. “She can’t possibly do it,” said Kay. “She’s not well
enough.”
“Why do you think I asked her?” I said. “For one reason only--to lift
her morale.”
“But she looks so ill.”
“Take it from me, she’ll look beautiful.”
On the day the show was due to be filmed, I went to Marion’s house
wearing the make-up Gene Hibbs had already given me at my home. I
brushed aside her compliments: “Wait until you see what he does for
you. And George Masters is coming, too, to do your hair.”
She was so weak that her nurse, Mrs. Mauser, had to help her downstairs
to the dressing room where the two wizards were waiting to ply their
arts. I went off to the bottom of her garden to shoot some scenes
there. When I came back, the transformation had been worked. It was as
if a magic wand had waved lovingly over her. She looked thirty years
younger than when I’d left not more than an hour before.
She literally danced out of that dressing room and hurried upstairs to
put on a blue satin gown. Her body was so thin I had to pin the dress
in with safety pins all up the back to keep it from falling off. Her
arms were as thin as wrists. “You need a mink stole,” I said, “to wear
around your shoulders.” When that last touch had been added, she took
a long look at herself in a mirror. “You look beautiful,” I said. She
nodded agreement, smiling like a girl on her way to her first prom.
I got Charlie Lederer on the telephone. “Come over to Marion’s right
away. I want you to see something.”
“What is it?” he said instantly, afraid as we all were that her illness
was taking a bad turn. I refused to tell him, let him see for himself.
At the first sight of Marion with her age and sickness erased, he burst
into tears and left the room.
For fear of her stutter and of fatiguing her, we’d arranged to give her
only one line to say: “Welcome to my house.” She carried it off on the
first take. “Is this all I get to do?” she demanded. “I want more.”
“Don’t be a greedy little girl.” At five o’clock she insisted on going
visiting. She went to Pickfair to show Mary how young she looked and
then all over town, until it was time for bed. At midnight I received a
call from her: “How do I get this stuff off my face?”
When the show was screened, she was a sensation. Thanks to Hibbs and
Masters, she enjoyed a last flurry of fame and fun, including her trip
to the inauguration, while I went off for a month to Europe. She had
two more offers for TV.
When I came home, Marion had been taken into Cedars of Lebanon
Hospital. She never came out alive. She was in a coma for five weeks.
“I don’t think she’ll recognize you,” Mrs. Mauser said. But I went
anyway. I’ll never forget my last picture of her. Weeks of daily cobalt
treatments had colored her neck and part of her face a deep purple. It
was heartbreaking, yet she was feeling no pain.
On September 23, 1961, the Los Angeles _Examiner_ reported the death
of Marion Davies the previous day. “The list of Miss Davies’ close
friends,” the obituary said, “was long, impressive and diverse,
reflecting her wide range of interests. They included George Bernard
Shaw, William Randolph Hearst, Sir Thomas Lipton, Winston Churchill,
Lloyd George, Bernard M. Baruch.... Miss Davies’ only venture into
matrimony lasted until her death. She was married to former Merchant
Marine Captain Horace Brown....”
* * * * *
A letter Frances Marion wrote her earlier struck some different notes:
“Remember how we laughed even when we were crying?... How we danced the
shimmy and the Charleston ... tossed our petticoats over the windmill
... went to the Follies to applaud _A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody_ and
cheer the beautiful Miss Davies, who was Miss-Miss-Miss America!
“Then the thirties ... those fabulous excursions to San Simeon ... the
long table in the dining room with W.R. shepherding his flock (and
not all of us lambs) ... nipping champagne in the little girls’ room
... those overnight picnics ... Miss-Miss-Miss America on a gentle
old nag but looking more scared than if a mouse had run up her riding
habit ... sleeping under the stars ... W.R. pacing up and down as he
waited for his forgotten Seidlitz powders ... the ride back in the
morning, the fields dappled with wild flowers ... a lot of us wilder
than the flowers but just as pretty ... Bill Haines dressed as though
for the North Pole wearing a hood over his head and face, and mittens
on his hands ... Errol Flynn smacked in the heart by the limbs of Lili
Damita....
“All of this was ours to enjoy and be grateful for the rest of our
lives. And none of these memories could have graced our past if it
hadn’t been for you and your loving kindness.”
If anybody can sum up a life in nine words, Frances can. Of Marion
Davies she says: “She was a butterfly with glue on her wings.”
_Twelve_
The lure of the almighty dollar brings two categories of people to our
community--those who work and those who prey. Like Hamlin before the
Pied Piper, we are infested with rodents, from bookies to con men, from
mobsters to panderers anxious to supply anything a paying customer
calls for. Difference between us and Hamlin is that we’ve given up
hoping for the Piper.
Extortioners have flocked to our town since the notorious reign of
George Browne and Willie Bioff, the union racketeers, who, in the
thirties and early forties, didn’t even condescend to visit the
studios--top producers had to stop by their hotel room and toss on to
the bed wads of greenbacks for “protection.”
Now there are only lean pickings left at most studios, and the leeches
cling to individual stars. They sucker them into accepting loans
to buy the new house, the new mink, the new car, in return for a
permanent slice of income. They let them run up bookmakers’ bills at
strangulation rates of interest, collectable every payday. By offering
fat fees for night-club performances, they entice them to Las Vegas,
the sanctuary for birds of prey, and make sure they get back every cent
of salary and more at the gambling tables.
Syndicate men have the run of Hollywood society. I don’t know who
charms whom more, the actor or the mobster. I understand that “Lucky”
Luciano could charm a bird off a bough. Frank Sinatra, who has a
weakness for such fragrant characters as Joe Rocco and Charlie
Fascetti, of Chicago fame, is fond of boasting: “If I hadn’t made it in
show business, I’d have been a mobster myself.”
Bookies used to have priority at studio switchboards when they made
their calls to Culver City. Nowadays, Las Vegas soaks up much more
floating cash and credit. It’s fashionable in some circles to brag
about how much you lost down the drain. Phil Silvers has shed a fortune
at the tables. Gordon MacRae has unloaded thousands at one go, so that
ever-popular pair of night-club entertainers, Gordon and Sheila MacRae,
parents of four fine children, have to smile with every evidence
of delight when they find they’ve been booked around the country
forty-three weeks out of fifty-two to make ends meet. When Ernie Kovacs
departed this vale of tears, he left $600,000 of gambling debts.
The police departments, often reported to be openly cozy with mobsters,
have a long record of blinking at other kinds of lawbreakers, provided
a nimble press agent can get on to the case in time. Clark Gable,
returning home from a party at Paulette Goddard’s after downing too
much of the bubbly, banged up his car in a traffic circle, but it was
happily announced that a passing motorist was really to blame.
Eddie Mannix has related how it cost a total of $90,000 to keep the
reputation of a celebrated MGM star intact when he was caught in the
same desperate situation that sent Big Bill Tilden, the tennis ace, to
prison as a homosexual.
Studio cops worked hand in glove with custodians of the law outside
the studio gates. Some days the telephones of top public-relations men
like Howard Strickling at Metro and Harry Brand at Fox rang like a
four-alarm call in the firehouse, as police dutifully reported they had
this or that star safely locked up for speeding, drinking, or mixing it
up in a public brawl.
There’s something heady about driving in Hollywood that got even
Garbo tagged twice for speeding. One of the wildcat drivers was Luise
Rainer. She had won her _Great Ziegfeld_ Oscar and was going into _The
Good Earth_ as the sensation of the industry. For the picture’s sake,
the studio conspired with minions of the law to frame her. She’d be
arrested, plead guilty, and the judge, primed in advance, would lift
her license until _The Good Earth_ was completed. So ran the plot.
But a snag developed after the police trapped her; she clung to her
innocence and vowed to fight the case in court. So the ticket had to be
quashed, and the suppress agents had to ’fess up to Luise. She refused
to speak to them for weeks.
Since we live in an age of corruption, almost like the declining days
of ancient Rome, with the “interests” digging in deeper all the time,
I ought not have been surprised at a campaign to build another Las
Vegas right in the heart of our community. The plan was to incorporate
a separate little city made up of the Sunset Strip, with its night
clubs like Dino’s and Jerry Lewis’ new place, and stretching from Santa
Monica Boulevard up into the hills. Like Beverly Hills, which is a town
unto itself and an extremely well-conducted one, this new Sunset City,
or whatever it was to be christened, would have written its own rules
and controlled its own life.
The idea was perfectly feasible, however unattractive. The area
involves a bit of no man’s land, bounded by the city limits of Beverly
Hills and Los Angeles, yet attached to neither of them. This is county
territory. The promoters’ objective, among other things, was to bring
in gambling, making it as legal as Nevada. It was a choice location and
could be a perfect haven for mobsters.
Among the unsuspecting citizens of the Strip, petitions were circulated
to gather signatures as the first step to take the proposed “city”
away from county control. Whether or not he realized the implications,
one of the sponsors was Bart Lytton, whose modernistic new savings
bank stands on the site of the old Garden of Allah at the hub of
the territory. It was he who threw one of the biggest parties in
Washington, D.C., on the night of President Kennedy’s inauguration,
which drew JFK and other members of the family. Even I received one of
the gold-engraved invitations, though I’d never met the host.
Our local _Citizen-News_, which has since changed management, broke
the story of what lay behind the apparently innocent moves to make
the Strip independent. I got busy in my column and with some letter
writing to throw a monkey wrench into the wheels.
I was amazed at the time that my words were allowed to appear, because
some exceedingly powerful individuals stood to gain from “Sunset City.”
But it worked. Our community had seen too much of Murder, Inc. muscling
in, of gangsters receiving the lead-poisoning treatment on the streets.
The petitions died from anemia--but I am sure the backers haven’t given
up hope or forgiven me.
There was another time when the businessmen of the Strip weren’t so
slow to take up arms. In this other affray they succeeded in putting
the object of their attention behind bars, but then she was a woman, or
even a lady, and a local celebrity. She was a tall, dignified creature
with a back straight as a ramrod, who introduced herself to me one day
as we sat under neighboring dryers in a beauty parlor. I was happy to
make her acquaintance, having heard a great deal about her.
She was a pioneer in her profession by allowing her patrons, including
some super-sized stars, to run up bills for their pleasure, whereas
cash in advance is, I gather, the almost invariable procedure
elsewhere. She accumulated a load of bad bets as a reward for
establishing her informal credit plan, though her establishment gained
a certain distinction from the array of several Oscars which stood on
her mantelpiece, gifts from satisfied customers.
She conceived the ambition of retiring from her former calling and
opening an extremely proper and swank restaurant on the Strip. She had
the plans drawn up, which envisaged upstairs dining accommodations for
private parties, which are not unusual among caterers. She ordered some
somber but becoming gowns to wear as hostess. The restaurateurs along
the Strip were outraged. They shuddered at the thought that _chez elle_
could well become the most popular, though innocent, port of call for
natives and tourists alike. She was denied a liquor license and later
arrested.