In their day, they were stars

Reviving a Faded Movie Star and Her Pool
Marion Davies and her beach house embodied Hollywood's Golden Age.
Decades later, the actress and the site are back in the limelight.
By Martha Groves, Times Staff Writer
September 29, 2006


At the height of the Roaring '20s, newspaper baron William Randolph
Hearst built an extravagant house on five beachfront acres in Santa
Monica for his blond mistress, actress Marion Davies.

It was the grandest manse at the shore, dwarfing the residences of such
Hollywood nobility as Louis B. Mayer, Samuel and Frances Goldwyn,
Irving Thalberg and Norma Shearer, Harold and Mildred Lloyd, and
Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford.

Davies, a silent film star, and Hearst entertained assiduously. Their
elaborate costume parties drew the likes of Clark Gable, Carole
Lombard, Cary Grant, Gloria Swanson and Howard Hughes, who donned
lederhosen for a Tyrolean bash.

Charlie Chaplin, rumored to have been Davies' lover, cavorted with her
in the 110-foot saltwater swimming pool, lined with Italian marble and
spanned by a Venetian marble bridge.

During the silver screen's Golden Age, Davies emerged as a Hollywood
favorite, an effervescent prankster with porcelain skin and a zest for
merrymaking.

Yet today she is remembered, if at all, as a minor luminary of that
era, largely because of two men.

There was Hearst, the married magnate who used his media empire to tout
her talents, leaving detractors to conclude that she couldn't stand on
her own. And there was Orson Welles, whose 1941 film "Citizen Kane" -
loosely based on Hearst's life - cemented in the public's mind the
notion that Davies was shrill and talentless.

In recent years, Davies' fans have worked to revive interest in the
actress and her films.

At the same time, admirers of the beach property, its mansion long ago
demolished, have been pushing to turn the forlorn site, with its
historic pool and guest house, into a public beach club.

The two efforts aim to rehabilitate not only a tired oceanfront
property but also a dead woman's image.

Near the end of 1915, soon after his wife, Millicent, had given birth
to twin boys, Hearst attended a new Irving Berlin musical on Broadway,
"Stop! Look! Listen!"

In the chorus was an 18-year-old strawberry blond named Marion Davies.
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., she was the youngest of five children of a city
magistrate, Bernard Douras, and his wife, Rose. She and two older
sisters who also went into show business adopted the name Davies after
seeing it on a real estate sign.

Hearst, 52, was smitten. "He sent me flowers and little gifts, like
silver boxes or gloves or candy," Davies recalled in taped
reminiscences, published posthumously in 1975 as "The Times We Had."

By the spring of 1916, according to Hearst biographer David Nasaw, the
tycoon and the chorine were seeing each other regularly at parties and
dinners. Seeking to be discreet for the sake of his wife, a former
chorus girl who refused to grant him a divorce, Hearst tried to lead a
double life. He fooled no one.

In May 1916, a story in the Hearst-owned New York American revealed
that Davies had been "the first of the new Follies beauty crop to be
selected by Mr. Ziegfeld" for his upcoming show. After that, news items
about Davies began appearing regularly in the Hearst papers.

Davies' first film role was in the 1917 "Runaway, Romany," a movie she
wrote that was directed by her brother-in-law George Lederer. "I
couldn't act, but the idea of silent pictures appealed to me because I
couldn't talk either," Davies recalled much later, alluding to her
problem of stuttering.

The next year, Hearst's Manhattan film studio, Cosmopolitan
Productions, produced two pictures starring Davies: "Cecilia of the
Pink Roses" and "The Burden of Proof." Reviews for the former were
mixed. Hearst's American raved about her performance.

The New York Times yawned: "There is no objection to Miss Davies. She
is by no means a sensational screen actress, but she fills the
requirements of her part."

Throughout her two-decade film career, in which she worked at MGM and
then Warner Bros., Davies seemed most at ease, and generally earned her
best reviews, in light, comedic roles. Hearst often miscast her in epic
costume dramas, but even in those she sometimes won praise.

In 1928, in the waning days of silents, Davies starred in two frothy
comedies directed by King Vidor that are considered her best: "The
Patsy" and "Show People." They gave rise to her reputation as
Hollywood's first screwball heroine.

That year, Davies and Hearst moved into their beach compound at what is
now 415 Pacific Coast Highway.

The three-story, Georgian Revival main house was U-shaped, with 18
Grecian columns across the back. Davies and Hearst had separate suites
connected by a hidden door. Four other houses were occupied by Davies'
family, long-term guests and more than 30 full-time servants.
Altogether, the complex included 110 bedrooms and 55 bathrooms.

As at his sumptuous San Simeon castle on California's Central Coast,
Hearst purchased entire rooms from European locations and had them
reassembled in the beach house. He transplanted paneling from Burton
Hall in Ireland, a ballroom from a 1750 Venetian palazzo and a 1560
tavern from an inn in Surrey, England. Seventy-five wood carvers worked
for a year to complete the balustrades of the main dual staircases.

A common misperception holds that Julia Morgan, California's first
female architect and Hearst's collaborator at San Simeon, laid out the
beach house. In fact, William Flannery, about whom little is known, was
the architect of the main house. Morgan designed the guest house (known
as the North House) and the pool, with details that caught Hearst's
eye.

"Would like marble stairs to San Simeon pool like those at Santa Monica
beach pool soon as convenient," Hearst telegraphed Morgan in November
1928. "They are very successful."

When the mansion developed foundation problems, Morgan served "almost
as a civil engineer to shore that up and keep it from washing out to
sea with the tides," said Nancy E. Loe, special collections librarian
at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

By the time the mansion was completed, according to "Marion Davies,"
Fred Lawrence Guiles' 1972 biography, it had cost $7 million - $3
million for construction and $4 million for furnishings and artworks.
That would be $83 million today.

The interior was palatial, with immense Oriental rugs, Tiffany crystal
chandeliers, a room finished in gold leaf and 37 fireplaces. Portraits
of Davies hung in the entrance hall.

When in town, Davies invited guests for dinner every night of the week
and for all-day swimming parties on the weekends, Nasaw wrote in his
2000 biography, "The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst."

Actress Louise Brooks recalled a weekend visit in April 1928 in which
"there were 20 people to lunch, 40 were added in the afternoon to swim
in the Venetian pool of white marble which separated the house from the
ocean, and 40 more were added for the buffet supper served on the porch
overlooking the pool."

On special occasions like Hearst's birthday, huge canvas tents were
erected to accommodate as many as 2,000 guests. In 1937, partygoers
dressed as circus performers (including a bearded Bette Davis) and rode
a merry-go-round borrowed from Warner Bros. To make room for it, Hearst
ordered a wall torn down and then put back.

In the beach house's early days, Davies' merry mood masked the panic
that she felt with the rise of talking pictures. At a New York showing
of Al Jolson's 1928 film "The Singing Fool," Davies began sobbing, her
mascara running, and whispered to a companion: "I'm ruined. Ruined!"

Davies, whose low whiskey voice was marred by stammering, feared that
talkies would spell the end of her starring roles - and her $500,000
annual salary. But not long after, she was stunned to hear from
Thalberg, MGM's production chief, that her sound test had earned her a
new contract. It turned out that memorizing lines kept her from
stuttering. She went on to make 16 talkies.

It wasn't just Hollywood celebrities and Hearst who viewed Davies as a
vivacious companion. She charmed playwright George Bernard Shaw and
aviator Charles Lindbergh. Weeks before the October 1929 stock market
crash, Winston Churchill and his family stayed at San Simeon, then
visited the beach house to swim.

In 1937, after 46 feature films, Davies retired from filmmaking. Not
long after, Davies' devotion to W.R., as she called Hearst, was sorely
tested. His assets mortgaged, big-spender Hearst was on the brink of
insolvency. Davies liquidated stock, real estate and jewelry to give
him an empire-saving $1-million cash infusion.

By that time, she had amassed a personal fortune worth several million
dollars, much of it in Beverly Hills and New York real estate. She was
one of the richest women in Hollywood and donated millions to charity,
hapless friends and even strangers.

Her image, however, would soon suffer a "murderous" blow, in the view
of biographer Guiles, with the release in 1941 of "Citizen Kane."

People began referring to Susan Alexander - Charles Foster Kane's
mistress, played by Dorothy Comingore - as "the Marion Davies part."
Alexander, like Davies, was blond, did jigsaw puzzles and drank too
much, and she lived with Kane in the San Simeon-like Xanadu. The late
movie critic Pauline Kael later observed: "Susan's fake stardom and the
role she played in Kane's life spelled Marion Davies to practically
everybody in the Western world."

In 1945, Davies sold the beach compound, which she described as a
"white elephant," because of a property tax dispute. Investors paid her
$600,000, a relative pittance that approximately equaled the cost of
the 37 fireplaces.

Hearst died at the age of 88 in 1951 in the Beverly Hills mansion he
shared with Davies. At his sons' request, the distraught Davies had
been sedated. As she slept, Hearst's body was hustled from the house,
along with every trace of him, including photographs of their many
trips to Europe.

"Do you realize what they did?" she would ask later. "They stole a
possession of mine. He belonged to me."

Ten weeks after Hearst's death, Davies married Horace Brown, a sea
captain who had courted her sister Rose. She began to drink even more
heavily than usual, and she lived increasingly in the past. Many of her
friends had died, others had drifted away, and most of her films had
been forgotten.

As Jeanine Basinger put it in her 1999 book, "Silent Stars": "Although
the critics often gave [Davies] excellent notices, they never forgave
her for the sin of William Randolph Hearst."

In early 1959, doctors found a malignant growth in Davies' jaw. She
underwent surgeries and cobalt treatments that discolored her famous
porcelain skin. She died Sept. 22, 1961, at the age of 64.

By then, the beach property had gone through various incarnations. One
owner, hotelier Joseph Drown, added three buildings to the site. In
April 1957, pieces of the main house, such as shingles, columns and
interior fixtures, were put up for sale. Not long after, the house was
demolished.

The state bought the land in 1959 and leased it to the city of Santa
Monica, which in turn leased it to the private Sand & Sea Club from
1960 to 1990. The city subsequently operated a day-use beach facility
there.

The 1994 Northridge earthquake sent a brick chimney crashing through
the roof of the North House. All buildings in the complex were
red-tagged.

Since then, the site has slowly deteriorated for lack of funds. The
North House's windows have been boarded over, as have the historic pool
and its whimsical fish tiles. Weeds have sprouted through cracks in the
pavement. Railings have rusted and wooden beams stand rotting.

For years, government officials and community activists have worked on
a plan to transform the site into a public beach club. For a modest
day-use fee, anyone would be able to enjoy the swimming pool where
Chaplin and other stars splashed, a sun deck with lounge chairs,
volleyball and paddle tennis courts, event rooms, a children's play
area and picnic tables.

Wallis Annenberg, the TV Guide heiress and philanthropist, has
committed nearly $28 million for the project from the Annenberg
Foundation. She recalls as a young woman spending glorious summer days
at the Sand & Sea Club, where many of the members, like her, were
Jewish. Other private clubs tended to exclude Jews.

"It bothered me to see [this] land lying vacant with a chain-link fence
around it," Annenberg said. "It was important to me that this be a
lovely fun place for the public to enjoy."

The city recently reached a settlement with residents who had
challenged the project because of worries about traffic, safety and
noise. The city expects to break ground next September and complete the
project by early 2010.

Davies' fans hope that the facility will renew enthusiasm for her
movies and the Golden Age in which she played a leading role.

"Seeing Marion Davies' name in connection with this site will spur
interest in her career and the history of Hollywood and its connection
to Santa Monica," said Marc Wanamaker, a Hollywood historian and
archivist. "Remember, she was Hollywood royalty."

A few years after her death, film festivals revived several of Davies'
best films. Confronted with her comedic flair and charms, film buffs
and scholars weaned on "Citizen Kane" suddenly had to rethink their
opinions. "Captured on Film," a 2001 documentary, aimed to further
redress some of the misjudgments.

Welles also sought to set the record straight. Decades after "Citizen
Kane" cast a shadow over Davies' career, Welles apologized, saying
Susan Alexander "bears no resemblance at all" to Davies.

Fourteen years after Davies' death, he sang her praises in the foreword
to "The Times We Had," calling her "one of the most delightfully
accomplished comediennes in the whole history of the screen."


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