William Randolph Hearst died in the early hours of August 14, 1951, at his Beverly Hills home. He was 88 years old. By the time Marion Davies woke that morning, his body was already gone, taken by his sons along with his personal belongings. The locks had been changed.
Every trace that he had lived there with her had been removed. She had shared his life for 34 years. She had sold her jewelry and written him a check for $1 million to save his empire during the Depression. She had nursed him through a decade of decline.
And when he was buried 500 miles away in San Francisco, she was not there. His wife, Millicent Hearst, from whom he had been separated since 1926 but never divorced, performed that role. A Time magazine reporter noted that Marion remained behind drawn curtains that day. She told a nurse, “I had thought I might go to church this morning, but I will just stay here alone.
He knew how I felt about him, and I know how he felt about me. ” The reporter also noted a small detail: Hearst’s dachshund, Helena, sat beside her. The story of Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst began years earlier, in a Broadway theater. In 1916, Hearst, then 53 and controlling 28 newspapers, attended the Ziegfeld Follies for eight consecutive weeks to watch a 19-year-old performer named Marion Davies.
She was a gifted comedian with a stutter she had learned to manage through relentless rehearsal. He was married with five sons, but he was determined to make her a star. By 1917, the arrangement was understood. Hearst financed her films through Cosmopolitan Pictures, promoted her relentlessly in his newspapers, and built her a 110-room ocean house in Santa Monica.
What he could not give her was his name. Millicent Hearst would not grant a divorce, and Hearst would not force the issue. Marion stayed. She would later say she never walked out on him because he was good to her and kind to her.
Marion was genuinely talented. She had successfully made the transition from silent films to talkies, negotiated her own contracts, and earned $10,000 a week in the 1920s. Director King Vidor, impressed by her comic instincts, cast her in The Patsy and Show People. Serious critics recognized her skill at physical comedy and timing.
Hearst, however, preferred her in period dramas and historical epics, casting her as queens and duchesses. He considered comedy beneath her. The result was a career pulled between the roles Hearst imagined for her and the comedies where her real talent surfaced. Her biographer, Lara Gabrielle, who spent nine years researching her life, would later describe her as one of the genuine comic pioneers of American cinema.
There was also a carefully guarded secret. Sometime around 1919, Marion gave birth to a girl in a hospital outside Paris. The child was named Patricia and was officially presented as the daughter of Marion’s sister Rosemary. The little girl grew up inside the Hearst empire as Marion’s niece.
According to later accounts reported by the Los Angeles Times, Hearst privately acknowledged her on her wedding day. Marion kept the secret for the rest of her life. The 1930s brought financial collapse. By 1937, the Hearst corporation was in serious difficulty, and San Simeon, the castle he had been building for nearly two decades, was at risk.
Marion sold all her jewelry and wrote him a check for $1 million. Hearst kept the castle. She was never repaid. She made her last film that same year and never appeared on screen again.
In 1941, Orson Welles released Citizen Kane. The film told the story of Charles Foster Kane, a newspaper magnate who devoted his fortune to promoting the career of an untalented singer named Susan Alexander Kane, a kept woman who had no business on a stage. The physical and biographical resemblance to Hearst was impossible to miss. And the world decided that Susan Alexander was Marion Davies.
Welles would insist for the rest of his life that the character was a composite, not a portrait of Marion. His co-writer, Herman Mankiewicz, had spent years as a guest at San Simeon and had assembled his observations into the screenplay. None of that mattered. Thirty million people saw the film and concluded they now knew exactly who Marion Davies was.
The truth was different. Marion was genuinely talented, but her career had been damaged by too much interference, not lack of ability. Hearst’s insistence on lavish period pieces prevented her from developing the comedic talent that had made her exceptional. None of this was visible in the film.
Marion did not see Citizen Kane. Her sister Rose did and called her immediately afterward, furious. Marion told her to calm down, then said, “There’s one tradition that I have that was taught to me by W. R.
Orson Welles can make whatever movie he wanted to make, and who am I to tell him how to make his movie? ”
Hearst did not share her composure. He attempted to stop the film, pressured theater owners, and ordered his publications not to review or advertise it. A coalition of Hollywood executives tried to purchase the negative and destroy it.
They failed. Citizen Kane was released, won one Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, and eventually became widely regarded as the greatest American film ever made. And Susan Alexander Kane became the lens through which the world looked at Marion Davies. She watched this happen.
She was alive for most of it. In recordings she made in the 1950s, never intended for publication, she remained composed, but there are moments where her voice shifts when certain years are approached, as if the body remembers what the voice is not permitted to say. In Hearst’s final years, Marion managed his household and cared for him daily. On the night he died, his sons were present, along with lawyers and associates.
Marion found the commotion intolerable and said they were disturbing him. A doctor administered a sedative. Marion was given something to help her sleep. She was unconscious when Hearst died.
Eleven weeks later, she married a man named Horace Brown, a merchant marine captain who resembled a younger Hearst. The marriage was not happy. She filed for divorce twice; neither was finalized. Hearst had left her 170,000 shares in the Hearst Corporation, enough to give her a controlling interest.
Marion signed papers returning every share to the Hearst family. She kept only the trust fund established from 30,000 shares. She did not explain why. She went on to build the Marion Davies Children’s Clinic at UCLA, funded by a donation of $1.
9 million, and established the Marion Davies Foundation to search for treatments for childhood diseases. She threw herself into fundraising. Those who knew her described a woman who was still funny and warm but who was, by most accounts, drinking heavily. Marion died of stomach cancer on September 22, 1961.
She was 64. She is buried at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in the Douras family mausoleum under her own name. She left half her estate, approximately $10 million, to charity. The other half went to Patricia Lake, introduced in the will as her niece.
In October 1993, Patricia Lake lay dying in Rancho Mirage, California. Ten hours before her death, she told her son that Marion Davies was her mother and William Randolph Hearst was her father. The Los Angeles Times reported the story the day after Patricia died. The secret had been kept for more than 70 years.
In 1975, Orson Welles wrote a foreword for a book of Marion’s recorded memoirs, published after her death. He wrote, “As one who shares much of the blame for casting another shadow, the shadow of Susan Alexander Kane, I rejoice in this opportunity to record something which today is all but forgotten… Marion Davies was one of the most delightfully accomplished comediennes in the whole history of the screen. She would have been a star if Hearst had never happened.
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The clinic at UCLA carried her name until 1998, when it was renamed. In September 2022, Lara Gabrielle published Captain of Her Soul, a biography based on nine years of research, including the original tape recordings. It was reviewed as a corrective to decades of myth. The title came from a sentence Marion spoke with complete conviction: “I’m the captain of my soul.
Therefore, what I want to do, I want to do myself, regardless of what people think that I should do. ”
The world had given her many names over the course of her life. Chorus girl, mistress, Susan Alexander, the woman who could not make it without Hearst’s money.
She had chosen her own.