Marion Davies Gave Hearst One Million Dollars. He Locked Her Out the Night He Died D
August 1951, Beverly Hills. Marian Davies woke to silence. The house was empty. William Randph Hurst, the most powerful man in American media, had died in the night. His sons had taken his body, changed the locks, removed every trace that he had ever lived there with her. She had loved him for 34 years.
She had sold her jewelry to save his empire. She had given him everything except the one thing he never asked for, a way out. His daxund sat beside her on the bed. She stayed behind drawn curtains while they buried him 500 miles away. This is the woman, Citizen Cain, turned into a punchline. This is what it cost her.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Crown Files. There is a particular kind of erasia that only Hollywood knows how to perform. It doesn’t use fire or silence. It uses a film reel, a darkened theater. 30 million people walking out into the night, having decided without being told who a woman was.
In 1941, a movie called Citizen Cain opened in New York. It has since been called the greatest American film ever made. What it did to one specific woman has been called, more quietly, one of the great injustices of the 20th century. The woman’s name was Marian Davis. She was a comedian, genuinely gifted by all serious accounts.
She had made the transition from silent pictures to talkis at a time when that transition destroyed most careers. She had negotiated her own contracts, earning $10,000 a week in the 1920s, a number most of her contemporaries could not have imagined. She had built a children’s clinic at UCLA.
She had written a check for $1 million to save the empire of the man she loved when that empire was on the verge of collapse. And then, in a film she had nothing to do with, a fictional character named Susan Alexander appeared on screen. talentless, kept resentful and the world decided it knew exactly who Marian Davis was. It didn’t.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves because the story of Marian Davies does not begin with Citizen Cain. It begins much earlier. It begins, as so many stories of this kind do, with a young woman who was simply very good at something and a very powerful man who noticed. Tonight we tell the story of the woman history chose to remember as a mistress and what history chose to forget about her in order to do so.
The talent, the sacrifice, the locked door on a summer morning in Beverly Hills when the man she had loved for 34 years was taken away in the night and she was given no say in how the story would be told. Her name was Marian Davies. He was William Randolph Hurst. And this is what really happened. Brooklyn, 1914. Marian Cecilia Durus was 17 years old when she first stepped onto a Broadway stage.
And she already knew two things about herself that the world had not yet decided to believe. The first was that she was funny. Not charming funny, not pretty and funny, but genuinely technically funny in the way that requires the kind of timing you cannot teach. She could hold a pause for exactly as long as it needed to hold. She could make a single look carry the weight of a scene.
She knew without being told where the laugh was. The second thing she knew was that she had a stutter. It had been with her since childhood, a catch in the throat, a hesitation before certain sounds, a betrayal of the voice that the rest of her refused to allow. She had grown up in a household of three older sisters, who were also performers.
She had learned early that you did not let the stutter stop you. You prepared. You rehearsed longer than everyone else. You stood in front of a mirror until the words came the way you needed them to come. She went by Marian Davis on stage. Her father, Bernard Durus, was a New York City magistrate, Irish Catholic, practical, careful about names and appearances.
The Davis name belonged to her sisters, too. It was cleaner. It was easier. She was Marian Davis. By 1916, she had graduated to the Ziggfeld Follies, the pinnacle of Broadway spectacle, the stage where the most watched women in New York performed for the most powerful men in America. The costumes were extraordinary, the music was lavish.
The audience sat very close to the front. One of those audience members in the autumn of 1916 was William Randolph Hurst. He was 53 years old. He controlled 28 newspapers. One in five Americans read a Hurst paper every week. He had served in Congress. He had run for mayor of New York. He owned Hurst Castle, a palace being built on a hilltop.
He had a wife, Millisent Wilsonhurst, whom he had married in 1903. They had five sons. He sat in the front row and watched Marian Davies perform. Then he came back the next night and the night after that. According to her own account, Hurst attended the Folly for eight consecutive weeks. Every night front row, he sent gifts backstage.
He arranged to have her photographed. He found ways to be in rooms she was in. Marian Davis, at 19, was not entirely sure what to do about a 53-year-old married man who was perhaps the most powerful figure in American media. She was not naive. She had grown up in New York. She understood perfectly well what it meant when a man of Hurst’s standing began orbiting a young chorus girl.
She was also by every account that survives genuinely enchanted by him. He was unexpectedly kind in private. He had a way of directing his entire attention at the person in front of him that made them feel like the only person in any room. Marian would describe this quality later. He gives me the feeling that I am worth something to him.
She was already worth a great deal on her own terms. She was earning a solid living and building a reputation with real comic instincts. Hurst saw it as something he wanted to possess and protect. He was going to make her a movie star. He was absolutely certain of this. By 1917, the arrangement was understood.
Hurst would finance her films and use his newspapers to promote her career. He would build her an ocean house on the Santa Monica beach, 110 rooms, because the woman he loved should live in importance. He would create cosmopolitan pictures specifically to produce her work. What he could not give her was his name.
Millisent Hurst was Catholic. She would not grant him a divorce, and Hurst would not force the issue. He and Millisent would separate fully by 1926, but they would remain married until the day he died. Marian knew this. She had known it from the beginning, and she stayed. She would say in a moment recorded on tape and preserved in fragments that she never walked out on him because he was good to her, because he was kind.
Because in a world that was often neither of those things to women who lived the way she lived, those qualities were not small. What she did not say, what she perhaps could not say even to herself in those late recordings was whether goodness and kindness were enough. Whether 34 years in the shadow of another woman’s legal claim was a price that could be rationalized.
Whether the word mistress, which the world applied to her so easily and so permanently, had ever felt in the quiet moments like a wound. The 1920s were not quiet moments. In those years, the parties at San Simeon drew everyone who mattered in Hollywood. Charlie Chaplain, Douglas Fairbanks, Clark Gable, Winston Churchill, a young John F.
Kennedy, George Bernard Shaw, who looked at the castle and said, according to multiple accounts, that it was what God would have built if he had had the money. Marian was not a guest at these gatherings. She was the hostess, the center, the woman around whom the room organized itself. And on the screen, in picture after picture, she was doing work that the serious people were beginning to notice.
Director King Vidor after finishing his masterwork, The Crowd, in 1928, approached Marian specifically because he wanted her to star in a Hollywood satire. he was planning. He had seen her work. He knew what she could do with physical comedy with timing with the kind of layered performance that looks effortless and is anything but.
He cast her in the psy and then in show people. And for those of us who have actually watched those films, not the myth, not the shadow cast by what would come 13 years later, but the films themselves, what is visible is unambiguous. She was very, very good. Orson Wells would say so himself eventually, but that comes later.
For now, it is 1928 and Marian Davies is at the apex of her world. The parties are brilliant. The career is alive. The man she loves is the most powerful man in America, and he is entirely devoted to her, and she is entirely devoted to him. And there is a little girl growing up inside the castle with Hurst’s eyes, introduced to everyone as Marian’s niece, a girl whose real name and whose real parentage will remain one of the most carefully guarded secrets in Hollywood for the next 65 years. The light in those photographs from San Simeon, the ones that survive, golden and formal and slightly overexposed, catches Marian Davies at the height of everything. Standing in the courtyard, laughing at something off camera, wearing a dress that Hurst would have approved. She
looks in every single one of them like a woman who has everything. What the photographs do not show is what she did not have and what she was about to lose. The problem with being loved by the most powerful man in America is that his love has opinions. Hurst had opinions about everything about architecture, which was why San Simeon had been under construction since 1919 and would continue to be under construction for another 20 years.
accumulating rooms and towers and imported European ceilings with the relentless logic of a man who could not stop wanting more about food, which was why dinner at the castle had rules. You sat where you were told. You arrived on time. You did not under any circumstances appear drunk at his table, even if you had arrived at the party six hours earlier.
About newspapers about which he had opinions that had shaped the political consciousness of 30 million Americans and helped push the country into at least one war. and about Marian Davy’s career, about which his opinions were, depending on how you measure these things, either the greatest gift ever given to a woman in Hollywood, or the single most efficient method of containing a genuine talent ever devised.
He wanted her in period dramas, historical epics, lush, expensive productions in which she appeared as queens and duchesses and women of consequence, draped in costumes that cost more than most Americans earned in a year, photographed in the best available light. What Marian Davies was actually brilliant at was comedy. specifically the kind of fast physical improvisational comedy that requires not beauty, though she had that too, but intelligence.
The ability to hold two competing registers simultaneously, to be funny without trying to be funny, to let the audience in on something the other characters haven’t noticed yet. Director King Vidor had seen it. The critics who paid attention had seen it. Her co-stars saw it constantly in the way she could detonate a scene with a single raised eyebrow.
Hurst did not see it or saw it and considered it beneath her. The comedies were fine. The comedies made money. But a queen, a woman of grandeur, of historical weight, that was what she deserved. That was what the world should see when it looked at Marian Davies. The result was a career that ran on two parallel tracks.
There was the career Hurst imagined for her expensive promoted relentlessly in every Hurst publication in the country, occupying 14 rooms of bungalow on the MGM lot that he had negotiated as part of the distribution deal. And there was the career she was actually capable of, which surfaced in the comedies, the moments when the cameras caught her in motion rather than in pose, and which her biographer Lara Gabrielle would later describe after 9 years of research as the work of one of the genuine comic pioneers of American cinema. When MGM’s Irving Thalberg cast Norma Sheira, his own wife, in the role of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the Barretts of Wimpol Street in 1934. Hurst erupted. He had wanted Marian in that part. He pulled Hurst newspaper support from MGM entirely. Louis B.
Mayor barely noticed. Marian noticed, but she said nothing in public that could be quoted. She negotiated her own contracts. She earned $10,000 a week in the 1920s, and she invested wisely. She understood money in a way that Hurst, for all his power, did not, because Hurst had grown up inheriting money, and Marian had grown up in Brooklyn, knowing that the money stopped the moment the work stopped, and there was the matter of what had happened in France.
Sometime around 1919, the accounts vary by a few years and the precise date was never established with certainty. Marian Davies gave birth to a child. The birth took place in a hospital outside Paris during a discreet absence from Hollywood that was explained to the public with the standard language of the era.
Arrest, a European trip, nothing unusual. The child was a girl. Uh, her name on the paperwork was Patricia. The mother listed was Rosemary Davies, Marian’s older sister, whose own infant had died around the same time. The father listed was Rosemary’s aranged husband. The certificate was altered. The story was established, and the little girl with William Randph Hurst’s eyes grew up inside the Hurst Empire as Marian Davy’s niece.
She was present at San Simeon for the great parties of the 1920s. She moved through those gilded rooms past Clark Gable and Charlie Chaplain and the European art that Hurst had shipped in by the crate as a peripheral figure, a background presence, a girl nobody looked at too closely. According to later accounts reported by the Los Angeles Times, Hurst himself acknowledged her privately.
On her wedding day, he told her who he was. For more than 60 years, Patricia kept what she had been told. Marian kept it longer. She kept it for the rest of her life. There is a particular kind of silence that is not absence, but discipline. the daily practice of not saying the thing that would change everything.
Marian Davies was extraordinarily disciplined. She had learned to manage her stutter through preparation and repetition. She had learned to manage her position in Hurst’s life through patience and consistency. She had learned to manage the public story of Patricia through a lifetime of introductions that began with the words my niece.
The discipline held it held through the 1920s, through the great parties, through the peak years of the career. It held into the 1930s when everything began to come apart. The depression arrived. Hurst had always spent extravagantly the castle, the newspapers, the art, the films, the bungalow on the MGM lot, the ocean house in Santa Monica with its 110 rooms and its private cinema and its pool that could have accommodated a small neighborhood.
For a man of Hurst’s wealth, extravagance had always been sustainable. Then, suddenly, it was not. By 1937, the Hurst Corporation was in serious difficulty. The debts had accumulated to a point that his bankers were beginning to use words like foreclosure, San Simeon, the castle, the hilltop, the thing he had been building for 18 years as a monument to his love of beauty, and his refusal to be limited was at risk.
Marian sold her jewelry. Not some of it, all of it. The pieces accumulated over two decades gifts from Hurst himself, from the lavish years when money had been entirely theoretical, when a bracelet or a necklace had been added to the collection, the way other men might add a postcript to a letter.
She sold everything. Then she wrote him a check for $1 million. In 1937, $1 million was a sum beyond the imagination of most Americans. It was not a gesture. It was not symbolic. It was the difference between losing San Simeon and keeping it. Hurst kept the castle. Marian Davies did not ask to be repaid.
She had given up her jewelry, her financial cushion, a year’s income, and what she received in return was what she had always received, his company, his attention, his very considerable affection. His name remained unavailable. She made her last film that same year. Ever since Eve, 1937, she was 40 years old.
Hurst had closed Cosmopolitan Pictures as part of his financial restructuring. There were no more vehicles being built specifically for her. The era of the lavish Hurst produced Marian Davis film was over. Not because she had aged out of her talent, but because the machinery that had both elevated and constrained her had finally run out of money.
She did not make another film. Instead, she stayed. She nursed his decline. She managed the household. She was present at his side through the late 1930s and into the 1940s when the world was at war and the castle was considered too exposed to the coast to be safe. And they moved to a remote property in the Oregon wilderness that Marian called Spatoon because she despised it.
She stayed because she loved him. She stayed because walking out was not a thing she was capable of. and she stayed as 1941 arrived, the year that a young director named Orson Wells finished a film he had been working on for months. A film that the Hollywood establishment was already nervous about.
A film that would do to Marian Davis what no financial crisis and no failed career move had ever managed to do. It would give her a name she had never chosen, and it would make that name permanent. The film that destroyed Marian Davis’s legacy was not made about Marian Davis. Orson Wells would say this for the rest of his life with the particular urgency of a man who understood too late exactly what he had done.
The character of Susan Alexander Kaine, the untalented singer, the kept woman, the embarrassment her powerful patron could not stop promoting despite the evidence of her own mediocrity, was not intended as a portrait of Marian Davis. Wells was clear on this point. His co-writer, Herman Mankovitz, had spent years as a guest at Hurst table, eating Hurst food and drinking Hurst’s wine and collecting observations about the man that he would eventually weaponize in the screenplay.
But Susan Alexander, Wells maintained, was a composite, a device, not a woman. None of that, however, really mattered. What mattered was what 30 million people saw when they walked into a darkened theater in 1941. and watched Charles Foster Cain, newspaper magnate, the most powerful man in America, a man whose physical and biographical resemblance to William Randph Hurst was impossible to miss, devote his fortune and his obsession to the career of a woman who had no business being on a stage.
In the end, they saw Marian Davis. They had been given every reason to see her. The character was a showgirl from New York with a thick accent. Her patron was a media baron who had built an empire from newspapers. He financed her career, promoted her relentlessly in his publications, constructed an enormous estate on a hilltop for them to inhabit together.
He could not accept that she was not talented. He could not stop pushing her forward even as the audiences turned away. The parallels were not subtle. Herman Mangowitz, who had sat at San Simeon and watched Hurst manage Marian’s career with the obsessive precision of a man who believed his attention could substitute for ability, had assembled those observations into something that looked from the outside exactly like the truth. The truth was different.
The truth was that Marian Davies was genuinely talented in a different register than the one Hurst kept insisting she occupy, but talented nonetheless. The truth was that the real damage to her career had come not from lack of ability, but from too much interference. Too many period epics, too many roles that required her to be regal rather than funny, too many decisions made by a man who loved her and was completely wrong about what she was best at.
None of this was visible in the film. What was visible in the film was Susan Alexander hitting notes she couldn’t reach, performing for audiences that winced, sustained by a man whose pride had long since overtaken his judgment. Marian Davies did not see Citizen Cain. Her sister Rose did. Rose called her immediately afterward.
According to the account Marian later recorded on tape, Rose was furious. She said she would kill him. She said it was terrible. She said the film had Marian playing opera behind curtains and it was against her and she couldn’t bear it. Marian told her to calm down. Then she said something that her biographer Lara Gabrielle preserved from the original recording and that is worth letting stand in its entirety.
There’s one tradition that I have that was taught to me by WR. Or a Orson Wells can make whatever movie he wanted to make. And who am I to tell him how to make his movie? It is a remarkable sentence for many reasons. It is dignified in a way that the situation did not require her to be. It is generous toward a man who had just handed her a caricature that would follow her for the rest of her life.
And it suggests underneath the composure something that Marian Davies had learned over the course of 24 years beside William Randph Hurst, that there were battles you chose and battles you let pass, and that the ones worth fighting were never the ones that made you look small. Hurst did not share her composure. He was incandescent.
He had recognized himself immediately, and more than himself, he had recognized what Manowitz had assembled from those years of dinners and weekends, and overheard conversations. He moved with everything he had to stop the film. He considered buying the negative outright. He pressured theater owners, and given that one in five Americans read a Hurst paper every week, his pressure was not theoretical.
No Hurst publication reviewed Citizen Canain. No Hurst publication advertised it. A coalition of Hollywood executives, nervous about the man’s reach and influence attempted to purchase the film’s negative and have it destroyed. They did not succeed. Citizen Canain was released. It did not find a large audience in its original run, partly because of Hurst’s suppression campaign, partly because the film was difficult in ways that 1941 audiences were not prepared for.
It won one Academy Award, best original screenplay shared by Wells and Manitz. It lost best picture to How Green Was My Valley. Then the years passed and the critical consensus shifted and Citizen Cain became slowly and then with gathering speed the film that everyone agreed was the greatest American movie ever made.
And Susan Alexander Cain became in the same gradual and irreversible process the lens through which the world looked at Marian Davies. She watched this happen. She was alive for most of it. the 1940s, the 1950s, the years in which the film’s reputation solidified, in which the film schools began teaching it, in which a generation of critics and cinnaphiles absorbed its version of the Hurst Davies relationship as historical fact.
She was alive and she was watching and she was maintaining the composure she had always maintained and saying when asked variations of the same thing she had told Rose on the telephone in 1941. She had no quarrel with Orson Wells. What she had was something quieter and more corrosive. the knowledge that the public story of her life had been written by someone else in a language that had nothing to do with the truth and that the story had been so well-made and so widely seen that correcting it was no longer possible. You cannot argue with a masterpiece. You can only watch it outlive you. There were moments when the discipline cracked. In the recordings she made in the 1950s recordings that were never meant to be published that were assembled into a book only after her
death. There is occasionally a quality to her voice when certain subjects arise that her editors described as a mixture of gratitude and resentment, of awe and contempt, of warmth and frustration. She was not performing equinimity on those tapes. She was not being careful. She was being honest in the way that people are honest when they believe no one is listening.
But even on those tapes, she did not say what the cost had been. Not fully. Not the way that the cost of 34 years beside a man who would not give you his name eventually settles into the body, into the habits, into the bottle that had become more necessary as the years accumulated and the career receded and the great parties of San Simeon became a memory.
The drinking had worsened after the film stopped. Everyone who knew her in those years noted it. She was managing something that had become very large and very heavy. And she was managing it largely alone because the man she loved was old now and declining and needed her to be steady rather than struggling. She was steady. She went to him every day.
She managed the household at the Beverly Hills residence where Hurst spent his final years too frail for the castle, surrounded by his sons and his lawyers and the machinery of an empire that was still enormous even in its diminished state. And she was there in the summer of 1951 when he began to fail.
His sons were there too. All of them moving through the rooms, having conversations in lowered voices, taking meetings with lawyers, establishing the shape of what would come next. The house that had been Marian’s house, the house she had paid for, the house she had managed, the house where she had nursed him through a decade of decline, was filling with people who had his name. She did not.
She never had. And now, in the long evenings of that final summer, as Hurst moved toward the end of something that had lasted almost a century, the people with his name were making decisions that Marian Davies was not part of. She did not know yet how completely she was about to be removed from the story.
The night of August 14th, 1951 began like many of the nights that had preceded it. William Randph Hurst was 88 years old. He had been in decline for years. The kind of slow incremental decline that the very old experience where each week is slightly less than the week before. Where the distance between the bed and the window becomes a journey, where the voice that once commanded the attention of an entire country has become something quieter and more private.
Marian had been at his side through all of it. She had reorganized the Beverly Hills house around his needs. She had managed the staff, the schedule, the medications, the visits from the doctors who came and went with the careful expressions of people who understood what they were managing.
She had been doing this for years. It had become the structure of her days. That evening the house was full in a way it had not been in some time. His sons had arrived. All of them or most of them the sons Millisent had given him. The sons who carried his name in the way Marian had never been permitted to carry it.
Lawyers were present. Associates, the people whose presence in a house signals not a gathering but a transition. They moved through the rooms and spoke in lowered voices and took telephone calls and had the quality of people who are waiting for something they have already in some important sense decided.
Marian did not want them there, not because she was cruel or territorial or small about it, but because she had spent years maintaining a particular kind of quiet around his decline, a quiet that she believed he needed, that she had worked to protect, that was now being filled with voices and footsteps, and the low hum of people conducting business in the rooms where she had cared for him.
She found it intolerable. She told them it was too loud. She told them they were disturbing him. The sons did not leave. At some point that evening, the exact sequence of events is not entirely clear, and the accounts that survive were assembled afterward from people who had their own reasons for remembering things in particular ways.
A doctor administered a seditive. Marian was given something to help her sleep. She was upset. She was distressed. And the people in the house had decided, or so the record suggests, that the most useful thing she could do at that moment was be unconscious. She slept. William Randph Hurst died in the early hours of August 14th, 1951.
He was 88 years old. Beside him with a people with his name. Marian Davies was not among them. Ah. When she woke, the house was different in a way that takes a moment to understand the way a room is different when something large has been removed from it and the space it occupied is suddenly wrongly empty.
She knew before anyone told her. She knew from the quality of the silence. His body had been taken in the night. his belongings, the things that had accumulated in that house over the years he had spent there, the evidence of his presence, the small material record of a man who had filled every room he occupied had been removed.
His sons had organized this with the same efficiency they had brought to everything else. The body was already on its way to San Francisco, where the funeral would be held, where Milisent would walk slowly around the casket in her widow’s weeds, where the family that had his name would gather to bury him.
Marian stayed behind drawn curtains. Time magazine sent a reporter and what they recorded in their coverage of his death was this. That Marian Davies, the woman who had shared his life for three decades, did not attend the funeral. That she remained at her Beverly Hills home. That she told a nurse on the day of the service.
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. And then the reporter noted one more detail, small, almost incidental, the kind of detail that gets included because someone thought it was color, not understanding that it was the whole story.
His duhund Helena sat beside her. There is something about that image that resists description without also resisting the impulse to explain it. A woman behind drawn curtains in an empty house with a dog that had also been left behind. 500 m away the people with his name were conducting the ceremonies.
Here in the house she had managed and maintained and paid for and filled with 34 years of her life. There was only this. She had given him her jewelry. She had given him a million dollar check. She had given him her career, or at least the career she might have had without him, the one where the comedies multiplied, where King Vidor made film after film with her, where the talent that Orson Wells would spend decades apologizing for obscuring had room to develop on its own terms.
She had given him the silence around Patricia. She had given him 10 years of nursing and managing and being steady when steadiness was the only thing she had left to give. And she had received in return everything he was capable of giving. His love which was real, his attention which was consuming, his protection which was genuine.
His houses and his parties and his castle on the hill and his newspapers that promoted her name in every city in America. His name she had never received. Not on a certificate, not on a door, not in the way that the law recognizes or society acknowledges or history records. She was not his wife.
She had never been his wife. And now he was gone. And the wife he had never stopped being married to was in San Francisco performing the role that the law had always reserved for her. And Marian Davies was sitting in Beverly Hills with a dog that had also been overlooked, and the curtains were drawn, and the house was very quiet.
11 weeks later, she married a man named Horus Brown. He was a merchant marine captain she had met only recently, in the months of Hurst’s final decline. Those who knew her said he bore a striking resemblance to a younger Hurst. The marriage was not happy. She would file for divorce twice.
Neither was finalized. She stayed. Staying was what she knew. There was one more piece of business to attend to. Hurst had left her 170,000 shares in the Hurst Corporation, enough to give her a controlling interest that exceeded even his sons. The lawyers explained what this meant. Marian listened. Then she signed the papers returning every share to the Hurst family.
She kept only the trust fund he had established for her, the one derived from 30,000 shares which would sustain her for the rest of her life. Everything else she gave back, no conditions, no demands, no negotiation. The sons who had sedated her and removed his body and changed the locks and taken him to San Francisco to be buried without her.
She handed them back the empire she could have claimed. She did not explain why. The accounts that survive suggest she did not feel the need to explain. Perhaps it was dignity. Perhaps it was exhaustion. Perhaps it was the logic of a woman who had spent 34 years declining to fight for the things she was owed and was not about to start now.
Or perhaps it was something simpler, that the shares were his and he was gone, and keeping them would have required her to spend whatever remained of her life in a legal war with the people who had his name. She did not have the energy for that war. She had a children’s clinic to build. She built the clinic.
The Marian Davies Children’s Clinic at UCLA opened in the years following Hurst’s death, funded by a donation of $1.9 million more than she had given him to save his castle, directed now toward children with illnesses that could not be argued with or managed or contained by the force of a powerful man’s will.
The clinic bore her name, not his, hers. It would continue to operate under that name for nearly 40 years. She also established the Marian Davies Foundation, which searched for treatments for childhood diseases. She threw herself into fundraising for causes she had supported quietly for years, children’s hospitals, organizations that served people who could not afford the kind of care she had always been able to arrange for herself and those around her.
Those who encountered her in this period described a woman who was still funny, still warm, still possessed of the timing that had made King Vidor want to put her in front of a camera. She was also, by most accounts, drinking heavily. The combination of the two, the warmth and the alcohol, the charm and the cost underneath it, was something her friends navigated with the particular care of people who understand that asking too directly about certain things will only cause the thing they are asking about to recede. Further, she had begun sometime in the 1950s to make recordings. The project had started as an autobiography, an official account of her life, organized chronologically, the kind of document that would allow her to set the record straight in the way that 34 years of public life and one extremely famous
film had made necessary. She worked on it with a friend named Stan Flink. They recorded hours of conversation. She spoke about her childhood in Brooklyn, about the follys, about the early years of her career, about Hurst, about San Simeon. She did not speak on those tapes about Patricia.
She did not speak about the morning after Hurst died, not directly, though there are passages in the recordings. Her biographer, Lara Gabrielle, noted after listening to the original tapes, “Where something in the quality of her voice shifts when certain years are approached, as if the body remembers what the voice is not permitted to say, the autobiography was never finished.
” Marian lost interest in it after Hurst’s death, and the recording sat in fragments, not chronological, not organized, but honest in the way that conversations are honest when the person speaking believes they are not being preserved. After her death, the tapes were discovered and edited into a book published in 1975, more than a decade after she died.
It was called The Times We Had. The title was her phrase. It was, depending on how you read it, either a statement of contentment or the saddest sentence she ever spoke. She was the captain of her soul, she had told Stan Flink during one of those sessions. That was what she believed about herself. That was the principle she had tried to live by.
whether the life she had lived was the life she would have chosen, whether 34 years beside William Randph Hurst on the terms he had set and she had accepted constituted the existence of a woman in full command of her own course is a question the tapes do not answer. They circle it, they approach it, and then move elsewhere.
Marian Davies in those recordings is not the woman her friends saw at parties, quick and funny and filling a room. She is something quieter, something that has been carrying a great deal for a long time and has learned to carry it without making it visible. She died on September 22nd, 1961, stomach cancer. She was 64 years old.
The funeral was held at the Immaculate Heart of Mary Church in Hollywood and 200 people came. Mary Pigford was there and Buddy Rogers and many of the names that had populated the great parties of the 1920s and 30s. The names that had passed through San Simeon in the years when the castle was still being built and the future felt inexhaustible.
She is buried at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in the Doris family morselum under her own name, Marian Davies. Not Hurst, not Mrs. anyone, her own name. She had left half her estate, approximately $10 million, to charity. The other half went to Patricia Lake, introduced in the will as her niece, inheriting in the way that a daughter inherits when a daughter cannot be acknowledged.
Patricia would carry the secret for another 32 years. In October of 1993, Patricia Lake lay dying in Rancho Mirage, California. 10 hours before her death, according to her son, Arthur Lake Jr., She told him what she had known since she was 11 years old. That Marian Davies was her mother. That William Randph Hurst was her father.
That she had been born in a hospital outside Paris sometime around 1919 and given to Marian’s sister Rose to raise and brought into the castle under a false name and had spent her entire life in the margins of the dynasty that had created her. The Los Angeles Times reported the story the day after Patricia died.
Hollywood gossip columnists had speculated about it for 70 years. Now, finally, it was confirmed by the person who had kept it. Marian had been dead for 32 years by then. She never had to answer for it or explain it or defend the choices that had made it necessary. She never had to watch the world absorb the information and decide what it meant.
14 years after Marian’s death, Orson Wells sat down to write a forward for the Times we had. He had been given the Life Achievement Award by the American Film Institute that year. He was 60 years old. Citizen Cain was by then universally acknowledged as the greatest American film ever made.
and the shadow it had cast over Marian Davies had only deepened with the film’s reputation. Wells wrote, “As one who shares much of the blame for casting another shadow, the shadow of Susan Alexander Cain, I rejoice in this opportunity to record something which today is all but forgotten except for those lucky enough to have.
I seen a few of her pictures. Marian Davies was one of the most delightfully accomplished comedy ends in the whole history of the screen. She would have been a star if Hurst had never happened. She was also a delightful and very considerable person. He signed it in Los Angeles on May 28th, 1975. It was the correction the record needed.
It was 14 years too late. Marian Davies had spent the last decades of her life watching the film that had unmade her reputation become a monument. And she had said when asked that Orson Wells could make whatever film he wanted to make, and who was she to tell him otherwise? She had been dignified about it. She had been measured.
She had maintained until the end the composure of a woman who had learned early that the battles worth fighting were not the ones conducted in public. The clinic at UCLA carried her name until 1998. Then it was renamed as institutions are renamed when the money that sustains them shifts and the name that had stood there for nearly 40 years quietly disappeared.
In September of 2022, a book called Captain of Her Soul was published by the University of California Press. Its author, Lara Gabrielle, had spent nine years researching it, tracking down the people who had known Marian, listening to the original tapes that had been edited into the times we had, working through archives in cities Marian had passed through and left behind.
The book was shortlisted for a major California literary prize. It was reviewed as a corrective to decades of myth. It was described by those who read it carefully as an attempt to give Marian Davies back the thing that had been taken from her, the fact of herself. Gabrielle had found in the tapes a sentence that Marian had spoken to Stan Flink during one of those sessions, a sentence that had made it into the book’s title.
a sentence that Marian had apparently believed about herself in the way that people believe things about themselves that the world consistently refuses to confirm. 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. She had said this according to Gabrielle with complete conviction.
The world had given her many names over the course of her life. Chorus girl, Mistress, Susan Alexander, the woman who couldn’t make it without Hurst’s money. She had chosen her own.
