1897-1961
Marion Davies, who was born on this day in Brooklyn as Marion Cecelia Douras, was extremely talented. Her life was overshadowed by two men: William Randolph Hearst and Orson Welles. In truth Davies was a fine actress (admired by many with whom she worked), an accomplished screenwriter and even a film producer. Her work in the film business, though, has been too often looked at through the lens of the reality of Hearst and the mythos of Welles. She was born into an upper middle class family who were staunchly catholic. She and her siblings were all educated in convents. This was not at all to Marion's liking and, it turned out, her character either. One fact that may have contributed to her psyche growing up was that her parents were close acquaintances of the infamous New York architect Stanford White, who was a vicious pedophile. Young Evelyn Nesbit was not his only (or even close to first) victim, she was just the most famous. Davies heard all about it as a young child. It could not help but to have had some type of effect on her young mind, it may have influenced the manner in which she handled older men when she did enter show business. She was from an early age enamored with becoming a stage performer of some kind; and she had an older sister who first become a model and performer--so had an example to follow. In fact, it was her older sister who adopted the surname "Davies" for stage purposes, and when Marion decided to quit school and go into stage work, she followed suit. I am not sure if any source has the exact time that she made her stage debut, but she is known to have been performing by the year 1914. She spent time working as chorus girl in a major musical in Philadelphia, so there must have been some earlier start to her career back in New York. She also, like her older sister Valentine, worked as a model. It was not long before she was noticed; as mentioned above, she was genuinely talented and beautiful. In 1916, like a myriad of other girls from 1907 through the very early 1930's, she was signed on the Broadway musical revue that was The Ziegfelf Follies. The one thing that did become an obstacle to voice acting was a stammer. This would not, however, be an impediment to silent film acting, of course. So, within a year of joining the Follies, she made her film debut. She was first captured on film in 1916 in a "newsreel"--really a modeling "actuality"--but there is not much more information about it; but her film debut was an impressive one. Her eldest sister Irene, who went by the name Reine Davies, and was married to Broadway revue producer and director George Lederer, proved helpful to the younger Davies, as he had dabbled in films. She penned Runaway Romany herself and convinced Lederer to produce and direct it with her as the star. The most well known actor that also appeared in the film was Matt Moore of the Moore brothers (all born in Ireland). The film was released on the 17th of December of 1917. Of course, as much as I'd like to skip talking about Hearst, there is NO getting around that he was mostly responsible for the vast part of her film career. He first spied her at the Follies and there is no doubt he was more than just a "creeper." Davies was a teenager and his reputation among the older dancer was bad; she was repeatedly warned about him. He was pretty clearly a predator. On the other hand, and mind you I am in NO WAY excusing/understanding/condoning or otherwise saying he was anything other than a horrible exploitative man preying on a young girl nearly 35 years his junior, he clearly became really infatuated with her to an extreme degree and "kept" her for the rest of his existence on this planet. In 1918 Heart formed his own production company, Cosmopolitan, with the express aim to sign Davies--though he didn't explicitly set the company up to be that obvious. The company then pursued Davies with the offer of that no one would dare turn down. The studio would only be in business though, it would turn out, as long as Davies was willing to be in pictures. Starting out in New York, she and company moved business out to California in 1923. Her first film with company was Cecilia of the Pink Roses, released in June of 1918, it was an over-the-top "poor girl melodrama" based on a Katherine Haviland-Taylor novel. Her career was so heavily promoted by Heart that he devoted a single reporter to her from one of his newspapers. Despite that Davies was both a talented writer in her own right, and apparently a first rate comic, her early films with Cosmopolitan were feature length soap-dramas like this one, with Hearst himself interfering in the script material. Now, I have no idea where her career would have gone without all of this, but at the same time she has been robbed of the recognition that she deserves for her own talents and intelligence. I am thus confining comments to some of her films from this time period that stand out. Her first film in 1919, Getting Mary Married, was her first opportunity to show off her comedy chops and charms and the people behind the film were no slouches: Alan Dwan at the direction and the husband and wife writing team of Anita Loos & John Emerson. One credit shows at least one person from her "pre-Hearst days" was the presence of Matt Moore in the film. Her next film The Dark Star (August 1919) further allowed Davies to expand in her talents both in acting in dancing. The film was an adventure film with a spy plot, it featured a dance sequence that Davies reportedly both staged and directed herself, though all of the direction credit again went to Dwan. Her most famous work in film came with director Robert Vignola and her first role in a film he was hired by Cosmopolitan direct was the highly fantasy inflected Enchantment, released in October of 1921. Of course, any fan of silent films will know that her most well known film with Vignola is When Knighthood Was in Flower, in which she plays Mary Tudor, sister of Henry VIII (Lyn Harding), and released in September of 1922. They next paired up in 1923 for Adam and Eva, another comedy and based on a successful Broadway play; only one reel is known to have survived. Also in 1923 she makes a cameo in Charlie Chaplin's The Pilgrim (Chaplin thought so highly of comedy acting, he proclaimed her one of the best); with her own next film, Little Old New York, clocking in at nearly two hours, bringing a bit of comic levity to another tired story of Irish immigrants, though Davies received seriously mixed reviews for her performance as a girl in disguise as a boy. The film was directed by Sidney Olcott (who was himself the son of Irish immigrants) and featured the first Harrison Ford. It was also her last film in New York. Her first role in a film made in California was yet another disguise film Yolanda (though parts of the film were filmed in Harlem); quite the opposite of her previous film, Yolanda was just over an hour in length and was a full blown romance story and Vignola was back in the director's chair. Also in 1924, she appeared in the King Vidor film starring John Gilbert The Wife of the Centaur. As it was an MGM film, it was obviously not a Cosmopolitan film, and her first real film role outside of the Hearst studio. She was next back at her "home studio" making the film version of the comedy Zander the Great (1925) that allowed her to pull off some real slapstick moves where needed (this had been a Broadway hit with Alice Brady in the lead that Davies took in the film). Her next film also allowed her to feature her abilities with dance, and dance set up, and was also a huge box office draw; Lights of Old Broadway, in which she plays twins separated at birth, the film also had the alternate title The Merry Wives of Gotham. By this time Hearst was starting a long slog of over-promoting her films. It went on for years and got to be so over the top, Davies wrote in her memoirs that people would actually insult her because they were just so tired of constantly seeing her name in lights and in news print (there was also a terrible blowup between Hearst and MGM studio head Irving Thalberg in 1938 that was the fodder for rival newspapers--Davies was embarrassed by it apparently--and never made another film). That is probably the one aspect of her career that Welles glommed onto--but as far as her actual career went....that was it. Nothing else in the Susan Alexander Kane in Citizen Kane character that really fit her at all. In the last years of the 1920's, she made several comedies which included: Beverly of Graustark (1926), The Red Mill (1927), Tillie the Toiler (1927), The Fair Co-Ed (1927), Quality Street (1927), The Patsy (1928), and The Cardboard Lover (1928). Her first partial sound film is the rather famous King Vidor romantic comedy Show People, released in October of 1928. While her first full sound film was her very next film the now lost musical The Five O'Clock Girl, also in 1928; (a musical must have been a welcome foray into sound, as she still had a persistent stammer, a condition that plagued her in some fashion all of her life). She was next also included in the MGM's extravaganza The Hollywood Revue of 1929--landing her right back into the kind of stage work that she had started with. Her last two turns in film in the 20's had the same title, one Marianne (1929-I) was a full sound musical comedy; the other Marianne (1929-II) was fully silent and intending to be a version other talking film--it turned out much differently however, and was really more of a melodrama. Davies made just sixteen more film appearances in her career (a couple of them shorts), which ended in 1937. Her last film was Ever Since Eve (July 1937), a Lloyd Bacon directed screwball romantic comedy made for Warner Brothers starring Davies and Robert Montgomery. By 1938, Heart's health was failing and she was frankly tired of the whole acting routine (if you have a look at the three principle places that she resided in California...you probably wouldn't bother to work again either 😆)--she retired to take care of the now 75 year old tycoon. Hearst died in 1951 and she was well provided for, but by no means greedy--actually giving up control of Hearst Corporation that she had for a short time. She owned a lot of property...most of it back in New York City. She also married for the first time in her life and threw herself into charity work that she had begun back in the 1920's (though her marriage was an unhappy one). But she also had been battling alcoholism that had gotten out of control, especially in the 1930's when she was nervously dealing with speaking roles in films. Though she had a small stroke in 1956 at the age of 59 and never really regained full health afterward, she lived further five years. She passed away from a type of bone cancer on the 22 of September in 1961 at the age of 64. She was entombed in an elaborate mausoleum at what is now The Hollywood Forever cemetery. She didn't really address the assumption that the Susan Alexander character in the Orson Welles film was based on her and her career, but at least a couple of biographers, speaking with people who knew her, have concluded that the release of the film was point of extreme pain for her. The assumption that the character was completely based on her and Hearst was a completely pervasive one, and Welles didn't do a thing to dispel this until much later. In reality the character, though it had drawn from a few points from Davies life, was drawn from a number of women....and that horrible opera singing....that was most likely largely drawn from the truly untalented third wife of studio executive Jules Brulatour: Hope Hampton. Though the Charles Foster Kane character also had been drawn from several powerful and selfish men--Brulatour among them--the lion's share of the character development did indeed come from Hearst. Hearst's reaction to the film was vicious, public and deep. This left Davies crushed in the middle of these two men. I think she deserves better.
