Marion Davies was a gifted comedian buried by her powerful patron's publicity
Most people who know Marion Davies's name know it through a fictional character: the talentless singer pushed on the public by a newspaper baron in Citizen Kane. Orson Welles himself spent his last years insisting that picture was unfair. The real Davies was a skilled comic actress whose career was smothered by too much help.
Born Marion Douras in Brooklyn in 1897, she hated the convent schools she was sent to and was tormented for a childhood stammer, so she talked her mother into letting her leave early. She took the stage name Davies from her sister, who had spotted it on a property billboard, and danced in Broadway chorus lines. As a featured player in the Ziegfeld Follies from 1916, her stammer kept her from speaking lines, so she only danced.
The newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, then in his fifties and married, reportedly sat in the front row night after night to watch her. In 1918 he set up a film studio to make her pictures, and his papers and newsreels promoted her relentlessly, one reporter assigned full time to chronicle her days. He spent an estimated 7 million dollars on it. For a while it worked: in 1924 theatre owners named her the top female box-office draw and crowned her Queen of the Screen.
Then the effort curdled. Blocks of billboards bearing her name so irritated New Yorkers that strangers would insult her, and she later judged that the campaign did more harm than good. Hearst's jealousy vetoed handsome leading men and banned on-screen embraces, so some early films lacked even a closing kiss. He rewrote scripts and pushed her into costly period costume dramas when her gift was comedy. The director King Vidor saw it, building comedies around the mimicry she performed for friends at parties.
The couple held court at Hearst's vast castle at San Simeon, whose guests ranged from Charlie Chaplin to Winston Churchill and Amelia Earhart. After her films faltered in the Depression she retired in 1937 to care for the ageing Hearst, and stayed with him until his death in 1951. She died in 1961.
Source: Marion Davies
